Parsons nodded solemnly to the speaker. “We’ll find them.” His voice was quiet. “Regardless of what’s happened to them, we’ll find them.”
“What about the monsters?” another voice spoke out.
My blood chilled as I thought about the massive creature that had dove out of the sky and taken out one of the shuttles with a single strike. Monsters. We were stranded on a planet inhabited by monsters.
The crowd fell silent once again, tension and fear humming in the air. Parsons and Carter exchanged a weary look. There was so much resting on their shoulders. The fate of humanity was in their hands.
“When they put this mission together, our founders foresaw encounters with hostile life forms. There are some weapons on board the shuttles. There are also mech suits and artillery on board the ship.” I nodded along with many others in the crowd, though I doubted the weaponry on the shuttles could effectively defend against such large creatures. “The heavy-duty weaponry is locked in the armory on the ship. We will have to make that one of our priorities.”
“Come on, people!” Parsons shouted. “Get with your designated work groups and you will all be assigned tasks. We have a lot to do and we’re burning daylight! Let’s go!”
The crowd began to break apart and I turned to find Cern and my other teammates.
“Hey!” Parsons jogged toward me. “You want to wake the other colonists?”
My mouth opened and closed dumbly before I managed a nod. “Yes sir.”
“Good. You’re leading the expedition to find survivors.”
I blinked at the man. “I don’t know how to lead anyone. I’m not part of the commanding crew.”
Parsons shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Not right now anyway.” He looked out over the dispersing crowd. “You care about those people,” he said firmly, crossing his arms over his chest. I nodded tentatively. “Well, we need someone to find them. Wake them up and make sure that the rest of the colonists are taken care of.”
I nodded again slowly.
“When they are awake, have them checked out by the medics and then send them my way so we can brief them and put them on a task.” Parsons looked me over and sighed. “I’m not going to lie. We don’t expect to find all of the colonists alive, but there has to be some. Do you feel like you can do this?” His eyes bore into me.
“Yes sir.”
Parsons nodded. “Good. Get to it.” With that, he turned and headed for another group of colonists.
In a daze, I stumbled over to Cern.
“What was that about?” Cern asked quizzically.
“We’re going to be in charge of finding survivors from the other cycles.” The image of the torpor tube lying loose among the wreckage hovered in my mind.
How many more destroyed tubes housing broken bodies would they find?
I looked up at the gaping hole in the side of the ship. Jagged pieces of metal jutted out around the edges and wires dangled down like vines. This side of the ship had taken the brunt of the damage from debris in orbit.
Directly inside the hole was a torpor room. The tubes were sealed when they closed and would have provided the sleeping colonists with air, but the stress from extreme cold and then sudden extreme heat more than likely would have been too much for the tubes.
“Come on.” I looked over my shoulder to my teammates. I imagined that the awe and horror plastered over their faces mirrored my own expression. “These people need us.”
Carefully, I climbed up the opening, finding easy handholds and footholds in the twisted metal. My palms began to sweat as I climbed up the wreckage, and I quickly wiped them on my shirt. Part of me wanted to run. To hide. To never know how far our numbers had fallen. But I knew I couldn’t. The colonists needed me to be there for them. To explain what had happened. To tell them they were safe now and that everything would be alright.
As I pulled myself up onto the floor, I kept my eyes downcast, staring at the linoleum for an extra moment as I tried to postpone the inevitable. The light-gray flooring was singed black underneath my fingers. It had blistered in the heat of re-entry. I saw Cern’s hand reach over the edge as he grasped for purchase. His breathing hitched. With a deep breath, I slowly raised my eyes.
It was worse than I had imagined. The entire room had turned black. The floor. The walls. The tubes. What tubes were left anyway. Many were missing from their rows. They had been ripped straight out of the floor, leaving nothing behind but loose wires.
“Oh god,” Lero whispered behind me.
The words snapped me from my trance. We didn’t have time to mourn the dead. Not yet. We needed to find the living and keep them alive.
“Come on,” I said, surprised to hear the hard edge in my voice. “We have to check the tubes and make sure that…that…” I suddenly didn’t know what to say. That they were all dead? It sounded so harsh. “We have to see if anyone is still alive.”
“No one is left here,” Elsy stated.
“What if someone is?” I asked. “What if it’s only one person? We have to check every tube. I’d rather know for sure than wonder if we missed anyone.” Elsy pursed her lips into a thin line but nodded.
I stepped forward to the first tube, the one closest to the tear in the ship. The outside was scorched. The glass in the small viewing window had begun to melt and drip down the front of the tube.
I depressed the release lever, and the door popped open with a hiss. I held my breath and yanked the door open.
Immediately, I leaped back, my hand flying up to cover my mouth. The body was covered in blackened skin. The mouth hung open in a silent scream. The eyes were gone, leaving behind gruesome empty sockets that stared back at me accusingly.
I closed my eyes as I shut the tube, trying to block out the image, but it wouldn’t leave my mind. The image played against the back of my eyelids, refusing to be unseen. When I looked around the room again at the almost two hundred tubes we had to check, I shivered. We would see that same image again and again. The same blackened skin. The same eyeless stare. The same everlasting scream.
I knew, in that moment, that those images would never leave me for as long as I lived. The memory of those who had died today would always haunt me.
The smell of charred flesh was stuck in my nose. Despite covering my face with a cloth, the smell permeated everything.
We hadn’t found one survivor. No one had been lucky enough to escape the burning heat of re-entry. I only hoped that their deaths had been painless. I hoped they were still in hibernation when they died. Oblivious to the chaos around them and their own impending demise.
Our group was defeated already. All around me I saw the same downcast eyes and mouths set into grim lines. The rescue party was covered in dark streaks of soot, making us look even more beaten down.
For a moment, I wondered if I had been wrong to force a search of this room. We hadn’t found anything but despair. We had known we wouldn’t find survivors from the instant we had set foot in the room. Why had I insisted that we search anyway?
We had debated what to do with the bodies. It seemed wrong to leave them there, sealed in the tubes, even though they were so much like caskets. But there were so many more rooms to check. So many unaccounted for. We had no choice but to tally which bodies body we found and move on.
With a groan, I stood from where I sat against a wall. We had taken a quick break to prepare ourselves for the task that lay ahead. Another room. Another room that could hold as much death as this one.
“We’ve been here long enough,” I said to the others, my voice subdued. “The dead are gone and beyond our help, but the living still need us.”
There were no words as the others pushed themselves to their feet. They responded like robots obeying a command, allowing their brains to turn off as they prepared for more horrors.
The door that led out of the torpor room did not open as I approached it. When I hit the manual button, nothing happened.
“What’s wrong?” Cern stepped u
p beside me.
“We need to jimmy the doors open.” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. Why couldn’t just one thing be easy? Just one. Like opening a door.
“Can they even be jimmied?” he asked skeptically. I just shook my head. I had no idea. The door had never not worked before.
“The doors should slide open if you pull on them,” a woman stated, stepping forward. “A few decades ago, they lost power in the hydroponics section. It’s some kind of failsafe.” The woman shrugged. “Not all the doors have it, but this one should.” My cheeks flush with embarrassment. Of course they had built a failsafe into the doors.
“Alright. Cern, help me out.” Together we pried the seam apart at the middle of the door and slowly pulled the doors apart until there was an opening wide enough to pass through.
The hallway was dark. Not just dark, but the entire absence of any light. I had never seen the hallways so dark. There were always light on in the common areas. During the day cycle, the lights were bright and warm. As the day continued, the lights would dim. Day and night were irrelevant without a sun, but the change in lighting was pleasant. It allowed the colonists to feel a sense of normality.
Now, all of the lights were gone leaving the hallway entirely pitch black. I fished around in my small supplies bag and dug out a powerful headlamp. Flicking the light on and pulling the band tight around my head, I looked out into the hallway again. It was still dark, but at least now I could see where I was going.
Despite the darkness, the hallway looked normal. Since nothing could have been tossed around during the landing, everything had remained just as it was. The next torpor room was only a few hundred meters down the hall.
This torpor room was pitch black as well. The tubes rose up out of the shadows on either side of the room. In the dark, they looked more like coffins than hibernation chambers.
This room was untouched by the destruction that had ravaged the last. With a deep breath, I tried to steady my nerves. I didn’t want to look in the tubes again. I didn’t want to see what was inside them.
As the others filed in behind me, I stepped up to the first tube, smacking the release button before I could reconsider. With a hiss, the tube popped open. I swung the door fully open, afraid I would back away if given the chance.
A woman stood surrounded by the soft, pillow-like cushion of the torpor tube. Her hair was dark like molasses and hung around her ears. Her skin was pale from the lack of sunlight. She didn’t appear to be hurt, but she didn’t move. She wouldn’t move if she were still in hibernation.
Hope welled inside my chest. If she wasn’t hurt, then she could still be alive. With shaking hands, I reached forward to find the woman’s carotid artery as I looked for a pulse.
I could feel nothing. The artery was as motionless as the body.
Bum-bum.
The skin bounced beneath my fingers and my heart skipped a beat. My whole body stilled as I waited for another beat. When it didn’t come, defeat washed over me like a tidal wave. Perhaps I had so desperately wanted this woman to be alive that I had imagined it.
Bum-bum…Bum-bum…Bum-bum.
The beats were sluggish and far apart, but each one grew stronger and closer together as the effects of the hibernation serum began to wear off. My heart race as the woman’s eyes fluttered as she fought to open them.
“I-I-I’ve got a survivor.” My voice trembled as I fought back tears. Slowly, carefully, I gripped the small tube in the woman’s nose and smoothly pulled it out, in case the drug was still being delivered to her brain. When the woman’s eyes opened, they were hazy from the drugs.
“What?” Her head lolled and she fought to hold on to consciousness. “Survivor?”
I grabbed ahold of the woman before she could collapse to the floor, easing her down gently, like I had done so many times before when waking the next cycle.
“It’s alright,” I whispered in the woman’s ear. “It’s all going to be alright. We have a home now.”
“I have another survivor!”
“I’ve got one here too!” I looked up from my charge. Down the row, I could see others being pulled from the tubes and eased back to wakefulness.
Tears clouded my vision and spilled down my cheeks. We had risked so much, landing on Iotova. There had been loss. People who could never be replaced. But we had survivors as well. People who would now have a planet to call their home.
We were home.
Chapter 3
I plopped down on the ground. I had never been so tired in my entire life. Cern dropped down next to me, his arm draping around my shoulder and pulling me in close. I rested my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes.
“We did good today.”
I smiled weakly. “It would have been better if we could have found more survivors and fewer bodies.” The distorted bodies trapped in their torpor tubes flashed through my mind and my eyes flew open.
“But we did find other survivors. Six hundred and thirty-five, correct?”
I nodded. “We also found eight hundred and seventy-three bodies, and that leaves roughly eight thousand people still unaccounted for.” I rubbed my face wearily.
Cern nodded. “We wouldn’t have found those survivors, though, if you hadn’t spoken up in the first place.”
I sighed and smiled. I had to admit, it felt good to find all those people. To tell them that they had a home now. That their journey was done. “How did the other groups do?” I changed the subject. I didn’t like all the praise.
“They’re making progress. Some of the preserved food was damaged in the landing, but some of it survived. The engineers are working on restoring power to the ship, but there are so many things that have to be checked before the power can be turned back on.” Cern shook his head and sighed.
I hated to ask, but I had to know. “Do you know how the genetics lab fared?” My voice was barely a whisper.
Cern shook his head. “They haven’t been able to check yet. It doesn’t have power, none of the ship does, but as far as how damaged it might be…” His mouth set in a grim line.
I gnawed on my lip and thought about all the DNA locked away in the ship. Any hope of resurrecting the creatures from Earth would be disappear if we didn’t preserve those samples. With a sigh, I shook my head.
“I know,” Cern whispered softly, his fingers lightly brushing across my hair. “I know there is a lot to do, but we’re here.” He gestured to the land around them and deep purple night sky.
“We are here.”
An inhuman scream cut through the night, making me pull away. It had come from somewhere across the prairie.
All other sounds silenced across the camp. Cern leaped to his feet, pulling the rifle he had off his back.
“What was that?” My voice was hardly a whisper as I slowly shifted to grab my own weapon. Cern didn’t respond as he swept back and forth, searching for the source of the sound in the darkness.
I saw a flash of movement in the dark. “There!” I pointed, but whatever had been there was already gone.
Another scream echoed through the night. The animalistic cry was quickly followed by several more that echoed across the prairie.
I jumped to my feet, every muscle in my body tensing. The other colonists were up as well, a frightened cacophony of voices rising with them.
“Everyone, into the ship! Now!” Lieutenant Commander Parson bellowed above the noise. Suddenly, everyone was moving. The colonist stampeded toward the safety of the ship.
“Do we have more weapons?” I asked Cern.
Cern shook his head dismally. “No. They weren’t able to make it to the armory today.” My heart sank.
A small distance away, I saw one of the shuttles. “Wait!” I slid to a halt. Instead of following the other colonists, I darted for the shuttles. I shoved the door open and dove for the chest of armaments. I had made it this far, survived the fall, and seen more than I had ever cared to. I wasn’t going to die now without a fight.
; “What are you doing?” Cern’s shadow fell across her as he stood in the doorway. “Get to the ship.”
“We need weapons. We can’t meet whatever is out there without weapons.” Another shriek cut through the air. It was so close. “Help me with this.”
I ran over and kicked open another chest. “Now!” I barked when Cern didn’t move. Together we hoisted a large 50-caliber rail gun out of the case and carried the weapon back to the shuttle’s doors. Cern dropped a short pole into a hole in the floor. The pole locked into place with a resounding thunk and we hefted the weapon up, mounting it on the pole.
“Go get in the pilot’s seat!” I snapped as I grabbed the harness and quickly strapped it around my waist. Cern disappeared to the front of the shuttle. On the Endurance, he had trained as Elsy’s backup if she was ever hurt or killed. He wasn’t as skilled with the small vessel as Elsy was, but we didn’t have time to wait for the others.
After clipping the harness to a hook at the edge of the door, I reached for one of the headphone sets mounted on the wall and pulled it over my ears.
Big shapes loomed out of the darkness. They were sleek figures whose skin reflected the moonlight in flashes. They rippled through the grass, closing in on the Endurance quickly.
“Get this thing up now!” I screamed into my headset as a creature crested the last small hill between us. The thing was easily the size of the shuttle.
As the engines whirred to life, the creature raised its triangular head and let loose a roar that gave me chills.
The shuttle lurched into the sky just as the creature lunged for us, swiping at us with a gigantic clawed paw. The creature screamed in frustration, its open mouth revealing a row of jagged teeth.
As the shuttle rose into the air, my breath was sucked from my lungs. Dozens of the creatures swarmed across the prairie.
With a jolt, I slammed my finger down on the trigger. The machine hesitated as it spun up before belching round after round so quickly I couldn’t follow all the tracers. The gun jumped in my hands for a moment before I brought it under control, trying to cut down the creatures as the raced through the grass.
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