“Always with the gold toilet,” Marcus said as he climbed to his feet. It felt just like Earth gravity, and after five months of simulated half-gravity in the Shackleton’s habitation pods, that was too heavy for his taste. His legs felt weak and unsteady, and he thought he might collapse at any moment. Then he grew lighter until it was just right.
“Get some environmental readings, Juliette.”
She stepped up beside him and drew out her probe again. “Atmospheric pressure at a hundred and one kilopascals, temperature steady at thirty-two degrees centigrade. I’ll have spectrograph results in a minute.”
“She’s bending over backwards to make us comfortable,” Faulkland said. “I’ll bite.”
Marcus turned just in time to see the ship’s commander crack his neck-seal and lift the helmet from his head. He blew out and took one hesitant whiff, then began to breathe normally. With a smile, he lipped something Marcus couldn’t hear and gave a thumbs up.
“You reckless son of a bitch,” Marcus said, well aware that Faulkland couldn’t hear a word he said. Not to be outdone, he unlocked his own helmet and did the same.
The air that rushed in was warm and moist, and when he took his first sniff, he detected a faint hint of something metallic. It smelled of fresh blood.
Commander Faulkland flagged him down after he’d had a chance to take a few breaths. “I said it smells kind of funky, but it’s not bad.”
Marcus inhaled deep and filled his lungs. He was already growing used to the smell. “Not bad,” he agreed. “A little oxygen rich, but not bad. My freshman dorm smelled worse.”
He looked at Juliette through her clear mask, and wasn’t surprised at the furious face she was making. It’d been years since he’d seen that expression. She said something, and he didn’t need to hear the words to appreciate the message.
Marcus plucked the headset from inside his helmet and hooked it over his ear. “Should I be glad I missed that, Doctor St. Martin?”
“Nothing I haven’t called you before. Damn it, Marc… I haven’t even tested for microbiology yet.”
“When you do, I’ve got a hunch it’ll turn up positive. Draw up a quarantine procedure when you get a chance.”
“Done. I’m also going to check you two every ten minutes, whether you like it or not.”
Marcus groaned. “Understood. Everybody else, keep your lids on until further notice. At least we know this stuff’s breathable if we have an emergency.” He glanced around, and decided that this spot looked as good as any. “Let’s set up base camp here,” he said, and the team began unpacking their equipment.
“You put a good spin on that,” Faulkland said to him after a moment. He was affixing his own headset.
Marcus unloaded the mission transponder from his back and set it down. “Thanks. You’ve got me wondering, though… how the hell have you survived this long?”
The commander chuckled. “I steer boats, Doctor. This walking around alien spaceships business is new to me. What’s your excuse?”
“I’m competitive and prone to fits of idiocy,” he said, and they both laughed. “Just do me a favor. Gimme a heads up next time you plan on doing something stupid.”
Faulkland snapped a salute. “Aye aye, sir.”
Juliette finished assembling her med station and walked over to the two men with her probe firmly in hand. “Do either of you feel different? Warm, short of breath, light-headed?”
“No, no, and no,” Marcus said.
Faulkland said, “Ditto.”.
She waved the probe in front of Marcus’ face, and used the light to test his pupil response, then did the same to Faulkland. “The first sign of anything strange, and I mean anything, you will tell me. No more cowboy shit, understood?”
“Yes ma’am,” they both replied.
Satisfied, she returned to the small foldable medical station and started looking over the results.
The pressure suit helmets weren’t designed to be carried, so Marcus removed the lamp from his, and set the bulky thing down next to the transponder. Faulkland did the same.
“So, what kind of emergencies did you have in mind?” Faulkland asked.
Marcus shrugged. “Beats me, but as far as I’m concerned, we’re out among the many moons of Mongo now, and I won’t pretend I know what’s ahead of us.” Then a thought occurred to him. He glanced left then right down identical corridors stretching into the distance. “How’s this for starters, though… where’d the iris go?”
Faulkland took a long look around. “Good question. Damn good question.”
“Yeah. I thought so.” Marcus ran through some possibilities, but the word “possibility” was quickly taking on new meanings. He needed more information. “Donovan to Base. Be a pal and tell me where the mission transponder is located right now.”
“One moment… Showing right on the other side of the iris, Doc.”
Marcus took that as good news. It meant the doorway was still there but hidden. This was much better than finding out he’d been mysteriously shuttled to some distant part of the ship. Unless Zebra-One was falsifying sensor information. Best not to consider that, he told himself. That line of thought could only lead to madness.
He decided to worry about the missing door some other time, and turned back to his work. The base camp was assembled, the teams were itching to get started, and he was burning to know what was around the next corner. Time had come to start exploring. “Alright, there’s no time like the present. My team will head aftward. Rao, take yours toward the bow. Keep the channel open and plan to meet back here in four hours.”
With that, the two teams parted, each marching off in their given direction.
Chapter 10:
Are You Alive?
“Hey, are you alive?”
Jack Hernandez wasn’t sure about the answer. He didn’t know where he was or who was talking to him. His mouth tasted like blood, his body hurt all over, and the last thing he wanted to do was open his eyes. He felt fingers on his throat, and he thought someone might be checking his pulse.
“Come on… Wake up, hero. We gotta go.”
He pried his eyes open and saw nothing but bright light. His ears were buzzing, his head was a giant pile of hurt, and he wanted to throw up. What was on his face? Some kind of mask. He reached up and tried to take it off, but hands grabbed his wrists and stopped him.
“You don’t want to do that. Trust me. Hey Nik, he’s coming around. Can you gimme a hand over here.”
The wind was howling like Jack had never heard before. The Earth was angry.
“Hands are full. Can he stand?”
“Don’t think so.”
His eyes began to focus, and he could make out the shape of someone standing over him. The person was decked out in Corps gear, and their face was covered in a bulky combo oxygen/gas mask. The corpsman looked like some kind of human insect hybrid. Jack tried to read the name tag, but the words were floating around, splitting apart and rejoining.
“Albright?” he asked.
“Yup,” she said, hovering over him. She shined a light through his goggles, in one eye and then the other. “Looks like you’re concussed, but not too bad. You could be a lot worse off after a landing like that.”
Little by little, his vision was getting sharper, but the scene wasn’t right. It was like trying to make sense of a kid’s drawing. After a couple breaths, the shapes started to coalesce, and he recognized that he was in the ruined cockpit of a leviathan. The angles were still weird, though. He finally decided that the vehicle was on its side.
He could hear something outside roaming in big circles. It sounded like a clothes washer on the spin cycle.
“What the hell’s going on?” Jack asked, his own voice sounding muffled. The inside of his mask was slick and a little sticky.
“No time right now. I’m gonna unbuckle your seat belt, and you’re going to fall. I need you to be ready. Are you ready, Jack?”
He nodded as firmly as he could, then he heard the click of th
e harness and he dropped to the floor. It wasn’t a very big drop, and he managed to get his arms crossed in front of him, but he still managed to land partially on his head.
There was a strange tugging sensation around his midsection. He thought it might be the seat belt, but he discovered that it was his arrestor cable, its hook still attached to a guidebar in the doorway. His hand found the release button, the cable snaked back into its housing, and the unpleasant pressure was gone.
Lisa Albright took Jack’s hand and started pulling him upward. “I know it hurts, but we can’t stay here. Whatever’s out there is getting closer and I don’t want to be here when it shows up. Can you stand?”
With Lisa’s help, Jack climbed to his feet shakily. It felt like he was lifting a cement truck on his back. “Yeah. I’m fine,” he said. He wasn’t fine.
When he was half-way up, Albright pulled his arm over her shoulders and together they shambled back into the cargo hold. The room was lit from two gaping holes lined with torn and shredded steel, and the raging dust storm could be glimpsed outside. Lifeless bodies in metal restraints lined the walls, beaten and bloodied exhibits in a museum of death. Seven seats were empty, and five corpsmen were standing near the open ramp at the far end.
Jack was in a haze. He was lost in a bad dream. None of this was real, a shaky voice in his head claimed. He recognized Leonid Nikitin, the lighthouse, standing above everyone else with an extra service-pack slung over each shoulder. The rest were mysteries; orange jumpsuits and gas-masks with unknown occupants. Everyone was loaded with as much equipment as they could carry.
“You find anything other than that sad sack o’ shit?” Nikitin asked, pointing at Jack.
“Flare gun and a couple rounds. I raided the first aid kit, too. Some extra bandages, iodine, morphine, mixed auto-injectors. Not a bad haul.”
The flying clothes washer’s pattern was tightening, getting closer, louder.
“We’re out of time. Let’s move,” Nikitin shouted.
The four unknown corpsmen didn’t need to be told twice; they all wanted out of the charnel house. They clambered through the cargo door under cover of the half-destroyed ramp. Meanwhile, Nikitin took two long strides over to Jack and grabbed the arm that Lisa had over her shoulders. “I’ve got him. Go keep the rabble together.”
Five-foot Lisa Albright nodded her head and trotted off ahead. Now with the great Ukrainian holding him up, Jack felt like a little kid and he was glad for it. Even with his strength coming back, he wasn’t ready to walk on his own. Nikitin wasn’t gentle, but he was strong enough to carry an ox if he wanted to, and the two made good time catching up with the others.
The world outside the leviathan was more unsettling than the inside. Whirling dust and rocks painted the air a ruddy beige, hiding the blasted landscape beyond. What could be seen was utterly destroyed; a churned up mixture of raw earth and debris, like an endless compost heap.
With Albright leading, the squad moved quickly over broken ground and took cover in a jagged ravine, where the upturned roots of a fallen tree provided some meager shelter. Jack was glad to be back off his feet, if only for a moment.
Something was getting closer. All around them, the oscillating sound of the clothes washer drowned out every other noise, even the bitter howling of the wind. In another second, a silhouette descended through the maelstrom, and the source of the noise was revealed.
The strange thing emerged from the fog and hovered above the wrecked helicopter. It was shaped like half a tear drop, with its flat side facing the ground. The body was circled by a single undulating fin that moved in time with the sound, like some perverse, airborne imitation of a cuttlefish. The rest of the thing was covered in sharp edges, bony outcroppings and stalactites, except at its tail where there was a series of overlapping panels resembling silvery gills.
It floated to one side and then the other. Nikitin, holding a pair of binoculars up to his mask, leaned over toward Jack and said, “It’s inspecting the kill.”
Short arms on gimbals extended from either side of it, then angled down toward the leviathan. All of the corpsmen made educated guesses about what would happen next and covered their ears.
Each of the arms flared and then fired a bright cyan round that screamed into the fallen helicopter, and on impact exploded in a shower of blinding sparks. There followed a groan like steel girders sheering under too much weight, and nothing remained but a smoking puddle of glowing slag.
The floating cuttlefish lifted back up and disappeared into the whirling dust, apparently satisfied with its work.
It was a long time before anyone spoke. They sat there in the ravine, catching their breath, licking their wounds and looking through their gear. It was busy work, the kind people do when they don’t want to think. The previous two hours were a lot to take in, even for corpsmen who face catastrophes for a living.
Nikitin finally something after twenty long minutes. “Thing I can’t figure out,” he said, with everyone turning to listen, “is how to smoke a cigar with this stupid mask on.”
Albright shook her head, but the rest let themselves laugh a little. That included Jack, who would’ve preferred not to, thanks to his aching head. He consoled himself with the discovery that he didn’t have any cracked ribs, even if the rest of his body was thoroughly tenderized and sore.
“What now?” one of the other four jumpsuits asked.
“Find water,” Nikitin replied. He looked up and down the ravine they were hiding in. “This used to be a creek, I think. Should lead us toward water, give us a little break from the wind as we go.”
Jack could hear two or three more flying cuttlefish in the distance. Either that or his head was worse than he thought. “Yeah, it’ll keep us out of sight, too. Anyone know where we are?”
Nikitin shook his head. “Fat chance. Everything looks like landfill, and this shit’s so thick I can’t find the sun. Could you make out any landmarks from the cockpit?”
Jack’s memories were still scattered, coming back in flashes that faded just as quickly as they arose like embers spitting out of a campfire. He closed his eyes and tried to play through it, and all he saw was a dust cloud stretching off to the horizon. “Nope,” he said.
Nikitin looked down at his watch. “Well, we’ll have a better idea at sundown. I should be able to figure something out, what time zone we’re in at least. Until then, let’s make tracks.”
Weary and bruised, the corpsmen climbed back to their feet and dusted themselves off. The jumpsuits that were once bright orange were already growing dingy, turning the same shade of brown as everything else in sight.
Jack knew that Nikitin was doing the right thing; they had to keep moving. The weight of their situation might sink in if they stood still too long, but there was always hope as long as they were moving forward. Better to keep going, keep pressing on toward something, toward anything at all. Settlements clung to running water, and with a little luck, they might find some scrap of civilization that had survived the massacre.
For the first time, Jack realized he wouldn’t even mind running into Blade Aerospace or Carbon Corp troops.
Nikitin looked up and down the ravine again. To Jack, both directions looked equally inhospitable, but using some method that he couldn’t guess at, Nikitin picked a direction and said, “That-a-way.”
The rest of the corpsmen started to march. Nikitin waited to pull up the rear with Jack. “You alright to walk, pal?”
“Yeah. Just needed a couple minutes to recharge.”
“Good.” Nikitin gave him a hardy slap on the back that hurt more than it should have. “You know me, Jack. I’m not real big on this leadership crap. The sooner you can climb back into the hot seat, the better.”
Leadership meant responsibility, and that had never been Nikitin’s strong suit. He was a real hero-type to be sure, the kind that went to the zoo ready to jump into a lion cage at the first shout of “My baby!” He would never let Jack down, but he preferred to have the op
tion. Leaders don’t have that luxury.
Jack was just the opposite. He ate up responsibility like a shark after chum. “Gimme a few klicks to get my head on straight.”
“Sure. One other thing, though,” Nikitin said, and he craned down to Jack’s level. “Thanks for saving our bacon in the ‘viathan. That was some true blue hero crap, and we’d be a pudding splat without you.”
The memory of a spinning cabin flashed through Jack’s head, accompanied by the feeling of tumbling out of the sky. He’d never heard Nikitin thank anyone for anything, and at first, he didn’t know what to say. The only answer that came to mind was the trite catch-phrase from the old ERC recruiting commercials. As he started to recite the words, Nikitin chimed in and they said them together. “No need to thank me. The Corps saves lives. It’s what we do.”
Chapter 11:
Anatomy
The thing that really struck Marcus Donovan about Zebra-One’s interior was the emptiness. As his team trundled down the long corridor, there were no access panels, controls or anything for a person to interact with. There hadn’t been any junctions, nor were there any markings indicating where they’d been or where they were going. He wasn’t foolish enough to expect a wall-map with a big red arrow labeled “You Are Here”, but anything at all would have been nice, and something resembling writing would have been even better.
Instead, he was left to wonder whether the original occupants—the “natives”—used written language at all. It was possible that their writing was in a wavelength he couldn’t see, but the team’s few peeks into infrared and ultraviolet revealed nothing worthy of note.
Still, he felt like the natives must have had some way to keep track of their location, and as his exploration continued on, the possibilities occupied his thoughts.
Small round ventilation organs ringed the corridor every twelve meters, and it was possible they released pheromones, or some other chemical marker that neither his team nor their equipment could detect. Communication by stink, as it were. That led to an image of man-sized ants and Zebra-One as their hive, but neither idea excited him very much.
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