“Your point?” asked Claire. She was growing increasingly out of breath, digging deep into the sand and scooping it back with both hands.
“So it’s a lot of sand,” said Amelia. “It’s like a major snow drift.”
Claire was focused on clearing the door. “Uh, huh.”
Amelia rose to her feet. She studied the scene around them. “Sand storm,” she said. “On a serious scale.”
“Uh, huh.”
“This sand didn’t come from here. It came from outside the basin.”
“Whatever.”
“It blows in from above, comes down into the hollow, and pushes up against the pod and the rock wall behind it.”
“Whatever.” Claire leaned back on her heels, looked sharply up at her sister. “A little help here.”
§
One overhead light came on when they entered the pod. It did little to push the shadows from the main compartment. Still, it was enough light that they could see to get around, and that was the intent.
The room took up about half the width of the pod and a third the length. Along the wall beside them was the communications station. A small galley was set along the right wall. Next to the galley was the hatch leading aft to where the two main holds were located, as well as the enclosed engine compartment.
Amelia walked to the square table in the middle of the room. The systems console was inset into the surface. She activated the environmental systems. A few moments later the primary lighting came on, then the climate control systems.
“Okay, we’re good,” she said.
Claire waited a few moments, then pulled her face mask down and tested the air. She gave her sister a positive nod and then pulled her gloves off as she stepped through an opening in the wall directly opposite. It was a narrow room with bunks on the right, two doors on the left. One door led to the equipment room, the other to the toilet and shower compartment.
Coming back into the main compartment, she saw that Amelia had moved over to the communications station. Her sister glanced briefly in her direction as Claire continued toward the hatch leading to the aft compartments.
“I’ll find Danny’s message,” said Amelia.
“I’ll see what supplies he thought to send us,” said Claire.
The aft section consisted of two holds set along the walls to either side, a sealed engine compartment in the center that ran to the end of the pod. Claire found a number of containers secured in the storage racks. A cursory inspection found rations, clothing, an assortment of spare parts for the shuttle, replacement equipment, and more than a few years worth of cryo-juice canisters.
Thank you, dear brother…
She would do a thorough inventory once they transferred the supplies to their shuttle. For now, Claire closed the last container and returned to the main compartment.
Amelia had brought a chair over to the communications station. There were only two chairs in the pod, and they were usually locked into position at one of the stations.
She spun slowly about when Claire came into the room, leaned back and looked up at her sister. She said nothing, but was wearing a curious expression. It was as though she wasn’t quite sure what to say.
“Did you find his message?” asked Claire.
“Yeah,” noncommittally.
“So?”
“It was easy enough to open. Same key.”
“Amelia…”
Amelia gave Claire another uncertain look, finally spun slowly about again in her chair and reached out to the comm panel. She activated the recorded message without saying a word.
The screen flickered and Danny’s face appeared on the monitor. He looked much older, decades older; and tired. But what struck Claire most was the sadness in the eyes. That had never been there before.
“Hey, sisters one and two,” he said. He tried to smile. “Hope you like the goodies I’m sending. Figure they’ll come in handy.”
“Absolutely,” sighed Claire. “Thank you much.”
“So… reason for the call. Don’t go home. Not a good idea. There’s no one there, or in any of the colonies. The bad guys have been busy. Their little war just goes on and on and, you know, they continue to conscript us and send us out to play soldier for them.
“But it’s been decades,” said Claire.
“So goes galactic-size wars,” said Amelia.
Danny’s message continued. He seemed to shift gears.
“Those of us remaining have retreated to Old Earth. An interesting place, actually. I don’t know why we never visited before. Anyway… we’ve created what we call a Labyrinth Sphere. Think of it as a kind of defensive shield that encloses the Solar System.”
Claire turned quickly to Amelia. “That had to have taken years.”
“Like you said, Claire; the war has been going on for decades.”
“There’s one way in, one way out,” Danny’s message went on. “It takes a unique ID to enter, and the passage sequence through the labyrinth reconfigures behind each ship as it passes through. I’m sending an incomplete ID for you to enter into your shuttle’s system. You’ll need to modify it using our family code.”
“Paranoid much?” mumbled Claire.
“This will give you your own unique valid ID. As you approach the labyrinth, the monitoring system will read this ID. Once it accepts it, it will send you the encoded current sequence that will get you through the labyrinth.” Danny’s expression grew deadly serious. “If the monitoring system doesn’t accept the ID, or if you deviate from the path specified in the sequence, automatic weapons systems will destroy the shuttle without warning. So don’t mess it up.”
Danny leaned in nearer the screen. “Hope this message finds you, and I hope all is well. See you soon.”
The screen went dark.
Claire hesitated, then looked over at the galley station. “All right, then. How about we get something to eat?”
“Meatloaf,” suggested Amelia.
“Hard to tell. It might be.” Claire had never been able to comprehend Amelia’s fondness for that meat-flavored ration. She let it go, thought a moment then. “It’ll be dark soon. No sense going back to the shuttle today. We should spend the night here.”
The pod wasn’t meant as living quarters, but it offered the basics and would serve in a pinch.
“I’m fine with that.” Amelia stood and brought her hands together. “You cooking?”
§
The lighting throughout the pod was turned down low. There was a faint hum thrumming through the compartments, the sound of the environmental systems working to keep them warm and to cycle carbon dioxide for oxygen. Claire and Amelia were in the sleeping compartment, Claire in the upper bunk, Amelia the lower. They had been asleep for several hours, having gone to bed after a simple dinner and an evening of planning for the next day and some discussion of Danny’s message.
They wouldn’t be going to their home world, nor to their original destination at the time that everything had gone crazy. They would be going to Old Earth. Neither of them had ever been there. It had been an administrative world, holding the vast library of human knowledge, for centuries. Very few people had actually lived there.
Until now; now it held not only the wealth of human knowledge, but now it seemed much of free humanity as well.
How many? Danny hadn’t said. Nor had he said how many the Takiree had conscripted or how many might still be alive.
If the rest of their family had passed on, Amelia and Claire hoped they had died free a long time ago. If they were yet alive, they had to have spent years in cryo, as had Danny. If that was the case, they hoped they were on Old Earth.
But Danny had said nothing of the rest of the family.
Amelia rolled onto her back. After several moments, the relaxed expression on her face slowly morphed; the hint of something… intense thought, focus… concentration. Her eyes opened. She wasn’t yet fully awake, but she was no longer asleep.
Something had roused her. Her head
drifted slowly to one side. She looked about the sleeping compartment.
Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, and yet…
She looked out into the tiny room a few seconds more, finally pulled her blanket aside and brought her legs around, brought her feet to the floor and sat up. She listened for her sister in the upper bunk. Claire’s breathing was normal; there was an occasional grumbling snore; also normal.
So what was wrong?
Amelia leaned forward and stood up. She took the single step into the middle of the small compartment. She looked about again, she listened.
There.
That sound. The background noise was different. There was a hissing noise; a faint hissing sound. It was pushing in on the sound of the environmental systems.
“Amelia?” Claire was awake in her bunk now, up on one elbow. She was looking at Amelia.
Amelia looked back to Claire, said nothing.
“What’s that sound?” asked Claire.
“I don’t know.”
“Something wrong with environmental?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.” Amelia tilted her head, furrowed her brow. “It’s coming from outside.”
Claire sat up in the bunk, dropped to the floor. “That can’t be good. We better check it out.”
§
Amelia sat at one of the table’s central consoles in the main compartment. She brought it to life, studied the monitor, worked again at the keyboard as Claire worked her way to the door.
“Six degrees,” said Amelia. “Warmer than normal for around here, this time of night.”
“Anything toxic?” Claire’s hand rested on the latch. The hissing noise from outside continued to grow louder.
“All readings are showing clean.”
That was good enough for Claire. She pushed down on the latch and pushed open the door; or tried to. The door was pushing back. A drift of sand blocked the bottom of the door. Claire laid her shoulder against it and managed to widen the opening enough get her body through.
A blinding wind was blowing and she quickly brought her arm up to protect her face. The air, bitterly cold, was filled with fine, gritty sand.
Six degrees Fahrenheit and near hurricane strength wind… the hissing sound was that of sand blowing against the shell of the pod.
Claire stepped back inside and closed the hatch.
“Are you all right?” asked Amelia. She was on her feet and had taken several steps toward her sister. Claire brushed cautiously at her face. Her skin looked as though she had rubbed coarse sandpaper across it.
“That hurt,” she grumbled. Her hair, her clothes, and the entire forward section of the compartment, was covered in a layer of sand.
Amelia was looking closely at Claire. The grit had dug into her skin, leaving a hundred tiny red marks. “I’ll get some warm water, and something to sterilize your uh… face.”
Claire brushed at her clothes and hair. She managed to speak casually. “I think I figured out what that weird sound is.”
“Ya think?” Amelia had gone to a cabinet and was looking through first aid supplies. “Interesting weather pattern; probably happens on a daily cycle across the planet; the sudden temperature change from day to night, maybe drifting high and low air pressure cells, maybe a combination of both.”
“You have no idea, do you?”
“Not a clue.” She set a small box on the counter, went over to the galley station to dampen a cloth. “But I’m pretty sure we won’t be going outside after dark.”
§
It was morning. All was quiet. Amelia stepped clumsily from the sleeping quarters into the main compartment. She had managed a few hours of restless sleep.
Claire was sitting at the central table hovering over a bowl. She looked briefly up at Amelia, returned to her breakfast. She spooned a mouthful of something gray before she spoke.
“The storm finally died down, about an hour ago,” she said.
Amelia looked once to the galley station, then to the door. She decided… and started to the door. Claire waited until Amelia reached for the latch.
“We may have a little trouble getting out of here,” she said. She took another spoonful of breakfast.
Amelia pushed at the door, managed only a few inches before stopping. She peaked through the narrow opening, then pulled the door closed.
Claire pointed at the door with her spoon. “Sand.”
Amelia stared at the door. It was partially blocked by a sand drift. “So I see.”
“Breakfast?” asked Claire. “The label says oatmeal. It isn’t bad, really; if you’re into oatmeal.”
§
Claire just managed to squeeze her way through the partially opened door, still mostly blocked by the sand drift. Perhaps a lighter breakfast would have been wiser. She stepped away from the pod and stepped up beside Amelia.
The sky was clear and bright gray. There was the slight hint of a breeze.
Claire’s attention shifted from the sky overhead down to their shuttle, sitting on the other side of the hollow, beyond the other side of the central rock formation. There were drifts of sand pushed up against the landing struts, but she wasn’t able to see much else.
“Well, it looks to be in one piece,” she said.
“The fewer nights here, the better.”
“No argument there.” Claire looked back over her shoulder. “What say we get the hatch open, get the supplies transferred over?”
“Now is when I’m thinking you should have parked a little closer.”
Transferring the supplies from the pod to the shuttle was going to involve a number of trips. They didn’t want to carry all those boxes and canisters by hand if they could help it. The only cart in the pod was the tool cart; the small wheels would bury in the sand, and it was too small to do much good anyway.
Using a thin metal shelf from one of the inventory racks, they came up with a makeshift sled to carry some of the larger boxes. This worked well enough once they figured the optimum weight load. Too heavy a load and the front end pushed into the sand, despite bending the nose at an angle.
So, larger but lighter boxes worked best. This meant that Claire could pull the sled on her own using a rope while Amelia followed alongside carrying several smaller boxes in her arms. This still meant they would be transferring inventory and supplies through much of the day.
Reaching the shuttle the first trip across, Claire left the sled near the hatch and conducted an initial inspection of the shuttle exterior while Amelia took the supplies inside. Working her way around the craft, she returned to the sled in time to meet her sister waiting to start back to the pod.
“Grit got into every strut joint,” said Claire. “No permanent damage that I can see, but we’ll have to get them cleaned out before we take off.”
“Everything else look all right?”
“Two of the exposed satellite plates are scoured pretty bad. We should replace them.”
“Which ones?” asked Amelia. Most of the external antennae and dishes had retracted prior to descending into the atmosphere, but several plates along the top-rear of the shuttle were fixed flat to the hull.
“Long range sensors.” Claire gathered up the rope and prepared to pull the empty sled back to the pod. “And we should have closed the forward shield to protect the viewport.”
“Oh, no… how bad?”
“Let’s just say it’s lost its crystal clear sheen.” Claire started across the hollow toward the pod.
“It could have been worse, I guess,” said Amelia, walking beside her. “I’ll run di-ogs on all the systems soon as I get the chance.”
“Engine compartment is fully protected, but they should get priority,” said Claire. “If we can’t get off the ground, nothing else matters.”
Amelia figured that if any of the systems were down then nothing else mattered, but no sense nitpicking. “First on my list, then.”
They returned to the pod and collected more of the supplies that Danny had sent them,
loading the sled and collecting a couple of boxes that Amelia could carry.
Once they had finished their third run, Claire left Amelia to return to the pod on her own for more supplies while Claire set about cleaning the grit from the strut joints. They would need to be able to smoothly retract the landing gear once they lifted off.
Outside the pod, Amelia finished loading the sled and began tying down the boxes. Something caught her eye then, off to her left. She wasn’t sure what it was, it had been little more than a shadow, but it was movement. She was sure of it.
She straightened and studied the landscape to her left… sand all the way to the perimeter of the hollow, where the rise sloped quickly up to a low crest. No sign of movement. No sign of anything. Listening, she heard only the faint whispering of the light breeze across the sandy floor of the hollow.
Finishing tying the boxes to the sled, Amelia pulled the rope taut, began drawing the sled along. Reaching the rock formation, she veered left and continued around the rocks.
She stopped.
She could have sworn she saw something out of the corner of her eye, a flickering shadow within or perhaps beyond the rock formation on her right.
Now though, as before, there was nothing.
Are my eyes playing tricks on me?
Maybe… or maybe there’s something here with us.
The shuttle was directly ahead, about two hundred feet further on. Amelia leaned into the rope, again pulling it taut, and quickly made her way across to the ship, bringing the sled up beside the side hatch. Claire came around from the other side of the shuttle.
“The struts are clear,” she said. “Just need to get those satellite plates replaced.”
Amelia had dropped the rope and was looking back across the hollow to the rock formations. “Good,” she said absently.
Claire had already started up the ramp into the shuttle to get the replacement plates. She stopped midway and looked back to her sister.
“Are you okay?”
Sisters in Space: The Complete Series Page 8