Project Columbus: Omnibus

by J. C. Rainier

  The thick, black power line tugged taut and then slacked. Darius looked up, squinting as the bright late morning sun shone in his eyes. Miguel, high above the ground in the white lift bucket, had his gaze was fixed on his work at the top of the utility pole. Instead of acknowledging Darius with eye contact, he jerked his thumb skyward twice. Darius grabbed the line and unwound two turns from the spool. Miguel took up some of the slack, and the aerial span running to the next pole sloughed to a normal hang.

  “That’s good,” Miguel called down and his hands went to work fastening the line to the pole.

  Good. At this rate, we’ll be able to plug the grid into the reactor tomorrow.

  Darius uncoiled several more loops from the spool. He heard the whirl of a motor as the boom lowered back to its parked position. Miguel dropped to the ground and gripped the line in his thick gloves. He helped Darius twist the line to straighten it as Ivan slowly reversed the crane truck in the direction of the sleeper ship.

  “You know, there’s something about you I don’t get, Miguel,” Darius said.

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “This line’s completely dead. We started at the river and are working back to the ship. There’s no way power can go through the line until we stretch it all the way back to Gabriel. So why do you wear those gloves?”

  Miguel shrugged his square shoulders. “Habit. Never touch a line without ‘em. After you work a crew for a while, it gets in your head that if you touch it you die.”

  “I never thought of it that way. I guess it makes sense.”

  “There’s probably stuff you used to do out of habit when you worked with those computers of yours.”

  Darius considered the point. “I suppose you’re right. I always organized my programs in a specific order. At first I did it for efficiency, but then I found later that if I screwed up the order, I’d get lost altogether. I guess it became a crutch for me.”

  Miguel leaned left, peering around the slowly lumbering machine. “Oh, what’s this?”

  Darius ducked under the line and craned to catch a glimpse of what Miguel was looking at. A small trail of dust rose from the top of the hill, and a rider could be seen galloping his steed along the telegraph road, straight toward them.

  “Messenger?” Darius asked.

  “Yup.”

  As the rider approached, Darius recognized the familiar paint that was becoming a fixture of communication for the work crews not equipped with radios. He realized that the rider was not one of the two men who were becoming as recognizable as the horse, but rather a blonde, petite teenage girl. She wore a grin on her face that looked more like elation of freedom than desire to see any of the crew members.

  Must be a busy day if they can’t even spare Smith, he thought.

  The blonde girl pulled her mount to an abrupt halt when she reached Darius. Her eyes darted between him and Miguel, and her smile waned slightly.

  “I’m… not sure I’m in the right place. Are either of you Ivan Novak?”

  In unison, the two men pointed to the cab of the truck. The rider turned the horse around, and Ivan emerged from behind the controls. He took his hard hat off and wiped his brow as he walked to the messenger.

  “Ivan Novak?” she repeated.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  She reached into a leather satchel strapped to the right side of the saddle and fished out a few letters. She read the names on them, plucked the correct one, and offered it to him. “You have a message from Rory Baines.”

  Darius gulped hard and he froze in place.

  “Thank you,” Ivan nodded as he took the folded paper from her.

  The rider scanned the horizon, looked at the remaining letters, and back at the scenery. She lingered for a moment, patting the paint on its shoulder.

  “Anything else I can do for you?” Ivan asked impatiently.

  “Sorry, just a little lost. I know where I’m going now.” She squeezed her legs and the horse took off at a trot, back along the dusty trail.

  The work crew waited until she was out of sight. Darius walked up to Ivan and took the letter from his hands.

  MR. IVAN NOVAK

  OUR MUTUAL FRIEND HAS SOME INTERESTING NEWS ABOUT DEVELOPMENT OF THE POWER GRID. HE THINKS THERE MIGHT BE AN OVERLOAD IF ADJUSTMENTS ARE NOT MADE, BUT IS NOT SURE ABOUT HOW TO GO ABOUT THEM. HE WILL BE COMING TO DISCUSS THEM WITH YOU AT THE END OF THE LINE AT HALF PAST NINE. HE WILL BE BRINGING YOUR CONSULTANT WITH HIM AS WELL. YOUR CREW CAN CONTINUE THEIR WORK WHILE YOU HAVE YOUR MEETING ABOUT THIS ISSUE.

  RORY M. BAINES

  “Is it your friend?” Novak asked quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “He needs to meet me in a few minutes. Can you guys handle this on your own?”

  “No problem,” Miguel replied. “Go do what you need to do. Me and Novak will take care of business here.”

  “Thank you,” Darius nodded, and jogged away toward the river.

  Darius knew that the letter was a ruse. The message was in code, and sent by Lieutenant Roger Miller. He had devised the method of communication with Rory, and Ivan and Miguel knew that any letter to them from Rory was actually a message for Darius, and he trusted them to keep any communication quiet. Rory was also trusted, as the former staff sergeant quickly sided with Darius after learning of Colonel Eriksen’s threats.

  Power grid, Darius mused. Overload. Nice way of putting it, Roger.

  The letter was about Colonel Eriksen. Darius knew that something important had come to light; otherwise Roger would not risk a meeting, even away from the crew of Gabriel. There was still something odd about the letter: a phrase that Darius could not interpret.

  He will be bringing your consultant with him as well, he recalled. Consultant? Who? Is Roger bringing someone with him?

  Darius came to a stop to catch his breath. A disturbing thought crossed his mind.

  What if it’s a trap? Has Eriksen figured out our code? Or has Roger turned on me?

  He shook his head and continued on. There was a chance that the colonel had broken or turned Roger, but he had to take the chance. If Eriksen wasn’t involved, Darius needed to know what was going on. Dr. Kimura and Lieutenant Reid could be endangered by any scheme of Gabriel’s commander, and Darius could not stand idly by and watch while one or both were put to death. At least not if they didn’t have a fair trial to begin with.

  Darius reached the last pole in the line, about two hundred feet from the river bank. A single bulldozer sat in the middle of a wide clear cut. Stumps had been blasted or pulled out from half of the cut, and the machine rested by a tall mound of dirt, waiting for its absent operator to finish the project of flattening the land for building. He looked around the construction site for any workers, but found none.

  They might be on a lunch break, he thought.

  Darius glanced at the pitted metal watch on his wrist. Though the hour hand on the Earth-made timepiece was useless, the minute hand told him it was twenty-six minutes past the hour. He paced back and forth, then made a trip to the river bank to make sure no one was there. He then inspected every inch of the lonely machine, making sure no one was hiding in or under it. Satisfied that there were no agents of Colonel Eriksen to be found, he selected a stump with a good view of the shallow, wide river, and sat.

  It did not take long for Lieutenant Roger Miller to arrive. He greeted Darius as he approached. Darius felt a moment of shock when he saw Don Abernathy arrive at Roger’s side.

  My consultant, he thought. Clever.

  “It’s good to see you, Roger,” Darius said.

  “Likewise. I wish it was under better circumstances.”

  “You have news, then?”

  “I do.” Roger sighed and sat on another stump a few feet from Darius. He cast his eyes at the dirt and his shoulders slumped as if weighed down by the tree that once stood in his spot. “I thought you were crazy at first, I’ll admit it. I thought I was just playing along to keep you fro
m snapping. Back on Earth I accidentally stumbled across Doctor Kimura’s files on hibernation psychosis, so I thought you might have been suffering from it. But after what I heard this morning, I know you’ve been right all along.”

  “Go on,” Darius replied, shrugging off the suggestion of insanity.

  “I accidentally left the bridge recorders on this morning during a routine com check. I guess when Colonel Eriksen barged in and ordered me out immediately, I just… forgot.”

  Darius nodded and leaned back slightly. So he accidentally recorded Eriksen.

  “The weirdest thing about it was the fact that as I left the bridge, Major Kintney was going to the bridge, along with Captain Quinn.”

  “Sorry, Roger, why is that weird?” Darius asked, slightly confused.

  His former partner lifted his head and looked Darius dead in the eye. “Major Kintney was supposedly assigned to an expedition group five days ago. I saw him get in the crawler myself. Every log I’ve seen confirms that assignment. No one I know has seen him for days. So I did something… impulsive. I checked his rack in the crew pod. He’s definitely been living there. His bed was still warm, and there are too many food pouches and dirty suits stashed away in that section of the ship.”

  “So he’s been hiding on Gabriel? What for?”

  “I don’t know. But when I got back to the bridge and found the recorders on, I stashed the conversation on a thumb drive before purging the computer.”

  “Good thinking,” Darius added.

  “In any case, I had to do a redundancy check on the mainframe this morning, so while I was locked in the computer core I took a few minutes to listen to what happened on the bridge.” Roger paused for a second as he scratched the stubble on his chin. “It’s pretty shocking. They were going over a list of points to bring up at the court martial. Lists of witnesses. They mentioned you.”

  “I thought they made it clear they didn’t want me at Doctor Kimura’s trial,” Darius sneered. “Why would they want me at Reid’s?”

  “They don’t. Colonel Eriksen said that you were to be ‘excluded.’ The colonel almost went off the deep end when Quinn asked him why, and kicked him off the bridge. Anyway, Eriksen knows that his efforts to push you away from the Kimura trial failed, so he told Major Kintney to make sure you don’t testify at Reid’s trial, and to keep your legal ‘watchdogs’ at bay.”

  “It’s clear this man has no regard for legal procedure or consistency,” Don noted. “Unfortunately, when it comes to a military court, I don’t have any real power. Fred Hausner and I are doing all we can to keep him from interfering with Doctor Kimura’s trial, but I’m afraid I can’t help you get your foot in the door with respect to Lieutenant Reid.”

  Darius thought hard about the information and what it all meant. The fact that Eriksen’s second-in-command was hiding on the ship while assigned elsewhere was very strange. Kintney had been in stasis for the entire journey, so he did not get a chance to see how Dr. Kimura kept his end of the colonel’s bargain. His head began to swim, and he knew he needed to be alone to sort out his thoughts.

  “Thanks, Roger,” he said as he rose. “At least we know the colonel’s in this to lay down the law. We should probably leave before the work crew comes back and sees us together. I wouldn’t want that to get back to the colonel. You don’t need that kind of trouble.”

  “There’s more, Darius,” Roger said as he grabbed Darius’s elbow. “None of the men assigned to Kintney’s expedition group were civilians. They were all Air Force. And I think all of them are camped out on Gabriel, just like Kintney. I think the crawler’s there, too. I didn’t want to open the cargo pods because it would leave a trace in the system, but I ran a calculation through the mainframe when I was working on it earlier. Gabriel’s load sensors show that it’s between six and twelve tons too heavy on the starboard front quarter right now.”

  “A crawler weighs eight tons,” Darius remarked. “That’s a lot of metal to be hiding in plain sight. Who else was assigned to that expedition?”

  “Camp, Garza, and Marks.”

  “Can you keep an eye out for them? Send a message through Rory if you see them.”

  “I will.”

  Darius shook hands with the two men. He then walked to the steep bank of the river and looked across at the other sleeper ship. He wondered if their crew was struggling with how to handle any conspirators that might have been on board. He wondered if they had the luxury of being able to concentrate solely on colonial life. For a moment, he yearned to be on the other side of the river, to be able to walk freely among the other crew.

  He walked downstream along the river, searching within for many answers.

  Calvin McLaughlin

  15 April, Year of Landing, 09:55

  River Islands, 1 mile east of Michael landing site

  Cal’s hand shot out and grabbed Alexis’s arm as she nearly stumbled face first into the swift, sparkling water. Her weight pulling on him made his foot slip, and he was forced to take an awkward step to avoid dunking his backpack in the river. His left hand dropped, and with it, their shoes plunged into the cold water.

  “Damn it,” Cal muttered.

  She regained her footing and straightened up. The knee deep water lapped at her soaked jeans. They had rolled up the cuffs as far as they could, but even at the shallow crossing to the islands, the river was just a few inches too deep to keep their clothing dry.

  “Sorry, I slipped,” she said sheepishly, almost drowned out by the river.

  “It’s okay.” He held up two drenched pairs of sneakers and grinned. “We’ll just bring the river with us when we walk.”

  Alexis wrinkled her nose. “I’d rather go barefoot, thank you.”

  They crossed the last fifty feet of river with great care; their feet would alternate between finding solid, smooth stones and sinking a couple inches into muck in the river bed. When they reached the shore of the near island, disappointment set in. Cal gingerly picked his way around the downstream shore, only to find that the entire island was nothing more than a heap of mud, accentuated with numerous felled trees and only a half dozen or so that were still standing. He could not find a patch of dry ground anywhere he looked, so he returned to Alexis.

  “A bust?” she asked, pouting slightly.

  “Yeah. Shall we try the other one?”

  Alexis turned to the narrow channel of churning water that lay between the two islands. It was nowhere near as wide as the fork of the river that they had just crossed, but the white rapids that dotted the span as far down as the downstream tip of the island made Cal question the safety of the idea. He was a strong swimmer, but was more used to lakes and pools than anything else. He knew that one false step in such a current could be disastrous.

  “I think so,” she replied. “It’s fast, but I think it’s pretty shallow, too.”

  “You sure?”

  “You bet. I’m not wasting a day off just so we can mope around back at the ship. I’ll go first,” she said as she grabbed a long, soaked branch from the ground.

  She waded into the river, prodding the river bottom as she went. Cal followed just behind. He kept one hand just behind her, ready to reach out in case they fell. The water pulled at them, threatening to sweep them from their feet if they made a false move. But the river bed was lined with rocks, and had only gradual shifts in depth. The water barely rose to their knees before they closed in on the far shore, and the channel once again became shallow.

  The second island rose farther from the river, and was topped in lush vegetation. Birds called from the trees above, and the midday sun helped to ease the chill of their waterlogged jeans.

  “This looks more promising,” Cal chirped as he took a few steps downstream and scrambled up the tall bank. As he emerged on top, he caught a glimpse of something metal from the corner of his eye, buried in the vegetation. He walked over to a tall, half flattened bush and found an eight foot tall cylinder with four legs splayed out on the underside. It sat at
a sharp angle on only two of the legs, with a fallen trunk wedged underneath it. Alexis bounded up to his side.

  “What is that?” she asked as she brushed a clump of dirt from the side.

  “I think…” his voice trailed off. He skirted around the other side and pulled back a branch full of tiny blue leaves. Underneath were thick block letters, scratched from its hard landing.

  USAF. XCS-03-R.

  “Yeah, that’s Raphael’s landing beacon, alright,” he confirmed.

  Alexis had her eyes glued on the beacon as she walked around it, one hand firmly planted on its skin. “I thought that there was nothing left of that ship?”

  “No other part,” Cal corrected. “Hunter said this was launched as part of their approach, well before they had a problem. We knew this piece was here, I’d just never seen it in person before.”

  An uneasy silence fell between them as they inspected the only artifact from the doomed sleeper ship. Cal’s nightmare of the burning wreck began to play in his head, but he shook it off before it could consume him.

  “Come on,” he beckoned toward the high point near the center of the island and laced his fingers with hers. “I’ve done enough swimming and sightseeing. It’s time to eat.”

  They walked slowly along the low ridge, avoiding shrubs and sticks that might poke into their unprotected feet. Just below the top they came across a grassy patch with a lone felled tree below a shaded canopy from three others that were standing. Cal cast aside their shoes and slipped out of the shoulder straps of the pack. He set it down and carefully removed the belt and holstered pistol, which he then set down next to the pack.

  Please be intact. Please be intact.

  Cal dug further into the container, removing meal pouches that had been rolled and clamped to seal their slit tops, and the skin of scotch that Dr. Taylor had gifted to him. Though the alcohol had been consumed the first night on Demeter, Cal had refilled it many times before, even taking it with him on the scouting excursion. On this occasion it was filled with coffee that Gail helped him sneak from the kitchen just before he and Alexis had left the camp. Cal hoped that it had retained enough of its heat to remain palatable; the bladder of the bag was not well insulated. He laid the items out on the ground next to the log.