She looked at her nails. They were broken and filthy. She started cleaning the dirt under her nails with the tip of her knife. When she got to her middle finger, the knife slipped and cut into her skin.
“Ow!” May said sucking on it. “So we can’t cut own own veins but we can still prick ourselves accidentally? Some blessing you got there, Luna,” she said to the heavens and gave her a bloody finger.
May stretched. She was awake now. She rose, pulling her rags along, and a pack of guinea pigs bolted away from her and found refuge elsewhere. She had liberated them from an abandoned lab, and they were happily munching cables and littering the place to the bane of the remaining service drones.
Her belly roared. She protested and dragged herself, leaning on corridors, down to the shop. The ship was mostly empty, and she had chosen a place specifically so the few remaining women didn’t bother her. So she walked the distance, down empty halls, abandoned crew quarters, sealed rooms, forgotten lockers. It was a bleak contrast to what the Frostips used to be, which was packed to the brim with people, hustling and bustling.
Well, she blamed herself for that.
She found the shop. It wasn’t a real shop, since they didn’t actually have currency. Everyone was assigned resources depending on their contribution, but no one would ever be left homeless or to starve. Homelessness was a long gone problem now of course, and food was plentiful.
It was they who were too few.
The shopkeeper was a sort of a volunteer, just like any other non-essential job posting on the fleet. People needed to be active and useful, and maintaining a shop was demanding enough. They could all be asking drones to fetch their groceries for them, but May had read sometime that it was a small rush of endorphins when you actually did the shopping yourself.
She looked at the girl inside. “I want some tomato juice, give me a can,” May croaked.
The girl didn’t dare look her in the eye. “Sure! Um… Luna said you needed a few more for your diet, you know… Here’s some orange juice, and some fish, and-”
“I said I only want tomato.”
A few more shoppers stared at her, looking disgusted at her rags and pinching their noses. “Is that May?” they said amongst themselves. “No, don’t think so.” “Who else could it be?” “They say she would be Admiral now…” “Is it true she…”
“Please,” the shop-girl begged her. “It’s for the baby,” she said with concern and nodded towards May’s body.
“What baby?” May asked and then realised she was forgetting something. She pulled her rags aside and revealed a belly. Huge one, seven or eight months? She didn’t know about these things, she’d never given birth before. Her career had been more important.
The group of women saw the belly and gossiped with furor.
May picked up the pack of food, and turned to hiss at them. They stepped back, shocked.
Heh. That would teach ‘em.
“Okay fine,” May said to the shop-girl and walked back to her spot. She had rats to take care of.
Two months later, she made a video. She had her infant daughter beside her, inside a gas tank that was cut out and stuffed with clean cloth. May propped the comm upright, made sure the frame was good for both of them and started talking to the camera.
“I’m Captain May. Or used to be. This is our customary birthday video, it’s what people did back in my day. We took a video, along with the infant you, so that you could see it at your 18nth birthday and cry together and shit like that. Anyway, this is our story…”
May looked up for a moment, thinking about what to day. “I was captain of Frostip 2. An astrogator with aspirations to become captain. I worked myself hard and I did make it. I always loved the stars… Cal would complain that I spent all my nights stargazing. We do have some of the best telescopes on board you know.”
“Every day was a record for us, you know. Every day, we would find ourselves farther than any human or man-made object had ever gone before. It kinda lost it’s glamor, honestly. One night I saw something that didn’t make sense. It was just a glimmer, but it was too shiny for a rock. It was at -74 degrees from our heading, so we would be actually getting closer to and get a better look. A few days later, when we were at optimal distance, I grabbed the PA system and talked to the people on board. I knew it was silly and I was afraid I’d just get ridiculed, but my thirst for knowledge was greater than that. There’s a thing called Silent Protocol. It’s what submarines used to do back on Earth. They’d power down everything, every crew member would sit down and stay quiet, and the sub would become undetectable. Our problem was with vibrations. Our telescope was quite good, but the object was too far away to get a clear picture. So I just talked to my crew and the people, about my love for the stars. About what we do out here, our great mission to colonize. And I simply asked them to do the Silent Protocol for me, to stop what they were doing, power down everything non-essential and eliminate all vibrations for a few minutes. I gave a time-frame of three hours, and thanked them in advance. To be honest, I didn’t think they’d do it. Maybe some, but not all. People were busy, it’s not like they’d give their time for nonsense like that.”
May paused for a minute and looked at the baby to her side. “The time came, I lined up the telescope and to my amazement, the picture was clear as glass. The whole of Frostip 2 was silent, as if holding it’s breath. They had done it for me. I took the pictures and couldn’t believe it, I contained my cheer because you could hear a needle drop at the bridge at that moment. Luna processed the pictures through some corrective algorithm and I lost my marbles. It was simply impossible.”
May waved her hands, showing as she was explaining. “It was an artifact. An honest to God, non-human artifact. Nothing natural could have made that, it was too designed despite it’s damage. It was round, with protruding antennae in all directions, some of them broken. It was glinting in a dark-golden color, muddy and dirty. It had a distinct ridge at it’s circumference, and I thought I could make out a port at one side.”
She sat back. “Everyone had seen it, they were all waiting to see what the fuss was about. But when the image cleared I could hear the oohs and aahs before it even registered in my mind. Alien fucking object. Clear as day. Further away than anything we had ever sent out, resembling no man-made technology ever. A true alien artifact, orbiting a rocky planet.”
She sighed. “I couldn’t contain my excitement at that point. I just hopped around and squealed like a girl. Then I composed myself and grabbed the PA mic again. I thanked the people for doing this for me, I told them we’d need to examine the object better before jumping to any conclusions. But I didn’t believe it myself, it was clear as day! Aliens!”
The baby cooed and May put the blanket around it. “Cal, your father, literally lost me after that. I spent all my time studying the artifact, campaigning for a scout mission. But the damn thing was too far away and we were heading at a weird angle. I didn’t have a lot of time you know, the fleet is moving really fast even though you don’t realize it from within. I asked the Admiral to let me take Frostip 2 to examine the alien artifact. He denied my request, said it was too risky. He was willing to devote a Scout for it, who was barely coming back, than risk an entire ship. But the ship was the only thing fast enough to break formation, examine the object, hopefully grab it for further research and sprint back to catch up with the fleet.”
She cleared her throat. “I admit, I knew the Scout was the better option. We wouldn’t grab the artifact that way, but it was the safest, most logical thing to do. But I had lost my mind. I wanted to see it up close for myself, the first ever alien object, and maybe, hopefully, an encounter? Wishful thinking, I know. I couldn’t leave as a Scout, having a whole ship to command. So I took the ship with me.”
The baby cried and May looked at it with no affection, not touching it, not cradling it, nothing. “Admiral threatened me, but I overruled him. We were all under his command of course, but in extreme circumstances the Cap
tain was in charge of his own ship. I asked the crew and the people if they were willing to go and explore. Most of them did. They really did love me as a leader. So I broke off the fleet and took Frostip 2 to the artifact.”
The baby cried louder, so May just pushed the cradle slightly to calm it down. “A week later we got near it. Every image of the artifact was clearer, every detail exposed, every crater, every broken antennae. It looked like a satellite on steroids, and it was about a hundred meters in diameter. I was giddy all the time, I couldn’t sleep. I was just examining the readings from the artifact, biting my teeth as we inched closed with a snail’s pace.”
May stopped as the baby fell asleep. She whispered. “I was so close. I kept imagining what I’d find in there. People? Bipeds? Quadrupeds? Alive, dead, in stasis? Digital entities? How would we even communicate? I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that I was the one who would go first. Me, Captain May of the frikkin Frostip 2, in line for fleet Admiral. Not after my little mutiny of course, that career was long gone, but it was worth it in my mind. What’s a little job like Admiral, when you are about to make history?”
The baby drooled and May talked a bit louder. “I brought Frostip close to the artifact. We were planning to haul it with us if it wasn’t active, I even had the drones whip up plans for the project. Luna was reporting strange readings that she didn’t understand. Every one of the two thousand souls aboard was waiting, staring at their monitors and comms, waiting to see what would happen.”
May bit into her lip with hate, and she looked into the camera. “Then the message came. It was raw-optical beam, so it could be picked up even by incompatible computers without any processing. It simply showed a dead, decapitated and rotting. It was an alien head, gray, disfigured, bleeding dark blood on dirt. ‘What does that mean,’ I asked Luna as I was watching the image. She replied, ‘I’m afraid it means, Die.’”
May’s eyes were unfocused, as if narrating from a history book. “I was shocked, unable to move. The artifact blew up and turned into tendrils of plasma, white hot and slithering, striking Frostip. Luna began evasive maneuvers but it was too late. The bridge darkened, emergency lights turned on, sirens blared. A metal beam broke off and came straight at my head. I ducked a moment too late, but it hit a flash of distorted pane from the protective field. It was Luna’s doing. The beam didn’t kill me that day. I looked around, yelled commands and ordered an evacuation. Frostip was being pummeled with strikes, it wasn’t armored enough to withstand that attack.”
May pointed at her heart. “As I ran around, tending to my injured crew I felt a stab in my heart. I wavered, holding myself up by a desk. A tiny drone flew away in a blur from my heart and towards the other officers. Luna told me she had injected me with adrenaline, and that I should move to the life-boats. I got away, carrying beside me a young officer who had a head injury and was bleeding all over my shirt. Frostip took more hits. We made it to the life-boats, which of course were nowhere near enough for two thousand. If there were so many left alive. I was rambling all the way, and the officer told me later I was saying the word ‘mine,’ over and over and over.”
May tapped her finger on her knee. “Mine. Mine. Mine.”
“Think about it for a minute. The first alien encounter in the history of the human race, and it was with a bomb.”
May stared into the camera with a terrifying look.
“Don’t talk to me about hope.”
Two days later, May carried her baby to another ship. She walked down the empty halls. She saw a few women, but none bothered her. She was still in her rags and cloud of smell. She asked her comm for directions.
“Yes, the way to medical is two doors to the left,” Luna’s soft voice said.
“You know, I never understood this deal you wanted. It’s like an inverse deal with the devil, I’m forced to give birth to a child I don’t want, and then give my firstborn to you, so that you allow me to die.”
“May… You’re one of the Eves. You know I’m only thinking about you and the colonists.”
May snorted. The colonists. As if. It all seemed so… Distant. Hopeless. She placed her baby’s bassinet on the dark corridor.
It began crying.
She turned around and walked away, as her infant’s cries echoed down the halls.
“I’ve done what you asked Luna,” she said hatefully.
“Cal lives on through her, May. Didn’t you want that?”
May shrugged. The seed was from Cal himself, not of in vitro fertilization or anything else. It was of a night when she came back to their bed, exhausted. He wanted her, she was tired, he was hard, so she ordered him to please himself with her body and not care for her own pleasure. She must have already fallen asleep when her husband came inside her. “Not really, she said eventually as she walked away.
May went back to her rats. They were fluffy white and brown guinea pigs, but she called them rats anyway. Nobody would take care of them now. She wanted them to have something to feed on, so she sliced her wrists there on the floor. Luna didn’t stop her that time, and she died with a smile.
Chapter 30: Gen 7
Tam looked around the scout ship. It was small, could barely hold a person, let alone two people standing there as they did. It was too cramped for her, she would have gone insane riding one of these for years.
“Tam,” her subordinate said, “It seems the ship’s automatic call-back engaged and it flew back. The logs say pilot was lost in EVA, retrieving the probe from an ion storm. The AI was fried irreparably shortly after.”
Tam sniffed around. “No, it’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. The wear on the exercise machine is many years old,” she pointed. “It’s still well greased. And the smell, sure it’s been sealed for years, air scrubbed and recycled but still… No, this reeks of ball-sweat.”
“Oh? If you say so Ma’am, but do you really think a man is aboard the ship? Wouldn’t someone have seen him by now?” the subordinate asked.
“Scouts are crafty,” Tam said staring outside the cockpit at the stars.
“You think we sent out the best men to be found on the fleet?”
“No. I think we sent out the craziest.”
“Okay,” Ash said to his motley band of criminals. “Goal one, get this to Luna.” He showed the rugged datastick in his hand. “Goal two, somehow stop what hold Una has over Luna. It might be a password, a keycard, heck even an Admiral’s limb for access.”
“We used to have movie nights all the time back then during Gen 4,” Knox explained to Dot. “Too many action movies and spy flicks from old-Earth.”
“Ew! Go on,” she said.
“Goal three, don’t get caught during all this. Goal four, repair Scout Luna.”
“Already on it, man. What did you think this was, a make-up parlor?” Knox said doing the yo hand signal with his tiny appendage.
Ash eyed the drone for a moment. “Good, I guess. So, Dot fishes around for gossip on how Una holds her power, Knox you go start repairs, and I will go undercover and scout out the patrols on Frostip 1.”
“That’s dangerous,” Dot said worried.
“It’s OK. I’ll manage,” Ash said and forced a smile.
“Okay. Then that’s also crazy,” she added.
“I know. But we need to get planet Webb’s geo survey to Luna, the fate of the colony might depend on it.”
Chapter 31 : Gen 7
“How nice of you to bring me your mother’s medicine, Dot” Miss Fay said and accepted the pill bottle. She was paler than usual, thin and sickly.
Dot flashed her best smile. “Well, you’re my mom’s best friend. As soon as mom Sue found out, she sent me immediately here to give it to you.”
“How thoughtful of her,” Fay said and tried to get up.
“No, I’ll prepare it for you. Tell me what you need,” Dot said opening cupboards.
Fay pointed at the proper kitchenware for Dot to fetch.
As she poured the tummy medicine, she asked, “So,
I heard that Una will give that keycard she has for control of the fleet over to Tam, is that right?”
Fey’s face brightened at the sound of fresh gossip. “Really? I thought it was that earring she wore, you know, the funny looking one. People always said it was big enough to hold a chip for access,” she mumbled.
“Oh right! Well, you know how people, always assuming stuff and gossiping about,” Dot said and gave the medicine to Fay.
She sipped audibly. “Yes, it’s terrible, gossip gossip all day long.”
Dot smiled.
Ash wore the bio hazard mask. People were frail and susceptible enough to diseases, locked inside the Frostips that it wasn’t uncommon to see some germophobes. That was mostly back then, on his time. Gen 4. When the ships were crowded, filled to the brim. Two thousand people each.
Ash was about to get on the pod and fly to Frostip 1, but he hesitated. He was home. It was an empty husk of the ship it once was. He couldn’t run down the corridor for two steps without bumping into someone. Now here he was, back home, corridors, empty, quarters abandoned.
No sounds. No people.
He turned back and made haste. He needed to see his home. He just had to. What would he even find there? Would it just have been given to someone else? Would everything simply be untouched, what little belongings his family had?
Would he find them dead in there?
No, the drones would never allow such a thing, for medical reasons alone.
But that was the imaginary picture seared into his mind. His parents, aged and dead, right on their kitchen table.
Ash reached in the mask and rubbed his eye. He went down the familiar corridors, he was gone for so long but this was his world growing up. Some of the scuffmarks on the aged ship had been caused by him, his running about, his playing, his hanging out with Ben.
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 85
