He turned on the exterior cameras to see the dome for the last time. The other kids in the flight crew watched on their overhead screens. They were mortified by what they saw. ES1 had made it and they had made it, but ES2 was falling down back onto itself. The floor of the dome was filling up with fire and rocket fuel until the entire dome exploded with the imploding rockets of first ES2 and then ES4.
Air sucked hard into his lungs and his heart stopped. The whole of the island seemed to explode as flames billowed up in an inferno toward them enveloping the ship’s camera in smoke.
They worried the explosion would reach up and throw them back down to the earth to die with the rest of the species, but it never did.
The ES3 lifted high into the sky and approached the heavens. Every cell in Adam’s body ached from irrecoverable loss, yet even as sorrow tightened his chest he knew that none of it mattered anymore.
These few survivors of the planet earth must leave all that death behind and together build a brand-new past.
NIGHT WITHOUT END
THE EDEN PROJECT: Book Two
DP Fitzsimons
-1-
“Today we honor the dead.” Those were the first words Zeke uttered standing before the thirty-six others who had survived the bloody end of the dome and were now billions of miles from Earth gliding smoothly through the endless night of space.
Gen did not hear the rest of her captain’s heartfelt words. Her mind wandered. It had been five months since all the evils of the world came crashing down onto their heads and four months since the other survivors on Eden Sphere 3 had traveled out of range of communication.
They were on their own. The planet from which all their ancestors had come was now forever lost to them. The friends with whom they had spent all their lives would never be seen or heard from again.
Adam and Sylvia and Maya were alive somewhere in another dark corner of the universe, but they were billions, soon to be trillions, of miles away. Their absence was as permanent now as the dead who had been turned to ashes by their launch rockets.
“This time tomorrow, we’ll be able to see Pluto.”
Gen knew it was Tuna even before he spoke. She could smell him. All their lives every kid had to bathe vigorously with antibacterial soap twice a day. Tuna rarely bathed since leaving Earth, since leaving Cassie on the floor of the dome. He had grown patchy teen facial hair and a sweaty, unpleasant scent usually accompanied him. If you caught him smelling good it meant Zeke had recently forced him into a shower.
“And then what?” Gen said, trying to get Tuna to look into her eyes.
“And then nothing. You know that as well as I,” Tuna said, glancing everywhere but at Gen. “I know what you are trying to do. I’m fine. I do my job every day. I do things no one else could ever do.” He stopped suddenly to flash a quick look of defiance. He no longer liked the weight of another’s eyes and disappeared quickly into the small crowd.
She knew that once they passed Pluto there would not be another celestial body for trillions of miles. A never-ending endlessness. It would be almost a year before they would enter the next star system and that would be Alpha Centauri where the only earthlike exoplanet had an estimated surface temperature well above 1000 degrees. They would not even stop to check it out. Their target was another star system well beyond Alpha Centauri. And even then, years from now, it would be a long shot to find an Earthlike exoplanet in that system.
Their journey could last decades, generations, centuries. They had to get used to the confines of the ship being their whole world. And it was up to Gen to feed them now and forever.
The dead. They were on her mind as much as the living. She knew she had to change that. Tuna was a living reminder that one could not live borne back forever into the past. The images were horrifying and spectacular. Not easily forgotten.
Cassie’s sad eyes and heroic plunge from the ramp. Milo and the three charging into the horde with their guns blazing. Claudia’s flame thrower frying dozens of the infected in their tracks. These were the acts that helped preserve the species at the cost of their own lives. Such selfless stories had risen to the level of legend in the days and weeks following departure.
Lately, however, it had become poor taste to even mention them.
They were looking forward to a future free of such memories. Zeke had planned this memorial for that purpose, to move on, to be free of the dark days of their past.
But there were not just dark days to move on from, there were also days of unmatched beauty and light, days where Gen’s heart pounded electricity into her veins, a trembling energy that reached the skin of her lips, the tips of her fingers and then, finally, reached him. Adam.
Her energy had dissolved into his energy. Completely.
His heartbeat could be felt hungrily beating against her chest as he pulled her roughly against him. On days when she managed to forget, it was always his heartbeat that found her and carried her back to those cherished minutes when all past and all future became nothing but a nuisance.
“How’d I do?” Zeke said as he emerged from the exiting crowd.
“Yeah. It was necessary. You did well.” Gen forced a smile for him, but none of her smiles had been real for a long time. It was not Zeke’s fault. He did nothing wrong. No more than she and Tuna and Adam had done anyway.
Zeke seemed to read her. “I know,” he said. “I feel the same way.”
She did not understand him, not entirely. They considered each other’s eyes, trying to connect.
Molly, a ten-year-old, tugged on Zeke’s shirt. “Commander Firstborn, it’s still okay to miss them, isn’t it?”
Zeke bent down to be on her level. “Of course it is, Molly. You can miss them, but we honor them more if the memory makes us happy.”
Molly wrapped her arms around Zeke and squeezed tight. Gen managed to find a real smile now as she watched cute little Molly buzz away from Zeke feeling better.
Zeke gently touched Gen’s shoulder. “Come with me,” he said as his hand dropped down to find her hand.
* * *
GEN AND ZEKE ENTERED the officer’s lounge unnoticed by Tuna who sat hunched at a long glass console in front of two screens. He searched intensely through distorted images on the screens moving backward and forward in time.
“I asked Tuna to show us everything,” Zeke explained. “He even has footage from the ES3.”
Zeke sat next to Tuna who did not flinch or even acknowledge their presence. Gen sat as well. The door slid open. Zeke nodded to Jax and Lexi who came in to stand behind Tuna.
“Good. We’re all here.” Zeke grabbed Tuna’s shoulder. “Let’s proceed.”
Tuna became visibly uncomfortable from the physical contact. He filled his chest up with air and let out a deep, defeated sigh. “Okay, so, on the left screen I’ve stopped at the moment when an explosion throws four people back off their feet.”
“It’s tough to make a lot of these images out,” Zeke stated the obvious. Everyone leaned in to study the distant blurred images that had come from an exterior ship camera. Tuna was the only one who seemed disinterested in who the people actually were.
Gen winced as Tuna turned a small dial and the images began to move forward. Two of the people were obviously smaller. Kids. She covered her mouth as tears welled in her eyes.
“What is it, Gen?” Jax asked. “Can you make them out?”
Gen dropped her eyes. “It’s Ada.”
“Yeah,” Zeke said. “And the bloody one there, it must be that Trumpet kid with her.”
Lexi nodded. “And two Doctors.”
“Quarna and Becker,” Jax observed.
Tuna moved the dial so that the four people on the screen were lifted up off the ground by the explosion. Their arms flapped wildly as they glided through the air and landed on a large mound of something. Bodies.
“The infected,” Tuna said pointing at the mound.
Lexi winced. Gen leaned in when she saw that Ada was moving.
&n
bsp; “Ada’s alive,” Gen said.
She was moving after the explosion. She even began to tend to Trumpet who lay lifeless on top of the bodies.
“Roll it back,” Zeke commanded. “I want to know what happened before this.”
“He killed them all,” Tuna whispered. A cold shudder went through Gen as she watched the images rewind quickly to the point where Trumpet was running up behind Doctor Quarna who was facing the cannibal horde.
“There,” Zeke said pointing at the screen.
Trumpet ran up the back of Doctor Quarna and launched off the Doctor’s head. He soared high above the horde with long, silver knives spinning in his hands. Lexi gasped as Trumpet cut a hole in the horde and landed. The strange boy became a blur of decapitation and bloody death.
Even Tuna sat back in awe at what he witnessed.
“Doctor Becker told me something,” Lexi said uncertainly. Tuna stopped the footage. All turned back to look at Lexi. “The boy is immune.”
The news seemed to hurt Tuna and shock the others.
“Tuna, show us the rest, could they have survived?” Zeke said.
Tuna did not respond or move. Zeke touched his shoulder again which brought Tuna back from distant thoughts. He slowly moved his hand to the control and fast forwarded until after the explosion.
They watched in awe as Doctor Quarna and Doctor Becker kissed each other madly. They were covered in infected blood, but it did not stop their almost animalistic hunger for each other’s lips.
When the doctors stopped kissing it was because Ada reached out to them, her small hand. They hurried to her and helped prop Trumpet up, but before they could lift him, the feed went black.
Gen turned white. “What happened? Is there more?”
Zeke lifted his hands to her, unsure.
Tuna shifted in his seat to reach the control for the second screen. “I have a little bit of footage from 40 seconds later,” Tuna answered. “From Adam’s ship.”
The second screen was darker. This was the feed from the ES3. The images were both distorted and unsteady.
“There’s nothing there,” Jax said squinting to make out images of the dome floor.
“Wait,” Tuna said.
A few shadows and a shoulder or two were visible and moving and then gone from the second screen. The senior command of ES1 bent their faces wondering what they had seen.
“Was it them?” Gen wondered.
“It must have been,” Zeke said hopefully.
“Of course it was them. Everyone else was dead.” Tuna lost patience with their questions. “They had ninety-five seconds to get from there to some buried place that could withstand the exploding rockets from ES2 and ES4.”
“And?” Gen glared down at Tuna who met her eyes.
“And did they survive?” He sighed and turned the screens black. “This is just another of the things we can never and will never know.”
-2-
The beauty of his mind had captivated Lexi since the first time she ever heard him speak. He explained the second law of thermodynamics in a class when she was ten. He managed to make heat convection, the flow of matter and buoyancy forces seem like a candy-cane colored sky.
He sat hunched over his scrollpad when she entered. His heart had broken and yet his work had not wavered. In fact, he usually worked into the night on various present and future concerns. His heart was as beautiful and steadfast as his mind, she decided.
“You should be with the others. You’re running the cryo pods tomorrow,” Tuna said without turning around.
“How do you always know it’s me?” Lexi wondered aloud.
Tuna tilted his head to give her a quick peek at his elusive eyes. “More accurately, I know it’s not anyone else. Everyone’s footsteps can be heard except yours. Process of elimination leads me to you.”
Lexi nodded and took a quick breath. “How are you doing, Tuna?”
Tuna did not seem to understand the question at first. When the intent dawned on him, he became uncomfortable. “Fine,” he said and turned back to his work.
“No, Tuna. I need to know and you need to ask yourself this question. You can’t push it all away forever.”
He stopped working, but would not look at her.
“It must be difficult,” Lexi said setting her hand on his back.
“What must be difficult?” he said still bent over the scrollpad.
“To spend your whole life asking how and then one day something happens and you just want to ask why.”
Her words hit him. He looked up at her and for the first time since leaving earth, he felt connected to someone. He did not look away.
She felt the weight of his eyes. The air in her lungs struggled now to lift up and out of her throat. “For me,” she added, “I ask every day why I ran onto ES3 instead of fighting through the crowd to get to our ship. When I finally left ES3 to make a run for ES2, the ramp was closing. Zeke appeared and told me to get on ES1.”
“They were waiting for me,” Tuna realized.
“Yes. I was lucky the ramp was still down. I was lucky they were waiting for you. Your heroic act saved my life in the end.”
“I could not save everyone,” Tuna lamented.
“I know. I know, Tuna,” she touched his back again. “All those kids on ES2, our faithful crew, they died. They died and I should have been there. I should have died too.”
He was confused. He wanted to comfort her. He felt a social duty to comfort her. It had been so long since he even really heard anyone when they spoke. “Our sole purpose is survival,” he finally said not entirely sure if that would be enough to comfort her.
Lexi could see that something rational and caring was still alive within Tuna’s shattered persona. This is what she was hoping to see. She had in her possession something she had been waiting a long time to give him, waiting until he was able to receive it.
Tuna studied the small, silver case in her hand. “What’s this?”
“A gift of blood,” she said. “Something Doctor Becker really wanted you to have. She said it was for the future. A potential safeguard.”
Tuna took the case from her hand and studied it. “This is a freeze block. Did she say what type of safeguard?”
Lexi shook her head. “She just shoved it in my hands and said you would know what to do with it.”
Tuna considered her words for a long moment.
“It’s his blood,” Lexi said, “the boy from the outside.”
* * *
GEN’S WORK WAS HER only true comfort. Her crops were thriving and she decided to make meal time a wondrous event on the ship. Zeke was always urging the officers to go the extra mile to keep morale high. Every day she would lose herself in her imagination trying to create new and colorful combinations on the plates of her shipmates.
Today she was trying a new dish. Pumpkin ravioli with rosemary sauce. The key to selling her new invention to the hungry crew was making the rosemary sauce not only delicious but aromatic. She also liked to make a striking presentation on the plate and today she had mini asparagus spears to work around the main dish.
“I don’t know what that is, but I want to eat it,” Trinh gushed as Gen held up the plate to her. Trinh had been reassigned to the gardens when Zeke went through and reshaped the crew after the exodus from earth.
Exodus was a Tuna word. His vocabulary had become strange since they launched and exodus is one of the few Tuna words that had stuck.
“It tastes even better,” Gen proclaimed proudly.
“You have the magic touch,” Trinh said smiling her sweet smile. She was twelve, but very small for her age. When people thought of Trinh they thought either of her long black hair or her passion for combat simulation.
The only kids who had bettered Trinh’s scores in the simulation games were Zeke and Adam. She had been a dome security staffer before they launched. Gen worried at first that Trinh would resent her assignment to domestic services on the ship, but nothing could be further from the
truth. Trinh wanted to learn everything. She was a sponge and her energy was just the right kind of sunny to offset Gen’s dark moods.
“I think you’re ready,” Gen assured Trinh.
“They’ll be so disappointed with you gone for six months,” Trinh said while she tasted a little of Gen’s sauce. “Their bellies will hate me.”
“I’ve put together recipes for twenty somewhat easy dishes that the crew loves and sent it to your scrollpad.”
Two young girls, Lizzie and Tam, banged through the doors pushing empty food carts.
“Thanks, girls. We can get the rest,” Gen said to the nine-year-olds. “Go take your seats and we’ll bring out your meals.” The girls smiled and bounded back out the doors cheerfully.
Trinh loaded a cart with trays of food. “Okay, but I’ll get bored and start experimenting. Then they will hate me and we’ll all start to count the days until you return from your sleep pod.”
“Don’t be silly, Trinh,” Gen said as she pushed her cart toward the swinging doors. “Half the kids will be in hypersleep with me. It’s our turn and in six months it’s your turn for deep sleep. Your crew will be loyal to you and hunger your meals. They’ll forget me soon enough.”
“Is this all really necessary?” Trinh wondered aloud.
Gen pushed her cart through the doors and Trinh followed.
“We could be probing for decades,” Gen reminded Trinh. “Spending six months a year in stasis will allow us to age slower. That means we can wait longer to have children and keep our minds on finding a new Earth. It’s in the Protocol.”
“Okay, okay,” Trinh responded, “but if we ever find New Earth, can we finally throw out the protocol when we get there?”
Gen enjoyed Trinh’s devilish grin as they pushed their carts into the ship’s commissary. Their shipmates sat waiting eagerly for Gen’s next culinary wonder.
Zeke and Jax passed in front of their carts. Zeke smiled a long smile at Gen who kept her eyes on him as he walked across the commissary to join Tuna and Lexi for dinner.
Tuna did not notice when they sat down. He hunched over his scrollpad and typed madly. His hair was disheveled and the beginnings of acne colored his sweaty forehead with a red tint.
The Eden Project (Books One & Two) Page 16
