And It Devours by M. K. Dreysen

Tonight, reader, I ask you to turn your eye to the red planet.

To contemplate what may yet come to be. Who will go. What they might do there.

And... what may be demanded of them. This week's free story is one that I call

And It Devours by M. K. Dreysen

The beast is massive, it consumes. It crawls across the crusted desert, and it eats what it finds there. Eats it, digests it, dribbles out the processed material so that the world the beast helps build may grow to be something not quite so dusty and empty of life.

The treads move, and then only grudgingly, on decadal cycles. The caverns behind and beneath, away from the beast's mass, grow only so far, so fast. Eaten out by the action of one precious gram of water at a time. The water flows through the hoses the miners wield, out and back to the drain and the sump and the pump.

Into the beast's maw. Where the water is released of its cargo, evaporated, condensed; sent down hole again to restart the process. Every gram is sacred, of water and salt and the other minerals that come along with them.

Every liter of new empty volume below the crust is venerated, as well. Along the beaded trail the beast has worn into the mineral crater's surface, every second kilometer holds a cavern. Filling, with structure, with life. Down below where the radiation can't.

Chris-Jian Wan crawls the beast's pipes like he owns the place. Steam pipes, big ones, the relief passages for pressure and heat. They're shut down, now. Mostly.

Temperature doing its thing on the surface, the evaporators can't be shut down completely. The alloys are marvelous. They hold up to so very many attacks. But thermal stress is a stress, so the steam lines stay lit, just a little.

Enough to keep the pipes warm. And covered in a faint sheen of condensation. Chris wipes it away so he might gauge how well the pipes are doing. Corrosion? Pitting? Wear marks as the alloys wear in just that little bit more?

The engineers had built for a century, that's what the electronic books all say. Diagrams and materials lists, calculations and assumptions discussed. The beast should live for a century more, with care.

Chris is one of the ones doing the care these days. With a little help from Jen Nguyen. She keeps watch at the access hole while Chris mumbles to himself. "A little pan scale here," Chris notes.

"Got it," Jen answers over the suit radio. She's also taking notes, so the maintenance crews know what Chris and Jen are adding to the ever present list of preventative. "Where?"

"Fifteen centimeters," and then Chris pauses, to look at the drawings on the tablet. "Fifteen centimeters to the steam scrubber side of the first field weld." First one past where the pipe turns horizontal coming out of the top of the vessel.

Jen taps the location and description into her tablet while Chris brushes the scale. The alloys here don't corrode, they're not subject to chloride attack. Where'd the scale come from, then? Chris rubs the material between gloved fingers, trying as best he could to feel the grain of it.

Sandy, uniform. Chris grunted at that, then pulled a sample bottle from his tool case. "This one's probably on the operators, we'll need to talk to them about the past ninety days, how they've been cycling."

"Ok, think they're running hot?"

Chris shrugged. "Not paying attention to the lab reports, more like." The ones that told the beast's unit operators what sort of mineral composition would be coming up the feed. The beast fed on natural materials.

The kind that varied in composition.

Sometimes, the sandy buildup Chris filled the test bottle with testified to, sometimes more than a little. Enough so that the operators should have adjusted their pressures and temperatures, and feed chemicals, to account for it. "Looks like a sulfate, or maybe borate."

"You'll have to explain how you carry that around in your head," Jen complained.

"Say it that way and it'll turn out to be something we've never seen before. I've been here long enough to make all the mistakes, Jen, that's all it is." And then some. Before he left it, Chris took pictures of the scale, from a couple different angles.

And cussed himself in the vaults of his mind. For not taking the pictures first, before he'd wiped the grit into an anonymous swirl. Another mistake, maybe, but the lab results would show whether he'd screwed up enough to matter. Chris put it out of his mind and went on to the next weld in the pipe.

He'd anticipated the end of the rope lining up with the end of the shift. The recovery line that Jen played out, the one she'd use to drag Chris back to the hole if something went wrong. Only, Chris didn't find anything else to bother the maintenance team with.

Good for them; the beast shut down once a year, for boiler and steam line inspections, and to catch up on all the pieces that had gone funny over the last year. Pipe leaks, frozen valves, the little aggravations. Maintenance always came away with a list.

One that Chris didn't really want to be longer than it had to be. Because anything on the list meant something he'd have to follow up with.

He crawled out of the hole and sat down next to Jen on the crawlway. "Your turn," he said after a few minutes of silence.

"Shit."

Chris played out the rope for the next hour or so, listening to Jen's running commentary. He tried to keep his mouth shut. Jen spotted a couple more, smaller, scale deposits.

"Young eyes," Chris muttered as he tapped the locations into his tablet. And back and knees and other joints. Then, his aching joints complained only in Chris's head.

Crap floating into the steam scrubbers brought complaints and issues from others. But that part of the inspection carried tomorrow's number. For now, for this end of shift, Jen crawled back out of the hole to sit and recover.

They walked the kilometer back to the locker rooms in more or less companionable silence. Chris didn't have to work hard to remember what he'd felt like, those first couple of years.

Dumb as a post. Lost. Knowing someone would decide that, really, they'd made a mistake somewhere, sorry, you'll have to go down to the mines, or maybe grab a broom and get sweeping, those are about the only jobs you're qualified for.

He knew better now. The mining jobs took a hell of a lot more work and thought than he'd ever have known, fresh out of school. And they'd switched to robot janitorial years before the beast ever took its final form. But the young engineer with more worries and insecurities than experience really hadn't known that then.

And when he'd found out... well, Chris-Jian hadn't slept well for a month after. What did that mean for his mother? And her job? But the mail did come in, somewhat regularly. And Mom's voice and face did continue to come through his helmet's display, like it did now while he and Jen made their way to shower and get out of the damned exposure suits.

"Chris-Jian, thank you for writing. Your sister's eldest has recovered, thank God, she needs some physical therapy but the doctors assure Lin-Eve that Molly will eventually be completely back to normal." Mom went on through her own social maintenance list.

When he'd first come to the beast, Chris had tried to keep up with his mother's network in something like real time. Cousins, neighbors, Lin. He'd made it about six or seven months before he'd had to change tactics; if one of Mom's stories later turned significant, Chris went back through his archives and replayed the videos.

Played Mom's messages at twice speed, asked after Lin and Molly, and now Molly's new baby Grace-Yi, and whichever of the neighbors or cousins sounded like interesting this week.

Jen held up a hand and stopped. Chris turned around, questioning with a shrug, until he remembered to turn off Mom's message and switch over to the beast's live feed. "Charlie's body has been placed in cold storage in the locker room, waiting your report. Please advise."

And by you, someone clearly meant Chris. Hell. So much for getting done in reasonable time. "Yeah, we're almost there," Chris replied. "How about the site?"

He figured that was safe enough. Wherever Charlie'd been discovered was a site. Someone had to have done at least a little bit to secure it, from the random eyeballs going by at soon-to-be shift change if nothing else. "Defu is there. He asks that you hurry."

Of course, Chris didn't say. The old man's as ready to leave for the day as everyone else. "Will do." He didn't say anything further, in favor of walking faster.

Jen kept pace, and mouth shut, until they stood over Charlie Wen Hai's body. Safely stored away in a refrigerated cart. "Regretting lunch yet?" Chris asked her.

"We ate before, not after," Jen reminded him.

"Right." Chris wasn't coroner or detective.

Then, nobody on the beast held those titles. Chris did, however, lay claim to "Health, Safety, and Environmental Technical Projects Manager".

Jumped up engineer. Because the beast's organization required titles if Chris wanted certain people to listen.

He'd found out after he got that particular title, among the others, that it meant he was the one they sent the dead to. And the job of discovering what precisely had happened to them.

Hai's body had been stuffed naked into the refrigerator cabinet, a wheeled contraption that should have been serving duty in the canteen. "Where's his suit?" Chris asked.

"Probably with Defu," Jen answered.

Chris grunted, leaned over into the cabinet, and looked for... anything.

Jen took out her tablet and started making notes, just as she had at the steam pipe. "Why do they bring these to you?"

"The same reason they bring me in when a vessel collapses or the mines hit an unstable stretch of mineral. Something went wrong, and I'm the one who's been put in the position of figuring out what it was."

"And fixing it so it doesn't happen again."

"Yeah. Hmm, there's bruising around his wrists." Chris looked around the locker room until he found the box of gloves.

Super-sized latex monstrosities that went over the suit gloves; he didn't need the boot covers, but they were hidden somewhere under one of the benches, as well. Their purpose being to let people go in and out of the conditioned spaces without de-suiting if they didn't have to.

Chris offered Jen a pair of the gloves, slid his on, then grabbed Charlie's hands at the base of the dead man's fingers.

Chris fumbled a bit, tired, until his finger found the button on his own tablet, the one that took the pictures. When the camera caught up, he laid the hand down to examine the rest of Charlie's body.

"Matching set of bruises on the ankles," he finally said, once he'd got that far. Jen scribbled her notes while Chris continued his process.

And then, finished, Chris made her switch places with him. "I'd try and save it for another day, but really, it could be years before we see another death."

Thirty-five years and Chris had done this only twice before. For a team of five hundred, Chris was awfully proud of that, and the team for working that safely. Back under full gravity, that kind of record was unheard of.

Here? Huoxing, where a bad seal on your suit meant unconsciousness, frostbite, worse if nobody noticed?

Chris made himself be even more careful to keep any hint of an opinion out of his voice as Jen made her observations, he took his notes, and she then took her pictures. "They're pressure ligatures, aren't they?" she asked, at the end.

Where the suits had clamped down to try and maintain core integrity. Better to lose a hand to frostbite and exposure than suffocate and die. The suits didn't have quite the job that a full vacuum suit did. Huoxing did hold an atmosphere, if cold and thin.

On the other hand, the beast's environment wasn't a benign walk in a sunny park, either. But the suit's sophistication amounted only to a running series of "Pressure good, temperature good?" questions.

Chris, and Jen now, knew the suits well. They had to, in order to understand what the maintenance team's reports meant. And whether they'd been decertifying an unusual number of suits recently. As they had. "Let's get to Defu, and quick. He'll know, or know who took Charlie out of his suit and can tell us."

"Means he was dead before the suit lost complete pressure," Jen muttered to herself as the pair jogged to Charlie's warehouse.

Chris was glad then of the suit, and the height difference. Jen's head and shoulders advantage over him meant she couldn't see the proud smile that threatened to cross his face as his junior partner worried the problem and formed her own guesses.

"Where, Defu?"

"Second floor, southeast corner."

Charlie's space was, had been, the parts warehouses. If you needed a part, Charlie was the one who knew where it actually was. As opposed to where the computers thought it should be. Chris and Jen climbed the stairs to the second level and walked to the back.

Defu sat on top of an old crate, a lean tall orange-dusted suit that unfolded himself as Chris and Jen came down the crosswalk.

Chris kept his grin to himself. Defu, second in command of the beast, the only remaining hand on the crawler who'd been at it longer than Chris. "What do you have, Defu?"

The older man gestured to the crate; more particularly, to the back side. "Zhe Huang found Charlie's body. She said he didn't show up for lunch, so she went looking for him after."

The crate, and the pallet it rested on, sat next to the guardrail. The second level of the warehouse was a twenty meter-wide ribbon running around the walls, with the middle open to the floor below. Defu pointed to the space between the crate of parts and the rail system. "Here."

"Do you have pictures?"

"Check your mail."

Chris and Jen both did that; the pictures showed that Huang had found Charlie's body lying half on the crate, half in the crevice behind it.

"And the suit?" Jen asked.

Defu stepped away; he'd laid the suit out next to the crate. Chris and Jen moved up together.

The gloves and the boots showed the damage the ligatures on Charlie's body had testified to. The palms of the gloves had been burned away, and holes torn-burned through the arches of the boots.

While Jen took pictures and made notes, Chris looked around the second floor. "What was he standing on, then?"

Defu grunted. "That's why you're here, isn't it?"

Chris swallowed the comment he wanted to make. "Did Huang know what Charlie was working on?"

"Inventory. I've asked the warehouse crew to keep up with the maintenance list, so we know what can be done with parts on hand."

Chris nodded. Jen, himself, the outside inspectors, could put together all the lists they wanted to. Defu and operations determined when and how it all would come together.

Charlie's suit, the burns, told Chris that electricity was involved. Somewhere in the crates and storage shelves, Charlie had touched a bare line. The shelves, for the smaller parts that could be broken out that way, ran perpendicular to the walls.

And the rolling ladder steps, portable stairs on wheels, that Charlie and the others used to reach the higher shelves... they sat some five meters or so away. Chris looked up.

This warehouse had only the two levels. Above, six or so meters, the angled iron framing of the roof defined the rest of the space. And all the electrical conduits, for the warehouse and the secondary processing units the warehouse shared a wall with.

Chris pulled up the electrical drawings on his tablet. Then, he fed them to his suit's display.

The ceiling above lit up now; red showed Chris the 110 volt lines, blue the 220, green the 440. Or, at least, the colors indicated where the electrical engineers thought the lines ran to and from.

Chris pulled a line meter from his tool case. The suit couldn't, of itself, read the field lines. The meter, once he plugged it into the suit, changed that. Chris walked around, tapping the meter on steel until he found one that connected fully to the warehouse's ground.

The meter, once his suit accommodated its feed, told Chris two things. One, that the rolling stairway wasn't currently energized. And two, that one of the 220 lines didn't run where the EE's had drawn it up.

Chris whistled, hummed, then carefully stepped around the portable stairs to the space behind. "Jen, can you help?"

"Ok." When she released the brake on the stairs, they rolled the stairs free and out away from the shelving units. "I'll look for the burn marks."

"Right." Chris turned back to the shelves. The blue lines overhead diverged; Chris toggled between drawings and actual live energy until he found the line. The real one, an open black snake of heavily insulated wire some five centimeters wide stretched from a conduit in the ceiling to a conduit that fed through the concrete bricks of the wall.

With only the insulated wiring hanging free between. Chris wanted to shake his head. Only, he knew how it had to have happened.

Repair the lines, some maintenance shift in the past had done. Well enough, just, to get the beast live again. The heavy black insulation of clean new wire shielded well enough. Flag the area, note it for maintenance to bring down on a night shift and run conduit to make everything fully secure.

Chris ran his fingers over the remains of yellow tape. The shelves concealed the hanging wires; the original crew had run the flagging just as they should have. Tied it off to the shelves.

Only, as Chris verified by walking out to the main aisle and taking a picture, the shelves concealed the wire and the flagging from anyone standing on the main walkway. If you didn't know to look... "When did Charlie come to the plant?"

Defu had the personnel authority to make that records request. "Eight years, Jian."

Chris nodded to himself.

****

Eight kilometers, and decades, stretched between the beast and the first cavern it had been used to construct. Chris kept his thoughts to himself as he and Defu made the drive.

Most of the plant's workers, the ones who'd been here more than five years especially, lived in that cavern. Defu and Jen were among those who made the drive every day. Chris tried to remember the last time he'd accompanied one of them, and couldn't do it.

Living in Shou, the beast, saved Chris a little extra money. He'd told himself, all those years ago, that this was the share of savings he'd use to buy himself a personal space, somewhere somewhen. The numbers had continued to grow in his bank account.

What hadn't grown to accompany the surplus, Chris admitted, was any real vision of what to spend the money on.

He'd asked Jen to make the presentation to the company's president. And then Defu had stepped in. "She wants you to do the presentation, Jian."

Chris had apologized to Jen for that, and meant it. For the missed opportunity to be present in front of those who made larger decisions.

Zhao Difei had been president of the operation for less than five years; Chris discounted the rumors that suggested she would move on in less than two additional years.

The typical president's tenure since Chris had come to Huoxing-Shou averaged something just more than nine years. He played the odds, such as they were. "Thank you for seeing us so quickly, ma'am."

Difei waved them both in; Defu and Chris both wore office clothing. They'd arrived early enough so that they'd been able to shower and change on entering the clean controlled space of the First Complex. "Not at all, Jian, Defu. None of us want such a loss. How, and what happens next, are most important."

Chris let Defu talk his way through the discovery of Charlie's body; then he explained what his and Jen's investigation had found.

"An accident, of course?" Difei asked when Chris wound his story down.

"Yes, ma'am." At least, everything Jen had found on the portable stairs said so. And with no loose ends, and Defu watching carefully, Chris had no suspicions to give voice to. Here and now.

Difei tapped her chin. "Jian. You'll be searching for how the wiring project went uncompleted. Send me the report as soon as you have it written."

"Absolutely," Chris agreed.

Difei rose, and Defu and Chris stood in response. "Thank you both for coming, and taking the time to give me a personal presentation. Please do keep me informed. My office is handling the funeral arrangements, so look for the email soon."

They were halfway to the elevators before Difei stuck her head out of the office to call Defu back.

"Go ahead, Jian," Defu told Chris. "You're staying at the Hilton? Do you want company for dinner?"

Chris smiled; Defu and his wife had adopted their grandchildren, twin boys about, what, twelve years old? "Go and enjoy the soccer game."

"Swimming," Defu replied. "Soccer begins next month."

Chris waved the other man away. "Go, go."

Chris was glad, when the elevator doors closed, that he wasn't the one who had to discuss whatever other business the president had remembered.

And, he admitted, that living in Shou meant that his rare stays at the Hilton were expenses Chris could charge to the company.

Chris didn't see the First Complex, and the Hilton, in any kind of separate perspective; the developers had filled the original salt cavern comprehensively. Everything here was a walk along enclosed hallways, most of them with video screens showing Earth views.

He preferred the view from Shou. Yes, the beast lived in piping and metal and clouds of dust under a red-tinged sky.

But it lived. The First Complex, and the other six living caverns, to Chris felt closer to a video game than anything else. No matter how well lit, and the sunlight really was replicated to great fidelity, Chris felt as though he walked perpetually down a fancy hospital's psychologically well-tuned atrium.

Jen rang Chris's tablet as he was sitting down to eat at the hotel restaurant. "How did it go?"

Chris stumbled through talking to Jen, reading the menu, and ordering iced tea. "Umm... right. Very short, really. She wants a report when we have one."

"Who to blame for the maintenance failure?"

Chris paused to remember Difei's face. Poised of course, closed. He didn't really know her, as other than a face on the other side of a screen, or the person behind an occasional email. Chris couldn't remember if he'd ever had more than a few personal words with the president.

Certainly not enough to judge where she was headed. "If I told you, I'd be lying. This is the first major accident since Difei took over."

"Meaning..."

Chris shrugged, paused to order the pork with long beans, then resumed his thinking. "Jen, there are some risks that are part of the job. If the company requires a scapegoat, though, you should know that you are not in line for the job." Yet, he didn't add.

She frowned, but accepted the quiet advice. "Ok. Do you need a ride back to the beast tomorrow morning?"

Chris weighed his options. In theory, Defu had obligated himself to give Chris a return ride.

On the other hand, riding to work with Jen meant Chris wouldn't have to discuss whatever it was that had caused Difei to call Defu back into her office. Discuss, or spend the minutes in silence not discussing. "What time do you leave?" Chris asked.

****

Part of the job lay in answering the phone whenever it rang. "Yes, ma'am?" Chris said, staring into his tiny bunk room's darkness.

"Jian, it's Difei."

He'd known from the phone's screen, but Chris didn't say that. "How can I help?"

"I read your report. It's a very good summary, I'd say. I just have a few questions."

Chris nodded, then said, "Please, go ahead."

He couldn't say, given how worn the insulation had been, that he'd been surprised when, on Jen's deep dive into the decades-old job logs for the beast, that she'd found that the electrical patch job had taken place on his predecessor's watch. Tommy Lu had held slightly different titles than Chris, but the job had been the same.

But Tommy had been good at the job. Good enough that Chris had immediately tasked Jen with going back through his own work logs. "If Tommy missed something like this, guaranteed Defu and I have a few little traps waiting. Different ones," Chris hoped. "But there will be something."

Though Chris had worried at a different aspect of the trail he'd found. Tommy wasn't just safely retired.

He was safely dead. Out of reach of blame. Difei had called to ask precisely that question. "How certain are you, Jian? You must know how convenient this might appear, should the need for blame, rather than simply..."

Fixing the issue. Yeah. Chris shivered a little. "We kept, and documented, the wire when we replaced and shielded it. The lot codes on the insulation match the original job and material logs. All of the documentation has been placed in archives with your office, and with the main operations center in Shenzhen."

"Where will you keep the wire?" The electronic documentation, and the pictures showing the lot codes on the wires, formed one database.

"We have a small warehouse on Shou devoted to project continuity." The boneyard, such as it was, formed the physical archive. Eighty years now of bits, pieces, most of it for equipment long since replaced and upgraded.

Chris didn't allow anyone to throw anything in that particular boneyard away, nor recycle it. Tommy'd taught him that, and he'd passed the lesson, he hoped, on to Jen. There was space enough. "I understand there is a similar storage area in First?" Chris asked.

"I don't think that will be necessary, Jian. You obviously put a great deal of care and effort into your job, I won't second guess you when there's no need to."

"Yes, ma'am."

"There is one other small matter. It's regarding Mr. Hai's wife and child."

Chris bolted up at that, then leaned over slightly. "Is there something wrong?"

"Would you mind talking to her? She will tell you. Jian, please do what you can for her. You know well, better than many, how much we all depend on each other here at Huoxing-Shou."

"Of course I'll do what I can."

"Thank you. You've handled all of this so well, I know this small denouement will be the last of Mr. Hai's worries for you."

Chris waited for Difei to hang up her end of the phone conversation, then set his phone down. Not to sleep, but to stare at the ceiling, and ponder the obligations she'd pressed down to him.

****

"Charlie wanted more than we needed, Mr. Wan."

"Chris, please, Yanli. What do you mean?" Chris had traveled back to First Complex to meet Charlie's widow and child.

He'd been shocked, and had to work to keep it from his face, when he'd found Charlie's apartments. Not only were they far larger than a couple and an eight-year old could normally use.

The apartments were in the high rent district.

In fact, Charlie and Yanli and little Teddy lived just below and a few doors down from Difei. Granted, the subsidized mortgage rates for Huoxing-Shou employees were more than affordable. But Yanli and Charlie had bought the place on the assumption of two incomes.

"I... Charlie's insurance won't pay off the entire mortgage." Yanli looked from Chris to Teddy, and left unspoken the rest of it.

That the company was supposed to take care of its own. In theory, Charlie's company insurance policy should have been enough to pay off an apartment, and then provide much of Teddy's college education. On Huoxing, sure, not back on Earth at the major universities.

But that assumption broke when the employee had reached for the clouds with his home. Chris wanted to argue, had to stop himself from asking whether "You tried to talk Charlie into something more sensible?"

His mind kept returning to the phone call from Difei, unrecorded on his end at least. But still very much placing him into an obligation. Or else the questions Difei had hinted at might not be carefully forgotten within Difei's office. "How much is left on the mortgage? And how much will Teddy's tuition be?" he asked.

And then he had to fight hard not to wince. Chris wanted more than anything at that point to convince Yanli to move someplace cheaper. But that would mean leaving First Complex, likely for Sixth, or perhaps so far as Seventh.

New schools, in other words. And the loss of networks and connections that went along with them. Chris rubbed his forehead, and told himself that living in Shou for the rest of his career wasn't as bad as all that. If he hadn't found anything else to spend the money on by this point... "I'll make sure it's taken care of, Yanli. And we'll set up a trust for Teddy's college."

One that, he hoped, could only be accessed for tuition and such. "Of course we'll set that up," Difei told him when Chris called to ask her if such a thing was possible. "I knew you would be able to handle this little problem."

****

Chris tried on his end to not mention what he'd done. But the beast's world was small. Word got around, as Chris knew it would.

"Why?" Jen asked.

Chris couldn't answer that fully. Though he did tell her of the implied threat; he had to. So that Jen would know what the signs were when her turn came.

"That doesn't explain all of it," Jen said. "You could have asked around. Defu, me, we'd have pitched in."

Jen maybe. Defu... "I'm happy to take on the obligation. That way, when you take over the job there's nothing hanging." And, if he made sure to be far enough away, he'd be able to leave Jen with room to maneuver. As Tommy had for Chris.

He probably left Jen with more questions unanswered than answered. But Chris thought that might be good.

The beast squatted in the middle of a great field of minerals, consuming them ton by ton to create galleries beneath the surface. Storms had covered the great metal monstrosity in red dust; a man in a just-as-dusty exposure suit crawled through the beast's gantries, inspecting, looking. Listening.

Chris-Jian Wan also spent his time on the beast's external workings thinking. Of how the beast worked. And the people that kept it going.