Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) Read online

  I slid up until my face was a foot above the canopy and then paused for a moment, floating and looking down at the dirty stasis pod. Pushing past my hesitation, I wiped away the century and a bit of grime. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dim interior and a second more for my brain to what I was looking at.

  “Whoa!” I cried, reflexively pushing myself away until I gently impacted the grating of the level above.

  “What the hell happened to you, Evert?” I murmured.

  Clearly dead, his eyes were gone, leaving only dark pits beneath his round plastic frames; the fleshy part of his nose had decomposed leaving just skin and bone. His face looked gaunt and mummified. I’d seen plenty of corpses before in my former life, but not many decomposed ones like this. Not a pretty sight. I looked away, aghast. Less than a perceived hour ago, I’d been speaking to the poor guy.

  Whatever befell Evert Rietmuller might give a clue to what was happening on the not-so-good ship Juno. With only emergency power coursing through the pod’s circuits, I once again went for the emergency release. And once again, it was ceased solid. Sighing at my sore fists that had pummeled the last canopy, I decided to go looking for a less nerve-bundled battering ram. I had another look around, keen to keep myself anchored in the weightless environment. Like before, there was nothing. I gently propelled myself away from the pod, gliding silently and effortlessly through the chill, dim air. I passed half a dozen more stasis pods, each within arm’s distance should I have needed to stop—after all, there was no other way in zero-g. No way available to me, anyway. I passed over the metallic grating of Level 8 and below its counterpart forming the ceiling and the floor of Level 9. A few more pods ahead stood a pair of sturdy-looking vertical I-beams—one either side of the walkway nestled between the nearest pods. Using friction, I brushed the dirty canopies of five pods, turning my head as I passed the girder, slowing myself to a halt at the sixth pod. I’d seen what I needed. After reorienting myself toward the rear side of the structural column, no more than five feet away, I flew toward the fire ax affixed to it. Why didn’t I think of this before? I asked myself; although I doubted it would’ve saved Kate Alves. Whatever had taken her young life was beyond the skills of a first aider with no medical equipment.

  With hands outstretched like Superman, I cushioned my approach and hung on with my left arm while releasing the ax with my right.

  Retracing my steps, I arrived back at the stasis pod of Evert Rietmuller. As the first ax blow bit into the plexiglass, I wondered what the other pods contained. Were the red status lights of Evert and Kate the harbingers of their demise? All the other lights I’d seen showed no illumination at all apart from my own, which was green. What this all meant, I didn’t yet know, so I tore into Evert’s canopy glad of the warmth of exertion. I wasn’t so glad of the rancid smell of death that came wafting from the breach. I continued breathing only through my mouth, a technique I’d used many times before in a former life.

  I wedged the ax handle into the gap under the pod to keep it from floating away and then pulled the internal canopy release.

  The corpse of Evert Rietmuller lay there in its restraints, the stasis suit loose fitting around his skeletal limbs. Unlike Kate Alves, he was dry all over, his blond hair swaying slightly under the direction of some unseen airflow. The fact that skin still covered his bones meant that he’d died relatively recently—relative to the twelve decades we must’ve been traveling for. There’d been moisture—preservation fluid at least—inside the pod meaning his state was more a case of recent death than long-term mummification. I bent down and felt beneath his back. It was still damp—a disconcerting mix of preservation fluid and God-knows-what from his body. I made a mental note to wash my hands at the earliest opportunity. Surveying the body both front and back of the corpse for causes of death, I could see no clues. I removed the stasis suit—a task well worth avoiding—in search of the same, but still found nothing. Redressing Evert for dignity’s sake, I closed the stasis pod and floated above what had become the modest, intelligent man’s casket. I still didn’t understand why he’d left a wife and kids back on Earth—he must have had his reasons—but I doubted they were still alive after so long. Yet again, my only consoling thought was that he might see his loved ones in whatever place he believed was waiting for them.

  Bowing my head, I said, “Rest in peace, Evert Rietmuller.”

  Keen to start breathing through my nose again, I retrieved the ax and glided away from Evert and Kate and back to the ax’s former home. As I held onto the cold steel column, I listened once again. Still nothing. It could have been like this for a hundred days or a hundred years, there was no way to know.

  I spent the next ten minutes going from pod to pod, cleaning an aperture, and then looking inside. The first was a young man I didn’t recognize. The second a young woman, perhaps just a teenager. Both were just like Evert Rietmuller—very decomposed and very dead. Their youth saddened me more than I otherwise would have been. It made me change my strategy too. From then on, I’d first wipe the info plaques clear before checking inside. This was for one simple reason. Although I wasn’t squeamish—I couldn’t afford to be in my former job—there were some things I never wanted to see again. The corpse of a child was near the top of that list. A dozen stasis pods and a dozen dead later, the plaque read:

  Charlotte Ross

  DOB 21-Jun-2065

  United Kingdom

  Colonist JA-01028

  I closed my eyes, frowning deeply, my mouth downturned as I realized she was just five years old. I shook my head at the lunacy of it all. Why do we humans try to be so damn clever all the time? In the case of the Juno Ark, I knew of course. Many of the reasons for the voyage were the same as for my ancestors that arrived on the shores of America three hundred years before. None of this lifted my heart, though.

  I was done with seeing the dead. They’d yielded no clues as to the cause. But there was one person I needed to find. My only real friend on board: Mike Lawrence. I needed to know if my own Level 8 was the exception or the rule.

  I took a moment to visualize the module’s layout. There were between one and thirteen aisles on each of the twenty levels holding 12,521 people and 12,800 pods—a little over two percent spare capacity. The engineers must’ve been pretty confident in their technology to have so few spares. From the mounting body count, it seemed they shouldn’t have been. At opposing ends of each level’s central aisle were steel-grate stairways up to the next level and down to the one below; it was the same on every level. The hull got narrower toward Level 1 at the bottom and Level 20 at the top—so there were fewer aisles on each level. By time one reached the top or bottom, there was just one aisle on each. It was a natural consequence of the stasis module’s cylindrical shape. Overall, the double-skinned module measured three hundred feet in diameter and the same in length. The population of a small town was crammed into the something the length of a football field, although many times the area. The aisles ran in the direction of the Juno’s axis with. Access to the adjacent modules—Modules 4 and 6—was via link tunnels on Levels 1 and 20. One of my more useful virtues was my good memory. Not quite photographic, but nearly. Mike Lawrence was just one level above me on Level 9. If recall hadn’t failed me, then he was on aisle five, stasis pod fifteen.

  The gloomy, cold place still showed no evidence of life. I listened intently but still had only the sounds of the Juno Ark to keep me company. Before set off, I tried shouting one more time.

  “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.

  3

  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 b
ody 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.