Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

was inside when the air went—he’s dead. I saw somebody else sucked in. I don’t know what happened to him. People hurt.” His hand went to his forehead and came away bloody. He gave a foolish, inappropriate grin. “Hard to stay on your feet. That’s how I got this.”
    Somebody caught him before he fell. The fifty or so people in the chamber milled about uselessly, but Pite and another section leader were gradually whipping them into shape.
    “What happened to Trog?” Penser seemed to be losing control. Bram was surprised. The man had seemed invulnerable to emotion. “Why can’t anyone tell me anything?” Penser complained. “How fast are we losing air?”
    More people from the inside battleground were drifting in, gradually filling up the place. One of them answered Penser.
    “The chamber sealed up again somehow after it drew in all the air. Otherwise, we’d all be dead. Great big floating things, like sticky balloons, slapped up against the hole. I think the tree makes them. Now you can get into the chamber again. Fire’s snuffed out. But there’s air leakage into the next chamber through all the little cracks and breaches!”
    Everybody’s eyes went to the drifting smoke in the air again. It didn’t seem so frightening now. It was still clearing itself out, but the rate of flow was nowhere near the great gulp of air the evacuated area had taken at that first thunderclap.
    Penser’s confidence returned. “Break through the next wall!” he screamed at them. “There’s nothing to worry about. That one will seal itself, too. We won’t lose more air than we can afford. This is only a small part of the tree. It will replenish itself. Keep going. They can’t keep retreating forever! I don’t care how many walls you have to blow! Keep going till you get them all!”
    A cooperative babble broke out. Penser had them all in the palm of his hand again. Pite had his thugs assembled. They were testing the sharpness of spear points, weighing clubs. The person in charge of the explosives yelled that he was almost ready. Bram, with a sense of shock, saw that one of his helpers was Eena, molding the claylike balls together into a new shape with her remaining arm.
    Dawn broke through the lenticel as the tree rotated into sunlight again, and a giant many-legged shadow was suddenly thrown across the room.
    Bram turned his head with the rest. He saw a decapod silhouetted against the light. More silhouettes, less sharp than the one pressed against the membrane, filled the translucent window, making a flickering shadow play inside.
    Somebody gave a strangled cry. “They’re trying to get in!”
    A nipple appeared in the exact center of the membrane and bulged inward. The sharp point of an instrument broke through, and there was a terrifying hiss of air. The people in the room recoiled, drew back. A few broke and fled.
    “Stay where you are!” Penser ordered hoarsely, checking the human movement. Bram watched in fascinated dread.
    The silvery tip of a space-suited tentacle followed the sharp instrument, and the rest of the decapod oozed in against what must have been impossible air pressure. The boneless body seemed to elongate, corking the air. The last tentacle to be drawn in was joined to a limb of another Nar behind him, who squeezed through the elastic opening in an uninterrupted flow.
    Air kept hissing, but Bram did not feel the radical decompression he feared. More Nar continued to ooze through in a continuous chain that was like a single, endless living creature clad in silver. The last one through slapped some sort of seal on the puncture. The seal fastened with a huge sucking whoosh, followed by little bubbling sounds around the edges. Bram could appreciate why the skein of decapods had remained twined together; it must have taken the combined strength of all those tentacles, first to hold the frontrunner down and shove him inside, then to brace themselves and draw the rest in after them.
    It had taken less than half a minute for that silver stream of Nar to gush through the opening. Now the multiple creature broke up into units that quickly dispersed into a chess pattern of tall pieces that moved to engulf the still-paralyzed humans.
    There were about twenty of the space-suited Nar. It had to be the outside docking crew and maintenance personnel, Bram thought, his mind racing. There couldn’t have been time enough for reinforcements to arrive from Lowstation—though, he was sure, they had been