The jellyfish turned away from the creatures and began flying toward the team from Scarab Five.
“Get away, get away, get away,” chanted Terry, like a mantra. Out of the side of her faceplate, Vee saw someone stumble backward and turn to slog away.
The jellyfish kept coming with Angela, encased in glass, supported between them. They drifted forward until they were about two meters away. Then, very gently, they sank down and laid Angela on the ground. Their tentacles released her and they rose, drifting back toward the scarab.
“Holy God and Mother Creation, what’ve they done?” Josh moved forward. Vee looked up at the alien, her alien, who hadn’t moved. Then, slowly, as if she had to remember how, Vee walked up beside Josh and looked down at the glass coffin.
Angela lay inside, whole, and perfect. Her eyes were closed and her arms lay straight along her sides.
“I think she’s breathing,” said Josh softly.
Vee bent closer. Yes. You could see it. Barely. Angela’s chest didn’t so much rise and fall as flutter like Vee’s heart. But she was alive under there.
Alive and without a suit on Venus, and there sure as hell weren’t air tanks on that glass case. Vee’s mind fastened on these details and jolted her body into action.
“Help me!” She grabbed Angela’s feet.
Josh grabbed Angela’s shoulders. They heaved Angela up as if they were lifting a log and staggered back toward Scarab Five. Fighting pressure and the awkwardness of the suit, Vee could glance up only once. The jellyfish reemerged from Scarab Fourteen, carrying another glass-encased figure in their tentacles.
“Peachman, get back here! I need help!” shouted Terry.
“I’m there. I’m there.” Troy waddled more than walked over the ridges. His suit was scored. Had he fallen in his hurry to get away from the aliens? “I’m sorry. Christ in the green, I’m sorry.”
Maybe we should have brought Julia after all.
“Kevin, are you watching this?” came Josh’s voice over the intercom. “Get that door open!”
“Done!” shouted Kevin. “God, god, is she really alive?”
“I think so.” Josh’s voice was breathy with hope and uncertainty.
I hope so, thought Vee, because it means they saved her. It means they’re…what? Friendly? Doesn’t cover it. Human?
Obviously her brain could take only so much of this.
The airlock door was open. They laid Angela on the floor.
“Take her up!” ordered Josh.
“Can’t,” came back Kevin’s reply. “The pump is almost dead. We can’t risk running it more than once. You’re going to have to get them all in here. Get moving!”
Vee stared at Josh. “This is going to sound dumb,” she said, her voice too high and tight. “Will she be all right alone?”
“I hope so,” said Josh. Obviously, that was the phrase of the day.
Vee slogged back toward Scarab Fourteen, wishing desperately that she could run. All she could manage was a fast walk. Sweat poured down her face. Her face plate blinked yellow warnings at her to drink and take a salt tablet. She ignored them.
Terry and Troy were hoisting Lindi Manzur off the ground when Vee and Josh reached them. The jellyfish were arriving with another woman in a pilot’s coverall. Must be Charlotte. Charlotte…what was her last name?
Why is this bugging me now?
Adrian, all on his own, hoisted Charlotte into his arms and staggered across the broken landscape.
It was ridiculous. It was macabre. But they did it three more times, hefting colleagues and strangers like bricks and laying them neatly down on the airlock floor, trying to make efficient use of space but trying not to think too much because it would slow them down.
They headed back one more time. The jellyfish had another form in their tentacles. But this one was shaped wrong. It was all curves. It didn’t have enough straight lines for a human body. The jellies stopped about three meters away this time. When Vee registered what she saw, she had to choke back her bile while part of her mind said, “Ah, that’s why they call it ‘pulped.’”
The jellies did not put this one down. They carried it back past the gold creatures and vanished into the bottom of the balloon.
“Who was that? Why’d they do that?” asked Terry. “Sorry, sorry, I know you don’t know…I—”
“It’s okay,” said Vee. “Really.”
There were no more, what? Deliveries? The aliens flew back into their balloon, except the one still one. Vee wondered what it was waiting for. It stared at her with its huge eyes, as if memorizing every detail of Vee’s form, as Vee was memorizing its, with the sharply angled wings and the thick, but amazingly flexible neck, the broad body, the crimson and ivory mane that streamed down its neck and the dark lines on golden skin.