Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) (7 page)

Another thing didn’t make sense. Something I’d always wondered about.
Why were there so many heavily armed marines and so many weapons on a trip to an uninhabited planet?
Was it just precautionary, to keep law and order or to stop future coups d’état? After all, governments had always strove for a monopoly on the use of force. Perhaps the nascent colonial government had the same idea. It sure as hell wasn’t covered in training. An alternative theory surfaced in my mind. One more disturbing and outlandish, but possible nevertheless—
was Aura-c already inhabited? Did the mission planners know something we didn’t?
I shook my head and dismissed the idea, never one for conspiracy theories. I’d let the facts do the talking. All the same, I couldn’t rule it out completely.

I shook my head, trying to dispel these weighty thoughts. I had a choice to make: go destroy the droid and get to the next module or take my chances and use the
lower
link tunnel instead.

***

I never got to the lower link tunnel on Level 1. I couldn’t even get halfway there because I found the stairwell completely impassable below Level 9. As I lay prone on the deck of the corridor near its center-point, I faced one way, then turned around and looked along the floor the other way. The floor rose in the middle where I lay, then curved downward toward both ends. With the floor in the middle noticeably closer to the ceiling, some tremendous force had lifted it. The stairwell itself was a melted mass of twisted metal, the stairs ending in midair a few steps below Level 9. Whatever had happened to the floor below was structural and serious. My guess was another explosion—this time something big—one faction trying to cut off the route for some reason or another.

I didn’t relish taking on the security droid on Level 20—but would if I had to. But then an idea occurred to me laying there on the cold metal floor. It was what I’d seen on Level 10 that sparked it—the lab with the spacesuits. If I couldn’t get to the command via the lower link tunnel and didn’t want to face the droid, then perhaps I could use a spacesuit.

Full of renewed enthusiasm, I sprung to my feet and made my way up the pitch-black stairwell to Level 10. Turning left, I took the branch tunnel to the outer corridor and found the lab. Once it was probably spotlessly clean, with gray alloy and gloss white surfaces and bright lighting. Now it was like everywhere else—a picture of decay and mold and grime. A rat scurried out from a dark corner, startling me, then saw me and changed directions darting back under a workbench. The lab was compact by the standards of the weapons labs I’d seen, with equipment-strewn workbenches either side of a central open area with a table on which sat a computer terminal. I tried the terminal, but it was as dead as all the others I’d found in this module. Next to it lay a space suit helmet with some cabling connected to some sort of input-output port—clearly a prototype, as almost everything was wireless even back in the 2060s when the
Juno
was constructed. Another identical helmet lay next to the first, but in a state of semi-deconstruction with parts lying beside it. In front was a door marked
Suit Room
and underneath it on its own plaque,
Airlock.
I opened the door and saw the locker room with the half a dozen space suits hanging up that I’d chanced upon earlier. These were nothing like the first suits worn by the likes of Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin. Compared to these lightweight masterpieces, those historical suits were like spacecraft in their own right. Not much thicker than the spandex-like stasis suit I already wore, these one-piecers sported built-in booties, gloves and hoods. On the back sat a built-in maneuvering pack no bigger than a box of tissues. All I needed to complete the ensemble was a helmet and an air bottle. It didn’t take long to find a helmet inside a closed locker and the rack of compressed air bottles sat just past the lockers against the bulkhead to the airlock. I retrieved the gold-visor helmet and placed it on the small bench in the center of the room, its black rubberlike hose dangling to the floor. 

I checked the suits for wear and tear—all looked pristine and, as far as I could tell, identical except in size. I chose the XL and hoped it’d work since it was the only one there. I lay out the suit next to the helmet and went to get an air bottle. There were eight bottles on the rack, each with an old-style manual pressure gauge. I figured there would be a wireless data link to the helmet’s heads-up display—the HUD—like the ones we’d trained on before stasis. I read the testing date of each bottle—all 2070 and requiring their next check in 2072.

“Oh well, only a hundred and eighteen years overdue,” I said, chuckling to myself.

I let out a blast of air and smelled it for contamination. As fresh as a daisy, so I took the bottle and connected it up to the suit back on the mount atop the thruster pack. Then I plugged in the quick-connect hose and opened the air bottle valve. After removing the ax from my stasis suit leg, I donned the spacesuit and then the helmet, locking it to the connector ring around the hood neck. It felt a little tight around the shoulders and stretched at the knees, but its material was flexible enough to allow me to move around okay. I breathed in and heard hissing as fresh air flowed up the inside concentric tube. Then I breathed out and after a lag heard it leave the helmet-based scrubber and go back down the outer concentric tube and back into the buffer ready to mix with the next intake. After a few more breaths, the HUD showed two hours supply based on my current rate of oxygen consumption. It also told me helmet, bottle and suit status—all normal—as well as environmental data like temperature and pressure.

A status message popped up which read,
No network detected.
It then promptly disappeared.

Next message read,
Use the tag SUIT for voice commands.
So I did.

“Suit, switch to ambient air supply.”

“Switching to ambient air supply ... Completed,” said the synthesized female voice.

I felt butterflies in my stomach as I turned the wheel to the airlock and entered the small chamber. Sunlight from Aura streamed in through the round porthole as a volumetric shaft of light in the dusty air. I closed the internal hatch and shuffled over to the external wall, placing my hands on the air evacuation valve—a wheel of about six inches’ diameter. Taking half a minute to refresh my memory on thruster pack control, I then switched to bottle air and turned the wheel. Immediately, air hissed from the chamber and vented to space. The traffic lights that should have indicated pressure equalization were dead, but I knew the outer hatch interlocks would prevent premature opening. If not, the pressure could blow the hatch door off its hinges. Once I heard the airflow stop, I opened the hatch and peered cautiously outside. There was something about being untethered in the vastness of space that I found deeply unsettling.

No turning back now,
I thought.

Climbing onto the threshold, I held on tightly and closed my eyes in the face of Aura’s dazzling light. A golden glint caught my eye from the right where, toward the stern, the giant solar panels stood extended from four sides of Module 8. That the half-mile-long panels had deployed, meant the ship needed back-up power. In turn, that meant the four reactors either had stopped or had been damaged somehow. Thankfully, they worked on fusion, not fission—no risk of a runaway reaction, not much risk of radioactive contamination either. I turned my head left toward the bow, squinting to see better and there before me lay the enormous gray bulk of the
Juno Ark
, framed the blackness of space.

Less than quarter of a mile toward the bow could lay the answers. If anyone logged what happened to the good ship
Juno
, it should’ve been Captain Emilio Gutiérrez. Now, as I clung onto the outside of Module 3’s curved exterior, I just needed to get there. Eyeing the route to the bow, I could see the remaining forty feet or so of Module 3. Beyond it lay a gap to Module 2 with the link tunnels and the structural spine of the ship hidden from my viewpoint below it. The dedicated military module—Module 2—came next. All nine modules comprising the
Juno Ark
were three hundred feet in  diameter save for the nose of Module 1, which reduced to a rounded point. Module 1—the location of the bridge, communications, sensors and navigation—was at the front of the ship. The great cylinders were largely flush and quite featureless in the main, meaning that I had no reliable way to climb along it. The artificial gravity stopped at the outer walls of the ship—so if I lost thruster control and got separated from the ship then I’d just keep going until the air ran out. Not a happy prospect and not a good way to die, alone in space.

“Suit, bring up virtual controls,” I said, referring to the right-hand control stick and left-hand control panel I needed. The suit computer would generate their virtual images on the helmet HUD. By tracking the movements of my hands and fingers, the computer would allow me to manipulate these controls as if they were really there floating in front of me.

“Virtual controls activated,” said the synthesized female voice, its tone efficient, yet somehow comforting.

Now I had voice and hand control and this made me feel a little better. I stood slowly upright, feeling my toes leave the hull by an inch in a gradual, almost imperceptible rise. My levitation slowed a foot above the hull and I started returning back down.

“Well, would you look at that!” I said, smiling.

I guessed it was probably the huge ship’s micro-gravity doing its work. Still, I knew that had I pushed off with anything but the barest of touches I’d have simply floated away.

It was time to engage the suit thrusters. Throttling up the jets gradually, I lifted off toward Module 2. Flying above the ship, I watched my own shadow pass over the sunlit hull. Somewhere inside the ship below stood the droid that had attacked me. This really was the way to travel when the internals of the ship had been devastated so badly—no droids, no bodies, just uninterrupted views of the ship and space. I grinned a little. For the first time, I actually felt like I was having fun.

I passed over the upper link bridge and slowed, pulling back on the virtual thruster joystick. I looked down at the roughly twelve-foot wide link tunnel. Below it, in the dead center of the ship, ran the cylindrical spine. Running from bow to stern, this structural element gave the
Juno Ark
its strength. Inside, it ran thousands of service lines, from power to water to data. It even contained a service bore used for transporting items between the modules at high speed.

I left the link tunnel behind and glided over the threshold of Module 2, maintaining my altitude at ten feet, unwilling to stray too far. Scanning ahead for obstacles, I saw only the shallow rise of one of Module 2’s cupolas above the hull. A number of small portholes were also dotted over the ship’s surface. Only those I flew directly over were easily visible due to the sun’s glare. Perhaps traveling through the heat of the unmitigated sunlight was not the smartest idea, but the suit seemed to be coping with the heat-loading okay. There was something about staying in the light that I liked. Something about safety and security, although I guessed these were probably psychological.

Approaching the cupola, I slowed and descended to look inside. Only Aura’s light illuminated the viewing room below—no lighting, emergency or otherwise. I saw a laser assault rifle floating near the wall in the corner. Then I spotted something inside. A body suspended above the room’s floor, the lower half in shade. She—I guessed it was a she—wore a marine’s uniform aside from the helmet. The lack of headgear exposed her blonde hair, still tied into a bun. The starlight lit up her partially decomposed face, grotesque in its intermediacy between a recognizable human and the corpse she’d become. The eyes had gone, but some of the soft tissue must have remained. All this told me two things. Firstly, the obvious fact that artificial gravity had failed; second, with no internal pressure containment, the module’s atmosphere was gone too.

I wondered what had brought the female marine to the cupola.

“Were you hiding out here? Had you come here looking for salvation from outside—a rescue ship?”

She continued her vigil, forever gazing sightlessly at the star we thought we’d grow old beneath. I closed my eyes and bowed my head in reverence, feeling a twinge of sadness at having to leave her alone even though she had been before I came. If I ever needed one, it gave me another reason to continue my search. Whatever injustices were committed—and there were bound to be when something as devastating as this happened—I wanted to pry the truth from the clutches of obscurity.

I reengaged the thruster pack and vectored my path down the side of the module toward the nearest porthole. Still in sunlight, I peered inside what looked like a small office. I guessed it belonged to a senior officer from the fact it had a porthole next to the wooden desk and a portrait on the wall of a forty-something man in full dress uniform. Various objects hung statically in the office: a coffee mug, a bottle of pills and a black office chair were among them. No sign of its occupant.

Former occupant,
I corrected myself.

I continued down and around the curved hull toward the bottom of Module 2. On crossing the sharp terminator from light to shade, the hull looked nearly as pristine as the day it had left Earth. I stopped, descended to the gray metal surface and turned around to where Aura’s brilliance shone just below the ship’s horizon. Edging toward that brightness, I adjusted the visor shading against the glare now emerging in front of me. And there, beside the alien sun, hung the dark disc I thought I’d seen in the corner of my eye. That shaded orb was our final destination: our Second-Earth, planet Aura-c. I blocked out the light with my hand and tried to get a better look at the planet, but could see no detail. With Aura nearly behind its disciple, only the thinnest of arcs outlined the planet’s left-hand side. The fact I could see the planet as a definite disc of decent size told me something else: that the ship was probably in some kind of high orbit around it. So not only had we made it to the Aura system, but we’d crossed the light years to the planet itself.

So the
Juno Ark
arrived, entered orbit and then what? A coup on the eve of colonization? An attempt to cease control early and forever dominate the nascent society?

As a cop, having seen the dark side of our nature for so many years, I’d put nothing past my fellow humans. Despite this, though, I wanted to believe the 12,521 colonists were largely in it together. Selection certainly contained enough psychological and neurological tests, many of which were supposedly about building the right population, whatever that was. Social engineering, Mike Lawrence had called it. I guessed there was always going to be something like this on humanity’s first long-term sleeper mission. All the signs so far said It didn’t seem to have worked.

Looking along the once mighty
Juno Ark
, I wondered about her sister ship. Just a skeletal framework at the orbital shipyard when we departed, the
Janus Ark
was to launch seven years after we did. Its destination was the same: Aura-c. Assuming I’d been in stasis for the planned one-hundred-twenty years, the
Janus
would arrive in about seven years’ time. Assuming no delays.

I squinted, trying to discern some sign of the colony that may have been on the planet below. It was hard to be sure, but I could see no sign of artificial light on the dark disc. Not that I expected to. Any colony would be minute—even more so given the population after all the dead I’d seen. At least there weren’t clusters of city lights from some imagined alien civilization.

While lost in thought, I’d floated way above the ship, drifting slowly into the void. I looked down the thirty or so feet and felt uneasy flying so high but not dropping. From my elevated position, I saw something I hadn’t before. I dialed down the visor shading to see properly. My jaw dropped when I saw the gaping breach at the bottom of the ship.

Flying toward the damage that was confined to Module 2, it looked like the hull had sustained a giant, ragged-edged bite. Extending maybe four levels up at its peak, the roughly semi-circular breach surrounded the hanging remains of splayed-out decks, structural members and service lines. Drawing closer, I could make out the faintly blackened edges of the jagged rim. The hull plating had been torn outwards, telling me this was no impact from space debris or anything as outlandish as an alien weapon—this breach had come from within and was explosive in nature. It certainly explained why the module had no gravity or life support.

I stopped sixty feet from the damage and decided I’d already seen a lifetime’s destruction since awakening. Getting my bearings, I found the nose of the
Juno Ark
and vectored straight at it.

Sighing deeply, I realized Module 2 was a write-off. Whatever truths it contained would take something exceptional for me to venture inside and find them. In seconds, I’d be outside of Module 1, the seat of command and the communications nerve-center. The curved point of a nose resolved into view, the only windows the apex cupola and a scattering of small portholes like elsewhere on the ship. Approaching from the shaded side as I was, I could already see the faint glow of internal lights.

“Thank God,” I whispered, glad of the promising signs.

The airlock hatch accelerated into view as I gave a blast on the thruster pack to touchdown. Crouching down, I grasped the recessed door wheel and prayed it wasn’t locked.