With those items in hand, Darius ran out of the room and back the way he’d come.
It took him just five minutes to reach the cryo room. He stopped inside the entrance and called out, “I’ve got clothes!” He was already scanning the rows of cryo pods, looking for Cassandra’s.
But all of the previously illuminated pods were now dark and dormant. That meant the heaters would be offline too. A jolt of adrenaline kicked Darius’s heart rate up. He was too late. “Cass!”
Chapter 4
“I’m h-here,” Cassandra replied, shivering.
Relief coursed through Darius at the sound of his daughter’s voice.
“‘Bout t-time you sh-showed up!” the man said.
“Hang on, Cass. I’m going to try to get up to you.”
“Hey, what about me?” the man asked.
“I’ll get to you as soon as I ca...” Darius trailed off as movement flickered through his peripheral vision. He turned toward it, and brought his rifle up. “Hey, who’s there!”
A naked woman appeared, drifting out from behind a frozen corpse. She was using the statuesque bodies to pull herself through the room, careening from one to the next.
“I c-can’t f-feel my h-hands,” she said.
It was the woman whose pod had been at ground level. The hysterical one. Darius grimaced and hurried over to her. He released his rifle once more and grabbed her arm to halt her momentum. “Here.” He unrolled his bundle of clothes and passed her a pair of socks and men’s underwear. “Put these on.”
She nodded jerkily and reached clumsily for the articles. Darius looked on with a frown, waiting impatiently while she struggled to put on the socks and then the underwear. “Now this,” he said, and handed her one of the jumpsuits. A pair of socks slipped out of his bundle and began floating away. He snatched them back and looked up to see if the woman needed any help.
“Do you mind?” she said.
“Sorry—” he looked away, embarrassed. She was naked; of course she didn’t want him to watch her get dressed.
“No, the zipper,” she explained. “I can’t open it. My fingers are too cold.”
“Oh.” Darius turned back to her, and opened the zipper running behind a seam in the front of the jumpsuit.
“Hey, w-what about us?” the man called down.
“H-hurry, Dad!” Cassandra added.
“Coming!” Darius replied. To the woman, he said, “You think you can manage from here?”
She nodded, already pulling the first leg of the suit on.
Darius left her and hurried over to the wall where his daughter’s pod was stacked. He released the rifle and pinned the bundle of jumpsuits under one arm. “I’m going to climb up,” he said, already feeling around for a handhold on the pod in front of him. At least he couldn’t feel the cold through the suit. Having found his grip, Darius tried pulling himself up, one-handed, but the magnets in his boots were too strong.
He lifted one foot, heel first, as if he were walking, in order to break the mag-lock. Then he did the same thing with his second foot, and suddenly he was floating free. He pulled up with one hand and drifted slowly to the second row of pods. If he remembered correctly, Cassandra was somewhere along the fourth row.
“Honey, I need you to keep talking so I can find you,” Darius said.
“O-okay. I’m over h-here.”
Darius pulled himself in the direction of the sound and drifted up to the third row.
“Say something else.”
“I’m f-freezing!”
“Good,” Darius kept going in that direction, pulling himself up at an angle this time. He spotted her waving one arm outside her pod. “I see you.” A moment later, he was hovering in front of her pod. “Hey.”
Cassandra was too cold to be embarrassed, but he did his best to keep his eyes averted while he passed her a pair of socks and underwear. “Done?” he asked as soon as her movements quieted.
“Y-yeah.”
He passed her a jumpsuit next, and risked a glance in her direction. She was shivering uncontrollably, fumbling with the zipper. Darius opened it for her, and waited while she pulled the suit on. He hoped it was warmer than it looked. If not, they were going to need to find something more substantial and fast.
Once Cassandra had the jumpsuit on, he helped her pull the zipper up. “How’s that?”
“S-still c-cold,” she said.
“Pull your hands inside the sleeves and hug yourself. She nodded quickly and did as he said. “Good. Stay here.”
“Wait, where are you going?”
“I need to help the others.”
“The woman left.”
“I know. I found her already.”
“No, the other one. She went to see if she could get inside that ship.” Cassandra jerked her chin to the vehicle on the deck below. Darius followed her gaze. That was actually a good idea. The vehicle would have its own power and heating system. It might be a good way to warm everyone up—and to keep them safe from whatever monsters were loose on board. “We’ll go find her in a minute. I’ll be right back. Don’t move, okay?”
Cassandra nodded.
“Hey... where are you?” Darius called.
“O-over h-here.”
Darius turned to the sound and saw the man waving to him from a pod three over from Cassandra’s. “I see you.”
He pulled himself along the row of pods until he was hovering in front of the mystery man. The man was large, fit, and middle-aged, just as he’d seen from a distance. He looked like a body-builder, a picture of health and fitness—not at all what Darius expected from a terminal patient.
“Are you just going to g-gawk at me?”
“Right. Sorry.” Darius handed the man a pair of socks and underwear and waited while he put them on. As soon as he finished, Darius handed him one of the remaining two jumpsuits. The man opened the zipper and pulled the jumpsuit on in a hurry. When he was done, he stuffed his hands under his armpits to keep them warm.
“What’s your name?” he asked, sounding like he was making a supreme effort not to shiver.
“Darius Drake.”
“Blake Nelson,” the man replied, and thrust out a hand. Darius hesitated before accepting the handshake. Blake gripped his ice-cold, armored glove firmly and shook it once before returning his hand to his armpit.
“Nice to meet you,” Darius said.
“Likewise, Spaceman. Did you find out who turned on the lights?”
Darius shook his head. “Not yet. I came back as soon as I found clothes.”
“Thanks for that. Pity you didn’t find any more suits like yours, though.”
“Even if I had, I never would have been able to drag four of them back here.”
“Good point.”
“Where’d the other woman go?” Darius asked. The one who was in the pod near yours?”
“Blondie? She went to check out the shuttle. Said she was going to freeze to death before you came back.”
“Well, she had a good idea, if we can figure out how to get inside and turn the shuttle on, we should be able to warm up fast.” Darius remembered the foreign language on his HUD, and suddenly he doubted the chances of that. There was no way they’d be able to operate complex systems in a foreign language.
Blake looked skeptical. “I don’t think she’s an astronaut, so the chances of her figuring out how to do that aren’t good. She’ll be lucky just to find a way in.”
“Then we’d better find her before she really does freeze to death,” Darius said.
“After you.”
“I’m going to get my daughter first. Meet you down there.”
“Sure,” Blake said.
“Be careful maneuvering yourself in here. You don’t want to end up drifting in the middle of the room.”
“No kidding.”
Darius pulled himself back over to Cassandra’s pod. He found her shivering inside, hugging herself as he’d told her to do. “Come on, honey. We need to get you down.”
She nodded jerkily. “‘K-kay.”
“Put your arms around my neck.” Cassandra reached for him, and he helped her with one arm, while holding onto her pod with the other. “You’re cold!” she screamed.
“I know. It won’t be long. Ready?”
“Go.”
Darius pushed himself back down as fast as he could, being careful not to drift out of reach of the pods. The deck rushed up below him faster than anticipated, and his knees buckled on impact, but the motors in his suit whirred and cushioned that impact, holding him up when his legs wouldn’t.
Darius turned and walked toward the shuttle. He could feel Cassandra shivering against him. “Almost there,” he said. They walked by a pair of dead people, one of them headless, the other missing an arm, and Cassandra screamed.
“What happened to them?!”
Darius shook his head. “I don’t know honey.” Remembering Blake and the unidentified woman he’d already given a jumpsuit to, he looked around quickly to locate them. The woman was busy pulling herself through the open door of the cryo room, while Blake was nowhere to be seen.
“Blake!” Darius called.
“Over here, Spaceman. You’ve got to see this.”
Darius followed the sound of his voice around the side of the shuttle. As he rounded the shuttle, Blake appeared standing in front of a broad viewport that had been hidden by the shuttle. He’d obviously figured out how to steal a pair of mag boots from one of the bodies.
The view from this window was a lot more impressive than the one Darius had seen in the crew quarters.
“Is that Earth?” Cassandra asked, pointing to the planet that took up most of the viewport.
Darius walked steadily up to the window, his eyes wide and blinking.
“I don’t recognize any of the continents,” Blake said as Darius stopped beside him. “And the sun is blue—where the hell are we?” Blake blew out a stream of condensing moisture that fogged the viewport.
“I’ll tell you where we’re not,” Darius replied. “We’re not in our solar system anymore.”
Chapter 5
The planet below was mottled with craggy grays, white clouds and glaciers, and temperate regions ranging from red and purple to green and yellow. Vast blue oceans peeked out between the landmasses. Definitely not Earth... Darius thought.
“So...” Blake trailed off uncertainly. “If we’re not in our solar system anymore, then we’re probably not on a space station. It must be a spaceship. I mean, something would have had to bring us here, right?”
Darius nodded slowly. “But why did we come here? And where is here?”
“Got me,” Blake replied.
“This might explain the foreign language.”
“Say what?”
“The heads-up-display inside my helmet is written in a language I’ve never seen before.”
“What, like Russian?”
“No, I don’t recognize the alphabet.”
“So maybe it’s Greek. What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’d recognize Greek, and it’s important because language takes a long time to change. This spaceship must have been built a very long time after we went into cryo.”
“That makes no sense,” Blake objected. “We would have woken up on Earth if centuries had passed. It wouldn’t take hundreds of years for people to find a cure for cancer! Finding a way to travel to another star represents more of a technological leap than that.”
“And yet, here we are, orbiting a planet around another star. Maybe something happened on Earth. Something that would stop anyone from waking us up.”
“So instead of waking up all the terminal patients in cryo to help repopulate the species, they thought, hey, why don’t we build a spaceship and fly them all to another planet instead?”
“We’re all dying, so how could we help repopulate the species?” Cassandra asked.
Darius felt a familiar stab of pain with that reminder. His daughter had been given two months to live when they’d gone into cryo. That was still true now.
Darius shook his head. “Interstellar travel takes a long time. They’d have to put people in cryo for the trip, anyway, or they’d run out of food and supplies before they ever arrived. Whoever brought us here probably thought it would make more sense to keep us frozen. They probably planned to explain everything once we arrived.”
“Yeah, okay, but then how come there’s so many dead people in here? Shouldn’t the crew have been in cryo too?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Darius said. “They’d have to leave someone to man the ship, a skeleton crew. The dead people we’re seeing are probably that crew, or their children, or even their children’s children—depending how long it took for us to get here from Earth.”
“So we’re on a generation ship?” Blake asked.
“Looks like, yeah,” Darius replied.
“What’s that?” Cassandra asked.
“It’s a large spaceship that goes on a very long voyage, long enough that multiple generations are born and die on board before they arrive at their destination.”
“Snaz!” Cassandra said.
Darius nodded. “Yeah, real snaz.”
“You mean mega snaz,” Cassandra said.
Blake snorted. “When were you born, kid?”
“Twenty thirty-three. What about you?” Cassandra replied.
“I was born in nineteen ninety-eight.”
Cassandra’s nose wrinkled. “You’re a fossil!”
“My youngest used to call me a dinosaur. Daddy Rex. She used to say everything was mega snaz, too.” The crow’s feet around Blake’s eyes pinched together as he recounted that.
“Did she go into cryo with you?” Darius asked.
Blake arched an eyebrow at him. “How could she? I’m the one who was terminal, not her. She’d have to have real bad luck to be dying at the same time as her old man.”
Darius grimaced. “I guess so.”
Blake’s eyes pinched into slits. “Speaking of, how did you two end up together?”
“Stage four small cell lung cancer,” Darius said, jerking a thumb at himself. “And stage four metastatic renal cancer,” he added, pointing to Cassandra.
“Did you guys catch it from each other or something?”
“Just our luck, I guess,” Darius replied. He was trying hard not to let his nervousness show. Blake had obviously been forced to leave his family behind when he’d gone into cryo.
Until he knew more, Darius wasn’t going to advertise the fact that he’d used his money to break the rules.
“We’d better go find Blondie,” Blake said, already turning away from the viewport.
They crossed the deck to the back of the shuttle together.
“How are you doing, Cass?” Darius asked as they went. He hoped she didn’t have frostbite.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re not cold?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
Darius frowned and checked the temperature readings on his HUD.
28°
-2°
“Someone turned up the heat,” Darius said.
“Now that you mention it, I do feel warmer,” Blake said. “I thought it was just the jumpsuit. How can you tell from inside your suit?” Blake asked as he examined a control panel beside the rear hatch of the shuttle.
Darius explained about the readings in his helmet.
“Then it’s almost above freezing. That’s good.”
“Yes and no,” Darius replied. “These bodies are going to start to rot, and all of the frozen blood in the air is going to melt. We could get contaminated.”
“Hmmm,” Blake said. “All the more reason to get this shuttle open. Maybe we can hide in here. Aha... I think I’ve figured it out.”
Blake touched a button on the control panel, and the hatch slid open, revealing a small chamber and another hatch. “Damn it! There’s another door.”
“It’s an airlock,” Darius repli
ed. “It opens in stages.”
“Right, that makes sense. Let’s get the inner door open,” Blake said.
Before any of them could climb inside, the door swished open and someone walked out in an armored black space suit, the same as the one Darius was wearing.
“Blondie?” Blake asked.
“My name is Lisa, not that you bothered to remember.”
“Hey, what flew up your nose?”
Lisa ignored him, and her helmet turned to Darius. “Darius, you’re back.”
She knew his name. This had to be the one who’d woken up right after him. He remembered introducing himself to her. “Yeah, I’m back. I found some clothes for you,” he said, and removed the bundle under the arm that wasn’t holding Cassandra.
“Thanks, but I’ll stick with my suit for now. I bet it’s warmer than those jumpsuits. Safer too. Where’s the other woman?” she asked, turning back to Blake.
He shrugged.
“She left the cryo room already,” Darius said.
“And you didn’t stop her?”
“I guess we didn’t think about it...” Darius replied.
“Did you find any sign of what killed the crew?”
“Something big, with very sharp claws,” Darius said.
“Great,” Blake muttered.
“Any survivors?” Lisa asked.
“Not yet, but there must be someone on board. It’s been heating up in here, so someone’s bringing the ship’s systems back online.”
“Then we’d better find them. You should get your daughter some mag boots,” Lisa said, nodding to Cassandra. “You’re going to want your hands free if we run into trouble.”
“Yeah... did you find any spare boots on the shuttle?”
“Attached to space suits, but I don’t think they’ll fit. She’s a little too short.”
“Just grab some boots off the nearest corpse and let’s go,” Blake said.
Darius grimaced at the thought, but looked around. The nearest corpse was too tall, and the boots would be too big. He needed to find someone closer to Cassandra’s height. He went clomping through the room, checking bodies as he went.
Broken Worlds: The Awakening (A Sci-Fi Mystery) Page 4