Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells Page B

and they both went down in the dark. It wasn’t a soft landing; they both went flailing and cursing. Bergen dropped both his pack and the canister. He scrabbled around for it.
    Walsh was grasping at him, alternating between speaking incoherently and laughing maniacally. Bergen fought down panic and froze in place for a moment, concentrating. His thoughts were disjointed…the deep voice. There was something…yesterday….
    Why couldn’t he think?
    “Commander? Walsh? Bergen? Report. Over.” Ajaya’s voice again and still the monitors beeped.
    Walsh’s grasping movements slowed and he went limp, a dead weight, collapsed against Bergen’s side. He was asphyxiating or something. Bergen knew he was next unless he could find that canister. He shoved Walsh’s inert body to the floor and redoubled his efforts, blindly feeling all around them, searching for the cani ster, the pack, anything.
    Walsh. Walsh has a canister too.
    Bergen scrambled, adrenaline pumping, to turn Walsh over. Dammit! Walsh must have taken the harness off at some point; it wasn’t on his back.
    Bergen slumped. He and Walsh were going to die there, in the dark, on an alien spaceship—surrounded by ginormous, freaky, alien space-slugs.
    He closed his eyes, giving in to the sleepiness. It was hard to sleep, though, with all the beeping. Someone should really turn that off.
    His dozing was interrupted by the sound of Jane’s voice and he roused himself half-heartedly to hear her. Her voice sounded u rgent. “Walsh, Bergen—this is Jane. Can you hear me?”
    “Jane?” Oh. She’s on the radio. He grabbed at it, his fingers thick and unresponsive. The little red light came on. He could talk now. “Jane? S’Berg.”
    “Dr. Bergen? Are you …ok?”
    He struggled to keep his eyes open. “Lost it. Both of ‘em. S’dark, Jane.”
    “What—what’s happened? What did you lose?”
    “Dunno. Air, I think. So sleepy, Jane.”
    Beeping. Lots of beeping.
    “Alan, listen to me. Stay awake. You—it—I think it’s a gas. The room you’re in is flooded with some kind of gas. You need to get out of that room!”
    Well, he’d thought of that already. “Can’t. Can’t see a damn thing. Can’t see the slugs.” His voice sounded slurred. Was he drunk? How had that happened?
    “Ok. Right. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”
    “Yup.”
    Jane went quiet then.
    The alarm still beeped, shrill in his ear. He started to nod off again.
    “Alan? There are very tall storage tanks with access ladders nearby, right? Climb one of them. There’ll be less of the gas, if you can get higher. I’m coming to help you, but you have to do some work too.”
    What was that beeping sound?
    “Jane? What’s going on?” Compton’s voice. Now they were talking.
    Bergen tuned them out and clung to what she’d just said. A gas. Huh. He pulled himself upright and stooped down to grab Walsh’s arm. He stuck out his other arm, searching for one of the tanks, and took a step, clumsily dragging Walsh along.
    There were going to be slugs on it. Icky, squishy slugs.
    He staggered, dragging Walsh behind him. Something rattled, skittered across the floor nearby. What was that? It seemed i mportant. He concentrated on the angle the sound had made and dropped to his hands and knees and felt around. Finally, his fingers brushed against something hard and cold and then closed around it.
    Air. Oh, holy fuck, it was the air.
    It seemed to take forever to get his fingers to close over the mask and bring it to his face, while he braced the tank against his chest and turned the valve with his other hand. He concentrated on inhaling deeply. After just a few moments, a comprehensible picture began to form.
    Xenon gas. He’d detected unusual amounts of it in the air the day before. The storage tanks must contain xenon and apparently there was a leak. It was an odorless, tasteless gas. Who knew what the concentration was in there? They were lucky they hadn’t suff ocated.
    The deep voice,