Forgotten (The Forgotten Book 1)

by M. R. Forbes

  “Query Pilgrim schematic,” he said, unsure if it had a voice module like the PASS in the Law Station. A map of the ship would be incredibly useful to help him get his bearings.

  It did, responding to his query a moment later.

  NO RESULTS.

  It didn’t have the schematic or anything like it. It was a secured system inside a secured area. A third network, then? But sharing the same master code as Metro? He wasn’t an Engineer. He didn’t know if that was normal or not. It was what it was.

  “Query personnel records in Research,” he said. He had used that command in the Law Station plenty of times to access his deputies’ files. He could write to those records, adding reviews, commendations, that sort of thing.

  A list of names and positions appeared on the display. The head of Research wasn’t named Admin after all. Ironically, their name was Hope. Senior Special Officer Hope Mendez. Age: Thirty-seven. Status: Suspended.

  Suspended? Normally, status was either living or deceased. He didn’t know there was a third option.

  He didn’t drill deeper into her file yet, reading more of the names from the list, instead. Special Officer Kyle Noah. Special Officer Jennifer Kazlaski. Junior Special Officer Ramshit Shah. They all had ranks of some kind. But the Pilgrim was supposed to be civ -

  He stopped himself. It was stupid to keep assuming any part of the the ship’s history was the truth. Not after everything else he had learned. Maybe the Pilgrim was a colony ship. But maybe it was also something else. There was enough firepower under Metro to level the city. What about elsewhere in the ship? And this secured area? Research? He still wanted to know what kind.

  He went back to Senior Special Officer Mendez, opening her file. The display split in half, one side showed a three-dimensional, lifelike image of her over the eagle logo and the USSF abbreviation. The other side had a more detailed description of her.

  Divorced. A specialist in bio-engineering and infectious diseases. She had gotten her Doctorate at Harvard University. She had risen through the Special Officer ranks of the USSF quickly, going from junior to senior in a few years. She had published a number of papers on the topic of genetics, genetic engineering, and the role of gene mutation in both weaponizing and neutralizing disease.

  As far as Hayden was concerned, she was a frightening individual. She toyed with the building blocks of life like they were grains of sand on a playground, and had the education to create things that killed.

  Like the xenotrife?

  He couldn’t rule it out. Not with what little he knew about the creatures. Maybe they hadn’t found their way onto the Pilgrim, but had been created within it? That was a frightening thought, too.

  “Query mission logs, Senior Officer Hope Mendez,” Hayden said, wondering if she had recorded her progress the same way the Captain had.

  She had. A list of recordings displayed, each with a timestamp. He chose the first result, the last entry she had made, noting the date was a few days after Captain Bradshaw had been killed.

  Mendez's face appeared on the display. She was an ordinary looking woman, with dark hair and intelligent eyes. Unlike Bradshaw, she looked composed on the recording. Unconcerned with the creatures overwhelming the ship.

  “Research Log Four Hundred Seventeen,” she said. “We’ve finished securing the Research module. It was more work than we expected, and the number of modifications needed to route proper filtration and seal off the ducts from intrusion cost many people their lives. The entire Fourth Squad was assigned to the area, and we’ve only survived because of their bravery.”

  She paused for a long time, her eyes glistening at the thought. Hayden couldn’t help but wonder what had happened down here. Or how.

  “Our research has gone as far as we can take it. Without access to the colonists, we can’t continue to test any of the mutagens, and without access to the trife, we can’t test our toxins. We had hoped to come up with something before the clock ran out. A cure. A poison. Anything to stop their spread. We had hoped to seal the ship, keep them out and provide an answer before we had to abandon the planet. We’ve failed at both. I can only hope our counterparts on the other Generation class vessels have more success, and I mourn for the billions of souls already lost in this senseless conflict.”

  She stopped again. Tears were running from her eyes. Hayden felt cold, his body shivering from her words. The PASS had always insisted that the Pilgrim had left the planet of its own volition. That the colonization program was voluntary.

  Of course, the PASS lied.

  What the hell had happened to Earth?

  “I don’t know if anyone will ever hear this log. I don’t know if anyone will ever see my face again. I hope that if and when you do, the Pilgrim will be free of the xenotrife. I hope the ship will have set down on New Gaia, the secured hatches will have unsealed, and you’ll be discovering this area a long time after you’ve begun to dismantle the city and move it outside. I hope that you’ll have already found us, sleeping in our hibernation pods. I hope you’ll have woken us up so that we can rejoin you as members of a new society.

  “If not. If the trife survive our best efforts. If the Pilgrim drifts across the universe until the end of time... I hope never to wake up at all.”

  The recording ended. Hayden stared at the interface containing the query results for nearly a minute, trying to process what she had said, and slowly piecing together a vague outline of events.

  The trife had come from outside the Pilgrim. From Earth. Mendez and her team had been working to find a way to stop them, using colonists as test subjects for their experiments. Apparently, there were other ships and other researchers doing the same. And when they failed? That’s when the ships had left Earth. But the Pilgrim still had a bug problem, one they had decided not to carry to their new home. The ship was drifting, waiting for the creatures to die. Not only had they survived, but it also appeared they were still reproducing.

  And now here he was.

  Here they all were.

  Had any of the ships found a cure? Had any found a way to destroy the demons? Had they made it to their new home? Hayden felt a pang of jealousy at the idea that some other ship full of colonists was out there on New Gaia, enjoying the splendor of a clean world where anything was possible instead of facing a future that was anything but sure.

  He looked at Special Officer Mendez’s image on the display. She had said she and her team had taken to hibernation pods. That they were sleeping. The suspended status made more sense to him now. She had hoped they would make it to their new home and be woken then. She didn’t want to be taken out of hibernation otherwise.

  Too damn bad.

  39

  It took Hayden some time to find the hibernation pods. Research was larger than he expected, accounting for close to half a square kilometer. He had come across a number of hatches along the way, and while he had no idea what a hibernation pod looked like, he knew what it wasn’t.

  The whole area was self-sufficient, just like Metro but on a much smaller scale. He found cubes for the research team, a dozen of them, but they were tiny bunks in the wall just big enough to house a small mattress. He found a shared shower and bathroom, embarrassed about voiding on the floor outside when he did. He found a laboratory stocked with all kinds of fancy equipment whose function he didn’t understand. He found more external hatches that had been sealed with heavy solder to keep them from opening to adjacent corridors, and roughly patched shafts altered to keep the xenotrife away.

  In a discovery that sent his body to shivering again, he had also come across a room of cells, a prison like the one in Metro, eight separate cages in all. Seven of them had corpses in them. Bodies that he imagined had once been human. Something had happened to each of them, leaving them in a state of distressed mutation. On one, the skull was much too large. On another, it appeared as though the muscles had grown beyond control. He knew from Special Officer Mendez’s log that each of the apparent prisoners had been colonist
s. Had they volunteered for the experiments or had the soldiers on board taken them against their will?

  It was one of the many questions circulating in his mind. He expected to ask Mendez all of them once he got her up.

  The hibernation pods were tucked into the northernmost corner of the Research module. The room they were in was cold, much colder than anywhere else he had been on the ship. A wash of freezing air had exploded out of it when Hayden opened the hatch, having to enter the master code on the door’s panel to convince it to slide away. Once the mist had cleared, he was able to make out the twelve pods arranged in groups of six on either side of the main aisle. They were roughly bed shaped, flat on the bottom and rounded on top, with tubes entering at multiple points along the back. Displays sat over each of them, frosted over by the cold, moist air and leaving their contents invisible. He guessed each display would list the name of the occupant and their vitals, important because the pods had no transparencies to view the state of the bodies inside.

  He approached the closest pod on his left. Natalia would have loved to see this technology and to try to understand how it all worked. He didn’t much care for the inner workings of things, and especially not for these things. Not right now. All he wanted to know was how to turn it off.

  He reached up to the display, putting a finger to the freezing surface. He had never touched anything so cold, and the sensation of it caused him to draw his hand back. There was nothing in Metro like this. He overcame the shock quickly, scraping his hand across the display, watching as the heat of his body overcame the frost and began to clear it from the glass. He wasn’t sure what to think as it became clear of the frozen condensation.

  The display was empty. Blank.

  Dead.

  Conserving power? He tapped on it a few times, thinking it might activate with his touch.

  It didn’t.

  He stared at it, a sense of dread starting to filter in. He looked over the pod, studying it more closely. It had to have a manual release of some kind, didn’t it? He bent down to see beneath it, looking at the frosted tubes running from it to the wall. He scraped some of the frost off. They appeared to be empty. He had a feeling they weren’t supposed to be.

  He was pretty sure the pod had failed. Just like so many things in Metro had failed.

  He went to the next one, scraping the frost off its display. Again, it was blank. He examined its tubes. This pod was dead as well.

  He went to the third, and then the fourth. They were the same. Each time he discovered a dead pod his heart sank a little more. He needed one of the researchers to be alive, damn it.

  The fifth was dead. So was the sixth. He crossed to the other side. The seventh and eighth were both offline.

  He rubbed the frost from the display of the ninth. He was so prepared for it to be inoperable that when he saw the red text across the black background, he almost didn’t recognize what it meant. He bent to check the tubes, realizing that there was a clear fluid moving in and out of the pod.

  He stood back up, his eyes landing on the display again, his heart pulsing.

  KAZLASKI, J.

  A small graph ran below the name, measuring something inside the pod. It wasn’t flat, which Hayden assumed was good. At least one of the researchers was alive!

  He didn’t look for a way to open the pod. Not yet. Instead, he went to the remaining three, wiping the frost from each.

  There was only one survivor. Senior Officer Mendez had gotten her wish.

  She was never going to wake up.

  He returned to the operable pod. He reached up and tapped on the display. It changed beneath his finger.

  HIBERNATION SEQUENCE ACTIVATED. ENGAGE MANUAL OVERRIDE?

  A pair of buttons appeared. YES or NO. He tapped on YES.

  ENTER ACCESS CODE.

  He put in the master code.

  MANUAL OVERRIDE SELECTED. CONFIRM?

  Again, YES or NO. He tapped on YES.

  The text turned green.

  THAWING PROCESS ACTIVATED. STANDBY.

  A timer appeared beneath it. Ten minutes. The pod started to hum.

  Hayden took a step back from it, holding his breath. The other pods had all failed. What if this one died during the thawing process?

  He shook as he watched the timer count down. The hum from the pod was getting louder, and he could see the layer of frost surrounding it turning to water as it warmed up. The air in the room was getting warmer too, signaling that the system was aware only one pod was functional.

  When the timer reached five minutes, a sucking sound came from the inside, which he could see in the tubes below was the fluid draining from the system. That took another minute to happen.

  He wasn’t sure what it was doing after that, but the display was on 3:38 when it suddenly, inexplicably fell dark.

  There was no warning. No flashing lights. No indication of failure or emergency. One moment, the whole thing was working. The next, it had all stopped, going dark and silent. Dead.

  “No,” Hayden said, stepping toward it and tapping on the display. “Come on, damn it. No.” He smacked the side of the screen a few times. What the hell had happened to it?

  Three more minutes. It only had three more minutes. Had the person inside been revived? He needed to open it up. There had to be a way.

  He crouched in front of it, grabbing the tubes and pulling as hard as he could. When that didn’t work, he grabbed Baby, slashing and cutting at the lines until he got them disconnected. The pod still didn’t open. He banged the handle of the blade against the seam, hoping he could dislodge it. He couldn’t.

  He stopped hitting it, staring at it. How could he get it open? He was close. So damn close. He put his forehead in his hand, rubbing at it and trying to think.

  Something knocked on the pod.

  From inside.

  He moved back to it.

  “Hello?” he shouted.

  The knocking came again.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  Silence.

  “Hello?” Hayden shouted. “I can’t figure out how to open-”

  The seams hissed. Hayden jumped back. The top of the pod started to move, lifting open from the back. No, not lifting on its own. Being lifted. Two small hands gripped the sides of it, trying to push it out of the way. He rushed to help, grabbing one side and pulling it up. It was heavier than he would have guessed.

  He strained to keep it raised. He could see the woman inside. She was completely naked, and she moved in a way that suggested she had almost forgotten how.

  She wasn’t paying attention to him. She was struggling to get her muscles working, to get herself out of the pod. She faced away from him, leaning over the opposite side. She was still wet from the fluid, a shimmering gel that coated her bare, completely hairless flesh. She got herself to the edge and tumbled over, hitting the cold floor with a wet slap.

  40

  Hayden rushed to her, reaching out to help her to her feet.

  She looked in his direction, putting her hand out and trying to push herself away from him.

  He stopped moving when he saw she was afraid of him.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s okay. My name is Sheriff Hayden Duke. From Metro.”

  Her eyes were moving back and forth. She couldn’t see him, not clearly. Even so, his words seemed to calm her some. She stopped trying to push herself away, changing her effort to covering her breasts and groin with her hands instead.

  “I’m sorry,” Hayden said. “I didn’t know you were naked in there or I would have brought something to cover you. I can go and get something.”

  “No,” she said, the word viscous in her throat.

  She coughed, shifting her hands to lean on the ground while she spit out clear fluid onto it. She continued to hack for a good minute, her body heaving. When she had cleared the gel from her mouth, she looked up at him again, blinking rapidly. Her eyes seemed more focus now, her vision returning.

/>   She didn’t try to cover herself again. She had decided her modesty was less important than not being alone.

  “Sheriff?” she said, her voice a little stronger.

  “Hayden Duke,” he repeated. “From Metro. Inside the Pilgrim.”

  A small smile started to creep onto her face. “The Pilgrim? Then, we’ve arrived? New Gaia?”

  Hayden froze. He knew she was going to be crushed, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “No,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. We haven’t reached New Gaia. We haven't reached anywhere. I don’t know if we ever will. That’s why I woke you. I need your help.”

  She lowered her head again, shaking it. “Senior Officer Mendez?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this in a way that doesn’t hurt,” Hayden replied. “The pods. They all broke. Yours was the only one that was still functional, and it didn’t complete the thawing process.”

  She gave out a short cry, lowering herself to the floor. Her body shook with her sobs, and he stepped forward again with the intention of comforting her.

  She stopped shaking almost immediately, pushing herself back up. She reached up and wiped her eyes.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t touch me. Just give me a minute.”

  “I can leave?”

  “No. Stay with me, Sheriff. I don’t want to be alone. Just. Wait.”

  He turned around to give her some privacy, standing there while she breathed. Ragged at first, but slowly calming.

  “It’s a lot to take in,” she said after a few minutes.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “My name is Special Officer Jennifer Kazlaski,” she said. “United States Special Operations, Disease Control.”

  “I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, Officer Kazlaski, but honestly, I wish you were still asleep.”

  She looked up at him, holding out her hand. “So do I, but you woke me for a reason. Help me up. It’s cold in here.”

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. He did his best to keep his eyes off her body. He didn’t want her to think he was that kind of man.