Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) (11 page)

So with one good news message and one ominous one, I closed the alert boxes and reviewed the menu items, but quickly learned that my clearance level allowed no access to anything useful. Looking over at Captain Gutiérrez’s skeleton, I wondered for a moment whether I could find his RFID and bypass the elevated security. But it would be no good—without specific life signs the chip was useless.

I sighed and got up from the floor next to General Stewart, glad to distance myself from the dead.

I leaned beside the cupola and took in the view outside. The shaft of light from Aura was no longer perpendicular to the dome but entered the room now at a more acute angle warming my body in its radiance. The ship’s orbit had altered that angle and once I’d convinced myself the cupola was safe, I leaned inside it and shaded my eyes from the sunlight, trying to get a better view of the planet. Complete shade no longer covered the large disc and a thin, mainly white, crescent had formed on its left-hand side. I thought back to the nano-probe report on its habitability. Then I thought about the timing of the messages. The ship would’ve navigated here autonomously in any case, but the question I had swimming in my mind was,
when in the voyage had all the violence taken place? And did anyone but the elusive Reichs and I survive the trip?
One thing was certain, though: Aura-c was a confirmed Earthlike planet, and one I was close enough to see with my own eyes.

One thing was clear—it seemed the ship was no longer capable of returning to Earth. It left me with only one choice—to get to the surface of Aura-c. With its Earthlike conditions and stores of food and seeds in Module 7, I should have enough food to survive indefinitely.

But what life would it be, alone on an alien planet?

I had to hold out hope that at least some colonists had made it. But if they had, I’d need to find out
where
on Aura-c they’d set up the colony. Assuming it was at location
Hyland-Alpha
, I’d need to work out where that was exactly. Big planet, tiny settlement—like a needle in a haystack.

Full of renewed hope, I jogged through to the comms room via navigation. The rows of bench-like desks all faced the display wall at the front and had a small holo-pad in front of each of the dozen or so chairs. None of the devices worked. Apart from a few odds and ends like abandoned jackets, a pair of spectacles and several used coffee mugs, only one thing caught my eye—the glass cabinet at the back left corner. Even in the half-light, I could see the shelves of portable, long-range radios, as well as several boxes of intercom badges and four high-powered comms sets. Riffling through the first box of intercom badges, I checked until I found three that worked. I pocketed them just in case. Next, I switched on each of the two dozen hand-held two-way radios in turn, frowning as the last one showed its lack of power like all the rest. Last were the black beer-cooler-sized boxes with a carry handle and what looked to be an extremely long foldable, telescopic antenna—the long-range radio transceivers. Trying each one in turn, I discovered only one worked, reporting ten percent charge on the battery indicator. I hauled it out, dragging it to the corridor outside the ready room where the android had met his match. Next came extending the antenna—all sixty feet of it—along the floor. It was the closest long corridor to the front of the ship. I wondered how much attenuation the ship’s hull would cause. There was one way to find out. Once switched on, I set the auto-seek function searching for signals. It paused, tantalizingly, around 102 kHz, but all I heard was a variation of the same static noise. Round and around it searched, occasionally slowing at the same frequency then swiftly moving on. Perhaps the ship was shielding a signal from the colony thousands of miles away on the planet below. Or more likely, it was just interference from somewhere on the ship … Or it was Reichs. After trying for a while longer, I conceded a temporary setback but not defeat. There was still something that might work better.

I packed up the transceiver, then, wishing that artificial gravity could be switched off for a while, I carried it to the nearest airlock, the one I’d escaped from to flank behind the android. Once free of the encumbrance, I jogged over to the other airlock and retrieved the spacesuit, helmet and bottle. With such aged gear, it was better to stick with ones I knew worked. Now becoming adept at it, the space suit and helmet rapidly enveloped me for my impending outing. After trying the transceiver outside, my immediate job was to get some food, water and antibiotics. These were all supposed to be in Module 7 Stores. After that, I’d be stocking up for the journey ahead then heading over to Module 6—the colonization module and home to the
Juno’s
shuttles. The pristine world of Aura-c awaited me. It was there I hoped to find my fellow humans and a future worth living.

Once outside the airlock, gravity fell away over the space of mere inches such was the accuracy of the confinement field. With it, the heavy transceiver went from an encumbrance to a flight risk as it pulled on the tether with momentum. The tether was really some old boot laces tied together—I guessed the transceiver designers hadn’t thought of everything. With the last turn complete on the hatch wheel, I surveyed the starboard flank of ship, still in bright sunlight. I tied the tether around the hatch wheel then gently extended the antenna one section-at-a-time while moving away from the transceiver box. Once at the antenna was at full length, I went back to the radio and switched it on, ensuring the wireless link to my helmet was active.

“Here goes, ” I murmured, as I sent the transceiver searching for signals.

It sped through the low frequency band starting at 30 kHz. And then it stopped on 102 kHz again. This time, I heard voices through the static, distant and tenuous. Human, English-speaking voices.

“… lot more than last time …” came the male, American voice, followed by hissing and crackling.

My pulse raced and eyes widened.

“Oh-my-God! They made it! They damn well made it!” I cried to myself, beaming so much my face hurt.

I switched the radio to transmit and said excitedly, “Hello, this is Dan Luker, still on board
the Juno Ark
. Who’s this? What’s your location?”

“… sure it is, that’s why we tried this way …” said the female, also with an American accent, seemingly unaware of my call.

I tried again.

“Hey, this is Dan Luker, survivor on board the
Juno Ark
. Do you read me? Please respond…”

“… never seen … species ... If it’s edible … be happy …” the man continued, also completely unaware of me.

“… What’s your ETA, John?” asked the woman.

“… Be back—”

The male voice faded into a cacophony of meaningless static.

I halted the search function and kept it on the frequency for a full fifteen minutes, but nothing returned. A low battery warning from the transceiver flashed on my HUD.

It read
3% power
– auto-shutdown commencing in 5 minutes

Five minutes later, there was still no further contact. It pained me to see the radio power itself down. Until I could somehow recharge it or find a new one, I was frustratingly alone. Looking on the bright side though, at least I wasn’t light years from the nearest humans. Now it was in the thousands of miles and the ship still carried a fleet of shuttles I could get there with, assuming they still worked, of course.

Shade still concealed most of the planet, although the thin crescent had grown a little since I’d viewed it from the bridge. It looked maybe four or five times bigger than the moon while low on the horizon. I wasn’t sure how far away the ship was, but I guessed it’d be known as high orbit—it certainly was low orbit or the ship would’ve made a lot more progress around the planet since the first time I saw it. Now that there was some separation between it and its star, I could see it more clearly. The night side was completely dark as I’d seen previously—after all, the recon probe report stated there was no alien civilization nor anything like that. The sunlit crescent still looked predominantly white—banks of dense cloud with the faint hue of blue just discernible. More cloud cover than I’d seen on Earth, but hey, it wasn’t as though I had a choice of destinations and could fuss about the weather. The main thing was that now I knew people had made it to the surface. This lifted my spirits immeasurably. Whether it was a colony of two or two hundred, I didn’t yet know. But there was at least another man and significantly, a woman. I wondered if the presence of one woman meant a viable future population or not. Something about genetic diversity and inbreeding made me doubt it.

I used my thrusters to glide to the end of the antenna. I grabbed onto it and got a footing so I could retract it. It seemed that the people I’d heard sat at the farthest extent of the transceiver’s range. Not only could they not hear me, but I could hardly hear them either. Perhaps atmospheric conditions had contrived to allow a reception, only to snatch it away again like a capricious spirit teasing a mere mortal. If there was one thing I’d learned being a cop, it was that persistence often pays off. Lack of persistence usually guaranteed failure. So I’d find a way to get to these people, whoever and wherever on that vast planet they may be. Because now I knew they were there, I wasn’t letting go of the hope they represented.

On reaching the transceiver, I untied it and re-tethered it to one of the karabiners on my spacesuit before throttling up the thruster pack. With the heavy transceiver in tow, I needed to be careful when changing speed or direction. But that was why I’d picked the starboard, planet-facing side. Only straight-line movement was needed to reach Module 7—no tricky, curved trajectories around the ship’s hull to execute. Over two thousand feet away, toward the stern, I watched the shifting reflections on the four solar panels, each half a mile long. The power they gathered from Aura had kept me alive for who-knew how long while in stasis. I passed above Module 2, once the bastion of military power, now a cold, dark shell, devastated by the fighting within. From the corner of my eye, I noted the cupola below as I drifted past. I had no desire to see the partially decomposed body of the woman that had perished there. Another seven hundred feet of effortless gliding took me over the science module, then the habitation module then on past Module 5 Stasis.

In my mind, I replayed the snippets of conversation I’d heard. Five lines of unwitting code for a distant eavesdropper to decipher, a fellow human in orbit around
their
planet, who could hear them but not be heard. A strange thought came to mind—perhaps I’d died and I’d become a ghost. If I had, none of this would matter anyway. I quickly dismissed the thought—I didn’t think an android would have attacked me had I been an apparition.

The man named John had said, “…lot more than last time…” then there’d been a break in the reception and the woman said, “…sure it is, that’s why we tried this way…” Then John said, “…never seen … species ... If it’s edible … be happy …”

The third excerpt was the key. However he was doing it, this John had been out finding food. Could’ve been hunting, fishing, collecting plants or something else, but it was definitely about food. The fact that there
were
species
around to eat was a critical learning as far as my long-term survival went. This meant that even if I couldn’t find the survivors, I’d hopefully have access to food once my ship-derived supplies ran out.

Continuing to drift sternwards, I passed over Module 6 and went in search of the nearest porthole, trying not to deviate too far from my straight-line path. Up ahead, a series of three lay either side of the ship’s apex, about thirty feet below it. Spaced at a thirty-five feet apart, I changed course for the nearest one. A burst on the thruster pack slowed me and another sent me closer for a look. Disappointingly, between the grimy windows and the dimness inside I couldn’t get a clear view through the porthole. The second was the same, but the third, although still dirty, presented a brighter lit space that revealed something important. The objects inside—I guessed some boxes and what looked like the oversized tire of a land vehicle—were glued to the floor. That meant one thing: gravity. And that probably meant air pressure too, unless there’d been a breach as in Module 2. I re-tethered the transceiver to an exhaust outlet and decided to take a detour to inspect the module for damage. Once again, on a circular trajectory I allowed myself to drift well above the module to get a better perspective. At two-thirds down from the apex on the shaded, port side I could already see the damage to Module 2 in the distance and I surveyed along the underside—Module 3 then 4 then 5. All the others looked intact, the largely featureless gray cylinders punctuated by the occasional porthole or airlock door as well as the round, flush outlines of lifepod hatches. My eyes then fell upon Module 6, over which I flew. The edge of the nearest shuttle launch tube came into view—closed, as it should be. The module looked undamaged too, as did the rest of the ship, toward the stern.

I returned to my starting point and reconnected the transceiver, relieved that only one of the nine modules had sustained a hull breach.

Once underway toward Module 7—my final destination—my thoughts returned to John and his edible species. Thoughts of fresh fish and lobster swam up from my subconscious, no doubt sent there by my famished stomach. I quelled the thoughts with promises of food from Module 7 and tried to focus.

That he was called
John
was bad luck. Bad luck for me, anyway. If he’d been a Quentin or a Flem then I’d have a chance of tracking him down on the working terminal in Module 5. In turn, that may have provided some clues to the characteristics of a survivor of which there were now at least four.
John
had to be the most common male name in the English-speaking world. I supposed a smart-ass statistician would point out that this had made it more likely—correct, but of no help whatsoever.

The final two lines of the five were, “… What’s your ETA, John?” and the start of John’s reply, “… Be back—” And that’s when the signal cut out.

The last lines told me were that he’d gone off somewhere to get food. Nowhere that was quick to get to or they needed have bothered with radio comms and talk of an ETA. This suggested they had vehicles to cover a distance that would be worthy of the term,
ETA.
Not necessarily, but probably. They’d kept radio contact obviously meant they had working radios, which meant they had a source of power to operate them. This, in turn, meant they weren’t just subsisting in a cave somewhere, waiting to die when dwindling resources ran out. They were out in the environment increasing their food supplies. So much gleaned from so few words. I recalled their voices, and despite the awful reception, I’d have characterized them as relaxed, happy, almost jovial. Certainly calm.

If they can live there and are happy and relaxed, then so can I!
I thought with optimism.

A ray of reflected light caught my eye and roused me from my thoughts. I looked up to see the vertical solar panel towering above Module 8, less than three hundred feet aft. A brief burn on the thruster pack slowed my advance as I held onto the transceiver so it didn’t drag me onward. I’d reached the airlock to Module 7—the place we kept food and supplies for the longest voyage in human history. Whether or not they were still there and still useable I would soon find out. Without them, my survival would be in jeopardy.