Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) (3 page)

“Hey, this is Luker, colonist zero-one-zero-one-five! Can anyone hear me?”

Nothing.

I tried the intercom badge again. My hopes weren’t high, but they hadn’t gone completely. I double-tapped the badge, powering it up from standby.

“Tiro, connect me with the nearest crew member.”

My pre-recorded friend replied, “Tiro is unreachable. The communications network is inactive.”

It was sad but true to say I actually enjoyed the female tones of the intercom.

Is this the first step to madness?
I asked myself.

I said, “Intercom, initiate direct badge-to-badge communications. Any node.”

“No active intercom nodes within range.”

“Intercom, repeat last command.”

“No active intercom nodes within range.”

Repeating the same thing, expecting a different result—perhaps
that
was the first sign.

Maybe my intercom badge was faulty. I went back and tried Everts’s. Same result: comms network down, no one else within range. I couldn’t face seeing Kate’s lifeless face again and neither intercom badge showed signs of malfunction, so I’d just try again later.

I needed to keep busy. Sitting still in the deafening silence reminded me how alone I felt. For all I knew, I could have been the only live human within a sixteen light year radius. But I couldn’t believe that and with twelve thousand on board, I didn’t. Something had happened that had caused the stasis pods to fail.

As I pulled myself into a headlong glide toward the stairs, I decided it was no coincidence that the only three pods with any status light activity were mine and the two adjacent to it. I reached the middle of the first flight of stairs and cushioned myself to a stop. The sonorous noise of the ax impacting the step broke the peace and seemed to linger in the place, which was once alive with people taking to their pods. Faces full of hope and excitement. Dreams of a utopian new society. Achievements to make and fortunes, too. A different era, like a movie in my mind. It seemed to have happened just hours ago. Reorienting my body upwards toward the next level, I pushed off and flew through the frigid air. The floor of Level 9 passed below my eyes revealing the three-hundred-foot-long aisle with stasis pods either side. I scanned along the aisle, straining to see the farthest ones through the gloom as my body neared the ceiling and I grabbed it to maintain position.

“Damn it! What the hell is going on?” I said under my breath as if in consideration of the sleeping colonists in my midst.

Except there wasn’t a single status light illuminated, which meant they were likely not sleeping but were most likely dead. I hadn’t given up hope for Mike Lawrence though. His aisle was two to the right. I set off for the center of aisle seven where it branched off to the other aisles and thought of him. We’d trained for the mission in different intakes, but we’d been assigned as one another’s partners once on board. We’d clicked right away. We shared something of the same working class background, same humor, and the same careers as city cops. It was an old cliché that cops share a brotherly bond, but I really did feel a natural affinity for Mike. Three years older than me, he’d policed the streets of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods for most of his career. As a native of the hood, he knew the way it worked. Though respected by many unsavory elements on his turf, he’d found himself on the wrong side of a major crime syndicate. There was no way he could continue in his job and live. Divorced after his third marriage had failed and with his kids grown up, he’d decided not to relocate to a new city under the witness protection program, but to start again on a new planet. We all had our reasons.

I reached the right turn to the other aisles, grabbing the ceiling grating once more and redirecting myself down the branch aisle. I looked quickly left then right—still no status lights in aisle six, but something caught my eye and I stopped and stared. A pod, maybe five away to the left, didn’t look quite right. I glided toward it and it became increasingly clear that the canopy was damaged. On reaching the pod, I pushed down from the ceiling to get a closer look at the six holes bunched in two groups of three. Their size and clean round shape told me they were bullet holes—three to the head, three to the chest. Shocked, I went down to the plaque and rubbed in clean.

Sgt. Mitchell N. Saylor

DOB 28-Sep-2041

United States of America

Marine JA-09726

I exhaled, my frown heavy with tension at what I was about to do. Instead of opening up yet another ceased stasis pod, I cleaned the plexiglass just enough to see the skeletal remains inside. And this one really was just bones and a stasis suit with all three of the headshots having drilled through the twenty-nine-year-old marine’s skull. Any preservation fluid had long-since left the pod, but the lack of dried blood splatter told me it was probably there when he died. Anger welled inside me. Whoever had done this had committed murder. To shoot a guy while asleep in stasis was cowardly and lowest of the low. For their sake, I hoped they weren’t still alive to find out what I’d do to them if I ever caught them.

I turned away and sighed, running my hand through my cropped hair.

More questions, but still no answers.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but Sergeant Saylor wasn’t the only one to suffer the same fate. There were another three further along the same aisle—two more marines and a crewman named Jones.

I checked a few other pods at random—dead, skeletal but with no signs of violence.

So why were some shot and not the others? And what the hell went down in here, anyway?

Taking no more time, it felt more urgent than ever to find out what happened to my would-be partner, Mike. I’d gotten used to the zero-g and I raced toward aisle five, pod fifteen. Less than a minute later, I was rubbing the info plaque revealing:

Michael J.A. Lawrence

DOB 13-Dec-2035

United States of America

Colonist JA-02262

I swallowed hard, my stomach lurching. I’d found his pod and I checked then double-checked for bullet holes. There were none. Like all the others but three, there was no status light and no sign of any of the pod’s systems working. Only the ubiquitous layer of dust and grime stood between my eyes and what I thought they were about the see.

Reaching up to the canopy where his face would be, I braced myself and took a deep breath of chill air. Then I rubbed, dreading the prospect. My eyes widened with surprise. It wasn’t the dead face or the skeletal remains of Mike peering back at me at all—the pod was empty.

I sat back and shook my head in confusion.

This thing just keeps getting stranger
, I thought.

Once I’d gathered myself together, I spent the next half an hour checking other pods on Level 9, 10 and 11. Same findings—no status lights, no survivors. Some shot dead. Some plain missing.

With no signs of another living soul, I couldn’t check all twelve thousand pods. It was time to find a terminal and let the network give me some answers.

I searched for over an hour, covering all twenty levels, but none of the terminals on the stasis pod floors worked. The touchscreen displays on every level were all as dead as everything else so far. It seemed that the
Juno Ark
barely had enough power for life support, let alone non-core network terminals. I guessed this explained the cold, the emergency lighting and the lack of artificial gravity. None of this was for sure, though. For all I knew, the remaining colonists could have been having a big old party in the neighboring modules. I doubted it, but was sure to find out in good time. First, I needed to find a working terminal and it looked like I was in the wrong place. My best chance was in the stasis module control room down on Level 1, so that’s where I headed.

I noticed that my eyes had adapted to the dimly-lit labyrinth of metallic harshness. Better still, my headache had gone away as they said it would in training. My constant movement was keeping the chill at bay, but I was burning a prodigious amount of calories and was starting to feel it. My thirst wasn’t much better. But these weren’t my immediate concerns—I could still go a while more without food or water.

Reaching Level 1, the metallic door to the control room stood two hundred feet ahead. I pushed off the staircase and flew down the single aisle. There it was, at the base of the giant cylinder that was the stasis module. Floating forward just feet from space outside the hull, I wondered what was out there and where the hell the cavalry were. When I looked back up, the featureless door was looming large in front of me, just a few body lengths away. Behind the door was where all twelve thousand eight hundred pods could be controlled and monitor. This was the place I hoped to find some answers.

Staying horizontal, I reached for the entry panel to the right of the door. If it was dead, the ax in my hand would have a lot of work to do. With the door being so featureless, I decided to stow the small ax. Using its blade, I cut a small slit in the stasis suit’s right leg on the outside of the thigh. I slipped the handle in all the way to the blade, freeing up my hands. The entry panel had its tiny red light on, showing it had power, at least. I took a breath and held my right hand against the RFID reader, hoping the chip embedded in the web of skin between my thumb and index still worked. The panel light turned green and I breathed a sigh of relief as the door slid open with a familiar
swooshing
noise. Then it shuddered for a moment and ground to a halt halfway open. With enough room to get in sideways, I wasted no time pulling myself into the small control room.

The twelve-foot square room was as dimly-lit as the rest of the module with only low-powered glow strips on the ceiling for luminance. The floor was metal grating as outside, but the walls were the standard glossy white panels that I remembered from other parts of the ship. To the right, a pair of small desks with drawers sat bolted to the floor. The one-piece molded chairs that were once tucked neatly below now floated at eye-level, drifting and rotating lazily in the air. Floating around the chairs were a pair of chocolate bar wrappers. I grabbed one then the other checking for some half-eaten treat but found nothing. I doubted it’d be edible even if the person had been kind enough to consider me a hundred and twenty years ago. Beside the farthest chair was a plain white coffee mug. Only a brown stain remained, the liquid portion having long since evaporated. Wrapped around the armrest of the far chair was a navy blue piece of clothing. I pushed off gently and untangled it. Holding it out at arms’ length I saw it was a fleece, zipped at the front, pockets either side. A pretty standard item and of a size that’d just about fit me. What wasn’t standard was the object in the left-hand pocket—a semi-auto 9mm handgun with the safety on. I slid out the magazine finding only six rounds of twenty. Nobody carries a gun with six rounds when it can hold twenty, not unless they’ve used them. It seemed obvious where. Back home, we would’ve tagged and bagged it, careful not to put our sticky paws all over it. But here it hardly mattered. If the people that did the killing upstairs were still on board, I’d be putting the half-dozen rounds where they belonged—inside the murdering bastards’ heads. I donned the fleece, zipping it up, placing the gun in the right-hand pocket. It was tight across the chest and short at the arms, but its warmth was a welcome relief.

Above the desk, affixed to the wall, was the spacious display wall now black and devoid of power. Not a good sign. The wall in front had a pair of fire extinguishers still attached and a glass-cover control panel full of old-style hardware buttons, lights and switches each with labels underneath. None of the lights were on—again, not a good sign.

To the left, the two kiosk-like terminals stood side by side, one higher than the other. I imagined the last operators to use them were a short guy and a taller one, both having adjusted the heights for comfortable operation. Was it the tall guy’s fleece I wore? Were they the murdering sons of bitches that’d taken so many lives as they slept in stasis? Who knew? They weren’t here and neither were their remains. The terminal displays were angled for easy viewing and touchscreen operation. Both were black, but both had a red standby light.

I glided to the higher, right-hand terminal avoiding the floating chairs, the wrappers and the mug. Using the side of the display for some light leverage, I rotated my body into a standing position. No reason when weightless, but it just felt right I guessed. I tapped the display willing there to be power.

The screen stayed black but then a message appeared in white text:

Terminal Starting Up. Please wait...

“Yes!” I said, doing an air-punch, tennis champ style.

On Earth, I used to get mightily pissed waiting for devices to start up. Now, I was pleased seeing those lame old periods appearing and receding beside the
please wait.
The terminal had a good excuse—after all, it’d been on standby for a while.

The display turned white and a new message came up above a red rectangle:

User Authentication. Please place RFID hand in the red box...

I did as I was told, my huge hand taking up the entire allocated height. Any longer and maybe it might not have worked. The terminal went about reading my RFID pip, my fingerprints and my life signs. Apparently, I was still Dan Luker and I wasn’t dead.

Welcome Daniel T. Luker (JA-01015).

Then Tiro spoke.

“Welcome back Daniel T. Luker. How can I help you?”

I smiled. Then I broke out into laughter, the laughter of joy at hearing the voice of the network. And the laughter of that familiar voice that reminded me of C3PO from the classic
Star Wars
movies.

“Why are you laughing, Daniel?”

“Please, just call me Dan. And it’s nothing. Tiro, what the hell happened? Why’s everyone dead? Where are we? What year is it?”

“Dan, I cannot answer those questions.”

“Why not?”

“The network is down to one of three duplicates. The remaining network has sustained damage and is running on emergency power. The links forward of Module 4 have been severed. A system reset occurred yesterday. Stored files have been compromised but I am attempting recovery. The communications array cannot be reached.”

“A system reset?
Yesterday?
How can that be? Who reset you, Tiro?”

“User Arnold T. Reichs, JA-00008, executed the reset.”

“So this Reichs is alive?”

“At the time of reset he was alive. I do not know if he is still alive, Dan.”

“Tiro, how many others are alive?”

“I am aware of just one other person.”

“Who? Mike Lawrence, maybe?”

“No, it is you.”

Not funny,
I thought. Not that I believed Tiro to be capable of humor.

“There may be others since the personnel monitoring system is offline.”

“Tiro, what about the pods? Are there any in green status? Is anyone still in stasis?”

“No, all stasis pods are now offline. Yours recently went offline.”

I said nothing for a few moments, trying to absorb what Tiro had said. I had a million questions, but after reset Tiro was now of limited use to me. I had to try, though.

“Tiro, can you reach Module 1? Who’s captaining the ship?”

“Module 1 is unreachable. The links to module 4 have been severed, the back-up EM links are unpowered, therefore I cannot reach modules one through four. I cannot answer your question on who is captaining this ship.”

“Okay, well who’s this
Arnold T. Reichs
then? Can you bring up his info page for me?”

“Here is his information page, Dan. As you can see, he is a thirty-year-old man and a
Juno Ark
Investor.”

A photo-realistic full-body 3-D model of Reichs appeared on the display. To the right of the slowly rotating image was an information column. I drew closer to the display, studying the small, pot-bellied guy in a gray suit and red tie. I reverse-pinched the face to zoom in. Along with the suit, his sandy, side-parted hair and gold-rimmed round specs spoke of wealth and a life in the corporate jungle. His face, complete with prominent blue eyes and thin, smug lips, was slightly pudgy.

Too many brunches at the country club,
I thought.

I looked again. To say prominent eyes was being kind—bug-eyes would’ve been harsher, but more accurate.

Whatever … he was clearly super-rich if he was Investor Class—most on board were merely Colonists like me.

Looks like the concept of class was alive and well
, I thought.
And why not? There’d always been a hierarchy, always would be.
Just the way it is.

I read the information column. Much of it was redacted and covered with the words,
Insufficient Clearance Level.
I was sure Reichs wouldn’t have this trouble as a VIP investor. But it did tell me a few other useful things. Born in Dallas in 2040, it stated he was founder and CEO of San Francisco based Thinking Kinematics Inc. I’d never heard of the company before—although I wasn’t very interested in the world of business.
Thinking Kinematics
sounded like one of those robotics or artificial intelligence companies that had taken everyone’s jobs over the last few decades. Still, who was I to say? My Juliet would’ve known. I saw her face in my mind’s eye, despite trying to focus on the task at hand. I pushed the thought of her to where it belonged—in the special place deep in my mind and my heart, ready to find later when I had the time and space, when I was ready to give the honor her memory deserved.

I refocused on the display and Reich’s info page. The only other thing that wasn’t confidential was his pod location:  Level 20, Aisle 1, Pod 4. Not that I thought it’d be of any use given he was logged resetting the network yesterday. Clearly, he wasn’t in stasis. But where the hell was he? What was he playing at and why was he the only other survivor so far?

I took a last look at his face and memorized it. I wasn’t sure why—it wasn’t like there was anyone else on board to confuse him with. More cop’s habit.

I spent the next hour grilling Tiro as if he was chief suspect in a murder inquiry. In a way, he was. If he were human, I might have been tempted to charge him with obstruction. But he wasn’t pleading his right to silence—he just didn’t know and I doubted he could lie. Tiro was just a severely compromised AI computer. However, talking to him did reveal something. The info pages of those who’d been shot in their stasis pods. Over ninety percent of them were either crew or military. This cannot have been a coincidence. It just didn’t tell me why.

There was one last thing I wanted to see before leaving Tiro to his quantum circuitry.

“Tiro, pull up my info page, please.”

“Certainly, Dan.”

There was no reason. Just curiosity mixed with a sense that if I existed in Tiro’s database then I existed to the outside world. Whereas I couldn’t see most of the other travelers’ data, I could see my own.

Daniel Travis Luker

Colonist JA-01015

DOB: 10-Nov-2038

Place of birth: Boise, ID, USA

Age at launch: 32 years

Eyes: Brown

Weight: 225 lbs

Height: 6’ 5”

Place of Residence: Los Angeles, CA, USA

Former job: Police Officer

Marital status: Single

Children: None

Next of kin 1: Marlene Rose Luker (mother)

Next of kin 2: Nikki Alexis Luker (sister)

The 3-D body model flattered me, I thought. My mental image didn’t quite match the powerfully built guy on the screen. I zoomed into my inanimate face. The chiseled jaw and prominent chin made me look like a tough brute. That wasn’t how I felt about myself. At least not most of the time. I guessed my adversaries might not feel the same. Juliet used to tell me I had a Roman nose. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. She seemed to like it. The hair was right, though, the dark brown, close-cropped style barbered for ease of maintenance more than anything else.

I had one last request before leaving the control room.

“Tiro, what’s the status of the artificial gravity system? Can it be restored?”