Home Planet: Apocalypse (Part 2) (5 page)

“How do we do that? The engines must be offline. Reichs?”

“Yeah, that’d be right. This tin can’s flat out of fusion reactor fuel. Seen it with my own eyes.”

“My sensors in Modules 8 and 9 are unreachable,” said Tiro. “An alternative to the main engine may be the auxiliary thrusters, depending on chemical fuel reserves.”

“Know anything about the auxiliary thrusters,
Mr.
Reichs?”

He paused, grinning. I supposed because I remembered the prefix for expediency’s sake.

“No, don’t know a damn thing about no auxiliary thrusters, my crime-fighting friend.”

Crime-fighting friend—that’s a new one!
I thought.

“Okay, so the lifepods may be an option if we can’t get the shuttle and launch tube working,” I said.

“Yes, it may be an option—that is why I raised it,” said Tiro.

“Okay, now the shuttle would still be the primary option in case we need to come back to the ship. Tiro, can you access the blueprints for the launch tubes?”

“Standby ...”

A list of 3D blueprint files appeared on the terminal. Along with Reichs, I opened the one showing the opening and closing mechanism and associated hydraulic power systems. Consisting of a pair of giant hydraulic rams—one above and one below the launch tube—the way it worked was, in principle, quite simple. After an hour of digging, though, it seemed there was no way to open the launch tube on back-up solar power. Then we discovered an additional challenge—the sliplock system would also function only on full power. The sliplock was the system of airlock doors inside the launch and landing tubes. As the shuttle taxied into the launch tube, they would open and close in a coordinated way allowing the shuttle to pass at low speed while minimizing the pressure-loss to the vacuum of space. The shuttle could then ramp up its main engine to full throttle and accelerate out of the tube, safe in the knowledge that the outer sliplock door was blast-resistant. Although I was no engineer, Reichs was, and if there was one thing I’d learned as a cop, it was how to ask the right questions. So, I asked Reichs and Tiro questions. Lots of questions. Then came what turned out to be the seminal one.

I said, “So how did they test the launch tube opening and closing in the shipyard before they’d hooked up the main engines?”

Tiro said, “A test port exists on both upper and lower hydraulic cylinders. A high-pressure pump was attached during commissioning. The model used was an
Eclipse-HP3500
. Four units are currently in stores, location Row 2, Shelf 11E. Compatible high-pressure hoses can be found on Shelf 11F.”

“I know the stores like the back of my hand,” said Reichs enthusiastically.

“I’ll come help you carry it,” I said.”

He put up his hand.

“That won’t be necessary, peasant. My Laetitia will help me—she’s not aged a day since I met her ... Let’s wait here for her. I’ll give her a call; see where she’s got to.”

He opened the chest pocket of his grimy coveralls and pulled out an intercom badge. I didn’t stop him from indulging his fantasy. Whoever this Laetitia was—his wife he’d said—she was important to him. He tapped the badge and said, “Intercom, connect me with node tagged as
Laetitia Reichs
.”

This should be interesting
, I thought, partly amused, partly feeling sorry for the guy, despite his bad attitude.

My jaw dropped when I heard the genial female voice reply.

“Hi honey, I was just out fetching some food from the stores. I’ve located you there in the control bulb. Be there in a few minutes ...”

What the hell is going on? His wife is real, as in alive?

“Laetitia... your wife... she’s here? She survived too?”

“Sure did, cowboy! You wait until you see her. She-is-a-
beautiful
woman.”

He smiled salaciously, licking his thin cracked lips.

Poor woman, stuck here with him all these years.

Right on time, ten minutes later what I can only describe as a strikingly attractive woman emerged from the stairwell doors. As the tall, blonde with faintly Latin looks approached along the suspended walkway, she reminded me of a catwalk model strutting her stuff, complete with hip sway and the composed neutral look. She wore a dark fitted catsuit, belt and holster containing a semi-auto handgun. Her hair was tied neatly back and her skin looked clean aside from a grease mark on her left cheek. I wondered how long she’d been out of stasis, concluding it cannot have been thirty plus years like Reichs. Whereas he looked like a dirty old bum, she looked like a late-twenty-something model. I guessed she wasn’t exactly flush with choice, but still...

I stood transfixed, unable to comprehend what my eyes told.

“Huh, would you look at that?” I murmured as Laetitia arrived at the control bulb.

She smiled at Reichs as if waiting for his word, making no move to introduce herself or make eye contact with me.

“Laetitia, this is Mr. Luker ...”

She turned to face me, holding out her hand. I shook it.

“Mr. Luker, my wife, Laetitia.”

I cleared my throat, gathering my composure, “Err... hi, nice to meet you. Um... how long have you been out of stasis?”

“Oh, how long’s it been Arnie? A year, I guess.”

“A year, huh?” I said.

“If she says a year, then it’s been a year ... Me, I lost track of time
long
ago. Laetitia here is the only thing keeping me sane.”

Right... sane,
I thought.

“She’ll help me get that pump we need ... isn’t that right honey?”

“Sure, let’s go. I kn—”

“Wait. I’ve got a few more questions, if you don’t mind, Laetitia.”

Again, she deferred to Reichs, watching and waiting for his response instead of addressing me herself. It almost reminded me of some battered wife cases I’d had to deal with as a cop.

“Listen, peasant, I know what you’re thinking. What’s she doing with a crusty old geyser like me? Well, we’re in love and don’t you go getting ideas about making a move on her! Capiche? Now you want that launch tube working or not?”

Reichs looked unstable. Laetitia looked calm and detached. I put up my palms to placate the volatile man.

“Sure, you go on ahead. I’ll see if I can work out what’s going on with that shuttle battery.”

“Alright, we have ourselves an arrangement. Come on beautiful, let us get our pump from stores. Say goodbye to Mr. Luker.”

“Goodbye Mr. Luker,” she said with a smile, before turning and following her husband as he shuffled along the suspended walkway toward the stairwell.

I watched her walk away.

Amazing looking woman
, I thought.
Bizarre situation too…

“Tiro, can you access the stasis records and tell me the pod location of Laetitia Reichs?”

“I’m afraid those records are still unavailable after the reset that—”

“Okay, then is Laetitia Reichs registered as a network user and a colonist?”

“Yes, she is on both counts.”

She may be registered and Reichs may
believe
she’s his wife, but her chest gave her away. To be more precise, the lack of its rise and fall—her lack of breathing. Just like the assassin I’d taken out in Module 1, Laetitia had no need to breathe because Laetitia was an android. It wasn’t just her lack of breathing—although that was pretty conclusive. Her behaviors, her appearance and the way her handshake felt all combined to reinforce my conclusion.

I stood looking down at the shuttles, mulling over the implications. As he was all too keen to point out, Reichs ran one of the world’s most advanced robotics firms—Thinking Kinematics—which made humanlike androids just like Laetitia and the assassin. With everyone else dead or missing, it left Reichs as the last man standing. Reichs was a man that had been awake for a long time, a man that had completed a reset on Tiro two days back and wiped the stasis records, but not everything. With all the death and signs of violence I’d seen, the last man standing
had
to be implicated in some way. And my guess was that he’d used his androids to do the dirty work. He’d told me about the mutiny and implied it was somehow righteous, saying that
it depends on your point of view
, or something like that. Then there were the security droids in Module 3 and its replaying message saying,
Mutiny is a felony offense.

The crime was clear—the deaths, the destruction—but did he have the means, the opportunity and motive? If my theory was correct, the means were the androids. Even one of them was damn hard to stop. Maybe there were others. The opportunity could’ve been any time after the recall to Earth—probably a time window of years. But the motive still eluded me. Was it that he and his faction had their dreams destroyed when the ship turned back from a new life on Aura? Was it the fear of refugees fleeing the destruction on Earth might overrun the ship? There was only so much spare stasis capacity and I doubted whether the crew and military would’ve evicted existing colonists in favor of new ones. And besides, every non-essential colonist already in stasis would’ve been allowed to stay there so as not to complicate any rescue operation. These were concerns any of us may have had, but most of us were unaware of because we were still in stasis. Or was it something else, something more specific to Reichs? The truth was I had no idea. But I did know one thing: Reichs was an unstable character, he had an armed android under his control and that meant I now had a more pressing reason to leave. If he had wanted to take me out, it probably would’ve already happened. But things change, and with his megalomania and superiority complex, I was sure we’d clash eventually. My escape schedule had just moved forward, but without a working shuttle and launch tube, it’d be a one-way trip to the frozen planet below. Who knew what was down there?

As I made my way across the suspended walkway, I decided there was no way I should confront Reichs before I left. For one thing, I may need his help to lower the ship’s orbit and get the lifepod launched—or at least, to make sure he didn’t prevent me from doing so. Second, they may succeed in getting the shuttle working, although I doubted it in the short-term.

I jogged down the echoey metal stairwell toward the flight deck. The pull of what truths lay on Earth now combined with the push of wanting to escape the crazy world of Arnold Reichs and his stunning, but potentially homicidal android. The urge to leave had never been stronger. Now, I had to make it happen.

In 1912, the RMS
Titanic
sank with the loss of over fifteen hundred lives. Two years later, came the SOLAS—Safety of Life At Sea—treaty. Many died on that fateful voyage due to lack of lifeboats. Now, six hundred and seventy years later, the
Juno Ark
carried enough lifepods for double the complement that had embarked. It hadn’t helped the ranks of the dead on the interstellar ship, a toll that made the
Titanic
disaster pale in comparison.

I reached the deck with the offices and the airlock, then continued down the stairwell another level to the double doors marked,
Lifepods
. I pushed open the unsecured swing doors and looked along the long, unbroken corridor. I counted eight doorways either side—sixteen entrances for eight lifepods to ease emergency ingress. The doorways were staggered in pairs and had no door. I walked to the first one on the right marked,
Lifepod 6-1 Entrance A
. Inside the doorway, a short tunnel with twin airlock hatches led to the lifepod. I knew from training that the circular, mildly conical capsules comprised three levels—two upper levels for escapees and one equipment level below containing shelters, rations, All-Terrain Vehicles, radio transceivers and other essentials. The tunnel I’d taken led to the upper level of plastic molded seats arranged in concentric circles. The sign on the wall read,
Capacity 150 pax
, or three hundred people per lifepod across the two levels.

The central pillar had a small cabinet door, which contained things including the printed manual for the lifepod. There were still applications for non-electronic documents, and emergency escape pods were one of them. Leafing through the inch-thick manual, I found what I needed—confirmation that the lifepod would release given the ship’s power restrictions. Skirting around the central column, I found the ladder up to the cockpit above. The tiny dark space contained one seat, manual flight controls, including the control stick, throttles and artificial horizons, all old-style instruments acting as backup for the single dedicated terminal. Checking the terminal, I saw that it powered up and needed no authentication. I left the cockpit and the upper level of the capsule and went back to the corridor, then through entrance B and down the inclined tunnel to the lower level. Same layout, more or less a carbon copy of the one above except for the access hatches in the floor. I flicked on my flashlight and checked that the full complement of equipment remained below. Satisfied it did, I left and checked the other seven lifepods. They were all present and accounted for. All except for one:
Lifepod 6-6
, its access tunnel shut off by the airlock hatches. If they’d had portholes, only space would’ve been visible through them.

It was an interesting find and evidence that at least some of the survivors may have escaped, probably to Earth. Maybe John and Jane Doe were two of the lucky ones. They sounded happy enough in the five lines I’d heard on the transceiver. Then I reminded myself—John and Jane might have been distant ancestors of the
Juno
survivors. Five hundred years was a long time and about twenty generations. If the birthrate had been high enough—and above replacement rate—they could’ve built up quite a population over twenty generations.

My recce of the lifepods was done. I returned to the top deck where Reichs and Laetitia had their happy little life together in the shelter. Hungry and tired, I ate some of Reichs’s food and found a place to rest my head in an empty shelf amongst the boxes, using my fleece as a pillow. It was a hard surface to sleep on, but it didn’t smell like the Reichs residence and the tiredness inside me meant it mattered little. Within the space of two minutes, I fell asleep. My next meeting with the weirdest couple in the Solar system would greet me when I awoke.

***

“Oh peasant, where are you?” came the voice in my dream. Then I felt the hard shelf under my aching butt and realized it was Reichs out hunting for me nearby.

“I’m over here, Reichs!”

From out of nowhere came the beautiful face of Laetitia, up close to mine having found me still lying here. Although she was artificial, her skin and hair were living tissue, so it was hard to tell. That was the whole point—to blend in with the human population and do her master’s bidding. Or it would’ve been if there was a population to blend in with.

“Good morning, Mr. Luker,” she said, dispassionately.

“Err, morning, Laetitia. Did you manage to find the pump and hose?”

“Ah, there you are, cowboy!” said Reichs. “Wouldn’t be making nice with my Laetitia now would you?”

“Just asking about the pump for the launch tube.”

“Yeah, we found what we needed.”

I sat up and got off the low-level shelf I’d slept on. Re-donning my fleece, I felt the two weapons and flashlight still in the pockets. Reichs seemed to notice the sound of the weapons knocking together and the way the top hung down before zippering it.

“Now, would Mr. Luker be kind enough to return that gun? It’s my favorite, you know.”

There was little pointing saying no—it’s not like there was a shortage of weapons. I passed the subcompact back to him, grip-first, safety on.

“Much obliged, Mr. Luker,” he said, beaming at his small, black weapon before placing it in his dirty coverall pocket. He didn’t bother checking the magazine.

Laetitia continued to stand there saying nothing, watching us occasionally in her cold detached manner.

I broke the silence.

“Went down to the lifepods… Reckon it’s our best way out of here.”

“Who says I
want
to leave? Laetitia says it’s dangerous out there, don’t you beautiful? And we got our dreams. Dreams of a better life on Aura-c, where we were meant to be going in the damn first place!”

“A safe landing on the planet cannot be guaranteed,” she said, emotionlessly.

“Yeah, so Tiro said.”

“Look, peasant, I have more than enough help on this ship to let you go,” he said, as though I was some kind of serf in his feudal kingdom.

Nevertheless, I was pleased he wouldn’t stand in my way. If I needed a showdown with Reichs and his robotic bride, then I would. But it would be a definite risk and one I wouldn’t take if I didn’t need to.

“That’s mighty nice of you,
Mr.
Reichs, but we need to get the ship down to a lower orbit—less than three hundred miles altitude.”

“Well, why don’t you let Laetitia and I help you with that? We now know just the way to do it.”

Reichs was being very helpful—a little
too
helpful, making me wonder what was in it for him. Perhaps he just wanted rid of the interloper.

***

The trek to Module 8, Engineering, took us through the stores of Module 7 via the upper link tunnels to the open staircase down to the main deck. Other than the lifepods and maintenance area below the main deck, Module 8 was one enormous space containing the four enormous fusion reactors and associated equipment. The grating-type staircase descended the equivalent of seventeen regular levels or about two hundred feet to the dull metallic floor. As the three of us reached the bottom, I looked up at the four giant reactors, which took up the forward two thirds of the three hundred foot long module. They rested on four strutted legs, two either side of a wide walkway. Underneath all the support structure and piping that snaked its way all over them in ordered orthogonal paths, they looked spherical in shape. Whereas the undersides of the reactors retained patches of their original metallic shine, everything else looked dulled by grime and mold. Last time I’d been there, the hum of the reactors permeated my body with a combination of low noise and vibration underlying their almost supernatural power. The chief engineer had explained how the thermonuclear fusion reactors were in effect miniature stars burning inside their confinement fields. The floor below the reactors was full with terminals and control panels and piping. Farther aft, on the left of the central walkway, I could see the blue vertical storage cylinders labeled
D-T Fuel
. Next to them were the far more numerous red cylinders.

“Come on, this way, cowboy,” said Reichs, beckoning me with his dirty hand complete with filthy fingernails.

As we neared the rear of the module, the blue storage vessels on the left and the red ones on the right came into view.

Reichs swept his hand from left to right, looking at the cylinders and installations on the rear bulkhead and said, “Laetitia, explain to Mr. Luker what all this stuff is.”

She turned to face me.

“The blue cylinders contained deuterium-tritium fuel for the fusion reactors. These supply the ship and main engines with power. The fuel has been expended and the fusion reactors have shut down as a result.”

As she spoke, a wry smile flitted in and out of existence on her full lips. I wondered what was going on in her artificially intelligent mind.

She kept looking at me and continued, “The red cylinders marked,
Auxiliary Thruster Fuel
, contain fuel for the rocket motors. These tanks are eighty-one percent full.”

I nodded, fascinated by the movements of her human-looking face, constantly looking for signs of artifice.

“At the rear of the module, the many pipes and conduits disappearing into the bulkhead run to Module 9 in which the engines are situated. At deck level below them, you will see the terminals and controls for operating the engines. Here, one can find duplicate functionality to that found in Module 1. Two of the four terminals are functional and this area is connected to the network and Tiro. At either end of this rear bulkhead are situated the access doors to the lower Module 9 link tunnel.”

I chuckled and nodded in thanks to the android.

“A full and efficient account, Laetitia. Thank you.”

“You are welcome, Mr. Luker,” she said with a smile, before turning to face her crusty old master.

I eyed the weapon, still in her hip holster. The retention strap, which had been clipped on when I awoke, was now off. Imagining how quick her synthetic muscle would be on the draw, I reminded myself to stay on good terms with Reichs. If the time came to take her out, it’d need to be something I planned and dictated to stand a chance.

“So what do we need to do to lower the orbit,” I said, wandering toward the terminals.

Laetitia looked to Reichs and he nodded.

“Mr. Reichs will authenticate, then we will instruct Tiro.”

She strode, purposefully toward the middle left terminal, with Reichs and me joining her there. He placed his grubby hand on the display to authenticate. It amazed me that it still managed to read his prints along with his RFID given how filthy and cracked his palms were—something about reading the skin at the sub-dermal level, I thought.

“Wakey, wakey my little computerized servant!” said Reichs loudly, as though speaking to someone hard of hearing.

The civilized voice of Tiro answered.

“Yes, Mr. Reichs. How can I be of assistance?”

“My wonderful wife will instruct you. Do her bidding, you hear me?”

“Certainly,” said Tiro.

Laetitia took the spot in front of the terminal.

“Tiro, plot a course—”

She stopped dead, twisting her neck side to side her eyes inquiring and focused.

Reaching for her gun, she drew it slowly and turned away from the terminal to Reichs.

“Arnie, you need to take cover. There are—”

Suddenly, the left hand door to Module 9 swished open and out came a pair of handgun-toting security droids, their weapons raised. One targeted Reichs, the other Laetitia.

I reached into my pocket and clicked off the safety, pointing the gun toward the left-hand droid as Laetitia raised her gun. I heard the swish of opening doors and turned around one-eighty to see yet another humanoid robot appear, also with a raised handgun—this time covering me.

From behind me, I heard the robotic voice say, “Mutiny is a felony. Arnold T. Reichs, Laetitia Reichs, you are wanted f—”

Then, Laetitia opened fire and all hell broke loose. I fired twice, hitting the droid in the head, before diving to the side and rolling behind a fuel cylinder leg. With my back against cover, I saw Laetitia had dropped one droid, a small plume of fire emanating from its right eye as it lay on the deck. Reichs fired wildly from cover as Laetitia fired as quickly as the semi-auto would allow. Before her target fell, she took two rounds in the back from the lone droid before turning to engage it. She fired twice then ran out of ammo. When I peeked around the leg and opened fire on the droid, it bucked but started turning toward me. Then from nowhere, Laetitia came sprinting faster than anyone I’ve ever seen, and dove at the droid, sending them both to the deck. She straddled the machine, grasped its head then twisted it around, before yanking it clean off. She rose efficiently to her feet still holding the droid’s head by the neck cabling, before turning toward me.

“All threats have been neutralized, Mr. Luker.”

She re-holstered her gun, maintaining eye contact, waiting for my response.