Catalina counted down the seconds in her head. She heard footsteps behind her and whirled around—afraid that one of them was creeping up behind her—but it was just Ben. He’d finally left his computer terminal.
“You’re done?”
He nodded. Catalina saw that the excess fabric of his hazmat suit had been bunched up and cinched behind him with surgical tape—but how he could walk in those over-sized boots was a mystery. Ben went to the weapons locker and grabbed a rifle and an ammo belt for himself. The rife was almost as tall as he was, but he hefted it easily and aimed it at the door.
“Ready?” he asked.
Catalina was about to say no, but then the door swished open.
“Fire!”
Chapter 17
Darts streaked out, the feathery fletches turning to fiery red streaks. A few sailed on and plinked off the walls. Another one hit something solid and bounced off.
“Drones!” Remo yelled, diving to one side of the entrance. Commander Johnson hit the deck, and Doctor Laskin scrambled into the hazmat locker. That left only her and Ben standing. Catalina saw a matte black head turn her way, the dim red glow of an optical sensor fixing on her. The drone raised both of its arms and Catalina stared down the twin barrels of its integrated weapons. She cringed, anticipating the muzzle flashes and the searing pain that would follow.
But nothing happened.
“Its not shooting...” Commander Johnson said.
“It can’t,” Ben explained. “I reprogrammed it. We’re permanently designated as friendlies. Looks like we got lucky—they didn’t risk sending any people.”
The drone dropped its arms and turned to face back the way it had come. Missile racks folded out from its shoulders and it fired, blowing open the opposite door with a deafening bang!
“You could have just opened the door,” Catalina said.
“And go through decontamination again?” Ben shook his head. “No time. Let’s go,” he said. The drone went clanking out, punching a hole in the cloud of smoke left by the explosion.
Ben went after it, followed by Remo and Commander Johnson. Catalina went next, and Doctor Laskin trailed behind.
Once they were all standing outside the bio-safety lab, Catalina asked, “The drone’s on our side?”
“It is now,” Ben said. “I thought they might send drones in first, so I programmed a back door into them.”
“I guess that solves the problem of firepower,” Remo said, glancing back at the ruined door.
“Where is everyone?” Catalina asked, looking down both sides of the corridor. Gone were the doctors and nurses she’d seen earlier.
“They could be anywhere,” Commander Johnson said as she swept her rifle from side to side, looking for invisible targets.
Ben clucked his tongue three times fast. Waited, and then did it again.
“Nothing,” Benjamin said. He raised his rifle to his shoulder and started forward. “Let’s go.” Keep your distance, and I’ll clear the way.” He went on ahead, clucking his tongue.
“What the fuck is he doing?” Remo asked.
Catalina shook her head.
“He’s echo locating,” Doctor Laskin whispered. “Like a bat. Incredible...”
“Is that even possible?” Commander Johnson asked.
“It’s been documented that blind people can develop the ability,” the doctor replied, “and I’d guess that his synthetic brain is far superior to the average biological one, so yes, it’s definitely possible.”
“Their cloaking technology reflects sound waves, but not light?” Commander Johnson asked as they crept down the corridor after Ben.
“Limitations of the technology, perhaps,” Doctor Laskin suggested. “Electromagnetic radiation can be absorbed or reflected around an object. Sound is just vibrations in the air. It’s impossible to contain that.”
Catalina heard the drone clanking along softly behind them, bringing up the rear. She looked back and saw that it was actually walking backwards, somehow not colliding with anything or falling over. Both of its arms were raised and its weapons tracking restlessly back and forth.
Ben was bringing up the rear with that drone and echo-locating from the front at the same time. Yet more proof of the superiority of synthetic brains. She wondered if she and the others had that same potential.
They walked on until they reached the reception area, but it was just as empty as the corridors.
“Where are we going?” Catalina asked.
“To where all the others went,” Ben explained as he stopped in front of the Med Bay doors.
Catalina checked the doors with her ARCs and found them locked. She tried unlocking them, but an error flashed up before her eyes—
Access Denied.
“They locked us in!” she blurted out.
“Not for long,” Ben replied, and a split second later, the doors swished open, revealing a broad corridor and a row of elevators.
Commander Johnson’s voice crackled to them over the comms: “We should get to the CIC. From there we’ll be able to see where they’ve gone, and we’ll be able to take control of the ship’s systems.”
Ben clucked his tongue three times, waited, and then walked out of the med bay.
“Did you hear me, Ben?” Commander Johnson asked.
One of the elevators in the corridor opened for him as he approached, and he replied audibly, not bothering to use the comms. “I’ve already taken control of the ship’s systems.”
He walked inside the elevator and beckoned to them. “We need to hurry. They’re going to leave.”
“Leave where?” Catalina asked as they all crowded into the elevator. She imagined he meant they were fleeing to one of the ship’s adjacent sections—either Section 6 or 8.
“For the planet,” Ben replied.
“What are you talking about, kid?” Remo asked as the elevator raced down. Catalina saw that Ben had selected level 1-HANGAR.
“We’re already in orbit over Proxima B,” Ben said. “They’re boarding the shuttles as we speak.”
PART 3 - ARRIVAL
“‘The journey is the reward’—except when it isn’t.”
—Anonymous
Chapter 18
While Alexander stood in line, waiting to board his shuttle, a man with coffee-colored skin, elongated features, and a shaved head walked up to him. Alexander realized from the deep maroon color of his jumpsuit, and from the golden oak leaf insignia on it that the man was a Marine Major. It was Major Bright, Section 7’s executive officer.
“Alexander,” Bright said, stopping in front of him.
“What can I do for you, Major?”
“Our security measures have failed to contain the Outsiders. They are coming.”
Alexander’s eyes darted to the elevators and back to Major Bright. “We’d better go now, then.”
“There’s not enough time to get everyone on board. The Entity thinks you might be able to buy us the time we need. They will hesitate if they are confronted by their loved ones.” As he said that, a woman with short blond hair and dimpled cheeks walked up beside him. “This is Lieutenant Dempsey. She’ll be joining you for the negotiations.”
“You can call me Deedee,” she added.
“The others are already on their way,” Major Bright said, beaming brightly at him.
Alexander understood what Major Bright meant, and he smiled back. “That’s very good news.” He couldn’t wait to see the Outsiders’ faces.
* * *
Catalina steeled herself for a fight as the elevator reached the hangar level and the doors parted.
“Don’t shoot!” someone said. “We just want to talk to you.”
“Who’s there?” Remo demanded. “Show yourself!”
Catalina recognized that voice. “Alexander?”
Ben stepped out of the elevator, clucking his tongue and turning his head every which way, his ears cocked for slight changes in pitch that only he could hear.
Another voice spo
ke, “Remo, it’s me.”
“Deedee?”
They crept out of the elevator after Ben into a room with wall-to-wall lockers of spacesuits.
Ben took aim and fired in the direction of the voice. The dart froze in midair; then it fell straight down and hovered just above the deck. A moment later, a naked woman appeared lying there with the dart sticking out of her arm.
“Deedee!” Remo roared and raced toward her, heedless of the risk. He went down on his haunches and checked her pulse.
Ben was already scanning for his next target. His commandeered drone went clanking to the fore, weapons tracking.
“Ben, wait! Let’s hear what they have to say,” Catalina said.
“There’s no time for that!”
“Benjamin?” another woman’s voice asked. Catalina frowned. That voice was familiar. “Put the gun down, Benjamin.”
It can’t be... Catalina thought.
“Mom?” Ben asked, his aim faltering as he searched the room for her. “You’re dead!”
“I was,” she replied. “The Entity brought me back.”
Esther’s voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, and Catalina realized that she was speaking to them over the ship’s PA system.
“Where are you?” Benjamin asked.
“I’m right here,” she said. The doors at the far end of the locker room parted, and she came striding in wearing a black jumpsuit. She didn’t bother to hide from them, and she wasn’t alone. The man who walked in behind her was unmistakable for his size and the haughty swagger in his stride.
“Mikail?” Commander Johnson dropped her rifle to her side. “You’re dead! You’re...” she shook her head. “How is this possible?”
Mikail and Esther stopped in front of them with matching smiles. “The question you should be asking is why,” Mikail replied. “If the Entity were evil, why bring us back from the dead?”
Commander Johnson scowled. “You’re one of them, so why the hell wouldn’t it?”
“I wasn’t one of them,” Esther added, shaking her head and smiling patiently. “It brought me back, too.”
“You were dead for a whole day before the others were infected. There’s no possible way they could bring you back,” Ben said.
“A fossil is dead, yet we can use it to reconstruct a skeleton,” Esther replied.
Ben shook his head. “You’re not my mother.”
Alexander chose that moment to appear, standing right beside them, buck naked, and wearing a matching smile. “We’re not the enemy. Put your guns down.”
Commander Johnson did the opposite, bringing hers back to her shoulder and sighting down the barrel at Alexander. “You’ve got five seconds to convince me of that before I shoot. Five...”
“Because if you kill us, we might not come back again,” Councilor Markov said.
Commander Johnson shook her head. “Not good enough. Four.”
“We’ve arrived at Proxima,” Alexander said. “That means the Entity has been telling the truth from the start.”
Commander Johnson glanced at Ben and then back again. “So what if we have? Three.”
Their smiles faded in unison. “You really are wretched creatures,” Esther said.
Commander Johnson pulled the trigger and Alexander fell. Ben and Remo each fired another shot and both Esther and Councilor Markov crumpled to the deck beside him.
“How long before we know if it works?” Commander Johnson asked.
“A day. Maybe two,” Ben said.
Catalina ran out to check on Alexander. He looked like he might have hit his head on the way down. Thankfully the low gravity had made the fall easier. Going down on her haunches beside him, she pressed two fingers to his carotid artery and found a steady pulse. Beside her, Commander Johnson did the same with Councilor Markov. Benjamin didn’t bother to check on his mother. Either he didn’t care about her as much as he claimed, or he’d already checked her vitals via some hidden means that was only available to his enhanced synthetic brain.
“We need to get as many of the others as we can,” Ben said, already reloading his rifle as he stepped by them and through the open doors. He froze there at the threshold, his rifle slowly dropping from his shoulder.
“We’re too late,” he said.
Catalina jumped up and hurried over to see what he was looking at. There, on the other side of the waiting room, clearly visible through a wall of viewports, a shuttle hovered nose-first above the outer doors of the hangar. As they watched, the boarding tunnel folded away and the outer doors rumbled open.
Chapter 19
As soon as the hangar doors were fully open, the shuttle’s magnetic docking clamps released, and it shot out, propelled by the ring decks’ rotation. Catalina gaped at its departure.
“At least we were able to save a few,” Remo said after a long moment of silence. He turned to glare at Ben. “Assuming your cure works.”
“It’ll work,” Ben said slowly, as if uncertain of that.
They all turned back to look at their loved ones lying crumpled on the deck in the locker room.
“What about the other shuttles?” Doctor Laskin asked. “They can’t all have left already...”
The hope in his voice was painful to hear. Everyone has their loved ones except for him, Catalina realized. “You had someone on one of the shuttles.”
To her surprise, Doctor Laskin shook his head. “No. I don’t have anyone, and now I never will.”
An awkward silence followed, and Remo cleared his throat. “Tough break, Doc, but if it makes you feel better, you might not need to worry about it. Has anyone else wondered why they left us all alone up here? The Liberty was designed to separate into ten sections and support the colonists from orbit. We’re talking about a hundred trillion Sols of valuable supplies and machinery, but they just threw it away like an empty gum wrapper.”
“Maybe the ship that brought us here already has everything they need,” Commander Johnson suggested.
“Maybe,” Remo said. “But if that’s true, then we really are disposable. Ben—? Hey, what’s with the kid?”
Catalina noticed that he appeared to be in some kind of trance.
“Maybe he’s running out of oxygen?” the doctor suggested. The hazmats had built in air tanks, but they could only last so long.
Wordlessly, Ben turned to them, his eyes wide and unblinking. “You need to see this.”
“See what?” Remo demanded.
Ben walked over to the viewports facing the empty hangar. They followed him there and watched while he toggled the viewport to show a view from one of the ship’s external holo cameras.
Floating there below them was Proxima B. Shuttles, fighters, and drones streaked down toward it in a steady stream of bright blue thruster trails. The alien ship that had encapsulated theirs was nowhere to be seen.
Catalina studied the planet below. They were orbiting just above the day/night terminator line. Half of the planet was cast in deep shadows and glowing with dendritic red patterns of light, while the other half was bleached white and dazzling with reflected light from Proxima Centauri—an endless desert, no doubt. Between those two extremes ran a colorful blue band of what might have been liquid water. Varying shades of blue and indigo blossomed around the central band in grainy patterns that suggested vegetation, or maybe even algae.
“What are those striae?” Doctor Laskin asked, pointing to the glowing red lines on the dark side of the planet.
Catalina thought maybe they were rivers of lava, but the planet was tidally locked, meaning the dark side of Proxima B never changed—not like Earth or Mars where they rotated on their axes to bring a steady cycle of day and night—and since the dark side never saw the sun, it had to be hundreds of degrees below zero.
“There’s only one thing they could be,” Ben replied. “Cities.”
“Cities?” Catalina echoed uncertainly. She’d seen both the urban sprawls of Earth’s cities and the pimply green rashes of Mars’ domes from
orbit, but these patterns didn’t look anything like either of those. The only thing she could liken them to was Europa’s lineae, but those lines didn’t glow in the dark like these ones did.
“We came to colonize Proxima Centauri,” Ben said, “but someone already beat us to it.”
* * *
“Now what?” Catalina asked as she watched Alexander sleep—if it could even be called sleep. More like another coma, she thought. He hadn’t woken when she’d carried him to a bed back in Med Bay. None of them had. She glanced around the recovery room at the other beds and their occupants—Councilor Markov, Desiree, Esther, and Jessica, still recovering from the brain biopsy her parents had authorized. Each of them had someone by their side, all except for Esther. Benjamin stood by Jessica’s side instead. He was no longer wearing his over-sized hazmat suit. None of them were. With all of the others gone, there was no longer any need to pretend that their dart guns were loaded with Ebola instead of nanites.
Jessica was the only one of them who was awake. Her head was wrapped in a bandage, concealing her bouncy brown curls, but she seemed to be alert and in good spirits. “Ben?” Catalina prompted.
It still felt strange to be looking to a nine-year-old for guidance, but all the others were looking to him, too. Even Commander Johnson, who by all accounts should have been the one in charge.
Ben faced them. “We still don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with, do we, Doctor? Two people came back from the dead—and one of them wasn’t even infected.”
“As far as we know,” Remo said. “And not to mention Deedee had a pair of broken arms last I checked. Not only did she shuck her casts like corn husks, but they don’t seem broken anymore.”
“The infection might bestow regenerative capabilities on its hosts,” Doctor Laskin suggested.
“We should run some tests and see what’s going on,” Ben replied.
Doctor Laskin nodded. “I already took blood samples from the infected and also from myself and Lieutenant Taggart. I checked and cross-checked them for signs of—well, anything really, but I didn’t find much.”
Exodus: Book 3 of the New Frontiers Series (A Dark Space Tie-In) Page 15
