Home Planet: Apocalypse (Part 2) (3 page)

“Keep going on your merry way cowboy!”

“Don’t worry, I’m going ...”

As I drew within ten feet, my eyes confirmed what I’d hoped I’d seen—the safety on his gun was still on. In that moment, I did two things. First, I sidestepped, while pointing the flashlight at his eyes. He instinctively shielded them, losing sight of his target. Second: I charged him, covering the distance with two thrusting strides and driving my shoulder into his chest. He cried out as momentum took me down on top of him, winding and dazing him as he hit the deck. I snatched away his gun and pocketed it. He lay there breathing hard, expelling his foul breath too close for comfort. He was of medium height, but scrawny and had gone down more easily than expected. I was glad I’d gone easy on him and not charged him too hard. Despite his less-than-friendly welcome, I didn’t want to break the old guy. Even with his disheveled, bum-like appearance, I guessed I still had an innate respect for elders. Still, mister 9mm draws no so distinctions and the way his juddering hand pointed that gun at me had me worried.

“Now, if I get off you, are you going to talk nicely to me?” I said.

“Yessir.”

It was my pleasure to get back to my feet, away from his odor. He sat up but still seemed winded, so I bent down and offered my hand. Two eye twitches later, he accepted the peace offering and took my hand. I hauled him to his feet and looked down at his blue bloodshot eyes flitting around behind his dirty metal specs. He let go, pushing my hand away and stepping back.

“What you doing here? Who sent you? Is it my time to go ... is that why you’ve come? To take me away?”

I smiled sympathetically but didn’t know what to think. So I just told him the truth.

I held out my palm, offering a handshake and said softly, “My name is Dan Luker. We’re both survivors on the
Juno Ark
. What’s your name, friend?”

Tentatively, he reached forward and shook my hand with his limp, grubby palm.

“My name is Arnold Tristan Reichs the Third.”

My eyes went wide with disbelief. Reichs was supposed to be a preppy-looking man around thirty, not a sixty-something bum.

“
You’re
Reichs?” I said, standing opposite him on the empty maintenance bay.

“Mr. Reichs to you, young man.”

“How long have you been out of stasis?”

“Do you
see
a watch? Ah, I don’t know. Every day’s the same here. Just sleep, eat, shit and try and get out of this
purgatory.
”

“Are there any other survivors?”

He gazed vacantly into the distance, saying nothing.

“Well?”

It seemed to bring him back to the present.

“Unless I dreamt it, there were others. But they don’t come around here anymore. I like it better that way.”

“Who were they? How many? What happened to them?”

“Whoa there cowboy, how about you tell me who
you
are now you know my name?”

“Already did but the name’s Luker, Dan Luker, colonist out of L.A. Used to be a cop. Woke up from stasis two days back and found nothing but dead people...Until I met you. Gotta say, though, you look nothing like your image in the database—sandy haired guy, about thirty-something. You must be what, in your sixties. How long you been awake?”

“You know, I’m not too good with time these days…more than two days, that’s for sure. My wife tells me I still look good. She—”

“You have a wife here?”

“Sure do. Wouldn’t wanna be here alone, cowboy.”

“Well, where is she?”

“She’s inside that old tent over there,” he said, pointing to the shelter.

“I didn’t hear anyone in there? Can we go say hi?”

He paused, gazing over my shoulder, his eyes glassy, his lips mumbling something.

“What do you mean busy? Man says he wants to say hi,” he muttered.

“Who you talking to?” I said.

“Huh, what?”

“Just then—who were you talking to—something about someone being busy.”

He chuckled and ran his fingers through his greasy gray hair.

“Don’t matter.”

“So, your wife? Shall we go over and talk to her?” I said, hoping I could get a more coherent response from her.

“Sure, I’ll lead the way,” he said merrily and shuffled toward the shelter with a limp.

We reached the entrance flap and went inside. I kept the flashlight beam on him, making sure he didn’t try anything. He leaned down and switched on a portable lantern, illuminating the messy room he’d clearly been sleeping in.

“Oh Laetitia, we’ve got a visitor. Won’t you come out and say hi to Mr. Luker?”

He drew back the concertina door to a small en suite bathroom unleashing a repulsive odor. I drew instinctively back as it hit me, only recovering when I switched to mouth breathing.

“Ah, there you are honey! Always taking too long at the mirror, doing your makeup and your hair into plats like that.”

He turned around, big grin across his crazy-eyed face, and stepped aside, arm outstretched as if presenting something amazing.

“Mr. Luker, this is my beautiful wife, Laetitia. Honey, this is Mr. Luker...”

I neared the en suite and shone the flashlight inside. The bathroom was empty.

Reichs was clearly deluded and hallucinatory. If my theory was correct—that he’d been awake and alone for most of thirty years—then it was no surprise. I needed to help him and show some tolerance to this poor guy, despite his unappealing manner.

Keen to leave the stinking shelter, I stepped back outside and beckoned Reichs. He darted into the internal door next to the bathroom. I waited outside, hand on the gun in my pocket, flicking off the safety just in case.

“Coming …” he called from inside.

He emerged half a minute later with an opened tin of something and a bottle of water.

“Here, for you,” he said, handing them over, smiling inanely. “Laetitia says you look a little malnourished and could use some calories in you. I told her it’d encourage you to stay here, but... Well, she’s kind like that.”

“Hey, thanks, Reichs,” I said, eyeing the fruit salad pieces in syrup.

It looked and smelled okay, so I poured some of the contents in my mouth then cracked open the water. I quickly finished it off, but when I looked up, he wore a scowl, his brown, decaying teeth gritted in anger.

“What’s the matter Reichs?”

“I-al-ready-told-you. It’s
Mister
Reichs! Do you know who I am, peasant?”

Who’s this guy calling peasant? Has he seen himself lately?
I thought, holding my tongue.

“
I
am Arnold T. Reichs, founder and CEO of Thinking Kinematics, son of Arnold Reichs the second majority shareholder of Reichs Oil Inc.
You
are a mere colonist, a former cop and a peasant. As the biggest private investor on this project, you are on
my
property, cowboy. So what I say
goes
!”

“Okay, Reichs, nice speech, but whatever you may have been on Earth in 2070 you sure as hell ain’t anymore. This is the year 2584, my friend—five hundred and fourteen years after we left Earth. Now we’re back in Earth orbit, the planet’s frozen and civilization as we knew doesn’t seem to be there. For whatever reason, fate has decided to keep your sorry ass—and mine—alive. That means we’ve gotta work together and try to get off this ship. There are people down on Earth—I’ve heard them on long range transceiver.”

His face had changed back from angry to bewilderment.

“So we’re alive?” he said, pinching himself as though it represented some evidence of his existence.

“As far as I can tell ... yeah, we’re still on this mortal coil.”

“B-b-but, Saint Peter told me to clear this place of unholy beings... Then I could pass. That’s what I thought—”

“It’s your mind playing tricks on you. You’ve been alone so long you’ve started hallucinating. There is no Laetitia in your shelter... Sorry, if that comes as a shock to you.”

He pointed at me, breaking out into a big grin as though I was just kidding.

“Okay, whatever. We need to get off this ship and down to Earth. There are people down there. We need to find a way. But first, I want some answers from you. You’ve been awake a long time—you must know something.”

It was clear there was only so much sense I could get from Reichs, but I didn’t want to stand there all day, so we relocated to the sole shuttle sitting over in bay number two. He led the way up the steps and into the passenger cabin. Fortunately, the only part he’d used was the single bathroom at the rear. I went and closed the door and the stink abated. I insisted on a seat near the front, away from the smell, so we sat there across the aisle from one another.

“Right, time for some answers. How long have you been out of stasis? I’m guessing upwards of twenty-five years.”

“Well, let me see,” he said, looking up and counting on his fingers. “I’d say about thirty-five.”

“Okay, that’s good. We’re finally getting somewhere. So, you came out of stasis thirty-five years ago. Who else came out since then?”

“Never saw another soul,” he said, his eye twitch having returned.

My gut told me I didn’t believe him, but I had no way to disprove it.

“Apart from Laetitia that is,” he added.

“Right, yeah. Laetitia. So what’ve you been doing all these years?”

As if suddenly finding some lucidity, he looked me in the eye and said, “At first I spent time trying to find the truth, just like you. Most of them are broken, but I found me a working terminal next door in stasis, down in the control room. There’s another one down on the launch deck. You see, I have some VIP, high-level security clearance in this here chip...”

He waved his right hand around as he referred to the RFID embedded there.

“... Found out all sorts of interesting stuff about our
ill-fated voyage
.”

“Like what?”

“Now that’d be telling, would—”

I drew close and said slowly and sternly, “
Like what?
”

“Okay, okay. The log, it told me what happened. Few years after we embarked they got a recall order to turn the ship around and return to Earth. Not everyone was overjoyed at this—”

“What happened? Why’d they recall the ship?”

“Oh, now that’d be the asteroid,” he said casually.

His words hung in the air as I took them in.

“Asteroid?”

“Yeah, you heard me right ... A big space rock from space. They sure as hell knew about it before it came—that’s how they got word out to our merry little tin can.”

So
that’s
what had triggered the ice age and turned Earth into a snowball? The impact must have triggered it somehow—I guessed by throwing huge amounts of dust and ash into the atmosphere, changing the climate. An image of my matronly old history teacher at high school flashed into my consciousness. It was probably one of the most fascinating lessons of my high school career—about Indonesia’s Mount Tambora. In 1815, one of the most powerful eruptions in recorded history sent so much material into the atmosphere that it lowered global temperatures and led to the so-called
Year Without Summer,
the following year. In that year, snow fell in New York and Maine and a bunch of other places that don’t see snow in June. And that was just one volcano. It sent a chill down my spine, imagining what a major impact event would have done.

“Do you know what year it hit?”

“You know what, I
do not
recall. But I know we sure as hell didn’t reach Aura.”

“So what happened after the recall?”

“Far as I could tell, Señor Gutierrez—our noble captain—was all okay with wasting a bunch more years going back to Earth. A few more learned folks knew it’d be too late to help survivors. The logs called it a
mutiny
, but I guess that depends on your point of view now doesn’t it?”

“So that’s what all the violence was about? A mutiny?”

“The logs made it sound more like a
civil war.
Really screwed up this ship good and proper. Now I’m stuck here, in purgatory, waiting to get to heaven. Thank God I got my Laetitia—a fine and beautiful woman.”

“So why us? Why did we survive when so many others didn’t?”

“Now
that
is a very good question. I guess we must’ve been good in a former life,” he said and started laughing insanely again. “Say, cowboy, did you ever think we’re already dead? That we’re ghosts forever trapped on this here ark?”

“What do
you
think?” I said.

“I
used
to think that was true because everything I tried to get this ship working... none of it worked. It got me to thinking,
hey, I’m just a ghost, I can’t change where this ship’s going
. I’d hear voices of the living, then I’d start seeing them walking around. But then they all went away. They’d just come and go. Appear and disappear after a short while. All except Laetitia... and now you. How do we know anything is real, but for what our senses tell us, Mr. Luker?”

“You have a point there, but I don’t think we’re dead and I don’t wanna be stuck here any longer than I need to be. I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna find a way off this ship.”

Reichs chuckled derisively, then shook his head.

“Mr. Luker, Mr. Luker... Don’t you think I’ve
tried
? I am the CEO of the world’s most advanced robotics company. I know a thing or two about technology, let me tell you. We are
stuck
here, plain and simple. God or fate or something wants to keep it that way you big, dopey peasant.”

Rude, arrogant bastard
, I thought.

If he weren’t crazy, I would’ve throttled this guy already. My take was that he had a serious case of megalomania. I wondered whether it pre-dated his long period alone—after all, a high proportion of CEOs were clinically psychopathic, even if not criminally so. I was pretty sure he didn’t talk like this at the country club or in the boardroom. Time had clearly taken its toll, but he still hadn’t learned humility. On the other hand, he was the only other survivor so I had to work with him. At times, he seemed okay, swinging from lucidity and helpfulness, back to rudeness and delusion. I was no psychologist, but I knew to treat anything he said with caution.

“So what have you tried to get yourself out of here?”

“Ah well, first I tried to get the ship’s main engine’s running, but that was a bust—fusion reactors are dead as a dodo.”

“Yeah, I saw the panels outside?”

“Outside in space you say?”

I nodded.

“Now how did you manage
that
little feat?”

“Just put on a spacesuit and went out there, through the airlock.”