by TJ Ryan
“You undressed me,” Tara said to her. “You took my envirosuit off. Why would you do that?”
Atria laughed at her, a cackling sound that was near hysterical. “You have to feel the Earth on your body, just like you’re breathing it into your lungs. That’s why I took your suit off.” She slapped Tara’s face gently. “After all, this place is so very important to you, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what brought us all down here. You and your bagging obsession with this dead planet. I shouldn’t be here, Tara. I shouldn’t be here! I know what’s coming, and I shouldn’t be here. It’s not fair. Not after all the hard word and years I’ve put into my career. If I’m stuck down here, in this death-trap of a planet, then I sure as hell am going to take advantage of my last days. We’re here together…”
She pointed over to a further corner of the room when she said it. Tara couldn’t see that far into the gloom. Whatever ambient light was letting her see the small circle of space around them didn’t extend that far. But, she memorized the spot so she could find it later. If that was where her suit was, she was going to find a way to get to it and put it back on. It might be ripped from the fall that brought her here but some protection would be better than none.
There was no way she wanted to end up like Atria.
“I’m not crazy!” Atria snapped after seeing the look Tara was giving her, lunging backward and throwing her hands in the air. “I know what you’re thinking. I am not going crazy.” Her muscled thighs tensed with her firm steps as she walked a circle that brought her back to Tara. Her eyes burned feverishly hot now, and Tara knew how dangerous that kind of madness could be. “You were supposed to be the one who died down here. Not Crestin. Not him, and not me. This is your stupid idea. We were meant to go home.”
“What are you talking about? And where’s Tyrese?” Tara asked her, pulling her head away, desperately tugging her feet against the sludgy muck holding them. “Atria, please. What did you do to Tyrese?”
Atria blinked at her. Her expression slipped, but the mad light in her eyes remained. “Tyrese…isn’t here. He doesn’t need to be here. None of us need to be here. Lieutenant Danvers had a mission for me. For us. Only the stupid man had no idea what we would find. He has absolutely no idea what the Academy has been doing. Danvers had expected us to succeed, the fool. A toxic planet, what trouble would that be for two military experts and two Defense Engineers? A silly old planet covered in toxic dust – easy.” Atria began laughing maniacally, her nostrils flaring in the dim light.
“What are you talking about?” Tara asked.
“Luckily, the timing was right. I took a risk coming down with you, oh yes. I took a risk, but it would have turned out fine. We would have been able to get in, find your tech, complete my mission, and return to Overwatch in time. Only, Crestin had to go all bag-ass crazy on me and try to bolt without us. Damned fool! Once we had the fission tech we could leave. Ever since he lost his arm in that battle he hasn’t been the same. Always depended on me to keep him safe. Always depended…on me…”
Tears squeezed out of her eyes now as she whirled back on Tara. There was an intent written in the lines on her face that Tara definitely did not like.
“Everything would have been fine, until we became trapped down here like worms. We’ll be stuck here until we die, and even if we did manage to survive under here without food or water, the next attack will come and kill us all. We’ll be dead, like this poor, forsaken planet.”
“Atria, what the bagging hell are you going on about?” Tara grabbed her arm and shook the crazed woman until some sense came back into her eyes. “You’re the one who opened up the ground. You’re the reason we’re down here, dammit! Atria, what the hell is going on?”
Atria blinked. She then shook her head and began pacing back and forth. “No, not me. No, no, no. The toxins, they’re affecting my brain, I…”
Tears welled in her eyes and she collapsed onto the ground. “Crestin is gone. We won’t survive the attack. We have to end it now, before it comes. Mercy. We will give ourselves mercy. Tara, I will give you mercy.”
“What are you talking about? What attack? What mercy?” Her fear had morphed into a different sort of panic now. She couldn’t let Atria go through with whatever she was planning. In the woman’s cracked mind anything might make sense to her and Tara did not want to find out how far her insanity had spread. The Earth had poisoned her. It would do the same to Tara, if she gave Atria a chance to let that happen.
“What are you doing? Atria, what are we doing here? What are you talking about… Danvers told you to do something? What did he tell you? What was your mission? What attack?”
Atria’s hands shot forward. They grabbed Tara’s wrists, holding them in a grip that was both tight and painful. The smile that slid over her face looked mechanical, like someone was pulling the strings on a puppet doll. Then she dropped to her knees, forcing Tara to kneel with her onto the cold metal panels covers in soil that had once been a grand building. Her feet were still stuck in place, and now her knees were submerged as well.
“Let me go,” she pleaded with Atria. “This isn’t right. Can’t you see how crazy this is?”
“I,” Atria repeated through clenched teeth, “am not crazy. Danvers promised me that if we retrieved the fission cells and your stupid tech, he’d promote me. No more grunt battles for me. No more doing the dirty work. No more being the Academy’s bitch. I’ll be the one running Overwatch, right up there with Danvers and General Ashton and all the others. They make the decisions. Only, they didn’t know… The Academy. Overwatch doesn’t know. Only I… But, I’m not supposed to. I’m not supposed to know.”
“Atria, you’re not making any sense. What doesn’t Overwatch know?”
“There’s no hope. The Earth is gone. Dead. Forever. The world is toxic and we will never return.” A flash of sanity showed in her eyes as the red hue disappeared for a moment. She walked up to Tara and buried her face into her shoulder and began to cry.
“Atria, that’s not true. Trust me, we will get through this. The Earth is coming alive again, Atria. I swear it’s true.” She struggled against Atria’s grip with no luck. The woman held her tight, and her face wasn’t pulling away. Tara needed to use this opportunity to try and pull the sergeant back from the grips of insanity. Their lived depended on it. “I know it sounds…crazy, um, but I swear I have proof. I have proof that the Earth can survive!”
Her wrists were bent painfully backward and Atria’s head snapped back up. Red returned to her eyes. “What proof? What do you know?”
The question didn’t seem to be aimed at finding out the truth. It was like Atria already knew the truth, and didn’t want Tara finding out the secret.
Not that it mattered, Tara knew. Her seed, the proof that the Earth could grow the trees and plants that they had studied in school – the ones that Danvers had displayed in painting on his walls - had burned up with the truth. “It’s all around us,” she decided to say instead. “You saw the grass! You saw the toxic environment that surrounded us as soon as we got off the ship!”
She considered telling her what she glimpsed through the Earth’s atmosphere from the defense pod six weeks prior, before this whole Overwatch ordeal happened, but decided against it so as to not sound as crazy as the woman in front of her.
“Ha!” More of that insane laughter filled the room around them. “That’s not life. That’s death, stupid girl. Death and the promise of no future. And no one will ever see the death these plants of yours represent, because no one will ever come back to the surface again. The Academy will make sure of that. The purge will come. It always comes.”
A cold sort of dread began feeding its way into Tara’s brain. The Academy? Purge?…
“Atria, tell me what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it at all? How do you think this planet has stayed so dead for so long? Huh? Do you really think it couldn’t have at least recovered a little bit in a thousand years?
You’re a Defense Engineer, do the math!”
She shoved Tara back, and stood up, pacing back from her, working her way from wall to wall with long strides. “Bagging idiots. All of you!”
“It’s called the Icharus Effect,” Tara said, repeating the information from her classes at the Academy as if it was a mantra. “A planet’s internal energy varies based on several factors, all of which affect the ability to recover from massive injury. It’s like a cold virus introduced to a human. The individual system will recover or not based on individual strengths but there is still a baseline average for when recovery can—”
“Will you listen to yourself?” Atria demanded, throwing her hands in the air. “You are all so stupid! You’re willing to believe any so-called scientific theory as long as it fits into your preconceived…your preconcei…ow.”
She bent low at the waist, her chest caught between her arms, her face twisted in pain.
Tara tugged at her own ankles, nearly freeing one foot only to have it sucked back down into the mucky soil. “Atria? Atria what’s wrong.”
“Leave me alone,” the woman screamed. “Leave me alone! There’s a reason the Earth is still dead and you’ll never know what it is! The Academy has it’s claws in the Earth. It has it’s…claws…it’s claws…!”
“Atria… please!”
The rose-skinned woman bent over, taking the sides of Tara’s face in both of her hands, and forced their lips together in a kiss.
“You’ll see,” she told Tara. “This will all become clear. Maybe not now, but soon. Eventually. You’ll see. I just need… I just need to think. It hurts so bad… just to think. I was so sad when Crestin died. When he…blew up. It was the worst moment of my life. But then I started breathing the air here on Earth and my head cleared. I saw things clearer. I understood things better. I want you to see what I see. You need to know what the Academy is doing. Then you’ll understand. Not that it will matter once it comes.”
Her fingers caressed Tara’s cheek. Her eyes then flashed a brighter red and she dug her nails into Tara’s skin. Her voice changed, as if it wasn’t Atria anymore who spoke. “No. No, you won’t understand. You won’t understand, because you won’t see. I’ll get rid of you first, so you won’t have to succumb to the toxins like I have. I know what it is. I know what it does to a person. You won’t have to die like me. I can give you a clean death.”
She kissed Tara’s lips again. “Then you’ll be free.”
The ground beneath them rumbled, and Atria’s grip strengthened on her face. A trickle of blood began to drop from where her fingernails dug into Tara’s soft flesh.
Not for the first time, she knew she was about to die.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Atria tried to press her full lips to Tara’s, light flared.
The chamber around her was suddenly illuminated by several small explosions in the air that spread a golden glow outward like a concussive blast, spreading a dusty coating of some fine powder everywhere. Tara closed her eyes as it fell across her as well.
Then she opened them again to a scene of complete chaos.
Atria was curled on the floor, her arms up over her face, screaming like she was in physical pain, her exposed body layered with an irregular golden glow from the powder lacing over her tight, bare skin.
The ground quivered and thundered with the sound of pounding feet. Like a dozen people running in on them all at once. With Atria screaming as if she were being stabbed through the heart, and the glowing powder spread over everything, she almost thought what she was seeing was a figment of her imagination. A wishful thought turned into reality. She breathed in deeply, trying to clear her head and make sense of what else she was seeing.
There really were people everywhere. People with large eyes and pale skin. They wore simple black clothes that fit tightly to their impossibly thin bodies. Long-armed and long-legged, these people swarmed everywhere.
But where did they come from? Tara blinked, nearly reaching out in front of her to see if they were real or merely a hallucination.
They scrambled around the room, holding long black staffs in their heavy hands, poking at the dirt at her feet. It shrank back from the glowing tips of the staffs as if scared of the odd weapons. She didn’t understand it, and she didn’t care. All she knew was that she was suddenly free. She crawled a few steps away, along the cold hard floor, suddenly remembering that she was bare-assed naked.
The man standing over her with his oddly gray skin and his ice blue eyes noticed she was naked, too. His eyes were overlarge to begin with, dominating his face, and there was no mistaking that they were staring at all of Tara’s more intimate bits.
Then, on the other side of the room, she saw Tyrese.
He came straight to her, lifting her up to her feet, and she curled into his side and only briefly worried about how naked she was. He was still in his envirosuit. Good, she thought to herself. At least one of them was going to live through this.
Then he handed her a bundle of cloth and rubber and harder composite material. It was her own envirosuit.
“Here,” he told her. “When we get you to safety you’ll need to put this on. You’ve been exposed to this atmosphere for too long as it is.”
“Safety?” she almost laughed, that uncontrollable fear from before threatening to bubble up in her again. “Where is there any place safe on this God forsaken planet?”
He kept them moving until they were out of there. “I’ll show you.”
She held the envirosuit up in her hands, staring down at the faceplate. Her reflection was just visible in its curved surface, highlighted by the irregular line of luminous sand that still clung to the upper part of her face, starting at her upper lip. She looked ridiculous. She didn’t care.
“You saved me,” she whispered to him, not sure if his helmet mic would pick up her soft voice or not. “You saved my life.”
Looking back over her shoulder, she could see the distant light of the chamber where Atria had kept her as some sort of prisoner, threatening her with things that she only half understood. What did the Academy have to do with the dead planet? What had she even said? The woman was crazy, but her words still rang in Tara’s ears. “The Academy has it’s claws in the Earth.” What did that mean?
The room behind them was lit up still like a mini sun had dropped into the place. She supposed that might be exactly what had happened, in a way. Now that she had a few seconds to think, she recognized the chemical reaction that allowed the dry powder to give off light. It wouldn’t last, but it had been enough to get her out of there.
She didn’t see the people who had been there to rescue her with Tyrese, with their overlarge eyes and their black sticks. Wherever they had come from, they were gone again. Maybe even back into her imagination, if that was where they had come from to begin with.
“What about Atria?” she asked as he unfailingly took a right turn down a hallway of rock overlaying metal walls. “We can’t just leave her there.”
“Yes, we can.”
“But… those things. You saw them too, didn’t you?”
His voice was tinny through his suit’s speakers. “Don’t worry about them. They don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Who?”
He stopped abruptly, looking both ways up and down the passageway. “Not now. Get dressed again. It will give you some protection. Their airlock was breached when Atria blew the place apart with her damned grenade.”
“What will the suit do now? I’ve already breathed the air. It’s too late.” She had already tugged on both boots and worked the suit up over her legs. She might as well wear it – it wasn’t as if it would hurt anything.
It might have been her imagination, because it was pretty dark, but she would have sworn that Tyrese’s eyes lingered on every bit of her that got covered up. “Look, there’s a rip in this leg, there’s a tear in the back. How is this supposed to protect me?”
His hands were on her suddenly, tugging everything int
o place and helping to latch her helmet down. “Enough that it matters. The oxygen in your supply tanks will clear out your lungs. That’s the main thing.”
“What do you mean?” she asked him.
“It’s…complicated. There. You’re suited up again. Let’s go.”
She reached up to hold his hand on her shoulder, and leaned back against his chest. The light from the dust on her face reflected against the inside of her faceplate, showing her the tense look of a woman who had been through Hell, and had yet to come back again. “I’m scared, Tyrese. I mean really, really scared.”
Turning her around to face him, he bent down to put his faceplate against hers. “I know. I am too. Right now we’re not safe, and we have to go.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” she quipped.
“It’s supposed to be honest. I think you’d rather hear the truth than have me lie to save your feelings, right?”
“Don’t ever lie to me,” she agreed.
“I won’t. You do the same for me, and we’ll get through this.”
She bit her lip, trying not to let the gravity of the situation crush her. “The seed is gone,” she said. “The one I brought up with the probe. Overwatch never even knew it was there, and now it’s gone. And Atria said that the Academy… said they were…”
She couldn’t even finish the thought.
“Don’t worry about your damned seed. There will be more where it came from, just you see.”
“No, Tyrese, you don’t understand. You never saw it. It was green, and sprouting. It was LIFE, and it’s gone.”
“There’s life everywhere on this planet,” he promised her, but the way he said it set her nerves on edge. “Don’t worry about your seed. Listen, after we got separated on the surface… I’ve seen a few things. Just trust me, okay? This isn’t the place for this conversation.”
“You know a better one?”