Earthless: The Survivors Series

by Letts,Jason

  Brina nodded and took longer to reply than Loris would’ve liked.

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” she said, without much enthusiasm or sympathy. “The effects of our loss have been profound and very tangible, but the end result is that most people are too highly absorbed in their own grief to really question what is going on now. Some people are facing a severe loss of motivation, while others are pouring more energy into their work as a distraction.”

  “And what about you?”

  Brina produced a faint smile.

  “I have not been immune to the effects. Or are you asking what I think about your plan? I trust you’ve thought it through. I can’t think of a better response. Have you had any luck sorting out the meaning of the probe?” she asked.

  She seemed exhausted but still so beautiful. He wondered if she hadn’t been sleeping.

  “We haven’t gotten anywhere with it.”

  “The curvy lines, straight lines, squiggles, circles, and dots,” she said, some life coming into her eyes. “Sometimes I stop and stare at it when I’m walking between my quarters and the counseling room. Other people do the same. It’s a real puzzle, and the way those symbols appear out of the darkness almost makes you think the meaning would just be broadcast into your mind.”

  “I’d love it if it did. That would make this entire thing a lot easier. Somebody sent these probes to us for hundreds of years. What were they trying to tell us?”

  Brina had one hand on her knee and the other on the bare steel table. For a second he imagined her in a fancy library lined with old books surrounding a roaring fireplace. His mom would’ve appreciated how smart she was.

  When he had that thought, Brina withdrew and pulled at her collar.

  “Does it feel a little hot in here to you?”

  “It seems normal to me,” he said, but a bead of sweat trickled down her brow. She seemed to be avoiding looking at him.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “What I’d like is if you could help me understand the mood of the station,” he said.

  “No, the way you look at me says it all. Is it sex that you want? What’s the point of resisting? Whether it’s today, tomorrow, or next year, I’ll eventually get worn down and cave in because I’m a needy human. I’d be kidding myself if I thought otherwise. My ability to choose has been taken away. Well, there is that cute guy in engineering, but personal hygiene is not his thing. You get what I’m saying. It doesn’t really matter what I want anymore.”

  Loris felt like he’d been stabbed in the heart. The last thing he wanted was a partner who felt like she’d been sentenced to a life of intimate servitude. He struggled to land on the right thing to say.

  “Do you remember when I first met you at the Academy? You were taking volunteers for some research you were doing on brain activity underwater and I signed up on the spot. I never told you this, but I have a crippling fear of drowning.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked, smirking.

  “I wish. I haven’t even gotten in a bath since I was five years old, but I let you tape all of those heavy wires to my head and throw me in a deep pool. Would it be wrong to guess none of the other volunteers tried to keep in contact with you, or any of your classmates for that matter? That was five years ago, and I never forgot for a minute how impressed I was with you.”

  “I feel like I must’ve been a different person back then,” she said, growing reflective. She slipped into lethargic trances so easily, and Loris felt like he had to fight to keep her attention.

  “Look, I didn’t expect that we’d be thrown together on a ship and instantly fall in love. I hoped one day you would see something in me that was similar to what I saw in you. This might surprise you, but I’ve never once asked a woman out in my life.”

  “You haven’t?” she asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

  “No, that’s not my style. I prefer to charm them so much that I don’t have to.”

  Her eyes drifted again, though this time they didn’t roam off in some random direction. She looked toward his hand not far from hers on the table.

  “Well, maybe you won’t have to wait long for a good opportunity,” she said, but it wasn’t in the optimistic way he’d hoped. There was dread in her voice.

  “What makes you say that?” he asked, but he noticed what she did almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

  “Your wristband, it turned red. The station is in a state of emergency.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Loris hurried through the station, which now had red lights flashing at intervals. It was a long way from the study room to the engineering section, requiring a long lift ride, but it wasn’t long enough for him to get a good idea of the situation before he arrived.

  Only bits and pieces could get through to him on the wristband. The station had come to a halt for repairs. There’d been a fire and an explosion. Someone’s life was in danger.

  It wasn’t until he saw Chief Engineer Marta Aylward and the distraught look on her face that he knew how grave the situation was. A few other engineering officers were running around, and Loris’s first thought was that the reactor had a problem. His first glimpse of the trouble was that of a smoky, blackened window blotting vision into the room beyond.

  “What is it?” Loris asked Marta after sliding around an officer who ran by in the commotion.

  “We’d detected some damage to the hull from a stray shot during the fight against the Silica and came to a stop to patch that up. It was a one-in-a-million hit really, because it damaged the station’s temperature regulator located on the other side. A conduit overheated over the past few days. Something from the repair job must’ve set it off, because before we knew what was what, the room was ablaze. An explosion followed as the regulator went up that blew through the inner wall, leaving a breach in the hull bigger than a doorway,” she explained.

  Loris swiveled his head to try to see more of what was behind the blackened window. They’d sealed the room and prevented loss of cabin pressure in the station at large.

  “And the maintenance officer?”

  “He was caught in the blast and thrown against a jagged edge of steel on the ship’s exterior that pierced his space suit and impaled him in the lower abdomen. The suit has sealed around the steel edge. If he moves, he’ll break the seal and suffocate. If he doesn’t move, he’ll bleed to death in a matter of minutes.”

  There’s a special kind of pain a commander feels when one of his officers faces life-threatening peril. That pain washed over Loris’s mind, something he’d do anything to abate.

  “Who’s the officer?”

  “His name is Vincent Price,” Aylward said. She was sweating in the heat.

  Loris didn’t think he could’ve felt any worse, but news that it was Price managed it. The man had just been the hero of their mission to retrieve the alien probe, and now he might not live through the hour if someone didn’t do something.

  “I’m going out there. If I can slice off the edge, we can bring him in, take it out, and patch him up,” Loris said, already looking for the nearest hatch, but Marta grabbed his arm to draw his attention back.

  “You can’t use a torch. The regulator is still leaking coolant fumes that would ignite.”

  Shutting his eyes, he searched his mind for another solution.

  “I’ll dislodge him, reseal his suit, and keep pressure on the wound while I bring him in,” Loris said. Marta had no optimism for the plan to offer him.

  “You have thirty seconds once you touch him before ebullism sets in,” she said.

  Loris couldn’t wait another instant before heading for the nearest hatch. He knew all about the dangers of space exposure that would rapidly occur once Loris tore open the rupture in Price’s suit. The loss of pressure would result in unconsciousness in fourteen seconds. Gas bubbles would begin to form in his bodily fluids at the same time as his tissue would suffer from loss of oxygen around thirty seconds. C
ollapse of his lungs, circulatory failure, and reduction of carbon dioxide in the blood would occur soon after. Death would be certain after ninety seconds of exposure.

  Reaching the hatch, Loris put on his space suit and helmet as quickly as possible. As soon as he felt the weight of it on his shoulders, he activated the com.

  “Price, I’m coming for you,” he said.

  “Commander,” Price replied weakly.

  Loris stepped into the airlock and attached the spooling tether to a hitch along his belt. As he swung around the corner along a rail leading to Price, it was hard not to think about all of the ways this could’ve been easier. If Price had been blown out into space, one of the ships could’ve just picked him up. The Balboa in particular could’ve sealed Price in a balloon to create a stable atmosphere. They just needed a little more time.

  His eyes fixed on the gaping hole in the station, Loris spotted a limp arm extending out into space. As he began to get closer, he got cords ready that he could use to seal Price’s suit around the wound and minimize the exposure.

  “Commander, I’m not going to make it,” Price said. It sounded like he was straining, fighting off the pain.

  Loris couldn’t pull himself along the rail fast enough. He finally laid his hand on the edge of the breach and swung alongside Price, who was attached to the inner wall. The man’s eyelids hung low, other sections of his suit suffered burns and small bits of shrapnel. There wasn’t a moment to lose.

  Careful not to move him, Loris attempted to tie the cords tight around Price’s chest and waist. This was difficult to do from behind, requiring Loris to swing into the room with the destroyed temperature regulator to steady himself.

  “Just stay calm. Keep breathing,” Loris urged but got no response.

  The time had come to pull the steel shard out of Price, which would give him a matter of seconds to reseal the suit and transport him to safety. Unified space suits had a mechanism for self-sealing anyway, which is what helped Price retain pressure despite being stuck with a hunk of metal. Over the com, Loris learned that others were coming after him to help, but the lack of responsiveness from Price made it impossible to wait.

  Loris pulled hard and the officer’s body slid off the bloody steel spike extending out from the wall. The end of the edge had a tiny hook that caught Price’s suit, tearing it further all the way up to the cord around his chest.

  “No!” Loris shouted.

  Price whimpered as Loris got to his front and attempted to tape it shut, but already so much crystallizing blood was coming through the wound.

  Seconds were ticking away and Loris started to panic. After what seemed like an eternity to hold down the suit and apply one piece of tape along one section of the tear, the reality set in that Price would not survive. Price had been wounded worse than Aylward thought. Having the steel shard catch on the suit was nightmarish bad luck that couldn’t be foreseen.

  Loris frantically attempted to finish patching up the suit while others began to arrive at the breach. Once he’d completed the seal, he looked up at the helmet to find Price’s blue eyes staring blankly, vacant. For a second Loris let go of everything and just floated in his agony.

  The others carried the body back in, and Loris slowly followed behind. When he passed through the airlock and took his helmet off, it felt like he’d lost a part of himself out there. The human population dipped to one thousand and sixty-five.

  He exchanged a few pats on the back and kind words with the other crew members who escorted Price’s body to the “cold room” of the medical wing. Loris looked for Marta Aylward at her workstation in a large monitoring room with a glass wall facing the reactor. He didn’t find her, but he did find a tablet on her desk that she must’ve dropped in a hurry when the fire started.

  Reading upside down, he saw that there were a number of messages from Armand Iotache. Loris was about to reach for the tablet when Aylward appeared behind him.

  “Commander Roderick,” she said, sounding surprised. Loris quickly turned around, hoping she hadn’t gotten a sense of what he’d seen.

  “I was hoping you could give me the outlook on the repairs,” he said. Aylward swallowed and looked at her feet.

  “We’ve already plugged the coolant leak, and we’ll have the hull patched up enough to resume moving by the end of the day. Fixing the temperature regulator will take much longer, maybe a couple of months. Expect us to consume more water in the meantime. There’s just no easy way to replicate those parts, especially when we’ve got so much to handle to begin with. Then assembling it has to be done very carefully to avoid another explosion,” she said.

  “Right. I’ll shift a few hands over from Chief Quade’s technological research team for this.”

  “That would help. And I do want to say that it was brave of you to go out there after Vincent yourself. I’m sorry you couldn’t save him.”

  The sympathetic look from Aylward was the best opening he was going to get to find out about those messages.

  “I’ll have to arrange a funeral service with Reid,” he said, hoping to hide his intent by bringing up as many chiefs as possible. “Have you heard anything from Iotache?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. He would be responsible for relaying information about a deceased officer back to Unified Command,” she said.

  Loris waited in case she’d go on, unsure if she was hiding something about the messages on her tablet or if they were innocent work-related conversation. Either way, it disturbed him that Iotache seemed to be in better touch with the senior officers than he was. Loris wondered if Stayed would’ve simply snatched the tablet from the desk and read the messages right in front of Aylward. He seemed like that kind of guy.

  But Loris wasn’t. He thanked the chief engineer and returned to his office to stew about the loss of his crew member and the tenuous control he had on his position. Before long he shifted to his console and began doing research on Iotache, trying to find the motive Stayed hinted at that drove his thirst for power.

  The man’s biography wasn’t hard to find. He’d built a career as a glad-handing yes man, always on the coattails of Unified’s cloistered elite. Information and connections were his currency. The closest he’d come to being in a fight were front-row tickets to hockey games, so it didn’t quite add up why he’d been so eager to be stationed on the Magellan in the first place. Records for what he’d done while on the station were sparse. He had an interest in space exploration, at least enough to make visits to the research facilities, and he occasionally performed on the violin.

  Late the next day, Loris felt like he needed to do something to shake his discomfort, so he headed to the cold room for a private moment with Price. The room was named for the temperature of the bodies, not the air, which continued to heat up to the point that their uniforms felt like woolen sweaters in the summer. The medical wing was mostly vacant, making it even more unlikely that anyone would be in the cold room, but right before walking in he heard voices inside.

  “This could be the first of many.”

  Loris walked in to find about a dozen men huddled together around Price’s naked body on a steel slab. They looked at him awkwardly, many of them with mouths open. Among them was Iotache, whose voice Loris must’ve heard before.

  “I believe the funeral has been scheduled for two days from now,” Loris said, but what he really wanted to do was demand to know what they were doing there.

  “This group came aboard with Vincent over a year ago and wanted to pay their respects together,” Iotache said.

  “He gave his life for us and this station, fighting until the very end,” Loris said.

  The group began to break up and head past Loris for the exit. Neither his brief eulogy nor his attempt to save Price were enough to garner any sympathy from these men. Iotache had managed to turn them all against him. When the old white-haired man offered a curt smile and tried to slip out among the others, Loris put a hand on his chest to hold him back.

  “A few
words alone with you, if I may,” Loris said.

  Iotache glanced back at the body on the slab.

  “Where I come from, we believe the dead can still hear. Why don’t we schedule a meeting at your office?”

  “I don’t think Price will mind. I’ve been thinking about how, without Unified Command to deal with, you must have a lot of free time on your hands. A change of position and some new responsibilities might be in order. You might enjoy working with the scientific research team alongside Chief Lala, and I know they’d take you,” he said, suggesting the most benign department he could think of.

  “That’s an intriguing proposition,” Iotache said, tilting his head thoughtfully. “We should confer with them about that and make sure I could be of some use. I confess my ability to conduct scientific research is pitifully weak. I’d hate to be a burden or get in the way.”

  Iotache’s equivocating inflamed Loris, who sensed he was getting the runaround. He wanted to threaten this man with charges of insubordination in the wake of clear evidence that he was propagating a conspiracy, but everything he’d learned about being a leader in the Unified fleet had taught him to treat even adversaries with dignity and respect.

  “It’s important that we find a way to use your time and energy more effectively than they are now,” Loris said, staring him down.

  “Exactly. I have no doubt we’ll find a good place for me sooner or later,” he said.

  The veiled comment felt like a slap in the face to Loris, who read in Iotache’s eyes that the place he referred to was the commandership.

  “Be careful it’s not in the brig with Stayed. I hear he’d make for a terrible roommate,” Loris said, crossing a line he thought he’d never cross by threatening another officer. It had little effect on Iotache. He raised an eyebrow and smirked. Loris immediately regretted moving the conversation into this uncomfortably frank territory.

  “Have you been listening to the ravings of that paranoid madman? When a killer snaps, most people don’t then buy into his crazed theories.”