Adam’s scrollpad rang again. He exhaled. He knew he could not avoid her forever. He would have to pick it up.
* * *
MAYA PACED BACK AND FORTH in front of Adam who leaned back defensively against a counter in his stateroom. She glanced at him with venom and decided against saying most of what was on her mind.
“Maya,” Adam began, “he’s barely twelve. You don’t have to even begin to get to know him for two years. By then--”
“By then what, Commander?” She stopped, put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “I’ll forget about Ozzie?”
Adam gave up. He knew he would have to hear her vent.
“He’s a child. A kid. Do you expect him to be a father to Eli? Max is a kid himself.” Maya shook her head. “I told you I didn’t want another intended. Ozzie and I already provided a child of the next generation.”
“Max is no ordinary kid,” Adam said. “I haven’t told him yet, but I will make him the second shift Commander. When he turns fourteen, he will be ready and I’ll take my first deep sleep. He will be in charge of the entire ship.”
“He’s headstrong and has a temper,” Maya said under her breath.
“Exactly. A perfect match. Only a headstrong girl like you could put him in his place.”
“I could punch you right now,” Maya warned.
Adam laughed. “Maya, can you trust me about this? Your feelings toward Ozzie will never change, but your feelings towards others will change.” He stepped forward and thought about touching her shoulder.
Her eyes convinced him not to do that.
“Really, Adam, if you keep talking I’m going to punch you in the throat.”
“You might even want another kid someday,” Adam said.
She swung a hand up and quickly slapped his face. Adam’s head turned with the momentum of the slap. He touched the cheek she slapped and turned back to her speechless.
“You’re sick,” Maya said. “Don’t ever mention that. He’s a child. That’s a sick thing for you to say.”
“You know what I meant,” Adam said. “And he won’t always be twelve. His simulation scores are very high. He’ll grow. His biological parents were very tall by the way. He will give you strength and support through the long years ahead. We’re all going to need it.”
“I’ll have Eli,” Maya said.
“Understand, Maya, I took great care in choosing your mate. I had equal numbers of boys and girls. If I did not pair you up, then one boy would not have an intended. Imagine how that boy would have felt.”
“That’s very romantic,” Maya observed.
“Romance is not in the protocol,” Adam said. His misguided attempt at levity did nothing for Maya.
“I really hate your voice right now,” Maya said, flashing him a disgusted look. “Tell your boy Max to stay clear of me for a while. If I see either of you for like the next month, I cannot be responsible for my actions.”
Maya walked to the door. She turned back with a devilish grin. “And if that little bully even thinks about me in his dreams, I will enter that dream and dig out his eyes with a spoon.”
And with that, she was gone. Adam’s momentarily relief that the dreaded encounter was at least over faded fast. He understood Maya’s feelings to some degree. He knew about lost love.
The events of the last few days had made him forget for a time, but can you ever forget the touch of one who can heal every vulnerability you have ever felt with a mere whisper or touch of their skin? Can the soul ever forget deliverance? Can the heart ever forget the way it beats in the presence of one who’s cherished?
He knew about love. When Gen’s eyes looked at him, every cell of his being looked back. And all we ever yearn for is to be seen.
-13-
Gen had trouble sleeping. Ever since she woke up on cryo deck to unimaginable horrors, she could barely sleep one hour straight. She studied every dark detail of her surroundings. The reactor had become their home. They never grew used to the sweltering heat, but they survived. They felt safe inside its walls.
The boys and Trinh had crossed paths with the infected only a few times when out scavenging. There were a few close calls, but Zeke managed to kill the first four flesh rippers they encountered. Trinh killed the last one by burying her knife into the back of the beast’s skull just as it was about to tear open Jax’s suit.
After the trauma of her first kill, Zeke decided Trinh should sit out the next raid to catch her breath which was his way of saying Trinh needed to come to terms with killing what once had been a human star explorer like herself.
Gen found Trinh next to the exit pipe while the others slept. Her appearance had altered so much in the months they had all been living in the reactor. Everyone had lost fifteen to twenty pounds, but Trinh could least afford to lose that weight. She was skin and bones.
Wet, greasy hair hung down Trinh’s sad face. They were all sweaty all the time in the reactor. They drank so much water to stay hydrated that they had to go out every two or three days to find more. Gen wiped the hair away from Trinh’s eyes.
“Can’t sleep?” Gen said.
“I was thinking about the others,” Trinh said. “I hope they make it.”
“The other Eden Sphere?” Gen thought of her friends. “They will.”
“Yeah. I was trying to imagine them,” Trinh explained. “They find this wild new planet. I dream of them swimming underneath a waterfall with blue crystal rocks all around.”
“I’m sure they’ll be fine and we will, too.” Gen smiled as she put her arm around Trinh to pull her close.
“I can hear them all laughing together.” Trinh closed her eyes to imagine the scene. “My old friends Artie and Nadia and Leo and Max.”
Gen thought about Sylvia and Maya. She wanted them to laugh in Trinh’s blue crystal waterfalls. Adam would be there. The sun would glisten on his beautiful skin and his eyes would find Sylvia sexily laughing under the cascading falls. With all her heart she wanted that to be true.
“They’ll make it, Trinh.” Gen took Trinh’s small face in her hands. “They’ll make cute little babies. They will and a great society will be born from them and they’ll build great cities and create new movies and eat delicious pastries and they’ll have great ballerinas and inventors and singers with beautiful voices.”
Trinh considered Gen’s hopeful eyes. “The boy I killed, he would have wanted the same things, don’t you think? That some ship would make it through and start a new, happy world?”
“That boy was already dead. Worse than dead,” Gen clarified. “But before he was infected he would have sacrificed himself to help his friends make it to a safe and wondrous new world. You know he would.”
“Thank you, Gen,” Trinh said. “I was feeling a little lonely before you woke up.”
“Maybe you should try to get some sleep,” Gen suggested. “You know, Jax would love it if you slept near him. Boys need that kind of thing. They want to be our protectors.”
Trinh smiled before she quietly tiptoed into the shadows to lay down and fall asleep next to her intended.
For the first time, it felt good to think of Adam and Sylvia happy together. Gen understood how Trinh's method to reduce her anxiety about killing the infected boy worked.
Imagine a sunny future and forget the dark present.
Right now, the six hopeless souls living in the reactor could not imagine a sunny future for themselves. Dreaming of their friends' future on the other ship might be the only way to escape the hot, desperate horror of their own fate if only in their minds.
Gen decided to let go of the past, to wish Adam and Sylvia well and to be the best she could be to those around her for as long as she could. She would feed and nurture and remain positive. If these be her last days, she would go out with strength and honor.
She moved quietly away from the pipe and found Zeke. She laid down in the shadows ever so close to him without touching. She wanted to be there for Zeke. She wanted him to feel her presence
.
* * *
SHE KISSED HIM BEFORE the boys left that day. She set his helmet aside and reached up to rest her hands on the back of his neck. She wet his lips with her slow, loving kiss. She handed the helmet back to him. Zeke felt like he was floating as Gen peered into his eyes.
“Be safe for me,” she said with a tone so tender it raced through his blood as he climbed up and out through the pipe for a mission they had been planning for weeks.
Jax remembered a place near flight deck where they would find two hidden pulse guns and a tranq gun. It would be tricky to get there unnoticed. Flight deck was one of the beasts’ strongholds.
Tuna insisted he come along. He said he needed to be there in case of an ambush. Three would have a much better chance than two to fight their way out. He also mentioned his lab. He would quite like to stop by if they were going to be in that area of the ship. There were some medical essentials there that they would be wise to retrieve.
Zeke eventually allowed Tuna to join them. He had a hard time refusing Tuna now. Zeke could not forget that Tuna had told him to blow the derelict ship out of the sky. If Zeke had trusted Tuna or if Zeke had just gone to sleep on his sleep shift in the cryo chamber and spent his six months in stasis alongside Gen, Tuna would have blown the Hero Journey 1 out of the sky.
The beasts would be vapor now. The entire crew would be alive and the mission would be alive. They would be eating Gen’s delectable food in the commissary and there would be a movie on the big screen after dinner every Saturday night.
Instead they made their way down a darkened corridor on engineering deck treading lightly and listening carefully for any sound. Ethan had amplified the comm links within the suits to allow the boys to pick up on even the slightest variations in audible sound waves.
They had been out so often in the suits that by now they had memorized every sound the ship made. They were able to sift through them without too much concern as their ears searched for something out of place, something new. Any new sound would likely lead to a sudden fight to the death with bloodthirsty flesh rippers.
The old sounds began to feel comforting to Zeke. Great relief came as each sound the ship made was readily recognized by his ears. He motioned Jax and Tuna to enter a transistor room. They quietly squeezed behind massive glass tubing that ran from ceiling to floor.
Zeke pulled a small knife out that was tied to the wrist of his suit. He squatted down to dig into the wall. He loosened a three-foot wall panel and then worked his gloved fingers onto the edge of the panel to remove it completely.
“Tuna,” he whispered. His voice was heard in the comm link inside the other boys’ suits. Ethan had managed to keep the mics inside the suits quiet despite the hyper amplified exterior mics.
Tuna dropped to his knees to crawl through the small opening and into the wall. Jax followed while Zeke kept his eye on the door through the blur of the giant glass transistors.
They knew climbing from deck to deck within the walls did not eliminate the possibility of running into the infected. The infected had searched every inch of the ship many times over except for the guts of the antimatter reactors.
Traveling through the wall cavities speeded their ascent to and from the upper levels. It also kept them out of the elevators which would open onto who knows what on the next deck. Trinh said riding the elevator was like playing Russian roulette between levels of hell.
Trinh’s comment had provided a moment of levity in the reactor until they all began to remember Pavel, the uninfected Russian engineer from the Hero Journey 1. He could have saved the ES1 if he would have had the courage to quickly blurt out that his crew had become infected.
The infected must have been surrounding him just off camera. They may have been holding other gagged crewmates. If he had made one false move, the others would have been shredded by the beasts and he would have been gutted right on camera.
He had the chance to potentially save the human species. Fear and loyalty to a few paralyzed him. He would have been talked about as a mythic hero in the classrooms of New Earth had he found the courage to act, had he sacrificed his already doomed ship. They were all blown to pieces only moments later anyway.
Zeke emphasized in the months that followed that the species must be preserved. At any cost, one boy and one girl must survive. If it so happened that your friends’ lives were in jeopardy, do not act, do not risk yourself. Your blood must remain pure.
The lives of others did not matter.
Tuna enjoyed the solemnity of the crawl spaces of the ship. They were clean and polished. Not what you would expect. The original engineers who had come to the island before the kids were born, took meticulous care of even the unseen parts of the ship. Nothing was loose. Nothing unfinished. They were creating the perfect vessel to carry the cherished future payload of innocence across the universe.
Those engineers loved the 117 kids of the Eden Project even before the kids were incubating in a lab. So many had sacrificed for the mission. Tuna decided right there climbing inside the cavity of the ship’s wall that he would willingly sacrifice himself one day.
So many had sacrificed before him and for him. The original engineers, the doctors and kids inside the dome, the kids on Eden Sphere 2 and now even most of the crew on Eden Sphere 1 had given their lives to this final hope. And then there was his beautiful mate, Cassandra Sixthborn, whose profound act of courage saved Tuna and later inspired him to continue believing.
It could not all be for nothing, he thought, not after all that had happened, not after Cassie rolled off that ramp.
They waited inside the wall of the main corridor leading to flight deck. When they pushed out a vent panel and stepped into the half-lit corridor, they were going to be within a hundred yards of what they felt certain to be the infected stronghold.
Jax pulled out a small, manual tool which he used to unfasten the vent.
“Stay right behind me,” Zeke whispered to Tuna who heard his commander’s voice quietly inside his helmet.
“Wait,” Jax whispered as he stopped unfastening the vent. He pointed at his ear.
Zeke and Tuna listened. Tuna leaned down to peer through the vent grid. Nothing moved, but he felt something. He thought the reach of the emergency light was obscured somehow. Maybe there was a foot of shadow that should have been brighter under the dim blue lights.
Tuna raised his hand to keep Jax and Zeke still.
They heard it together. Barely perceptible singing. A girl’s voice.
Little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high.
The three boys turned to each other. The voice was not quite sweet like a girl’s voice should be. It was affected. Dry and thin. Haunted.
When the sun is gone. When there’s nothing he shines upon, then you show your little light, twinkle, twinkle, through the night.
“Lexi,” Tuna said suddenly. “It’s Lexi!”
When Tuna tried to grab the tool from Jax to unfasten the vent, Zeke grabbed his hand. Zeke pressed his index finger to his face shield to signal Tuna to remain quiet.
Tuna struggled to do so. Finally, he nodded and leaned back down to the grid. Something white, the hem of a skirt, brushed past the grid, startling him. Zeke grabbed Tuna by the shoulders. The three boys did not move. They waited.
Minutes passed slowly while they waited. Tuna’s heartbeat raged. His desire to bust the vent out with a kick became almost unbearable.
“Tuna, she’s infected,” Zeke finally said.
“How could you know that?”
“Because,” Zeke began, “they did not come for her.”
Jax moved past Tuna to finish unfastening the vent grid. Zeke put his hand on Tuna’s back who hung his head.
Tuna had feelings for Lexi. They had all the same curiosities and aptitudes. It had become obvious that she would be named his new intended when second shift had risen from deep sleep. Zeke had informed him that he would reveal all the new intended mate assignments when ever
yone was awake between cryo shifts.
In many regards, Lexi would have been a perfect mate for him and, secretly, Tuna had always found her adorable.
Zeke helped Jax lower the vent into the corridor. The boys waited a minute and listened. Nothing unusual. Lexi must have moved on. Jax slowly stretched a boot out into the corridor. Zeke and Tuna held him by the shoulders as he shimmied feet first out through the small vent careful not to make any noise.
Jax stood up in the corridor and quickly surveyed the dark spaces in every direction. Lexi had vacated the corridor. All was quiet. Zeke popped up to stand next to him and then they both helped Tuna to his feet.
“We stay to the side, single file,” Zeke whispered.
Tuna glanced down the corridor imagining Lexi in her white gown, wishing Zeke had been wrong, wishing she was uninfected. He felt her absence in ways that surprised him. She had always been there in his life. Her smile lit up many long days of training.
Zeke tugged at Tuna to follow Jax. They moved slowly down the corridor toward flight deck. They knew the Alpha Beast would be inside those doors navigating the ship back to Earth in search of more pure blood.
Jax had seen the infected leader in an early battle that left six kids dead. After his narrow escape, Jax remembered something. The suit the beast had been wearing. It made sense. He was the commander of the other ship, the Hero Journey 1, and now he commanded the beasts.
They reached a narrow door. Jax disappeared into the small utility closet. Zeke and Tuna waited outside keeping their eyes on the double sliding doors which were the only things separating them from the entire cannibalistic horde.
“If they come, fall back,” Zeke’s voice whispered within Tuna’s helmet.
As fast as Zeke’s words entered his ears, the doors to flight deck slid open. Blood rushed to his head. A beast stepped into the frame of the door and stopped. Zeke and Tuna did not move in the shadows.
The infected man tilted his mangy head to sniff the air of the corridor. The light from within the flight deck lit the beast from behind. They could see his face. Open cuts covered his cheeks and lips.
The Eden Project (Books One & Two) Page 22
