The base itself was an impressive thing, the only structure of its kind out there in the otherwise undeveloped lowlands of Galatea. Three stories high, it was a thick, plated glass dome that allowed the scientists in the outer rooms have a constant view of their lands and territories. The last time I had been there it had been a bustling hub, full of movement, like a buzzing hive of honeybees. But now…
“Ara, hang on a second,” I said, this time jogging to catch up with her.
“Now what’s the matter?” she asked, pausing to prop her hand up on her hip.
“Something just doesn’t seem right,” I explained. “So let’s just… proceed with caution.”
“I’m sure everything’s fine…” she countered, but I could tell that she was feeling that same insistent sensation that something was amiss.
It wasn’t a military operation, but the last time I had been to this base, there had been armored trucks and armed guards posted at the entrance. But there was no one there, and we walked right up to the building without so much as a how-do-you-do, let alone a demand for credentials.
The glass doors parted for Araceli, and she crossed the threshold even as an automated voice said, Welcome, Dr. Cross in dulcet tones. Me, I got a Welcome, Guest, which I suppose was better than nothing. Another set of glass doors opened, and I felt the pressure around us shift slightly, just enough to mimic the gravity on Earth. Araceli walked a little easier, and I felt like I was bouncing on a cloud.
The base was the pinnacle of modern technology, both human and Galatean, and it was beautiful in the way that only the sleek and modern can be beautiful. We walked into the lobby, treading lightly on black marble floors, and I saw her furrow her brow as she ran her hands along the chrome detailing that adorned an empty reception desk. Behind that desk was an uninterrupted data feed, boasting high-resolution images of humans and Galateans shaking hands, slinging arms around shoulders, looking shyly into one another’s eyes. The picture windows at the front let in light that glistened off the dark flooring, and we followed the beams past reception and into a corridor, its walls lined with those same happy LCD screens, with those animated images of those same, happy human-Galatean couples. We didn’t speak to one another as we moved with silent trepidation through the hallway.
We reached the end of the corridor and came to a heavy metal door, armed and impenetrable. Araceli flashed her key card at a small console screen to the right of the doorknob, and I heard the behemoth click, groan, and give way. Thank you, Dr. Cross, the calm voice said, and Ara tugged the door open.
The scene on the other side of that door was dramatically different from the one we’d just left behind. In reception things were quiet and orderly, functional and clean, untouched as though the receptionist had simply taken a bathroom break and would return in just a moment to help you.
But we’d crossed over into one of the laboratory areas, and it had been thoroughly destroyed. Once, there had been separate labs on either side of the hallway in which we were standing, but they were indistinguishable from one another now. Broken glass was strewn haphazardly over the expanse of our general vicinity, smoke rising from indeterminate locations. The fluorescent lights above us flickered ominously, and hummed in a sporadic, insistent buzz, tinging everything in a sort of sickly yellow. But that wasn’t nearly the worst of it.
Blood. There was blood everywhere. Blood, and viscera, the chunky pieces of organic life that were so damaged as to be beyond recognition.
Ara was breathing hard, and I knew she too could smell the copper in the air, so strong I could almost taste it. And I didn’t know what to do. I’d brought her here, thinking that this place would have answers for us, thinking it’d be safe. But I had simply delivered her into more danger, and I didn’t know what to do to help her, what to do to set things right.
She swallowed hard, lifting her arm to wipe away the beads of anxious sweat that had formed at her brow. “Come on,” she murmured at last, not able to speak to the horror we were witnessing, able only to move forward. “We need to get to a communications console.”
“Ara—”
“Please,” she cut me off, “don’t say anything.” And my shoulders drooped a little to know that she blamed me, too. “Just follow me.” And I did.
She stepped gingerly over and around blood, gore, broken glass, bits and pieces of what I imagined was once furniture or chunks of LCD screens or lab equipment. The base was one giant half-circle, and there was only one entrance. This was supposed to be a security measure, but it seemed as though that measure backfired, as it trapped the scientists and lab assistants, the specimens and the volunteers, like rats in a maze when whoever was responsible came for them.
“What if they’re still here?” I asked in low tones, and she simply cast a sidelong glance in my direction, a look so full of vitriol it nearly stopped me in my tracks.
“Then I guess we’ll die, too,” came her cold reply. I bristled, unsure of when I’d made the deal to follow a crazy woman to my death. But what was I going to do, just leave her in there with the broken glass and the exploded corpses? No. So I tromped on.
I saw the contorted grimace of a still-intact face when I inadvertently glanced into one of the labs. Her jaw had come unhinged with the force of her screaming, and she had expired without closing her eyes. I hoped Ara hadn’t seen.
We wound around the perimeter until we arrived at a space that was more comparably intact than what had come before it. The glass remained in place, and there seemed to be only one cleanly executed corpse in the room, instead of dozens cut down like dogs in the street.
But this corpse was different, because Araceli rushed to its side and dropped to her knees beside it. It had been a man, balding, with spectacles on the bridge of his nose even in death. He’d been shot once, clean, in the head, and even still, those glasses stayed on. How was that possible?
Araceli was trembling with the force of her emotion as she placed her hands reverently on the man’s chest. “This was Dr. Martin Pierce. He was my longtime colleague, and my friend.” She petted him gently, the way one might soothe an ill child in bed, and I couldn’t do anything but kneel down at her side.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured lamely, but that’s what humans say during times like these. Humans take on the unimaginable and apologize for it, as though it will ever be enough. “Galateans have a saying during times like these,” I continued quietly and spoke in my native tongue: “Kygliian ei roshem cah may.” Literally, it translated to, ‘let no man’s blood be wasted,’ but colloquially—
“His death was not in vain, I know,” she said, wiping the damp apple of her cheek with the back of her hand.
“You speak Galatean?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, but I’ve heard the expression. And I’ve experienced a lot of loss, I guess.” She sniffled and rose to her feet, turning her attention then to the console behind her. I stepped around Dr. Pierce’s body and stood just behind Araceli, my eyes angled down at the touchscreen she was manipulating. Her fingers were lightning quick over the screen, and after a few moments of diligent work, she sighed.
“The internal communications are functional, but someone cut the satellite feed,” she explained.
“What does that mean?”
“It means, if you were standing on the opposite side of the building, I could communicate with you just fine. But trying to get a signal to an orbiting ship, or to a Galatean city, let alone all the way back to Earth…” She shook her head. “It just isn’t possible.”
“How do we fix it?” I asked. Stupid.
“Well, unless you’re secretly a mechanical engineer who specializes in satellites…” I glowered down at her, and she held up her hands defensively. “I’m sorry!” she asserted, “I’m just saying… Danovan, I’m a geneticist. I don’t know how to repair satellites.”
“But—”
“No,” she stopped me. “Whatever you’re going to say, no. I’m not so
me… Swiss Army knife of science genius. I just know bodies. Biology. Organic matter. I can fix that. But I don’t know how to fix this. I’m sorry.”
She dropped down onto a rolling chair, all of the air deflating out of her where she sat with her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. She didn’t know what to do any more than I did.
“So, what? We just give up, then? Lie down and die here along with everyone else?” She peeked at me through her fingers; at least she was listening to me.
“What do you propose we do?” she asked, taking her hands away from her face.
“We need to get to Pyrathas. It’s the biggest city on Galatea. They’ll have functional satellite feeds. We need to find out what happened here, and if it’s connected to what happened to the Leviathan.”
She nodded, a few errant curls falling into her line of vision. She swept them impatiently aside. “Yes,” she agreed. “Good. How far away is it?”
I moved forward and manipulated the touchscreen—I was adept, but much slower than she was. I was trying to pull up a map, but when I closed out of her schematics page, I saw that a message icon was blinking insistently in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.
I touched it without thinking twice.
Immediately, the screen above the touch panel illuminated with the image of a living Dr. Martin Pierce, a sheen of sweat coating his face. His mouth was agape beneath his bushy brown mustache, and his brow was furrowed in desperation.
“What is that?” Ara demanded.
“A message,” I said. I looked up at her and was shocked by her desperate expression, how she was literally wringing her hands. “Should I play it?”
She swallowed hard and glanced over her shoulder to where he lay, dead on the floor behind us. “Yes,” she breathed. “Yes, play it.”
I pressed play, and the audio filled the lab with the sounds of his heavy breathing and the more distant sounds of screams and gunshots.
Chapter 8:
Dr. Araceli Cross
I have no combat training, no reason to be adept at processing such brutality, such overwhelming carnage. The tang of blood hung in the air, sour and slick, and it formed a knot in my throat that wouldn’t dissipate no matter how hard I swallowed. So when Danovan and I moved through the hall, past a gamut of broken glass, blood, and viscera, I tried my best just to put one foot in front of the other, one at a time, and on and on, until we reached Dr. Pierce’s office, which had always been my intended destination.
But I hadn’t planned on seeing him there, lifeless on the tile floor with a gunshot blooming like a rose on the back of his head. He was my friend, this man. I knew him. I knew his wife. They lived in Des Moines. They had four cocker spaniels. A life snuffed out like so much firelight.
But then he popped to life in glorious widescreen, and I feared that, in watching his recorded message, we would see his final moments. And I would not look away. He was my friend; I would not look away.
Danovan played the video, and I could hear Martin Pierce panting. He had been a biologist, and the manager of this lab, in charge of feeding his findings to the Leviathan and collecting the findings that I would send to him. He and his team would compile the data and package it neatly for GenOriens shareholders to digest over budget meetings. He would present to board members, he would communicate with CEOs; he was the only one among us who looked at the big picture. And he was gone.
I saw his features contort with fear before he started speaking, shrieks and the patter of automatic gunfire echoing all around him.
“We are under attack,” he breathed into the microphone, glancing behind him every few moments to see if they had come for him yet. “I don’t know who they are or what they want. They have given us no demands. They arrived suddenly. They have set off explosions on all levels of the base. They are gunning people down. I don’t know who they are.”
He swallowed hard, glanced over his shoulder, and turned back. “Something strange happened this morning, before the attacks began—all of my findings on all of my GenOriens drives were erased. Everything we’ve worked on since we arrived on this planet—gone. I have a backup of some archival findings on a personal drive, the location of which I will not disclose in this recording. But even that does not have the most updated information.”
He looked over his shoulder again, then wiped nervously at the sweat dripping down his brow. “I do not know for certain if one has anything to do with the other, but it seems like too big a coincidence not to mention.” The gunshots were drawing nearer; the sound of a grenade exploding. The camera shook, and Dr. Pierce stiffened.
“Please tell Sherry that I love her.”
In that moment, a man appeared on the screen behind Dr. Pierce. He looked like a soldier, Galatean, in what looked like army fatigues. He pointed his pistol at Dr. Pierce, and I held my breath. Dr. Pierce—Martin, the married man with four dogs back on Earth—closed his eyes. And, blessedly, the video came to a stop.
“Galateans killed him,” I whispered, aghast. “That was a Galatean soldier.”
Danovan nodded slowly. “We saw one Galatean, but that’s not a uniform our military force wears. Besides, this is a mixed human-Galatean research center. It’s fairly safe to assume that it was a mixed human-Galatean attack.”
“Is it?” I snapped without meaning to, and his features colored with unspoken anger. “All we know is what we saw—a Galatean shooting a human in the skull with a handgun.”
“Technically, we saw a Galatean aim at Dr. Pierce with a handgun…” I shot him a look of rage to match his own. “I’m saying, we don’t have a clear picture of the whole story.” He paused, propping his fists up on his hips and glaring down at me. “Do you really want to go around mistrusting the Galateans? I’m on your side, Ara.”
And I believed that he was. All the air went out of me and I slumped into the rolling chair which, I realized, was probably where Martin had been shot and killed. I stood up again. “But what does his data have to do with anything? And why would someone have wiped it? No one would have had access to it unless it was someone higher up in GenOriens than Martin himself was.”
Danovan shook his head. “I honestly haven’t the faintest notion. But what I do know is that we have to get out of here.”
On that point, we most certainly agreed. “We need to collect supplies,” I said, “food, water. A vehicle, if we can manage it. I don’t want to be making this whole trek on foot. It’ll take too long.”
“Agreed.”
I quirked a brow. “How long will it take?”
Danovan swiped away the video of Dr. Pierce and continued to search for a map, enlarging it so that it was projected on the console’s primary screen.
“We’re here,” he said, pointing to the clearly marked base at the center of the map. “Pyrathas is this way.” But not close enough to be represented on the map. And, furthermore, it looked like it was going to take us northeast—past the Leviathan. I shuddered to think of it. “And we’ll go by way of a village I know, a day’s journey past where the Leviathan fell.”
“I don’t see it on the map,” I mumbled.
“No,” he said, bearing the hint of a smile. “But trust me, it’s there.”
***
We went diligently about our business, first scouring the GenOriens base for any sign of survivors. There were none. Whatever militia had staged the attack was incredibly thorough. They hadn’t left a single survivor. And most of the communications hubs had been cleared of their data, so there weren’t even any other videos like the one Dr. Pierce had left. But on the upper levels, where fewer explosives had been used in favor of point-blank executions, there were plenty of undisturbed supplies. Protein bars and water, first aid kits, and tools, and we were more than ready to get the hell out of that base. When we walked out of it, we had sealed its fate as mausoleum.
I tried not to think of it as a place full of my dead colleagues; I tried to think of myself as moving
forward, in order to ensure that I found out who was responsible for their demise so that they could be brought to justice.
At the side of the building was a series of terrain rovers, all plugged into their charging stations. They were odd, bulbous little things like a glass bubble on tank tracks that could go up the sides of mountains as easily as they could flat surfaces. “Do you know how to hotwire these things?” Danovan asked me, and I smiled. Another one of his movie references, no doubt.
“No,” I said, opening the doors to one and climbing inside, “but my key card will let me use it.” There was a touchscreen in the console of the rover and I flashed my card in front of it. “Good afternoon, Dr. Cross,” the rover’s soothing female voice said to me as Danovan climbed into the passenger seat.
“I should drive,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I know where we’re going.”
“Fair enough.”
I climbed out of the rover and rounded its backside, crossing paths with Danovan as I did so, our shoulders only barely brushing as we moved. I took my seat next to him in the rover and we closed our doors, allowing the atmosphere to pressurize to something I was more used to. I heaved a sigh of relief when we were on our way, putting the GenOriens base in our rearview.
We drove quietly for a while, my forehead pressed to the side window of the rover so I could watch the passing landscape. But finally, he broke the silence, and I was grateful for it.
“I’m sorry about your… scientist friend.”
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“We’ll figure this all out. I promise.”
I turned to look at him in the seat next to mine, steering his way across the tall grass of the Galatean plains, and I believed him.
“So,” I breathed, refusing to crack under the weight of our undertaking, “do you know any road trip games?”
He blinked, glancing at me with the ridge of his brow raised in question. I couldn’t help but admire him in the afternoon sunlight as it streamed in through the glass of the rover. He was so beautiful; his presence made me feel calm. Even if, sometimes, he got on my last nerve, he was a constant companion and had proved himself to be more than reliable. That alone earned him respect, if not my good humor.
Alien Survivor: (Stranded on Galatea) An Alien SciFi Romance Page 7