Jubilee Year: A Science Fiction Thriller (Erelong Book 1)

by Gerard O'Neill

  Iron oxide dust and heated fumes filled the interior of the cave making him cough and retch. He pressed his face against the wall and found he was able to breathe a little of the fresh air that escaped to the surface through the rock fall. He knew some of them must surely be alive down there, sealed in what had become a tomb. What a way to go, he thought.

  Keech struggled for whatever oxygen he could suck into his lungs. His bronchial tubes were overreacting to the mix of dust, gas and the swift change in air temperature. The tissue in his airways was already so inflamed he found he was no longer able to exhale.

  He believed he had outgrown his asthma at the age of sixteen and because of his extreme confidence he managed to hide his condition from the Army doctors. Now, at the age of twenty-four Keech was suffering a severe asthma attack. His chest hurt from the effort to breathe and with his strength failing, he curled into a ball.

  His retinas, starved of oxygen, fired a staccato of signals to the brain, informing it they were capturing an image of sparkly lights. The hemoglobin in his blood fell away, finding no more oxygen molecules to carry from his lungs, causing his vital organs to shut down and his lips and fingernails to turn a bruised blue.

  His body refused to give up the struggle to live even as his unseeing eyes closed. In the final minutes of his short life, Keech watched his own private show of bright white stars pop off like the sparklers he waved when he was an eight-yea-old until they finally faded away.

  Long Night

  With the collapse of the shaft, their refuge became a tomb. It was not a quiet one. The dull percussion of meteoroids striking the mountain was amplified and echoed by the stone ceiling and walls.

  Families clung to one another, and there were many individuals sobbed in fear. Yet not one among them would give up the will to survive.

  Cameron and Taylor sat close to one another, while Boyd and Kwong chose to sit alone, each to their own platform. If the light were sufficient to pierce the haze, the soldiers would have seen the same desperation etched deep in the face of each and every huddled form.

  As the hours went by the dust and fumes seeped through the rockfall and down the shaft to drift over them, and they began to suffocate. Should a hundred blowtorches have been applied to a mass of metal work inside their chamber, it would probably have resulted in a similar quantity of choking fumes.

  Storm blinked his eyes, but the sting would not go away. He dragged the bag of oxygen tanks up on the platform and shone his flashlight on the bottles inside. He turned to Stella beside him on the same platform.

  “Mom, I don’t know how to do this.”

  Stella pulled out the masks and tubes and spread them over the mat. “Is this all we have?”

  “That’s it,” Storm replied.

  He should have filled another bag when he was at the surgery instead of giving in to fear. But it was too late to rethink his decision.

  Matthew and Cameron crouched down beside them to help assemble the kits. When they were finished, they held the masks over their own faces and taking several deep breaths. Pure oxygen made all the difference. Their strength returned, and they were ready to distribute the kits.

  “We need to share the oxygen equally,” Cameron shouted over the muffled roar. “Turn off the tap as soon as you can breathe freely, then pass on the tank. Waste nothing! We have no idea how long this is going to last.”

  The gas in the cavern grew no worse and while many were sickened as a result, they remained alive. When the din outside began to subside the youngest among them fell asleep. For the rest, the meteoroid onslaught outside might have eased, but their turmoil inside remained and all they could do was stare into the darkness.

  Inside the mini-system, the orbitals, including the great planet, continued on their way around the dark star. The magnetic fields of the two stars acted to repel each other; the counter force growing stronger as the distance between them narrowed. The approach of the intruder binary twin slowed until it might have seemed to a godlike observer to be locked in a fixed orbit around the yellow dwarf.

  Earth accommodated the new forces acting upon it. The planet was nothing if not a survivor. It would continue to grumble for days as magma from the excited core expanded and rose to the surface before it reached a new equilibrium. The main event would take place when the dark star crossed Earth’s orbit path as it traveled around the Sun. Then, all hell would break loose on the planet’s surface.

  Stella checked her digital watch and saw it was two hours past midnight. She patted Summer’s head, heavy in her lap. When she finally fell asleep, it was only to wake with a start minutes later to find she still sheltered in a cavern in a hill.

  A young Jawindjira woman set down the lit candle on the rocky slab behind their bench and smiled at Stella.

  “Thank you, for the clean air,” she said. “Our elders were choking.”

  “How are they now?” Stella asked.

  “They are better,” the woman told her and she went back to her group.

  In the flickering glow, Stella watched three children as they moved among the refugees. They carried with them containers of dried meat, finger limes, bright pink brush cherries, and green bunya cones they offered in small hands to those who accepted them. In good times their gifts would count only as meager at best, but under the circumstances, they were gratefully received by most.

  When Boyd protested the bunya fruit was inedible, the children patiently showed the most recent arrivals how to extract the small nuts.

  Kwong alone of his group persevered and ate.

  Cameron collected the remaining cones unopened. He placed them on the mat in front of Stella for her to divvy between her own.

  Stella stroked her sleeping daughter’s hair. She felt as though she might be locked in a very bad dream as she watched the corporal move back to his dark corner of their sanctuary.

  Among the late arrivals, it was Boyd who was the most aggrieved by the situation they faced.

  “This bloody abo shit ain’t food, Corporal. I could’a scavenged this lot out of the bush myself!”

  “You should be thanking them for giving you vitamins and roughage,” Kwong advised.

  “We already got vitamins,” Taylor complained. “I’m with Boyd. That bush crap will give us diarrhea if you ask me.”

  “I’m not asking you,” Kwong growled in reply.

  “Why we do we have to be stuck with blackies anyway, Corporal?” Boyd muttered.

  “If you knew what was good for you, you’d be eating the bush tucker,” Matthew called softly to him from the shadows.

  “You lot should just stay in this hole,” Boyd sneered in reply. “It’s safer than those bloody humpies you lot sleep under in the outback. But I bet you won’t. I bet you’ll want to be close to white fellas so you can still get a square meal.”

  “When you say—this hole—you mean the cave you are sheltering in, right?” Matthew asked, speaking each word evenly. “The one we invited you to share with us?”

  “It isn’t your hole in the ground,” Boyd shouted. “We got as much right to it as any of you!”

  “You ought to shut it,” Kwong said to Boyd.

  “We were…” Boyd continued.

  “Shut up, Boyd,” Cameron barked at the man. “And that is an order!

  “Yes, Corporal,” Boyd replied.

  He fell quiet, sullen in his discontent, and after several minutes he groaned and got to his feet.

  “I’m going to take a dump,” he said. “I think I got the runs.”

  He made his way to the darkened end of the cavern, cursing loudly as he stumbled over rocks.

  Aunty Wanganeen got to her feet.

  “Hey, this cave isn’t a toilet! We showed you what we prepared for everyone further down the branch off! Corporal, tell your men to respect this place.”

  “I’ve already tried,” Cameron said.

  “Aunty, you’re dealing with a frigging boofhead!” Kwong told her. “He hasn’t got anything up here,” t
he soldier said, tapping his forehead to underline his meaning.

  “If we ever get out of here, that bugger is going to clean up his mess before he leaves!” Aunty declared.

  “Fair enough,” Cameron replied.

  The corporal was too exhausted to make an example of Boyd to the men, and anyway, how could he do that with everyone stuck in the same chamber? He switched on his torch, found the beef jerky in his pack, and stretched out on the platform. The bush bed wasn’t so bad, he thought. He closed his eyes, chewing the dried meat slowly. There was a way out of this miserable cavern. There had to be.

  Squeeze Space

  “Keep at it!” Cameron bellowed at the rubble clearing team.

  He squinted into the dark at the barely discernible shapes of three soldiers working a large slab off the top of the pile of broken rock. A large piece slid off of its own accord; the hollered warning coming too late, the rock crashing to the floor.

  Since it was entirely possible that a sizable piece of debris could land on someone’s leg or worse their head, the sleeping platforms were moved to the far side of the cavern. There the cave floor declined to the extent a trickle of water they had celebrated earlier because no one was going to die of thirst, meant damp crept into their makeshift beds. The need to escape the chamber had ticked up another notch in the scale of urgency that Cameron created in his head.

  Matthew shone his flashlight through the dust and across the top of the rubble heap.

  “How about we focus on clearing a crawl space between the cave ceiling and the rock pile?”

  Taylor and Kwong stopped pulling stones to follow the beam of light.

  “Hey, who told you two to stop?” Cameron bellowed at the two men.

  “The collapse will go all the way to the entrance,” Matthew said. “What they’re doing is causing rocks to move down the shaft toward them and us. It’s dangerous.”

  “He’s right,” Taylor said. “We only aim to clear enough space to crawl out. Not to drive a car through the shaft.”

  Cameron wiped the grit from his eyes with the corner of his shirt. “Alright. So—where are we at?”

  He looked around the faces he could see in the dim flicker of candlelight for suggestions. “

  “Okay,” he said, when there were none. “We only need to clear a squeeze space. Let’s get back to it!”

  After an hour of shoving rocks down the side of the pile, Cameron called a halt to their labor.

  “We’ll do it in shifts. We’ll have four working on top with two in the front and two behind. The rest of you! I want you all to organize yourselves. We will take turns at working in chains to pass the rocks back. Let’s try fifteen-minute rounds.”

  Summer and Stella watched as the beam of a flashlight played on the ceiling. The great pile of rock that had poured from the shaft still filled more than a quarter of the cavern. Clearing a passageway out looked all but hopeless, and yet they held onto hope.

  “Mom, Dad will be okay, won’t he? They will have some kind of shelter at the camp won’t they?”

  Stella patted her daughter’s shoulder. “I think so, Sum.”

  She blinked her tears away, grateful Summer could not see them.

  But Summer traced the curve of Stella’s jaw upward along the cheekbone, rubbing her thumb across her fingertips and felt the wetness. She put an arm around Stella and pressed her head against the breast of the woman she had known for so many years as her mother and listened to the heartbeat.

  Storm sat close to Michael and Penny. No words had been said for many hours, yet he remained hopeful. He gazed across at them in the dim candlelight.

  Penny nestled her head against her father’s shoulder. Her eyes closed, her face pinched. She was unreachable.

  By evening they figured they were more than one-third of the way up the shaft. The work shifts were lengthened to an hour atop the pile. Long enough to strain muscles and scrape skin.

  Neville Combo found extra bark mats for the tunnelers to lie on and they helped, but progress remained slow.

  At first, injuries were few and minor, but as the tunnelers became overwhelmed by tiredness and energy ebbed their mistakes became frequent. When Boyd crushed the fingers of one hand, Stella took his place.

  Darren stripped wood from the stick platforms to use as splints and bound them with bandages he found in the first aid kit. They decided not to waste what little morphine Storm had gathered, and with no alcohol to lessen the pain the injured man was left on the bark mat to moan himself to sleep.

  The able-bodied survivors worked in shifts. No one wanted to stop digging, but the lack of food and sleep slowed the tempo of their effort. A mood of resignation had settled over the exhausted laborers. No rescuers from above would be coming to their aid. They tried their best to remain optimistic, telling each other all the hard work and sacrifice was going to reap a reward, and they were right. their bleak situation was about to change for the better.

  Kwong and three young men from the Jawindjira mob were about to complete their long shift at the top of the pile.

  “You feel the wind, boss?” Kuparr Naaiang asked Kwong in an urgent whisper.

  “I can’t feel nothing but pain,” Kwong muttered in reply. “Fucking rocks have scraped all the skin off my knees and my ribs.”

  “I can even taste it,” Kuparr told him. “And it tastes good.”

  Kwong groaned with the effort as he wiggled closer to the man. He was of the mind they were never going to dig their way out of the pit, but there was something in Kuparr’s tone he couldn’t ignore. He sidled up closer to the man and when he felt the draft, it was shocking. It was only a waft of cool air brushing the perspiration on his cheek.

  “Oh—yeah!” He exclaimed. “That feels good!”

  “Like a splash of clean, cold water,” Kuparr suggested.

  “Like an ice cold beer!” Kwong replied.

  They laughed together and set about digging with a renewed vigor.

  It took another two hours of carefully pulling away the stones when the two men glimpsed sunlight, the first they had seen in five days. When the others heard the good news. The cavern echoed with wild whoops.

  It was on the morning of the sixth day of their entombment that Kuparr slid down the other side of the rock fall.

  Kwong pushed aside enough stones for his large frame to wriggle through and he too was able to tumble to the floor.

  It was little more than twilight inside the small entrance cave but they found themselves squinting. The two men breathed the fresh air deeply, as they waited for their eyes to adjust. At the mouth of the cave they found the stone surface was blackened and still warm to touch. There they stood for many minutes, gazing at the stark and sterile world outside.

  “There’s nothing left!” Kuparr whispered.

  The narrow valley had been swept by a fiery inferno. Blackened stumps stood like spines amid heat fractured boulders. Smoke and ash drifted in the breeze, and like the sky above their heads, the land was blanketed in gray.

  The heat that remained in the rock was still tremendous. It worked its way through the thick tread of their boots to cook the soles of their feet as they made their way down the slope. When they saw they had reached the end of the valley and the heat lifted, they both whooped with the relief.

  Their elation didn’t last long though because with each step they took, hot ash billowed up in acrid clouds filled with sparks that stung their exposed skin. After several minutes their throats had become raw from coughing.

  “Stuff this!” Kwong exclaimed and raised his forearm to cover his mouth and nose.

  Kuparr looked at him and shook his head.

  “Do like me.”

  Kwong watched as Kuparr pulled his T-shirt over his head and tied it around his lower face, knotting it from behind.

  “On the way in, I spotted a pond next to the fence line,” Kwong said as he fashioned a dust mask of his own.

  The two set off down the slope. Plumes of ash rose with each fo
otfall. Spirals picked up and scattered over the wasted land by the gusts of wind that came and went. The Sun’s rays were struggling to penetrate the layer of smoke below the clouds. There would be many days of twilight to follow.

  The hope they had that their vehicles might have survived the fierce bombardment and fire was fast fading. They gazed down the slope toward the cliff face and saw a scattershot of craters stretching across, what was before the storm, weathered undulations that went all the way back to the far hills. Chunks of glassy dark meteorite protruded from earth patched ash-white and burnt orange by the heat of impacts. The rocks from space glittered like gems even in the dim yellow light.

  “Looks like the Moon blew up, eh?” Kuparr said, looking about him.

  Kwong gazed at the scarred, still smoldering landscape. “Looks like we’re walking on it.”

  The pool was much smaller than Kwong recalled from his position behind the cannon. Now it resembled nothing so much as a tar pit in a desert.

  Kuparr was already sinking below the surface by the time Kwong reached the edge of the water. He waited for the man to come back up. He needed to know it hadn’t turned to acid. When he saw the other man stand upright he was stung by a sense of shame, and he realized how much his sense of humanity had been tested over the past few days.

  Kuparr wiped the sticky ash from his eyes. “You were waiting to see if it poisoned me, right?”

  He laughed, then he shook his head when he realized the truth in Kwong’s face.

  Kwong wasn’t hesitating any longer. He let out a yell and ran like a five-year-old boy into the pool, shallow diving below the floating layer of ash and brown scum. He held his breath for as long as he could and rolled joyously like a seal pup in the ocean. It was as good as a warm bath. He kicked his legs and let the warm water take the edge off the pain in his feet.

  Kuparr had stopped at the entrance to the cave. He was staring back at Kwong in surprise.