“I think you better stop asking so many questions, Ms. Baker. I wonder who else had questions around here?” Eric said, his veiled threat not so hidden.
“Listen here, you son of a bitch…” Kendra reached for him with her good arm, but Andrew was there, snatching her wrist before she could grab Keller’s collar and wring his neck.
“Not worth it.” Andrew’s voice was almost silent.
Keller watched the incident with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. She’d seen a similar reaction from him before, and was sure he was on some sort of medication.
“Mr. Miller, I think you better escort your lady elsewhere.” Keller walked by, making sure he shouldered Andrew as he passed.
Andrew bristled, but didn’t engage. “That’s not how we do things. Not in front of everyone, Ken.”
“I understand that, but did you hear him? He basically admitted to doing something to Robin,” Kendra said.
“Let’s find something to eat,” Tony said, grabbing hold of Val’s hand.
Diane was already gone, sitting with Jennifer. Kendra was grateful someone there was taking care of the girl.
Her sister was nowhere in sight, and Keller was long gone. She didn’t even know where the man slept. It wasn’t in the empty section of Eden that the rest of them were relegated to.
The residences were growing wider and taller with each passing day, and they’d be sleeping in their own rooms soon enough. She did wonder about Andrew’s idea. Could they eventually build their own log cabin outside of camp? Was there going to be more to this than living in a box and working a daily task before exhaustion took over every night? Would humanity thrive once again on this distant world?
“Kendra, are you going to eat?” Val asked her, and Kendra blinked a few times, finding herself in line without a plate.
She shook her head and grabbed a cup of coffee, meeting Andrew at an empty table. The others came to sit with them. Roland was already muttering about his day.
“Jeez, wake up at the crack of dawn, eat wet eggs, and go to the treatment plant for nine hours, only to hit the hay two hours after getting to camp. We may as well be sedated,” Roland said.
The idea came to Kendra like a slap to the face. “What did you just say?”
“We may as well be sedated,” he repeated.
“That’s it.” She stood up and kissed Roland on top of the head. Her hands were shaking with excitement.
Andrew motioned for her to have a seat. “What the hell has you so giddy?”
“What Roland said. All of this is wrong, can’t you see that?” Kendra wanted to let it go, but she couldn’t. She had to uncover the truth before letting herself live the life of happy colonist.
She lowered her voice, and wrapped her fingers around the coffee cup after sitting down. “We aren’t on Proxima. That means Hound lied about it. Where is he? It’s too strange. Why would the guy be trekking around an alien world alone, trying to collapse passes in the mountains? He’s hiding something from us, and I’m willing to bet it’s on the other side of those ranges.”
“Even if he is, how do we find the passes before he closes them up?” Andrew asked.
Tony’s eyes were wide, and Val’s brow was furrowed as they waited for her response. “The predators. If they’re really coming from the other side of the mountains, we wait for the storms, lure one in, and sedate it.”
“What good will that do?” Roland asked.
“We’ll place a tracker inside the food, along with the drugs. When it comes to, it’ll lead us across the range,” she said.
Andrew glanced at Valeria, and nodded grimly. “It could work.”
A bell sounded, bringing an end to their breakfast hour, and the start to another day of assigned work. Kendra would see if she could figure out where to find a tracking device and begin implementing their plan.
“Come on, Tony. The water plant is calling our names,” Roland said.
“It’s not fair. Why can’t I skip school like Tony?” Val asked.
“Because Tony will likely be turning a wrench like your old man when he’s older,” Andrew said.
“Dad, stop it. Tony’s bright. Don’t listen to him,” Val told her boyfriend, and Kendra noted that he didn’t seem bothered by Andrew’s comment.
“You’re acting like we’re still going to be around when we’re older,” Tony said calmly.
Kendra saw the worry behind the boy’s smile. “We’re going to be fine, Tony. I promise you. But we might have to break a few rules to ensure it. Everyone go about your days, and we’ll reconvene tonight. Don’t tell anyone about this.”
They all promised they wouldn’t, and everyone but Andrew walked away.
He leaned close. “Watch yourself, Ken. I wouldn’t want to do this alone.”
“I will.”
He nodded and left her alone in the mess hall with her cold coffee.
TWENTY-FIVE
Roland
“What do these readouts mean?” Tony asked, tapping the screen in the compact facility.
The computers were making a chiming noise Roland had never heard before. He placed his tablet on the counter and crossed the room, moving around the ten-foot-tall filtration tanks to reach Tony’s side.
He read the screen and sighed. “It appears that something’s blocking the damned intake pipes. One of us has to go underwater and physically remove it.”
Tony raised his hands. “Don’t look at me. I don’t swim.”
Despite spending most of his life near the ocean, Roland wasn’t much of a fish either, but he was older, and in charge. If he let anything happen to Tony, Valeria would be mad, which would make Andrew furious, which would upset Kendra. He was working with an unbalanced ecosystem and had to tread lightly.
“Fine. At least help me into the suit,” he said, moving to the edge of the facility where a wetsuit roughly his size waited in a closet. He’d watched a video on scuba diving as part of his day one training, and thought he might be able to fix this without freaking out too much, or drowning. He’d take the former over the later.
Ten minutes and a lot of swearing and mumbling later, Roland was in the suit, goggles and breathing apparatus ready. The thin tank was strapped to his back, and he felt like a fool walking toward the water with flippers on his feet. All the technology in the universe, and he was stuck using old Earth scuba gear. Figures.
It was windy today, and Roland leaned against the gusts, his feet flapping onto the rocky lake edge. The water, normally calm, was wavy and disrupted. It was unknown exactly what lay beneath the surface of the water, and he had the foreboding feeling he was going to encounter an alien swamp creature beneath the cresting water.
His goggles were tight on his forehead, the mouthpiece dangling over his shoulder. He turned to Tony, who was nice enough to not make fun of Roland in his new getup. “Stay here and wait for me. If I don’t return in…”
Tony lifted a finger. “Hold on a minute,” he said. “I saw something that might help in the shed out back.”
Tony ran off, leaving Roland standing on the lake’s edge. He tried to tell himself there was no reason to be uneasy, but struggled to believe it. “It’s likely some debris brought in by the wind. Nothing more.” It had to be on the other side of the grates that kept large items out of the intake, so his saving grace was the fact he didn’t need to go far inside the tubes.
“Here!” Tony yelled, racing over with a heavy-looking tool in his hands. He lowered the reel, complete with motorized winch, and Roland understood what the boy was suggesting. He took the skinny rope, which seemed to be made of a strong metallic alloy, and used the clamp to attach it to the suit’s belt.
“I’ll keep hold. Try not to be carried away by a shark or anything. I’m not sure I can hold this with that much pressure,” Tony quipped, and Roland grimaced.
“Let’s keep the joking to the professionals,” he told the teenager, turning to face the water.
“Pull the cord three times if you want me
to drag you in,” Tony told him, and Roland nodded along.
“Three times. Okay, Rollie, you can do this,” he told himself, and stepped into the water. Even with the wetsuit, it was cold on his legs. He kept walking, his flippers slipping on the rocks below the surface. He stayed upright, and once he was up to this chest, he glanced at Tony, giving the kid a thumbs up. It was more for his own benefit than Tony’s. Roland pressed his goggles into place and put the breathing apparatus in his mouth, hoping he was the first to ever use it.
Drawing a deep breath of air from the mouthpiece to test it, he advanced forward. There was a square structure jutting out over the water at the end of a drone-created metal dock, and he moved for that spot. The pipes ran underneath the dock, and that’s where he needed to head.
With trepidation, he fully submerged. Water rushed around his face, and he took a few panicked breaths, struggling to acclimate to the apparatus feeding him air. He tried to think about how far he’d come, how outside his comfort zone every day was, even spending time with other humans. It distracted him enough to catch his breath, and before he knew it, he was making even inhales and exhales.
Instead of attempting to swim over to the end of the tube, Roland staggered across the lakebed, the wind causing the waves to kick up sand and silt, making it cloudy below. He thought he saw fish-like creatures swimming around him, but he couldn’t be sure.
He hoped he was walking in the right direction, and after two minutes or so, he stopped, trying to reorient himself. The tubes were up ahead, a little to his left, and he shifted on his flippers, moving toward the end of the wide black intake pipe.
It was about eight feet above the bottom of the lake, and he ended up underneath it. Roland crouched, bending his knees, and he jumped underwater, making awkward kicks with his flippers. He missed the opening of the tube, and hit his head underneath it.
Frustrated, he moved a few feet farther, attempting the jump again. This time it worked slightly better, and he was able to grab hold of the pipe’s opening. He pulled himself up and into the five-foot entrance to the tube. It was clear what was blocking the first grate.
He nearly choked on his breathing apparatus as he recognized the cryopod. It was ten feet inside the pipe, tightly fitting at the angle it entered. Here the water was calm, and fish the size of a large coin swam around, their colors muted and bland.
What the hell was a cryopod doing out here in the lake, and in the intake pipe specifically? It was dark inside, and Roland flipped on a light on his wetsuit’s chest. The fish darted away at the sudden brightness, and he assessed that the pod was damaged, the glass cracked, making the entire device waterlogged. Was it empty?
He’d need to enter the pipe to check that, but he was too scared to move. The walls of the pipe were smooth, brand new, and it felt like they were closing around him as he began to float inside and toward the pod.
After coaxing himself to keep going, he landed at the side of the blockage and peered into it. A pale face stared up at him, eyes open wide. He shivered, hitting his tank on the wall. The breathing apparatus sprang from his mouth, and he gasped in some lake water. He was stuck in the tube with a body and no air, water filling his mouth.
Calm yourself, Rollie. You can do this. He was talking to himself in his head, but the voice he heard was Kendra’s strong, relaxed tone. He pictured her intense and friendly eyes staring at him, and he placed the device back in his mouth, pressing water out and breathing air in. He closed his eyes and counted as he inhaled, then exhaled. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
When he was sure he wasn’t about to drown, he moved toward the pod again, pulling and tugging at the end of it. It dislodged surprisingly easily, and he dragged it to the edge of the pipe before clambering out himself and shoving it to the bottom of the lake. The busted glass door propped open, the deceased floating free.
Roland fought the urge to swim away and grabbed hold of the corpse. He took the rope from his suit, wrapping it around the woman’s waist. He didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean much. She was filled with water, and had probably been in the lake since they’d landed on the planet. Once she was secure, he tugged on the line three times, and Tony began to drag her across the sandy lakebed.
Roland took a small comfort in the fact that Tony would be scared witless when he realized he was pulling in a body, not Roland. Payback for the shark comment.
He swam fiercely, moving through the murky water toward the beach. As he stood out of the water, he heard a scream from the teenage boy.
“Roland, what the hell, man?” Tony shouted at him, and Roland found he couldn’t even enjoy the joke. Someone was dead.
He pulled off the goggles and dropped them to the rocky beach, kicking off the flippers one by one. “Sorry about that. She was lodged in the pipe inside the cryopod,” Roland explained.
“Do you know who she is?”
“No clue, but I have a feeling Andrew might recognize her. Come on, help me lift her into the treatment building,” Roland said, crouching low and grabbing her under the shoulders.
“We’re not telling Carrie about this?” Tony asked.
Roland continued to feel the pipe walls closing around him as they hefted the bloated corpse toward the building. “Not yet.” The woman’s mouth was slightly open, and water spilled from her lips as they jostled her through the doorway and into the far corner, where Roland hid her poorly under a tarp.
It would have to do until he had a chance to speak with the others. The bodies were beginning to pile up in their new promised land.
TWENTY-SIX
Andrew
Andrew finished scraping the last scraps of lasagna from his plate, and then pushed out his chair with a weary sigh and stood up. All eyes pointed to him.
“I’m going to turn in for the night. Harold’s been driving me like a slave. He keeps saying his back is no good, and leaves all the heavy lifting to me.” Andrew stretched his neck out with a wince. “Apparently the only exercise he gets is with his mouth.”
“Dad!” Val chided, her eyes sparkling with amusement.
“What? It’s true.”
Kendra smiled wanly and pushed out from the table next. “Hey, ordering people around is hard work,” she said with a wink at Andrew. “I’ve been barking at my cadets all day, and I’m exhausted.”
Andrew snorted, but gave no reply.
“Where do you think Roland and Tony are?” Val asked, her eyes searching the mess hall. “They’re going to miss dinner.” Her gaze snapped over to Andrew, eyes suddenly wide. “What if something happened to them?”
Andrew shook his head and dropped a hand on Val’s shoulder. “The water treatment plant is inside Sergeant Harper’s perimeter, and there are motion sensors all around the camp. They probably just got caught up. And anyway—” He checked his Eden-issue smart watch. “We’re still fifteen minutes from curfew.”
“That makes them over an hour late,” Val replied, rising from the table with a plate of half-eaten lasagna.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Kendra added, but the sharp glance she sent to Andrew behind Val’s back told him she was also worried.
They began filing out together, heading for the exit. They reached the dirty dishes bin, and dropped their trays and utensils in with a clatter. From there they headed through a short corridor to the airlock, and then down the landing ramp outside to the trampled red grass. Val veered off immediately, heading for the lake.
“Hold on.” Andrew caught her by the collar of the gray Eden-issue jacket she wore over her white jumpsuit. It was a cold day today. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
“To check on them,” she replied.
“No, you’re not,” Andrew insisted. “Not on your own. It’s too dangerous.”
“But you just said—”
“Hang on,” Kendra interrupted. “Here they come.”
Roland and Tony came running across the field from the lake. They arrived breathless and swe
ating, their brown jumpsuits both wet and smelling like something rotten.
Andrew covered his nose with his sleeve. “What the hell is that stench?”
Roland’s eyes were wide and glassy, darting with terror. Val stiffened at the sight of them. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
He just shook his head.
“Roland?” Kendra prompted.
“You need to meet us at the treatment plant.”
“It’s almost dark,” Andrew replied. “Curfew, remember?”
“Screw the curfew!” Roland snapped, drawing curious glances from colonists filing out of the mess hall.
Kendra motioned for them to follow her and led them around the side of the ship section, out of earshot. “What’s so important, Roland?” she asked.
“We found a body,” he whispered.
A spike of adrenaline lanced through Andrew. “A body of… your old assistant?”
Roland shook his head.
“Penelope?” Kendra suggested. Roland gave her a blank stare. “The psychologist. She went missing in the storm.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Roland said.
“What makes you so sure?” Andrew asked. “And why are you telling us? You should be telling Carrie or Keller. Let them deal with it. I’m too tired for this shit.” He was. He could barely think. His brain felt like sawdust. He began peeling off, heading for the empty storage section where the colonists had their sleeping bags set up until the habitat modules were finished.
“Andy, wait,” Roland said.
He half-turned to Roland with a sigh ready on his lips.
“She was in a cryopod. Someone dumped her in the lake.”
That put a frown on Andrew’s face. “What did she look like?” he asked.
“Bloated,” Tony replied.
“I was hoping you could identify her,” Roland said. “Tell us if she’s the one you saw that night…”
“Shit,” Andrew muttered. “This is bad.” He turned towards the horizon. The blue sun was splashing the clouds with purple fire above a jagged line of black treetops on the other side of the lake. It wouldn’t take long to reach the treatment plant, but it would be past curfew before they could return to camp.
Final Days: Colony Page 20