The captain grunted. “What about the cats?”
“Dozer is curled up beside Libby, Hiccup is with Connie, and the kittens are with Spuds in the kitchen.”
“What the hell attacked us?” asked Kriss. “Did anyone see anything? I sure as hell didn’t. It happened so fucking fast.”
“Me neither, sir,” responded Smitty. “I just hope whatever it is doesn’t come back soon. I don’t think we could take another attack.”
“Get Merc and Sophi here on the double. I want the drone launched ASAP to get a visual on the situation.”
“Aye, sir, I’m on it,” Smitty responded.
The drone was undamaged and soon launched. Its cameras began sending back live video feed. Much to Pickle’s dismay, Connie demanded to be wheeled over to a monitor so that she could watch.
“My brain’s not paralyzed, and the colony needs me,” snapped Connie. Her insistence negated Pickle’s pleas. And she was right. They did need her.
The drone was flying slowly; in fact, it was more of an aerial hover. The five-acre clearing was much larger now, more like twenty. It looked like an old-world logging clear-cut, not professionally done, but like a slash-and-burn site done by private loggers. Except there were no telltale cut-off stumps marking the clearing like tombstones of the dead; instead, any stumps that were observed were still attached to the tree, because they had been ripped out of the ground and thrown.
“This doesn’t make any sense. What could have done this?” asked Kriss.
“Tell Sophi to move the drone over another half mile,” ordered Connie. Something had caught her eye, and as the drone moved over and scanned again, the crew saw what it was.
Another clearing about the same size as the one the colony was in had been hit by something even more violent. Mounds of soil and debris piled up sixty feet high in one spot, followed by a ravine equally as deep. From the air, the terrain looked like the folds of a stretched-out accordion.
“Captain, if I had launched the SOB as planned, this is where our colony would have been located,” said Connie in a weak voice.
“What do you mean?” asked Kriss.
“When we were orbiting the planet, I was distracted, and Dozer hit the launch button himself. If not for him, we would all undoubtedly be dead right now.”
Walking over to Libby’s gurney, Captain Kriss stroked Dozer’s large head. She fought back the tears welling in her eyes. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded clear and confident. “We are going to make it. Nothing can kill our spirit.”
The words had barely been spoken when Merc came in. “Captain, the nuclear reactor is heating up. The cooling skin in Engineering isn’t working.”
Interrupting, Connie said, “I think I know what attacked us.”
Everyone present became silent.
“I think ice attacked us, sir,” continued Connie matter-of-factly. “The drone mapped the planet prior to our landing, and the seismic charges it dropped helped reveal what was under the surface. But even I didn’t expect this.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Kriss.
“Watch,” said Connie as she feverishly typed on the computer’s keypad. A simulated rendition of Alpha-64 came up on the monitor, and a growing red line traced its way across the image. It wasn’t straight, but serpentine, like a red river with small tributaries.
“What is that?” asked Smitty.
“It’s what tried to kill us,” replied Connie. “It’s a fault line, and it is over eighty-seven hundred miles long. The fault line combined with several others, and branches about ten miles from where we are now. The larger branch ends at the other clearing the drone just showed us; the smaller branch ends right under our colony. This planet, like Earth, appears to have plate tectonics, and where these floating landmasses meet, fault lines occur. Imagine snapping an eighty-seven-hundred-mile-long whip. By the time the energy traveled its length, the power generated would be immense. Fortunately, the final split had a large branch, and most of the shock traveled down this branch and not ours. That is why this other clearing shows so much more damage.”
“How did ice cause the fault line?” asked Kriss.
“Because the planet’s core is ice. What attacked us wasn’t a monster. It was an ice quake. The core is slowly melting, and as it melts, the planet is retracting. This causes the fault lines and the quakes. The roar we heard when Dozer rushed into the clearing was from the surface ripping apart.” Connie beamed. “Merc, bore a hole towards the planet’s core and pump the cooling gel for the reactor into it to avoid a meltdown. My recommendation is to start drilling now.”
Chapter Seventy-Five
The beating of eighty thousand pairs of wings made an intense fluttering noise. One of the hives had been ripped out of the ceiling of the ship’s garden, and the insects flowed out like heavy molasses down its overturned sides.
As the queen circled her former prison, her brood rose and followed. The swarm at first had no form, but then, like a synchronized flock of starlings, a unified shape appeared, as dense as living flesh. They disappeared, then magically materialized again in a new shape, only to be swallowed up as they flew down the throat of the tunnel.
The tunnel’s other mouth, which opened in Engineering, was unceremoniously vomiting out the insect hoard. Anyone caught in its wake threw themselves flat against the floor in fear.
The only one unafraid was Spice. She ran like a distraught mother, begging her fleeing children to come back. Tightly gripped in her hand was a large net on an aluminum pole. Swinging it in vain, she valiantly attempted to catch the queen. It was a losing battle; they soon outdistanced the commander and, in one final aerial maneuver, poured out of the breached wall where the boulder had smashed.
Spice looked dejected. The colony had just lost a quarter of its bees. My beautiful diamonds are gone.
Her eyes came to rest on the Hole, and as her vision focused, she realized something else was wrong. Its gated entrance was open, and the culvert’s interior was empty. In disbelief, she ran over and looked inside. Leea was gone.
*
The electric motor whined as the drill stem slowly turned on the derrick. As one section of pipe was twisted into the ground, the tongs lowered another one, and it was screwed into the first. Then the motor whined again.
It was slow going. The planet’s rocky crust had already worn out one diamond-tipped drill. The drilling crew had to trip the pipe, change bits, and reinsert the sections to start to drill again. They were forcing a muddy slurry of crushed rocks from the garden down the hollow core of pipes to lubricate the diamond bit. The downward pressure from the derrick was creating heat, but the slurried, crushed rocks were full of moisture; it was working.
Merc analyzed the core samples for Connie. The chief science officer was insistent that she be informed of all new data. So far, they had gone down eight hundred feet, and found the temperature was twenty degrees cooler than at the surface. They didn’t have enough pipe to drill much deeper, so Connie had come up with an alternative. They would drill a series of these deep wells in a sequenced pattern and then frack them at the bottom. This would be done by setting off small explosions at the bottom of each well. Then the reactor’s coolant would be pumped into one well on one end of the series and exit through another well at the other side and circulate back to the reactor. All other wells would be capped. In theory, it would act like a giant underground radiator.
Merc had her doubts, but Connie insisted that it would work. They had no alternative. If it didn’t work, the reactor would have to be shut down. Without it, the colony would be paralyzed. No reactor meant no electricity, and no electricity meant no computers. No computers meant no gene sequencer. If that failed, they all died.
Smitty, in charge of getting the colony’s perimeter defenses back up, was doing a fine job under the captain’s watchful eye. Kriss had just left one ne
wly reerected platform when Spice ran up to her.
Breathing heavily, Spice said, “Captain, I’ve got some bad news.”
“Ever since we’ve landed, it has been all bad news,” barked Kriss.
“We lost a colony of our honeybees, sir, and
Leea escaped.”
“What?”
“Leea escaped, sir.”
“I should have emulsified her when I had the chance. Get back to Connie and have her track the prisoner with her RFID chip. Tell Smitty so she can alert our perimeter guards.”
“Yes, sir,” snapped Spice.
*
Walking towards Med Bay, the captain was exhausted. It seemed everything was going wrong.
Leea, on the other hand, was elated. Finally she had escaped the confines of the Hole. When the ice quake had hit, she’d felt like a marble in a washing machine, battered and bruised. But, more importantly, she was free. After being confined for so long, her muscles had atrophied, and the added gravity left her winded.
“Hey, you guys, wait up.” Brooke and Jade stopped and turned as Leea caught up.
“We’ve got to keep going and distance ourselves from the colony. It’s only a matter of time before they discover us missing,” hissed Brooke.
“Just let me rest a minute,” pleaded Leea, sitting down.
Jade and Brooke had backpacks on, and the added weight caused both women to perspire heavily. The escape hadn’t really been planned; it just happened, all the pieces falling together at the right time. The ice quake had distracted the guards, which when coupled with the breach in Engineering, had allowed the two women to free Leea from the Hole. They then had slinked out into the clearing just after Smitty had done a head count of all the fatalities and injuries, giving the appearance of helping clear up the debris. If Spice hadn’t stumbled upon the empty Hole, the trio may not have been discovered missing for hours.
As it was, they had only managed to worm their way several hundred yards through the jungle from the clearing’s edge before the colony’s alarm siren went off.
“Shit, girls, they are on to us!” yelled Brooke.
“Don’t worry, honey. The captain isn’t going to chase us. She has bigger things to worry about right now,” said Leea.
“I’m worried about what’s out here that wants to kill us,” said Jade.
“That’s what I brought these for,” said Brooke. She removed two bolt guns from her pack, handing one to Leea and the other to Jade. “Okay, ladies, let’s conserve our energy. You act as guards and I’ll break trail.”
With a slash of her machete, Brooke led off. The trio made steady progress until they were about a mile from the colony. They heard no pursuit, so they felt somewhat safe. Hacking out a little area in the vegetation, they sat down and sipped some water from a flask. They drank it sparingly, as they knew breaking the planet’s rocks with the hammer they had stolen from Engineering would be a slow process.
The escapees were unaware that they were already being watched by Connie and the captain. Their RFID chips had located them on the computer’s monitor. Kriss angrily suggested using the drone to bomb the convicts, but Connie argued that their need for food would bring them back and that their capture would be imminent. Reluctantly, the captain gave in, due in part to the colony’s good news: Libby was awake.
When her eyes flickered open, the first thing she saw was a large round face looking down at her. With a weak voice, she said, “Dozer.”
“Shhh,” whispered Pickle. “Don’t try to talk. You have a concussion and your brain is bruised. Close your eyes and rest.”
Libby’s eyes slowly closed.
“Is she going to be ok?” asked Kriss in a hushed voice.
“Yes, Captain. Her brain scan is normal. If the swelling keeps going down, she’ll improve. I do have something that I only want you to see, though.”
Motioning for the captain to follow, Pickle led the way to the back of Med Bay. Flipping the wall-mounted switch, the overhead light began to hum as it flickered to life, its sterile glow illuminating the room.
“What are you showing me?” asked Kriss. “Everything looks normal.”
Pickle walked around a tall cabinet and pointed behind it at the floor. Peering around the cabinet, Kriss let out a gasp. The floor had a jagged hole in it, the metal torn back into an open angry smile, like a trap waiting for prey. In this case, the prey was the contents of Med Bay.
Grabbing a flashlight from a charging station, Pickle shined its beam into the dark opening. Expecting the light to shine a long way down, Kriss was surprised when the beam reflected back almost immediately. The circular beam of yellow light ended in a red illuminated saucer of planetary soil only a few inches below Med Bay’s floor. There was no hole in the ground; instead, it was completely smooth. The only thing out of the ordinary was a green, leafy, bamboo-like plant sticking up through the hole in the floor.
“What the hell is going on here?” barked Kriss. Grasping the plant, she pulled on it, and to her surprise, it came out easily and cleanly, the cut oozing a gel-like substance similar in color and texture to aloe vera.
“Be careful, sir, don’t get that on you. We don’t know if it’s poisonous,” said Pickle.
“What happened here?”
“I don’t know, sir, but something made one hell of a hole,” replied Pickle.
“Well, I can see that. Is anything missing?”
“I don’t know, sir. At first glance I think everything is okay, except we need to get Engineering to fix the floor.”
“Very well. Get Merc in here and get it fixed. Also, video the room and show it to Connie to make sure nothing is missing,” ordered Kriss.
*
Several hours later, Connie was sitting up and eating her supper rations when Pickle arrived with the video.
“Are you feeling better, sir?” asked Pickle.
“Yes, I’m fine, thank you. I just can’t do anything strapped in this gurney.”
“Well, the captain wants you to take a look at the damage in the back section of Med Bay to see if anything is missing,” said Pickle.
“Missing? How can anything be missing?” Connie questioned.
“Something ripped a massive hole in the floor during the ice quake,” replied Pickle.
“Nobody told me that,” said Connie.
Without warning, Merc came barging in with a happy look on her face.
“What are you still doing lying around in bed? You know the captain will throw you in the Hole for being lazy,” said Merc.
Connie responded in a harsh voice. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m paralyzed.”
Then something caught her eye. It was a black chair, high-backed, with a stainless steel footrest and two armrests. It had no legs or anything underneath the seat cushion to support it, but rather hung like a magician’s levitation trick.
“What is that?” asked the chief science officer.
“It’s your new set of legs,” beamed Merc. “Come on, Pickle, help me lift Connie.”
With the help of two other women from Engineering, they finally got Connie’s dead weight into her chair. To Connie’s amazement, it still hovered about four inches off the floor, even with her sitting in it.
“How does this work?” asked Connie, dumbfounded.
“Just wait,” said Merc. “First, let’s show you how to operate it. See this round button recessed in the armrest? Simply push it down like this.”
Instantly, a thin-handled joystick popped up out of the right armrest.
“Now push it in the direction you want to go. The harder you push, the faster it goes.”
Stepping away from the chair, Merc gave Connie room to maneuver, and before long, Connie was whizzing around Med Bay, grinning from ear to ear.
“I call it a hover chair,” said Merc. “We were boring holes
for the reactor’s cooling system when some of the core samples began to float on their own. When we ran a small electrical charge through them, we were able to make them move in a specific direction by varying the wavelength of these signals. I don’t quite understand it, but it works. Your chair has some of these samples sealed in the seat, and they are wired to a small battery pack in the backrest. Your joystick servo does the rest.”
“I’m speechless, Commander. Thank you so much,” said Connie. “I’ve got my legs back. I think I’ll go check the damage in Med Bay myself, instead of watching the video.” Shooting across the room like a thrown paper airplane, Connie disappeared behind the closing stainless steel doors.
*
It was some time later when the chief science officer emerged again in search of the captain. With dread in her heart, she finally found Kriss. The captain was surveying the outside garden, which somehow hadn’t been damaged in the ice quake. Spice and her crew were busy at work harvesting their first crop of food.
Turning around, Kriss jumped in surprise. Connie had pulled right up beside her unawares.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” Kriss said cheerfully. “Wow, look at you! Merc did a great job building your hover chair.”
“Yes, sir, she did,” replied Connie.
Sensing her mood, Kriss asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Well, sir, I just had a heart attack as well. The gene sequencer is gone.”
Chapter Seventy-Six
The glowing coils of the oven were white-hot as the burning flesh fell from the bones and incinerated into gray ash. The hair had gone first. It had started to smoke, and then burst into yellow flames; then went the skin, and now the flesh. The last was the femur bones and enameled teeth—the femurs because of their size, and the teeth because enamel is the hardest substance in the body. But even these yielded after four hours of unrelenting heat from the cremation furnace built by Merc and Sophi.
Connie had told the captain about the slide with the plant sample and her own bloodied DNA, and how they had combined together under the electron microscope. At Connie’s urging, as a precaution until they better understood this planet, no one was to be buried in this alien soil. All the ice quake victims were incinerated, and even the dead mission specialist was unearthed and burnt.
Mutationem Page 24