by G J Ogden
“They are grave stones,” said Gaia, anticipating Maria’s next question. “They mark the locations where we buried our lost friends and family.”
Maria stopped and stared at them. “So the bodies are buried there, under the soil?” The thought of decayed, dead bodies so close by made her skin crawl. On the moon base, the dead were simply incinerated, after a short ceremony. Burying the dead would be impossible, or at least highly impractical on the moon, and also completely pointless, at least so far as Maria was concerned.
“Yes,” said Gaia. “It is an ancient custom, not practiced for a long time. But we just felt it more appropriate, somehow. These stones help us to remember them, and keep something of them with us.”
Maria didn’t respond and simply stared out at the stones, trying not to visualize what was underneath them.
“Come, I will give you a closer look,” said Gaia, and then she stepped through the gate and continued into the park before Maria could think of a way to politely suggest otherwise. Reluctantly, she followed and stood beside Gaia in front of the stone slabs, on which she could now see were inscriptions of names and short messages.
“This was my father,” said Gaia, pointing to a stone with the name Artur Souza engraved on it. She moved a little further along and pointed to another stone with the name Alex Beck. “This was my husband. He was sadly killed some time ago by the genetically-corrupted wolves that I believe you are also well-acquainted with.”
The mention of these maddened animals made Maria shudder even more than the prospect of standing above some decaying old corpses.
“Yes, I remember them all too well,” said Maria. “If you don’t mind me asking, how did it happen?”
“No, I do not mind; it all happened a long time ago, now,” said Gaia, unperturbed by the question. “Alex was outside the complex, searching for seeds and other samples of plant life that could be useful to us, to cultivate food or grow cultures to create new medicines.” Talking about her deceased husband did not appear to make Gaia sad, but the mention of food made Maria think of something she hadn’t even considered up until this point. There were only ten scientists and engineers in the entire compound; did they have food and supplies for another three hundred? She put this question to Gaia.
“Oh, yes,” said Gaia, unconcerned. “As you already pointed out, this city was built for thousands, and it was being prepared for a live testing phase before the disaster. There are still huge quantities of food packs stored in the warehouse, back in our complex.”
“Sounds delicious,” said Maria, again unable to control her tendency towards sarcasm. She was aware of these types of food packs; they were still manufactured and used to some extent on the moon base, usually to supplement other food sources in the event of a production shortfall.
“Oh, we don’t eat them,” said Gaia. “We created an arboretum and grow our own food. And we’ve also gotten pretty good at engineering food in the lab here, which tastes better than it sounds, before you ask!”
Maria held up her hands, conceding.
“Between Henrik, Watson and my daughter, Kia, we have created a highly sustainable source of food,” Gaia went on. “It will take some time to scale up the operation to support our newcomers, but it’s certainly possible, and we can even train some of them with the skills to help us too. The food packs will amply provide for everyone in the meantime, for many years, if needed.”
Maria nodded and took a deep breath. This place was perfect and more than she could have possibly hoped for. The old hermit’s advice had literally saved them; she wondered where the strange old man was now, and if she would ever see him again. He deserved their gratitude, though she knew it was a debt she could never repay.
They remained together for a few moments longer, silently observing the grave stones. Maria scanned the names, not really paying any attention to the inscriptions, and she was about to suggest that they continue on to their rendezvous with Tyler, when her eyes glanced across a name and her heart almost stopped beating. The name on the stone read, ‘Christopher Kurren’.
Maria hurried forward and fell to her knees in front of the stone. “It can’t be…” she said, still unable to comprehend what she was seeing. “How?”
“This is what I wanted to show you,” said Gaia, kneeling beside Maria. “I take it you knew him?”
“He was my partner,” said Maria, gripping the top of the stone tightly; she was suddenly light-headed. “We were together the first time I came planetside, but I was forced to leave him behind. How can he be here?”
“It was maybe four or five years ago now. He appeared out of nowhere, in the same tunnel where we found you.”
“You spoke to him? Was he okay then?”
“No, he was already very weak, and largely incoherent,” said Gaia, thinking hard to recall what happened. “He managed to tell us his name, and said something cryptic about Summer being fine, and then he asked, ‘Did she make it?’. He would repeat it over and over again, Did she make it?, but none of it made any sense to us. When we got him through decontamination we discovered a serious wound to his side that had been hastily patched up. It was treatable, but the real problem was that he was already suffering from the effects of severe genetic damage. It hadn’t changed him physically, which we always found curious, but it was beyond our skill to rectify.”
“He would have dosed himself up with meds. Probably over-dosed, knowing him.”
Gaia considered this. “Yes, I suppose that is possible. We had never considered him to be from off-world; just another one of the corrupted, we thought. The only oddity was that he had a data-processor on his wrist, like yours, but we just assumed he’d picked it up from inside a city somewhere. After he passed away we tried to access it, but it was locked and encrypted and although our party includes quite a varied set of skills, cracking military-grade encryption isn’t among them. His appearance has remained one of our most enduring puzzles. In over one hundred years neither we, nor those before us, had ever seen anyone quite like him, until you arrived, of course.”
“How did he die?” asked Maria, forcing back tears. The shock of seeing the grave had been replaced with sorrow. She had always assumed her partner to be dead – or, more accurately, hoped he was dead, rather than maddened – but not knowing for certain meant that she had never fully been able to grieve for him.
“He slipped into a coma soon after we got him inside, and never recovered,” said Gaia. “It was painless. Peaceful.”
Maria was silent. It was taking all she had to simply stop from breaking down, and she didn’t want to succumb to her emotions now; there was still too much to do. She gripped the stone even more tightly, so that the pressure forced her fingernails to bend, but the pain of this was not enough. She then thought of Diana and her sacrifice, and the destruction of the space station, and rage surged through her body, which combined with the pain to overcome her feelings of sorrow.
“Was he related to this other Kurren? The one who now searches for you?”
“He was his brother,” said Maria, bitterly. “But he was nothing like that pig general,” she added, feeling a need to distinguish between them. “Chris was a good man, and he was my friend.”
Gaia placed a hand on Maria’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “I am sorry, Maria.”
Maria took Gaia’s hand and then stood up, helping to lift Gaia up alongside her. She was again grateful for Gaia’s efforts to console her, but she did not want consoling. She wanted revenge. She looked down at the grave and read his name, one last time. Rest easy, old man. “Thank you for showing me this,” she said to Gaia, and then a thought struck her. “Do you still have his PVSM?”
“Yes, I believe so. It will be in the stores, back inside the main complex, unless Niels has stripped it for parts. If you wish, we can take a look, after we have spoken to Tyler, of course?”
Maria thanked Gaia again, and accepted the offer. She didn’t know what she would do with it, if it was indeed still intact,
but it was the only thing that remained of him now, other than this grave, and perhaps possessing it would help to give her closure.
They left the park and resumed their journey to meet Tyler. When they arrived, Maria discovered that the engineer was already chatting with Ethan and Page. Gaia had laughed, and remarked that Tyler had probably been so impatient to tell someone of his genius engineering solution to whatever problem he had solved that their delay had meant he’d called Ethan and Page over instead. It was certainly the case that Tyler was talking with great animation to both Ethan and Page and, while Page appeared politely interested, Ethan’s glassy-eyed stare said everything about his lack of investment in the conversation.
Ethan spotted Maria’s approach, and his face lit up, seeing an opportunity to escape. “Sal, hey, I was just saying we should come and find you!” said Ethan, trying to reinforce his desire to escape by covertly flashing his eyes towards the museum.
“Oh, no rush,” teased Maria. “I’m sure Tyler has much more he can tell you.”
“Oh, really, that’s great…” Ethan replied, checking to make sure that Tyler wasn’t watching and then giving Maria a disapproving shake of his head.
Page’s PVSM bleeped an alert, which spared Ethan another lecture about power systems distribution, and how Tyler had increased efficiency by doing ten things that Ethan found entirely incomprehensible.
“How are you getting a signal down here?” Maria asked.
“Tyler managed to hook me in to an external antenna, close to the peak of the mountain,” said Page. “It was originally intended to take a feed from the comsats, but he modified it to interface with my PVSM.”
“Yes, the method I used was quite innovative, actually, and required me to…” Tyler began, but Gaia swiftly interrupted.
“I am sure the explanation can wait,” said Gaia, “perhaps we should learn the nature of this alert first?”
Tyler conceded and Page flipped open the panel of the PVSM. He read quickly and his expression darkened. “There are two transports approaching. They’re close, but their trajectory suggests they are not returning to the same location as before. They are heading further along the side of the mountain.”
“Show us a topographical holo of where the transports are and their projected destination,” said Maria, who had switched instantly into a serious, military-style of speaking, as had Page.
Page made the necessary inputs to the PVSM and a few seconds later the device projected a holo of the mountain with two points connected by a pulsating white line. One was moving rapidly, indicating the transports, and the other sat at the base of the mountain, in an area of land that seemed unnaturally barren and flat.
Tyler looked at Gaia. “The engineering door?”
Gaia studied the holo for a few moments, and then reached into the image and expanded the area close to the mountain. “It is possible,” she said, then with more urgency added, “If this is the case, we will have to act fast.”
“What’s the engineering door?” asked Page, getting the question in before Maria or Ethan managed to ask it.
“It is the only other way into this city,” said Gaia, gravely. “It was the primary access route for the engineering machines that built the city. The door was shut and sealed after the building phase was completed, but it could still be opened, with the right technology or application of force.”
“We should assume Kurren has found it, and that he can open it,” said Maria, immediately understanding the threat.
Page agreed. “Which means we have to evacuate the museum, and get everyone out of this cavern.”
“But where will they go?” said Ethan. “Is there space inside the complex?”
Gaia looked again at Tyler, inviting him to reply, though Tyler simply responded with a non-committal shrug. Gaia’s next look made it clear that this response was not sufficient, and Tyler elaborated. “The complex was designed to accommodate around one hundred and fifty at peak capacity, but we have converted some spaces to other uses, such as the arboretum. Right now, there’s no way to fit in another three hundred.”
“What about the east wings?” said Gaia.
Tyler shrugged again. “They could be made habitable, I guess,” he said, “but not immediately. It would take some work just to purge the environment and then get clean air and heat back into them, before we could even consider adapting them for habitation.”
“What are the east wings?” asked Maria.
“The UEC originally planned for a capacity of two hundred and fifty scientists and engineers, but cut-back for cost reasons. The east wings were intended to support the extra capacity, but were sealed after the cut-backs. They are habitable, or could be, but they are only crudely finished.”
“That will have to do,” said Maria. “How long before we can start moving people inside?”
Gaia again looked to Tyler. “I don’t know…” he began, looking uncomfortable at being put on the spot again. “It will take a couple of hours, perhaps more.”
The timid delivery of Tyler’s response did not inspire Maria with confidence. She had noticed that Tyler rubbed the knuckles of his left hand whenever he felt stressed or under pressure, and he was doing it now.
“We may have to hold Kurren off, to buy more time,” said Maria. “Which means we’re going to need more than just my and Page’s sidearms.”
Gaia shook her head. “We’re just scientists and engineers, not soldiers; there are no weapons here.”
“What about the guardians?” asked Tyler.
The hairs on the back of Ethan’s neck tingled at the mention of this word, but surely Tyler could not be referring to the mystical lights in the night sky that planetsider folklore believed shielded them against the Maddening? “What do you mean, guardians?” he asked, eager with anticipation.
Tyler was only too willing to explain, and went into detail about the history of the sub-surface city experiment, and how it was a highly confidential and commercially-sensitive project that the UEC was obsessed with keeping secret. The UEC were ahead of the game, but they were not the only mega-corporation who was exploring this sort of technology, and the UEC was in a state of perpetual paranoia about competitors stealing their technical secrets and engineering plans. In order to prevent this from happening the UEC created a fleet of specially modified sentries, which they called Guided Anti-Reconnaissance Drones, or GARDs. Tyler laughed as he explained that they used the word ‘Reconnaissance’ instead of ‘Espionage’ in a weak attempt to disguise their true purpose of jamming or destroying any rival drones, using their powerful stun emitters to disable electronic equipment and cause temporary paralysis or unconsciousness in a person.
“The project leaders referred to them as their special metal guardians in the engineering logs,” said Tyler, “but when the refinery was destroyed, taking out all of the UEC’s private comsats, they became useless.”
Tyler’s very detailed, but ultimately dry and analytical explanation had quelled Ethan’s earlier giddiness, but there was still something satisfying about the prospect of having guardians fighting by their side, even if these were technological, rather than ethereal, in nature.
“If there’s no way to control them, what use are they?” said Page, stating the obvious fact that Ethan had missed.
“I could try to modify them to work on short-range telemetry,” said Tyler. “Providing you can maintain a strong signal, and ideally line-of-sight, so the range will be very short. The only problem is that I lack a control interface; the only device we had that was suitable was re-purposed to manage the water recycling systems thirty years ago.”
Maria released the fastener on her PVSM and offered it to Tyler. “What about this? It includes a short-range transceiver.”
Tyler took the PVSM and spent a few moments checking it out, making noises like ‘umm…’ and ‘hmm…’ as he turned it over and over. He then cycled through a series of menus, many of which Maria didn’t even know were accessible.
“It’s possible,” said Tyler eventually. “I can try.”
“Give that task to Niels and Zoie,” said Gaia with a sudden assertiveness that sounded almost military in nature. “You focus on getting the east wings open. We have precious little time, do you understand?”
Tyler started rubbing his knuckles again, but nodded and then excused himself. Maria hoped that he was as smart as Gaia had indicated, but from the way Tyler had reacted, her gut told her that two hours was a wildly optimistic figure that he had simply guessed at random when put under pressure. They would need the GARDs to stand any chance against Kurren, and even these may not be enough.
“Gaia, is there any way to fence off this city block, so that the UEC soldiers will be forced to abandon their transports and approach on foot?” asked Maria.
Gaia considered the question and then nodded. “There may be a way to block off the major streets, but they will still be able to get close.”
“Show me,” said Maria. Gaia then explained that each major street intersection contained retractable barriers that could be raised up from the compartments under the street surface. They were installed during the construction phase as safety measures to protect the manual workers, while the gigantic automated machinery worked in other areas.