The first story people told about Vey had me kneeling before a god.
I was kneeling. Mott had dropped a coupling behind the heater, and I was the only one whose fingers fitted between the pipes. By the time I got it out, the ground was moving.
We had been on Vey for eleven months. Our ship sat at the edge of a crater. We had drilled a descending tunnel into the crater wall and fitted it with a service rail; at the bottom, a heater softened the pale ore for the extractor. A supply hose ran beside the rail all the way to the ship.
The ore was valuable. One more tank, loaded to the contract’s ninety-eight percent minimum, would give the company its quota and give us the completion pay we had been promised. Without that pay, I could not afford passage home from the company’s depot. I had a seat reserved on the next transport, with no ticket yet.
Mott wanted to stay aboard for the next contract. He liked the captain. He also liked finding deposits other people had missed, and had found this one.
“Got it?” he asked.
I showed him the coupling. The heater’s amber light blinked against my glove. Behind it, in the newly exposed wall, something blue opened.
At first I thought we had uncovered glass. A slit ran through it. The slit widened, letting the blue turn toward us.
“Kill the heater,” I said.
Mott was already reaching for the switch. In the dark, the blue remained bright. It was wider than both of us standing side by side.
The rail buckled.
Mott fell against the extractor. Its control lever tore his suit at the shoulder. The pressure alarm began shrilling in my ear. I slapped a repair pad over the rip and held it there until the suit registered a seal. His arm hung at an angle I did not like.
He said, “I didn’t touch anything else.”
“I know.”
The floor lifted under my feet and stayed tilted. Dust went down the tunnel toward the heater instead of up toward the entrance. The blue slit narrowed, then opened farther.
I called the ship. “Brant. Stop filling. We’re coming up.”
“The tank’s at ninety-six.”
“Something’s moving in the wall. Mott’s hurt.”
“Bring the recorder.”
It was bolted to the extractor. I could have unbolted it in two minutes, with both hands. I had one hand on Mott and neither of us could stand without leaning uphill.
“You have the live feed,” I said.
“It’s gone to snow.”
I left the recorder.
We climbed. The service rail, once a useful handhold, had twisted away from the rock in several places. Mott could not grip with his injured arm. I carried his tool bag until it caught on a bent bracket, then let it fall. He reached after it.
“My own tools.”
I made him put his good hand on my shoulder. The bag slid down past our boots. Far below, the heater disappeared behind a closing fold of pale rock.
Nothing chased us. That was worse. We were climbing out of something that did not need to notice us.
At the entrance the sunlight was white, as always, but the crater rim had changed. A ridge now stood where there had been a gap. Our ship was still in sight, its cabin facing us across the flat loading ground. The captain had lowered the ladder. Beside it, the supply hose lay stretched tight.
“Go,” I told Mott. “Keep toward the ladder.”
We had walked that distance twice a day for months. Now each step found the ground in a different place. I fell and slid toward the tunnel. Mott came back and caught my wrist with his good hand. I told him not to be an idiot. He called me something equally useful. We got up together.
Brant met us at the ladder and took Mott’s weight. The captain’s boots were unfastened. He had put his helmet on over the soft cap he slept in.
“Strap him in,” he said to me. “I’ll finish the disconnect.”
Inside, I secured Mott in the nearest seat. Through the open hatch I could see Brant working at the hose release. The tension had pulled the joint crooked. He stopped, ran his fingers along it, and backed away.
“Need the cutter,” he said.
I fetched it from the hatch locker. When I passed it down, he pointed behind me.
“Close the tank valve first. Red wheel.”
The wheel was stiff. I needed both hands. I had never closed it during loading before; that was Brant’s job. When it finally stopped, the loading light went out. The tank read ninety-nine percent; it had kept filling while we climbed. He cut the hose, dropped the cutter beside it, and climbed in.
I shut the hatch. He got into the pilot’s seat without fastening his boots. The ship rose while Mott was still trying to see out of the window.
On the monitor the tunnel entrance contracted. The crater stretched into a long hollow. A dark joint appeared beneath it, flexing very slowly.
We had drilled into a shell. Our crater was a hollow on its surface. Our landing ground was lifting with the shell as the body beneath it straightened.
Brant took us farther out. Pale plates unfolded under the ore crust. Rock slid from them in curtains. One limb, still carrying ridges we had named after members of the crew, extended into open space.
Mott asked me to turn his seat so he could see the monitor. I did.
The thing moved away from Vey’s remaining fragments. It opened more blue slits along its side. They looked in different directions. Once I imagined one turned toward us, but Brant had already changed course and I could not tell.
Nobody spoke for a while.
Then the completion-pay indicator on the cargo display went green.
We had kept the completion pay.
At the depot, our report took three days. They separated us for the first interview. I worried more about that than I had about the blue opening: people who want a useful account often start by keeping the witnesses apart.
Mott was accused of bypassing a survey alarm. He had not. There had been no survey alarm for a living deposit; the category did not exist. I wrote that sentence in every space the interviewer left for additional comments.
Brant handed over the cabin recording. It showed him refusing my first stop request and then meeting us at the ladder. He could have cut the first part. He hadn’t.
The depot doctor set Mott’s arm. The company paid his treatment and our completion wages. It charged us for the lost tools and equipment under a clause we had all signed. We lodged an appeal. Brant signed that too.
I bought my ticket.
On the day before departure, a woman from a touring theatre came to find me. She had written a performance about Vey. In her version, three miners had gone into the dark to release the traveller imprisoned there. The captain had heard a command in the blue light. I had knelt and offered my tool bag.
“Mott’s bag,” I said.
She wrote that down.
“And nobody offered it. I dropped it.”
Her pencil stopped.
“People need a way into something this large,” she said.
I asked whether they might enter through the torn suit and the unpaid equipment appeal.
“They could,” she said. “It would be a different play.”
She was not pretending those details didn’t matter. She wanted a play she could sell. I knew enough about wanting passage home to understand her. I declined the offer to speak before each performance.
That evening I went alone and bought a seat at the back.
The actor playing me was much taller than I am. She knelt beautifully. Blue lamps opened across a hanging sheet, and for a moment I felt again the lift of the floor beneath my boots. Beside me a child caught her father’s sleeve.
When the captain in the play heard the traveller speak, the voice came from behind the audience. I turned with everyone else.
At the curtain call the writer stepped out and asked whether anyone in the audience had been on Vey. They would like us to stand.
A man two rows ahead glanced back at my work jacket. He had worked at the depot when we arrived.
The actor playing me looked toward the dark seats.
I stayed in mine. When the applause began again, I joined it.
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