The Rimes Trilogy Boxed Set

by P. R. Adams

  33

  29 October, 2167. Fourth planet of the COROT-7 system.

  * * *

  The desert stretched into a gray-brown infinity. The last of their energy bars were long gone. The empty stims and anti-inflammatory ampules were slowly recycling in Sung’s medical pack. Their water reclamation systems were falling behind, producing nothing but a few drops in their containers when they needed so much more.

  They were all sucking at the nectar of a cocktail of painkillers and stem cell boosters to get them through the final stretch, but they were rapidly dehydrating. It was in their foul breath, their sandpaper tongues, and the constant phantom sulfur taste the air left in their dry mouths.

  Unspoken, the sentiment was nonetheless shared: They weren’t going to make it.

  They’d started off early, before the slightest hint of sunrise. An unexpected breeze had kicked up several minutes into the run, obscuring their way. Almost immediately, the breeze had intensified until, by the time the sun did rise, they were leaning into the wind to make any progress at all.

  Somewhere during all that, the sun rose.

  It was the middle of the day before they could run again, and by then, they were drained. At some point, the sand had transformed into a uniform gray that seemed testament to the lifeless void they moved within.

  Rimes encouraged the others on, pushing them with raspy-voiced encouragement until they reached the base of a slope.

  His throat too dry to shout anymore, he had resorted to carrying Fontana and Watanabe, alternating with Meyers and Munoz. When they reached the top, Rimes turned to scan the way they’d come. There was an immediate joy to see the wind had all but obliterated their footsteps. The joy was short-lived when he easily spotted the camp from the night before, close enough he imagined he could see where he’d slept.

  He took solace in the lack of any sign of pursuit.

  They could be flanking us. They could have passed us already. No! He refused to surrender.

  Reluctantly, he gave everyone a moment to lick at their water container nozzles and stretch. He shared what little had collected in his own container with a surprisingly exhausted Andrea. Her parched lips left blood on the straw. Wishing he had more to offer and knowing he didn’t, Rimes put the container away.

  Seeing Andrea struggle to keep her footing, Rimes pulled Kershaw, Meyers, and Munoz aside. “Look, she can’t go on like this. She’s barely able to stand.”

  Meyers looked at Andrea out of the corner of his eyes. “You want to cut her loose?”

  Rimes watched their eyes. They were exhausted, ready to collapse. Only Meyers seemed skeptical. “Cut her bonds, yes. She’s not a threat. Not like she was. The other options are to leave her or carry her.”

  Munoz managed a tired wink. “I’m getting all the thrills I can hope for carrying the other two, sir.”

  Kershaw scratched his nose and gulped a few times, probably trying to get some saliva in his mouth so he could talk. “If we leave her here and they find her, she’ll just be another gun on the other side.”

  Meyers sighed. “We could kill her.”

  Rimes shook his head. “Not an option.”

  “Your call.” Meyers said. He stumbled away.

  Kershaw and Munoz looked at each other and nodded weakly.

  Rimes walked back to Andrea’s side and grasped her arm, turning her gently so he could remove her bonds. She didn’t resist or attempt to run or attack. Instead, she slowly worked the kinks out of her hands and wrists. She looked at him for a moment, and the gratitude was clear in her tired eyes.

  Hoping to capitalize on whatever slight edge remained from the painkillers in their systems, Rimes got everyone moving again. There was no value in speech, and he wasn’t even sure he could manage it, so he simply began walking. He didn’t glance back to ensure the others were following.

  At one hundred paces, he began to jog. It was slow and painful, his joints objecting with each impact, but he dug deep enough to find a reserve that he could tap into. The first time he looked back, he saw the others behind him in a line that snaked nearly a hundred meters.

  Darkness fell, and Rimes kept going. It was full dark when he spotted it: a bright light in the distance.

  The wind had kicked up again, although without the pitiless intensity it had earlier in the day, so the light seemed at first a flicker. He looked back, slowing until the others caught up to him. He went to each one’s side to point the light out. They all nodded and somehow took encouragement from what was surely a meaningless sign.

  An hour later, the light was clearer, brighter. The wind was dying, the sand settling. They could see the first hints of a silhouette. He tried to blink away the mirage, unable to believe what was slowly resolving out of the lone point of light in the murky, overcast night: a shuttle.

  Over the course of the next few hours, they continued—walking, jogging, sometimes crawling. They never stopped, never spoke, never truly believed what they were seeing, and never lost hope it was real. Only when Rimes placed his hand against the smooth, sturdy hull did he finally allow himself to truly accept that it was indeed real.

  A shuttle. Here. In the dead zone of the desert.

  One by one, they collapsed at the shuttle’s rear airlock. They were too tired and too dehydrated to speak, but even if they could, they wouldn’t have pushed Meyers to try to overcome the airlock’s entry system. Another few minutes—even another few hours—of rest would hurt nothing.

  And so, one by one, they slipped into the sort of sleep only the truly exhausted can know.

  Morning came and Rimes woke to find himself intimately entangled with Andrea on the sand. The back of her head was hot, pressed against his cheek. Her hair smelled of sweat and carried an intriguing musk. She didn’t wake when he slowly extricated himself from her sunburned limbs. The sulfuric odor was heavy in the air, a strange scent to Rimes’s tender and fatigued nose. He tried to work up some spit to clear the dryness and pain from his mouth, but couldn’t.

  A few meters away, Meyers first woke, then forced himself to his feet, then slowly walked to the airlock door. It was like watching someone in a trance.

  Meyers ran his scaly tongue over his cracked and bleeding lips, trying to fathom the intricacies of a simple control panel, something he could normally overcome with minimal effort.

  Knowing he could offer little more than moral support, Rimes pushed against the sand, uncertainly getting to his feet. He staggered slowly to the airlock doorframe opposite the control panel and leaned against it for support. Meyers nodded wordlessly in acknowledgement, then turned his glassy gaze back to the control panel.

  Finally, Meyers seemed to remember the workings of the system and clumsily drew a multi-tool from a belt pouch. He fiddled with the tool awkwardly, settled on a fine prying blade, and went to work on the panel face. A minute later, the airlock cycled, its hiss an alarm clock for the rest.

  Rimes staggered back to the others, helping Andrea and Fontana to their feet. He let them lean on him, fearing at any moment he would fail them and collapse to the ground. They stumbled through the airlock together and into the shuttle.

  Its interior drew memories from his overtaxed mind: Fort Sill, the orbital shipyards. It was a top-of-the-line vessel, superbly maintained.

  And it was empty.

  While the others seemed content to settle into the seats and eye the harnesses, as if admiring them was merely a formality before escaping the desert rock, Rimes edged forward. He stopped in front of four cargo cases secured to the bulkhead aft of the cockpit, two across, two down. With trembling finger, he hit the open button on the top left case, stepping back as the front folded outward.

  Energy bars, medical supplies, and liters of water lay arrayed before him. Empty silhouettes in the foam indicated where other supplies had been removed.

  Water!

  He pried out three of the water containers and inspected them. They were several months old. He handed one to Fontana and another to Watanabe
; the third went to Andrea. He fished in the medical supplies for lip balm, then smeared some on his tortured lips. He carried the medical supplies to Sung.

  Rimes returned to the cargo cases, first trying to squat, then simply dropping to his knees in front of the bottom left case. He opened it and found more supplies. The top right case contained ammunition, including a few grenades, the bottom right, batteries and replacement gear.

  Meyers stepped up, took a pull from one of the water containers, and then handed it to Rimes. Rimes turned to be sure everyone else had taken a drink, then accepted the container.

  He fought through a cramp as he stood and took a quick drink of water. Another drink and the container was empty. He pulled energy bars from the first case and passed those around. That done, he returned to the case with the grenades, pulling them out and giving one each to Kershaw, Meyers, and Munoz.

  After a moment, Rimes took one of the energy bars and tore away the wrapper. He bit off the tip of the bar and chewed on it slowly, giving his weakened jaw muscles and depleted saliva glands a moment to cope with the demands he was placing on them.

  He looked back at the passenger bay. Instead of center rows that would have allowed two squads, the area held some sort of mount frame. It was just over three meters long and about two meters wide, with what appeared to be six locking clasps and easily as many cables ending in unfamiliar adapters.

  Shaking his head at why someone would give up personnel for what he imagined was an exotic weapon, he made his way into the cockpit. His muddled mind flashed back to the mount he’d seen in the genie fast attack craft. Why? Why would they have the same sort of mount in their craft?

  Rimes settled into the co-pilot’s chair next to Meyers, who was seated in the pilot’s chair. Neither spoke as they looked the controls over and sucked at the energy bar pieces wedged between their teeth and gums.

  Finally, Rimes looked at Meyers with a nervous smile. “Looks intact.” His voice was an ugly croak.

  Meyers scanned the console slowly. “Yeah.”

  “No damage, the batteries are still charged. Can we bring the reactor online?” Can we get the hell off this rock? But I can’t say that. I shouldn’t even feel it. I have people out there to rescue.

  Meyers flipped a few switches and connected to the shuttle’s systems. His face became grim after a few minutes. “It’s a Commando shuttle, all right. Looks like it landed here just over a month ago.” He stopped, confused. “I’m opening a workspace. See if you can connect.”

  Rimes activated his earpiece’s communications. It took a few tries, but he finally connected to Meyers’s shared workspace. The interference isn’t as bad here.

  Meyers displayed data he was pulling from the shuttle systems. Landing date, launch date, the ship the shuttle launched from, mission log—he highlighted key elements before dragging them into an orderly arrangement.

  Rimes blinked. He felt slow, stupid. “The Carolina?” He drilled down into the record and inspected it in more detail. “Looks like a Corvette-class ship. I’ve never heard of that. You?”

  “No. Why wouldn’t we have seen it in orbit?”

  Rimes considered that notion for a moment. How could we miss a ship? A Corvette looks like it’s pretty small, but it would show up. Unless it can somehow evade our sensors? “According to the log dates, they left Earth after us and came straight here.” Rimes highlighted the relevant dates and a mission notation. “Responding to an SOS?”

  Meyers dragged some more data into the workspace. “Call it a wild hunch, but…“ It took a minute, but he brought up a globe representing the planet. “That’s the old data we were given, the stuff that keep causing our systems to glitch.” He transferred data from the Commando shuttle into the representation.

  Rimes didn’t feel the hunch was wild at all. Details began filling in—magnetic north, the poles, the equator, mountain ranges, the dead ocean basins, tectonic plates. Meyers overlaid data from the crashed shuttle into the workspace—their flight path, the altimeter readings, the crash sites. Everything mapped accurately.

  Meyers dragged the current location onto the globe and rotated it to drill down into their location. The display redrew. Once again, everything seemed to map out.

  More importantly, the system didn’t glitch.

  “Hm.” Meyers scratched at the stubble on his face. “Not what I expected.”

  “Which was?”

  “The glitch, I guess.”

  Rimes sat back, confused. With the food slowly settling into his stomach, he was waiting for his mind to come back to life. Finally, it hit him. “What was the SOS coming from?”

  Meyers looked at him like he was an idiot. “This shuttle. You saw the hull light. It must have been some sort of proximity alert that set it off.”

  “No.” Rimes closed his eyes and rubbed the scar on his right temple. “They came here in response to an SOS. What we picked up was an ADMP SOS being transmitted from this shuttle. It’s not a normal SOS, and it’s not a military SOS.”

  “Right.” Meyers blinked, irritated.

  Rimes tapped the blank instruments display panel. “So where’s the original source of the ADMP SOS that brought them out here in the first place?”

  Meyers’s face screwed up. He began examining more of the shuttle logs. “Here.” A new point appeared on the globe, about five kilometers north of their current position. “Looks like they did a flyover of the site before landing here.” He rotated the globe to the new position and the entire display glitched. “I’ll be damned. There’s the bad data, then.”

  “Can you bring up just the shuttle’s flyover data?”

  Meyers tapped out an impatient beat while their earpieces cycled. When everything was back up, he quickly re-opened the workspace and loaded just the flyover data. He drilled down, whistling as a three-kilometer diameter crater resolved in the display. It was nearly a half-kilometer deep, its shape improbably symmetrical. The ground surrounding the crater rippled out for another three kilometers all around.

  That’s what’s causing the glitch?

  Rimes pointed to a symmetric shape not five hundred meters out from the crater’s southern rim. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “I think so.” Meyers drilled down until the shape became clearer. It was big, like a luxury yacht, more than twice the size of the genies’ fast assault craft, with two decks and a small forward cockpit. A few finger strokes over the fuselage and an ADMP logo resolved in front of the ship’s name: Tesla. “Looks like a huge yacht or a small explorer.”

  Rimes stared hard at the image, rotating it around until he could see every part of the ship caught by the shuttle’s cameras. “Here. See this? The landing gear couldn’t handle that terrain. It’s buckled. What kind of idiot takes that sort of risk? Based on the images, there’s no good place to land a ship that close to the crater.”

  “Someone overconfident, under-trained, or ordered to try.” Meyers leaned in to look closer at the damage. “My vote, I’d go with overconfident.”

  “So the Commandos landed here, then went out to the ADMP yacht. Then…what? How’d the ADMP SOS get into their system? Why? And where’s the Carolina?”

  Meyers shrugged. “Really, do we care? I mean, yes, we do, obviously. But right now, there are a handful of us and you said, what, thirteen genies out there? We have one priority right now, as far as I can tell, and that’s getting the hell off this planet. If the Valdez says it’s still too hot up there, we can fly back and pick up the wounded and put a few hundred kilometers between us and the genies. Maybe we find their ships and scavenge from them. Maybe they had more onboard than energy bars.”

  Rimes didn’t have to think about it long. Everything Meyers said made sense. Although it didn’t sit well, they could come back for the missing Commandos after getting medical attention and picking up some reinforcements. “All right, but let’s see if we can raise the Valdez. We need to warn them about the Carolina. I don’t like that we have no idea where it is. You’d t
hink it would have tried to contact us the second we arrived.”

  “You’d think it would’ve done something to recover this shuttle. Or maybe returned to Earth.”

  “Yeah.” Unless something was wrong with it. Rimes stood. “I definitely don’t like it. Can you fly this thing?”

  Meyers looked the controls over and nodded, each bounce of his head more confident than the last. “Yeah, I think I could. These things mostly fly themselves outside of the landings, and even those aren’t bad if everything is stationary and simple.”

  “We just need to get out of here for now. See if you can get the reactor online. I’ll tell the others.”

  For once, he had good news, at least for the moment, but something about the situation—all the unanswered questions and improbabilities—left him questioning just how long the news could stay good.

  34

  30 October, 2167. Fourth planet of the COROT-7 system.

  * * *

  Empty plastic water containers and black energy bar wrappers lay in a chaotic tumble on the shuttle floor. The occupants were sprawled across their seats, chests rising and falling with a slow, tranquil rhythm. They watched Rimes with a mixture of fatigue and excitement, and he watched them, curious. Mostly, he wondered how Andrea would react to the idea of beginning her formal transition to prisoner.

  Rimes sucked in the air and did his best to ignore the pungent odors they were all giving off after days sealed in their suits, running in the brutal heat. By comparison, the shuttle was cool, sterile.

  And quiet. He could hear their breathing, each a distinct, clear signature in the tight enclosure.

  The shuttle felt safe, but it could easily become a trap.

  “All right, so, we’re trying to raise the Valdez right now. If it’s still too hot in orbit, we’ll fly back to 332 and retrieve the wounded, then get somewhere safe until the fighting is over. If it’s all clear, we’ll pick up the wounded, get everyone some medical attention and rest, pick up some reinforcements and head back here to search for the missing. All of the missing. No one needs to die on this cesspit of a planet.” He stared at Andrea, who didn’t react.