by J. N. Chaney
I didn’t argue with him. I was beyond exhausted. I fell asleep against a tree using my pack as a pillow. A million stars overhead acted as my own personal nightlight.
I don’t remember much, except that it felt like I had just closed my eyes when I woke to Stacy shaking me.
“Hmmm? What? What’s wrong?” I asked, jolting awake. I wiped at a line of drool coming down the corner of my mouth.
“Nothing,” Stacy said, pointing to the sky. “Sun—suns are coming up. Time to get to the Orion.”
“Right,” I said, stretching. Ricky and Doctor Allbright were still sound asleep across from me. All through the camp, people were talking to one another. They rose from their places of rest and prepared for the trek.
I stood, feeling every muscle in my body complain to me that they were sore and needed more sleep. I ignored them. Instead, I made my way to Ricky’s side. Mutt rose from his place beside me and followed.
I grabbed Ricky by the shoulders and shook him. “Rick. Hey, Rick, it’s time to get up.”
“But everyone will laugh at me if I wear that to the dance,” Ricky muttered in his sleep.
“Ricky,” I said with a grimace. “Snap out of it, man. You’re oversharing right now. I don’t want to hear any of this.”
I shook him harder.
Ricky finally opened his eyes, staring at me and then the sky, as if he had no idea where he was.
A look of realization hit him a moment later.
“Oh crap,” Ricky said, glancing around him and finally sitting up. He yawned and stretched. “All of this was real.”
With the appearance of the twin suns over the horizon, the half steel circle of the Orion was visible in the distance. We could cross the area in a day’s time if we pushed ourselves.
Time to get moving.
27
We traveled all day through grassy fields and rolling hills. There was still no wildlife or insects along the way. Just the calm swaying of the breeze in the nearly beautiful landscape of the planet.
If it weren’t for the many escape pods we found on our way, it might have been nice to take a walk. The looming shell of the damaged Orion was another thing that made the walk even more ominous.
More survivors joined our number from escape pods and landing crafts. Some pods we came upon were already abandoned with no sign of the occupants. It was chilling to think these survivors were already gone.
Everything in my mind told me they were just doing what we were. They had seen the Orion and were making their way to the larger ship.
I walked towards the head of the party with Stacy and Boss Creed. The former had her blaster tucked into her pants. The latter had been given a laser rifle usually carried by a suit. I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to take it away from him. Besides, I didn’t trust anyone, and everything I knew of Boss Creed said I could do just that.
“People are already asking questions about what happened to the ship,” Stacy said in a low tone. “They’re going to ask more and more questions and rightly so.”
“We’ll wait for Arun and Elon to make that call,” I said. “I don’t do politics. They decided to keep the truth about the Disciple from everyone in the first place. Let them decide what to do now.”
“If they’re still alive,” Stacy said, nodding towards the Orion. “The ship’s almost half of what it should be. Multiple pieces of it broke apart in the crash.”
I looked up to the sky, where dark smoke still reached to the heavens from the downed Orion. There was no point speculating as to who was alive and who wasn’t until we got there.
We traveled all morning, breaking only briefly for a noon snack of protein bars and water before heading forward again. We reached what was left of the Orion a few hours into the afternoon.
The damage I saw through a mechanic’s eyes was horrendous. The lower half of the craft had torn itself apart upon descent. Only the top upper half of the moon-shaped ship remained.
Whoever was at the controls had done one hell of a job turning the angle of the ship as it descended. They must have used whatever power the ship had left at the right moment. The Orion had come to a skidding halt on the planet as opposed to striking the ground like a meteor. Somehow, they had managed to turn the craft, so it slid on the ground and finally came to a hard stop against a large peak.
The landing divot made in the dirt was so long, the starting point appeared lost. The groove it made in the ground had to be ten meters deep. Opened like a cracked egg, exposed wires popped and sizzled, creating fires that continued to burn, while torn steel exposed sharp edges.
There was a large group of survivors who shouted, turning to meet us. I didn’t see either the Eternals or Iris amongst the group.
Stacy recognized a suit, who jogged up to her with a report.
“Miss Wilson, it’s so good to see you,” he said, motioning to the crowd around us. “And so many of you that made it.”
“It’s good to see you as well, Ira,” Stacy said, embracing the man quickly. “Have you searched the craft for survivors yet?”
“We just started going level by level.” Ira hesitated, looking to me and Boss Creed.
“It’s okay, you can talk freely in front of them,” Stacy told him. “We’re all in this together.”
“It doesn’t look good in there.” Ira swallowed hard. “A lot—there’s a lot of people who didn’t make it.”
We all stood quietly for a moment. It was strange to stand so still, thinking of something so horrific. In the background, we could hear shouts of joy. Multiple survivors from our group had found loved ones gathered at the base of the Orion.
For as many of the shouts of joy we heard, we also caught the concerned screams of others, shouting the names of friends and family, looking and not finding them.
“We can help,” Stacy said, breaking us all away from our thoughts. “We’ll divide into search parties.”
Stacy turned to all those gathered, using her hands to amplify her voice. She placed her palms in a circular shape around her lips. She began to shout, “Everyone, if I could have…”
It was obvious as she began that her voice would not carry to all the survivors gathered.
I put my right thumb and pointer finger into my mouth and released a shrill whistle.
“Hey, everyone listen up if you want to live!” I shouted.
That did it. Everyone turned and gave us their full attention.
My words might have been a bit dramatic, but they sure had done the job.
“Thanks,” Stacy said with a grin. She turned back to addressing everyone in front of us. “We need to search the Orion for survivors and any supplies. We’ll take the ship level by level.”
Stacy went on with directions and things to be careful of, as they made their way around metal corners and exposed wires. While she doled out instructions, I took the time to study what had been the greatest achievement of mankind to date.
It had taken thousands of workers years to build the craft. In minutes, it had been reduced to a pile of scrap steel.
“Ira and Mr. Creed will let you know what portions of the ship to search.” Stacy finished her instructions. “Be careful while you’re in there. We don’t know how stable or unstable the Orion is. Each team should carry a holo pad. The communication distance on each pad isn’t far, but we should be able to hear one another now since we’re so close.”
Murmurs of agreement followed her warning as Boss Creed and Ira divided up search parties.
“We’re going to start at the bridge,” Stacy said as she joined me, looking up at the titanic structure. “Elon was piloting the ship when it went down. Arun would have gone to him. We need to make sure they’re still alive and get Iris up and running while we’re at it.”
“Agreed,” I said as Ricky joined us.
“Let’s get going,” Ricky said, stretching his arms and legs. “I don’t want to spend another night out in the open. It gives me weird dreams.”
“Yeah, I bet,�
� I said as we made our way toward the ship.
Mutt whined next to me as we walked forward.
“You got to stay here, buddy,” I told him reaching down to scratch the underside of his jaw. “It’s dangerous and unstable in there. Stay. Do you understand ‘stay’?”
Mutt gave me a look like I was kidding. He rolled his eyes at me, sat down, and whined.
“Okay, stay there. I’ll be back,” I said. “I can’t believe this. I’m reassuring a dog.”
“You’ve changed for the better since I’ve known you,” Stacy said with raised eyebrows. “I mean that.”
“Just don’t let the word get around.” I grinned back.
Ricky was ahead of us, already examining the best way to enter the craft and how to get to the bridge.
“The stairwell will be the easiest way to the top, or maybe the elevator, depending on how damaged it is,” Ricky said, coming up to the smoking ruin that had once been our home. “Either way, we’ll have to walk. It won’t be an easy trip to the top. I’m guessing there’ll be something like a hundred and fifty levels we’ll have to climb.”
“What in this trip has been easy at all?” Stacy asked with a huff. “Come on; let’s get to it.”
The three of us pulled our way to the stairwell on the edge of the Orion. The going was tricky. There were debris and loose items everywhere. I was almost fried at one point, reaching for the next handhold when a live wire singed my hand.
We climbed the perimeter of the Orion, more than four stories up, before we found the stairwell. Like Ricky guessed, it was clogged with debris ranging from food, clothing, and of course, bodies.
The smell was already setting in, making me look away and spit. Death was never an easy thing to stomach, and I had already seen my fill of it.
“We should take the elevator shaft,” Stacy said, working her way further into the ship. “Depending on where the elevator stopped, we may have to travel through it, but hatches are on both the bottom and the top, so we should be all right.”
We clicked on our flashlights. The emergency lighting in the Orion flickered off and on in a bizarre pattern. It was like it was trying to give us a coded message of some kind.
We continued forward mostly in quiet as we made the long trip to the bridge at the top of the ship.
Lucky for us, the elevator was in the lower half when it had been torn apart. This meant we wouldn’t have to navigate around the cylinder-shaped container.
Sweat poured off my face as the steel tunnel warmed in the light of the day’s suns.
It wasn’t too much of a surprise that Ricky was the one to break the comfortable silence halfway through our journey.
“Do you think the escape crafts have enough in them to reach space and go back to Earth for help?” Ricky asked. “That must be the plan, right? We have to go back. Or do you think they’ll send help?”
“I think they’ll try,” Stacy said as if she were talking to herself. “Sooner or later, they’ll realize something went wrong. The only problem is where do they search? We don’t even know where we are. How are they going to know? We have to get Iris up and running again. Once we figure out where in the universe we are, we’ll be able to make a plan.”
“Right, right,” Ricky agreed, chewing on his lower lip. “We’ll figure it out.”
His words were courageous, but I knew the guy well enough to know he was scared.
We made the rest of the way to the bridge as the tunnel sloped ever so slightly upward. Stacy pulled out her red holo card and tapped a few buttons, bringing a diagram of the Orion up for all of us to see.
“I think we need to go three more levels up, and we should be there,” she said, wiping sweat from her eyes.
So far, we had traveled the elevator shaft with the doors to every level opening on our left. We followed Stacy’s instructions, heading up three more floors before coming to a set of closed doors that led to the bridge.
“Here,” Stacy said, reaching into her pack and pulling out a short steel crowbar. She jammed one end of the rod into the door.
Ricky and I pressed our fingertips into the wedge in the elevator door, ready to pull the two pieces of metal apart.
“On three,” I said. “One, two, three!”
Stacy muscled the crowbar as Ricky and I tore at the steel elevator doors. Slowly, they opened, allowing us to get a better grip on the doors in front of us.
I anchored my feet into the ground and braced my back. My arms quivered as I threw everything I had into pulling at the door.
Stacy abandoned the crowbar now that the doors were opening. She wedged herself in between the doors, putting her back on one side and pushing with her hands on the other. The door gave more until it finally opened all the way and locked into place.
We looked into the bridge, completely unprepared for what we saw next.
28
“Stacy, Dean!” Arun said, limping to the doorway. “You’re alive.”
“And Ricky too,” Ricky said, probably feeling left out.
I was going to respond, but between the state of the bridge and Arun herself, I held my tongue.
The bridge was a disaster. Emergency lights flickered on and off, exposed wires hung from panels and the ceiling, and pieces of furniture had been thrown to the front of the level where a glass wall lay cracked.
Arun herself was a bloody mess. Crimson stains fell down her uniform and face. Her hair was in disarray, and her left arm was in a makeshift sling.
Arun came up to us and hugged Stacy.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Stacy told her friend. “Where’s Elon?”
“He’s over here. I should warn you, he suffered serious injuries in the crash, but he’s going to be fine. He’ll heal,” Arun said, looking over to Ricky and me with a smile. “So good to see you as well, Dean. And you too, Ricky.”
Ricky didn’t waste his opportunity. He opened his arms, hugging Arun.
“Don’t worry, you’re safe now, you’re safe now,” Ricky said, holding her tight.
“Yes. We’re going to be okay,” Arun said, confused at first, then giving in and hugging Ricky back.
“Shhh…” Ricky told her. “Don’t strain yourself.”
I rolled my eyes, working my way deeper into the room. From where we stood, the floor sloped down. The light blue glow of the emergency lighting allowed me to see well enough, but I still had a hard time of it.
I made my way through the loose furniture and gathered debris resting on the bottom of the level to a steel panel that had come loose from the ceiling. It had been laid flat, and a figure was lying on it.
I moved deeper, realizing it was Elon. He was on his back with a piece of clothing folded to support his head and a blanket over his body. He looked up at me with an uncomfortable smile.
“Dean Slade,” he said. “I knew you’d be among the survivors. It’s so good to see you, my friend.”
His bright blue eyes showed the pain his voice would not. Much like his sister, his hair was a mess, and he had spattered blood across his grey uniform. He pushed himself up on his elbows, not moving his legs.
I’d seen enough injuries in my time to tell when there was something seriously wrong. Elon wasn’t moving the lower half of his body. The smile he put on was laced with pain.
“You stayed on to land the ship, you crazy son of a gun,” I told him, shaking my head. “I never thought I’d see the day where an Eternal risked his own life to land a colony ship of Transients. You’re crazy. You know that, right?”
“Ah, but am I crazy if I realize I’m crazy?” Elon started to laugh. “I’ve heard the truly insane don’t recognize their own madness.”
I cracked a grin, and he laughed harder. A moment later, he stopped, wincing from the act.
“What’s wrong with your legs?” I asked, pulling off the blanket that covered them.
“No, you don’t want to—” Arun said as she came up behind me with Ricky and Stacy.
Elon’s right leg was com
pletely gone from the knee down. His left leg was a mangled mess of blood and flesh.
I swallowed back the bile that rose to my mouth.
“It will heal and grow back in time,” Elon said, trying to reassure all of us, even though he was the one with the missing appendage. “My DNA will make the necessary repairs, and it will regrow.”
“All of it?” Ricky asked in awe. “I mean, I knew Eternals healed quickly and could grow back limbs, but—the entire leg will come back?”
“Yes, there are some that this may bother amongst our Transient counterparts,” Arun said, clearing her throat. “What I’m trying to say—”
“You don’t want us to tell anyone because growing back limbs is bananas, and you think people will say you’re inhuman,” I said. “Your secret is safe with me.”
“Thank you,” Elon said, lowering himself back down on the steel sheet. “It’s one thing to know that Eternals are capable of regrowing limbs, but it’s another thing to actually witness it.”
“We can keep it covered until you’re healed,” Stacy added in. “We’ll get a wheelchair in here and cover your legs with a blanket until then. Not to move on from this topic, but is Iris still up and running?”
“She is,” Arun said, reaching for a holo card inside her breast pocket. “I powered her down to conserve energy, but she’s functional.”
Arun produced the red holo card in her palm, tapping a few buttons, and Iris appeared in front of us. The ethereal blue light that surrounded her was a welcome sight.
She looked at all of us in turn. “I’m so glad you’re all alive. I was concerned.”
“It’s good to see you too,” Arun told the Cognitive. “Iris, can you do a full diagnostic of the ship and tell us everything we need to know?”
“It seems that the ship broke apart on the descent. Only levels one hundred and fifty and above are remaining. All other levels are scattered across the planet,” Iris said as if she were reading a report. “I’m detecting multiple life forms in the Orion.”
“Can you detect how many?” Stacy asked.
