The metal froze his already freezing hands, but he held fast, determined not to die drifting in the middle of the cryo storage room. He floated there, hovering prone above the floor like a skydiver. At least in zero-G he could keep his bare feet from touching the deck.
Darius looked around quickly before heading through the door—and saw open lockers to either side of it. Lockers. Clothes! His chest swelled with desperate hope. He reached for the open door of the nearest locker.
The door handle froze his hand, but it was already halfway numb. Darius swung the door open all the way, revealing a weapons rack with a handful of matte black rifles and sidearms clipped into place. Weapons? Why would the Mayo Clinic store weapons with its cryo patients? There were more empty slots than weapons on the rack. Most of them had already been taken from the locker.
Darius’s teeth began to chatter noisily. He could figure out why there were weapons here later. He let go of the locker door and grabbed the next one in line to pull himself in front of it. This one was empty, just a big open space, easily big enough to fit three grown men.
“Damn it,” Darius muttered under his breath. He reached for the next locker....
Also empty.
He continued hauling himself down the row of lockers. After passing two more empty ones, he finally came to a locker that wasn’t open yet. With numb, stinging hands, he fumbled with the latch, and prayed that it wouldn’t be locked. A catch depressed beneath his fingers and the locker sprang open, revealing a glossy black space suit, complete with a helmet and boots.
Darius almost wept for joy. He reached for the suit with his free hand, trying to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge.
He tried again, this time applying more force, but it was no use. Growing desperate, he ran a violently shaking hand along the suit, hunting for some kind of seam, or zipper, or...
“How the h-hell do you put this th-thing on?!” he roared. He couldn’t believe he was going to die like this.
“Found something?” the man called out.
“Dad? Are you okay?” Cass shouted down to him.
“I’m f-fine, h-honey!” He took a moment to calm himself and study the suit more carefully. He probed it with his free hand once more. The material was unyielding. Hard. It wasn’t like any space suit he’d seen before. It was more like armor. Darius recalled the weapons locker, and nodded to himself. Weapons went with armor. That made sense, but there had to be some way to get the damn suit out and put it on!
Yet it appeared to be seamless. It was all one piece. If I were designing a pressurized suit of armor in the future, how would I design it?
I’d mechanize it, Darius decided, already searching for a control panel, or a button—anything that might open the suit.
After a few seconds, he found a likely-looking access panel on the waist. Probing it with numb fingers, he managed to slide the panel open. There were recessed switches and buttons inside. Frenzied from the cold, he tried all the switches and pressed all of the buttons. One of them had to do something!
A sudden whirring sound began, and a clu-clunk sounded inside the locker as something let go.
Then, to his amazement, the suit walked out of its locker, heavy boots clanking resoundingly on the floor. The suit turned to face Darius, looking more autonomous than he’d expected, and suddenly he wondered if this was some kind of robot. That would put an end to his dreams of crawling inside for warmth.
But before he could despair, a series of whirring and clicking noises issued from the suit, and it splayed open, revealing a hollow, human-shaped space inside.
Darius gaped at it. He’d done it! He pulled himself toward the open suit using the open locker beside him. As he drew near, Darius traded his grip on the locker for one of the suit’s splayed-open arms. He maneuvered himself inside and lined up his limbs, sliding his hands into the suit’s gloves and his feet into the boots. He stood up in the suit, but his head only reached halfway into the helmet. It’s too tall! The spongy padding inside the suit grazed his back, and he winced from the cold. He flexed his hands into fists inside the icy gloves, and almost screamed from the pain that movement caused. As he did so, the suit promptly folded up around him, and the helmet descended over his head. His breathing reverberated loudly in his ears and fogged the faceplate, which was now squarely in front of his face
“Thank God,” be breathed as he shivered violently inside the suit. In a matter of seconds, sweet, blessed warmth came pulsing through the previously icy padding now pressing against every inch of his frozen skin. The air inside his helmet grew warm and his breath stopped fogging the faceplate. Numbness gave way to pins and needles, and searing pain.
Darius gritted his teeth, telling himself the discomfort would pass. His hands were the worst, since he’d had to use them to hold onto cold surfaces. He flexed them over and over again, watching the suit’s armored gloves move dexterously.
As the air inside the helmet warmed, the faceplate cleared, and Darius noticed glowing symbols and icons there. A heads-up-display. He struggled to make sense of the information. He identified words, but the alphabet wasn’t at all familiar. He shook his head in confusion, and the helmet moved with him. What language is that?
It definitely wasn’t English. In fact, it didn’t look like any language he’d ever seen before. A chill came over Darius that had nothing to do with the cold. How long had he been in cryo? They were supposed to wake him when they discovered a cure for his daughter’s cancer! It couldn’t have been more than fifty years... could it?
“Hey, there he is!” the man from the cryo pods called out.
Somehow he sounded both far away and nearby all at the same time, with his voice rippling out right beside Darius’s ears. There must have been speakers inside the helmet to relay sounds from outside.
“Looks like you found yourself a space suit!” the man went on.
“Something like that!” Darius tried calling back. His voice sounded over-loud to his own ears, but he doubted it would carry beyond the helmet.
And yet somehow it did.
“Is it warm?” the man asked.
Darius scanned the pods above, and found the man’s open pod glowing brightly, four rows up and two pods over from Cassandra. The cryo pod illuminated him amidst the pulsing red lights, but the angle and distance between them preserved his modesty. Darius couldn’t see much other than that he was a large man, fit, and maybe middle-aged.
“Toasty warm,” Darius replied.
“Are there any other suits down there?”
Darius turned back to the open lockers and tried walking up to the next one in line. He found that moving in the suit was easier and more natural than he’d expected. His feet snapped to the deck as he walked, keeping him from floating free, and the suit whirred with every step, motors assisting his movements and diminishing whatever inertia the bulky suit should have had because of its weight.
The next locker was empty, so he kept walking down the line, but all of the subsequent lockers were empty too.
“Well?” the man called out when Darius reached the end of the line.
“Nothing here. Let me check the other side.”
Darius jogged down to the lockers on the other side of the open door. He found another weapon rack beside the door, with more rifles and sidearms inside. Again, most of them were missing. He jogged down the line, checking each of the other lockers, but they were all empty.
“There aren’t any more suits!” Darius said.
“Great... looks like you’re on your own, then,” the man said.
“I’ll go find help,” Darius replied.
“Better check those dead bodies first. See what you might be up against.”
“Good point,” Darius replied.
“U-up against?” the nearer of the two women asked, her voice trembling.
“Well, something killed them,” the man explained.
“Like what?” she replied.
“I guess we’ll see. Hey, Spaceman!” th
e man prompted. “You want to go take a look for us?”
Darius was just standing there, luxuriating in the warmth of his suit. He took long, deep breaths of warm, mercifully odorless air. He wasn’t sure if he was breathing the atmosphere aboard the station through a filter, or if the suit had its own air in a pressurized tank, but whatever the case, at least the foul smell was gone.
The smell of death, he realized, as he turned to face the human statues behind him.
“Dad?” Cassandra prompted.
“I’m on it,” he said.
He walked up to the first statue, a young man. As he drew near, he saw what had killed the man: his stomach had been ripped open, and his bowels were floating there in front of him like a nest of snakes. The man was wearing a simple black jumpsuit, discolored with blood. There was a strange red patch on the upper portion of one sleeve—a red triangle with a white eye inside of it—while the other sleeve bore a single red chevron and a cross-shaped symbol above that. Those symbols made Darius suspect this was a military vessel of some kind. That, and the pistol floating up beside the dead man’s ear. His hand was locked around the butt of the weapon, and his face was a frozen rictus of horror and pain, speckled with frozen droplets of blood.
Darius grimaced at the gory scene, though it was surprisingly bloodless given the extent of the man’s injuries. No blood had pooled on the deck—not that it would in zero-G—and the pulsing red emergency lights aboard the station made everything look equally red, so the coils and loops spilling from the man’s open stomach could easily have been knotted ropes.
Except that Darius knew better.
“So?” the unidentified man from the tanks prompted.
“This one was ripped open,” Darius said.
The woman swore under her breath.
“By what?” Cassandra asked.
Darius shook his head. “I don’t know, honey.”
“Check someone else,” the man suggested.
Darius strode over to the next body, all the while wondering what kind of weapon could have ripped open the first one’s stomach like that. The next body was wearing a suit of matte black armor like his, but that hadn’t saved the wearer. The chest plate was gouged with deep, ragged furrows, and pried open in the center, as if someone had used a giant can-opener on it. Darius peered closer.
As he did so, his stomach gave a sickening lurch. The heart was missing from this body.
He looked away, up to the person’s face. The helmet’s faceplate was cracked and smeared with blood from the inside, but he managed to glimpse a contorted face through the smears of blood. Feminine features. She’d been pretty. Young. What a way to die...
Darius grimaced, and looked away, to the other bodies standing sentinel around the gleaming vehicle in the center of the room. He couldn’t imagine what could have possibly killed these people. These weren’t bullet holes or laser burns. He couldn’t even imagine a weapon that would pry open thick metal armor like it was tin foil, and then still carve out a person’s heart. Darius looked back to the woman and noted the parallel furrows gouged into her armor around the hollow chest cavity.
“Well?” the man asked.
A terrible suspicion formed in his gut, and he turned from examining the body to look at the open door of the cryo storage facility. As the emergency lights pulsed brighter, he saw that the door wasn’t open—at least not in the way he’d expected.
It had been pried open, just like the dead woman’s armor.
Chapter 3
“Hey, Spaceman! Did you hear me?”
“Dad?”
“Her heart is missing,” Darius said slowly as he walked toward the ruined door.
“Damn...” the man replied.
Cassandra said nothing. She sounded like she was hyperventilating.
“It’s okay, honey. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
As Darius went, something dark thunked against his faceplate. He lashed out reflexively with one hand, sending whatever it was spinning away. He felt the impact relayed from the armor to his skin. Tactile sensors of some kind? As the lights pulsed brighter, he noticed that he’d entered a cloud of dark, glittering debris. He swiped his hand through the cloud, and grabbed a piece of the debris for a better look. As Darius brought it up to his faceplate, he flinched.
It was a frozen, bloody chunk of flesh. He tossed it away with a grimace. This is going to make a real mess if it ever gets any warmer in here, he thought. Darius’s gaze strayed to the HUD glowing on his faceplate. This time he noticed a pair of two-digit numbers that he recognized.
25°
-39°
Internal and external temperature? Darius wondered. Nodding to himself, he continued on to the ruined door, determined to find whoever might still be alive aboard the station.
When he reached the door, he stopped to examine it. Deep, parallel furrows led to curling plates of metal. Claw marks... That only confirmed his suspicions. This door and that woman’s armor definitely hadn’t been ripped open by weapons fire—they’d been ripped open by some kind of beast. But what kind of animal can carve open armor and doors with its bare claws? Not even a grizzly bear could do that. Icy fingers of dread stabbed Darius as his mind conjured nameless horrors. Feeling suddenly hunted, he whirled around to make sure nothing was creeping up behind him.
“Cass? I’m going to investigate the rest of the station to see if I can find more space suits, okay?”
“O-okay.”
“I won’t be long.”
Darius crossed the threshold of the ruined door into a gleaming corridor with a normal-height ceiling. Exposed conduits lined that ceiling, while more bodies lined the floor. Frozen, glittering carnage floated freely through the air. Darius ignored the gruesome sights and picked his way down the corridor, looking for help. Someone turned on the lights. Someone turned up the heat. So someone is here fixing things. He just had to find them.
As he went, he passed body after body, some of them were standing up like the first two he’d seen, while others were almost lying down, with their feet planted and knees bent, looking like they were about to do sit-ups. All of the dead either wore suits of armor like his, or simple black jumpsuits with the same crimson triangle and white eye symbol that he’d seen on the sleeves of the first two. That symbolism seemed somehow familiar, but Darius didn’t have time to focus on it now. These people all bore gruesome injuries just like the others he’d seen, and if the drifting rifles and sidearms were anything to go by, they died fighting.
As he went, Darius noticed dark scorch marks on the walls and floor. Weapons fire. Lasers? Feeling suddenly vulnerable without any weapons of his own, Darius grabbed one of the drifting rifles. Fortunately, it seemed to have been designed with the suits in mind, and his armored index finger just managed to fit inside the trigger guard. Where’s the safety? he wondered. He aimed the weapon at the floor and squeezed the trigger.
A white-hot beam of light flashed out at his feet with an echoing crack, and a glowing orange circle appeared where the laser had hit. No need to find the safety.
Darius continued walking for at least ten minutes, passing more shredded doors and bodies as he wound his way along the corridor. How big is this place? he wondered. Eventually he reached a T at the end of the corridor and turned left—
Only to freeze on the spot. The next nearest body wasn’t pinned to the deck, and it wasn’t wearing armor or a black jumpsuit. This person, a man of about fifty, was stark naked and floating free, his body curled into a fetal position. Unlike the others, there was no obvious cause of death. The man’s skin was unmarred. Darius blinked in shock as he realized where the man must have come from. The other empty pods... He was one of the ones who’d woken up before them. He also went looking for help, but froze to death before he could find any.
It was remarkable that he’d even made it this far, considering he must have been navigating the ship in utter darkness, and without any mag boots. Darius approached the body slowly and stopped to
examine it further. He still couldn’t find any kind of gruesome injury, which meant that whatever had killed the original crew might no longer be a threat. Darius blew out a breath and removed his finger from the trigger of the rifle he’d found.
Darius hurried on, wondering now if it was safe to call out for help. He decided to risk it. “Hello! Is anyone there?”
But no reply came. That wasn’t surprising, since none of the bodies in the corridor seemed to be moving.
Darius thought about his daughter back in the cryo storage chamber with three strangers, and he broke into a jog. “Hello!” he called again as he ran.
He needed to find help, or spare jumpsuits for Cass and the others.
Where am I? he wondered, glancing at pried-open doors as he ran by. The rooms inside looked vaguely like sleeping quarters. Thinking he might find spare jumpsuits in one of them, he ducked through the nearest door and spent a moment studying the room. There wasn’t any kind of bed, but there were several lockers, and some unfamiliar posters and artwork pinned to the walls, as well as a viewport looking out at space. Darius walked over to it and spent a moment trying to pick out familiar constellations.
He gave up after just a few seconds. He’d never been much of a stargazer on Earth, so he didn’t expect to recognize anything from space. He turned and hurried over to the lockers. Opening the nearest one, he found jumpsuits hanging on a rack inside. Bingo! Below that were drawers and smaller compartments. He tried opening the drawers and he found some regular clothes—men’s undergarments and socks, but it was better than nothing.
Darius carefully released his rifle and left it floating beside him while he removed four jumpsuits from the rack. He laid them carefully on top of the drawers and then rolled them up with four pairs of clean underwear and four pairs of socks. He couldn’t imagine the underwear fitting Cassandra, but it was better than nothing, and at least the jumpsuits were stretchy, so they would be a better fit. Cassandra was five-foot two inches, so at worst she’d have to roll up the pants and sleeves a bit. Darius tucked the bundle of jumpsuits under one arm and snatched his rifle from the air, being careful to mind the trigger so he didn’t accidentally shoot off one of his feet.
Broken Worlds: The Awakening (A Sci-Fi Mystery) Page 3
