Was the snub deliberate? An unvoiced suggestion that they didn’t trust her to do her job?
Or was she just being paranoid?
Then again, they’d already made comments that suggested they didn’t trust Reyes and they’d paired her with Reyes. It certainly seemed like a judgment.
She struggled to dismiss it, but nothing she could think up to explain her uneasiness about it helped her convince herself that she was imagining the entire budding conspiracy theory.
She was afraid it was paranoia brought on by chemical instability, but also afraid to simply dismiss it since people in survival mode were less inclined to work together toward a common goal and more inclined to focus on their personal survival.
If they decided she was dead weight they might decide to cut their losses and abandon her or dispose of her.
She wasn’t convinced Wilkes would consider it or Shelly, but she wouldn’t put anything past Ralph Johnson.
Luckily, the ice test was a success. They discovered it actually was frozen water—very pure water, in point of fact, and they should be able to extract the oxygen from it in sufficient quantities for air not to be an issue—as long as the equipment didn’t break down.
Unfortunately, they also discovered the water was salty—sea water—which meant they’d landed in the middle of this world’s ocean or one of them, in any case.
Which was ok as long as the water remained frozen but very bad if it began to thaw.
Which it might since the planet could be headed straight toward the sun, or at least further into the solar system, which meant it could get close enough and warm enough for the ice to begin to melt.
But then that would be months or possibly years down the road depending on the Rogue’s speed and trajectory and they might not survive long enough to worry about that particular issue.
Chapter Three
The room had an exotic look to it that was like nothing Claudia had ever seen, and yet … there was something that seemed almost familiar about it.
She spotted him before she got more than a glimpse of the room, striding purposefully toward her.
She wasn’t alarmed even though he was alien.
There didn’t seem to be anything threatening about his approach, just purposeful.
“You come back.”
Claudia blinked at him. His lips hadn’t moved. The words just seemed to form in her mind and while she understood them it almost seemed the words hadn’t been spoken in English—which was seriously bizarre.
“En-gish? Dis is de tongue you speak?”
Confusion fluttered through Claudia and it deepened when she realized his stride had brought him unnervingly close and he still hadn’t shown any indication that he meant to stop.
He caught her shoulders, as if he knew she was contemplating flight, and moved close enough to brush against her just about the time it flickered through her mind that he must intend to kiss her.
Something flickered in his eyes as he pressed against her, trapping her between his body and a hard, flat surface behind her, and then he lowered his face to hers.
A hint of amusement?
Passion?
He seemed to hesitate, his lips so close she could almost feel the heat of them. Then, to her disappointment when she’d begun to anticipate his touch, instead of completing the circuit, he pressed his forehead to hers.
When he did, her mind seemed to explode with images and voices that poured into her so swiftly she couldn’t identify anything.
She felt like she was falling into a deep pit of darkness.
And then she jolted all over when she stopped abruptly.
Sucking in a sharp breath of shock, Claudia opened her eyes and stared blankly at the bunk little more than a foot above her, completely disoriented for many moments.
Finally the world righted itself, however, and she recalled that they’d completed the check and repair of the hull before the sleep cycle. Once done, they managed to stabilize the pressure within the ship and raise it to a level comfortable enough they were able to discard their suits.
Mostly, they hadn’t, although they’d all removed their helmets.
The rush to get in to the suits was still too fresh in everybody’s mind, however, for them to feel completely comfortable about discarding the suits. No one wanted to get caught with their pants down again. Even though that seemed like a remote possibility when they were 99.9% certain they’d found everything.
The outer layer of the ship was ‘self-healing’, but the ceramic layer beneath that had cracked at impact by the steel sheeting beneath that that had been damaged. Exposed, several sheets had torn and curled back when the ship had skidded on the icy surface. The metal protrusions had made it impossible for the outer, self-healing skin to completely seal the ship until the damaged metal panels had been replaced.
Johnson had decided to sleep without his suit, though, and Claudia had decided that, if he thought it was safe enough, there was no reason why she shouldn’t also get comfortable, remove her suit, and use one of the bunks provided for the crew for those times when everyone had to stay close to the bridge.
“You ok, kid?”
Recognizing Reyes’ voice, Claudia glanced toward the sound with relief and a touch of amusement. “I’m thirty-two. I haven’t thought of myself as a kid in a while,” she said wryly. “Yeah. I’m ok. Just … another weird dream.”
He chuckled. “I’m fifty six—you’re a kid to me. You sure you’re ok?”
Abruptly, Claudia recalled that she’d thought the alien man would kiss her and … well, she’d actually hoped he would, had felt a rush of warmth and anticipation. She felt her face heat with discomfort at the memory.
Reyes looked a little uncomfortable. “Ah. Well maybe it wasn’t so bad, huh?”
Claudia shook her head, frowning now. “It was … just … strange.”
“And already fading?” Reyes guessed.
Uneasiness stirred in Claudia’s belly. “That’s almost the weirdest part. A minute ago I couldn’t remember anything about it. Now, I do.”
Now, she remembered more than she thought she could possibly have dreamed.
How was that even possible?
* * * *
“It looks like a solid three day hike even if we don’t run into any problems,” Commander Wilkes said grimly.
“What are our options?” Shelly Adams asked.
Claudia looked at her in disbelief, wondering if the crash had lowered the woman’s IQ or she was just that deficient in common sense.
“Stay here and wait to run out of rations,” Wilkes said tightly.
Shelly gaped at him and uttered a disbelieving snort of laughter. “That isn’t an option!”
Claudia rolled her eyes. Unfortunately, Shelly caught the eye roll and took exception.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.
Claudia’s own temper was stretched to the limit. “It means that was a stupid question! Where were you when we did the inventory?”
Shelly glared at her, but the Commander intervened before they could escalate the argument. “That was a rhetorical question,” he said tightly. “We don’t have any options. Well, other than trying to make it to the hab wheel where we have a reasonable expectation of finding enough supplies to hold us for a while.”
Shelly gaped at him indignantly. “Well why the hell did you ask?”
He ground his teeth. “Because I’m not going to order everyone out of here and in to a dangerous situation when we don’t know anything about this planet except that it’s a completely hostile environment! We will all agree, on the record, that it was the only option we have and no one was forced to go against their will.”
“Well! I’m very much against it!” Shelly ground out. “We don’t know what’s out there! We have food and water, air. We just spent nearly a week making this place safe!”
“And even though we’ve been at half rations, we barely have a week’s worth left!”
&nb
sp; Because some asshole among them hadn’t been eating half rations! Claudia suspected Johnson, but there was no proof it was him and she didn’t know if she suspected him because she didn’t like him or because he had behaved in a way that suggested he was the culprit.
He was the biggest among them and it could be argued that half rations was a greater hardship for him, but by taking a full measure, if not more, that severely shortened their survival time.
“I’d rather wait here,” Shelly said tightly. “Just leave my portion of the rations.”
“So what you’re saying is you expect us to make the hike, take all the risks, and then endanger ourselves further by hiking back to rescue your ass?” Johnson growled.
Not that Claudia hadn’t been thinking similar thoughts, but ….
“That isn’t just stupid! It’s irrational!” Johnson snapped, and then looked at Commander Wilkes significantly.
“That isn’t an option. You put everybody at risk that way. This isn’t a vote. There aren’t any options.”
“Why did you even ask?” Shelly growled angrily.
“Because if we all die—or any of us—he doesn’t want it to go down as his fault,” Reyes pointed out.
“What difference is that going to make if we’re all dead?” Shelly snapped.
Commander Wilkes stared at her for a long moment and then looked at Johnson. “Are you in agreement that this is our best option?”
“We just spent the last thirty months establishing a supply chain!” Shelly interrupted. “Everything we need is out there ….”
“The closest is six months out, at least, and moving away from us as we speak, and we don’t have any way to get to it,” Claudia pointed out. “If we were closer in, that might be an option. There might be some possibility that Houston could send help, but we’re much too far out now to have any expectation of that. The hab is way closer and, from the video we got from the drones, it looked like there were several sections still pretty much intact. The terrain between here and there could be dangerous, but there’s nothing living here that we need to worry about.”
Instead of looking heartened by the comments, Shelly looked like she might burst into tears.
Claudia looked at the Commander. “I understand. I’m in.”
In the end, they had to sedate Adams, stuff her into her suit, and drag her. Reyes had fashioned a couple of sleds for them to pull their supplies on. They had to strap Shelly to one of the sleds and the added weight made progress slower than they’d anticipated.
Johnson, assigned to pull the sled carrying her, grumbled (bitched) about it for the first hour of the trek.
Claudia wasn’t even almost tempted to offer to help him.
In the first place, she was less fond of Johnson now than she had been and that was no easy thing.
In the second, she was helping Reyes pull a sled and suspected he was carrying most of the weight and that was hard enough to have her panting after less than an hour. They paused after two hours to catch their breath, check their bearings, and survey the terrain just ahead of them for any dangers.
Claudia tried not to think about the possibility of stepping into a hole the drones had missed, or a thin area of ice that they might break through.
They’d used lasers to check the thickness of the ice where the ship rested and calculated it must be a minimum of thirty feet deep/thick. There were indications of liquid water beneath, however, and if the ice hadn’t been so thick and they without the means of drilling through it Wilkes, Johnson, and Reyes would have done so—Wilkes to test for life, and Johnson and Reyes to look for food.
They’d set up the lasers around the ship afterward to act as a beacon for them if they were able to return to the ship and decided to and so that NASA could use them to calculate the speed and trajectory of the planet to ascertain if it was a threat to human life or would move harmlessly out of the solar system as it had moved in.
Well, relatively harmlessly. It had stirred things up in the Ort cloud when it had come through and sent some fairly large asteroids out of orbit and directly toward Earth. They’d had dozens of impacts since they’d first noticed the disturbance almost a decade earlier, but most of them had caused little or no damage—far more had missed than hit and they’d managed to divert the two largest.
Fortunately for Shelly, she came around when they stopped several hours into the trek to catch their breath. Johnson had been debating rolling her off his sled and leaving her.
He pretended he was just joking, but Claudia didn’t believe that. She thought if Johnson had had the opportunity he would have done just that.
Shelly was furious when she came to and discovered they’d brought her despite her objections.
Claudia could see her point, but the stupid bitch hadn’t left them any palatable options—they could knock her out and take her, or stay with her and die with her, or leave her to die alone. Of the three, the knock out seemed like the only thing they really could do.
She damned sure wouldn’t volunteer to stay behind and slowly starve to death and if they’d stayed much longer they would’ve lost the window for getting to the wreckage with enough supplies to make the journey possible.
She shut up when Wilkes offered to tie to her to the sled and Johnson offered to knock her teeth down her throat.
But she wasn’t happy and she made damned sure everyone knew by bitching without cease until they finally stopped to try to sleep for a couple of hours.
As convinced as everyone was that there couldn’t possibly be any kind of living creature on the planet that would be a threat, Reyes set up an alarm perimeter to help everyone sleep easier.
Actually, Claudia wasn’t entirely convinced any longer that there were no living creatures on the planet. She didn’t know what sort of threat they might represent if any at all, but she’d begun to believe there was something on this planet.
She might have continued to believe that something had happened to her that had affected her mind, but she couldn’t ‘feel’ anything that seemed ‘wrong’ with her, and the consistency of the ‘dreams’ she kept having suggested they weren’t dreams at all.
She was well aware, though, that believing didn’t necessarily make it so and convincing the others seemed far less likely than convincing herself—particularly when she didn’t know that there was any threat that they needed to be made aware of.
Chapter Four
“I am Torin BynVishnu.”
It was the same man she’d dreamed of before but he seemed … different somehow.
There was no warmth or welcome in his expression or his eyes.
But then, maybe she’d just imagined there was before? She hadn’t seen him nearly as clearly, after all.
“Dis is my world. Why your people are here?”
Claudia studied him uneasily, trying to decide how to respond. She didn’t want to appear weak or helpless … or threatening. Instead of responding directly to the question, therefore, she posed one of her own. “You’re … the ruler of this world? Is that what you’re saying?”
Something flickered in his eyes and she knew when he spoke that he was lying. “No. Ert your world. Vishnu mine. Birthed here. Live here.”
A shockwave went through her, but she tried her best to hide it.
He knew about Earth? How could he?
“You read my mind!” she said accusingly.
Again, something flickered in his eyes. “No.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I don’t believe you.”
He reflected her anger back at her and she thought his was much more effective. “I am here. You are here. I showed you my world and you showed yours to me.”
“I did nothing of the kind! Not willingly! You took! You invaded!”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You are invader! Dis my world!”
Claudia jerked awake and sat up, looking around.
The other crewmembers stirred when she did and shook themselves awake.
“What is
it?” Wilkes asked sharply.
Claudia stared at him for a long moment, debating whether to say anything or not and finally opted for the coward’s out. “Nothing.” She shook her head. “Weird dream. I guess it’s this place.”
“Thanks,” Ralph Johnson growled. “I was having a good one myself.”
“Don’t share,” Shelly retorted. “I know what constitutes a ‘good’ dream for you.”
“You weren’t in it,” Johnson snorted.
The day was an exercise in misery. The atmosphere was too thin for the wind to actually buffet them, but it kept the dusting of ice particles on the surface stirred and made poor visibility even worse. They couldn’t remove their helmets and had to use the feeding tubes to suck down water and ‘baby food’ to keep them going. There was no point, therefore, in stopping to eat, but they needed to stop every couple of hours to rest. They probably would’ve had to anyway, but the fact that they were pulling the heavy sleds made it impossible to avoid.
And the damned sleds were heavy because the gravity of the planet was a close match to Earth’s and the sleds plus the supplies together were roughly the weight of a large person.
Beyond that, the surface was a long damned way from smooth. There were frozen ridges that looked like they might once have been waves-worn down, granted, to short ridges, but obstacles they had to deal with. And there were troughs, fairly shallow dips, but they had to go down and up again or walk around and no one wanted to add any steps they didn’t have to.
The suits themselves were heavy.
About halfway through the second day they realized that they were gaining altitude. The climb wasn’t sharp, but it was clearly uphill and that made the going even harder.
Claudia thought they might have progressed from frozen ice water to ice over land, but there was no way to be certain without tests and they couldn’t spare the time for that.
Their rations were running low and there was still no sign of the hab wheel.
When they stopped to rest again, Wilkes and Johnson took out the drones for a look.
Thankfully, they saw they were still on track but still a full day, at least, from the beginning of the debris field and probably a half a day from the nearest segment that looked like it might be intact enough to offer shelter.
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