Providence - Max Barry Page 0,109

He wasn’t sure of the effect of discharging the lightning gun underwater and didn’t especially want to find out, but he thrust the weapon in that direction. A shape loomed, amorphous and indistinct, a sac: a translucent blob congealed around a dark larva. He let it float by.

He tried to control his breathing. His thermals were rising. None of this was good for his core battery. He had thirty-five minutes.

Soon he encountered another sac, then more. The fourth was smaller and less well formed, and frayed apart as he maneuvered by. For most of his descent, he had periodically scraped the sides, as the tunnel fell at an angle, but now it widened to the point where he couldn’t feel the walls. He found this disconcerting. He’d been prepared for a long tube, but expected it to be narrow: one end connected to the nursery, the other to something he could shoot.

“Where are you?” he said.

He began to swim and still couldn’t find anything solid. Soon every sac he encountered was little more than sticky clumps of gossamer. He feared he’d taken a wrong turn, becoming lost in the muck and winding up in a place for discards and genetic failures. This tube might have side tunnels. It might be a network. He sank through soup.

Eventually his boots found the floor. He used his light and saw round boulders. There was nowhere else to go, so he struck upward at an angle.

Unexpectedly, he broke the surface. He bobbed, casting about with the light. He was on a lake. There was a high rocky roof. To his right, it curved down to meet the soup. The rock was different: rough and irregular, gray rather than orange. He swam until he found a natural shelf on which he could rest.

He breathed, exhausted. He had been avoiding looking at his core, afraid of what it would say.

Six minutes.

He had to move. The queen, or whatever there was, could be a hundred miles away. Or it could be around the next turn of rock.

He couldn’t resist activating his ping sweep one more time, searching for Beanfield. Now she was outside his range. When his light played against the rock wall, he saw a twist of something that appeared organic, almost like ancient tree roots. He wondered: Had the salamanders encased a planet in resin? Perhaps there was a whole world down here that they’d slowly drowned.

The soup flowed gently by, lapping at him. When he raised a leg, it was filmed with a sticky substance. Sacs. Remnants of sacs. The lake was thick with the stuff. He couldn’t figure out why there was so much of it. It didn’t make sense to him that they would float around here until half of them disintegrated.

Also: How were there so many?

He hadn’t finished his train of thought from before. It was conceivable that all salamanders came from a single breeder; there were animals that bred in those kinds of numbers, fish that spawned thousands of eggs at a time. But tiny eggs, because the fish didn’t have much mass to give.

If there were a queen, she would have to be the size of a city. Larger than he could imagine, spawning salamanders in an endless flowing tide. How would that work? What would she eat?

What do you think you’re going to find out there?

Answers. I like finding the answers to questions like that.

Even if he couldn’t kill the thing, he wanted to see it. He at least wanted to answer that question to his own satisfaction.

His suit was losing the ability to replace carbon dioxide with oxygen. It had been complaining for a while with low, insistent tones. He should move. But first, he closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he saw the truth.

The sticky film; the disintegrating sacs. They weren’t old. They weren’t broken. They were new. They were forming.

He dialed up his suit light. Illumination spread across the surface of the lake. The edges of the light ran farther and farther back and found no end.

There was no queen. Of course not. There was only soup.