by Phil Maxey
Soon, he was entering the Governor’s office. The comfortable carpet had been replaced with a large rug running over the carbonium floor, and the decor was now less regal. Evgeni gestured for Luke to take a seat, which he did. Yegor was standing behind him.
“When you wanted to spare the lives of Murlock and Babel, I went along with it, but now there are a lot of rumblings amongst people that they are still alive.”
“Evgeni, we can’t just execute people. There are serial killers in solitary who have killed dozens, and probably would again if they were allowed out, but we chose to hold them down there, and keep them alive, because they have rights.” Luke shook his head. “You don’t think I want Babel gone? But if we start down that path, there’s no coming back.”
“And what if Babel gets out? His Grainers still group together, what if they try to get him out? People are afraid he will be back.”
“Evan and Manning have gone over the security measures and made them even more secure, he’s not getting out no matter what the remaining Grainers try to do.”
“And the warden? Many died because of his madness.”
Luke stood up. “People are just going to have to live with my decision.”
Evgeni nodded. “Okay, I will tell them, no executions.”
As Luke moved away, he remembered something that had been bugging him from before. He turned back to Evgeni. “The Archons?”
Evgeni looked up with a questioning expression.
“I didn’t see any of their followers as part of the forces that attacked us?”
“No, they kept out of the whole thing. Even now we hardly see them.”
Luke quickly did some mental calculations. “So that would now make them the biggest syndicate?”
Evgeni nodded. “Perhaps so.”
Luke turned and headed back out into the corridor.
CHAPTER 34
“I thought being chief technical officer meant I didn’t need to go on missions to zombie infested lunar colonies,” said Evan anxiously, the inside of his helmet steaming up.
Weber rolled his eyes. “You young people have no back bone, a century ago it was very different. We could not be afraid during the Earth revolution of ninety-eight!”
Evan looked at him confused.
Just how old are you?
There was only one ‘Earth revolution’ that he knew about from his history classes as a kid and that was the one of 2098, which would make Weber at least one hundred and forty years old. He would still have some way to go to beat the oldest humans age, which at the time that Evan left home, bound for Tantalus was two hundred and ten, but still, Weber was getting on in years.
He looked around the shuttle that was making the short journey from the ship to the nearest docking port of the Moon colonies water station, at the four others and two IMs that were with him.
These look like they know their shit, I’ll be fine.
His mind flashed back to a few days before to the scene of carnage that played out around him in the cargo hold. The blood and noise had been plaguing his dreams, and each day he woke feeling like he had just relived the battle. He thought about his room back in west coast municipality zero-three, and how he left everything expecting to return in a few years. He told Agar his neighbor to try to keep his plants going, but now his plants and Agar were just part of his memories.
The shuttle juddered. Aruna looked at Evan and smiled. It took her a few years before she was used to space flight as well, but soon she was piloting her own hauler between Earth and the Mars colony and loving every minute of it. To her left was Casey who she had heard good things about, and further left someone she handpicked herself, a member of her own syndicate who went by the name of Takeshi Hayashi but everyone called him Tak. She tried avoiding eye contact with the man opposite her, she had heard too many stories about the Phoenix syndicates old mad genius to want to get to know him too well.
An IM’s voice came through their comms. “Docking in ten seconds, be ready to disembark.”
“Everyone know their roles?” said Aruna looking around the cabin. “Evan and Weber’s job is to get the pumps up and working, our job is to keep them alive to do that and for all of us to get back to Tantalus. We have already found one person alive in this colony, there might be more, so don’t shoot to kill unless you're sure they're already dead.” She immediately realized how strange that last statement sounded.
Everyone nodded, and the shuttle shook. There was a clunk, then everyone detached their seat latches and walked towards the hatch. As the light turned green, Aruna touched the screen, and the hatch opened with a hiss.
They all moved along the airlock, until they reached the opposite hatch, where IM 011 made quick work of the manual mechanism and they were soon looking out onto a pitch-black corridor, which their lights were reluctant to penetrate.
Weber had spent many hours reviewing the helmet cam footage from the previous two encounters with the hidden, and he eyed the darkness in front of him suspiciously. Casey went to move forward, when he put his hand across her. “Wait. I need to take some readings.”
She pushed his hand out of the way. “Sheesh, I want to get off this base as soon as we can, I’ll take my chances.”
Weber’s frown was just visible inside his helmet. They all moved into the bleak looking corridor.
Aruna switched her comms to communicate with the ship. “Tantalus, we are inside the first corridor, no problems so far. Over.” Ensign Haywood's voice acknowledged.
“This way.” Weber pointed to their right. “Should be about a thirty-minute trek to the pump control room.”
“What was that?” said Evan, turning his head quickly to the left.
Takeshi slowly swung his rifle around. “Chill, there’s nothing there.” He started to follow the rest.
Evan could feel the others disappearing into the darkness a few meters from him and decided to forget what he thought he had just heard and follow them.
After navigating a series of winding corridors, they arrived at a shaft. Weber looked at his HUD. “Two floors up then we are almost there.”
Evan switched his HUD to display sensor readings and was relieved when there still wasn’t any sign of anything moving in the corridors around him. They entered the intense blanket of dark inside the small cylindrical space and were soon standing on the platform at the second floor.
“I was kind of hoping to see more of those undead people,” said Casey looking back down the shaft into the void.
“Be careful what you wish for, young lady,” said Weber, looking at the readings coming from his wrist device. “Looks clear ahead.” He nodded to the IM to open the door.
As the door slid to one side, warnings flashed up on everyone’s HUD’s. “Fall in temperature detected.”
Evan’s head flicked around nervously. “What does that means? Are they here? Are they going to—”
Takeshi put his hand on Evan’s shoulder. “Calm that brain of yours, it’s just an environmental warning, happens all the time when you’re exploring places where their environmental controls are offline. You don’t get out much do you?”
“Umm, no,” said Evan, looking up at him.
They all moved into the empty corridor.
“This way,” said Weber, moving through the darkness until they came up against a closed double door with, “PUMP CONTROL 006” above it. The IM started to open it without hesitation.
Weber looked back from the way they came. “What is it?” said Aruna.
“If you have been alive for as long as I have, you develop a sense for when something is off,” he said, looking into the shadows. “Anyway, let’s get on with this.”
They moved through the open doors and into a large room with a view over part of the complex of pipes on the surface of the colony. Most of them were covered in the huge shadow cast by Tantalus which was positioned above them.
Aruna turned to Casey and Takeshi. “Secure the area, nothing comes in or out.” She switched
her comms to address the Tantalus. “We are at the pump control room, initiate the cable.” The ship acknowledged, and a huge cable meters thick with thruster rockets on one end started to leave the Tantalus above heading for the water ports outside.
Weber moved immediately to the console in front of him, plugging in a cable into the wrist part of his suit, and the other end into a port under the unit. The whole black screen which made up most of the console came to life with symbols, options, and simplified imagery of the pumping procedure. “Okay I’m in. IMs, you need get out there and manually open the valves.”
Both machines ran the length of the large room, bounded up some stairs, opened another door, and disappeared through it.
Evan moved closer to the window. “I see them, they’re making their way to the valve.”
“Evan get over here and look at this data,” said Weber, who had his eyes closed.
Evan obliged.
“I’ve only got limited access to the colonies databases, so if you want to look this is the time to do it,” said Weber, with sweat beginning to build up on his forehead.
Evan tapped away at the screen. “Yup, I’m looking now.” Images, text, and video flashed up on the screen then was immediately replaced by more. “Are you able to save all this?”
“That’s what I’m doing. Keep searching.”
Aruna looked out over the landscape of crossing pipes and at the two IMs that had opened the huge wheel shaped valves. “How’s it looking Tantalus?”
“Going well Lieutenant Anthony, two hundred thousand gallons pumped so far.”
Alarms sounded in all their suits. Weber's eyes flicked open. “Proximity sensor,” he said under his breath.
Evan looked up from the text he was reading. “Are they here?”
Casey ran forward from the doorway they had come from. “We got multiple detections about one hundred and fifty meters along the corridor we came in on.”
Weber disconnected his cable from the console and the screen immediately reverted to black. He ran to the doorway, stopped, and walked forward slowly, straining his eyes to see into the gloom.
“What are we doing, Weber?” said Casey, walking with him, looking down her sight towards where their sensors detected movement.
“I need to see them for myself.”
Aruna ran up to them. “Weber, we need to try to secure the control room! You need to go back!”
They heard them before they saw them. The sound of shuffling drifted through the air. Their lights illuminated an impossible number of undead things crammed into the corridor, somehow still managing to move slowly forward toward them.
Aruna stood stunned, while Casey raised her gun ready to fire. Weber stopped, then started to move forward. “Fascinating.”
Aruna grabbed his shoulder, pulling him backwards, he turned on her angrily. “We need to learn how this is happening, leave me be!”
She continued pulling him back. “We ain’t going to learn anything if you’re dead!”
A strange noise them emanated from one of the bodies in front of them, and they all turned to look at this individual whose eyes seemed to be paying them attention.
“It’s looking at us,” said Weber trying to resist being moved any further back into the room he had come from.
Just as they were nearing the doorway, the darkness, like a wall of shadow pushed towards them completely enveloping the undead and presenting them with nothing but a black void just in front of the door way. The suddenness of it made them all fall backwards into the control room.
“Get the door closed now!” shouted Aruna.
Casey and Takeshi grabbed the manual control and rotated it around as fast as they could, but the wall of nothingness stayed watching, waiting just outside. Weber stood transfixed. “It’s like a kind of negative energy, but with a form of structure,” he said, slowly moving towards it.
The intense shadow lashed out, with a needle like finger past Weber hitting Evan in his chest, picking him up.
“No!” screamed Aruna as the door closed, cutting the stream of darkness off from its source, but it still held Evan off the ground and swirled around him. Evan’s arms and legs stretched out and backwards and his body started to shake.
“Weber, do something!” Aruna shouted as Weber stood watching.
He turned to her. “Do what?”
Just as Aruna went to reply, Evan’s body slowly drifted to the ground, his arms and legs looking like the limbs of a puppet. Inside his helmet black mist swam around his face. Evan’s legs shuffled forward.
“Screw this!” shouted Casey and raised her rifle.
“No!” shouted Aruna, “Maybe he’s not dead, maybe he’s—”
Before she could finish a noise sounding like words from one of those radio players from hundreds of years before came from their internal comms.
Takeshi looked around at those around him. “One of you say something? I’m sure I heard—” He realized they were equally confused by who was talking.
“What is that? Is that a song?” said Casey, her rifle swaying in the direction of Evan’s supported body.
“Weber, where’s that coming from?” said Aruna, trying to control the feeling of panic which was threatening to control her.
“Shh,” replied Weber. The noise increased in volume and now contained words in rhythm. “That the miller may grind his corn—”
The sound was Evan’s voice, but not. They all looked at him. The black mist was still swirling around outside and inside his suit, but they could also now see his face more clearly.
“Is he smiling?” said Takeshi looking down the sight of his gun that was aimed squarely at Evan’s head.
“That the baker may take it—And into rolls make it—”
“What do we do?” shouted Casey.
“It’s—it’s a rhyme of some kind,” said Weber, stepping closer to Evan’s propped up body.
“And bring us some hot in the morn—” Evan’s distorted voice crackled inside their helmets.
The black mist started to leave Evan spiraling upwards and joining the shadows above their heads. Evan collapsed into a heap on the floor.
CHAPTER 35
Evan opened his eyes, then immediately closed them. “Too bright—” he croaked. A young woman he did not recognize ran from the room beyond a clear partition.
“Evan, can you hear me?” said Omar.
“Yes, I think so, where am I? What happened?” The questions came out as rasps.
“There’s a bottle of water on the table to your left.”
Evan reached across without opening his eyes and fumbled around until he felt the smooth plastic of the bottle, which he quickly opened and started gulping down. “What happened? Am I still in the lunar base?”
“You were injured during the mission, what do you remember?”
“Where are you? You sound distant.”
“I’m in the room adjacent to yours. You’re on Tantalus. The mission was—a success.”
“Why are my eyes burning, can you turn the lights down.”
The lights in the room duly dimmed, and Evan opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed, with a small table to his left and not much else around him. In front of him was a large clear partition with a door. Omar, the woman he didn’t recognize, and the captain were standing watching him.
“Hey, Evan, it’s Luke. How are you feeling?”
“Thirsty.” He reopened the bottle and this time drunk it all. For the first time, he realized he might be seriously injured and anxiously looked at his body, arms, and legs. Everything seemed as it should. “How was I injured? I remember the darkness was at the door of the pump control room. They were trying to get the door closed, then I woke up here. What the hell happened?” He started to get worried.
“Hold on,” said Luke.
In the gloom, he could see them arguing.
“They’re going to run some tests on you, make sure you’re fit for duty, okay?”
“Sure, whatever t
hey want—Sir.” Suddenly, his eyes felt too heavy to keep open and he laid back into the soft cushion.
Luke looked at Evan fall asleep in the dimly lit containment chamber. “Do we know what happened to him?” he said to Omar.
“We have done every test I can think of. We have mapped his neural pathways, we have tracked blood flow, we know more about his body now than he does, but honestly, I have no idea what happened to him,” said Omar bringing up a three-dimensional map of Evan’s body.
“So, we have no idea if he’s back to normal now?”
“Define normal.”
“Do you even know how to test for the hidden?”
“Well, seeing we don’t know what the ‘hidden’ is, that would be a no.”
“Whatever it is, it controlled him for over a minute to use him to speak an ancient English nursery rhyme”
“It would appear so, yes.”
A noise came from behind them and the door to the observation room opened. Weber came in, out of breath. “He is awake? Did he say anything? I need to go in.”
“Slow down Weber, he’s gone back to sleep, and he didn’t say much, just that he was thirsty and his eyes burned. I don’t think he has any idea what happened to him.”
Weber looked frustrated. “If you just allow me to perform a little procedure—”
Luke raised his hand. “We have had this conversation. Unless it’s to save his life, the answer won’t change.”
Weber turned to leave the room. “Fine.”
“Any progress on exactly what happened?”
“No.” Weber left.
“Not big on charm that one,” said Omar, who then paid attention to one of Evan’s readings on the screen in front of him. “He’s dreaming.”
Luke looked back at the young man in the bed, and wondered where Evan’s mind was.
* * * * *
Evan looked around his apartment from his bed. It must have been a bright day outside because shafts of light dissected his room down the middle. Usually that would be a bad thing because he would have been up all night earning his rent, but today for some reason, he felt like being outside.