She made a mental note to tell Raphael to put together a power backup unit and to have someone monitoring both the main power and the backup at all times in case it wasn’t the equipment at all, but some sort of electrical interference. She’d have felt better if they’d had some good, old fashioned bracing to put in the mines so that they weren’t dependent entirely upon the electronic pressure system, but she doubted they had the materials to manage it even if they scavenged parts from the habitat.
That being the case, she thought it might be a good idea to rotate the workers so that the bare minimum were exposed at any one time. Raphael’s crew was not in danger of running out of air as the previous crew had, but they could certainly be crushed to death if they had a major collapse.
Victoria realized quite suddenly that her head was pounding. She checked her watch and was surprised to discover it was mid-afternoon. She’d missed lunch. Rising, she stretched the kinks from her back and went in search of something to hold her until dinner. Grabbing a can of fruit and a bottle of water, she headed back to her quarters.
She stopped dead still on the threshold. Raphael had turned at the sound of her approach, his arms laden with his belongings. She stared at him without comprehension. “What are you doing?”
He focused his attention on what he’d been doing. “It’s two weeks. I thought I’d move my belongings to my quarters.”
Victoria was so stunned she couldn’t even think. “Two weeks?” she repeated blankly.
He nodded without looking at her. “Company rules.”
Moments passed before Victoria realized she was gaping at him like the village idiot. With an effort, she collected herself and moved back to her desk, doing her best to ignore the activity behind her. Thankfully, he did not linger long. When the door had closed behind him, she turned to stare at it, trying to comprehend what had just happened. It was useless, of course. Her brain simply could not put the puzzle pieces together.
Had she misunderstood him when he’d said he wanted to stay with her? She frowned, thinking, but try as she might she couldn’t recall the exact conversation that had passed between them. Maybe they’d been speaking at cross purposes?
It still didn’t seem to fit because she couldn’t think of anything he could have said that would have made her believe he wanted to stay with her if that wasn’t what he’d meant.
She wondered if it wasn’t something else. Had she said, or done, something that had made him change his mind? What, she wondered, could she have possibly done to have brought about such a change in him?
It was almost as if he was a completely different person—one who looked like Raphael, and spoke in the same voice, but who was someone else entirely.
She realized quiet suddenly that she was shaking, that she had been holding herself and rocking mindlessly. It was the pain she was trying to comfort herself from, the pain that was so acute she had gone numb from the shock of it. Now that the shock had begun to wear off, it crept through her in slow, agonizing waves.
A sound erupted abruptly from her tight throat, shocking her so that she jumped, clamping a hand to her mouth. Fearing someone would overhear, she leapt from the chair and ran into the bathroom, turning the water wide open. The face in the mirror didn’t even look like her own. It was pale, her eyes red and swollen from the tears streaming down her cheeks. Scooping up handfuls of cold water, she dashed it over her face, but it did no good. The tears continued to flow, on and on.
Why was she crying? She never cried. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d cried ... certainly not since she’d been a child.
More importantly, why could she not make herself stop? She climbed into the shower finally, fully clothed, hoping the water would somehow soothe her, help her to regain her self control. She wept until the hot became warm and the warm became cold. Finally, exhausted, freezing, she climbed out again, peeled her wet clothing off, dried herself and found dry clothes.
She returned automatically to her desk, sat and picked up the reports. She could not make any sense of them, however. It was almost as if she’d forgotten how to read. Finally, she decided she was just too exhausted to think. Dragging herself from the chair, she dropped onto the bed and was almost instantly asleep.
She awoke several hours later to the sounds of movement outside and sat up with a jerk, listening. It was the crew, coming in for dinner. Scrambling from the bed, she rushed into the bathroom to check her appearance. To her horror, she saw her eyes were still red and swollen. She splashed cold water on her face again and finally, in desperation found a cloth, soaked it in cold water and held it to her eyes for several minutes. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help. It only made her vision blur.
Giving up on it, she decided she’d just skip dinner. She wasn’t particularly hungry anyway. Besides, she’d never eaten the fruit she’d gotten earlier. Looking around, she discovered she’d left the can on her desk.
She needed to finish going over the reports anyway.
Her heart skipped a beat when someone tapped on her door. “Yes?”
Brown opened the door and stuck his head in. “Just checking to make sure everything was all right.”
Victoria threw him a quick, distracted smile over her shoulder. “Thanks. I’m fine. I just need to get through these reports.”
“You’re not coming to dinner?”
She held up her can of fruit without turning to face him.
When he finally closed the door again, she set the can down and covered her face with her hands. She was being ridiculous. She couldn’t stay holed up in her room. Everyone was bound to begin imagining all sorts of things if she did. Besides, Raphael was her second. She couldn’t avoid him. He would be sharing the same floor with her, even if not the same room, and she would have to discuss the job with him.
She didn’t have to see him tonight, though, now, when she was afraid anyone who saw her face would know immediately that she’d spent hours crying like a wounded child.
Returning her attention to the reports, she began reading again. She had to read them over and over before they began to make sense, but finally she managed to focus enough attention on them to understand what she was reading.
In the end, it was one line that totally grabbed her attention.
We buried the dead in the tomb they’d dug for themselves and moved to the secondary location to start the new mine shaft.
She stared at the words, read them again and finally, slowly, it sank in. They hadn’t found any sign of whatever it was the miners had unearthed, because they’d been looking in the wrong place.
* * * *
Quelling the temptation to race up to main operations and take the place apart until she discovered the surveys, Victoria focused on the logs once more, searching for other possible clues.
The company had issued orders that the senior officer was to induct as many of the construction workers as possible as miners to replace the men they’d lost. The senior officer had offered pay raises and bonuses, but no amount of money could convince the construction workers to go back and work the mine that had collapsed. With great reluctance, because the original mine had had such a rich vein of ore, the senior officer had decided to excavate a new mine. Apparently, he had originally intended to leave the first mine open though.
The surviving miners had nixed that idea, insisting that the mine was haunted by some sort of ‘evil’ spirits and that the mine should be used as a tomb for the miners who’d died. The senior officer had finally agreed because it looked as if they might have rioting on their hands if he didn’t.
Victoria frowned, wondering what could’ve aroused so much superstition. In general, miners tended to nurse a few antiquated superstitions, maybe more than the average person, but they were minor things—the bad luck of the number thirteen; lucky seven; or tossing spilled salt over their shoulder to appease the ‘little folk’. No one she’d ever met even bore a serious paranoia about such things, though, quoting them more for amusement t
han anything else.
Either they’d been exposed to some sort of hallucinogen, or their fears had had nothing to do with superstition and the senior officers had simply ignored their complaints and put them down to absurd folk lore.
The more she thought about it, the more certain she became that that had to be the case. The miners were afraid of something that was really down there, but they hadn’t been able to convince the officers that there was a threat.
She still couldn’t see how anything they might have aroused below the surface of the ocean bed might have presented the threat from topside, but the senior officer had mentioned the threat of rioting. Maybe the threat became so great and fears rose to such heights that there had been rioting?
She frowned, realizing that wouldn’t explain the lack of any bodies.
She decided to shelve it. Later, when she’d found every little puzzle piece that she could find, she would sit down and try to put them all together and see if they fit.
She scanned the remaining logs.
Apparently, problems escalated rapidly after that. The workers were somewhat appeased by the decision to seal the original mine, but tempers were still short and discipline became an increasing problem. There were an alarming number of accidents on the new project, which management put down to the lack of skills of the trainees. Missing men were considered AWOL. There were fifteen men and women on the list.
“Jesus!” Had Johnson been completely incompetent? Insane? Kay was totally uninhabited. No one in their right mind would just ‘quit the company and walk off the job’, not here.
She realized quite suddenly that the logs had been doctored. Management had expected the probability of a full investigation and had been trying to cover the company’s culpability here. And either they’d had no imagination, or things had gotten so bad they hadn’t been able to come up with a more believable lie to use as a cover up.
Setting the files aside, she doodled absently on a piece of paper while she tried to sort the useful information from obvious lies.
Mine collapse: accident? Or ‘evil’ spirits? Was there any chance, she wondered, that it had been deliberate? She decided she couldn’t rule it out. It seemed outrageous, to say the least, to consider that anyone would have blown it, risking so many lives—causing so many deaths, but she didn’t think it was completely impossible. She found, however, that she was leaning more in the direction of an accident caused by whatever it was they’d found down there ... by workers stampeding away from it, or by the creatures chasing them.
Frowning, she wrote: Intelligent? She decided she could rule out a higher intelligence than animal. There’d been no sign of any sort of weapons or tools, other than their own. But if it was a predator by nature, then it was a hunter, and it would have to be more intelligent than the grazers. Hunters were usually territorial, though, and worked alone, and she couldn’t believe the loss of life here could be put down to a single creature.
They uncovered something: Unless she considered the possibility that all of the activity below had drawn the interest of a scouting predator, that seemed indisputable. All the problems had started after the first excavation. Moreover, the mention of the ‘evil’ spirits seemed to indicate that the miners, at least, figured the danger came from the excavation. The problem was, she had not found one single mention of anyone having been attacked by anything or having seen anything.
She thought about it for some time and was finally forced to conclude that management, for reasons unknown, had either decided to omit mention of hostile/dangerous life forms, or those who’d encountered these life forms hadn’t lived to tell about it.
Deaths: accidents; disappearances. There’d been thirty men and women caught in the collapse ... which in itself was criminal negligence. There should never have been so many miners down in the tunnels, even if they had four tunnels going at once. Counting the construction worker who’d died during construction of the habitat—which predated the problem—and the ten that were killed outright or fatally injured during their attempt to excavate a new mine, that accounted for well over half of the missing workers. When she eliminated all those listed as missing, that left maybe a couple of dozen who’d retreated into the habitat for their last stand.
It seemed irrefutable that the alien life form, or forms, had been picking them off almost from the time the mining crew had arrived. Something had triggered a massive attack, though.
What? Try as she might, she couldn’t think of anything the crew might have done. Maybe it had been planetary conditions? Something had happened to drive away their normal food source and hunger had driven the creatures to take the next available thing—the crew.
The habitat looked as if it had been through one hell of a storm when they arrived. Maybe the storm had not been recent, but had occurred before the attack on the habit? She’d made it a point to question the workers below about any life forms. None had caught more than a glimpse of a few, small swimming things. She’d assumed the activity must have driven the indigenous life further away, but what if it was a combination of the storm and the creatures higher on the food chain hunting their food out?
Dropping her pen to the desk, she rubbed her eyes and then massaged her temples. The headache was back, probably as much from lack of food as from the hours she’d spent pouring over the reports. She was tempted to walk up to sickbay and beg a painkiller off of Tuttle.
That thought prompted another possibility—that the information she was searching for regarding encounters, or sightings, of the creature might be in the medical reports.
Bringing up the computer, she began scanning the list of files, wondering if Raphael had broken the system security completely, allowing her access to everything, or if he’d merely unlocked the log-on.
She stopped when she reached MANAGEMENT studying it, wondering if she dared access it. Clearly, it was Johnson’s files, but she could always argue, if it came into question, that she was higher management on site. Brushing aside her sudden nerves, she opened the file and scanned the files inside. One stood out. Like the button marked ‘do not push’ its title alone was enough to draw her in.
EXTREMELY SENSITIVE MATERIAL!
She opened the file and read:
Glitch regarding geneoid construction 18945: Further tests have led us to conclude that the particular combination of traits implanted in the crew are not reversible at this time. Since this violates penal law, this is a situation that must be handled with utmost delicacy. The attempt to terminate the experiment en-route failed.
Recommendation: The crew must be kept on Kay until and unless we are able to unravel the problem. Use whatever means necessary. Geneoid’s expendable.
Further to the defect in geneoid construction: The accelerated growth hormones have failed to level out per expectations. Expected limitations regarding their ability to withstand normal human conditions are exceeded. Prolonged exposure to breathing air expected to result in serious health complications. Calculations of maximum exposure narrowing from 12 hours maximum to 10 within the first month of release. However, if the growth hormone continues to accelerate maturity, this time frame will be further limited as it progresses. It is considered a strong likelihood that the geneoids will progress beyond the point of being able to tolerate normal human conditions, which will render them useless except as miners on KAY2581.
It was her second shock of the day and by far more stunning. Victoria stared at the screen in dawning horror as the meaning began to slowly sink into her sluggish thought processes. Black specks gathered and began to swim before her eyes as she struggled to force herself to breathe.
Something, some sound or movement, drew her attention toward the door and she turned. Raphael was standing in the opening, watching her.
Moments passed while she struggled to force herself to speak. “I didn’t know,” she finally said faintly. “I swear to you I didn’t know.”
He studied her for a long moment. “In the end, does it matter?”
>
Victoria swallowed with an effort, unable to think clearly. One thought, or perhaps emotion, emerged, however. “It matters to me that you know that I didn’t ... wouldn’t have anything to do with this ... this....” Words failed her.
“Glitch?”
Shame and guilt brought the blood that had rushed away from her head at the discovery flooding back in a hot tide. She realized it was useless to try to explain that it was shame and guilt by association, not because of anything she’d done directly, but because she worked for a company guilty of such an atrocity. It wouldn’t matter to him. All that mattered was that he’d discovered they had been betrayed by the people who had created them and they were to be abandoned on this rock as if they were nothing but an embarrassment, to be swept under the rug.
Before she could think of anything to say, he was gone.
* * * *
Victoria stared at the door for several moments. The urge was nearly overpowering to go after him and try to explain, to try to make him understand that she would never have betrayed anyone in such a way, and him least of all. Her pride held her where she was.
He had to know how she felt. He must. If it made no difference to him, how could it make a difference if she swallowed her pride and went to him? What could she say, or do, that would make him feel differently?
What if she swallowed her pride only to have him trample it by refusing even to listen?
She thought about it for some moments and finally realized that she’d recover even if he did. She wasn’t so certain she would ever be able to forgive herself if she didn’t even try.
Rising, she left her room before she could change her mind, entered his without knocking. He looked up when she entered, his expression guarded. “Did you need something?”
She nodded. “You.”
He didn’t move, but she sensed his withdrawal. “Leave it.”
“I tried. I discovered I couldn’t. You told me something. I want to know if it was true, or just pretty words you thought would please me.”
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