“Frost over?”
“Yeah. I mean, with the life support shut off…well, it wasn’t just the air. It was the heat, too. While Donaldson was shaking on the deck, gasping for air, this frost started to form all over him, as well as the walls, the ceiling…everything. I’d seen holovids of things like this happening. You know, emergency procedures and stuff. So I flicked on my suit so I wouldn’t freeze to death.”
“Your suit wasn’t on?”
Garcia shook his head slowly, once. “No, ma’am. I didn’t turn it on until after we’d lost battery power.”
“You’re sure?” She leaned toward him for emphasis.
“Yes, ma’am. Is there significance to that?”
Melissa pursed her lips. “I’m not sure…please continue.”
“So there was no way I could grab another EVO suit and put it on Donaldson. By the time I got back from the locker, his body was frozen, stiff as a board. I knew instantly he was dead. I was sure of it. My suit was reading near space-normal temperature in the compartment. Considering we were on the dark side of Second Earth at the time, that would have made the temperature about minus one hundred thirty degrees Fahrenheit.” He seemed to smile at the remark he’d just made. “A cold day in hell, for sure. Ain’t nobody gonna survive that for more than a few seconds. I…” Garcia looked backed to Melissa as he strained to gather his thoughts. “What did I do next? Oh, yeah. I floated around in the compartment looking for anything that had power to it. I didn’t see anything. Luckily I got trapped in the EVO training simulator, so there were plenty of repair tools here.”
Melissa nodded, then inclined her head over her shoulder in the direction they’d come in. “So where did all the food come from?”
“Ship’s stores. Like I said, there were tools in here. I used a plasma cutter to open a hole in the bulkhead over there.” He craned his neck over his right shoulder, Shawn following his line of sight with his flashlight. Sure enough, a four-foot hole was cut neatly into the wall. “From there, I got to the mid-deck ladder. That took me everywhere I needed to go.”
“What did you see when you left here?”
His eyes went glassy, and Garcia visibly shuddered as he recalled the imagery. “Bodies, ma’am. Frozen. Hundreds of them. Some were still sitting in their chairs, but most were just floating around the corridor or the compartments that I passed by.”
“No one else was alive?”
He shook his head. “None that I’ve found. I gave up hope after ten days.” He looked to the distant wall. “I think it was ten days. I can’t be sure. Maybe it was eleven?”
“Where are all the bodies, Lieutenant?” Melissa asked. “We haven’t seen a single one since we came on board.”
“I…I moved most of the ones I could find. I mean, you don’t know what it’s like…walking around a ship full of frozen bodies. All your friends and shipmates…just…dead. I had a lot of time on my hands. I’d move from compartment to compartment, looking for survivors. I didn’t find anyone. I did come across Cooly, though.”
“Cooly?” Shawn looked at him quizzically.
“Yes, sir. Ensign Tabitha Cooly. She’d lost ten credits to me in a poker match a few nights before. She was cute as a button, but couldn’t play poker to save her life. I wouldn’t have come across her, but the doors to the microbiology lab were fused open. She must have…floated out into the corridor. Anyway, I felt bad about the ten credits, so I slipped it out of my wallet and into her lab coat pocket. She’s down there, with the rest of them.”
“Meaning what?” Shawn asked.
“Well, like I said, I had lots of time on my hands. I did what I would’ve wanted them to do in my place: I moved them one at a time, down the main escape trunk, to the dry storage compartment on deck twelve. It’s the largest hold we have. I mean, we had. Like I said, I would have gone crazy…seeing their bodies every day. Crazy, I tell you.” His voice cracked at the last statement.
“It’s okay, Lieutenant,” Melissa said as she laid a gentle hand on top of Garcia’s matted hair. “You did the right thing. What about the power to this space?”
“Well, luckily I knew the electrical systems pretty well. I’d apprenticed in damage control before I moved up to the sensor operations department. I got to the main DC locker on deck six and took out the portable generator, hooked it in-line with the power conduits on deck five, and routed power to this space. Minimal life support came back online, and two of the gravity generators on deck five kicked on as well. That was…man, I don’t even know…four months ago? I’ve kinda lost track of time.”
She nodded slowly. “It’s understandable, Lieutenant. You’ve done an amazing job of keeping yourself alive.”
“Thanks. Not long after that, the noises started.”
“Noises?” Shawn inquired with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah. Loud, clunking noises. Like something heavy was being moved across the deck. I’d hear the occasional bang, or what sounded like…like water flowing. It went on for a day or two before it stopped. It’s been silent ever since.”
“Water flowing?” Shawn asked.
“Yes, sir.”
Melissa turned her chin up to peer at Kestrel. He returned a look that told her that they would discuss it later. She nodded and turned her gaze back to Garcia.
“How does the ship look? I haven’t seen an active sensor scan in months.”
“She looks…pretty bad, Lieutenant. We’ll talk more about it later.” Melissa reached down to the recorder and shut it off. “I think I’ve gotten everything I need for now. If anything else crosses your mind, just say so.”
Garcia nodded slowly, his eyes wide as he retraced his memory for anything he’d missed. “Yea, ma’am.”
“Do you feel well enough to travel?” she asked just as Sergeant Adams returned from his limited patrol.
Shawn looked to the dark-skinned Marine, asking without speaking if any other survivors had been located. Out of sight of Lieutenant Garcia, Adams only shook his head somberly.
Looking up to Melissa, Garcia smiled faintly. “Yeah, sure. Where we going?”
“Auxiliary control. I need to get the electronic data records from the Icarus’ mission computers.”
“Good luck with that,” he said sarcastically. “I tried to get in there a few months ago. I was hoping to access one of the long-range transmitters. Unfortunately I’d only found one spare plasma cutter in my search of the ship, and those things empty pretty quickly when you’ve got a lot of bulkheads to cut through. I barely made a dent into aux-control before my cutter went dry. Since then, I’ve had to make do with whatever access I could discover. I can get to the food lockers on deck eleven…and to the life pods on the starboard side of deck twelve, for all the good they’d do. They don’t have any power either, but they do have food rations stored inside.”
“What happened to your suit?”
Garcia looked at the worn and torn life support suit he was wearing. “I got a little more use out of it than was probably intended when they built it. I’d been stockpiling food up here for a few weeks. On my last journey back, I snagged a particularly nasty conduit. It ripped a hole right through the pants.” He looked down to his right leg and to the four-inch gash in the material. “The only other EVO suit in here was too small, and all the other lockers were sealed shut when we lost backup power. In hindsight, I should probably have used my cutters to open the lockers, but food and shelter were my number one priorities.”
“It seems you did just fine for yourself, Lieutenant.” She smiled at the young man.
“Thank you. Now, about that little walk,” Garcia again gestured to the hole in his suit. “I don’t think I could make it all the way. There are a few manual hatches between here and there that I’ve closed to keep the pressure in this compartment stable…sort of a poor man’s airlock, you could say. I’ll need a new suit to go any further.”
Shawn reached into his toolkit and withdrew a small laser welder. “This should be just strong e
nough to cut into an EVO suit locker or two.” He grabbed his helmet from the deck as he made his way to the makeshift hole Garcia had cut. “Where are the closest ones?”
With Melissa’s help, Garcia struggled to his feet. “Through that hole there’s a passageway that extends for about ninety feet. Halfway down on the left is a connecting corridor that goes for another fifty yards. There are five EVO lockers in there.”
Shawn looked first to Garcia, then Melissa. There was no way in hell he was leaving her alone in this compartment with him. Garcia seemed sane enough, but Shawn shuddered at the thought of what six months alone in a dead ship could do to a man’s psyche. Fearing for Melissa’s safety, and not willing to put his trust in the lone survivor, Shawn checked the charge on his gun—making sure that both Garcia and Melissa saw him do so. “All right, let’s get going then. You lead the way, Lieutenant.”
Chapter 11
Walking down the long, unlit corridor of the Icarus, Shawn was reminded of a haunted house he’d once visited as a small child. The house itself was little more than an attraction, designed to scare small children while simultaneously entertaining adults with its tongue-in-cheek gore. For his part, Shawn could attest to the successfulness of both tactics. Shining his flashlight into the dark passageway of the Icarus, Shawn could hear the echoes of his mom’s roaring laughter in his mind. The fear he’d felt as a child came back to him in spades as he wondered what—if anything—would pop out of the unassuming crates or doorways he passed. A pang of guilt washed over him as he came to the realization that, whatever monstrous horde awaited them, it would get to Lieutenant Garcia first. Then again, if anything decided to creep up on them from behind, it would attack Sergeant Adams before it had a chance to get to him. It was a no-win scenario that didn’t have any favorable outcome, assuming there was something to be terrified about in the first place.
As it was, the short trip to the environmental suit lockers was uneventful, save for a rogue steam pipe that’d decided to burst as soon as the trio had passed it. On high alert, Adams had squeezed off a round from his pulse rifle into the darkness behind them. Getting a sympathetic glance from Shawn, and a subtle look of disapproval from Melissa, Adams had apologized and the team had moved on.
Prying open one of the suit lockers with Adams’ help, Shawn handed Garcia a new suit, which he unabashedly donned in front of them. His undergarments were as soiled and tattered as the decrepit space suit he’d discarded, and Shawn was instantly distressed at the sore state of the young lieutenant. Garcia had been put through hell—almost literally—and Shawn vowed to make it up to him when they got back to the Rhea. Even if he had to move Heaven and Third Earth, Shawn would make sure Garcia was given a proper stateroom, one fit for an admiral, and he’d receive the best hot meal the Rhea’s cooks could muster. Lieutenant Garcia deserved it, and more. Unfortunately, Shawn also knew there were some things that neither a hot shower nor a good meal would clear away. Again, Shawn swore to make any type of care available to the man, should he desire it.
Once Garcia was fitted with a new EVO suit, the trio headed off for the Icarus’ auxiliary control. Shawn had lost track of how many twists and turns they’d made on their way to what was arguably the most important part of the ship behind CIC. Almost every door they’d come across was closed, which meant they had to make do with access crawlspaces and service passageways.
One of the utility passages, a particularly tight fit on deck eight, had caused the team to slow their descent into the bowels of the Icarus. Several of the water pipes had broken, and the team found themselves waist-deep in crystal clear water. They’d managed to wade through, but not without incident. Melissa stumbled over a pile of debris that had become lodged on the unseen deck, and her EVO suit was completely soaked from head to toe.
Once the team was safely—albeit it significantly saturated—on deck twelve, they made their way to auxiliary control using guidance from Garcia, as well as Shawn’s recollections from his time on board the Daedalus. In front of them loomed the doors to their destination, complete with burn marks in the compartment’s bulkhead from Garcia’s previous attempts to enter the space.
“Now what do we do?” the lieutenant asked of his rescuers.
Shawn gave the door a cursory inspection. “I have just enough power left in my field emitter for one last door. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to find another way in.” He reached into his tool bag and withdrew the device once more, placing it firmly above the burnt crescent that Garcia had made. “Hopefully you didn’t cut anything important when you tried to get in.”
“Agreed,” Melissa granted with a nod.
With a press of the initiator button, the small angular device began its steady rise in pitch until it finally burst a field of energy from within its microgenerator core. The main door into auxiliary control slid open halfway, then ground to a halt.
Melissa looked to Shawn for answers. “Commander?”
Shawn reached up and pressed the initiator button on the generator once more. Nothing happened to either the emitter or to the stubbornly half-opened hatch. “The power core is depleted, but I don’t think that was the problem.” He studied the frame of the door, then looked at the alcoves in which the doors should have been resting. “I think the door is physically jammed. It might be something in the tracks.”
“Great,” Melissa replied, exasperated. “Of all the doors to choose, we get the one that’s bent.”
He studied the aperture with approval. “At least we can squeeze inside.”
“But we’re going to have a hard time hauling out anything larger than two square feet from the compartment.”
Not knowing what she could possibly want that was that large, he agreed with her assessment regardless. “There should be some more power emitters in here we can use, and I’m sure there’s at least one more door out.” Shawn stepped through the half-cocked door, with the dripping wet Melissa and Garcia following close behind. There was no power to the space, so the only visible light came from Shawn and Melissa’s flashlights.
There was also a fine mist in the air. The computer on his wrist told Shawn that the compartment’s air was saturated with toxins typically associated with melted wiring and cooked insulation. Even if this compartment were sealed tight and afforded all the warmth of a summer day, the air quality was totally lethal, bordering on acidic. “We can’t stay in here for too long,” Shawn said as he turned off the computer on his wrist. “The concentrated mixture of gasses in the air is going to start eating through our suits in about thirty minutes.”
Following a round of affirmations from the small team, Melissa made her way to the secondary navigational computer station on the farthest bulkhead. She shined her flashlight on the non-functioning unit, trying to figure out a way to get power to the undamaged screen. “This should contain an exact duplicate of the bridge’s main flight computer. If I can access it, we should be able to tell what happened here.”
“Better just to crack open the unit and take what you need,” Shawn said from behind her. “I can’t imagine the storage media bay would be damaged.”
“This is a state-of-the-art astrometric navigational guidance computer,” she said in frustration. “You don’t simply ‘crack it open.’ We could damage any number of sensitive pieces of equipment in there.”
“Well, while you’ve been busy gawking at this thing, I took a look around. I found two more emergency power emitters, but the only other door out of here is jammed worse than the one we came through.” He then looked at the large computer at her side. “And this will never fit through our only exit, so you’d better think of something else.”
“All things being equal, I’m pretty good with computers. But I don’t have the technical skills necessary to work on a navigational processor. This is better suited to an engineer or an—”
“I do,” Lieutenant Garcia piped in from behind them. Both Shawn and Melissa had almost forgotten he was there. “If I could get your help, Comma
nder? Just give me your tools and I’ll see what I can do.”
Melissa looked to him skeptically. “You have training in this, Lieutenant?”
Garcia shrugged. “Some. I mean, I’m no expert, but I’ve had to repair these units in the past. Under supervision, mind you.”
Shawn looked to Melissa, who only sighed heavily. Not taking her response as a good omen, he reluctantly slid the tool pouch off his shoulder and handed it to Garcia. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
“Unlikely,” he looked at the tools disapprovingly. “This is going to take a little time, but I think I can get the holocubes out without too much trouble.”
Not having the greatest of luck with electronics in general, Shawn was doubtful he could do anything to help the lieutenant except to cheer him on. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing, for now. But I may need your help in a few minutes.”
Shawn and Melissa stepped back from the computer as Garcia got to work unscrewing one of the small, semi-metallic front panels. When Garcia was fully immersed in his task, Melissa motioned Shawn into a sidebar. Shawn locked eyes with Adams, then nodded his head in Garcia’s direction, giving the Marine a nonverbal order to keep an eye on the lieutenant. Receiving a curt nod in response, Shawn and Melissa stepped to the large, inoperative status screen at the head of the control room.
“What’s on your mind?” Shawn asked her tentatively.
She glanced over Shawn’s shoulder to Garcia, then lowered her tone to barely a whisper. “I want to get a look inside the captain’s logbook.”
Shawn nodded in understanding. He knew it was a breach of protocol to look into the log book of a commanding officer without first going through the proper channels—meaning someone of command rank or higher—but under the circumstances, he didn’t see any other options. Besides, the rebellious streak in him wanted to find out what happened to the Icarus probably as much as the beautiful intelligence agent standing before him did.
With a nod, he walked back over to Garcia and grabbed the unused power generator that was lying on the deck next to the scruffy-looking young man. When he got back to Melissa’s side, she moved over to a computer terminal located on the bulkhead near where they’d entered the compartment. She reached for the console’s chair, but when she spun it around, she found it occupied by a cold, lifeless body. She briefly stared into the horrid face, which had the unmistakable expression of terror frozen across its countenance. She involuntarily gasped, turning quickly toward Shawn and burying her face in his chest. He reached his arms around her and held her fast as both of their hearts raced.
Icarus Page 19