Wayfarer: AV494

by Matthew S. Cox

  He drew a harder pull, and winked. “If this won’t, something else will. Surprised I made it this long.”

  “You want to die?” She stared at him.

  “Nah. Just ain’t afraid of it. I figure the universe gives us each a set amount of time, and when it’s up, it’s up.”

  “Didn’t peg you for religious.”

  He blew vape rings again. After seven, he shrugged. “Didn’t grow up that way. Maybe I still ain’t, but when you have a hundred some odd shitheads throwing bullets at you at eighty rounds per minute, ya kinda start hoping there’s somethin’ waitin’ for ya after this whole mortal life thing.”

  “That statue head we found had dead alien bacteria in it. This file says they managed to rehydrate some of them and brought them back to life.”

  He shook his head with a hollow chuckle. “Alien apocalypse, just add water.”

  “I don’t know how it got out, or how bacteria hit everyone so fast… They worked on it in an isolation box. Maybe it’s just coincidental? Maybe we found something else too and didn’t see it.” Thinking back to the feeling she’d gotten in that chamber made her shiver. Or we tripped a curse. Aliens and ancient Egypt collided in her brain. Yeah right…

  She pored over file after file, most of which contained bio-pharma jargon she could barely follow, interspersed with numerous of pictures of plants, cells, spores, and fibers. An hour or so later, she ran out of files and decided to check the email system.

  A row of red exclamation points drew her attention to the subject line: “I want this careless idiot off my team immediately!”

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered while tapping the screen to open the message.

  Captain Chen,

  As you know, the sudden onset in most of the crew of inexplicable flu-like symptoms is getting worse. I have been trying to analyze some of the blood samples Doctor Sekhar sent over, and I made a most disturbing discovery. The patient’s blood contained live AM-3 organisms, which I had believed existed only in my lab. Upon reviewing the attached security feed, I discovered the reason.

  Will Braxton’s carelessness has endangered this entire station, and everyone on it. Not only did he mishandle a dangerous, unknown sample, he failed to notify anyone of his ineptitude. Now that I think about it, he made a request for me to bring a firmware update over to Mr. Mardling around this time. I’m sure his intention was to get me out of the lab so he could gain access to the secure cabinet. I believe he wanted to steal the team’s work and take sole credit for it, but his carelessness may have put us all at risk. Worse, he attempted to conceal the accident as though it never occurred. His callous disregard for the safety and welfare of everyone on this station is beyond incompetent. It is criminal.

  With all due respect, Captain, I will not tolerate behavior like this among my science team. I am formally requesting his termination, and I would like your security detail to have him detained until he can be sent back to Earth.

  -Annapurna Bhatia, PhD.

  Kerys squeaked. “Oh, you idiot… what did you do?”

  Sergeant Gensch stood and walked over.

  The video attached to the email contained a ceiling-eye view of a laboratory space full of cabinets and boxes. Will walked into the frame from the right, dressed in his usual green jumpsuit, reading an e-pad. He crossed the room at a casual gait, stopping by a storage cabinet labeled ‘Level 3 protection required.’

  “You’re an idiot!” rasped Kerys.

  Will glanced around, opened the door, and retrieved a clear capsule about the size of a beer can with metal ends that appeared to hold a small quantity of blue sand. He started to walk away, but his elbow bumped the cabinet door, knocking the sample from his hand.

  The tube shattered on contact with the ground, bursting in a puff of azure mist. Kerys slammed both fists on the desk in time with it breaking.

  “Dumb ass mother…” Sergeant Gensch grumbled the rest under his breath.

  Will grimaced. After another look around, he rushed to sweep up the glass bits, dumped them in a trashcan, and scurried out of the room as though nothing happened. The video ended a few seconds later.

  “You careless goddamned idiot!” yelled Kerys.

  In seconds, she became so angry that rage tears ran down her cheeks.

  All the times he’d been a shit to her paled in comparison to this.

  “Jackass! You’ve always been an arrogant, careless, inconsiderate, self-important bastard… but this?! How could you drop a Level 3 container and just pretend nothing happened?”

  Sergeant Gensch squeezed her shoulder. “Poor shithead was at ground zero. He got the full blast. Probably the first one gone.”

  “Dammit.” She looked around for something to smash, found nothing, and settled for pounding her fists into the desk a few more times. “I don’t know whether to feel messed up over his death or pissed off. If he’s dead, I can’t kick his ass.”

  Gensch chuckled.

  “I have to send a warning to corporate. We can’t let people walk in here blind.” She shivered with new terror. What if they see that and just leave us to rot?

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “What if they leave us here?” Eyes closed, she forced herself calm. “No… I have to. It might get back to Earth.”

  “Hey, maybe it died again. Them little bastards might not breathe our air.”

  Kerys opened the SFT client on Anna’s desk and started a new message. She attached Anna’s email to Captain Chen, and the file about the rehydration of alien microbes, then recorded a brief explanation of what she believed happened. “I’m sure it’s in the air. He just dropped the capsule and the stuff has spread over the entire facility. So far, it hasn’t affected me, or Sergeant Gensch. There may be other people who have some kind of resistance to it… or maybe wherever we were at the time it got out shielded us by some freak fortune in the design of the vents.

  “We’re going to try and stay alive until a ship arrives. I don’t want to be left here, but I had to warn you about possible contagion. It should be safe for us to stay in e-suits and go straight to cryo back to quarantine medical treatment on Earth. I’m no doctor. I don’t know if it’s infected us and hasn’t shown signs, or if we’re clear. I hope you give us the chance to find out.”

  Kerys pushed the ‘Send Message’ button.

  The little orb spun around and around as it always did whenever the system uploaded to the space fold transmitter. After a few minutes, it displayed: ‹Transmission error, retry?›

  She hit yes.

  Twenty seconds later, the same error popped up.

  “Dammit.” She looked up at Gensch as if he could make it work by the mere wanting of it. “Why isn’t it working?”

  “Hellerman thought the antenna array went down.”

  Kerys tapped her fingers on the transparent amber desk. “So, let’s check on it.”

  “It’s on the roof.” He pointed at the ceiling. “Outside.”

  “There’s e-suits… there’s gotta be technical manuals in the system somewhere, like you said.”

  Sergeant Gensch frowned at his vape wand, tilting it to study a tiny bit of fluid left in the reservoir. “What the hell. Not like we’re gonna break it more.”

  21

  Breathless

  Kerys tried not to think about Annapurna lying dead on the floor back in the dome while they conducted a brief search of rooms in Lab Pod 1. Finding nothing critical to take, Sergeant Gensch sealed the airlock where the hamster tube connected to the pod. The hissing out in the tunnel hadn’t worsened, but it got under her skin. She gazed past the white scuff on the window at the glimmery regolith, the blue-indigo sky, and the distant strip of giant ‘trees.’ Knowing only a half-inch-thick layer of polycarbonate resin stood between her and a toxic atmosphere got her hands clenched with anxiety.

  Fortunately, Wayfarer Outpost’s atmosphere processing system hadn’t been damaged. Where the e-suits had a small canister of cyanobacteria to re-oxygenate the air, the outpo
st had a huge living colony. The e-suit capsules ran out after a while, but the station had such a massive biomass filter, it could reproduce effectively to sustain itself. Assuming nothing else went wrong, they’d at least have breathable air for as long as it would take the next starship to pull into orbit.

  Gensch startled her out of her stupor by grasping her shoulder and urging her to walk. When they reached the end where the tunnel connected to the dome, he hit a button. Two halves of round door emerged from the sides, sealing off access to the labs.

  She stood a few seconds in silence, unable to hear the hissing.

  “Where should I look for those manuals?”

  “Probably engineering or the command area.” He shrugged.

  Kerys jogged down the hall toward the stairs. “We’ve seen NORAD is empty.”

  “Heh… now there’s a term I haven’t heard in a long damn time.”

  “What? It’s a huge room with like a hundred screens on the walls.”

  He followed her to the middle of the third floor. Kerys shivered by the time they reached the command and control center for the whole outpost. She brushed a few nuggets of broken safety glass from a red cushioned chair, and sat.

  “D-damn, it’s cold in here,” whispered Kerys.

  Sergeant Gensch looked around at the emptiness. So many rooms had wraparound windows, even if the glass hadn’t been shot out, they would’ve had a clear view across the entire floor, except what the giant wall of monitors blocked off. “Seems quiet here. Think you’ll be all right for a few minutes?”

  She swiped at the screen, hunting for a path to systems information. The idea of being alone, even for a few minutes, terrified her―but it had been hours since they saw anyone other than Anna. “Yeah. Don’t get lost.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” He winked, and jogged out.

  It took her a few minutes to find the technical documentation for the space-fold transmitter. After reading for a little while, the idea of marching into the excavation site and translating the alien pictograms felt like it would’ve been a more productive use of time. She gravitated to pictures of the hardware, a cluster of metal boxes with seven rods of varying length protruding from the top. Three held a ring-shaped structure above the ‘primary focuser,’ the thickest rod.

  “Any luck?” Gensch walked back in and set a cup of coffee on the desk beside her, steam wafting between his fingers.

  It smelled a touch on the stale side, but all things considered, she’d take having coffee at all as a feat. Kerys clutched the cup in both hands, ignoring the blood dried into the creases of her knuckles, sipping while staring past the blurry text on the screen. “I never did too well at math.”

  “Well…” Gensch lowered himself to sit with a grunt. “Hellerman thought he could get it back online, and he mostly handled the computers and network stuff. How hard could it be?”

  “Never ask that.” She sighed.

  Kerys studied the ‘user manual’ for what amounted to a nine million dollar radio, focusing on a diagram depicting how the major components connected. Gensch scratched at his gut and grumbled.

  “Well, that only took two days. Be right back. Got a matter of some importance I need to discuss with the plumbing.”

  “Thanks for sharing.” She leaned her head in her hand and kept reading. At least the techno-jargon kept her mind off having killed a man.

  Gensch headed out into the hall and went to the right.

  She held the coffee close to her chin, absorbing heat. She debated asking him to turn down the air conditioning, but with bodies piling up, the cold became a blessing. Minutes passed, the words and diagrams turning into a meaningless blur. She caught herself skimming, and backed up to re-read a whole section she’d glazed over.

  “… ck in range …” Gina’s voice came from the ceiling, wrapped in static. “… ter’s about had it. Don’t… don’t think I’m gonna reach …”

  “Gina?” asked Kerys. “Where are you? Can you hear me or do I have to push something?”

  “I’m.” Gina wheezed. “Filter’s done. I”―squelch ate a few seconds―“Runnin’ outta air.”

  “Come back inside!”

  The woman’s voice regained some strength. “No goddamn way… I’m not going in there. It’s in the goddamn air. I ain’t breathin’ that shit in!”

  “Gina, you have to come inside… You’re gonna suffocate out there. I think it’s gone already. I’m still here. Gensch is sane too.” Fuck it. “I’m coming. Hang on!”

  Kerys pulled the combat knife out of her pocket and sprinted out into the hall. Snowy glass bits sprayed away from her boots when she hit the swath of broken windows. She grabbed the wall, cornering into the stairs at a full run. There’s spare filter pods in the locker. I’ll bring her one. That’ll be faster than dragging her inside.

  She raced out of the stairwell on the first floor, heading right toward the atrium where the entrances to the cafeteria, garage area, and residence pods converged. Repetitive metal grinding came from somewhere up ahead. Kerys jumped over Marco’s body, zoomed past the cafeteria, and headed down the tube to the garage airlock. By the time she reached the ready room, the scraping sound had ceased.

  Come on Gina… you can make it.

  Her locker hung open, but aside from a bullet hole in the door, it hadn’t changed from how she’d left it. Her heart almost stopped at the sight of the finger-sized opening in the steel, but as soon as she got a good look at her undamaged suit, and a row of eight filter pods at the bottom, she relaxed.

  After tossing the knife onto the shelf by the helmet, she pulled the suit out and got into it as fast she could. She squirmed around, trying to reach behind her back to secure the clamps. The hip ones proved easier, but she got the shoulder fasteners closed part way by hand and finished them off by slamming her back against the next locker.

  Kerys grabbed her helmet and a filter canister before running for the airlock. She tucked the gel pod under one arm, packing her hair and seating the helmet on the run. Within a second of the ring around her neck sealing, a man came out of nowhere and tackled her. The cylinder bounced out of her grip, sliding across the floor

  She screamed in shock, but her cry of fear changed to a snarl of anger before her lungs emptied.

  The man grabbed her by the shoulders and bashed her helmet into the floor.

  “Don’t… worry ’bout me…” said Gina, a dim yellow light winking on by her name along the left side of the HUD.

  Kerys growled. She threw herself to the right in a twist. The man groaned as the e-suit’s backpack rolled over his chest. She flung her arms for torque, slipped out of his grip, and landed on her hands and knees beside him, searching around frantically for the gel pod. As soon as she spotted it on the other side of the room, she scrambled into a crawl. A shift of her gaze to the blank line logged her in to the comm system. “Hang on, Gina. I’m almost at the airlock.”

  The man howled into a cackle. He lunged, wrapping his arms around her giant metal boot, and dragged her backward away from the filter capsule.

  “Dammit! Get off me!” she shouted while stomping blindly to the rear.

  Thump.

  The meaty smack cut off his horrible whooping and left him curled on the floor cradling his head. Kerys hurried to the capsule, scooping it up as she got to her feet. She walked sideways toward the airlock, glaring at a Middle Eastern man in a grey bloodstained jumpsuit.

  He snapped his head up, growling, his jaw crushed in and oozing blood.

  “Go away! I don’t have time for your shit right now.” She ran into the airlock, crossed to the outer door, and slapped the screen to start the cycle.

  “Ngh!” The man wobbled to his feet and shambled after her.

  Kerys flattened herself against the outer door as flashing yellow lights came on around the inside hatch. The idiot charged between the closing doors, heedless of the warning. She brought her hands up, ready for him. “Oh, you’re a damn genius.”

  He leapt a
t her, grabbing for her helmet and chest, but she held him away, keeping her back against the wall so he couldn’t reach the clips… not that he had enough mental capacity left to understand how the suit worked.

  Manic eyes widened at a sudden loud hissing, though he kept trying to claw at her. A hand raked down her visor; his nails caught at the bottom and tore away from his fingertips inches in front of her eyes.

  Kerys roared in disgust and smashed her helmet into his face, knocking him into a backward stumble. She shifted her weight, preparing to kick him, but hesitated as he wobbled down to one knee, clutching at his throat. For the four seconds the airlock existed in vacuum, his gaze appeared to reclaim reason. He scratched at his chest, giving her a pleading look as if she had a gun to his head about to pull the trigger.

  She eyed the control panel; she had a few seconds to abort, but that would kill Gina… and this man had gone beyond any help she could give him.

  “I’m sorry.” She looked down, wracked with guilt. “You’re already dead.”

  The doors behind her opened with a blast of not-air that ruffled his jumpsuit and knocked him over. His eyes bulged as his body sucked in a huge instinctual breath. A second later, he lapsed into a convulsive fit, raking at his chest and screaming like a man burned alive. Blood oozed from his mouth and nose. Kerys looked away as he slumped over on his side, twitching.

  “Gina, where are you?”

  “Mmm…” A weak moan came over the comm.

  “Gina!” shouted Kerys.

  ‘SSG Gensch’ appeared in the comm list with a faint chime. “Dammit, girl, what’s going on? Leave you alone for a few minutes to take a dump and―”

  “Gina’s outside. She’s running out of air. I can’t find her!”

  “Son of a bitch,” muttered Gensch. “Hold on.”

  Kerys crossed the garage, descended the ramp, and took a few steps on the surface. The ground crunched like gravel, but had the gleam of black ice.

  A boop sound filled her helmet as a yellow arrow appeared at the top center of her vision.