All around them both, something else changed. The ship had been thrumming up until this point. When she’d first entered, it had been very noticeable, like the sound of an air conditioner in a big, quiet building. After a time, she’d stopped noticing the sound and forgotten about it. The thrum had become background noise. But now that it abruptly faded and ceased, she did notice its absence.

  There was no time to worry about what had happened. Obviously, this big chunk of X had to have been powering something. Whatever that was, it had died now.

  She chased the rolling treasure, thinking maybe she could kick it into a corner and trap it. But it kept rolling, and the obstacles on the floor were slowing her down. She heard swift steps behind her and glanced back.

  Tanner looked more determined than she did. He had his pry bar in both hands, holding it like a spear. “Don’t let it roll down the shaft!” he said.

  “I can’t catch it.”

  He tried to scramble up on top of a series of anvil-shapes and fireplugs. For a half dozen steps, he managed to make lunging strides, passing her. He whooped with excitement.

  “I’ve got it!”

  She saw him reach out with his pry bar, almost touching the sphere. The cannonball kept rolling and bouncing downhill, flashing silently with released power whenever it touched something in its path.

  Then Tanner went down. He’d tripped over a latch or a corkscrew of metal. In his intensity to race after the goal, he’d lost sight of the things that clawed at his boots. In a final moment of desperation, he threw the pry bar like spear, trying to block the path.

  The bar flew and clanged into the passageway floor. It rang and clattered, and managed to get ahead of the sphere.

  Malena stooped over Tanner and put her hands on his shirt to heave him up. He looked up at her, eyes wild. There was blood running from split lips. It outlined every one of his white teeth with red.

  “Forget me,” he said. “I’ve never seen a battery that big! Don’t let it fall down the shaft.”

  She could tell he wasn’t seriously hurt. She didn’t care about the X all that much, but he obviously did. So many others had given their lives for this chance that she felt she owed it to all of them. As well, she’d like to see the look on Burke’s face—or better yet Ostlund’s—when they heard who scored the biggest find yet.

  She bounded over Tanner and went after it. She saw it roll and bump along the pry bar, it had been slowed but not stopped. When it reached the end of the bar it continued downhill and picked up speed. He’d managed to delay it, but not stop its progress toward the black shaft ahead. She didn’t know what would happen if it fell down the shaft to the bottom, but it couldn’t be good.

  As if he’d read her mind, Tanner shouted behind her.

  “We’ve got to stop it. If it cracks open the field inside will rupture. This entire region of space will implode. The whole ship might vanish.”

  Suddenly, Malena understood his all-out effort. She hadn’t reasoned it through. He wasn’t seeking a promotion back home. He didn’t want to be a hero. He just wanted to keep breathing.

  She gauged the situation, and saw how close it was to the finish line. She could tell right away, she wasn’t going to make it. She was too far back, and she couldn’t touch the sphere without dying anyway. She reached to her hip and grabbed her accelerator. Slowing her charge, she aimed it carefully.

  “Don’t shoot it,” Tanner wailed behind her. He was up and running after her.

  Malena fired. The passageway flashed blue and the booming report echoed through the ship. She fired twice more, rapidly. She hardly had time to correct her aim each time, and the kicks shocked her shoulders and numbed her hands.

  The third shot did it. She was rewarded by a groan of metal. A thing that looked like a candelabra sagged over, half-melted. It wisped with molten metal and vapors. It fell directly in the path of the rolling ball.

  The X hit the barrier and buzzed with released energy. They both had to shield their eyes. After a few seconds the spheroid had stopped moving.

  “I think it’s stabilized,” Tanner said, coming up next to her. He wiped blood from his mouth uncaringly. He looked at her with wide eyes. “Nice work.”

  She gave him a smile. She felt a rush of pride and put her weapon back in its out-sized holster. “Did you really think I was going to shoot the ball?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m a rookie, but I’m not an idiot.”

  Tanner laughed until he had to sit down and hold his aching ribs. She joined him. They both began feeling the aches and bruises of the day. Too bad, she thought, that their bodies didn’t repair as quickly as their smart suits.

  They both desperately needed a break. They lay back against the smooth walls, finding spots that didn’t have any bizarre protuberances.

  “You know,” she said, looking around and touching the walls. “I’m beginning to figure these passages out.”

  “Oh yeah? Enlighten me.”

  “Well, imagine you’re about fifteen feet tall. Then imagine you’re weightless in space. These passages would fit pretty well. Also, notice how some of the bizarre wall decorations come in groupings—like those anvils. There are always a few around each of the L-shaped latches.”

  “Okay, I’m following so far. You think all this stuff has a purpose. And in space with big aliens roaming around, it would make perfect sense?”

  “Exactly. The L-shaped things are latches. They open the hatches in the walls. The anvils are handholds—or footrests. They let you get leverage to open the hatches.”

  Tanner’s eyes roamed the walls as if seeing them for the first time. He slowly nodded his head.

  “You know,” he said, “if you were big and didn’t care much about pain, I can see how this equipment could operate. Every wall is covered with equipment because in space you’d be weightless and floating anyway.”

  “Right. You’d need the holds to get leverage, so you could apply pressure on things while weightless.”

  “These anvil things—they remind me of footholds on a climbing wall. I’ve done a lot of climbing and a lot of practice on indoor walls. There’s a pattern, here. I can see one of those giants maneuvering through the ship, dragging himself from one handhold to another. In fact, I’ve got an idea.”

  He got up, went over to one of the corkscrew-looking things. He put his foot into it.

  “If my boot was about three times this size,” he said, “these hoops of metal would wrap around me and give me excellent leverage. Yeah. I think you’ve figured it out.”

  Next, Tanner walked over to candelabra-looking thing which Malena had knocked over to stop the rolling spheroid.

  “I’m getting another idea about these things, too,” he said. “They’re less common, but—”

  She never got the chance to hear what he had to say about the candelabra thing, as at that moment, they both heard a loud clang from somewhere in the ship. The noise echoed and rang down the passages. Both of them stopped and crouched, looking around in alarm.

  “Use your headset,” he whispered.

  Malena closed her eyes and sought an answer. “Nothing there—wait. One moving contact. No, make that two or three of them. They’re all around us.”

  She opened her eyes again.

  “Guardian machines or giants?” he asked.

  “They seem to be moving too fast—I’d say they were machines. When we released the X, it must have alerted them somehow.”

  “Something turned off when the big ball of X fell out. It was like a battery powering the ship, and now it’s been disconnected. They’re coming to find out what happened.”

  She nodded. “From the feel of it, they’re all coming to investigate this time.”

  “We have to get out.”

  “What about the X?”

  “Screw the X,” he said. “It’s too big, too heavy and dangerous. If we live, we can find it again and drag it out of here. We have to find a hatch.”

  He was already heading uphill, toward the top of the ship. Malena followed him with misgivings.

  “What’s wrong with the way we came in?” she asked.

  “We already killed a machine there, and it’s too far. We have to get out now. I have a hunch there’s a hatch at the end of every passageway. These guys are pretty predictable in their ship design.”

  It would have been easier to head downward rather than upward, but Malena realized they might run into a blocked hatch that way. After all, half the ship was underground. They didn’t want to reach the end of a passage and find a hatch there that had a million tons of earth and rock behind it.

  They climbed up two levels as quickly as they could. When they were sure they would be above ground when they opened any hatch on the current level, they headed to the end of the nearest passageway.

  Malena could already see the shadowy end of the passage, but she couldn’t see if there was a door to the outside there. She couldn’t even see a latch that was supposed to open it, either. She could only hope both were there.

  When they were about fifty feet from their goal, a groaning sound of tortured metal hit their ears. They both winced and looked around like startled animals. Malena drew her weapon and crouched between metal fireplugs.

  There was a line of bright light dead ahead. It had to be daylight, and it hurt her eyes. Then the line turned into a crescent, and she knew what was happening. The hatch ahead was opening.

  “They’re coming through,” Tanner said.

  “I couldn’t sense them through the hull,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just shoot!”

  A shadow loomed as the hatch opened like a yawning mouth. She couldn’t see what it was, as she was almost blinded. She hadn’t realized how accustomed her eyes had become to the gloomy interior of the ship over the preceding hours.

  She aimed—but hesitated. “It’s a man,” she whispered to Tanner.

  Tanner didn’t answer. Instead, he fired his pistol. Seven shots rang out. She could hear impacts and corresponding grunts.

  The shadow at the entrance withdrew quickly. She stared at Tanner in shock. Had he recognized a member of a rival team? Was he that desperate to hold onto this find of X that he’d kill for it?

  Tanner caught her looking at him. They both were lit up in a yellow blaze of tropical sunlight now. Humidity and heat rolled downward from the open hatch, and she could even smell the stink of the mud that filled the swamp.

  “That wasn’t a man,” Tanner said.

  Before she could argue, a hand appeared at the opening. She could see it was a hand, as her eyes had adjusted to the glare of the sunlight streaming into the ship. The hand gripped something metallic with large, gray-leather fingers.

  The object was a gun, and it flashed blue. A tremendous report rang out, and a blazing streak of fire passed over them and burned a long charred scorch mark on the ceiling. Melted steel dribbled down around them to splatter and hiss like hot rain.

  Malena realized several shocking things in less than a second: first, that the hand wasn’t human—it was far too big and oddly-shaped for that. Secondly, the thing it was firing was an accelerator like the one she held in her own two hands. It was aiming blindly around the corner, shooting at them from the safety of the ship’s hull. For the alien, the oversized accelerator was a properly-proportioned pistol.

  Lastly, she realized that the aliens in the ship were now awake. At least one of them was, and it was shooting at her.

  -21-

  Malena still had the accelerator. When the firing stopped for a moment, she aimed around the corner and released several blue bolts of her own. The hinges of the hatchway smoldered, but other than that, she didn’t think she’d hit anything.

  Tanner was busy digging ammo out of his pack and refilling his pistol. Clearly, his traditional weapon was not as effective as it might have been. Malena wondered if these aliens used smart materials, if they did, that would explain why the bullets hadn’t done much to this particular visitor.

  “I think we have to aim for the head,” she said.

  “I was!” Tanner shouted back.

  She dared another look. There was the hand, but the gun was no longer in sight. The hand seemed to be clinging to the lower rim of the hatchway.

  “It’s not moving or firing back,” she said, edging closer for a better look.

  “Stay down. They’re tricky sometimes. Incredibly tough, too.”

  She glanced at him and then ducked back behind cover. “You didn’t tell me you’d been in gunfights with these aliens before. You didn’t tell me these accelerators were their guns, either.”

  Tanner shrugged. “Need to know.”

  Malena felt a flash of anger at this answer. It seemed to her she needed to know just about everything about these particular aliens, as they were trying to kill her. In fact, she had a right to know. But she understood government regs. She’d never had the time to get the proper clearances to even participate in this mission. Tanner had broken the rules a dozen times already, and she was sure Burke back at base had done the same.

  She peeked again, and the hand was still there. It was thick, dark and leathery. It looked as if someone were wearing a bizarrely over-sized glove of wrinkled gray skin. The nails were black and as thick as poker chips.

  Moving in a crouch, she walked forward to another anvil, this one was much closer to the hatchway. Outside, she could see the bright sunlight which was reddening the clouds now. She could tell there was a tropical sunset going on to the west, but she couldn’t see it from this angle.

  “Careful,” Tanner called after her. He had his weapon out and moved forward with her, taking up a new position to her left. “A long burst will burn right through this metal.”

  “A long burst?”

  “You can hold the trigger down to make a continuous beam, but the gun will get very hot. Eventually it will stop working if you do that too much. Or you’ll run out of ammo in the magazine.”

  More information she could have used earlier. She’d been squeezing off shots like they were propelling bullets. That wasn’t the case, of course. The weapon fired a continuous beam of accelerated matter. It kept firing until you let go of the trigger. She wondered if she could cut the creature’s hand right off by drawing a line across the fingers.

  When they’d waited and whispered for about a minute, with no reaction from the visitor. She straightened, aiming at the hand, and advanced the final steps toward the hatchway.

  “Burn it,” Tanner said. “Don’t look. Just burn it.”

  She ignored him, wondering if the alien might be dead already. She poked her gun over the edge, but nothing happened. She’d thought she could provoke it to action showing her weapon. The creature didn’t react. The gray leathery fingers remained clamped on the lower lip of the hatch exactly as before.

  Malena reconsidered burning away that alien hand. But she still couldn’t quite do it. At some level, she felt pity for this alien being. After all, it had crashed on her planet—an alien world from its point of view. Humanity had done nothing to help out. We’d come instead to loot the ship, to salvage what we could by force if necessary.

  Sure, these aliens had killed some of our people. Maybe the Cubans had started it by opening fire when they first met up with the creatures from the ship. Or maybe they were just as afraid and curious about us as we were about them. Whatever the case, she sensed this visitor was hurt and couldn’t quite bring herself to shoot it while it was down.

  She rushed forward the last step and aimed the gun over the edge, outside the ship. The humid heat of a tropical evening washed over her like the hot breath of a monster. It felt good after the stale, cool air of the ship. It was the natural atmosphere of Earth, and she drank it in.

  She looked downward and gasped, her sudden intake of breath entirely involuntary. The alien wasn’t there. Just the hand was left behind, gripping the hatchway.

  She ducked back inside and looked around wildly.

  “What is it?” Tanner asked, moving up to join her.

  “It’s gone. I think I blew its hand off.”

  Tanner felt along the lower rim of the hatchway. “Yeah,” he said. “I feel the burn-through here. You shot right through the hull and took the thing’s hand off.”

  “It’s had quite a bit of time to escape. And those machines are still looking for us.”

  He looked at her seriously. “We’ve got to get moving. Inside or outside?”

  “You’re in command.”

  “Yeah. Okay, outside. I’m tired of dark shafts full of metal prongs. Let’s go.”

  Tanner climbed out onto the side of the ship, passing the severed hand. Malena stared at it for a moment as she passed by. There it was, a hunk of extraterrestrial flesh, inches from her face. As a biologist, she wanted to collect it and take it back to the nearest lab to examine. From a personal point of view, she was disgusted and disturbed.

  “Should we take this?”

  “What? The hand? Hell, no. It must weigh ten pounds or more. And we have plenty of alien flesh back home, don’t worry.”

  She blinked at him, then nodded and followed. They picked their way down the side of the ship. Fortunately, they’d chosen well. They were only about sixty feet from the ground. As the exterior of the ship was as covered in handholds as the interior, the climb was not that difficult for them. If they’d been twice their size, it would have been like climbing down a ladder.

  As they went, they continually watched the scenery, looking for their one-handed visitor. He could be on the ground now, hiding under a waving palm tree. If he saw them and began firing, they would be easy targets as they climbed down the ship.

  “Keep moving,” Tanner said, thinking along the same lines. “We’re exposed on this hull.”

  When they reached the ground, they found something interesting half-sunken in the mud. Tanner hefted it experimentally. It was another accelerator.