Project Diamond (Jacob Lansing Series Book 1)

by J. W. Bouchard

  Static blared over my com. There and then gone again.

  “You hear that?”

  “Quiet. Just listen.”

  There was another burst of static.

  “There it was again.”

  “Where…are…they…”

  The transmission was garbled, but it was unmistakably a female voice.

  Gloria.

  The hurried chatter of the alien roaches drifted toward us through the tunnel. Click-clack-clack-click.

  Above us, the grate opened. I shielded my eyes from the dirt that cascaded down on us. A moment later, a body fell toward us.

  “Watch it!” Perkins yelled, and we moved out of the way quickly as Jin tumbled into the pit, smacking down on his back. We had barely enough time to drag him out of the way before Gloria landed in the spot he had been in a moment before.

  The gate slammed shut. More dirt rained down on us. I helped Gloria to her feet.

  “They got you too, huh?”

  She took a moment to catch her breath. “They took us by surprise,” she said after she had collected herself. “We didn’t even see them coming.”

  “Bugs,” Jin said, collapsing against the wall. “Giant bugs.”

  “Roaches,” Harper said. “We call them roaches.”

  “They look like praying mantises,” Jin said.

  “But ‘roaches’ sounds cooler,” Harper said. “Besides, it was Perkins that coined the term. So if you don’t like it, you can argue with him.”

  Perkins stepped forward, all business. “What’s happening topside? Is Hayes aware of the situation?”

  Gloria nodded. “They know enough. That you were ambushed. He’s sending another team down.”

  Perkins scowled. “They should have gotten all personnel off this rock and headed back.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Jin said. “Those things came at us from underground. Burrowed through the rock or something. That’s why we didn’t see them coming. They took the operation zone.”

  “All of it?”

  “I think so.”

  “What about Hayes?”

  “I don’t know. Our coms malfunctioned when they took us.”

  Perkins pounded the side of his fist against his helmet as if he was trying to knock a good idea lose. “And the ship?”

  “Still in orbit as far as I know,” Gloria said.

  “So they have most of the mining crew,” Perkins said.

  “And some of the science crew.”

  “Why would they send down scientists?”

  “Bertrand sent them down. Before it all happened.”

  I felt my heart race. “Do you know if Lisa was with them?”

  “I’m not sure. I wasn’t there.”

  Jin said, “We heard it all go down over the coms. Then they came out of nowhere and grabbed us.”

  Perkins paced back and forth.

  Harper and I helped Gloria and Jin lower their O2 settings and switch off their displays.

  Gloria looked wild-eyed, but was holding herself together. “What are we going to do?”

  My head was spinning. Maybe it was an effect of low oxygen, but I doubted it. I was hungry and felt like I hadn’t slept in days. I was worried about Lisa. If Gloria and Jin were right, then everyone that had been on the ground had been captured.

  Had there been any casualties? The more I thought about it the more I thought the roaches had killed Davidson as a show of strength. They had made an example out of him. How many more had they killed to make their point? I could only hope that Bertrand hadn’t sent Lisa down with the other scientists. The Astraeus was safe as long as it remained in orbit. At least that’s what I told myself.

  Which raised another question: where were the enemy ships? Hell, I didn’t even know where they had come from. Another planet? Another galaxy? Thomas was under the belief that the Alcubierre drive we had taken to 55 Cancri e wasn’t the only one. He had suspected that similar subway systems had been scattered across the universe.

  I took a breath and tried to focus. There were too many unknowns. I had to concentrate on what we did know, and what we could do in our present situation.

  For starters, we needed a way out of the pit. I didn’t know what we would do if we managed to get out, but that was putting the cart before the horse.

  My hand touched my stun baton where it was sheathed at my side. The roaches hadn’t bothered stripping us of our duty belts. I wasn’t surprised. Our weapons were a joke compared to theirs. Dead weight.

  I unsheathed the stun baton and expanded it with a flick of my wrist. I fingered the button on the handle and the top of the baton lit up with crackling blue light.

  “Anybody got any marshmallows,” I said.

  “A lot of good that thing will do,” Harper said. “Unless you can get one of those bugs to take a piss on it.”

  I lifted my head and stared up at the iron grate and then back to the baton.

  “What is it?” Gloria asked.

  “That might not be such a bad idea,” I said.

  “I was being sarcastic,” Harper said.

  “Harper, you might just be a fucking genius.”

  PART III:

  ESCAPE

  CHAPTER 16

  "It'll never work," Jin said. “We don’t even know if something like that would affect them. They don’t have the same physiology as us.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I said. “What do you think, Harper?”

  Harper said, “Why are you asking me for?”

  “Because you’re the closest thing to a bug expert that we’ve got at the moment.”

  “It’s possible. If you’re wrong, we’ll probably all end up like Davidson.”

  We all looked to Perkins. I suppose to some degree we considered him to be in charge. He was older and had more experience, but I don’t think that was all of it. After Hayes, he was the closest thing to a leader that we had. I’m sure he knew it too. I don’t know if he wanted that responsibility, but he seemed to accept it without question.

  “It’s flimsy,” Perkins said.

  “Told you,” Jin said.

  “But the alternative is waiting down here to rot,” Perkins said. “God helps those that help themselves. Might as well go down swinging.”

  Jin looked appalled. “All of you are insane.”

  “We’ll make sure the roaches know you were against it,” Harper said and laughed nervously.

  We pooled our supplies. In all, we had four expandable stun batons (Gloria had lost hers when the roaches had dragged her down the tunnels), five canisterss of restraint foam, and ten sets of zip-tie cuffs. The zip-ties were probably useless. The restraint foam was anyone’s guess. The planet’s gravity was weaker than Earth’s, and the air was different.

  “Try it,” Perkins said.

  I grabbed one of the aerosol cans and shook it. “Everybody stand back.” I aimed for the far wall and pressed the nozzle down. A jet of orange foam shot out of the nozzle. The foam expanded when it struck the ground. We waited. I squatted down next to it and jabbed it with my finger. “See for yourself.”

  Harper touched it. “Hard as a rock.”

  He picked it up and chucked it at the wall. It bounced off and landed in the dirt.

  Now it was a waiting game. Perkins suggested we get sleep while we could. The dirt floor was hard and uncomfortable, but somehow Perkins was snoring away within minutes. Maybe he had spent enough time in harsh environments that he could sleep through anything. If sleep was a luxury, you learned to take it where you could get it.

  I couldn’t sleep. I slouched down against the wall, staring into the darkness. Our suitlights were off to conserve battery power. We had night vision capabilities, but it was also a drain on the suit’s batteries.

  Now it was a waiting game. Wait for the enemy to s
how up and be ready when they did. If they did.

  I activated my HUD long enough to check the time. We’d been stuck in the pit for over ten hours. My remaining battery power was sitting at sixty-nine percent. Oxygen was slightly lower than that.

  I switched on one of my shoulder lights and put it on the dimmest setting. I sucked water out of my tube. It might be the last water I had for a while. I didn’t know when the roaches might make an appearance, so we had to be ready.

  I saw Gloria’s shoulder lights come on, shining a shaft of light into the darkness. She scooted over to me.

  “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

  “Not a wink.”

  “Me either. Mind giving me a hand?”

  “I need to get the drinking tube out of my helmet.”

  I twisted around so that Gloria had access to the back of my suit. I guided her through the process as she reached into the padded material just below the back of my helmet. There was a zipper there.

  “I think I found it.”

  “Okay, now I want you to unzip it and reach down in there until you find the water bladder. You should be able to feel the plastic nozzle connection at the top and then the drinking tube.”

  I felt her hand snake down into the reservoir that ran along the upper back of my suit and then a slight tug on my helmet.

  “Okay, got it.”

  “All right, good. Now pull any excess tubing out of the reservoir.” She did it, revealing the transparent tubing. “Now you have to extract the end from my helmet. It’s fastened in there with a rubber seal, so you might have to pull pretty good, but not so hard that you tear it.”

  “I feel like I’m performing surgery,” she said.

  “It’s kind of like that.”

  More pressure at the side of my helmet. A few dribbles of water leaked from the tube and ran down my neck. The tube slid along the side of my cheek.

  “I’ve almost got…there.”

  I turned around. She was holding several feet of tubing in her hand. About a foot down, there was a plastic clamp, which she closed so water couldn’t flow out of the tube. A few drops pooled onto the ground.

  Another possibility that could have thwarted my plan was that our environment was too hot and the water would evaporate once it came into contact with the air. But the drops sat in a tiny puddle in the dirt. We must have been far enough below ground that the temperature was significantly lower than the temperature on the surface.

  I took the tube from her. “Good job.”

  “How’d I do?”

  “I’m still alive. That makes it a success in my book.”

  I coiled up the slack tubing and stuffed it into the Velcro pocket at the front of my suit.

  She was breathing harder than normal. Even mild activity was a burden because of the lower oxygen level.

  We killed our lights and sat in the darkness.

  “You’re worried about her aren’t you?” Gloria said. She uttered an awkward laugh. “I suppose that goes without saying.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s a smart girl. I’m sure she knows how to take care of herself.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “Nobody back home?”

  “There was never time. Besides, who makes a journey like this if they have that already? You don’t leave something like that behind. Do you?”

  It made me think about my own life. Or maybe it was the fact that we were wasting away in the pit with little hope of getting out alive. I had made more friends in the last few months (or years, depending on how you looked at it) than I had my entire life. After considering myself a loner for so long, I had people I cared about now. They were the people I lived with, but they were more than that. I possessed normal survival instincts, the primal need to save my own hide, but I was also aware that this wasn’t my foremost driving factor. I wanted to get these people out alive. Maybe I was being selfish. Maybe it was a fear of disappointing them. Nobody was relying on me. We relied on each other.

  My thoughts turned inward.

  The fear came and went. I was focused. I don’t know if it was the darkness of the pit, or the last threads of hope slipping away, but I was able to think more clearly than I ever had before.

  I thought about my parents. About my dad dying on a ship that had probably been much like the Astraeus. I thought about my mother and realized that some of the hatred I had harbored for her was gone. It didn’t matter now, sitting in this place. I could forgive her. A part of me still loved her. I was repulsed with what she had done, disgusted by the fact that she had abandoned me. I told myself that she was a selfish woman. She had chosen herself over me. Had shrugged off the responsibility and taken the money and disappeared into the night with it.

  How had her life turned out? Was she living it up somewhere? Had she met someone else? Married again? Raised another child? Was I a deep, dark secret that she hid from everyone in her new life?

  Did she ever think about me?

  Damn me for still loving her.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Right. You hold onto something like that for dear life. It’s something you might only find once.”

  “Yeah, I’m still looking.”

  “Maybe you found it, but you’re too scared to really go after it.”

  I knew she was talking about Lisa. I also knew she might be right.

  “And that’s the ironic part,” I said. “Cuz here we are, trapped in a pit a few dozen light years from home, prisoners to a bunch of hostile alien cockroaches.”

  “Bad timing?”

  We both laughed at that.

  I was thirsty. Probably because I lacked the ability to take a drink. My water tube was stuffed in the stomach pocket of my suit. With a little skill and effort it would have been possible to thread it back into my helmet, but I decided to let it go. I could hold out a while longer.

  The lack of sleep was wearing on me. I felt drained. A lack of hope makes a person tired.

  “I might try to sleep a little,” I said. “What about you?”

  “Nah, I don’t think I could. But you should. I’ll wake you up if anything happens.”

  “I can stay awake. Keep you company.”

  But I let my eyelids close and I drifted off almost immediately. I dreamed of my dad. Of the accident. The same dream I had had countless times, but this time it was slightly different. Because this time in the dream I was there with him.

  We were both awake, our eyes open, moments away from impending doom. Sirens were blaring. Through a large window, we could see our ship racing toward the asteroid that I knew would be our death. I wanted to yell out, demand someone take immediate evasive maneuvers. Maybe we could skirt around the thing, dodge it by the skin of our teeth. But nothing came out of my mouth. You couldn’t cheat death.

  In the dream, my father was calm. Almost serene. He put his arm around my shoulders and hugged me close to him. I couldn’t understand how he could be so calm.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “I think it will,” I said.

  “Trust me, it doesn’t.”

  “I don’t want to die,” I said. “It isn’t my time.”

  “Keep your eyes open. You don’t want to miss this.”

  I obeyed him. As much as I didn’t want to, I opened my eyes and kept them open.

  Click-click-click-clack-click.

  “What’s that, Dad?”

  “Keep them open, Son.”

  Death in the form of a rock the size of a city block rushed toward us, but that wasn’t what bothered me. It was the sound. It grew louder and louder.

  Click-clack-click-click. It was deafening. I thought my eardrums would burst.

  Click. Click. Clack.

  “Keep them open!”

  His voice was a s
hrill scream now.

  In the window, nothing but jagged rock and swirling gases.

  Then blinding white light filled my vision.

  “Open your eyes! Get up! Open your...”

  Perkins’s voice.

  “…eyes. Open your eyes. They’re coming.”

  Panic.

  I was being shaken awake. Light from Perkins’s suit blinded me when I opened my eyes.

  “What?”

  “On your feet. It’s time.”

  Distantly, I could hear chittering noises and armored feet thudding over rock.

  My mouth was dry. It was hard to swallow. I moved my face to find my tube, but it wasn’t there. I remembered then that it was stuffed in the front pocket of my suit.

  I was face to face with Perkins, the faceplates of our helmets nearly touching. “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll haul you up. Harper and Jin will take Mayweather.”

  Gloria already had one of the stun batons in her hand.

  “Sweet dreams?” she asked.

  “Sweeter than waking life,” I said.

  Perkins hauled me up until I was standing on his shoulders. I gripped the iron grate with one hand and dug the water tubing out of my pocket with the other. I undid the clamp and held the end of the tube close to the grate, dowsing the bars with water.

  This isn’t going to work, I thought. Now that we were putting my plan into action, it seemed pointless. Farfetched. A pipe dream.

  Below me, Perkins grunted under my weight. I kept dowsing the grate until the last drops emptied out of the bladder. I let the tube fall from my hand as I clung to the rock wall.

  Gloria was beside me. One hand clutched at the rock wall and the other had the stun baton raised, the tip close to the iron grate.

  Carefully, I shrugged off my plastic pack and held the strap in my hand.

  The chittering noises grew louder.

  “Any second now,” I said.

  “I’m ready,” Gloria whispered. “I hope this works.”

  “This is some real MacGyver shit,” Harper said.

  “MacGyver?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Kill your lights,” Perkins said.

  I turned off my suit lights and switched to night vision. I held my breath.