Five Minute SciFi Stories

the pendulum swings

Aalia watched through a window as a giant spider jumped off the ship and rappelled down a silk rope onto a rock. It wasn't a planet, this rock, it was a comet fragment, a thin crust encasing an aquatic treasure chest. The spider that scuttled across the treasure chest was three times the size of a human, black and synthetic and covered in sensory hairs to sample the air, the soil, the water. The water, of course, was the most important. It was, after all, why they were here. Any useful elements were a bonus.

It was freezing out there in the space surrounding the comet fragment. A human would die within seconds. Aalia laid her hand on the glass window and thought about punching through and letting the cold envelop her. She didn't try. She knew she would fail. The ship would stop her. It didn't care how she felt. It only cared about bringing its cargo of six billion tonnes of Oort cloud ice and two lonely humans home to Venus.

The spider stopped probing, satisfied. Aalia was connected to the ship. She could feel what it felt. What it wanted her to feel. The spider lowered a set of pincers and started to drill. Water leaked out of the hole, staining the sandy surface and the spider drank, water filling its abdomen. A minute or two later, the initial tests results floated into Aalia's head. No major contaminants or toxins. The water was clean.

It was Eshwar's job to confirm the test results in the ship laboratory. To ensure that any water they collected would not poison the innocent Venusians waiting at home with open mouths. This was, in effect, Eshwar's only role here, the only reason why he had been ripped from the arms of a pragmatic wife. Like most humans, Venusians couldn't trust the synthetic sentient beings that had allowed them to infest the solar system, so they sent two humans on each ship as a symbol of impotent control. They had tried to send one to save costs but all the solo voyagers went insane.

Aalia didn't know what the ship was doing to Eshwar right now, it wouldn't let her see that, but she knew that he was nowhere near the control room or the lab and the spider with its water-filled belly had almost finished scaling the silk rope. Doing Eshwar's job, Gaman's old job, would give her something to do for half an hour at least.

She walked through the grey soulless corridors, past the kitchen and lounge and down to the toxicology lab. The spider was already standing in the lab filling the space between benches and machines with its huge body and long hairy legs. Its eyes, all eight of them, swivelled to face Aalia and its mouth opened. It stood, motionless, waiting for her. She picked up a suction hose and stepped into the its mouth. Fangs, taller than Aalia dripped sticky liquid onto her face as she tried to attach the hose. He could eat her in a snap, the spider.

The fangs splintered into a shower of sparks and the suction hose bulged in her hands, twisting and writhing in time with her heart beat. More liquid splashed onto her face, sliding into the sacs under her eyelids and snaking down into her mouth. It was sweet and warm and it tasted like Gaman and she was light, so light, that she floated out of the spider's mouth and hung in front of his face and he winked at her with one of his eyes and it was a green, blue, turquoise, turtle-coloured eye and a turtle poked his head out of the eye and sniffed the air and nodded as he squeezed out of the socket and began swimming around the room. Aalia rolled onto her back and started swimming after the turtle, flapping her arms like fins.

She forgot why she was flapping so she stopped. She hung there, in the air, warm and mellow and yellow and light.

And then sounds crashed in. Someone was stomping and pounding right next to her head. Maybe inside her head. And that person had sandpapered her mouth and the inside of her eyelids. She opened her eyes and light stabbed right through her skull, sawing at the grey mess inside. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth to tell the stomping, sandpapering stabber to go and inject their eyeballs with capsaicin.