The Planetsider Trilogy

by G J Ogden

  I promise to protect the few so that we again can be many. I promise to protect the few so that we again can be many. I promise to protect the few so that we again can be many. Though the world fell, we will not. Though the world fell, we will not. Please don’t fall. Please don’t fall, Aunt Summer. Please don’t fall.

  Chapter 22

  Maria and Ethan entered a dimly lit rectangular corridor with a white door at the opposite end, about five meters away. To their right were two large openings in the wall, and to the left was a cylindrical basket that rose to just above Ethan’s waist. Maria and Ethan looked at each other, with similarly puzzled expressions.

  “Please close the door,” came a female voice through a speaker in the ceiling. Unlike the modulated voice of the suited figure, this voice was normal and had an almost melodic timbre. “Unless you would like the wolves to join you, of course.”

  The thought of the maddened wolves made Ethan shudder, and he reached back and swung the door shut. Immediately he heard heavy bolts thud into place.

  “Please undress. Place your clothes in the receptacles to your right, and any other items in the basket to the left. Then stand with your arms raised and your legs slightly apart.”

  Ethan felt suddenly nauseous. “All of our clothes?” he said out-loud to the disembodied voice.

  “Yes, all of your clothes please,” the voice replied with the same vibrancy. “Don’t worry, I won’t look.”

  It’s not you I’m worried about, Ethan thought to himself, looking at Maria, whose eyebrows had raised almost to the top of her forehead upon hearing this last instruction.

  Maria acted first, removing her pistol and holster and placing them into the basket. Then she unstrapped the PVSM unit from her wrist and placed that in the basket alongside it. Once finished, she turned to face Ethan. “Well, come on then,” she said, impatiently.

  Ethan’s face went white; he slowly removed his tunic and then awkwardly began to unbutton his shirt, the brutal embarrassment of the situation masking any pain.

  Maria rolled her eyes. “I meant your knife, Ethan,” she said. “After all, it’s a good knife, right?”

  Ethan stopped unbuttoning his shirt and his face flushed a hot shade of red, with a burning sensation to match. “Oh, yes, my knife, of course...” he stammered, and then fumbled to unbuckle the belt strap that held the knife and his short staff, before finally managing to remove it and place it in the basket. He then stood in front of Maria with an expectant grin, as if waiting to be congratulated.

  “Turn around...” Maria said, hands on hips.

  “Sorry, yes, of course,” Ethan replied, swinging around so that his back was to Maria.

  “If you look while I’m undressing, I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  Ethan laughed nervously under his breath, stared firmly ahead and began to undress again. He thought she was joking, but he certainly wasn’t going to take any chances.

  Once they were undressed and their clothes placed into the receptacles (Ethan being very careful to keep his back to Maria at all times), metal apertures closed off the openings, and the basket sank through the floor and was quickly replaced by an empty one that looked identical.

  “Please stand with your arms raised and legs apart,” came the voice through the speaker.

  Ethan didn’t think it was possible to feel any more uncomfortable than he already did, but standing naked in this room, with his arms raised and legs slightly apart, he soon realized he had been sorely mistaken.

  “Stand by...” said the voice.

  Ethan wondered what he was standing by for when several narrow beams of purple light swept across the room, seemingly coming from all directions. The beams were not bright, or at least they didn’t cause him to shield his eyes, but he felt his skin tingling with a hot sensation. The beam continued to spiral around the room and eventually shut off. Seconds later the apertures that had sealed the openings in the wall where they had placed their clothes retracted again, revealing new items.

  “Please take a robe and sandals from inside the receptacles and pass through the white door,” said the voice. “I will meet you on the other side.”

  Ethan edged gingerly to the nearest opening, waddling like a penguin, and took out what looked like a thin, silvery-gray coat and a pair of rubbery gray shoes. He put both on, still struggling against the pain in his shoulders and chest; the coat reached down to just below the knee and was comfortable and surprisingly warm, considering how thin the material was.

  “Okay, you can look,” he heard Maria say.

  Ethan turned around and saw Maria wearing the same outfit, though on her the robe reached down to ankle level, and actually looked quite elegant. He looked at himself and could hardly say the same.

  “Very handsome!” said Maria, laughing.

  “Hey, I can’t help it that I’m tall!” said Ethan, trying to be offended, but finding the situation too funny.

  They heard a hissing sound from the far side of the room, and both turned to look, stifling giggles.

  “Hello, I’m Yuna,” said a melodious voice, though this time it did not come through the speaker in the ceiling, but from the mouth of a young woman standing in the doorway. “Please come through.”

  Yuna was wearing olive-colored overalls and was perhaps in her late thirties, with her syrup-brown hair tied back in a low, messy knot. Her skin appeared slightly clammy with sweat, and the way in which she carefully studied Ethan and Maria made Ethan wonder if she had ever seen another living person before.

  Yuna beckoned them on and then stepped back through the door. They followed her into a more industrial-looking area, with metal mesh flooring and smooth, gray walls that Ethan thought looked like rock, but it was far too uniform to be naturally-occurring. The corridor widened and opened into an enormous square room that looked to be a common area or living space, with tables and chairs and plush seating in the center, along with bookcases and a host of other items dotted all around, acting as dividers that split the space up into distinct zones. Along the walls were workstations that resembled the ones he’d seen in the UEC base and space station. Directly opposite where they were standing, at the far side of the vast room, was a floor-to-ceiling glass wall, which looked out upon an immense cavern. As they moved further into the room, Ethan was astonished to see what looked like part of a city built inside the mountain. It was only a fraction of the size of the ruined city near Forest Gate, but still at least twenty times larger than any settlement Ethan had visited. It reminded Ethan of the domed city on the UEC moon base, viewed from the glass Teardrop conference room. Even Maria looked impressed.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said Yuna, looking out at the underground city. “I never tire of looking at it.”

  “It’s incredible,” said Maria, smiling broadly. She looked out across the cityscape and was reminded of the residential district on the UEC moon base where she had lived; this was clearly based on a similar layout. Her thoughts strayed back to her old apartment; a place she would never see again, and her smile faded.

  “Were you born down here?” asked Ethan. It was a rather abrupt and direct question, but the one he was most interested in hearing the answer to.

  “Yes, I was,” Yuna replied with a warm smile, as if recalling a pleasant memory. “There was a team of fifty stationed here originally; a mix of engineers, biochemists, physicists, psychologists and so on, all employed by the UEC to manage, monitor and assess the success of the sub-surface city experiment. They were about to enter a live testing phase, populating portions of the city with volunteers, who in return would get free accommodation and living expenses. But, obviously that was never to be.”

  “Because of the Fall,” said Ethan, wistfully.

  Yuna looked puzzled, “The Fall?”

  “Oh, it’s the name we gave to the event that destroyed... well, everything,” said Ethan. “It was a phrase coined by the Firsts; the few that survived. Successive generations have used it ever since.”


  “You’re really from outside?” said Yuna, her eyes and tone of voice brightening. “I mean, you were born on the surface?”

  “Yes,” said Ethan. “How can you not know there are people still living on the surface?”

  Yuna was about to answer when a mechanical door to Ethan’s right hissed open and seven other people entered the room. Two were young women, who appeared to be a similar age to Yuna, and five were much older, even older than Administrator Talia. In the older group were two women and three men. They were all dressed in the same olive-gray overalls as Yuna, though each outfit was clearly distinguished from the others by unique adornments and accessories. One of the older women wore a colorful shawl and beaded necklace, while the two younger women also had colorful bracelets that seemed to be made from gemstones. Now that Ethan’s attention had been drawn to these adornments, he realized that Yuna wore a similar bracelet.

  “I’ll come back to your question later...” Yuna said with enthusiasm and then she stepped away from the window and raised an open hand towards the newcomers. “These are my companions and colleagues, and in some cases also my family.”

  Maria stepped forward, “I’m Maria Salus and this is Ethan,” she said, looking over at Ethan with a smile. “I realize there is much you will want to know, and there’s much we need to tell you, but unfortunately there is also little time.”

  Yuna held up a hand, “First things first, Maria Salus,” she said, “we need to attend to your friend’s injuries. You can tell us your story at the same time.”

  The older woman with the colorful shawl stepped forward, “Ethan was it?” she said, looking at Ethan, who nodded. “I’m Gaia, pleased to meet you. Come with me and we’ll get those wounds sorted out.”

  “Are you a healer?” Ethan asked, partly out of curiosity, but also because he wanted some assurance that this old woman knew what she was doing.

  Gaia smiled. “My father was a doctor,” she said, “a physician-scientist, actually. He taught me, just as I’ve passed on my knowledge to Yuna.”

  “Yuna is your daughter?” said Ethan, looking back and forth between them. Now that he looked more closely, the physical resemblance was obvious, as was the way they spoke.

  “Yes, and Kia and Zoie here are my other daughters,” she pointed to the other two younger women, who were both perhaps a little younger than Yuna, but unmistakably with the same eyes and syrup-colored hair. “Sadly, their father died some years ago.”

  “Are all of you related?” said Maria, which drew a gaggle of quiet laughter from the group. Maria scowled; she didn’t like to be laughed at, and Yuna appeared to notice this.

  “I’m sorry, Maria,” Yuna said, sincerely, “we’re not laughing at you or the question. It’s a sort of in-joke; we are an extremely dysfunctional family of sorts. But no, to answer the question, we’re not all related. There is myself, Kia, Zoie and our mother, and also our uncle, Henrik, but everyone else here is unrelated, at least in terms of blood.”

  Maria relaxed, grateful for the apology.

  Yuna moved beside her mother and then pointed to the other members of the group in turn. “This is my uncle Henrik, our second-generation biologist.” A man with an immaculately-trimmed white beard stepped forward and said a quick hello.

  “Then we have Niels, who is one of our engineers and physicists,” Yuna continued. A thin man with wispy gray hair and eye-glasses raised a hand. “And Tyler is the man we turn to when something breaks,” Yuna continued, pointing to a short man with an almost mirror-like bald head.

  “Yuna is especially good at breaking things,” Tyler said with a grin. Yuna beamed and nodded, accepting the indictment.

  She continued, “Jun is our second-gen psychologist, and is the one who keeps us all from going crazy in this rather cavernous prison of ours.”

  A lithe woman with hip-length black hair nodded. “I’m sorry to say they all went mad years ago, so I’m largely unemployed,” said Jun, and the group laughed politely.

  “And, last but never least, is Watson, our geneticist.” Yuna pointed to a man with bushy, silver eyebrows who looked to be easily the oldest member of the group. “Along with my mother, they take care of our medical needs too.”

  Gaia walked to the central area of the room and pulled out a chair. “Speaking of which, please sit young man,” she said to Ethan. “You can say how you came to be here said while I take care of these injuries. Besides the genetically corrupted, we honestly thought there was no-one left but us, until recently anyway.”

  Ethan obliged and sat down, lowering the silver-gray robe from his shoulders. “By ‘corrupted’, I assume you mean the creatures we met outside?” said Ethan, looking at cuts on his chest and wishing he hadn’t. The purple energy beams that had danced across his body earlier seemed to have stemmed the bleeding, but they still looked angry. “I’ve never seen a maddened animal before, and I thought I’d seen everything.”

  Gaia removed a black case from a cupboard behind the chair and placed it on the surface. “Maddened? That is a novel description, though I suppose not entirely inaccurate,” she said as she worked the locks of the case. “The process of genetic deformation is survivable by a very limited number of animal species. One side-effect of the corruption in surviving species is an intense sensitivity to light. It is especially extreme in the wolves, which is why they remain underground.

  Gaia flipped open the case and then paused and looked up, distracted by a thought. “Was the genetic corruption also a factor on the space station? I would have thought that the station’s shielding would have mitigated any exposure?”

  Ethan didn’t understand a word of what the older woman just said, and simply made an ‘ummm’ sound, while looking at Maria imploringly to help him out. She smiled and obliged.

  “One of the things you need to understand about us is that Ethan here is a planetsider,” said Maria. “He’s a descendant of the people who survived the catastrophe caused by the destruction of the orbital orrum refinery and the subsequent bombardment of the planet’s surface.”

  Gaia now adopted the same wide-eyed look of wonderment that had appeared on Yuna’s face when Ethan mentioned being from the surface. She looked around to check the faces of her companions and they were mirror images of her own. “Extraordinary!” she exclaimed. “We did not think anyone could survive on the surface without succumbing to genetic deformation. Our ancestors only survived because they were holed up down here, protected by both the rock of the mountain and the heavy reinforcements to the cavern walls, which shielded them against the radiation.”

  “That’s actually why we’re here,” said Maria, excitedly grasping the opportunity to raise the subject of the survivors. “After the refinery incident, the conflict between GPS and the UEC continued in space and has raged ever since. But yesterday, the UEC finally won; they destroyed the space station and GPS. We escaped here in twelve ships, barely making it down in one piece. We already lost one ship during atmospheric entry. Camped outside are around three hundred survivors, including some UEC citizens who defected, fleeing from the new military rule. Most of them are children. This place is their only chance of survival.”

  There was silence while Maria’s revelations sunk in, during which time Gaia examined the reactions of the others, especially those of Niels and Yuna.

  “That is quite a story,” Gaia said, rifling through the contents of the case, which contained a host of different instruments and colored capsules of varying sizes. “Just before you arrived, Yuna went to the surface to analyze an impact near Green Haven, a city not too far from here. I take it this is related?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so,” said Maria, “The impact was a fragment of the space station.”

  Gaia looked at Niels, inviting him to contribute.

  “The data is consistent with that explanation,” the physicist said. “If a fragment of the station with a rough diameter of perhaps forty or fifty meters passed through the atmosphere intact and impacted the city, it coul
d cause a detonation of the magnitude we monitored.”

  Gaia nodded thoughtfully and looked back at the case on the cabinet. She began to fit a yellow capsule with three blue stripes into what Ethan recognized instantly as an injector. He mentally prepared himself for the forthcoming stab of pain.

  “So you escaped to the surface in a fleet of ships and met this young – what did you call him? Planetsider?” Gaia went on while she worked.

  Maria nodded, “That’s right.”

  “You met this planetsider, who presumably had never seen or even heard of GPS or the UEC before, and he just came along for the ride?” Gaia said, with an almost accusatory tone. “As if there was nothing unusual about women from space suddenly appearing on his doorstep?”

  “I know it sounds unbelievable,” said Maria, rubbing the back of her neck, “and there is more. But it’s complicated to explain, and right now, there are children in danger.”

  “I see,” Gaia replied, and then turned her attention back to her patient. “Ethan, I’m going to inject you with some medicine that will prevent infection and accelerate healing. It will make you feel a little unwell for a time, but nothing worse than a mild headache and temperature, plus some drowsiness.”

  “It’s okay, these injectors and I are already well acquainted,” said Ethan, unable to hide his lack of enthusiasm for the procedure that was to follow.

  “Is that so?” said Gaia, and then she glanced back at Maria. “I presume that this knowledge is part of the ‘more’ that you still need to tell us?”