Project Columbus: Omnibus

by J. C. Rainier

  “They’re waiting for you,” his friend stated. “Alpha corridor. Better hurry.”

  Cal nodded, wasting no time in moving toward the front of the ESAARC pod. He passed the door to the pod’s cockpit, a place he had spent countless hours studying and stargazing during the journey. A short climb had him in Alpha corridor. His eyes took a moment to adjust to the bright light inside.

  As his vision came into focus, he could see the broken, sorrowful look on Brittany’s face. Her lips trembled as tears coursed down her face. Behind her stood Governor Dayton, arms folded across his chest, lips pursed. To her right stood Sergeant Brandt of the CVM, his hand firmly locked around her arm just above the elbow. Brandt stood motionless, his gaze fixed on some point on the wall behind Cal.

  “Cal,” Brittany sobbed. “Thank God you’re here. You have to stop them from doing this. Please.”

  He spoke softly in response, shaking his head. “That’s not what I’m here for. I need to know why.”

  “Damn it, I’m your friend! The last one from home. Don’t do this to me!”

  “We stopped being friends the second you set me up. Nice of you to warn me about that, by the way.”

  “I tried,” she choked through her tears. “But it was too late. Alan was already there.”

  “And what about breaking into my store? My home?”

  Brittany looked away, too ashamed to meet his eyes. “The damage was already done. I had to show them I was still with them.”

  “Well, I guess that sums up how you really felt about me, friend.” Cal’s voice was ripe with condemnation.

  “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen!”

  “You could have stopped it at any time. You could have just walked away, Britt. Faded into Concordia. Did you really think you were worth enough to Young for him to hunt you down?”

  “You don’t understand. He loved me.”

  “What a perfect pair you made, then.”

  A scream rose from Brittany’s throat, a mixture of anguish and rage. The noise startled Andrea, who immediately began to wail. Cal reflexively stroked his daughter’s cheek and soothed her.

  “I didn’t love Harcourt,” Brittany shrieked.

  “What about Rob?”

  Shocked silence answered him. “I… I…”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Cal could barely contain his disgust. “Young was in love with you, and you spurned him. Rob literally went to the end of the Earth with you, and you couldn’t even fathom giving him your heart, could you?”

  “That’s not fair!” she protested.

  He ignored her and continued. “So I guess that’s why you threw me aside, Britt. I loved you, once. Back on Earth. It seems like forever ago. At this point, it might as well have been. But it fits. You use a guy for what you can get from him and move on. And now that you’re in trouble you’re playing whatever card you can to get away.”

  “Cal…”

  “Just stop.” Cal paused long enough to draw in a deep breath. He puffed up his chest and straightened his posture, giving him an extra two inches over Brittany’s diminutive figure. “You’re going to sleep now. When you wake up… when they move you to a proper jail, I’ll be an old man. Andrea will probably be older than you. Certainly wiser. And there will be one thing you damn well know she’ll understand better than you. What true friendship means.”

  Cal nodded once at Brandt, who stepped behind her and took firm hold of both of her elbows. She called out for mercy, struggling against the sergeant in futile defiance. Governor Dayton opened one of the upper sleeper berths.

  “The stasis portion of your sentence begins today,” Dayton boomed, addressing the prisoner. “Upon completion of a proper incarceration facility, you will be revived and relocated, at which point you will serve the prison portion of your sentence. You will be eligible for parole not less than ten years after the beginning of the prison sentence.”

  “Cal!” Brittany begged one final time, though it fell on deaf ears.

  Brandt hoisted Brittany into the air like a sack of flour. Dayton guided her feet into the berth and held them steady as Brittany was secured inside the sleeper. The door closed with a resounding click. A second later, Brittany started pounding on the berth from the inside.

  Dayton walked slowly over to Cal, pressing a darkened button on the computer console next to him. “It’s all ready, Mr. McLaughlin. You know what to do.”

  Cal retrieved Andrea from the sling, snuggling her close to his chest to help calm her from the ordeal. He did not make a motion toward the computer screen. “It doesn’t feel right. Even after all she did to me, it still feels like I’d be betraying her if I turned on the sleeper. How could I explain to Andrea that I pushed the button?” He sighed. “It would make me no better than Brittany.”

  “You have every right to after she turned you over to that psychopath. No one would think any less of you.”

  “I would. That’s enough for me. Thank you for the offer, but I can’t be the one to do it.”

  Dayton’s arm fell to Cal’s shoulder. He squeezed once gently, then said, “I understand.”

  A moment later the governor activated the sleeper berth. Brittany’s thrashing ceased after a minute as the gas placed her into a deep sleep. Cal felt a momentary pang of guilt as the sentence was carried out. For him, Earth officially died in that moment. Concordia was all that remained. His life with Andrea.

  Cal stumbled numbly out of Alpha corridor, and out of a habit from years past, ended up in the pod’s cockpit. He situated himself in the left seat, curling Andrea in the crook of his arm. His neck craned upward, looking through the top canopy windows. There his gaze remained fixed on the sky as Andrea fell asleep and the night sky was painted with the glitter of endless stars.

  Gov Thomas Dayton

  12 May, 12 yal, 13:11

  Concordia Civic Hall

  “Where did I put that manifest?” Tom grumbled, flipping through the mass of paper on his desk. After a moment’s panic, the missing folder was set down in front of him.

  “In my hands, Governor,” his subordinate replied softly. “Sorry, I wanted to get a peek for myself. Maybe help you assign the new arrivals.”

  Tom was still unsure of his new deputy. It was a shock to the entire city when the previous deputy governor, Roger Miller, passed away suddenly in January. Cardiac arrest, according to Dr. Taylor. Not comforting in the least, since Roger was only forty five years old. Tom had more than a decade on the deceased deputy, but still felt as strong as the day Concordia was forged.

  Roger’s replacement was younger, taller, and stronger. Not to mention that his family was as close to royalty as existed in Concordia. That may have played a small role in his landslide victory during the special election in March.

  Whereas Roger would listen to Tom’s endless explanations and offer quiet counsel when sought, Deputy Governor Tyler Quinn was not a man to sit idle for a long speech. The man had ideas, and the passion with which he executed his job grew day by day. In another time, Tom might have sought such a trait when promoting officers. After six years in the governor’s seat with a more passive voice of reason at his side, Quinn’s exuberance sometimes teetered on the edge of upsetting.

  “Well?” Tom retorted with thinly veiled sarcasm. “What are your thoughts on the fresh crop?”

  Quinn’s lips distorted in an apathetic grimace. “This group looks more like scavengers than survivors. No real usable skills that I can see. Makes me wonder if they stole the ship, or if Earth is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel at this point.”

  “It could be either. It’s been six months since the last pod touched down. They’re getting fewer and farther between. I don’t think we’ll see many more in the future.”

  “Kind of a shame. Only a few people will be able to escape that hellhole anymore. No hope for those left behind.”

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope, Tyler.”

  The younger man shook his head. “I’m not goin
g to fly there and ask them if they believe it. In any case, there’s still the problem of these thirty-six new arrivals. There might be a good candidate or two for the CVM, but that’s all I see.”

  Tom picked up the folder and scanned through the list of names and occupations, adjusting the thin glasses on his face when he couldn’t read a line. On first glance, Quinn seemed right. Among the survivors were a bartender, an interior decorator, and a delivery truck driver. Their occupational skills weren’t exactly in demand in Concordia.

  “Maybe another approach. Let’s give them some hope and see what they do with it. See to it that they attend Unification Day.”

  “You think they might take issue with the Chinese settlers? I don’t think they’re quite up to speed on what’s happened.”

  “I don’t see a huge problem unless Devereaux didn’t do his job in disarming them when they landed. And as much as I hate to say it, it’s a quick way to weed out undesirables. If anyone picks a fight, it’s back to stasis for them.”

  Quinn rolled his eyes, though he still confirmed the governor’s orders. Tom checked his watch after the young man left. He had a few minutes left before his next appointment, so he set to organizing the paperwork on his desk. That task was finished with a couple minutes to spare, which he used to polish up his Unification Day speech. Soft rapping on the door broke his concentration as he neared the end of the speech. He glanced up at his visitor.

  “I’m here for my annual report, Governor,” Darius said as he stepped into the room.

  “Please,” Tom smiled softly as he offered a seat.

  Six years had passed since Darius lost his arm. Yet every time he came into the room, Tom had a moment of uneasiness. Every visit triggered a disturbing, ephemeral image of what life would be like if his own limb had been taken. The moment passed quicker with each year, though Tom still felt ashamed of his childish reaction. Darius was maimed by a reaper bear and, whether he knew it or not, he served as a living reminder of the creature’s danger.

  That grave injury was the final straw that broke then-Governor Owens. The reins were passed to Tom, and Darius became as close to a hermit as one could get sitting in front of screens all day. After he was able to recover some data from the phantom servers that Young had sought, Tom had jokingly given him the title of Technology Minister. That joke evolved into a legitimate position in Concordia, and Darius’s personal calling.

  Incredibly, the ex-governor managed to recover nearly eighty percent of the information from the wrecked drives. Concordia was poised for a technological explosion. At least, once the issues of resources and manufacturing were ironed out. Much of modern Earth technology relied heavily on plastics, and the colony lacked the raw materials or methods to refine them. It was up to the Technology Minister to safeguard the data for Concordia’s future.

  “I’ve completed an integrity test of each ship’s arrays, Governor. I’m afraid it’s not pretty this year.”

  Tom’s stomach knotted up. More issues.

  “What seems to be the problem, Minister?”

  “Another two blades on Gabriel have failed. System boards in both cases, so I can’t even combine them to make one good one. I’ll pull the rest of the parts that are good, but that leaves us with only seven good blades left until we have to take her redundant array offline. If they keep dying at this rate, Gabriel will have no backup in two to three years. Michael won’t have redundancy much longer, either.”

  “After all the sacrifice and the work to recover that damned information, it’s just going to fall apart.” The governor sighed heavily and rubbed his brow. “What can we do?”

  Darius shook his head, concern etched deeply in his ebony features. “Unless we magically find a way to manufacture replacement computer parts in the next two years, the only thing I have left is a complete gamble. Take Gabriel’s servers offline now. Patch up Michael’s and strip what’s left for parts. We can probably squeeze a decade or more out of it.”

  “And if something happens on Michael, say a fire or explosion,” he replied, instantly spotting the flaw in the plan.

  “Then we lose it all. We go back to only the knowledge in our books.”

  “And get set back who knows how many years. Decades.”

  “Maybe even centuries,” Darius added, biting back his frustration.

  “Two years,” Tom repeated, sinking into his chair. “There’s no way we can build you new parts that soon.”

  “I know.”

  Tom turned his chair to the side, casting his gaze out the window. The grounds of Benedict Square were being prepared for the Unification Day celebrations. Celebrations that would draw thousands together the next day. Original colonists, survivors of Raphael, and post-War refugees of a dozen Earth nationalities, all sharing a holiday that held different context, yet the same ultimate meaning: healing and unity. Perhaps the refugees from the latest pod didn’t understand yet, but they would, in time.

  So what do we give them? Hope, resting on chance? But what hope do we have of regaining Earth’s technology, if we can’t maintain the data banks?

  “Do it,” he muttered. “It’s as good as gone if we don’t at least try to keep it together. After tomorrow, I’ll gather the geologists and prospectors again. We found coal, right? Maybe we’ll find something else useful.”

  Darius nodded, exiting wordlessly. It was for the best; Tom might have tried to have the minister dissuade him from the course of action. It had to be right, despite his misgivings. The difficult, dangerous choices always were. It didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

  The air in his office seemed stifling, and the walls dark and confining, so he decided to go for a walk. The mild, filtered sun felt good on his skin, and the breaths he took were invigorating.

  As he strolled down Foundation Street, signs of the colony’s expansion could be seen everywhere. Fresh dirt packed over a recently filled trench ran the length of the street, with short, perpendicular spurs running at regular intervals to buildings on either side. Just beyond the town, halfway to River Islands, sat the first concrete building on Demeter: a small waste treatment plant. Farther upstream was a purification facility. Both had come online within the last two years, and their service range was steadily increasing.

  I guess it’s not all that bad, he thought. Even without Benedict’s servers we’re not living in the stone age. We have electricity as far out as Rust Creek. Running water and sewers are becoming more common.

  Tom reached River Way and circled back west, taking time to enjoy the view of South Concordia from the far banks of the Fairweather. The walk did him much good, and the troubles of his earlier meetings melted away. The smells of fresh baked bread mingled with sawdust as he passed industrial buildings of several flavors on his way. All the while, he considered how he would pass the evening. He ended up at a small two-story shop a few doors from Benedict Boulevard.

  Andrea McLaughlin giggled and smiled when she saw Tom walk in. Her blue-green eyes twinkled brighter than the red bow that held her sandy hair in a neat ponytail. She stopped coloring for a moment and shouted, “Daddy! Governor Tom is here!”

  A second later, Calvin emerged from the back of the shop, carrying a wooden crate full of soap in his arms. He slid his load onto the counter and came to greet the governor with an outstretched hand.

  “Good to see you,” Cal grinned. “It’s been a while, how have you been?”

  Tom shrugged indifferently. “Another day, another challenge.”

  “That ship that landed the other day?”

  Tom nodded slowly.

  “Well, I don’t think they’ll be any worse than the rest,” Cal added.

  “You’re probably right,” Tom agreed. He wandered over to the sales counter, where Andrea was hard at work drawing something that vaguely resembled her house. “That looks really good, Andrea.”

  “Thank you!”

  “It wasn’t that long ago that you could barely scribble.”

  “I don’t know wher
e the time goes,” Cal remarked. “Did you know that she’s starting school this fall?”

  That was a measure of six years that hadn’t registered before, and it made him acutely aware of his age in that moment.

  “Has it really been that long?”

  “It has.” Cal smiled weakly. “So what brings you in today?”

  “Do you have another bottle of your private reserve? I ran out a couple weeks ago and haven’t had a chance to get more.”

  “Of course.” The younger man reached blindly under the counter and produced a clear bottle full of rich, dark whiskey. “Four favors. On your tab?”

  “Please.” He took the bottle from Cal, rolling it over in his hand as he examined it. “Will I see you tomorrow?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Andrea would never let me hear the end of it if we didn’t go.”

  “What’s that, Daddy?” the little girl asked, looking up from her drawing.

  “The picnic tomorrow, sweetie. Just telling Governor Tom that we’re going.”

  “And that we’re going with Katie and Luke?”

  Cal stuttered, and the color drained from his face. His loss for words was telling. The fact that it was over spending time with a single mother from one of the Detroit pods was nothing short of damning.

  Tom smirked. “Katie and Luke?”

  “Please, please don’t get the wrong idea,” he pled. “I love Lexi. I always will. But she’s been gone for so long now, and Katie… well, we’ve really connected.”

  “No one will get the wrong idea, Mr. McLaughlin. No one will question your love, either. No matter what your mind tells you, you can’t shut out love forever just to hold on to a memory.”

  Cal reached inside his shirt and fished out his necklace of rings. He looked down, his fingers tracing the original aluminum wedding bands. “I know. It’s just hard to let go.”

  “No one ever said anything about letting go. Look at it this way; do you think Alexis would have wanted you to be alone if it meant misery?”

  “No,” he admitted after a moment’s thought.