by Geoff North
“They may be considered traitors back home, but they’re the best of the best. I wouldn’t trade them for the four hundred we left behind. We’ll get out of this mess. The ship will be up and running before know you it.”
Edmund stopped in front of the wide bay doors. “Thank you, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For not blaming me. I took us off course. I’m responsible for this… this hobbled vessel.”
SIC Barret slapped his son-in-law’s back. “As much as I bitched, I would’ve done the exact same thing in your boots. It was an Ambition shuttle that introduced the Alderamin threat in the first place… maybe this second one will provide us with more information to wipe them out.”
Edmund didn’t share his enthusiasm. It was an old command trick—boosting confidence when things were at their worst. The doors opened.
The Exodus shuttle sat in the middle of the bay floor. For a ship over seven hundred years old, it appeared remarkably pristine. There were no temperature scars on its surface, no meteor pitting on the hull. It was like a manufactured museum piece, not the original article. Two officers garbed in full haz-ag (hazardous agents) suits were standing at its starboard side, directly below the craft’s main passenger hatch.
“She’s clean, Commander,” one of them called out. He popped the seal of his bulky yellow helmet and placed the head covering beneath one arm. “No radiation, no bio-beasties clinging anywhere, inside or out.”
Bio-beasties was one of the countless names given to the black Alderamin plague that had broken out aboard Lieutenant Commander Artemus’s shuttle back in 2370 and spread throughout the Sol system. “Thank you, William. Shouldn’t you be down in engineering working on the fold drive?”
Lieutenant William Kelly ran his fingers through the tight black curls atop his head, and wiped sweat from his brow with the suit’s sleeve. “I have people working on the fold problem, sir. You’ll have to forgive me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to send anyone else to see this. Just look at it… an Ambition shuttle in our bay.”
“Totally understandable.” He grinned at his chief engineering officer. “Now get back where you belong, and make Retribution move again.”
William saluted his commander, nodded sheepishly at SIC Barret, and ran for the nearest exit.
“He’s right about there being zero traces of radiation.” The second haz-ag-suited officer mumbled. She removed her helmet, allowing a bundle of red hair to spill out over the shoulders of her suit. “But I’m not convinced of the bio-readings.”
“Explain it to me, Pen—is there anything… anyone alive inside this shuttle?”
“Give me a second. I’ve gotta get out of this damned thing.” Dr. Penelope Strong tossed the head cover to the deck floor and stripped free of the suit. Edmund glanced at Barret and saw the SIC’s cheeks already beginning to pinken. Strong was the oldest female crew member aboard, and one of the most beautiful. He knew how his father-in-law felt about her, and could hardly blame him. “I can’t be positive our sensors are giving us accurate readings. That magnetic shockwave fried a lot of systems. We won’t know for sure what’s living or dead until we take a peek inside.”
Barret was running a hand along the hatch, doing his best to avoid eye contact with the doctor. “That might be difficult. The computers inside here are centuries old. Unless Ada can dig up the security codes in the history banks necessary to open this door automatically, we may have to cut our way in.”
A voice boomed throughout the high-ceilinged bay. “Accessing information.”
The doctor jumped. “I hate it when she does that.”
“Ada hears everything,” Edmund said. “You should be used to her after all these years.”
“I’ll never get used to her interfering. You should try operating on a patient and having her walk you through the procedure without being asked. It’s downright disturbing.”
“Ambition shuttle Exodus security codes are not available. Operational records of Sol vessels decommissioned before the year 2850 have been removed from ships currently serving in the Republic. This excludes officers’ logs, mission histories, and crew manifests.”
“Decommissioned my ass,” Barret muttered. “Ambition was lost, not retired.” His fingers touched one of the hatch join lines. He felt a thump beneath the metal, a sudden shudder. An amber exit light powered on above the top edge of the hatch.
Edmund pulled Barret back as the door popped out and started sliding open to the side. Metal steps unfolded out automatically on a pair of chains and clanked noisily against the bay floor. The shuttle’s interior was bathed in deep red light and black shadows. Edmund reached instinctively at his hip for a side arm that wasn’t there. He chastised himself for not ordering his renegade crew to wear them at all times since entering the Pegan system.
Dr. Strong quickly retrieved a flashlight from the folds of the haz-ag suit crumpled at her feet. She shone a beam inside the open shuttle doorway. “Is anyone in there? Captain Agle?”
All three Retribution officers stepped back as a tall, wraith-like figure emerged from the shadows. He staggered down one step and stopped. His eyes were black holes, sunken deep into his skull. He winced at the light in the bay, covered his face with skeletal fingers, and moaned.
Edmund and Strong rushed forward and helped him down the remaining steps. The commander winced at the feel of bone beneath the rumpled uniform. The man was over six feet tall but weighed less than a child. The doctor lowered him gently to the deck. She pulled the hand away from his face, revealing sickly white skin and a mass of grey beard. “We’re going to help you,” she assured him.
“Ada,” the SIC snapped. “Get a full medical team down here.”
“There are no full medical teams serving aboard Retribution.”
“Then send whoever’s goddamned available with an anti-grav trolley and emergency medical unit. Immediately!”
Edmund squatted down next to the shaking figure. “Captain Shain Agle… my name is Alexander Edmund, commander of the warship Retribution. We received your distress call. Can you tell us how—”
“Now’s not the time, Commander,” Strong warned. “He needs treatment, not interrogation.”
“Alive,” Agle finally rasped. He opened his eyes again and looked at each of them with disbelief. “I’m alive?”
Strong brushed the sweat drenched hair away from his forehead. “Very much so, Captain. Alive, and soon to be well.”
“Alive.” Captain Agle grinned. His teeth were rotten, the gums swollen and bloody. “Everyone else dead… I’m alive.”
Chapter 10
“We shouldn’t be out here,” Charm said, trailing after her brother on the tips of her toes in the cold Martian night. “Not after what happened last night.”
Loke pulled her deeper into the shadows of the back alley and squatted down behind a recycling barrel. “How many times do I gotta tell you to whisper?” he peered up over the barrel’s lid and spotted their mother fifty meters ahead. “If she catches us following her, we’ll be locked in the house for a month. You want that?”
“Momma wouldn’t ground us that long. Maybe two or three days, but she wouldn’t let us miss any school.”
“I heard school’s shutting down at the end of next week.”
“How come? Holidays don’t begin until November. That’s like half a year away still.”
“Come on, we’re gonna lose her.” Loke crept back out into the street.
Charm reached for his hand and got a hold of two fingers. “Go slow, I can’t see nothing barely.” Deimos City nights were getting darker with each passing day. Businesses were closing at a rate of one or two a week, and houses were emptying even faster. People were leaving Mars, and shutting the lights off behind them.
Loke and Charm had set out after their mother shortly after supper. She had sent them to bed early and warned them to stay put while she went out for ‘provisions’. It was a dumb word, and an even dumber lie. Loke told his sist
er it had something to do with the room they’d found under the house. All those guns and computers hadn’t been left from the people that lived there before them—another terrible lie she’d told. Loke wanted to learn the truth behind the fibs, and Charm—who refused to stay home alone—had joined him.
Tarrace Edmund paused at a dimly lit intersection and looked back over her shoulder. The twins pressed up against the side of an abandoned housing complex and waited. “She ain’t going for any provisions,” Charm whispered. “We’re already six blocks past the food store.”
Loke squeezed her hand—a warning to keep quiet and still. When their mother started down the street to her left, the children resumed following her. “She isn’t going for food.”
“What’s she doing then? Where’s she going?”
Loke couldn’t give her any answers, but it didn’t stop the girl from asking more questions. “How come they’re shutting down school?”
“Because they’re aren’t enough students left to attend classes.”
“How come?”
Loke pointed into the sky as they crept along. “What do you see up there?”
“Stars and planets. That one there is Earth.” She pointed to the brightest light directly over their heads.
“We shouldn’t be able to see any stars or planets, that’s the problem. The clouds have started to clear all over the planet ‘cause they’re shutting the terra factories down.”
“Why would they do something so stupid? We need the smoke to breathe and stay warm.”
“Tell that to people like August Hegstad.”
The children approached the intersection slowly. They peered around the corner of a building and saw their mother removing a steel sewer cover from the center of the street half a block away. Charm tugged at his coat sleeve. “What’s she going down into the ground for?”
“It isn’t for food or water.”
Charm shivered, and wrapped the scarf around her neck tighter. She watched her mom disappear into the hole. The sewer cover thumped back into place seconds later. “What’s a terrorist?”
“Someone that kills people to get what they want.”
“Momma’s not a terrorist.”
“No, but she hasn’t been honest with us. Come on.” He pulled her out into the street. “Let’s go see what she is.”
Charm yanked free of his grip. “No way. I ain’t following her down there. I learned my lesson last night. We shouldn’t even be outside.”
Loke gave her a dumbfounded look. “I was the one that told you to stay home!”
The girl shook her head. “I’m not staying alone anywhere, not after what we did to those starvers. Maybe they saw where we headed after what Momma did to them. Maybe they know where we live now.”
Loke figured the two starvers from the night before weren’t in any condition to follow anyone anywhere. One had the back of his head nearly crushed in, and the other had run off half on fire, but he could understand his sister’s fear. “Then we find out what she’s up to together.” He jogged towards the sewer cover, and Charm followed begrudgingly seconds later.
The covering proved to be more than a match for Loke. “Don’t just stand there,” he snapped, straining with his fingers jammed beneath the steel edge. “Help me lift the thing up.”
When they’d shifted it eighteen inches onto the road, Loke squeezed through the narrow opening. His boots found metallic rungs. “Come on, there’s a ladder.”
Charm peered down past him. “It’s real dark down there.”
Loke climbed down a few rungs, and whispered back up to her. “I think I can see light coming from somewhere.”
Charm looked both ways down the empty, dark street. A cold wind blew into her face, almost pushing the hood of her coat completely free from her head. She scrambled into the hole after him. They climbed down five meters into a circular tunnel. Loke jumped from the ladder’s final rung, landing with a soft thump onto a floor of half frozen mud. His one leg gave out, and the knee that had jammed into glass plate twenty-four earlier absorbed the rest of the impact. He bit down on his lower lip to suppress a yelp, reached up for Charm’s boot, and gave it a shake. “Jump, you’ll be okay.”
She landed next to him and sniffed the air. “It stinks real bad down here.”
Loke rubbed his aching knee a few seconds longer, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark. The faint bit of light he’d seen from above was coming from one end the tunnel. He limped off in that direction, and his sister followed. The light grew stronger the further they went. The passageway ended, joining into another tunnel. They could hear voices coming from the left. Loke and Charm moved slowly through the mud. It grabbed at their boots like glue, releasing even more foul smells into the cold air with each step.
The voices grew louder, echoing past the children like ghosts. The light suddenly brightened as they stepped out into another junction. Loke scrambled back, pressing his sister up against the concrete wall.
“What is it?” She whispered. “What did you see?”
Loke poked his head out into the light. He saw an opening in the tunnel wall where a narrow set of steps led up into a small room of featureless concrete walls. Half a dozen adults were standing there in a huddle, Tarrace Edmund in the center. “It’s a bunch of people with Mom,” Loke whispered over his shoulder. “They’re looking at some kind of map.” Assured they hadn’t been spotted, he peeked again for another look. Charm crept out a little further from the shadows, and the children listened.
“Once they’ve powered down the main reactors,” their mother spoke, “they’ll need to station shut-down technicians in these areas.” She pointed to six sections on the map. “Each area requires a minimum of ten techs with a team of robotic aids to see the job done properly.”
“How long until the facility’s completely shut down, and they’re able to leave?” A tall man hovering over her left shoulder asked.
“If it were shutting down completely, I’d say less than a week. But we’re not going to let it get to that. After the fourth day, our people we’ll begin firing the chimneys up again.”
A woman next to Tarrace was shaking her head slowly. “It won’t work, we’re not ready. All those technicians need to be revolutionists. We only have half in place so far.”
Tarrace rolled the map up and tucked it into the vest of her heavy coat. “That’s what I told Jonas.”
“How did he manage to get all sixty of the Pavonis technicians to join our cause?” Another man asked.
“He’s an Edmund,” she answered. “Just as charismatic as his brother.” Even her father had succumbed to the Edmund charm; it was Alexander he’d chosen to help co-lead the Alderamin revolution. Both men were lost to her, but she imagined her husband was still out there somewhere, smiling and winking, effortlessly leading other men and women to follow him under the command of her father. Tarrace should’ve been one of them. She should’ve been with Alexander and her father this very moment onboard Retribution, closing in on the Alderamin home world—not whispering and conspiring in the stinking, cold sewage tunnels beneath Deimos City.
The tall man behind her spoke again. “Too bad he couldn’t have sent some of those converts to this side of the planet.” He nodded at the young woman standing to Tarrace’s left. “Leanna’s right, we won’t be able to bring the Deimos facility back up without full technical support. We’ll need sixty men and women for that. No way around it.”
“There is if we have mechanical help, Victor.”
Victor Brand was a seventh-grade school teacher. He would’ve taught Charm and Loke the following year if there was any one left on Mars to educate. He also happened to be a robotics genius, capable of stripping down any broken machine, and reassembling into a mechanical servant. Many of his ‘weekend creations’ were already serving as teachers’ assistants at the school.
Victor straightened up until the top of his head almost struck the low concrete ceiling. “My robots can grade test papers—I seriously dou
bt they could run a terra-forming facility.”
“I’m not asking you to build new robots from scratch. I want to sneak you inside the facility to reprogram the machines already working there.”
Brand pictured the factory’s robotic aids in his mind—from the smallest fifty kilogram personal assistants, to the ten thousand kilo work giants. He began to nod. “Most of the machines there are task-specific, but I could expand on their programming, I suppose.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Tarrace took hold of his elbow. “You have to admit, it beats blowing up government buildings in the middle of the night to make our point.”
The Mars revolution had been going on for almost a decade. The first eight years it had consisted mainly of peaceful protests; thousands of Martian residents gathering in cities across the planet, letting their voices be heard. The Republic of Sol Planets had slowly been losing interest in Mars for centuries. The economy had stagnated, and living conditions began to deteriorate. When the warship Retribution had been stolen from its lunar orbit docking station before its maiden flight, ROSP had had enough. They were done with political unrest throughout the entire Sol system, and Mars would be first to feel their wrath.
Victor squeezed her arm. “I never took part in any of that, Tarrace, and thank God we never had to use any of those guns. As much as it saddens me to see most of the people leave this planet, at least we never killed anyone here in Deimos.”
Tarrace recalled the awkward moment earlier that day when her children had discovered the hidden weapons room beneath their home. Victor was right—none of the Deimos City revolutionists had taken another life. And now that August Hegstad and the rest of his corrupt staff were leaving, an armed conflict in the city could likely be avoided. She wished she could say the same about Pavonis, Lowell Basin, and Olympus Mons. More than a hundred people had already been killed in those larger centers in the last eighteen months.
“All the conflict will finally come to an end soon,” she reassured him. “Mars will be at peace once again.”