Orbs IV_Exodus_Post Apocalyptic Science Fiction Survival Thriller

by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

  “Maybe.” Bouma shivered at the thought. “But she’s awake and alive now. What if the nanobots wake up, too?”

  The Rhino dipped and came up hard with a violent jerk. Ort smacked against the inner wall of the vehicle and cursed.

  “Sorry,” Diego called back. “Terrain is getting a little rougher. We’re going to have to slow down.”

  “Suspension is already shot,” Ort added. “No use beating up this poor thing more than we have to. She’s the only wheels we have, and we’re toast without her.”

  Ort’s simple statement hit Bouma hard. They might be the last hope for humanity.

  And they’d already lost Jeff and David.

  God, he wanted to curse and shout. His fingers slipped from Holly’s. They trembled as he curled them into fists. The Organics, and the arrogance of those boys. He should’ve never tried to convince them they’d be warriors someday. Then maybe they wouldn’t have run off in a heroic attempt to save the Sunspot.

  “I screwed up,” he said aloud.

  Holly gave him a perplexed look. “What?”

  “Back in Cheyenne Mountain, I told Jeff and David they could be soldiers. That they were soldiers. Look at what happened.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “They were just boys. They didn’t deserve to go out like that.” A sudden heat flushed through his face. “Shit… I just keep thinking, what if they’re still out there, wandering around and wondering where we are?”

  “We did everything we could for them,” Holly said, a sheen of wetness covering her eyes.

  “Did we?”

  Bouma raised a brow.

  “We searched for them, but you saw that blast. And right now, we’ve got others relying on us.” Holly nodded toward the two sleeping children curled up in their seats.

  Bouma brushed a fresh tear from her eye and then pulled her close. Together, they sat in silence while Diego and Ort consulted with Sonya regarding their path forward. Sophie and Emanuel continued discussing the nanobots and what her seemingly miraculous recovery might mean.

  Trying to reconcile their unknown future with their disastrous past, Bouma had trouble focusing on the intense thoughts roiling through his head. He couldn’t draw himself away from the images of Jeff and David in his mind’s eye. He could picture them walking across the desert until they collapsed.

  Maybe they were still out there, but Holly and Emanuel were both right. Their mission was to find the NTC colony. If they were successful, he could then launch a mission to find Jeff and David.

  Hold on, boys, Bouma thought. We’ll find you.

  — 11 —

  Athena sipped water and swished it around, savoring the cool liquid the Organics had come to Earth to collect. Something humans had taken for granted for so long. And now billions upon billions of humans and animals had perished for the aliens’ lust for the resource.

  She sat in the cracked leather chair on the bridge of the Ghost of Atlantis, looking over what was left of her crew, and waiting for Griffin, Malone, and Taylor to return from the hatch leading to outside.

  Almost all of her crew had huddled into the room to wait for the three soldiers. The stuffy air was ripe with a smell no one had really gotten used to. “Tolerate” would have been a generous way of describing their reaction to the constant stench of body odor and human waste.

  Of the original one hundred and twenty NTC sailors, this was all that remained. There were just seventeen of them inside the cramped bridge.

  Half the crew had accompanied Captain Rick Noble during Operation Redemption, while the other half had remained behind. Then a storm had damaged the vessel, leaving it stranded on the ocean floor until the waters receded, which hadn’t taken long. Most of the world’s oceans had been drained to half their capacity by the start of Operation Redemption.

  The damage to the submarine had been severe: cracking bulkheads had flooded several compartments with sand, destroying most of their communications equipment. They were deaf and blind, and the inside temperature was nearly ninety degrees. Fans connected to camouflaged solar panels in the sand above the vessel helped circulate some of the air, but it was still almost unbearable, especially with the stench.

  She scrutinized the filthy faces looking back at her on the bridge. Their features appeared almost ghoulish, illuminated as they were by lanterns. Trish Hodges sat next to their now useless communications equipment, a curtain of long hair hanging over one side of her face as she watched Athena.

  Bobby Posey, their senior engineer, or at least the most experienced engineer still left alive, sat next to Trish. The pale man rested his beard-covered chin in his hands.

  Sitting behind them were Farthing, Webb, and Stokes. They all shared the same melancholy looks. Stokes’s once round cheeks and rotund belly had deflated. His cheekbones now stuck out of his gaunt, grime-covered face, giving him a near skeletal appearance. He coughed and held up a hand to cover his mouth. Like most on the GOA, the navigation officer was ill.

  Over the tap of the transmitter and the sporadic coughs came the sound of footfalls in the corridor outside the bridge. Griffin ducked under the overhead and took his helmet off, revealing a dark-skinned face and sharp brown eyes. He scrunched his wide shoulders to fit through the hatchway.

  “Corporal, those things are gone,” he reported. “Malone and Taylor are still topside, making sure they don’t come back, but with the sun about to rise, I’d say this is our best shot to move.”

  “Move?” Trish asked, looking away from the Morse Code transmitter.

  Posey’s hands fell off his beard and he stood with an incredulous look on his face. “What do you mean, ‘Move’?” he asked.

  Athena also stood. Her ribs hurt from the sudden movement, and a wave of dizziness rinsed over her. The can of beans and a few glasses of water had helped, but she was still exhausted and dehydrated.

  She walked over to a metal table in the center of the room. Shattered monitors that had once provided access to data, intel, and visuals of the outside hung from the bulkheads. They were down to using paper maps to guide them on their raids into Los Angeles.

  Griffin, Trish, and Posey met her at the table, while the others gathered around to listen.

  “Alexia has located an underground garage that might yield some vehicles that survived the initial blast. If we can get to them, they could take us to the Pelican AFB military installation, where other survivors are taking refuge.” Athena pointed at the map. “With their help, we will actually have a fighting chance to get out of here. We just need to make it to Pelican and—”

  “To Pelican?” Posey asked, cutting her off. “With everything the Organics have out there?” He chuckled, nervously. “You lost Walker just walking into a deserted city. Now you want us to believe you can take us all to Pelican?”

  Athena looked at the engineer, but noticed the other frightened faces over his shoulder. Aside from Griffin, no one looked like they were up for another fight. She understood their fear, but it was madness, living in these conditions.

  “We can’t stay here and wait to die,” Athena said. She paused to look at Posey. “Actually, you can if you want, but I’m not planning on it. So if you want to stay behind, that’s on you. I’m going to take a group to get these vehicles, then head to this base. Alexia is working on a plan for us to escape the planet.”

  “Escape the planet? In what?” Posey snorted.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say when you cut me off.”

  This time Posey shrugged. “I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: that AI is going to get us killed.” He turned to look at the others. “Alexia’s going to get us all killed. I say we stay here and wait for the Organics to leave Earth. They can’t possibly take all the water. Once they leave, we will head into Los Angeles and start over.”

  “I agree,” said Collins, another communications officer. “I say we stay here and wait it out.”

  Athena listened to her crew argue back and forth for sever
al minutes before she silenced them with a fist to the metal table.

  “Look around you,” she said, gesturing toward the cracked monitors and dented bulkheads. “There’s nothing left for us here. We have maybe two or three weeks’ worth of food left, and a week of water. The Organics aren’t going to leave any behind, and even if they do, Earth is already dead. There’s not enough water left on Earth to make it habitable anymore.”

  Griffin took off his helmet and set it down with a clank. “Most of you haven’t been out there, but I have. There isn’t anything to go back to in LA, either. We can’t just start over.”

  Posey and Collins remained defiant.

  “You leave this submarine again, and you will die,” Posey said.

  “We stay in this submarine, and we will die,” Athena said.

  She looked over at Trish and then Griffin, the two people she knew she could count on. They both nodded back at her with reassurance.

  “We should have done this three months ago when Doctor Winston and her team took the NTC Sunspot,” Athena said. “The time for hiding is over. I’m getting those vehicles. When I come back, those of you that want to live are welcome to come with.”

  ***

  “You ready?” Jeff asked. He crouched behind a piece of metal that jutted out from the ground like a robotic shark fin.

  David nodded his helmet.

  Before them lay the hulking wreck of the Sunspot, its hull split open, the metal peeling outward. Globs of plastic had melted and then solidified in the dirt. Chunks of metal littered the ground, like an alien junkyard.

  He checked his HUD for an oxygen readout, swallowing hard at the report of less than ten percent. An animalistic urge told him to run straight for the Sunspot and find an oxygen canister before he suffocated, but Bouma had always told him a soldier didn’t rush into battles he couldn’t win. A real soldier gathered intel and made decisions based off weighing his options. Strategy and tactics were just as important as firepower.

  “Stay behind me at all times,” Jeff said.

  David nodded again.

  They crept through the debris like cats sneaking up on a mouse. When they got close to the main wreckage, Jeff ordered his brother onto the ground. Together, they crawled over the red sand, keeping as low as possible. Piece by ugly piece, they snuck through the scattered remains of the ship until at last they were just fifty meters from the bulk of what had once been the Sunspot.

  While their EVA suits isolated noise they made to within their suit, Jeff still whispered as he pointed to a section of the Sunspot near the stern, where what remained of the biomes could be seen. He recognized the twisted remains of one of the turrets. “That’s where we were before we escaped.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” David said.

  The hull near the turret was singed. Teardrops of melted slag had reformed along its sides. Jeff hoped there might be a couple oxygen canisters left there. It was the only shot they had, from what he could see.

  Of course, to get there, they’d have to sneak past the half-dozen spiders clambering over the hull. Through the wounds in the side of the ship, he could see the shapes of more aliens sifting through the shadows, their blue flesh illuminating the guts of the ship as they moved about.

  Near the bow, outside the broken hull, stood a scorpion-like alien with a huge catapult tail. Enormous arachnid legs arched from an armor-covered thorax. The monster’s head looked vaguely birdlike with a falcon’s beak, though multiple stalks sprouted from it, each carrying a gleaming eye. The beast seemed to be staring off into the distance, as if guarding the Sunspot.

  Jeff pressed himself lower against the soil and continued moving. He kept his eyes on the glistening blue scorpion alien. Its huge muscled legs shifted slightly, and its head started to swivel around.

  Grabbing David’s wrist, Jeff pulled them both up and sprinted across the rest of the dry landscape. With a leap, he cleared the last meter, pulling David with him, and the pair tumbled into a hole in the side of the Sunspot. His body rolled across the deck, kicking up a cloud of dirt.

  Had they been seen?

  He tried to manage his breathing, listening for the scratch, scrape, or any otherworldly wails.

  Beams of light penetrated the wounds in the ship, illuminating columns of dust. The noises of the aliens resonated through the metal bulkheads and up into Jeff’s suit. Goosebumps prickled his skin as he waded into the darkness.

  A huge thumping soon followed.

  Jeff pressed himself into the shadows and pulled David with him, hoping the darkness would disguise them. They hadn’t made it far enough inside the ship to hide from all the huge breaches in the hull of the Sunspot. He feared the scorpion thing would look through one of those holes and see him or David. The deck shook, and bits of sand danced with each walloping tremble.

  David looked up at him like he was about to ask a question. Jeff pressed a finger against his faceshield to silence him. His legs threatened to give out from under him as the noise of the beast grew closer, the vibrations growing louder and more violent.

  Jeff held a breath in his chest when he saw one of the massive legs through the hole in the side of the ship.

  The scorpion monster halted, and Jeff slowly let out his breath.

  Please, keep moving.

  The tree trunk legs pulsated blue outside their hiding spot. Seconds ticked by, taking what seemed to Jeff like an eternity. David squeezed his hand.

  The Organic wasn’t looking toward the ship, but facing away. Maybe on guard, or watching for signs of more humans, or something else.

  It didn’t matter. All that did was that the alien hadn’t seen them.

  At least, not yet. The sooner they found their oxygen and got out of here, the better.

  Jeff’s suit beeped in his ear. His oxygen was down to five percent. He dropped David’s hand and motioned for him to follow.

  They snuck on through the Sunspot’s remains. Metal creaked all around them, and dust swirled in from all the wounds in the hull. The dwindling number on Jeff’s HUD kept him moving through every obstacle they faced.

  The tap and scratch of spiders inspecting the vessel followed them through the corridors. Jeff tried his best to gauge where the creatures were, but found it difficult, given the way the noises echoed through the metal and his suit. And with half the floors missing, it was almost impossible to navigate through the treacherous fallen beams and twisted wires.

  He tried to remember where the turret was. That was the direction they needed to be going in, but with most of the ladders missing, Jeff hadn’t seen a good way to get up to that deck. After a couple minutes of crawling under fallen panels and pushing through jumbles of burned computer panels, an answer presented itself to him.

  Jeff looked up where there had been a set of ladders leading up four decks. It looked like three of those decks had completely collapsed, and they could see all the way up to the top deck. The space appeared cavernous. A length of the top deck had fallen down so it was nearly straight up from the level they were on. Pieces of pipe and scaffolding hung off it. Some swung in the wind tunneling through the devastated ship. At the top of the deck was the turret room and, next to it, the armory where they had got their suits.

  There might not even be any oxygen up there. All the canisters had probably exploded along with the ship. How much oxygen would he use up just trying to make that climb? His HUD was still flashing red. Oxygen levels were now under four percent.

  What was it like to suffocate? Did it hurt?

  If he fell, even with Mars’s weakened gravity, he bet it would still hurt. He’d be lucky if he came away from it uninjured. Being injured and trying to survive with Organics around would be a death sentence.

  He wanted all of it to just be a nightmare. A long, terrible nightmare.

  Bravery isn’t about not being afraid.

  Their dad’s words echoed through his head. He sucked in a breath. He was more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. It wasn’t jus
t his life at stake; David’s was at risk, too. But this wasn’t the first time.

  “How much oxygen do you have left?” Jeff whispered.

  “It says six percent. What about you?”

  “Enough.”

  Jeff motioned for David to follow, and they began moving toward the deck-turned-climbing wall. Punctures in the outer hull let a few beams of light cast themselves across the wall, but most of it was obscured in shadows. This would make finding handholds and footholds even more difficult.

  Back in cub scouts, he had gone climbing with his dad and their pack. They had learned the basics of how to scale walls with predetermined routes, and how to rappel down them. Jeff and some of the others boys had been frightened at the time. But Dad had told them not to worry—the climbing harnesses strapped about their waists would catch them if they fell. The people belaying them could always gently lower them back to the ground.

  There’s no belaying rope now, though. No harness, and no one to catch us.

  “We got this, bud,” Jeff said, patting his younger brother’s back. “You just use your hands to steady yourself and your legs to push yourself up. Got that?”

  “Push with my legs.”

  “That’s right. I’m going to let you go first, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  “What should I grab first?” David asked.

  Jeff pointed to a piece of the deck that had peeled away, leaving behind bare skeletal scaffolding.

  David showed no hesitation. He found a handhold and pulled himself up. Bit by bit he ascended, with Jeff acting as his guide.

  They used the charred wiring and broken pipes to brace themselves. Where the plates on the deck had come loose, they found that the structure under it worked like a ladder. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Jeff had thought. They could actually do this, and soon they’d be in the armory. They’d find themselves some oxygen canisters.