Genesis

by Lara Morgan

  “Run!” Aunt Essie roared and elbowed the man in the face. She turned to kick the kneeling man in the head, but he caught her boot and flung her against the wall.

  “Aunt Essie!” Rosie slowed but Riley dragged her towards the door at the end of the corridor.

  “The pass key, Rosie!” he shouted.

  Her fingers shaking, she swiped the thin slice of metal through the key slot and pushed the door open. Behind them a muffled shot sounded. Rosie turned back to see her aunt lying on the floor with one of the men standing above her, his weapon drawn. Her aunt was clutching her stomach. There was blood on the wall. Time seemed to slow. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe.

  Beyond her aunt, two more people were running towards them.

  “Rosie, wait!” It was Mr Yuang shouting at her and Pip was behind him. His face was pale as he stared at her. Fury filled Rosie and she tried to go back, but Riley grabbed her, pushed her through and slammed the door. He shot the lock with her aunt’s pulse gun.

  “Move!” he shouted, and dragged her with him.

  The accessway was narrow. It sloped down until it turned a corner then levelled out. It led straight to another door with a number three on it. They were under the spoke. Aunt Essie. Rosie’s hand shook as she slid the pass key through the lock and pushed through to the docking bay. Walkways made of metal grille stretched away on either side and in front. She paused. Which way was bay five? There, a sign above pointed left.

  She turned, running to the outer hull. The metal quivered under their feet and people turned to stare at them as they raced across the bridge. Behind them shouts echoed across the cavernous space.

  “They’re on the other side,” Riley said.

  She didn’t look back. She felt numb, her terror all but driven away by her focus on one thing: escape. She led Riley to the outer walkway that ran alongside the hatches. Through the slit in the hull she could see three ships docked; the last one was her aunt’s pod.

  “The hatch,” she said as she raced towards it. She could hear pounding feet now but didn’t turn around.

  “They’re coming,” Riley said.

  The crash of boots on the walkways was like an orchestra of chains. Riley aimed the gun and pulled the trigger. Concussive snaps of sound sang.

  “Rosie!” His voice held a warning.

  She punched in the code and the hatch hissed open.

  They jumped over the outer hull into the pod and Riley locked the hatch behind them as a pulse slug slammed against the metal.

  Rosie sealed the pod’s doors and ran through the small cargo bay and up the stairs to the bridge. She knew her aunt’s ship well. Every time Aunt Essie had brought it home she’d let Rosie sit in the pilot’s chair and drilled her through a hundred different flight plans. “If you want to be a pilot with Orbitcorp, you’ve got to be ready for anything,” she’d said.

  But Rosie had never actually flown it. Her heart was pounding as her whole focus narrowed to the pilot’s seat, the nav console and the controls.

  “Sit there.” She directed Riley to the copilot’s chair. She strapped herself in, then began the checking sequence. Aunt Essie ran a tight ship; all the controls were green, good to go.

  “Jesus Christ,” Riley was muttering as he strapped himself in. “That was Yuang.”

  But Rosie barely heard him as she concentrated.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Nav com green. Ignition.” With a shaking finger, she pressed the button and the engines rumbled into life. “Disconnect dock.” She glanced at Riley, then realised he didn’t know how. “Pull the blue handle towards you.” She pointed and he wrenched the docking grip back. She took hold of the steering arms as the pod floated free and the docking arms retracted back into the hotel.

  The com suddenly buzzed into life and a voice began hailing them. “This is Space Islands command, pod class thirty-three, you do not have permission to launch,” it crackled. “Kill your engines immediately. You are endangering docking craft. I repeat, kill your engines! This is Sp–”

  Rosie switched off the com and slowly pulled back on the steering, damping the starboard engine to perform a textbook reverse turn. The black was before her, dusted with stars.

  Coming in ahead was a massive cruiser and on their left a recreation shuttle approached the dock above.

  “Hold on.” She pushed the steering forward, firing up the core at the same time. The pod sprang ahead, forcing them back in their seats.

  “Watch the cruiser!” Riley shouted as they sped towards its left flank.

  Adrenaline ran like cold fire through her veins and Rosie banked hard. The pod swerved on a thirty-five degree angle, almost sideswiping the shuttle. It was so close she could see the shocked face of the pilot as the pod blasted past them and shot out into open space.

  Her hands were clenched hard on the steering arms.

  “Do you have the coordinates for Mars?” Riley said.

  “Yes.” She nodded. Her head felt stiff and strange. “They should be programmed in.” She turned to the nav com and called up her aunt’s log. “Here.” She transferred the information to the flight plan.

  “You can let go now,” Riley said quietly. Slowly, she uncurled her hands and called up the rear-view port on the computer screen, staring as Earth became smaller. And it was only then, as she watched it receding, that she remembered they hadn’t had time to refuel.

  With a bad feeling in her gut, she checked the tanks. The trip to Mars would take forty-eight hours – there wasn’t enough fuel.

  Pip kneeled by Rosie’s aunt. Blood was seeping from where the grunts had shot her and she was shuddering as he pressed down hard over the wound.

  She glared up at him through narrowed eyes. “Trying to finish the job, Pipsqueak?” she hissed.

  He ignored her. “Any of you got a nanoplast?” He said to the grunts.

  “What are you doing?” Yuang watched him.

  “I need to stop the bleeding.”

  “I realise that, but why?” Yuang crouched down, peering at Essie as though she was a peculiar exhibit in a museum.

  Pip thought hard. He had to be careful here. If he said the wrong thing, Yuang would let her die. He could still see Rosie staring at him. “Because she’s a better bargaining chip than Rosie’s dad,” he said. “Rosie and Riley won’t want to let her die. They’ll give up their plan for her.”

  Yuang touched a finger to Essie’s cheek and she rolled furious eyes towards him. “The child – well, yes, this woman is the only relative she has left, relatively speaking, but Riley,” he smiled coldly as if he’d made a private joke, “he’s been waiting for this for half his life. It’s his chance.”

  “I saw the way Riley looked at her,” Pip said desperately. “He cares about her.”

  Yuang stood up. Pip kept his hand pressed against the wound. He wasn’t sure if Yuang believed him. He wasn’t even sure if he was right but he knew Rosie would never forgive him if her aunt died. And he couldn’t stand the thought of that. Essie’s eyes were closed now, her breathing faint.

  “All right, I’ll humour you for now.” Yuang motioned to one of his men who pulled a small medikit from a pocket in his pants. “Patch her up and if she lives, we’ll see if you’re right.”

  Pip took the patch from the grunt and placed it carefully over the wound, making sure the nanoplast sealed and stopped the blood. He stood back and watched as one of the men picked her up.

  “Come,” Yuang put a hand on his shoulder, “we have a ship to catch.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Rosie slammed the lid down on the store, kicking it shut, then crawled back out of the access tunnel.

  “There’s not enough fuel. It’ll get us close but not all the way. About fourteen hours out from Mars if we’re lucky. Damn it!”

  She sat next to Riley on the steps leading up to the bridge and rested her head in her hands. She had a headache and was sweating from crawling around inside the narrow space.

  “I checked the food suppl
ies,” Riley said. “There’s a stack of protein bars, some vitamin shake powder and a few packs of soup. Not great but enough to last us. The robotics team must have filled the water tanks, ’cos they’re okay.”

  “Yeah, that’s protocol whenever a ship docks,” Rosie said, “but it won’t do us any good if we run out of fuel. Without fuel there’s no power and without power there’s no life support.”

  Riley was silent for a long time. Rosie stared at her shoes.

  After a while he said, “That man, Yuang, if I’d known he was involved–” He shook his head. “This changes things.”

  For the first time he looked less than confident and it worried Rosie. “Does he know you?” she said.

  “You could say that.” Riley was staring ahead with a bleak expression on his face. “And he recognised me. I thought maybe he wouldn’t but … he was always a smart bastard. He probably didn’t know it was me though until just now or he would never have let us get this far already.”

  “Who is he?” Rosie said.

  “A true believer.”

  “A believer of what?”

  “In what Helios is doing.”

  “You mean the Genesis Project? I overheard you and Aunt Essie,” she said. “She told me what you said.”

  Riley said nothing for a moment, then spoke quietly. “I wish to hell you hadn’t been the one to find the box, Rosie. It should have been me.”

  After what he’d said to her back on Earth, about wearing the pendant to remember what she’d done, she thought he blamed her for everything. “It’s not your fault,” she said awkwardly.

  “But it is, Rosie. I should have tried harder. Searched harder.”

  “But how could you even know?”

  “Because it belongs to my family. My name isn’t Riley. It’s Simon, Simon Shore. Margaret and Ethan were my parents.”

  Rosie stared at him. Things began falling into place: his secret hide-outs, watching the Senate, what he knew about Helios.

  “You should have told us,” she said.

  “It was safer for you not to know. In case.”

  In case she’d been caught, he meant. Rosie felt anger surfacing again. It hadn’t helped her aunt. “So they’re after you then?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “How come they haven’t found you?”

  “They did. Once. But I didn’t know about the box then – my sister had it. I hadn’t spoken to my parents for some time when they were killed. We were what you call, estranged.” He shot her a bitter smile. “I was in the Asiatic States. Yuang found me there. They thought I’d have what they wanted because I was the older one. By the time they’d finished with me, my sister had disappeared, the box along with her. She was only nine years old. I didn’t even know she’d had the stuff until she managed to get a message to me two years ago.” Angry disappointment filled his eyes. “She wanted to know why I hadn’t done anything. She thought I had the box. Whoever she sent to get it to me must have got caught or something, so they hid it.” He shook his head, staring away from her. “God knows what she thinks of me. I couldn’t get a message back.”

  “Where is she now?” she said.

  “Safe, but it’s too risky to contact her. I’ve been searching for the box and hiding from Helios ever since.” He shook his head. “I thought Yuang was dead.”

  “What’s the Genesis Project?” Rosie asked.

  “Helios’s big secret.” His gaze was weary. “The Genesis Project is their way of finding a cure for the MalX. But the way they do it – they experiment on humans, extract DNA, have test subjects, for as long as they live anyway.”

  Rosie felt ill. “Aunt Essie said they are going to clean Genesis.”

  “Yes.” Riley looked at her, his face expressionless. “Kill their test subjects and their remains. Wipe clean the evidence, just in case we succeed and get proof to the Senate and the UEC about what they’ve been doing. They think that nothing to see means nothing to tell. But that’s not their biggest secret.”

  “It’s not?” How could there be something worse than what they were doing to hundreds of people?

  “No,” Riley said softly. “Their darkest secret is the one only a few in Helios actually know about. They created the MalX, Rosie. That’s the secret my parents died for – the secret they were going to expose.”

  She stared at him. “How?”

  “An experiment. They were playing with DNA, with a virus, trying to harness a chemical that mosquitoes produce which they thought could cure any number of Earth’s diseases. But there was an accident, a mistake. A shipment sent back to Earth had the wrong cargo. Infected insects escaped into the atmosphere, but instead of trying to fix the accident, they covered it up.”

  “The mozzies bred,” Rosie said faintly.

  “My parents found out.” He shrugged.

  And they were killed, Rosie thought. “Without the code key there’s no way to get the information they died for,” she said.

  “Yes. They’ll destroy it all. There’ll be no proof.”

  “Unless we can stop them,” Rosie said. “But we don’t have enough fuel to get to Mars.”

  “No.”

  They both fell into silence. Rosie tried to digest everything he’d said. What did it all mean for her family now?

  “What are you hoping to trade for my dad?” she said.

  He didn’t answer but when she looked at him he didn’t need to. Of course, the diary wouldn’t be nearly as valuable as him. Rosie knew the right thing to do was to argue, to try to stop him sacrificing himself, but she couldn’t voice the words. “How?” she said.

  “I was going to do it with your aunt’s help. I was going to exchange myself for your dad. There’re things I know about them and they want very badly to ensure my silence. While they were distracted with me, she was to break in with the code key and get my parents’ files, but now I don’t know, it’s–” He exhaled sharply then stood up, pacing in frustration. “This was my best chance of bringing them down, of getting the information that will prove what they did to my parents, of giving my sister a chance for a normal life. I can’t–” He faced away from her, visibly struggling for control. “I don’t know how to get into their system without the code key. And now he has your aunt – I should have stopped her. I should have known Pip wasn’t right.”

  “He tricked all of us,” she said.

  He turned back to her, a hard bitter determination in his eyes. “I don’t like being conned.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  He shook his head and sat next to her again on the step. “I don’t know.”

  They sat in silence a moment, the only sound the whirring of the ship’s engines.

  “Do you think Aunt Essie’s okay?” Rosie whispered. “Will they help her? They won’t let her die, will they?”

  Riley didn’t look at her. “I don’t know.”

  Rosie squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment, trying to stop herself from crying.

  “They’re going to Mars, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. I’d say so.”

  “We have to get to Mars,” she said. “We can’t go back to the hotel.”

  “No, we can’t. But I don’t–” He stopped and frowned. “Wait, the pod has an ion core drive, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if we ran it at full capacity, would it get us to Mars?”

  “Maybe, but we’d have to divert all the power to do it. Including what we need to run life support.”

  Riley tapped his fingers on his knee. “With the ion core drive at capacity our travel time to Mars would drop to, what, thirty-two hours?”

  Rosie did the calculations in her head. “About that, but we might not make it to planetfall. We might only make it to the outer atmosphere. We’d crash.”

  “But Mars’s atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s and there’s less gravity. There’s a good chance we could survive.”

  Rosie didn’t know what to say. Was he right? She kept
seeing Aunt Essie lying on the floor, her blood leaking out. She hugged herself, staring ahead at the wall of the pod. One of her aunt’s spacesuits was hanging on a hook, the legs trailing on the floor.

  “Rosie,” Riley said. “We have to keep going. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know.” Fear was like a lump in her guts but she didn’t want it to win, she didn’t want them to win. She took a long breath. “We could use the suits,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pointed at the spacesuit. “There’s more of them. Aunt Essie always keeps the breathers fully loaded too.” Her mouth twisted in the semblance of a smile. “Be prepared, she always says. But each one only carries twenty-two hours of oxygen. We’d be ten hours short.”

  “How many suits are there?”

  “Three.”

  “We could share the air from the third.”

  It was possible. It was also possible they could use up all the air and still not make it. They could just die here, in space. One way or another, the fuel would run out.

  He was watching her closely. “I think we should try it. I’ll modify the suits so we can share the air.”

  “All right.” She got up and headed back up the stairs to the bridge.

  “I’m sorry your family got caught up in this, Rosie,” he called after her.

  She paused and knew she should say something, but she couldn’t. She was sorry too. Sorry she’d ever seen the box. She trudged up the stairs to the bridge and sat in the pilot’s chair and began checking through the ion drive settings.

  Her head ached behind her eyes – sharp stabbing pains like she’d been sitting up for days playing AI games. She drank some water and began setting up the diversion of all power to the ion core drive.

  As she worked, her mind kept going over and over what Helios had done. They were murdering her family, one by one. Her hands shook as she reconfigured the drives, diverting power. Well, they weren’t going to kill her.

  She was so caught up in her thoughts she almost didn’t see the amber light blinking on the console. Only when she reached for her water did she spy it. She froze. It was the long-range beacon.