She was certain, though, that both were churning in her belly and making her feel elated one moment and ill with apprehension the next.
Captain Clarkson had refused to even discuss the possibility of diverting to allow them to collect data and samples from the original colony planet until they were little more than six months out. But he’d apparently been turning it over in his mind and considering possibilities because he’d finally stood his ground and listened while Dr. Hobbs ticked off the reasons why it was of utmost importance to gather whatever data they could.
Because Earth would be looking down the barrel of a similar sized asteroid by now and they needed to have some idea of when or if it would be possible to return to Earth.
No one wanted to believe that time wouldn’t come.
Apparently in that respect Captain Clarkson was in complete agreement.
They had a drive, now, that would make it physically possible to make a round trip in under five years.
They just wanted to know what the odds were that there would be a living Earth to go back to.
The captain fixed Dr. Hobbs with a long, very hard look for a full minute after he fell silent and then lifted his head to encompass the rest of the group.
“I’m going to consider that you have all thought this through and accepted that the mission you’re suggesting could be one way? That whoever is chosen would have to accept the very real possibility of not making it back?”
Monica didn’t know about the rest of them, but she had not considered that possibility at all!
Well, maybe it had flickered through her mind that there would be some danger, but she was accustomed to working in a lab—where there was a very minimal possibility of death in the pursuit of science.
And, in any case, she wasn’t planning on going.
She thought if it had occurred to her that her position at the bottom of the totem pole meant she was more expendable and that she wouldn’t have a choice about going or not she might have smothered Dr. Hobbs in his sleep.
But so it had transpired!
Because the ship was not a democracy! While on board, everyone was under the captain’s command.
Dr. Hobbs had made a list of volunteers—which did not include Monica!—and then Captain Clarkson had gone over the colony roster and chosen four people he considered the least important to the success of their colony. That list included the youngest, least experienced, scientists and the oldest, soonest to ‘leave’ permanently or just reach an age where they weren’t able to contribute.
He added a pilot and one soldier/guard—for emergency defense.
Dr. Hobbs was outdone.
It was hard to say if that was mostly because he was one of the two elders chosen as most expendable or if it was because Captain Clarkson had completely ignored his recommendations.
They spent the next two months wrangling over the list while the ship the captain had chosen was prepped for the trip and then it came down to the wire and Hobbs had to decide whether to put his money where his mouth was—or not. They were out of time if there was any hope at all of collecting data and samples and catching up with the mother ship again before it performed the next space fold.
Of course, even the shuttle was equipped with the warp drive, and it was actually faster than the mother ship, but it hadn’t been designed to carry much in the way of supplies to start with and they couldn’t afford to risk losing supplies if anything should happen and the shuttle didn’t make it back.
Even with folds, they still had a full year to reach the new colony target.
The group heading toward colony A would have roughly one week, Earth time, to learn what they could, collect samples, and set up a monitoring system, and then they would have to take off and rendezvous with the mother ship before it made the next jump.
Monica was all in favor of just giving up on the whole mission.
She gathered her courage and approached the captain and suggested that it might be better not to jeopardize the colony mission by risking a shuttle, supplies, and scientists when there was no real reason they couldn’t come back to the Extinction Event and study it a year or two down the road.
He patted her shoulder and told her he was sure nothing was going to go wrong. It was just that it was his duty to consider that something might and minimize the risks to everyone else.
Well, everyone.
Monica wasn’t especially reassured by the afterthought.
Honestly, she thought she would have chosen to spend the remainder of the voyage in the brig, but she wasn’t given that choice either.
She was herded to the shuttle by Drs. Hobbs and McNeal and buckled in beside the other blubbering intern that had been chosen before she could command her mind away from her sphincter.
A strict upbringing in regards to embarrassing public behavior kept her in her seat with her tongue between her teeth, but she didn’t really ‘adjust’ to her new reality. The terror level rose and fell, but hysteria was never far out of reach and she fought a constant battle with it all the way to the planet.
It reached fever pitch the moment they entered the atmosphere and the shuttle began to buck and shake as if it would fall apart. With every buffet, metallic rattle, sudden free fall and updraft, Monica dug her nails deeper and deeper into the arms of her seat until the fabric abruptly separated and she could feel the stuffing embedding beneath her nails. The wailing intern beside her finally passed out, leaving her in peace to fall apart herself.
For some reason completely unknown to her, though, she continued the fight to hold herself together. She succeeded in her efforts to prevent herself from displaying her terror mostly because she wasn’t able to vocalize it.
Even when something big enough to punch through the shields slammed into the ship and it began to descend very, very rapidly she didn’t scream. She just slipped away into darkness.
* * * *
If he had not glanced up precisely when he did, Dar was certain he would not have seen the strange thing that fell from the sky, the thing that was clearly not a living thing, not debris from the volcano—not of their world.
But he did glance up.
Because he was trying to dodge lava bombs and reach safety before the volcano exploded in earnest and sent out a deadly tide of super heated air and gas and debris.
It was merely a coincidence, though, that the ship seemed to be traveling in roughly the same direction he was when he saw it take a hit from one of the rock missiles flying out of the volcano that had just appeared near the north end of what was once the capitol city of the realm of Niah. He did not make a conscious decision to try to locate its final resting place on the surface of their world. He was going that way anyway—as fast as he could.
Kaelen was several yards ahead of him and gaining ground.
He resisted the temptation to call out.
He was either going to make it—or not.
There was no sense in risking Kaelen’s life when there was nothing Kaelen could do but slow down and die with him if it was his day to die.
He was glad to discover it was not his day to die—horribly. The bombardment stopped before he could outrun the volcano’s shot range. A deep throated explosion followed, rumbling beneath his feet and shaking him hard enough to throw him to the ground.
Kaelen sprawled out, as well, but leapt to his feet almost before he stopped falling. He glanced back as he regained his feet, spotted Dar, and rushed back to jerk him to his feet.
It was a sure sign of the fear driving his friend that he had the strength to jerk Dar up, for Dar outweighed Kaelen by a good two stone—even after all the time that had passed since the Great Dying, with food becoming more and more scarce.
“We lost our fucking stash,” Dar growled a little breathlessly as they resumed their jog/run. “You should have grabbed the food instead of helping me.”
Kaelen snorted. “We can find more food.”
Dar flicked him a skeptical glance, but he did not comment
. It took his full focus to keep from landing wrong on the debris filled ground and possibly reopening his almost healed wound—a legacy of his last fight with a determined scavenger.
“I saw something when I was searching the sky for lava bombs,” he said when they finally slowed down to catch their breath.
Kaelen glanced at him questioningly when he seemed hesitant to continue. “What?”
“A flying thing in the sky that I believe was not an animal, but rather a thing that had been made by men.”
Kaelen’s eyes widened for a moment. Briefly, excitement lit his eyes, but it died very quickly. “You were hallucinating,” he said almost angrily.
Dar frowned. “Yeah. I think so, too, but it is worth checking out.”
“Waste of time,” Kaelen said tightly.
“Well, we have to find or improvise another shelter and we have to find supplies to replace what we just lost. I do not see what difference it makes which direction we take so long as it is further from the volcano.”
Kaelen shrugged. “I do not suppose it does. As long as you do not get your hopes up. We have not seen anything in the sky but carrion feeders since the Great Dying—and not even many of them.”
* * * *
Unfortunately, Monica’s consciousness returned before all the crashing was done. The impact with the ground nearly rattled her eyeballs out of her head and her teeth from her jaws. She managed to bite her lip and her tongue. She waited tensely when the shaking and bouncing and the sound of screaming metal finally stopped, more than half expecting the ship to explode.
All that happened was the ship’s onboard computer cut loose with a verbal damage report that sounded really ominous to Monica.
“Are we going to blow up?” Monica asked shakily.
“Oh God!” the intern, Sam Donaldson, screeched.
“Shut the fuck up,” the pilot, Mark Nunn bellowed, “or I’m going to come back there and beat you unconscious! I’m trying to focus here!”
“We’ve got company,” their security detail muttered ominously, “and they don’t look friendly.” He was the only one that had left his seat and had begun to prowl restlessly from one porthole to the next, staring outside with a hard, assessing gaze.
At that announcement, both Drs. McNeal and Hobbs scrambled out of their seats and dashed to the portholes to look out. “This is unbelievable! Intelligent, you think? What am I thinking? They must be because I can clearly see they’re carrying weapons! Primitives?”
“They couldn’t have survived the devastation here. They must be from some other place.”
Sam, who’d been whimpering quietly, went silent so suddenly it was if someone had gripped him by the throat to silence him.
Monica glanced at him and discovered he’d clamped both hands over his mouth and nose. Above his fingers, his eyes bulged as if they might pop out of his head.
“Shields up!” their security guard bellowed abruptly.
“They’re working?” Monica asked shakily despite the order to shut up.
“For now,” their pilot muttered.
“Oh God!” Sam exclaimed against his hands.
“Shut up!” Mark snarled.
“He’s just scared,” Monica muttered in a low voice, defiant but not quite daring to challenge him, reaching over to pat Sam’s shaking shoulder comfortingly. She regretted the impulse almost the moment she gave in to it.
He jumped all over when she touched him, letting out a terrified squeak.
“I’m going to come back there and brain you if the captain doesn’t,” McNeal growled.
Well, Monica thought philosophically, everyone handled emotional stress differently. She supposed men tended to get aggressive when they felt threatened.
Not that her father was prone to such blatant displays of aggression.
Of course that might be because he was so preoccupied with whatever project he was working on that he probably wouldn’t notice a threat until it got him and, in all honesty, he could be pretty scary if he was interrupted at a critical moment.
She was still very young when she’d learned that distracting him at the wrong time wasn’t a good idea.
The thought was followed by a pang of loss.
It was a comfort to know her father and mother and brother were headed to a new colony, as well, but that didn’t prevent a sense of loss when she hadn’t seen them since her own colony ship had left Earth. And she knew the chances of establishing regular traffic—communications and trade—between the colonies, although it was planned, wasn’t very likely.
The distances were staggering—even with the life/time-saving warp drive—and that meant the cost would be mind blowing, as well.
Of course, at the moment things weren’t looking very bright for her having much future, but she simply couldn’t accept that they weren’t going to make it back.
She hadn’t traveled so far just to die before ever making it to the new world!
They hadn’t crashed … exactly. They’d landed hard. Surely that meant that whatever was wrong with the ship could be repaired if the captain had managed to land it in one piece?
“Mayday! Mayday! This is shuttle one of the mother ship Exodus One! Shuttle one was damaged in landing. We are surrounded by possible hostiles. We are using auxiliary to power the shields.”
Monica’s belly cramped.
Sam started weeping. “I’m only 22! I don’t want to die!”
Indignation overshadowed Monica’s sympathy. As if she was ready to go herself! She wasn’t that much older than the prick! It wasn’t as if she’d gotten the chance to pursue fulfillment in her career or having a family! She’d hardly dated! She’d been too busy with school and then too busy interning and then too busy fleeing Earth to have any kind of relationship beyond very brief affairs. Her last relationship had looked really promising, but then he’d been sent off on another colony ship ….
“Well! I’m 70,” Dr. Hobbs snapped, “and I don’t want to die either!”
Sam sniffled. “I just meant ….”
“Quiet!”
Monica heard a transmission, but she missed the response from the mother ship.
Apparently the captain did, too. “Say again? Repeat message!”
“We’ll need a full visual assessment of the situation before a decision can be made, Nunn.”
“Yes, Sir! I understand that that is necessary, but we may be surrounded by hostiles. And, if they are hostile, I’m not convinced we have the fire power to hold them off if we drop the shields to do a visual inspection.”
There was a prolonged silence. “See if you can wait them out. According to the report we got the damage isn’t extensive enough to prevent take off, but the hull breach concerns me.”
“It concerns me, too, Sir.”
“Well … hold for now. Wait 24 and see if the natives lose interest. We’re going to have to abort mission if that breach is too much for the ship to heal its skin. And I’m think the hull integrity has been too compromised for a safe return.”
“What did he mean by that?” McNeal demanded when the captain had signed off.
Nunn studied him a long moment and then did a slow sweep of the others in the cabin. “We may not be able to make it back to the mother ship under our own steam. If the hull is weakened and we can’t fix it, we can’t afford to try a jump which means we can’t afford to let the mother ship get too far ahead of us or we won’t be able to catch them.”
* * * *
Kaelen felt his belly go weightless when he and Dar finally drew close enough for a good look at the object Dar had spotted falling from the sky. For an endless time, they both crouched silently, studying the object—every minute detail. Then, as one, they rose and moved to a new position to examine it and then another until they had studied it from every angle they could.
“I am almost one hundred percent convinced that this is not something of our world,” Dar announced finally.
Kaelen frowned. “Not a secret weapon?”
It was Dar’s turn to frown, thoughtfully. “Secret or not, there would be a code of identification and I saw nothing beyond those strange symbols that look like nothing I have seen before.”
Kaelen mulled that over for a while. “Aliens, then?”
Dar shrugged. “It would have to belong to aliens, I believe. Whether it is occupied is another matter.”
“The question is—if it is aliens what is their purpose in being here?”
“We may be on the verge of finding out,” Dar muttered quietly. “It looks like it is opening.”
Chapter Three
Drs. Hobbs and McNeal had spent most of the time while they were waiting rehashing McNeal’s argument for studying the planet in the first place with the pilot. Nunn had listened in impatient silence most of the time, waiting until they paused for breath to point out that the situation had changed drastically and they were in a survive or die position.
All the more reason, Hobbs pointed out, to gather what they could while they could.
For her part, Monica thought she’d just as soon cower in the shuttle until they left. She knew that was what Sam wanted to do.
Unfortunately, they’d been drafted—not volunteered—so they had no say in any of the decisions.
Not that they would have anyway.
They finally agreed, sort of, that the doctors could step out to collect some samples and plant probes to forward data to the new colony as collected while Nunn inspected the hull with the security guard.
That left Monica to stand guard over the scientists since Sam was so terrified of the weapon they were afraid he’d shoot them by mistake.
Thankfully, the security guard was out of the hatch first. He halted at the foot of the gangplank and studied the perimeter carefully. When he saw no movement, he motioned for Nunn to follow. Nunn descended the gangplank with his own gun drawn, looked around and stepped off.
Monica, struggling to look confident and competent, held her rifle at the ready as she’d been trained and moved down the ramp woodenly, wishing she could just close her eyes and be back inside the safety of the shuttle.
She hadn’t cared for firearms training when it had been in a controlled, learning environment. Being expected to use it if necessary was so scary it was all she could do to keep from passing out. She had to keep reminding herself to breathe but not to hyperventilate.
Exodus: Extinction Event Page 2
