ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2)

by Isaac Hooke

  I sat back and waited until Queequeg was done killing it. Then I watched as he ate.

  That was one of our rules: whoever made the kill, ate first.

  When Queequeg was satiated, he sat down beside me and contentedly rested his head on his forepaws.

  I got to work on preparing the meat. One of the nice things about having grown up on a farm on Earth was that I was familiar with the farmer’s trade, down to the butchery and cleaning of animals. Although it was a cider farm, my parents had believed in natural living. So in addition to the apple trees, we grew crops and raised livestock.

  First I jabbed a syringe into the skin to drain the green blood. A tube led away to the collection device built into my rucksack. I remember when I used to call the sacks “spacebags” thanks to the indoctrination of Basic Training—that seemed three lifetimes ago. Anyway, my suit recycled most of the water I excreted from my pores, bladder, and whatnot, but it wasn’t enough, and the blood would augment my supply. Not that I drank it raw—the collection device extracted the water from the blood plasma. The first time, I wasn’t sure the extraction process would work, because these were bioengineered animals after all. But apparently hybear blood plasma was fairly similar to normal mammals, coming in at roughly ninety-two percent water. I wasn’t sure where the animals got their own water from, however. Other than from eating each other.

  Ideally, I would have preferred to hang the hybear first, for proper skinning, but obviously I didn’t have a winch or tractor handy, which meant I had to keep rolling the carcass as I peeled the skin away with my utility knife. Bits of shale stuck to the exposed muscle and fat; I removed the small rocks by wiping one of my gloved hands down the surface. It would’ve been nice to have some water to wash away the excess hair and rocks with, but the liquid would have merely boiled away, like most of the remaining blood did.

  I’m not going to go into too much detail on the cleaning, like how I removed the anus and intestines and other internal organs after skinning it, or how I cut off the head, cracked open the sternum, and carved away choice portions of meat with my knife (wishing the whole time I had a meat cleaver). I’ll just wrap by saying I collected a nice bundle of meat and secured it to the storage compartment of my rucksack. That meat would keep me and Queequeg fed for the next few days.

  The cleaning done, I covered the offal and skeleton in shale, forming a cairn of sorts. That might keep other hybears away for a couple of hours, but eventually the scent would drift to them, and the hybears would close like sharks.

  Once the cairn was built I hiked to the next rise, putting some distance between me and the offal in case any nearby hybears picked up the scent early. Then I sat down and retrieved a cut of meat.

  Queequeg was whining beside me, already hungry again.

  I sliced away a small portion and tossed it to him.

  Queequeg caught the meat in midair with his jaws, and swallowed it in two bites. Then he looked at me, panting, those puppy dog eyes begging for more.

  I cut off another piece and tossed it to him. “No more. I have to eat, too, you know.”

  And so I did.

  First I cooked the meat with the surgical laser built into the index finger of my gloves. I had to keep pulsing the laser, and since my Implant was disabled, I couldn’t vary the depth of those pulses. I held my laser finger different distances from the meat to vary the cooking depth. Heat radiation helped roast the surrounding meat, but I still had to rotate the cut to ensure I cooked it thoroughly. It took a lot of time, which only seemed all the longer because of my hunger. I kept an eye on my power levels, because if I wasn’t careful the laser could exhaust the suit batteries.

  Eventually hunger and impatience got the best of me, and I decided the meat was cooked enough, though it couldn’t have been more than extra-rare. I reached into the cargo pocket of my left leg, retrieved the suitrep (suit repair) kit, and fetched the reusable “SealWrap” funnel from inside.

  The SealWrap was meant to form a seal between suits when a soldier needed to perform an impromptu operation on another soldier in a hostile environment—very useful for tactical combat casualty care, otherwise known as battlefield medicine, when the war zone just so happened to be on an inhospitable world, or in space. I’d found an alternate use for it though: with the SealWrap I could transfer food from the lethal environment outside to the pressurized confines of my suit.

  It was a little messy, but it worked.

  With the hunk of laser-cooked meat situated in the center of the funnel, I placed the edges of the SealWrap against the outer perimeter of my face mask. I strictly ignored the rumbling of my stomach: I had to take good care here, because if I got the positioning off, I’d die. I activated the sealant, and felt the suction pull my hand toward the mask.

  I tied off the other end around my wrist, then I held my breath, and said: “Suit, release face mask.”

  The glass plate descended inward slightly, breaking the seal between the glass and the helmet. The SealWrap abruptly inflated as the atmosphere of my suit expanded to fill the available space.

  I could still breathe.

  I hadn’t made a mistake.

  I sighed in relief.

  I could already smell the roasted meat, and I salivated.

  “Suit, lower face mask.” The glass plate slid down.

  I tilted my head back and let the hunk of meat fall toward my mouth. As expected, it wasn’t cooked well at all. It was very rare actually, cold and bloody. But I bit into it, chewed, and swallowed. I had to. Tasted like raw, wet beef.

  I remembered the first time I ever did this. I’d run out of rations, and was starving. I’d returned to the shuttle with a big piece of meat from a fresh kill (this was when the shuttle still had power). I cooked it thoroughly, draining as much blood as I could. The smell was amazing—I’d been living on meal-replacement rations for months before then. Still, I was hesitant to take a bite. I was convinced the meat was going to be toxic in some way. I had to remind myself these animals were bioengineered from Earth stock, so when it came down to it I was eating meat that was theoretically compatible with my stomach. Exotic meat, sure, but edible nonetheless. Eventually my stomach had overruled me, and I’d dug into the cooked hybear. Tasted great. Unfortunately, a few hours later I suffered intense abdominal pains. It got so bad I thought I was going to give birth to an alien lifeform or something. The cramps lasted for days, as did the diarrhea, but eventually I got over it.

  And I never got sick on hybear again.

  Still, the meat was tough, even when barely cooked, and eating it made the gums of my back molars sore. My molars had always given me trouble with the tougher meats, and now I regretted not getting those teeth removed on Earth. The pain was getting worse lately. My gums didn’t have a chance to recover, not when my entire diet consisted of meat. The whole area was probably infected at this point.

  That day while eating, the pain got so bad I gave up halfway through. There was still a sizable portion of meat remaining, but I left it half-chewed in the funnel and broke down and wept.

  There I was, bawling like a child, one hand SealWrapped to my face, a half-eaten piece of meat pressed against my chin. I rued my lot in life. Rued the day I ever came to this forsaken planet, and the day I ever signed up.

  “I just want to go home!” I said aloud, sobbing. “I just want to live again!”

  Queequeg lifted his head beside me, and pricked his ears in concern.

  I continued to blubber away.

  Queequeg lowed softly in commiseration.

  I lowered my free hand to his head, and petted him.

  The movement soothed me, though I could scarcely feel anything through the fabric of my glove.

  “I’m sorry, Queequeg,” I said, composing myself. “Sometimes, the situation seems so bad, so hopeless, like there’s no way out. And it just feels like the weight of the whole world is
pushing down on me. It makes me want to give up. But that’s the easy path, isn’t it? To lie down, vent out my suit, and let it all end.

  “But I can’t give up. I won’t. I’m just not capable. My friend Rade told me something, once. That the human spirit is resilient in the face of adversity. And I’ll let you in on a secret, Queequeg: I’m one of the most resilient people there is.”

  I shifted my head toward a small tube on the inside of my helmet, and took a long sip of water.

  I could do this. I could live.

  But I was done eating for that day.

  I shut my helmet and removed the SealWrap, packing it away with a promise to clean it later. I tossed the leftover meat to Queequeg, and then I continued onward toward the Forma pipe.

  I’d had it with self-pity. I wanted to get on with my journey. I couldn’t let myself look too far into the future, too far past the now. Couldn’t let the despair of my situation overcome me. I had to focus on reaching the next Forma pipe. One attainable goal at a time.

  The landscape before me was bleak, barren, slightly blanched by the too-bright sun. Geronium-275, the precursor to the radioactive fuel that powered starships, filled the view from horizon to horizon, looking for all the world like black shale. Or perhaps black dunes made of flattened fingers of rock was a better description. My boots were covered in utility tape, because those sharp rocks were a perforation hazard, and had already worn away the outer fabric.

  My suit protected me from about fifty percent of the radiation the Geronium-275 emitted. Before I’d abandoned my shuttle for good, I’d installed the last two subdermal anti-rads beneath my skin, which were timed to drip-feed the necessary radiation poisoning treatments into my blood.

  I only had about one week of treatments left. I wasn’t looking forward to suffering from rad sickness. I supposed, on the bright side, the radiation wasn’t as bad as some places farther north, where the SKs had detonated powerful nuclear warheads in their attempts to clean out the beasts. Still, only one week of treatments left . . . I reminded myself not to look too far past the present moment.

  That night I slept under the stars, with Queequeg on watch beside me. He didn’t actually remain awake, but the animal had ears so sensitive he may as well have. He’d shoot upright if a pin dropped ten meters away, and the warning laugh he’d unleash would rouse me from the deepest sleep. Not that I slept very deeply. Not anymore.

  I woke up late that night, drenched in sweat. I’d had the nightmare again. Rade and I were fully suited, on a spacewalk outside the hull of the Royal Fortune. A red-orange gas giant floated above us. Somehow, I lost my footing, and the line that tethered us broke. Rade caught me before I floated off. His gloved hands wrapped around mine, and he promised he wouldn’t let go. Still, I was slipping away. Rade became frantic. I wasn’t sure what frightened me more: the fact I was about to die, or that Rade was going to be forced to watch. Finally I fell, plunging toward the gas giant, which had become a black hole . . .

  Queequeg lay beside me, watching me. Even the slight change in my breathing as my body shifted from sleeping to waking was enough to rouse him, even though the sound was muffled by my helmet.

  I gazed at the stars. At first they had seemed so foreign to me, these stars eight thousand lightyears from anything I’d ever known. But I’d seen them so many times by then that they had become my new normal. I’d even invented constellations for them. There was the Robed Witch, holding the Apple. Retina, the eye, looking down on me. And there, the Claw—whenever I traveled by night, its bright red tip guided me.

  While I had grown accustomed to these new stars, I truly missed the old ones, the constellations of Earth I had grown up with as a child in the warm summers of France. Aquarius, Hercules, Lyra. Sagittarius.

  I missed the bright yellow moon.

  The murmur of the ocean waves.

  The salty, warm kiss of—

  I closed my eyes.

  Those days were gone. Best to forget them. I had fought with regret and melancholy many times before for this day, and nearly lost. I had sworn never to do so again. Such emotions only interfered with my survival.

  Still, I was so alone . . .

  No. That wasn’t true.

  “I have you, Queequeg, don’t I?”

  Queequeg lifted his head inquisitively.

  I scratched him above the nose, and closed my eyes. “I have you.”

  The next morning Queequeg and I made good progress toward the Forma pipe. In about four hours, the structure grew from a slim finger flipping me the bird on the horizon, to a vast concrete chimney stabbing the heavens, its long shadow devouring the landscape and making the dark ground darker. The pipe extended even farther underground than it did skyward, its telescoping limbs expanding like an organic root system, its acids breaking down the mineral impurities in the crust to extract oxygen for later release into the air.

  This pipe, and the forty-nine others that circled the equator of this planet, comprised merely the first phase of the terraforming process. There were other Forma pipes designed for the sole purpose of scrubbing the atmosphere and filtering out toxins, but those would be installed in the later phases.

  I had to laugh. There wouldn’t be any later phases. Not anymore. The SKs and UC had completely abandoned this planet, and destroyed all Gates leading to and from the system. Heck, I’d destroyed one of the Gates myself. There was no way back, not even if I could somehow get into orbit. Not even if I could somehow reach the Slipstream. Because without a Gate, I was trapped.

  I knew this would happen when I’d volunteered to stay behind. And I chose this. To save the ship. And the crew.

  To save Rade.

  I shut my eyes.

  Get out of your head, Shaw. You’ll find only despair there.

  As predicted, at this point I had about eight hours of oxygen left, including the contents of my bailout canister. I would’ve preferred to have more, but this definitely wasn’t the worst low-oxygen scenario I’d found myself in.

  I walked into the shadow of the Forma pipe, making my way toward the base of the structure.

  The Forma pipe was constructed entirely out of concrete poured into a rebar frame. If you imagined an arch-gravity dam on Earth like the Hoover Dam, you wouldn’t be far off from what I was seeing in terms of composition and scale. Except take that dam, turn its half-circle arch into a full cylinder, and send it towering into the sky, and you had a Forma pipe.

  At the base, a corroded metal staircase led to a door roughly three meters above the black ground. There was no door handle or key code box—entry was entirely via embedded ID. Of course, I was never on the list of recognized IDs. That didn’t stop me from climbing the stairwell and attempting the door anyway.

  It didn’t open. The way the steel panels smoothly irised shut gave me no purchase to pry it apart. The surgical lasers in my gloves might have been able to poke needle-sized holes after ten minutes or so, but my suit would run out of power long before cutting away anything useful.

  There was another way inside though.

  A ladder scaled the outer surface of the concrete chimney, all the way to the top. I ran my gaze upward, watching the perspective lines of the ladder recede into the sky. I couldn’t see it from here, but a ventilation shaft/maintenance tunnel near the top offered a way inside. Why they would build the maintenance shaft so high was beyond me. Even if I had a working jetpack (which I didn’t), I’d only be able to reach maybe a tenth of the way to the top before I ran out of fuel. I suspected the ladder was more a leftover artifact of the construction than anything else, kept in place as an unessential afterthought, because of course the main door would never malfunction, right? And if it did, the crew could just send a maintenance robot up the ladder.

  Fortunately, once I was inside, it was easy enough to program the door to accept my ID. I had the SACKER installed in the internal database of my
embedded ID, which was the Swiss army knife of privilege escalation kits. I’d taken a cyberwarfare elective back at my rating school, which gave me the clearance and training to use the kit. The SACKER was loaded with hundreds of known software exploits that allowed me to obtain administrator access on a variety of platforms, assuming any potential backdoors on a given system hadn’t been patched. Thankfully the door sensor unit inside the Forma pipes utilized outdated software—all I had to do was interface with the sensor, run the privilege escalation kit, load the software’s admin interface, and add my embedded ID to the list of accepted entrants. Then I could come and go from the Forma pipe as I pleased.

  But first I had to get to that door sensor unit.

  I doffed my rucksack and retrieved a universal charging cord for my suit battery. I tied the cord around my utility belt, then set the rucksack down beside the door. I didn’t need the sack burdening me the whole climb, and I knew I could count on faithful Queequeg to guard it.

  I took my rifle-scythe and secured the strap over my shoulder. Then I started the climb.

  Queequeg was whining and hopping to and fro, trying to figure out how to join me. He always did that.

  “Hang tight, Queequeg. I’ll be back in no time.”

  I did my best to sound hopeful, for Queequeg’s benefit, but to be honest I had a bad feeling about this one.

  Scaling a ladder in a jumpsuit could be tricky, because the bulky gloves and boots caused the mind to misjudge the thickness and position of each rung. Sometimes I’d step or reach too high or low, and I’d momentarily miss a rung. It was easy enough to recover of course, but still somewhat terrifying when you were so high up. Also, I was squeezing each rung a bit too hard, and the tendons below my wrists were killing me. The wider grip forced on me by the thick gloves didn’t help matters. Nor did my fear of heights.

  The tendon pain eventually got so bad I had to pause. Swinging the crook of my elbow over one of the rungs, I shifted my body weight and rested. I didn’t dare look down, or even toward the horizon. I always got vertigo when I did that. I was an astrogator, used to the empty, heightless void of space. I honestly didn’t know how planetary pilots could constantly land and take off without getting sick. Sure, I’d passed my Planetary Shuttle Qualification in training, but only after heavily medicating myself. The instructor was a flirtatious petty officer who ignored the fact I seemed slightly inebriated because I gave him my vid conferencing number. My fear of heights was why I was partially glad my shuttle’s autopilot hadn’t awakened me for the crash-landing on this world—I wasn’t entirely sure I could’ve done a better job.