Wayfarer: AV494

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Sorry….”

  Tires squeaked when rubber caught a dry patch of floor, making her lurch forward from the sudden slowdown. She steered for the passage south and twisted the handlebars to dodge a bench. Walls blurred by as she got up to forty-two MPH in the corridor.

  The quad skidded sideways when she tried to turn at the end. Both left tires slammed into the wall, launching her off the seat. She bounced away from a storage hatch and fell flat on her back. A noise part terror, part pain, and part anger escaped out her nose. Swinging her arms rolled her like a flipped turtle upon the heavy air-scrubber backpack.

  Lights came on at the north end of the corridor, along with the warning buzz of the airlock cycling.

  “Tell me you didn’t hear that,” said Roma.

  “I did,” said ‘GiantDICK.’ “Sounded like a big-ass door slamming.”

  “Someone’s alive in there, and they’re not running to us. You know what that means,” said Harper.

  “Yeah, means Dick forgot his deodorant. I can smell him through the fuckin’ e-suit.” The light winked on next to the name ‘Aaron,’ the deepest voice of the lot.

  “I don’t wear deodorant. It’s fulla chemicals and shit.”

  “Yeah, we know,” said Roma, coughing. “We know.”

  “It means whoever it is, is contaminated… not in their right mind.” Harper chuckled. “A sane person would think we’re here to rescue them.”

  Kerys grunted and got to all fours before climbing back onto the quad. Flashing yellow lights started a second before she drove into the tube that would take her to the cargo pod.

  “Split up,” said Harper. “Anything moves, kill it. You two got eight minutes for the residence pods while I’m grabbing the black boxes. Go.”

  She slowed to navigate the ninety-degree bend, but once she lined up with the storage pod, she wrenched the handgrip down and zipped over the last fifty meters in seconds, catching a little air when the tires hit the link ring.

  Despite its gyroscope, the quad rose up on two wheels as she slowed and tried to pull a hard left around a shelf. Kerys managed to keep from crashing, but almost went flying when it came down hard. At the sight of the collapsed tangle of metal and a forklift blocking the way, she cursed, but a ground-level stack of toilet paper on the left made an appealing target. She ducked and drove into it, sending cubes of plastic-wrapped paper flying. The shelf above her brushed her rebreather pack, but the hit didn’t seem too hard and the scrape hadn’t sounded loud enough to worry her.

  After skidding to a halt in the airlock, she hopped off the quad and mashed the button to activate the cycle. At this point, she had no choice but to hope they wouldn’t notice the flashing lights. The inner door slid closed. She stared out the window at the endless expanse of glittering black ground leading south.

  The hill! When she’d run from Corporal Guillen, she couldn’t see the outpost at all from the bottom of the hill. If she drove down there before heading north, they wouldn’t spot her! Energized with hope, she bounced on her toes until the red spot appeared in her visor, indicating a lack of breathable air outside.

  Kerys jabbed the button to open the outer door and leapt back on the quad. The instant the doors parted enough to let the vehicle slip past, she rolled forward. A forklift ramp worked fine for the quad, but her ass left the seat for a few seconds when the front wheels bit into the regolith.

  Rocks sprayed behind her when she twisted the accelerator down as far as it would move. The quad gained speed, bouncing and wobbling, but she clenched on with her thighs and hands, refusing to fear her ride more than the men coming to kill her.

  Crude remarks came over the comm, rating the looks of any dead female they found, especially from ‘GiantDICK.’ Harper kept quiet for the most part, which worried her more. She steered in a gradual left, racing past the southern tip of the Lab Pod 2 and heading straight for the hill down to the excavation site.

  Every few seconds, she looked back over her shoulder. As soon as she couldn’t see the lower two stories of the dome, she steered left again, north toward the forest. Too much could go wrong for her to fixate on any one way to get herself killed. She hadn’t been to the remote camp before and had no idea exactly how far away it was or how long it would take to get there. She started to worry about threats, but Gina spent a while out there, and she’d at least kept her sanity until she returned to the main facility. If anyone had gone crazy out there, she probably had already killed them.

  I just need to get to the shuttle.

  She almost let off the accelerator.

  What am I doing? Shuttle? I’m not a damn pilot… Fuck!

  Tears gathered in her eyes. To have a chance at survival waved in front of her and taken away felt as cruel as killing her friends. She looked left at the uphill slope, and debated her odds at sweet-talking the Avasar thugs into letting her live. They sounded like a real bunch of charmers. At that moment, a comment from Aaron about one of the dead being ‘still hot enough’ changed her mind.

  “Damn… What am―” She stared ahead like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming starship.

  Her mind jumped back to the flight down to the surface. The lazy pilot doing nothing. He said they fly themselves… It’s gotta be like the auto-surgeon. Shit. If I can teach myself to be a doctor in five minutes, I can fly a ship.

  “Clear,” said Aaron. “Nothin’ twitching in the residence pods. Moving to the hydro farm.”

  “Copy that.” Harper cleared his throat. “We’re halfway done with the labs. Meet up in the storage room in ten. Roma, check the reservoir.”

  “Uhh, boss?” asked ‘GiantDICK,’ “If we’re gonna just nuke this place, why do we have to search?”

  “Because, I don’t want anyone hitting the off switch on the bomb.”

  A safe distance from the outpost, Kerys steered up the hill.

  “It’s got an off switch?” asked Aaron.

  “Just sweep the damn place already.” Harper sighed. “Three years in a damn freezer, it’d be nice to get some target practice.”

  Aaron laughed. “Yeah.”

  Kerys bounced off the seat again as the quad crested the top of the hill to level ground. Up ahead, a pathway lined with silver posts tipped with weak lights pointed the way into the forest. Some effort had been made to smooth the dunes into a roadway there, which made pulling fifty-six MPH less nerve wracking.

  Her visor fogged from ragged, panicky breaths. The quad wobbled a little, but she had no trouble keeping it on the road. Gensch’s dog tags bit into her leg from the e-suit squeezing down on her thigh; she didn’t care. The discomfort reminded her of him, almost as if he had her back.

  Ahead, the swath of blue-violet-pink foliage rose higher and higher until she felt like an ant in the forest. Some of the trunks looked wide enough to be hollowed out into houses. Low-lying plants mostly resembled spongy mushrooms or glistening lichens, ranging from white to rose-red and shades of blue.

  All of it passed in a blur.

  The trail looped to the right before it snaked left to avoid another massive tree with a periwinkle-blue stalk. A campsite slid into view as she rounded the curve, four tiny structures that reminded her of the Copernicus mission surrounded a large flat space where another Avasar shuttle perched. The membranous walls of the one-room bubbles wavered in the breeze; one had bloody smears on it, but no sign of a body.

  Kerys drove straight into the camp and up the open belly-ramp of the shuttle. The quad skidded when she tried to stop, but she slowed enough to where her crash against the inner wall only bounced it.

  “Move your ass, girl!”

  She jumped off the quad, rushed to the most obvious control panel on the wall, and found a button to close the ramp. The interface resembled the airlock controls from the dome, except for the word ‘hold’ replacing ‘airlock.’ Cycling it proved a simple matter of poking two buttons. A rush of wind buffeted her, and the red atmosphere-warning dot vanished.

  A crimson glow at the cente
r of the wall she’d crashed into shifted to green. Four feet to the left of the quad, a door opened to reveal a spiral stairwell. She didn’t bother trying to take her suit off, and rushed up to the second level. The passage at the top led left and right, wrapping around the stairwell toward the rear of the ship. It also continued straight, past a small locker room to the cockpit.

  Kerys sprinted to the pilot’s seat and fell in. She prodded the middle screen, gave the flight stick an uneasy glance, and poked another screen. A whimper of surprise escaped her lips when everything switched on all at once.

  The middle monitor displayed a menu of routines as well as the word ‘Synching…’ with a spinning circle to the right.

  ‹Transponder signal acquired: AV-1841 Imperator. Local orbit. Flight designation: Unspecified›

  “It’s not a scheduled run… that ship had to be on the way already… they all knew what would happen here.” The idea that the six-month supply ship might not even exist since Avasar planned on everyone here being dead brought bile into the back of her throat. Will had almost left her stranded here for good.

  “Umm. Shit. Where’s the ‘go’ button?”

  She pressed her finger into the screen above the ‘transponder detected’ line and a bar of highlight appeared over it. An instant later, a sub window popped open. ‘Transponder confirmed, initiate flight routine?”

  “Yes!” she shouted, and drove her finger like a knife into the screen.

  Distant buzzing evolved to a subdued whine. Over the next ten seconds, it built into a roar that made the entire shuttle vibrate. Kerys slid back into the seat and pulled on the safety harness. A great cloud of dust blasted out from underneath, rolling forward. Seconds later, the ground fell away from the wide viewscreen in front of her.

  She grunted, clawing at the armrests as her stomach tried to go out through her rear end. Wisps of indigo, cyan, and bright blue shifted before her eyes. The feeling of rotation ceased, and a tremendous boom preceded acceleration pinning her to the seat with a thundering roar so loud she couldn’t hear herself screaming. She came close to soiling herself, freaking out at being at the controls of a shuttle she had no idea how to operate. The screens filled with moving diagrams of lines that looked like old video games, bar charts, and numbers.

  Right as she sensed imminent loss of consciousness, the G-forces crushing her abated. All the pretty color in the windscreen gave way to the infinite black void of space and the silence of the primary engines powering down.

  Kerys gathered her hands to her chest, shaking with fear, relief, and hope.

  A cheerful beep from the console made her glance at a monitor displaying: ‹signal lock, guidance routine engaged. Handshake accepted.›

  The nightmare of AV494 shrank away, vanishing beneath the lower edge of the view-screen.

  30

  A Home So Far

  Afraid to move, lest she throw something off, Kerys clutched the armrests and stared out at the stars. Soon, a flash of glint stood out against the black. She leaned forward, daring to hope she had a chance. A thin line of silver grew into the oblong shape of an interstellar ship. A somewhat-aerodynamic section at the front linked via a narrow spine and hundreds of smaller scaffold-like struts to the Translight drive, which accounted for three-quarters of the ship’s bulk.

  Small thrusters barked in short puffs and burps. The shuttle altered course, following a route that brought it around and ‘under’ the starship. She watched the silent ballet occurring between machines and computers in mute awe. An angled section at the underside of the starship’s nose opened, two clamshell doors extending to the sides like some massive snake preparing to engulf an egg. The shuttle rotated, sliding sideways as it passed the larger vessel. Seconds later, it turned to face the huge ship, sliding backward. A few puffs from the maneuvering thrusters pushed it sideways into the behemoth’s path and another short blast edged it down, lining up with a bay large enough to hold a single craft.

  She tried to bite on her knuckle, but the helmet got in the way.

  Without a sound but her breathing echoing in her ears, the shuttle glided into the hangar bay, solid steel walls sliding past the canopy on both sides. More thruster puffs slowed the little ship to a relative halt, the tip of the nose about fifteen meters from the inner wall. Mechanical whirring thrummed in the floor, ending a few seconds later with a heavy clunk.

  The bay doors closed, and the shuttle screen displayed the message: ‹flight routine end.›

  A flash of blue from a panel to her right startled her. The side-mounted screen displayed a command interface to the big ship, offering the option to re-pressurize the shuttle bay or open the exterior doors. She tapped the button for re-pressurize. A red ‘bay locked’ icon appeared at the bottom along with a heavy thud that rattled the whole craft.

  Flashing yellow lights came on out in the bay, becoming solid green after half a minute.

  Kerys sprung from the seat, raced down the spiral stairway, and opened the belly hatch. The layout of the ship matched the one that brought her here enough for her to find her way upstairs. She unclipped the pistol from the e-suit’s belt, gripped it, and advanced toward the flight deck, passing a room with a table, chairs, and a Hydra unit on the left; a door on the right led to a shower room.

  Her grip tightened on the pistol as she stepped into the narrow passage connecting the corridor to the flight deck, but her jaw hung open when she found it empty. The flight that brought her here had two medics, and she assumed at least a two-person pilot crew, but she had never seen anyone other than the medics and the man who’d flown the shuttle. Or at least the man who’d sat there while the shuttle flew itself.

  “If this was a secret flight, maybe they skipped the medics?”

  Kerys lowered herself into the central chair, feeling dwarfed by the movie-screen sized view before her of the planet’s surface. “Oh, please be as simple as the shuttle….”

  She spent a few minutes poking at the console hunting down command menus. Eventually, Kerys located a menu option that appeared to be a preprogrammed flight path. When she tapped the screen on that line, a diagram came up in a sub window on the main view-screen, showing a translight route plot between AV494 and Earth. Tears of joy came unbidden, gathering against her chin inside the helmet.

  She tapped a button marked ‘load.’ The route plot vanished, replaced with a message:

  Commit route plot for Translight (Yes / No):

  Origin: AV494

  Destination: Earth

  Estimated flight time: 02Y 09M 03W 2D 11H

  She pushed ‘yes.’

  The prompt box went black for a second before turning red.

  ‹Warning: transponder ID in shuttle bay differs from launch configuration. Confirm change?›

  She felt evil for only an instant, and hit ‘yes.’ “Screw ’em. They would’ve killed me.”

  A pleasant feminine voice filled the room. “Route plot loading. Calculating standard flight path to translight entry point. Estimated time before transition is fourteen hours and nine minutes. Translight initiation can be aborted at any time within the next thirteen hours.”

  “Umm. No, thanks. No aborting. Home.”

  Kerys sat there for about ten minutes, basking in the idea that going back to Earth might really happen.

  A brilliant white flicker came from a point on the planet’s surface, a second before a blinding flash sent an expanding ring rippling across the atmosphere. A globe of energy swelled up like a glowing tick stuck to the side of a cow. It lasted only a second before fading to a localized spot of dull glow. Forty seconds after the blast, if she hadn’t seen the explosion, the area of discoloration wouldn’t have struck her as notable among the swirls of color.

  Shit. Those thugs are probably in their shuttle coming back up here.

  The blue-black ball slid to the left as the starship broke orbit, shrinking into space at a speed that offered some relief. It seemed unlikely a shuttle had a chance of catching up, and even if it d
id, the bay had no room. Worry that they might be able to abort her trip via remote got her hunting over command menus until she found an option to lock in the flight path with a password.

  She entered “IgotmyA$$offthatrockSarge”

  ‹Password confirmed. Flight path secured.›

  Kerys reclined, smiling at the screen for a little while, watching the controls in case the kill squad did something she hadn’t thought of. An hour or so later, once she couldn’t differentiate AV494 anymore apart from all the stars and bright spots, she felt confident enough to leave the ship to fly itself.

  “Shit. I hope the cryo tubes are automatic too. This is going to be a long flight otherwise.”

  She meandered down the hall to the shower room, checking lockers and storage cabinets. A few contained men’s t-shirts and boxers.

  Any port in a storm, right?

  A storage compartment in the small infirmary held ten plastic body bags, each with an adhesive seal. She took one and headed down to the docking bay. Standing beneath the shuttle’s engines, as close to the seam in the hull as she dared get, Kerys finally broke the seal of her e-suit’s helmet and took it off.

  The stink of oil and burnt ozone swam into her senses.

  With methodical care, (and a bit of contortionism) she opened the clasps on her e-suit, got out, and packed it into the body bag.

  “You saved my ass, but you might be contaminated. Sorry.” She patted the helmet, feeling stupid for getting emotionally attached to her suit. I will never take another job that requires me to wear a damn e-suit. I’m never leaving Earth again.

  She kicked off her shoes, squealing at the coldness of the bare metal floor, and stripped stark naked. Every bit of clothing from shoes to socks to underwear went into the body bag. She considered burning it, but doubted she could find anything to light a fire with on a starship, nor did the idea of lighting a fire on a starship seem wise.

  With everything―except Gensch’s dog tags―in the bag, she pulled the plastic strip from the adhesive and sealed it. Teeth chattering, she sprinted across the bay and scurried up the stairwell to the shower area. She turned the water as hot as she could tolerate, and then made it a little hotter. She washed the dog tags and set them aside. Again and again, she lathered herself and scrubbed, standing in the flow until she felt like a lobster, using several shower cycles’ worth of soap.