Kerys ducked back into the break room before Will looked in her direction.
Shit! What’s he doing there? She balled her hands into fists, feeling stupid. Duh. He works on her team. Dammit! She couldn’t discuss the flower with her right in front of him. I’ll find her later. Defeated, she trudged across the lab and returned to the dome. The view of the landscape outside from the hamster tube made her entertain the idea of going out to the site alone in defiance of Saturday, but by the time she’d made it halfway to the locker room, she remembered Lars talking about the ‘buddy system.’
After dropping the head on Marco’s foot, she didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking rules. Especially with the contraband flower in her room. Anything Will could use to allege a pattern of bad conduct would bite her in the ass.
Fuming, she stormed down the hall to the fitness center. Hideous red-orange floor covered a room shaped like one-quarter of a pie, filled with various exercise stations, some lockers, and two private shower rooms. Swirling dust blanketed the world outside the giant, curved window along the outer wall, exacerbating the sense of being ‘trapped in a box.’
Unexpected sponginess underfoot made her look down at a strip of rubbery black. A two-lane wide jogging track ran around the perimeter. Two women and three men using treadmills, free weights, and a stationary bike gave her cursory glances as she walked in, going back to what they’d been doing without any odd behavior. They paid her little mind as she took a water bottle from a cooling cabinet and headed over to a padded bench by a rack of small dumbbells and a pull-up bar.
After stretching out for a while, Kerys jumped up to grab the bar. Three years of cryo had an effect, and she managed only five before she couldn’t pull herself up again. She took a seat on the bench and used a six-pound hex dumbbell to keep her arms moving. Three sets of fifteen with each arm later, she drank a few mouthfuls of water and headed for one of the treadmills, hoping a light jog would keep her mind from wandering into dark territory. She’d loved running while in school, almost enough to try out for the track team, but that whole organized sports locker room thing had embarrassed her away from the idea.
Granted, back home, jogging also included fresh air and sunlight.
She closed her eyes and settled into a rhythmic stride. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the streets around her mother’s house. Imaginary sunlight warmed her face, and the thump thump thump of her shoes on the treadmill blended with her heartbeat. Neighbors walked by, waving. That coppery-colored dog that always ran after her for two blocks zipped out from between parked cars and gave chase once again. White-glowing e-cars cruised by, so silent she never heard them coming and jumped every time one passed.
Thump, thump, thump. She picked up speed, throwing her consciousness into the dream, away from this place, away from Will. Her run took her past a small enclosure where tweens played baseball. The glowing orb never left the boundary of the park, steering itself to the ground whenever someone hit it too hard. Kerys cornered left, ducking a low-hanging branch in front of the little coffee shop she’d gone to every day from junior year of high school until she’d left Earth.
When she ran past it, Mrs. Finlay, the owner, gave her a bewildered look. At least she imagined the aging hippy would’ve given her such a look if she went by without going in. The flavor of their coffee, and the woman’s handmade chocolate biscotti came to mind. Kerys got homesick out of nowhere, a feeling that worsened when she took the final left turn back onto her street and saw her ten-year-old brother waiting on the porch for her.
As soon as Jaden waved, she opened her eyes, returning to Wayfarer Outpost. Kerys slapped the console to stop the treadmill and hopped off, lightly winded and pleasantly sore from head to toe. After a series of cool-down stretches, she finished off the water and glanced at the shower stall. She hadn’t planned on working out, and doing so in her jumpsuit left her feeling sticky.
Kerys grabbed another bottle and took a seat near the giant window to watch the dust storm. She swished water around, sipping it slow to avoid brain freeze, letting her heart rate fade back to normal. Looking at the clock―barely past eleven―annoyed her even more. Ugh. This is such a waste of time to be sitting around doing nothing. Kerys flicked her nail at the water bottle, debating how much trouble she’d get in for going outside alone.
Shouting echoed out of a ventilation duct nearby in the ceiling, too distant and distorted to make out specific words aside from a random curse every so often. The others in the fitness center looked up with confusion and unease on their faces. The yelling faded in a few seconds, and the other people resumed exercising.
Screw this. I need to get out of here.
She sucked down the last of the water and stood. Before she could take a step, a tall dark-skinned man with a flattop afro stormed in, heading for a weight bench. His random grumbling gave way to a long, malicious stare as soon as he locked eyes with Kerys. He slowed his stride, giving her a look that made her want to run out of the room as fast as possible.
The man pulled his glare away only after reaching the weight bench. He slammed metal discs into place on a bar, banging the equipment around and startling everyone else in the room to silence. Kerys crept back to the stand of hex dumbbells and grasped one of the small six-pounders. No one seemed to notice, so she kept it tight to her chest and hurried out. The way everyone had been giving her the evil eye all morning, she felt better having solid metal in her hand.
She clung to the weight like the handle of Excalibur while creeping from hallway to hallway on her way to the lockers by the garage airlock. Almost everyone she passed, regardless of the color of their jumpsuit, shot her nasty looks as if she’d somehow offended them. A woman in a yellow hydroponics uniform kept getting in other people’s faces, as if itching to start a fistfight.
The one man who didn’t give her a dirty stare appeared ready to collapse. He couldn’t have been forty yet, but walked in the hunched posture of an elderly man. She approached, but he waved her off with a weary smile.
“Headin’ to my quarters. Stay the heck back unless you want Flu-zilla too.”
She avoided him and hurried down the remaining length of hallway to the ready room. Perhaps a flu or cold had been going around and the people who’d been here for a few years blamed the newcomers for introducing it. That would certainly explain the annoyed glares, but not the outright malice in some. Head down, she dodged eye contact and rounded the corner into the ready room.
Don hummed merrily to himself while suiting up across the room from her locker.
“Don?” Kerys opened her locker and set the chrome-plated weight on the top shelf next to her helmet.
“Oh, hello, Kerys.” He smiled back at her.
“You’re suiting up?”
“Too much to do, no interest in any of the movies they have.” He shrugged. “Guess I’m a workaholic.”
“What about that ‘buddy system’?” She sat on the bench and traded her low-top sneakers for boots.
“You’re here. I suppose that renders the issue moot.” He chuckled.
“Yeah. I suppose it does.” After tossing her ‘inside shoes’ in the locker, she put on her military-style boots, stepped into her e-suit, and eased the metal neck ring over her head.
Don walked up behind her and helped secure the fasteners. After giving each one an exploratory tug to confirm it had closed, he turned to let her return the favor. Neither spoke as they put on their helmets, checked seals, and headed out via the airlock. It struck her odd seeing only two names in the comm list, but with all the strangeness going on inside, the quiet calm would be welcome.
“May as well take one quad. I don’t think those things like me.” Don gestured at one of the four-wheelers. “If you don’t mind.”
“It’s fine.” She climbed on, waited for him to mount behind her, and hit the power button.
Driving in the dust storm with only about thirty feet of visibility tested her nerves, but the downward slope and artificial l
ights in the fog ahead helped guide her to the ridge. She stopped a few paces from the door and shut the quad down.
“You’re getting better at driving these things.” Don patted her shoulder and climbed off. “Almost didn’t seem like you were frightened.”
Kerys laughed. “Thanks… I needed that. I never did like driving in bad weather, though California rain has nothing on this place.”
Don led the way into the alien site, but paused to open one of the large cases in the first chamber. Kerys headed straight back to the obelisk she’d been working on when they’d made her call it a night on Friday. Lars had positioned a two-story tall portable scaffold by it, which made reaching the upper end a simple matter of climbing a ladder to a raised platform. She wasted no time resuming the 3D imaging where she left off.
“Has Paula had any luck figuring out what any of these characters mean?”
“If she has, I haven’t heard about it,” said Don, “but she does seem to be quite occupied with the effort. Hasn’t answered any of my emails today.”
Kerys turned at a loud clatter by the entrance. It didn’t bode well that Paula ignored Don, and Marco went from being all smiles and ‘don’t worry about it’ to angry with her for dropping the head on his foot.
Don hummed and whistled like an old farmer tending his field. He left the chamber for a few minutes, returning with a pole mounted device in one hand and a case of electronics in the other, which he set up by the door they hadn’t yet opened. “Figured I’d give this thing a whirl while I scrape the slabs for DNA.”
“What is it?” Kerys resumed scanning, staring at the handheld’s screen, showing the obelisk’s surface rendering in 3D. The hardest part of the work entailed keeping it steady enough not to ruin the composite image.
“A deep penetration imager. Ultrasound resonance. It should be able to give us an idea of what’s on the other side of that door. Basically a larger version of what you were using the other day.”
“Oh. It’s so weird being on a team that has a real budget.”
He chuckled.
She kept working for a while, tuning out the muttering and clattering of Don setting up the imager. Eventually, he left it to run and resumed examining the ‘benches’ with a handheld unit. They worked through lunch without stopping, Kerys losing herself in the joy of discovery and the anticipation of what their work could mean for them, for science, and maybe even for humanity as a whole.
After finishing her scan of the northeast obelisk, she climbed down from the scaffold, sat on the steps, and frustrated herself trying to type with two thumbs on the little device in an effort to email herself the files. Once they went back inside, she planned to spend the rest of the day piecing the scan data together into a rendered model. That would allow Paula to study the entire obelisk at once in VR from the comfort of a desk.
“Argh!” She leaned back and growled at the fifth ‘invalid address’ error.
“Kerys?” asked Don.
“I can’t type in these gloves…” She laughed, let out a playful growl, and corrected the typo. “There!”
The ultrasonic unit by the door chirped.
Don ambled over to it. She stood, clipped the 3D scanner to her belt, and tried to drag the scaffold across the room to the northwest obelisk, but it refused to budge.
Damn. Gonna need Lars or Ellen to move it for me. Crap. She glanced to the northwest, then to the southeast where Paula had been doing the scan. Wonder how far she got?
“Oh, look at this.” Don beckoned her closer with a wave.
“Hmm?” She hurried to his side, huddling close to peer at a display screen inside the armored case on the floor next to the pole.
The system showed a 3D wireframe of the space beyond the door. Eight structures lined the left and right walls. Details remained blurry, though the overall shape suggested pads or tanks with an adjacent pedestal.
“Hmm. Those look like stations.” Kerys stooped lower to the screen. “Do you think this could’ve been some kind of hospital?”
“I suppose it’s possible. To our way of thinking, the setup does bear similarities to a bunch of auto-surgeons for massive beings. Then again, we don’t know what these creatures really looked like.” He laughed. “Maybe those are office cubes.”
Kerys smirked. “I thought they were supposed to be more advanced than us.”
“You’ve a wonderful sense of humor. I’m glad you decided to take the position.” Don fiddled with a slider bar on the touchscreen, zooming the image in and out a few times before rotating it. “I’m afraid taking guesses based on this information isn’t going to get us anywhere. We’ll still need to get that door out of our way.”
“Yeah.” She stared at the image drawn in yellow-on-grey lines. “Not sure we can manage that ourselves.”
“I don’t know. That excavator isn’t too heavy. They’ve even got a portable power cell.” He stood and faced the door.”
Kerys straightened. “Have you noticed people acting odd today?”
“Hmm? Oh. Can’t say I have.” He stepped over the case and approached the door, jabbing his finger at the pictograms. “Damn this miserable hunk of rock. How did you get those buttons to light up? These aren’t working.”
“Don, those aren’t buttons. They’re just carvings.”
“Well, then they’re useless.” He picked up the excavator laser. “Stand back, Kerys. This door needs to come down.”
“Whoa, Doctor Bouchard.” She ran over and grasped his arm. “Why don’t we wait for the rest of the team to be here? Leave the cutting to the pros.”
He whirled toward her with a penetrating stare that threatened to melt the thin layer of fog on his visor.
“Don? You don’t like cutting up dig sites. The laser might go straight through the door and destroy something irreplaceable.”
“Oh…” The extreme focus in his eyes evaporated; after a few seconds of bewildered blinking, he looked down at the excavator. “You’re right. Hmm. I suppose some of your youthful enthusiasm has rubbed off on me.”
I have to be dreaming. Is everyone nuts? She patted him on the back. “Right. I’ll, uhh, get started on the base of the other obelisk. Are you going to finish checking the benches for DNA?”
“I need to do that.” He put the laser down and scratched at his helmet. “How did I forget I hadn’t finished it? We’re not even ready to go into the next chamber. There’s still so much work left to do in here.”
She stood like a statue watching him retrieve the handheld and return to the wide stone slabs lining the sides of the room. Something’s not right. Don resumed humming, and seemed like his usual self after a few minutes.
Kerys stepped over wires on her way to the northwest obelisk. She glanced at Don, half-expecting to see him going for the laser again, but he remained content to hunt for scraps of biomatter on the stone. After opening a blank file, she took a knee and started the scan.
“This is going to be a long weekend.”
11
Off Limits
Buzzing dragged Kerys out of a heavy sleep. She groaned, rolled onto her back, and huffed to blow hair off her face. Overcome with fatigue, Kerys rested her arm across her forehead and tried to silence the alarm with sheer force of will. It took a few minutes to summon the energy to move, despite Monday morning beckoning her to work. The irritating buzz-chirp hammered her brain, causing the beginnings of a nasty headache to pulse in time with the electronic audio assault. Kerys sighed, and her nose filled with the scent of peaches and lavender.
“Dammit, Will. Now I know you broke into my room.”
Kerys flung the blanket to the side, further irritated by having to wear a shirt to bed. She’d skipped the sweat pants, relying instead on her underwear for modesty in case of ‘Creepy Will’. The air hit her like a blast of ice, startling a gasp out of her and setting her teeth chattering. In seconds, her throbbing sinuses unleashed a waterfall of snot from her nostrils.
“Ugh… shit.” She swung her legs ove
r the edge, took a breath, and stood.
Sure enough, the lamiaceae advena had been uncovered once more. She stormed over to the desk for a tissue. After blowing her nose, she, mashed the alarm to silence it, then placed the clear box over the flower before sweeping the case up in both hands. For a few seconds of manifest rage, smashing it into the wastebasket felt tempting, but she hesitated.
Someone will find that in the trash and start asking questions.
She set it back on the desk and covered it with a shirt again. Will had been in her room, and she knew beyond any doubt she’d locked the door last night. She’d spent all of Sunday in her quarters except for off-hour trips to the cafeteria to grab meals. Thinking of him in here with her while she slept got her blood boiling.
I should be freaking out, scared out of my mind. She scowled. Is that what he wants?
Kerys paced around for a few steps, sniffling to test how stuffy her head had become. This is a ‘call out sick if I have something fun to do at home’ kind of cold. Sniff. Not that bad. She peeled off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, and changed into clean underwear and a fresh jumpsuit. The scent of lavender and peach saturated the fabric.
“Son of a bitch.” She held her arms out, staring down at her outfit, but couldn’t find any trace of violet spores. “What is he doing? Oh, the hell with it. People will think I’m wearing perfume or something.”
Too angry to think straight, Kerys stormed out of her room and headed to the cafeteria. The ground floor of the residence pod smelled like soap and steam, likely from the twenty or so people trying to cram themselves into eight stalls to shower in the morning. She disregarded an argument echoing out from the bathrooms that reminded her of an eighth-grade locker-room fight.
Midway along the hamster tube connecting the residence pod to the dome, a man in a green jumpsuit leaned against the wall, bowed forward and coughing. When she passed him, he snapped his head up, glaring at her with bloodshot eyes. Wild light brown hair sprayed in all directions. Sweat dripped from his nose, and every breath came wheezy and dry.
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