by M. R. Forbes
Beyond them, another contingent of drones. These were smaller than the first set, more like the machines that had once patrolled Metro’s strands.
There was other equipment, too. Random machines and carts and ordnance that Hayden couldn’t identify. It was all arranged neatly in the space, organized around a square in the center of the room that was clearly a platform. A simple terminal rested at the edge of the platform, offering controls to work it.
“Sheriff, look at that,” Jonas said after a period of stunned silence.
Hayden followed his point past the armored vehicles, to the wall of the room. There were lockers spread along it, at least three or four hundred of them. Hayden crossed the room to one of them, noting the name on the front, “Jackson,” before pulling it open.
A uniform hung inside. It was semi-rigid, with plates along the chest and the top of the legs. An eagle icon was emblazoned over the breast with the letters ‘USSF,’ whatever that meant. There was a shelf above it, and a helmet sat there. It had a dark visor and the same logo and inscription as the uniform.
Next to that was a secondary locker within the locker, still closed. Hayden flipped the latch and pulled it open, revealing a different treasure inside.
A rifle, the length of his arm and as sleek as anything he had ever seen, with a small top barrel, a larger secondary barrel, and two different types of magazines hanging from the body. It had a bulge on top of it that looked like a display of some kind, and a small switch to turn it on and off. More magazines rested in a neat pile beneath it, along with a smaller pistol that took a lower caliber round.
“This looks like military equipment, Sheriff,” Jonas said, as Hayden hefted the rifle. It was heavier than he expected, and his tired muscles complained about raising it to a firing position.
Hayden switched the weapon on. A soft buzz and then the display appeared, offering only a reticle on the area ahead of him. A small message on the bottom read “Disconnected.”
“According to the PASS, the Pilgrim was a civilian ship,” Hayden said. “No military.”
But their eyes didn’t lie. Not like the PASS did.
He checked the size of the uniform. It looked too big. He went to the locker beside it and clicked it open. It was empty. The soldier, Percy, was out there somewhere. Dead. He tried the next three. One of the was empty. Another had armor designed for a woman. The third was the jackpot. He lifted the uniform out of the locker. It felt like it was made of rubber, and the plates were hard but not too thick.
“What are you doing?” Jonas asked.
“This has to be better than a t-shirt and pants,” Hayden replied, figuring out how to put the suit on.
It had a heavy zipper on the front, and he took off his boots and put his feet in and started zipping, slipping his arms in and bringing it over his chest. When the zipper reached the top, the small box on the back made a soft hissing sound, and the whole thing was pulled in tighter against his body. He thought it would make it harder to move. It made it easier. He grabbed the boots from the locker and slid them on. Then he reached for the helmet. He lowered it onto his head. Something in the back of it clicked as he did, and the visor lit up, filling with text and data. He turned his head in it, watching as different readouts changed. It was too much. He took the helmet off and put it back. He decided he would rather trust his eyes.
He ran his fingers along the name patch on the body armor. “Williams.” Then he returned to Jackson’s locker and reached for the rifle again. He wanted to sling the weapon over his shoulder, but it didn’t have a strap. Did he have to carry it? He looked down, noticing a small indentation on the hip of the uniform for the smaller pistol, as well as a pair of extrusions that looked like they would hold the magazines. He took the pistol, placing it on the indentation. Something grabbed it and held it in place. Nice.
He took enough magazines to fill the extrusions. Then he returned his attention to the rifle. It had to go somewhere.
He picked it up again. There was only one place that made sense. He held it by a small handle in the center and reached it to his back. It snapped into place. Satisfied, he picked up Baby and the demon head, pressing the blade to a band that wrapped around the waist of the uniform, happy to find it stayed in place.
“We need to find the terminal,” Jonas said.
Hayden nodded. “Check a few of the lockers for yourself, first.”
“I don’t want a weapon, Sheriff,” Jonas said.
“What about armor?”
“I’m not a soldier.”
“Suit yourself.”
They headed back the way they had come, walking past the armored vehicles. As they did, Hayden noticed a back ramp was extended on one of them, and it was giving off a bit of warmth.
“Jonas, wait,” Hayden said.
He approached the ramp. He began to notice a foul smell from inside. He was going to turn away, but something about it begged his attention. He drew the pistol he had just claimed, holding it ready as he climbed the ramp. The inside of the vehicle was small and dark, making it hard to see. He found a switch on the side, and he flipped it.
Half a dozen monitors on either side of the transport flicked on, along with lighting that extended the length of the vehicle. Each monitor was attached to a station of some kind, with individual seats and a control stick on the right arm. All of the seats were empty, but the cushioning was slightly depressed on three of them, showing they hadn’t been deserted for long.
One of them had a dark stain on the back and a similar stain on the arm. The wall beside it was damaged as well.
Blood. Splattered away from the seat as if whoever was sitting in it had been shot.
Hayden remembered the drone hovering in front of them. It had them both in its sights, and yet it had waited to fire, giving them the previous seconds they needed to escape.
Someone had refused to shoot him. One of his deputies. Which one? They had saved his life.
Hayden turned away, flipping the switch to power down the vehicle and heading back out into the hold. Jonas was standing by the central terminal.
“I thought it might have PASS access,” he said. “It doesn’t. It does open a lift up into the garage like you thought. I bet the missing drones are up there.”
“Maybe,” Hayden said. “They were piloted from here.” He didn’t mention the blood.
“Sheriff, we could use this lift to get back into the city with one of the vehicles. We could find the Governor, and make him let us out. Or we could show the people what he’s been doing. What he’s been hiding. You have the creature’s head. We can show them the truth. It’s what Francis would have wanted.”
Hayden stared at Jonas for a few seconds. Then he shook his head.
“No,” he replied. “I don’t think it is. What the Governor’s been doing is horrific, but what’s out there? It may be worse. Francis wanted to gather more information, to understand the whole picture before he did anything stupid. Except you were coming to blab to me about all of this and wound up doing the stupid for him.”
Jonas winced at his choice of words. “I didn’t-”
“The people in Metro are safe right now. As safe as they can be, Governor be damned. We go up there, and then what? He comes at us with those things?” He pointed to the large robots on the other side of the room. “We shoot up the entire damn city? We kill how many more innocent people? No thank you. That’s not what this is about. It’s about finding my wife. Plain and simple.”
“Maybe for you,” Jonas said. “For Francis, for me, it was always about finding the truth. The PASS has been lying to us. The Governor’s been lying to us. Don’t you care about that?”
“Not while Natalia is out there, no.”
“He killed hundreds of people. He killed my girl.”
And the demon killed Sarah because the Governor was too busy trying to kill him.
“I know. I don’t condone it. At all. But what are we going to do? Start a civil war? To what end? If there are
more of these demons on the ship, they’ll tear the people apart. Now, do you want to keep standing here and arguing, or do you want to help me find a way past the secure hatch? The only way either one of us gets what we want is to get out there.”
Jonas stared at him. He looked angry. Sad. Resigned.
“Okay. You’re probably right. I was thinking, Sheriff. The PASS mainframe isn’t inside Metro. I always assumed it was beyond the perimeter, but what if it’s down here? It would make things much easier to delete if you had direct access to the source.”
“And much easier to gain access to, I hope,” Hayden said.
“Possibly,” Jonas said.
“Then let’s find it.”
28
It took them nearly an hour to find the mainframe. They explored more of the below deck complex than Hayden had ever intended, and he had nearly given up on the idea that the repository of data accessible through the PASS terminals could be found in this part of the ship. The other areas they found on the way had left him angrier and angrier at the Governor, and at Metro’s prior Governors. It was obvious Malcolm wasn’t the first to learn about this place, nor the first to use it. Each successive head of Metro must have known this area of the ship existed. At least some of the Sheriffs and Deputies must have known, too. Who? How many?
His father?
It wasn’t only the military machines, uniforms, and firepower. It was worse than that. They passed an area with a handful of massive storage cylinders, each marked as containing water. They passed a room filled with medicines and medical supplies to handle all kinds of illness and injury. They passed thousands and thousands of small, perma-wrapped packages of food. It was enough resources to put Metro on a more secure footing, and maybe it would have been used for that if things got bad enough? But Hayden didn’t think so.
It was enough resources to fuel an army.
What he didn’t understand was why it was all sitting dormant, waiting for a day that might never come. They had enough guns and ammunition to go to war with the demons that had gained control of the Pilgrim. Why weren’t they using them? They had enough food and water and sundries to venture out into the rest of the ship, to regain control and maybe put themselves back on the right course. Why didn’t they?
There had to be a reason.
They had also passed another hatch, a secured access hatch to an area beyond Metro’s perimeter, marked with the same pattern as the hatch in Section C. It didn’t have a control panel on their side. It was sealed as tightly as the rest.
“This has to be it,” Jonas said, smiling when they entered the room.
To Hayden, it was the least identifiable of any of the rooms they had explored. A series of black cubes rested across a floor of metal grating, wires visible beneath, stretching from one cube to another. Each one had a single blue light that flickered and faded at variable speed.
A single terminal sat at the front of the columns of cubes. Like the other equipment, it bore the eagle logo of the USSF.
Jonas approached the terminal, standing in front of it. He put his satchel on the ground beside it and started typing on the projected keyboard. Hayden stood behind him, looking over his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Getting access,” Jonas replied.
Hayden watched the display. It bore the eagle logo, with the words “USSF. Pilgrim Assistance Service System” below it, along with an area to enter data. Jonas was filling that area now, not with standard text, but with some gibberish Hayden didn’t recognize.
“That’s access?” he asked.
“It’s code,” Jonas said. “The programming code the PASS was written in. It’s how Francis got to the source in the first place.”
The screen changed, showing lines of text and a blinking cursor. Hayden had never seen the screen before.
“Here we go,” Jonas said.
He kept typing, more of the code. The PASS Hayden was familiar with had a graphic menu, where users could drill into specific topics, or run queries against what they were looking for. This was like a stripped down version, where everything had to be entered differently. But Jonas seemed to understand it.
“What are you looking for?” Hayden asked.
“Do you remember when I said I thought maybe the missing data had been copied?”
“Yes.”
“What if I was wrong? What if it weren’t copied, but simply cut off from the terminals?”
“Can that be done?”
“Pozz. It’s a much less destructive way to block data. So I’m running one of the queries. You can see it on the mainframe there, the way the lights flash. That’s data access.”
Hayden looked out at the machines. The lights were all flickering. He couldn’t tell the difference from before Jonas accessed the terminal.
“Hah!” Jonas shouted. “I was right!”
Hayden looked back at the screen. There was a list of responses, all assigned to a number.
“Sheriff, look at this,” Jonas said, pointing at one of the lines.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure. I ran a search for the Pilgrim’s mission, and this is what came back.”
The line in question read:
Mission Log #1
Jonas tapped on it before Hayden could respond. The display changed, showing a video instead. An image of a man with short hair and a white beard, sharply dressed in a military uniform. He had a ton of hardware on his chest, and his name tag read Cpt. Bradshaw.
“Bradshaw?” Hayden said.
“Captain Bradshaw. Captain’s Mission Log One. The navigation computers have been set. We’ve identified a system forty-six light years from home that our people have eighty-six percent confidence contains a habitable planet with a breathable atmosphere. Based on their calculations, we should arrive in approximately three hundred years. Of course, I won’t be around to see it, but that’s the reason for this log. It’s important that future generations have access to everything that occurred on the journey, to keep them from losing hope in the mission. I know the need to move up the timeline has been painful for many of us, especially those selected for the journey. The decision to leave family and friends behind has been difficult for many of us, but at the same time, we have hope in our future and the future of human civilization on other worlds. The Pilgrim is a marvel of modern technology, produced at a speed none believed possible. It only goes to show what we can do when we all stop arguing over the details that don’t matter in the end.”
Jonas turned to look at Hayden. “Three hundred years, Sheriff. This confirms it. And they moved up the launch. Why?”
“I don’t know. Let’s not lose sight of why we’re here. We need to access code to the hatch. Any of the hatches. Get me one.”
“Okay, let me see.”
He typed some more code into the PASS. A few seconds later, it returned a single response:
Mission Log #59
Jonas selected it, and another video started.
“Captain Bradshaw. Captain’s Mission Log Fifty-nine.”
The Captain was disheveled. His hair hadn’t been cut; his beard hadn’t been trimmed. His uniform was hanging from his pants. He looked thinner and stressed.
“We thought we could handle the situation,” he said. “It’s become clear that we were wrong. We brought everything we thought we would need. We thought we could find a way. But this? We can’t stop this. We tried. Half our defense forces are dead. Eighty percent of the crew is dead. Lyle’s done an amazing job prepping the colony for the years ahead, but the strategy.” He shook his head, looking away from the camera. “Outlast them. That’s his plan. We have to seal in the colony and stay alive longer than they do. We have to make sure the future generations don’t know what happened here. It needs to be forgotten. All of it. Buried for as long as it takes. It’s the only way to survive.”
Hayden winced as the video output a high whine of gunfire, way too close to the Captain. A soldier in a un
iform like the ones Hayden had seen earlier entered the room backward.
“Captain, we have to go.”
“I’m coming, Sergeant Hicks,” Bradshaw said. He looked at the camera again. “This will be my last recording. It won’t be made available to the people of Metro. It can’t. Like so much of our history, this too needs to be forgotten.”
A creature moved into the doorway in front of Sergeant Hicks. He fired his weapon, a stream of rounds cutting the demon in half. An instant later, the recording was stopped.
“Damn it,” Hayden said. “He didn’t say anything about the codes.”
Jonas turned his head. “I’ll try another search. Give me-”
A single report sounded from behind them. Jonas’ head lurched forward, the side of it detonating outward and spreading across the terminal display. He collapsed to the ground, dead.
29
Hayden didn’t hesitate, diving past the terminal toward the rows of computers beyond it. He felt a bullet hit his lower back, a soft tap against the tough plate there. A second round hit the ground behind him, nearly striking one of the machines.
“Watch your aim, damn it,” he heard Malcolm say. “You damage the PASS, I damage you.”
“Sorry, Governor,” someone replied. It sounded like Deputy Bradshaw, but wasn’t he supposed to be wounded?
Hayden scrambled behind one of the PASS servers, knowing it would keep him safe for now.
“Hayden,” Malcolm said. “I see you’re helping yourself to equipment that doesn’t belong to you. It’s fine; you can keep it for now.” He paused, waiting for a response, continuing when Hayden didn’t say anything. “You were a hard man to find. Which is surprising in a place the size of Metro. But then I thought, if nobody had seen you topside, you probably found your way down here. And when I went home, I could smell something awful in my bedroom and assumed it was you. I’m impressed, Sheriff. Very impressed. I should have given you more credit.”
“We don’t have to do this, Malcolm,” Hayden said. “I just want to go out there. I want to go after her.”
