Providence - Max Barry Page 0,1

can figure, two starboard, one aft, one port, one below,” says de Veers. “Don’t think they’ve noticed that we opened the front door.”

For three days, they’ve been tracking a half-mile-wide brown rock. All they know about it is it’s full of holes and moving like it has some control over where it’s going. Ten hours ago, it began to angle toward Coral Beach, as if noticing them for the first time. Sixty minutes ago, it exuded five small, dark blobs, which sailed across the darkness and stuck to Coral Beach’s hull. Since then, the crew has been tracking them mostly from the sound, which is a clunk, clunk, clunk like someone’s walking around out there.

To your left, a woman stiff-legs it toward the exit. It’s tempting to join her. But Maladanto, Esperanza, Bock, and White are there with the breach door open and you’re struck by how they didn’t have to do this. At any point, they could have decided to pull out and leave this to someone else. Even now, they could have closed the exterior door and pulled Coral Beach away, and maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference—maybe by this point, their fate was sealed—but even so, they stood together and faced it. So you’re staying, too.

“Okay,” de Veers says in your ear. “Seems like they noticed. All five unknown objects converging on the breach chamber.”

You see their hands tighten, the skin crease around their eyes. Esperanza takes a little step to the left, which gets him out from behind Maladanto, and you think, Yes! as if there’s still a chance. Then he steps right back where he was. You hear someone moan quietly. There’s an urge to blame here, to say, There, that’s what went wrong. That’s why it happened. Esperanza’s positioning. Bock drifting away from the door. There must be something, a mistake without which it would have turned out differently. Surely it didn’t have to be like this.

A vibration. Low impacts coming through the hull.

De Veers’s disembodied voice: “Ten seconds, boss.”

Maladanto says, “We don’t know what we’re going to see. Neither do they. Let’s nobody turn this into something it doesn’t have to be.”

White’s lips move fractionally. You always thought he was chewing the inside of his lip, but he’s actually mouthing words. When you make out a few, you realize he’s praying.

A rough, blocky limb appears against the darkness. It curls inside the bulkhead like a tree root. Then another limb, and more: too many limbs. An irregular shape rises into view. There’s a rough-hewn head and shoulders and a massive torso and it looks like some kind of gnarled wood. It’s actually translucent resin. You can see a hint of movement beneath its surface, threads contracting and expanding, like a bowl of worms. A second shape clambers down from above, senses the gravity, and drops to the floor, landing on six thick limbs. The tremor comes up through your shoes.

“Oh, God,” someone behind you mutters.

Maladanto, Esperanza, Bock, and White don’t move. That’s always seemed remarkable, but now it’s flat-out amazing. They watched two alien nightmares climb on board and they didn’t fall apart and run.

The creatures move tentatively, taking stilted steps. Their heads bob. You know what they are. They have several names, nowadays, but most commonly, people call them salamanders. You know a lot about them that Maladanto and his people don’t.

The salamanders seem to notice them. There are moments of stillness: one, two, three, four. Maladanto raises a hand in greeting.

The salamanders don’t respond right away. It’s not clear whether they understand. Then the first begins to bow. It was standing on four hind legs; now it goes down onto all six. Its head dips.

Maladanto isn’t an expressive guy and even here his face is half-shadowed by his helmet, but you can see what’s blazing in his mind. He didn’t dare hope it would be life, and he didn’t dare hope it would be intelligent, and he didn’t dare hope it could communicate. He begins to lower his own head, mirroring a gesture he’s read all wrong.

The salamander’s face splits open. What you’re seeing is its protective resin breaking apart to reveal its true face for the first time. But to Maladanto,