“Yeah, that was a long time ago.”
“True, I’m old as dirt.” Her dad grins. He thinks for a moment, then says, “I gotta say…a new Geode Pegasus in Neptune blue—you know, with the null powered jump-jets? They do look mighty fun.”
Karli smiles. “Gosh, I’d love to see Mom’s face when you drive that baby up to the house.”
“Yeah,” he chuckles. “She’d exact a hefty bill, but a few nights on the couch wouldn’t be so bad.”
“Shoot, don’t need a couch. Those bucket seats fold back.”
They share a good laugh. Then their laughter fades. The singing of insects rises in its place. Karli senses it’s time to go, but she hesitates.
“Come down from there and give your old man a hug.”
The tears are already building as Karli pulls the latch. The door panel slides upward, and she jumps into her father’s arms.
“It’s my own damn fault you’re leaving like this.” Her father chokes up as he holds her tight. “This place ain’t never been a proper home to you, Sparky. I never stood up to her. I didn’t fight for you when I should have.”
It’s so rare to hear her father cry, Karli’s tears fall like rain. “It’s all right, Dad. You and the boys always made me feel loved.”
“Your mother loves you too, Karli. She’s a…complicated woman.”
Cold. Strict. Harsh, Karli thinks. Never happy with anything I ever did. Downright crazed. But Karli says none of these things. Instead, she gives Jake a final squeeze before pulling away. “I gotta go, Daddy.”
“Yeah, I expect.” Jake pinches the tears from his eyes. He watches her climb back into the rover. “Be careful when you shift into six-wheel. Gear it down slow or half the wheel nodes will lock up.”
“I know, Dad—I will.” Karli touches the ignition widget. The fusion cell hums to life and the holographic panels spread light across the dash.
Jake raises his voice over the engine. “You were wrong about one thing.”
Karli looks down at him.
“You got courage, Sparks. The most of any of us. So you get up there and live a good, long, happy life.”
The words uncap a well of emotion in Karli. She’s fighting back a rush of new tears. The only answer she can muster is a nod. There’s a few higher pitched notes as the null-matter core kicks on and the power nodes in all six tires start spinning. She puts her foot to the pedal and the rover lunges toward the open garage doors. As she drives into the chill desert night, she hears Jake speak one more time.
“And come back to me someday.”
Issue 02:
“Survive”
Mark 05
…Now
EMS McKinney Steward
Interstellar Space, Coordinates Unknown
April 11, 2232
1634 Hours, OGT
“Whoa, Bestie, you don’t look so good!”
The bubbly voice of a teenager’s drone pipes in Karli’s ears. She has the drone’s audio output restricted to a set of earpods so only she can hear—better than walking the alien-infested halls with a squawking robot. To her left, the sounds of the alien growths ooze out of the open locker room doorway. She leans against the corridor wall just outside, eyes closed, skin clammy, breaths shallow. The ammonia odor stings her sinuses. Even with eyes closed, she can feel the lime-green light pouring into the dark corridor, the horrors within casting quivering shadows. Her fist is closed around her brother’s Strider emblem, still pinned to her chest, comforting her like a security blanket. She knows she needs to go in, but she can’t bear to look.
“Kitty.” Karli tries to calm her hyperventilating. “Are you sure there’s none of them in there?”
“Scanned the room twice, kiddo.” The drone hovers near Karli’s shoulder. “No stranger danger. No ‘giant quaddies’ to be seen.”
“Okay. I’m ready. Okay.” Karli takes deep breaths. Then a shock of that burnt wiring smell hits her, and she throws up all over the deck. She opens her eyes on a puddle of green vomit. “Okay. Not ready.”
The egg-shaped drone floats down into view. She tilts down toward the pile, then up toward Karli, her three different-sized lenses zooming in and out. “Awe, Bestie, that’s a real bummer. How bout I order you some chicken soup? Connect me to the Starnet to download my Hot Pot delivery app. We’ll shop for blankies while we wait!”
“Gee, Kitty, that sounds swell.” Karli rolls her eyes. Maybe I should put the drone in sleep mode. In the nearby room, something makes an extra-loud sucking noise. Then again, maybe not. “Fiddle futz, this is bad.”
“I have an idea!” suggests the drone. “Let’s not go in there.”
Karli grimaces in an effort to hold back her puke. “Swell. Only, you said this is the only way to the lifeboats, Ms. Smarty-Drone.”
“Correct! But my running map only reveals places I’ve visited. To unlock more local area secrets, you gotta take a girl exploring!”
“That’s what I thought.” Karli frowns at the drone’s blinking cat emoticon. “Well, like Daddy always says: A dirty job don’t get done by staring at it. Let’s go, Kitty.”
After a deep breath, Karli steps into the locker room. For a second, she stands in the doorway, slack-jawed. The alien growth covers rows of chrome lockers in webs of whitish-grey goo. It rises off the floor in piles and pillars, eating around whole sections of the wooden benches. These larger clusters are pocked at the base with the red pustules, and alive at the top with tall white stalks. A few of the stalks reach high enough to scrape the metal ceiling with red bulbs at their tips. Space suits, helmets, battery packs, tools, and boots are strewn about, often half absorbed by the goop. There are a few exposed patches of the rubberized floor, and she steps carefully from patch to patch like crossing a river by stones. Still, her bare feet occasionally sink into a nasty glob.
When she makes it to locker 42, she breathes a prayer of thanks. She recalls what felt like only hours ago, when the dressing room smelled of pine-scented cleaner and ocean breeze bar soap. Before going into the suspension, she filled the locker with her belongings. She’s already imaging how good it will feel to be wearing her shirt, overalls, and shoes—even covered in the dust of Aldrin, they will make her feel Human again. She presses her thumb to the lock and the door swings open.
“Eiaah!” Karli jumps back. A clump of the sludge gushes out. It narrowly misses her foot. The contents of her locker are buried. Her cry of sorrow is pitiful. “Oh…my clothes.”
“Ick, Bestie,” says Kitty. “Time to hit the mall?”
Karli holds her head in her hands. Then she sees a glint between her fingers—jet black metal in the next locker, sticking out of a clump of goo. A specialized tool glove with fingers retracted for portability, designed to be worn on the forearm. She begins to salivate.
No way! Could it be…one of those?
Karli reaches for the sludge inside the locker, the rest of her body staying as far back as possible. She closes her eyes as her fingers sink into the goop. It’s every bit as thick and snot-like as she expected, but what’s worse—it’s warm. “Ugh…God.” She tells herself it’s like the time she helped a mama goat give birth. Her hand drives deeper, and the greyish sludge sucks against her skin. It grows before her eyes, inching up her arm. “Futz, futz, futz. Don’t chicken out, Karli Hart, not now.”
A smooth, metallic object stops her fingertips. It’s cool to the touch and a welcome relief. “Got it!” She latches onto the bracer and pulls.
The sludge doesn’t let go. Karli finds her arm stuck as though submerged in a bog. She jerks again and again, her arm inching out a little more each time. The growth responds by puffing up as though inflated. “Fiddle futz fudge!”
“Yikes, Bestie.” Kitty buzzes up close and shines a violet flashlight on Karli’s buried forearm. “You’re gonna need a disinfectant wipe. No telling where that’s been.”
“Dog-arnit, Kitty. Help me!”
The flashlight swings f
rom Karli’s arm, to her face, and back to her arm again. Kitty’s lenses zoom in and out. “Sorry, Girly, looks like I’m stumped. Ask me about other cool KitBot skills.”
For the first time since leaving Aldrin, Karli feels a new emotion. One her six brothers learned to steer clear of. She plants her foot on the nearby locker and gives vent to some good old fashioned aggression. Her growl soon becomes a roar. “Let go of me you butt-ugly…” She drives her foot into the locker. Her arm makes hideous sucking sounds as it slides out a few inches. “…stinking…” She kicks off with all her might. “…Sack of shit!”
Karli’s hand launches free with a wet pop. She flops back against the bench. The mound of goo squishes and quivers in protest. She breathes hard for a few seconds, examining the grey clumps covering her right forearm. The ammonia stench has her eyes watering and her stomach rebelling, but it’s worth the prize.
“Whoa, Bestie, is that a new Bracer?” The drone’s cameras telescope forward for a close look at the high-tech glove.
“It’s more than a Bracer.” Karli thrusts her hand through the shiny black cuff. It comes alive when it touches her skin, instantly shrinking to fit her skinny forearm. Millions of polymer microcells crawl up to her elbow and down to her hand like a torrent of ants. With a soft chorus of clicks, the cuff lengthens to encase her lower arm, then flows over the top of her knuckles and across her palm. A few silver-colored plates slide into place over her joints. She turns her hand over and watches five points of blue light appear in the palm of the glove. An indicator shows low power. “This is a flashjack. It uses morphos to flash-forge engineering tools.”
“Like what?” Kitty asks.
“Just about anything if you’ve got the right app.” Karli admires the black and silver finish, thinking of all the hours she spent on the farm, welding scrap metal to farm equipment, driving rivets with under-powered hydraulics, or just lugging wrenches. To have had this state-of-the-art toy would have been a dream. As she rotates her forearm, she catches her own reflection in the polymer sleeve. She recoils from the sight of her face encrusted with alien gunk and her hair plastered under a layer of slime. She gets to her feet. “Only the really high-tech engineers can afford a portable fabricator. I may be naked as a howler monkey, but I could laser-weld a hull breach with this baby—once I get the darn battery charged, that is.”
“Totally tartar sauce, Bestie! Do they come in pink?”
“Not a chance!” Karli smirks. She picks her way over to the showers beyond the rows of lockers. The only functioning fluorescent light flickers above a bank of stalls with translucent glass doors on the far wall. If she can’t change, at least she can feel water flowing over her, washing away the stinking, revolting slime. “And good news for me, flash-jacks are waterproof.”
Kitty buzzes after Karli, micro thrusters humming a high note. “Oops! That’s the wrong way to the liferafts.”
“Not just yet, Kitty,” Karli says over her shoulder. She pulls the stall open. “First, I need a—”
Karli shrieks and stumbles back. Her foot trips on a space boot and she lands on her butt. She gapes at the sight inside the shower stall, eyes wide and filling with tears.
The crouching form of a woman sits over the drain. Her naked body is like skin stretched over a skeleton. The alien gunk covers her like a patina, connecting her to the tile floor like spiderwebs. Her gaunt face is frozen in a blank, slack-jawed stare. An odor of rotting meat joins the usual chemical stench. Karli trembles as she slowly crawls forward. There’s a strange bulge in the dead woman’s body, as if she were a hunchback. Terrified as she is, Karli feels an irresistible urge to look closer.
“Whoa, girly,” chirps the drone. “Who fired the janitor? My ick sensors are on red alert.”
With growing dread, Karli rises to her feet. She inches closer to the corpse. Her hand flies to her mouth. The rise in the corpse’s back is no hunch—it’s a flap of necrotic flesh peeled open. Where the spine should be, there is only a yawning cavity. The insides of the woman are gone—blood, guts, bone. The corpse is like the shell of an egg. The only question is: what did it hatch?
Karli scrambles away from the shower. Her stomach rebels again, but there’s no vomit left. She dry heaves so hard, her throat is on fire. Her cry of horror is like the moan of a tormented spirit. She manages to regain a measure of composure, but doesn’t dare look back at the corpse. “What the hell happened on this ship?”
“Uh, someone totally forgot to buy air freshener!” The drone giggles and flies a circle, then animates a laughing cat. “Burn! High five.”
A hologram of a big red hand flashes in Karli’s face. She glares at the capering drone. Still, the thought of turning Kitty off, and thus braving this Hellscape alone and in the dark, is a thought too terrible to contemplate. “Kitty, get me to the liferafts.”
“Sure thing, Bestie! Follow me, pip pip.”
For what feels like hours, Karli follows her robotic companion through the darkened corridors of the McKinney Steward’s habitation deck. Even the emergency lighting is beginning to fail, plunging the corridors into flickering half-light. Webs of the sludge fester on the metal surfaces of the bulkheads. The pentagonal architecture of the corridors, designed to look inviting and modern, somehow feel as though pressing down on Karli—smothering her. The air is hot, and humid, and polluted with flakes of the sludge.
Occasionally, they hear the clicking of a giant quaddy and duck behind one of the support frames encircling the walls and ceiling until it passes. They walk through the mess hall, now a cluttered mess of overturned chairs, food rotting in the service window, and mounds of sludge pulsating on the tables. Karli gets a glance into the crew quarters, where a body is splayed open on one of the bunks, hollowed out like the cadaver in the shower. Several of the junctions from one section to another are completely blocked by the alien growth. As the drone leads her through a dizzying maze of turns, down one ladder and up another, she is grateful to have Kitty for a guide. Finally though, Karli turns a corner and sees light at the end of a hall. But not any light.
Starlight.
“We’re here!” Kitty flashes a cartoon girl in the middle of a brash stride, smiling with delight. “Good news, girlfriend. You just logged one-thousand two-hundred and thirteen steps and earned the ‘walk the talk’ achievement badge.”
At the end of the hall, Karli sees a mural of stars. She is drawn to them as though to an oasis in the desert. Her mouth falls open as she steps into a new, wider hall that runs along the outer port hull of the ship. It’s mostly clean, and studded with plush couches, plants, and reading lamps. Much of the floor, the ceiling, and all of the outer wall are made of diamonide windows looking into space. Millions of stars fill Karli’s vision. The massive Roanoke Rift spreads a panorama of colors from gold, to bronze, to copper.
For the first time since waking up, Karli feels a weight lifted from her shoulders. She can feel the starlight like a cool breath on her skin. At last, in this place, she can breathe.
“This way, Bestie,” Kitty says.
Karli follows the drone to one of several hatches in the floor. Each is labeled with red arrows and stripes. Letters on the floor panels read, “Emergency life raft. Open circular panel and pull handle to enter.”
“Finally.” Karli breathes a sigh of relief and drops to her knees. She reaches her fingers into a circle of holes in the floor, wreathed by yellow highlights, and pulls away the panel. She grabs the handle for the hatch release. “Let’s get out of here.”
The hairs on Karli’s neck stand up. A sound like the patter of footsteps echoes from somewhere in the ship. Followed by a barely audible murmur.
“…want my daughter to have a good life.”
Karli’s head swivels fore, then aft. Did someone say something?
The wide hall, cast in the autumn glow of the Rift, is empty. She squints as far as she can see, where the curve of the ship bends the corridor out of view. “Hello? Is someone there?�
��
More whispers. As of a woman muttering to herself, but too far away to make out.
A chill runs down Karli’s back. Her pulse quickens. She swallows. “I don’t know about you, Kitty, but I’ve had enough of this place.”
“You said it, girlfriend!”
Karli turns the handle. But instead of a hatch opening, an alarm tone blares.
The computer says, “Alert: Access to liferafts denied. An emergency quarantine is in effect.”
“What?” Karli cries. “Computer, open the liferaft. Now!”
“Unable to comply. An emergency quarantine is in effect.”
It doesn’t seem possible. Karli stares at the handle, speechless. Everything she’s survived—the river of sewage and piles of bodies and clouds of floating, filthy goo—only for it to come to this. The lifeboat locked and her new tool glove too low on power to help. Karli pounds the hatch again and again with her flashjack, each strike echoing with a powerful gahlang! In a daze of rage and despair, she pounds, and she screams, and she claws. She pours every ounce of her strength into the assault. The floor doesn’t even take a dent. When her strength fails her, Karli collapses onto hands and knees, sobbing.
“You appear to be in distress, Karli,” says Kitty. “If this is an emergency, please text SOS on your bracer.”
“Shut up!” Karli snarls at the drone.
The drone flutters back like a frightened rabbit.
“Shut up you stupid, worthless, sputtering little toy!”
Kitty’s flaps twitch up and down, but she says nothing.
Her companion’s silence hits Karli like a gutpunch. “I’m sorry, Kitty…I didn’t mean it.” She plops down on the hard deck and pulls her knees close. She cries, dripping tears on her shins. Beyond the window, the ocean of stars makes for a peaceful vista. Each point of light is so brilliant. So silent. So eternal. Utterly indifferent to her plight. “Kitty, what am I going to do?”
Galaxyborn: Season 1 Premiere Page 6
