Final Days
Contents
Gate Delta, Site 17, 1
×
10
14
AD (Home Date: 5 January 2235)
They were making good time along the East Rampart, on their way back to Vault One, when all four life-support indicators for Stone’s team suddenly faded to black. Jeff Cairns came to a halt, his pressure suit informing him, in a soft contralto voice, of a sudden spike in his adrenalin and heart rate.
You don’t fucking say
, Jeff thought sourly. He glanced automatically over the ramparts, his eye following the bright parallel lines of the path markers towards the truncated pyramid of Vault Four in the distance. He waited to see if the indicators would flicker back into life, his mouth suddenly dry and sticky.
Three other life-support indicators – representing Eliza Schlegel, Lou Winston and Farad Maalouf – still glowed on the curved interior of his visor. All three, along with Jeff himself, had been assigned to the first and second vaults for the duration of this particular expedition. Other icons – representing suit pressure, air supply and bio-functions – floated near the bottom edge of the visor, registering clearly against the black and starless sky.
Eliza and Lou, who had been walking a couple of metres ahead of Jeff, both came to a stop at the same time, their helmets also turning towards the fourth vault. Jeff listened, over the shared comms, as Eliza tried to raise Mitchell and the others, the strain becoming evident in the sharply clipped tone of her words.
The comms hissed as they all waited in vain for a response.
The East Rampart was one of four hundred-metre-high walls that connected the vaults together, forming a square when seen from above. For safety, the edges of the rampart were illuminated to either side by rows of softly glowing markers placed at regular intervals. It was a long way down if you somehow managed to wander too close to the edge.
Jeff turned to see Farad standing just behind him, his frightened eyes staring back at him through a smeared visor. The fingers of Farad’s gloves were wrapped tightly around the handlebar of a steel containment unit, mounted on four comically bulbous wheels, and his lips were moving silently in what Jeff suspected was a prayer.
‘Maybe we should go look,’ said Lou, sounding like he was thinking aloud.
‘No.’ Eliza’s voice was sharp, decisive. ‘The artefacts are our priority. We have to make our scheduled rendezvous with Hanover’s team at the Tau Ceti gate.’
Jeff turned to look back towards her. ‘We can’t just abandon them,’ he heard himself say.
‘Nobody’s abandoning anyone,’ said Eliza. ‘If something
has
happened, I don’t want to risk any more lives until we know exactly what we’re dealing with. Besides, it might just be a temporary communications breakdown.’
‘
Might
be,’ said Jeff.
Eliza turned and shot a quick, furious look at him.
I’m tired of your insubordination
, she’d warned him more than once.
‘Maybe Eliza’s right,’ said Lou, his tone conciliatory. ‘We have to be careful.’
‘So just what is it you’re saying we should do if we ing ahear from them?’ Jeff demanded. ‘Just
abandon
them?’
‘You’re not in charge here,’ said Eliza, ‘and we have our orders from Hanover.’
‘I know we’re expendable,’ said Jeff. ‘I’m under no illusions on that count.’
‘Nobody’s saying anyone is exp—’
‘We can get to Vault Four with time to spare if we start out now,’ Jeff snapped, his fear flowering into sudden anger; all that adrenalin couldn’t go to waste. ‘
Fuck
the artefacts.’
‘Really?’ said Eliza. ‘Would you like to share that sentiment with Hanover when we get back?’
‘That could be
us
stuck in there,’ Jeff insisted. ‘If they’re trapped and still alive, a rescue team won’t get here from Tau Ceti for several hours, probably longer. They’d run out of air long before that.’
Eliza’s expression suggested she was contemplating murder.
Typical military mindset
, he thought, almost able to see the wheels spinning in her head. It wouldn’t be too hard to engineer an accident for him, not with a long, hard drop on either side of them. Unfortunately for her, everything they saw, heard or did was recorded by their suit’s A/V systems.
‘Dan,’ Farad spoke into the sudden silence, ‘his life-support indicator. It’s back online.’
Jeff glanced down and saw that Dan Rush’s icon had indeed flickered back into life, and it was followed a moment later by Lucy Rosenblatt’s. Mitchell Stone’s icon remained dark, however, as did Vogel’s. The suit interfaces felt clumsy and old-fashioned, and again Jeff found himself wishing that a tangle of security precautions didn’t prevent them from using UP-linked contact lenses.
‘Dan, Lucy, can you hear me?’ Eliza shouted into her comms. ‘We lost track of you. Can—?’
She was interrupted by a brief burst of static, followed by a voice.
‘Hey! Hey, is that you?’ Jeff recognized Dan’s voice. He sounded panicked, very nearly hysterical. ‘Mitch and Erich are gone. It’s just Lucy and me. We—’
‘Slow down,’ urged Eliza, as the rest of them listened in silence. ‘Who else is there?’
‘Just Lucy. Mitch and Erich, they . . . they just . . .’
Dan paused, and for a moment they listened to the sound of his amplified breathing, sounding loud and urgent and close within the confines of their helmets.
‘What happened to them?’ asked Eliza.
‘We were up on Level 214. It’s filled with these deep pits, dozens of them. They were down taking a look inside one, while Lucy and me stayed up above. Then it started to fill up with some kind of liquid.’
‘And they didn’t get out again in time?’
For a moment, it sounded like Dan was trying to suppress a sob. ‘Not exactly . . . no. I’ll send a video squirt over, maybe it’s best if you just see what happened for yourselves. And . . . get here soon, okay? The tokamaks packed up all of a sudden, and it’s pitch black in here.’
Jeff found himself watching Eliza as they listened. She had turned away, to look back towards Vault Four, but from where he stood he could still see her face through her visor, and her lips were pressed together in a thin and bloodless line. She clearly didn’t want to have to go into Vault Four, but none of them did, not really, not when there was a chance that whatever had happened to the others might happen to them too. But Jeff knew that didn’t matter. He knew, deep in his gut, that they had to make the attempt, regardless.
‘We’ll be there soon,’ Eliza finally replied, glancing towards Farad’s cart filled with its precious treasures. ‘There’s no way you can find your way back out to us?’
‘No. It’s too dark to avoid the chance of getting lost, and this part of the vault hasn’t been secured yet. We can see some way with our suit lights, but not far enough to be sure exactly where we are. Don’t want to wind up like Rodriguez, right?’
No, thought Jeff with a shiver, nobody wanted to end up like Rodriguez.
Dan’s voice faded for a moment, and then came back. Jeff glanced down and saw the man’s life-support icon flicker in that same moment.
‘Lucy,’ continued Eliza, ‘how about you? Can you hear me?’
‘Yeah.’ Lucy’s voice sounded tense with pain. ‘I’m good.’
‘You don’t sound it.’
‘Hurt my leg,’ she replied. ‘Had a bad fall.’
‘Hang on and we’ll be there soon enough. But send that video squirt over so we can get some idea what we’re dealing with first.’
They watched the A/V from Dan’s suit in silence, projected on to the curved surface of each of their visors.
Standard operating procedure specified that, even once a chamber had been declared safe by the reconnaissance probes, and pressurized prior to a thorough eyeball examination by the artefact recovery teams, pressure suits must be kept on until a team leader was certain there was no danger of contamination or some other, less predictable risk. Mitchell Stone’s team had been tasked with just such an assessfont>
The A/V showed two suited figures, as seen from Dan’s point of view, kneeling at the bottom of a pit that looked about five metres deep, with a series of wide steps cut into the sides. The two men’s helmets almost touched as one pointed at hundreds of indentations drilled into the lower steps, and arranged in stylized, looping patterns. One turned to glance towards Dan, and Jeff saw Mitchell Stone’s face behind the visor.
The video blurred as Dan looked up suddenly at the shallow, copper-coloured dome of the chamber’s ceiling high overhead. Jeff noticed a fourth suited figure waiting up above, and Lucy’s face was visible through the visor: small and imp-like, loose wisps of her blonde hair pressing against the clear polycarbonate.
As Dan clambered up the wide steps, Jeff saw that half a dozen carbon arc lights had been mounted on tripods close to the chamber entrance. They cast incandescent light across dozens of pits, each one only narrowly separated from the next.
Dan then turned to look back down at the suited figures of Mitchell Stone and Erich Vogel, still crouching at the bottom of the pit. Without any warning, a viscous, oil-like substance began to gush out of the indentations, flooding the pit with astonishing speed. Jeff heard Lucy yell a strangled warning, and Stone and Vogel both jerked upright as if they’d been scalded. The liquid was already covering the top of their boots.
It was Rodriguez, all over again.
From the subsequent sudden blurring of the video, it was obvious that Dan had descended into the pit once more, in order to try and reach the two men. Stone and Vogel were already making their way towards the steps but, even as Jeff watched, he saw their movements become slower, as if the oil were congealing around them. By now it was up to their knees.
The oil appeared to defy gravity, racing up the sides of their suits and soon swallowing them both up in a black tide. Stone was the first to collapse, followed by Vogel a moment later. Jeff watched in mounting horror as their suits began to disintegrate, the metal and plastic dissolving and falling away from their bodies with astonishing speed. Jeff had one last glimpse of Stone’s eyes rolling up into the back of his head, before they were both swallowed up by the still-rising tide.