Maya was the only one to decline his offer. She thought Eli might get fussy and ruin the moment for everyone else. Sylvia and Adam tried to convince her otherwise, but Adam perceived a hint of sadness in Maya regarding the nuclear push.
They would travel a trillion miles in two months and that was only the beginning. If all the test runs went well, they could cover the final twenty trillion miles to Epsilon Eridani in just six weeks.
His perception of Maya’s sadness was born out of his own melancholy. He felt his blood wanting to go back, back to the past, to the Earth and the dome. They wanted to see Gen and Ozzie again, wanted to feel the warmth of their Sun and instead they were blasting away from all that, racing ever deeper into an unforgiving universe.
Artie sat below the flight screen working dual consoles. Adam sat in his commander’s seat behind him. Max stood to his Commander’s far right monitoring a series of screens. Sylvia, Leo and eight other kids were strapped into wall seats behind Adam.
“Strap in, Max,” Adam said as the ship began to make a loud humming sound. “Maya and Eli are strapped in on cryo deck.”
Max strapped in and the kids in the back gripped the arms of the chairs anticipating the coming acceleration.
“No issues, Commander,” Artie said.
Adam slid a lever slowly forward making a nearly deafening hum. He opened a small compartment on his console, reached in and grabbed a handle. “Say goodbye to the Sun.”
Adam nodded to Artie and pulled the handle firmly back.
Nothing happened at first as the well-trained crew all put their heads back and waited. The ship shook for a split second before some hellacious type of G-force pushed everyone’s bellies against their spines. The ship launched forward with a high-pitched howl and the star dots on the flight screen turned into long strings of white blur as the ship accelerated at a rate of five thousand miles a second.
It would take thirty-eight seconds of this nearly unbearable thrust to achieve the cruising speed and regain equilibrium. Adam felt his cheeks being pushed back into the bones of his face and his eyeballs pressing back achingly in his eye sockets.
When they reached equilibrium, no one said anything. They felt their own faces and stared at the stars’ white blur on the flight screen.
Artie was the first to unstrap. “Cruising speed, Commander.” Artie ran past Adam and left flight deck clutching his stomach. The other kids followed immediately.
Adam sat alone. He felt sick, but fought off the urge to vomit. He punched a few keys and witnessed the endless line of numbers that somehow represented his speed. His sickly face scrunched up to form a makeshift smile as streaks of white light rained down the huge flight screen, mesmerizing him.
“All things are possible,” Adam quietly said rising from the commander’s seat and hurrying to the door. He stopped to take one more long look at the flight screen before rushing off to the bathroom.
-10-
The dream of her drowning deep in the blue waters surrounding the dome seemed so real. It lingered in Gen’s panicked heart when she suddenly woke gasping for air.
Her heart slowly calmed from the dream, but as quickly grew worried. The air in her chamber should have been cool even after Lexi released her from deep sleep. The air was uncomfortably warm and the oxygen seemed to be running out.
Try as she might she could not get a lungful of air.
Her panic increased when she pushed on the chamber top and it would not open. She was alone and her air was running out. The lights were off outside the glass. Cryo deck had lost its power. The glow of emergency lights provided only a dim, murky blue light.
Gen leaned up to press her eyes against the glass trying to find the best angle to be able to see more of cryo deck.
“Where are they?” Gen whispered.
Down at the end of the row of cryo chambers, she could see the outline of someone in the shadows. The person was up on the steps and bent over an open chamber. They seemed to be diving in head first and working vigorously inside the chamber as if they were scrubbing it out. This could not be the case, Gen thought. No one cleans in the dark.
The man stood up and bent his head way back as if trying to swallow something down. His hands were dark and wet. His cheeks covered in the same dark, wet liquid.
The blood rushed to her head. The nightmare was too real. Terror erupted in her veins keeping her from passing out when the glass top suddenly flipped open. A deathly cold air spilled into her chamber and blanketed her skin.
Four hands dug down into her, clawing at her ribs violently. They pulled her roughly up and out of the chamber. The end had come and she was not all there. She was floating. The last thing she saw before being swallowed into darkness. Trinh. It had to be Trinh facing down the infected beast who had turned from the bloody remains of the sleeping child.
Trinh the ferocious. Trinh the invincible. So small in her protective suit. She marched to the beast and blew its head off. Trinh.
They slid the suit onto her quickly. Before they could snap her helmet into place, Gen had already returned to the dark realm of the unconscious.
* * *
ETHAN KNEW A PLACE they could hide. When the ship was designed, the engineers had built dual antimatter positron reactors in hopes to push the Eden Spheres way beyond the speed of light, beyond what a nuclear push could achieve.
It was decided that running just one antimatter reactor was cutting the razor’s edge of safety and that the second reactor would be a backup. Even an infinitesimal gamma ray leakage could be lethal or at very least damage the passengers’ reproductive systems.
In reality, they never fully equipped the second reactor. Ethan was the only one who knew this. If an antimatter reactor of that size failed, there would be no need for a backup reactor. Everything within fifty miles would disappear within the sound of a sudden pop.
Ethan alone knew it had never been sealed and he alone knew it was safe to be inside. That all sounded great until the kids actually found themselves within the pitch-dark reactor.
It was 160 degrees with zero airflow. Every minute inside that space was a misery. The pipe they crawled through to enter the reactor was human-sized at best so they could only bring in one hand-sized item at a time. Supplies like water and food would always be scarce and deadly supply runs would be needed twice a day.
Tuna had come up with the idea of tying fifty glowsticks together and dragging them behind him in the tunnel tied to his boot. The glow sticks were yellow and blue. This meant different areas within the oval reactor would be lit in dim blue or dim yellow or dim green in those places where the yellow and blue lights mixed.
The first time Gen woke she was in Zeke’s arms. His strong jaw line and intense eyes made her feel safe. She whispered, “Never let me go.”
Zeke brushed her hair back as she slipped back into sleep.
The next time Gen woke, hours later, she bolted straight up into a sitting position. Her head darted around trying to make sense of the blue and green and yellow lit shadows. Trinh talked quietly with Ethan in the green glow of the opposite wall. The heat filled up her lungs.
“Zeke,” Gen said.
Trinh turned. She considered Gen’s haunted face before racing across the reactor to hug her. “You are safe.”
Gen closed her arms around Trinh, but she did not feel like embracing anyone. She had no idea where they found themselves or why the air burned in her lungs.
Trinh let go and searched for words to begin. “Zeke is okay. He went with Tuna for more food and water.”
Gen stared at Trinh, growing hostile. “What the hell are you talking about? Food and water?” Gen rubbed her eyes and glanced behind her. Jax slept on the floor without a blanket. Gen chuckled, painfully. “These dreams are becoming brutal.”
“This is not a dream, Gen,” Trinh said.
Gen turned to Trinh. “What is this then?”
Ethan walked over and squatted next to them.
“You’re in a positro
n reactor,” Ethan said. “The air is good here. We enter each time through a cleansing airlock at the beginning of the pipe. It kills any surface germs. Our air comes from outside the ship.”
“We’re on the ship?” Gen asked, beginning to realize she was awake.
“Yeah,” Trinh said. “They’re here, too. The infected.”
Gen accepted Trinh’s hand now. She squeezed it unable to accept those words. “How?” Gen finally said.
“Another ship,” Trinh explained. “Only a few of them are still alive but the other infected, they are ours.”
The knowledge that many of the young faces on ES1 were now raving cannibalistic fiends hit Gen hard. She held her hand to her mouth and trembled. “What have you all done?”
Ethan and Trinh could not look at her. They knew that their shift had ruined everything. They knew that Zeke had left so that they would tell Gen the whole story. He could not be there. His shame would have been too unbearable.
Gen’s shift had slept quietly in deep sleep. They had trusted first shift to be smart and safe. Not only had that trust been broken, but second shift had been devoured in their sleep, tendon by tendon.
All except Gen and Jax.
Jax woke and yawned at length. His disorientation about the lights and the heat and the infected had to be dealt with from the top. As Gen waited, she became overwhelmed by glimpses of kids now dead or made into monsters. When Jax finally relaxed enough to hear the rest of the story, Trinh cleared her throat and began.
They had agreed to send water to the European Coalition ship. Trinh herself loaded the drone transport with as much water as it could possibly hold. Enough for a few months for the doomed crew of the Hero Journey 1. They knew it was nothing more than mercy. They knew it would only postpone the miserable end that would come to those poor souls. Mass dehydration was not a thing you even want to imagine.
Ethan had chatted with Pavel who was oddly unenthusiastic about finding solutions to the power issues they were having. The two engineers managed to come up with some long-shot scenarios having to do with solar panels and power cell erosion.
When Pavel had signed off, Ethan estimated the chances of any type of power cell erosion on the Hero Journey after it had been in flight for less than six years were one in a million, but they had nothing else so Ethan sent along a diagnostic device in the water transport that was superior to anything the European Coalition had at their disposal.
Tuna had warned Zeke that helping the Hero Journey 1 would be a risk just as well as not helping them. The only course of action, according to Tuna, would be to blow them out of the sky.
Before the water transport launched, Tuna issued a second warning saying that he could erase the threat with a push of a button. He was locked onto their engines. Their defense shields were down. Everyone viewed Tuna as overly emotional, hostile and blinded by his mourning for Cassie.
And so the ES1’s defense shields went down and the water transport launched.
It was over in a matter of minutes. The transport slowly moved away from the ES1. Everyone watched as it reached the halfway point between the two ships. All was quiet and peaceful. The transport evoked such a gentle feeling of unity between the two ships.
Tuna raised his hand. Something appeared on his screen, a small pocket of heat registered on the back of the coalition ship. Before we knew what it meant six star fighters dropped down below the Hero Journey and swung up towards us. Everyone screamed as one feeling the icy grip of death racing toward us. Our shields were down.
Zeke did not waiver. He switched weapons to manual and used all five fingers in his right hand to target five of the star fighters who were now underneath the ES1. Moving his fingers independently of each other he somehow fired all five shots simultaneously.
Tuna quickly announced the result. The five ships were gone. Erased. Before we could worry about the final star fighter, Zeke zapped it from Tuna’s screen as well.
Gen covered her heart with her hand as Trinh took a break from telling the story. She did not understand why Ethan and Trinh did not celebrate Zeke’s amazing marksmanship.
“That’s when Zeke said the coolest thing we had ever heard,” Ethan said, again without any hint of celebration.
“Tuna, clear my skies,” Trinh said wistfully.
Ethan nodded and repeated, “Tuna, clear my skies.”
“And Tuna did what his commander told him,” Trinh remembered. “He lit up the Hero Journey 1, blasting their engines with all we had until the massive ship started to explode in segments. It was a glorious series of blinding explosions, causing a deep sadness in our hearts because those had been people just like ourselves. They had left Earth hoping to start again.”
“And then what happened?” Gen asked.
“And then nothing,” Trinh said. “We flew away, leaving the smoke and debris behind. We didn’t even try to salvage the partially damaged transport. We left and tried to forget.”
“I don’t understand,” Jax said, losing his patience. “It’s a great story, but it doesn’t tell us anything.”
A tear slid down Trinh’s cheek as she turned and walked off into a blue shadow on the opposite wall of the reactor.
“What did I say?” Jax asked.
“We were never sure how they made it onto our ship,” Ethan explained. “They must have ejected from the star fighters.”
Gen did the math in her head. “The water was a decoy?”
“Exactly,” Ethan said. “They wanted us to put down our shields and open up an internal dock.”
“That’s why they never fired,” Jax said, catching on.
Ethan nodded to his friends. “They planned on ejecting and hoped we would destroy the star fighters and even their ship.”
“That’s quite a gamble,” Jax said. “If we would have closed the dock before they got to it, they would have been stuck floating out here in the black without a ship.”
“We figure as many as twelve of them made it to the transport dock before we closed it,” Ethan said.
“The first attack was not for six hours,” Trinh said from the shadows. “Two young ones, playing in the gymnasium.”
“Which young ones?” Gen’s voice broke as she asked.
Trinh could not answer. She moved farther into the shadows.
“It was Lizzy and Tam,” Ethan finally said. “Trinh found them.” Ethan fought emotions of his own now. He swallowed and could barely form his next words. “What was left of them.”
Ethan walked off into the shadows to join Trinh. They would not tell Jax and Gen any more of the past. Not now. Not ever.
-11-
The infected had an advantage in the dark. As soon as they seized control of the ship, the lights were turned off. Tuna pointed out that it was not that they could see in the dark, but that their other senses were incredibly sharp, especially their sense of smell.
Hiding from them on Earth became incredibly difficult. They could smell the body odor, the sweat, some even said they could smell the blood in uninfected veins from a mile away.
Tuna and Zeke moved cautiously down a dark corridor. Although, their protective suits prevented the infected from smelling their bodily scents, the infected would have trained themselves by now to sniff around for the smell of the suits instead.
This would not be an easy smell for the fiends to discern, Ethan had instructed, because the mesh used in manufacturing the suits contained many of the same materials used in construction of the ship’s walls.
If they stayed quiet and if they hurried past the blue emergency lights that appeared every twenty feet in the corridors, they would have a decent chance of moving about the ship undetected. It was a huge ship that they knew better than the beasts and Zeke had proven able to handle any single beast in close quarters.
“Tuna, in here,” Zeke whispered. The door slid open with a barely perceptible swoosh sound. The two boys ducked inside the room.
They both produced green glow sticks from large thigh poc
kets on their suits. They nodded to each other through their now green-tinted face shields and began to move in a glowing bubble of light through the dark room. Zeke felt around a counter until he found the thing he desired. He squatted down and opened a refrigeration unit.
Tuna squatted next to him. They worked together to fill up a cloth sack with bottles of water. “It’s enough for two days,” Tuna calculated.
“There should be some nutritional bars in here, too,” Zeke said as he started feeling his way along the floor cupboards. “There could be food for a week.” Zeke found a handle and slowly opened the cabinet. He held his glow stick inside the cabinet and lit up its contents. Dozens of huge bricks of packaged nutrients.”
Tuna slid in behind him. “More like two weeks,” Tuna corrected, “but we’ll have to come back for the rest.” Tuna held his glow stick between their faces. They exchanged satisfied grins.
Something changed. Their smiles faded. Neither would have been sure they had heard anything until they saw the other’s reaction. They couldn’t both be wrong. Zeke hurried a few blocks into his bag and then they soft-stepped away in opposite directions.
They ducked behind furniture and slid the green glow sticks back into their leg pocket. The room went totally black. Tuna tried to calm himself, but his breathing grew louder inside his helmet as the seconds ticked slowly by in the dark. Zeke clutched his long knife and readied himself for the worst.
When the door slid open, a small girl stepped into its frame. She wore a white sickbay gown colored blue by the emergency light shining dimly in from the corridor. Her wildly frizzy hair hung in wet strands in front of her face. She stood motionless there as if considering the possible risks of entering the dark room.
Zeke pulled his green glow stick from his pocket and moved out from behind a long sofa. Tuna watched but stayed hidden. Zeke stepped forward to face the little girl who did not flinch.
“It’s okay. It’s your commander,” Zeke said motioning Tuna to show himself. “It’s Zeke and Tuna. We are not infected.”
The girl tilted her head up suddenly when she saw Tuna step next to Zeke. They could see a quick glimpse of her face.
The Eden Project (Books One & Two) Page 20