by H. J. Lawson
Only three colors remained, and she watched as Treavyn scanned the board, putting the pieces together.
“The orange, I feel the worst for. Most of that sorry lot probably won’t see it until it’s too late. Their ships are too packed, supplies too low to sustain them for the duration the mission requires.”
Only two colors left now, and his eyes began to widen as realization struck. She could jump to the chase, but she didn’t owe this man any kindness.
“The black, of course, are the crippled remains of ten once-viable craft. The very same that I see when I look out this window.” She pointed out into the field even though she knew he couldn’t see them from where he sat; his eyes still transfixed on the last mark. One purple in a sea of life and death.
“But of all of it, this one bothers me the most. This one purple marker represents something that eats at my core. Those people out there,” again she pointed out the window, “they can’t help but act like animals.”
Treavyn swallowed hard and tore his gaze away from the board. When he looked at her, she saw the tears welling in his eyes. It was a frightening sight coming from a man of his size. His hands shook, and his shoulders trembled as the sobs came, unchecked.
Long years of service and leadership had prepared her for moments such as these. She was a kind woman, hardened by the choices she had to make and the sentences she had to hand down as an effective leader in the military machine.
“But something about this craft is different from the rest,” she said. “Sensor readings suggest that a launch was initiated with a civilian payload of only five to ten persons. With a minimum capacity of forty people and a maximum sustainable capacity of eighty-five, it just didn’t add up.”
Treavyn looked away from her and whispered, “Please.”
As big as he was, the man before her was a sort of an enigma. She couldn’t tell if the waterworks were real or some elaborate ruse. Treavyn Dennessee, by all reports, was practically a genius. If he was half as smart as the file indicated, he should have been able to read her for what she was, a no-nonsense kind of gal who didn’t allow emotion to dictate that which only discipline should. The tears did nothing for his case, but at the same time she couldn’t help but feel that these tears weren’t for her.
Still, she continued, “Of course, my first move was to investigate Salazar and Timmons, the two responsible for initiating the launch sequences of the spacecraft. They’re no soldiers, now, mind you, so I’m sure you’ll understand when I tell you that they aren’t taking the loss of life out there very well. Even men and women who are trained to handle loss often struggle with the consequences.”
She stopped to thumb through the file. “Can you imagine what an interrogation must have been like for them? These are your colleagues, after all. You’ve known them for…” She flipped through a few more pages. “Five years now?”
“Please, you don’t understand,” Treavyn pleaded.
“Of course, you must know by now that we tracked the communications relay to your workstation and that we are aware you walked someone aboard that ship through the launch sequence override.”
“There’s a good explanation for that—” Treavyn blurted out, ready to tell her everything.
“Not yet, Mr. Dennessee,” she said, her tone growing sterner. “Whatever reasons you had for putting your own interests above those of our mission are not your biggest concern at this juncture.”
“Ma’am?” he asked.
“This particular craft you were so intent on getting off the ground is in trouble. Whatever you did, whatever you had them do to initiate the launch sequence manually, it was the very thing that seems to have sealed their fate.”
A sick, ghostly torpor washed over Treavyn’s features as the blood drained from his cheeks.
“You see, everything you folks have done here, it’s great. A real marvel, really,” she admitted. “I really think space tourism would have taken off if you don’t mind my pun. Of course, when the stuff hit the fan and this virus started spreading like wildfire, we had no choice but to step in and enact the break-the-glass measures that were cooked up as a result of the expanding doomsday scenarios that are all run behind closed doors.”
“What happened? Please tell me, it’s important,” Treavyn muttered.
“When we modified the ships, we changed the autopilot controls to match those scenario parameters. There’s no way you could have known; it was classified. We had access to the source code before any of this went down.”
“Please tell me, Colonel Jones, tell me they made it. They’re our only real hope.”
She tossed the manila folder to the ground and pointed her sharp finger at his chest. “I am done being interrupted, Mr. Dennessee. Do you think you are the only one with a plan? Do you even realize what you’ve done? Whoever those people are, whatever their intent, they are drifting in an orbital debris field. The Mountain tells me the craft is being pummeled to pieces and we can’t reacquire remote control. There is nothing we can do and our estimates put their ship integrity at forty-five percent at best.”
“Oh no, oh no.” Treavyn put his hands to his ears and began rocking back and forth.
“As far as I’m concerned, that’s eighty-five lives your actions are responsible for,” she said. “I’ll take my licks for the black and the red, hell…even the orange. We should have been ready, and that’s my fault. It’s something I have to live with. But if I find out you were responsible for that breach, this is all coming down on you, and you’ll wish those creatures would take you before I’m through.”
Another timid knock sounded on the oak door.
“Enter,” she said, perturbed by the untimely interruption.
The young blonde captain acting as her protocol officer poked her head into the suite. “Ma’am?” she asked her tone the epitome of politeness.
“Yes?”
“You asked to be notified if anything changed. Major Driggs just called up. He says purple is on the move.”
Chapter 3 – Michael Anderle
Kearyn
I stumbled into the medical room. The autonomous medical unit was in the corner, a long white box against the steel walls next to it.
The walls would be much easier to clean when blood splattered over them, I thought. I had heard of these units but had never used one. I had told Walt to keep playing with the controls on the bridge, that I was going to check out the ship for an instruction manual or something. What I wanted was a way to save the team.
Screw it, let’s be honest, I wanted a way to save myself.
Since Grace mentioned skin-to-skin contact or breathing in the virus as possible vectors, I was pretty sure biting or whatever the heck it did to my hand was a third possibility. If I asked her, I would guess I was a prime candidate for infection.
So much for this group being the ones to save the planet. Now, I was reduced to protecting me, myself and I.
I closed the medical room doors behind me and keyed in a locking sequence. I pulled my hand out of my pocket and grimaced; the contagion was spreading up my arm. My hand had puffed up to twice its normal size, and there was no way to get a wedding ring on that bad boy right now.
I used my left hand to key in the normal sequence, and nothing happened. I looked around, confused, and hastily started looking for any other visible buttons.
“Can I help you?” a feminine voice asked.
Rolling my eyes, I answered, “Yes, I need to enter the medical pod for a quick assessment and possible application to help an injury.”
The pod door opened, and I finished ditching my clothes, leaving them on the ground. I slid into the pod and hit the green button that said ‘close’ on the inside. The voice, quieter this time, spoke again. “We have multiple legal questions to go through.”
“Skip them.”
“I’m sorry, but since you are awake, I need to get your approval to apply any and all necessary efforts to address what I may find.”
“Hell, wh
at is the worst you can do?” I replied with what I hoped wasn’t too snarky an answer for the A.I.
“Death.”
Oh, guess the joke is on me. “Fine, I approve every effort up to death.” The A.I. and I finished the last couple of legal questions to confirm I understood I might not wake up, and then I heard a gyro motor whine and detected the hiss of gas.
Then, I went to sleep.
Colonel Jones
“What do you mean purple is moving?” Colonel Jones asked the blonde captain as she came up to her desk.
“Ma’am, it is moving, and moving erratically. Like someone who doesn’t know how to fly too well is playing with the controls.”
Colonel Jones looked to Treavyn Dennessee. “Do you have an explanation?”
“They lost equipment, they lost people, they lost A.I. operational help or don’t know how to turn on the A.I. help,” Treavyn speculated, reeling off one staccato answer after the next. He shrugged. “They are our only hope; now they could be our final death.”
“Look, Mr. Dennessee, you aren’t making any sense. If you did something intended to help, for whatever reason, I need to know. I do not forget the eighty-five people and neither should you.”
Treavyn Dennessee breathed out heavily, then, his voice cracking, he croaked, “The virus is an embryonic implantation. It is passed by one infected human to another once it has reached maturity.”
“How long does it take to reach maturity?” she asked him, her voice still firm.
He turned to look at her. “Seventy-two hours.”
“So, seventy-two hours after they become ugly, we have infection problems?”
He shook his head sadly. “No, you misunderstand me, Colonel. That is seventy-two hours after the person’s original disease. If a person is especially susceptible, it will be less—sometimes significantly less. For those who are resilient, it will take longer, and we believe we found a DNA marker that confirms there are something like antibodies that fight the contagion in the first place. Of course, the best geneticist we have needed time to work on the problem.”
“You are about to tell me he or she is up on purple?”
He nodded his head. “Yes, she is.”
“Who?”
“My fiancée, Grace.” He paused. “She was in her fourth year at Johns Hopkins and was here on break. The contagion happened, and we all started working on vectors and understanding the causality. Then…” He paused a moment, going inside himself. Colonel Jones almost allowed herself to feel for him.
Then she stopped the impulse cold. She didn’t have time to babysit anyone. “Then what, Mr. Dennessee?”
Startled back to the present, Treavyn answered, “Then Mark declared we were all being asses. If we were to succeed, a few eggs would have to be broken. He left the room, and we weren’t sure what he was going to do, so we ignored him. He would do this from time to time, you see.”
“I’m not here to learn about Mark’s idiosyncrasies, Mr. Dennessee.”
“Right, sorry, I understand. Mark came back four hours later, convinced he had the answer. We crowded around him, and he triumphantly showed us these marks around his forearm. He said he had found an infected girl by herself in an alley, and allowed himself to get caught. He said the infected grabbed his arm and he could feel something like a nibble along with the pain. He claimed this little five-foot-nothing teenage girl was too strong for her size. By the time he broke from her grip, he had the mark he was showing us. We kept him quarantined until, of course, he was no longer Mark, and we put him to rest.”
“How?”
“Asphyxiation,” Treavyn answered. “We dropped a lot of Halon from the emergency fire system and killed the oxygen in the quarantine room. It kills them as quickly as it kills us.”
“That,” the captain said, interrupting the story, “was pretty damned brave.”
Treavyn just nodded his head. “It gave us plenty to work with, and we think we have a possible solution. However, we need time and opportunity to complete it.”
“And your solution,” Colonel Jones pointed to her board, “is flying around in figure-eights in outer space?” Treavyn nodded. “If they figure out how to fly, what else besides time do they need?” she asked him.
Treavyn shrugged. “Believe it or not, they need a live infected.”
Grace
“I didn’t leave Treavyn behind to be stopped by a stupid password!” I huffed in exasperation. Maybe the medical area was easier to use. I got up from the computer terminal I was sitting at and made my way up the ladder to reach the main deck and walked down the hall. I found the medical office and hit the controls to open the door.
Nothing.
I hit them again, and again, and then I pounded on the controls three times before I got control of myself. This was so frustrating, so very, very frustrating.
Then, I noticed the door had been locked from the inside. Confused and worried, I made my way to the bridge. “Walt?”
“Yes?”
“Do you have any idea what you are doing?”
“Yes, I’m missing things. At the moment, I’ll take that over hitting them as we were before.”
“Okay, I can’t fault that logic.” I slid into the chair next to him. “Have you seen Kearyn?”
“Yeah, she said she was going to look for a How to Fly Spaceships for Dummies book or something. She’s been gone a while.” Walt didn’t look my way. He seemed to be getting the controls figured out. We made a somewhat graceful arc and turned so that the sun was visible in the lower left-hand corner of the main screen.
“Do you know where we are going?”
“Certainly, I have it figured out now,” he replied, confidence in his voice. Then, “Maybe. Probably, even.”
“Where?”
He pointed toward the main screen. “That way. Toward the leading group, at least I think so.”
“What if you are wrong?” I asked.
He looked over at me and asked, “Have you seen Star Trek? We might be on our own version of a five-year mission. Without one of our engines, we aren’t going to make good time. So I hope you have something to keep you busy.”
Yes, I thought, yes I do.
Chapter 4 – Emma Right
Kearyn
I stared at the growing mess of what should have looked like my arm and winced. Strangely the gnawing feeling, as if insects were chewing at my flesh from the inside, had subsided somewhat. Had the nerves died in the affected area? Before I could work out what to do next, I’d need some heavy meds.
Someone had either locked the medical door from the inside or had added a layer of security so most of us couldn’t access the medical supplies.
Before I could think further, my gut twisted and I doubled over. Just then the ship jolted. For the umpteenth time, something hit us. At the rate the meteors were bombarding the craft, I might not have to worry about the virus that had invaded my system.
“Kearyn Jones!”
I swiveled around. Brody again. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was tailing me.
“Everything cool?” I mustered a smile which I hoped didn’t come off as a grimace.
“You look like sh—”
“You don’t look so hot yourself, stud. I just hit my head against the railing.” I pointed to the steel railing which spanned the bridge to the medical quarters. Should he report my infected condition to the powers that be here—an arbitrary enough group—I could just consider floating into outer space as my last vacation. I bit down on my lip and kept a straight face.
He squinted at me as if trying to read the truth in my eyes. It was dim in these passages, so I hoped he’d miss the lack of a bump anywhere on my head if he volunteered to check. Word had it that Brody liked to act as the medic when the doctor was missing.
“You’re going to see Grace?” he asked. Due to her medical background, we’d lumped Grace into the “medic group.” We’d need to consolidate all the scientific knowledge we had to be one up on this virus.
“Matter of fact, yes,” I lied.
“She’s out in the control room. Monroe’s ill. We’re not sure why.”
Without warning a giant sneeze burst from me. Reflexively, I brought my wrist to my nose.
When I glanced at Brody’s face, his eyes had widened. “You catching that cold Monroe’s got?”
“I’ve been warding it off since before we left. I need to get something for it.”
“I’ll help you look. No need to bother the medics. They’re in the quarantine room checking out the samples they collected from Jacob.”
“We’re not authorized. I tried the door before, and it wouldn’t open.” Was he testing me, to get me into trouble? Brody had had several run-ins with my sister, the infamous Colonel Jones, who’d stopped at nothing to get the mission—her mission—accomplished. That he might have a grudge against me wouldn’t faze me even though everyone here was more than aware of the sentiments my sister had for me. Thanks to my relationship with Treavyn. “Can we keep this between us?”
He winked. “I’m not going to say anything cos you need vitamins and non-prescriptive.”
“You know the code?”
He raised his eyebrow in reply. “We have to trust each other if we’re going to survive.”
I grunted.
He trudged up the stairs, the soles of his rubber shoes thumping against the metal steps. Was it my imagination or was Brody limping? In pain? It could explain why he was in this section of the spaceship.
When we got to the top, he punched the numbers on the keypad to unlock the door. So they did activate the codes here. We’d agreed earlier to leave this room accessible in case of emergency, but someone had authorized this added security. Was it Mark? Grace? Or someone with more political aspirations?
As the door slid open, we were hit by the pungent smell of chemicals that only medical facilities can create. One wall of the treatment area held panels with buttons and knobs, presumably to control the mechanical instruments and life support devices here. Five stainless steel beds lay side by side.