Discarded Colony (4 page)

A loud squishing sound rang out. Ryder had shot a bullet into the guard on the ground’s head just as he was firing his own weapon. The guard’s head exploded with brains, blood and flesh being sent out in a wide radius.

"Ok. Ok. Ok," said the guard as the gun returned to his head. "Take a uniform off one of the guys that are still alive, not a dead one. Cut the ID out of his left bicep and scan it at the exit down there." The guard pointed to some lights a few hundred feet down the tunnel. "You should be able to make it to the transport bay. It’s on level 134."

"You better not be fucking lying to me," shouted Ryder. He drove the pistol at the guard's head. The guard closed his eyes, sweating profusely. After a few seconds, Ryder decided that he was telling the truth. He had no reason to keep lying in the face of death.

"Ok, I believe you." Just as the guard started to smile in relief, Ryder punched him square in the face, causing him to crumple to the ground. Ryder could hear buzzing coming down from both sides of the tunnels.

"The cavalry," he thought to himself. He found the bladed weapon on the ground and grabbed one of the unconscious guards and started stripping off his uniform as quickly as he could. After putting on some boots, pants, jacket and headgear Ryder started to feel for a chip in the guard’s arm. He located it and dug the gauntlet into the bicep. Moving through the blood and flesh, he retrieved the chip. The drones were closing quickly so Ryder grabbed one of the large rifles and started bolting for the exit.

"UNIDENTIFIED PERSONS!" rang out a voice from a nearby drone. It let off green pulsing shots at Ryder. He desperately managed to dive out of the way, then aimed his rifle and pulled the trigger. The weapon let off an almighty rapid fire of shots that sprayed all around the room, most of which found their way into the piles of dead bodies. Ryder shot again and managed to hit one of the approaching drones which smashed into tiny pieces all around, but there were dozens of them coming. He had to get out of this tunnel fast.

He continued running, shots were being fired and were smashing into metal and corpses all around him, spitting and sputtering debris and body parts into the air everywhere. To his surprise the door started sliding open as he approached - it had detected the proximity of the chip. The door was made of a strange, semi-transparent compound and the face of the guard who he was impersonating appeared on it. Ryder turned his head and saw a huge combat drone coming flying out of the back of the others. It started to unloaded a salvo of massive red bolts at Ryder, exploding pieces of the room behind him. Ryder was inches away from the door so he decided to make a final leap. Shots reigned in around him as he was in the air. He was sure that he was going to be hit by one.

A loud crashing sound of metal, concrete, glass and flesh rang out.

Ryder had landed inside the doorway and hit the emergency close button. The combat drone flew right into it and exploded on the outside causing Ryder to fly back several feet while smoke filled fill the room. He managed to crawl his way into the transport tile nearby. He selected level 134 on a keypad and a transparent ball appeared around him, shooting him up into a chute. Ryder rapidly arrived at level 134 and the transport ball disappeared.

***

He walked out into the hangar area. It was a huge open space of different levels with ships docked along it for hundreds of meters. Remarkably, there didn’t seem to be many people around and certainly no one who was going to give him much trouble in his disguise. He could see cranes loading huge crates into ships. Control centers were along the left side and the right extended out to where the ships were docked. The ship side led straight out into space but some field was protecting the hangar from the vacuum beyond. Ryder ran a few meters and ducked into one of the control centers on the lower level.

Inside were screens, dials and ship diagnostic information covering all the walls. It was a dimly lit place that seemed to be running itself. He took a look at the screens closely. He could see ship numbers, flights paths and different destinations. Some destinations seemed to be the names of other space stations and colonies that he’d heard of before, but the majority of ships seemed destined for... Earth.

Ryder froze as came to a startling realization: The plots were not growing food for this prison... They were growing it for Earth! As he looked around and saw numerous ship manifests he could see that everything in the plots would eventually be sent back to Earth or other colonies and sold as premium foodstuffs or ground down into nourishment tablets like the ones they were required to eat up here. It was so clear to him now: Due to the extreme radiation and other hostile conditions on Earth they simply couldn’t grow food the traditional way in large quantities using just sunlight and dirt from the ground. Instead, they built a farm like this, tendered by the discarded residue of society.

"What a plan," he thought to himself as fear and anger consumed him. The Earth’s government was obviously complicit and who knew how many other people and organizations were too. Despite all the population had been told about there being no crisis with the Earth’s food supply, it was clear that it was bad enough for them to resort to horrific, previously unimaginable measures such as this. He could see on another screen how the climate was being controlled here with the sun being channeled via a network of floating mirrors to efficiently cover all the surface of the plots for as long as the various varieties of crops needed. This facility was operating more efficiently than any farm growing food on Earth ever had, given that even before the radiation there were so many inefficiencies and temperamental weather conditions! Not to mention the biggest advantage: this facility was run by a workforce that was not paid and could be exploited until their death. He hung his head low. Despite all the great advances humans had made as a species, here dying people were being held, captive like animals, tending to vegetables they will never eat, for people that will never know how their food was brought to them.

***

Ryder heard a noise outside the control room. At the same moment he saw something flashing on the screen indicating that one of the ships was preparing to depart. He got to his feet and saw a beat-up old transport ship that was starting to pull away from the hangar. He left the control room and started running towards the edge of the hangar. As he reached the edge, the ship had already started moving, and was fifteen or more feet below him. Its cargo hold was closing but there was a small gap that he thought he could try to jump into. Ryder ran to the edge of the platform as the ship pulled away and jumped for his life.

***

Ryder fell crashing into the cargo hold with an enormous thud. Luckily he had smashed through some crates containing foodstuff which had somewhat softened his long fall. The transport shot off into the air. He was alive and on board a vessel heading for Earth.

As the craft pulled away, Ryder jumped up to look out one of the small portholes that lined the room. Ryder’s mouth gaped open in horror. They were now high in space and he was finally able to see where he had been held captive. The island prison complex extended for miles and miles. It was enormous! Something on a scale he had never seen before. Forget his estimates of 10000 prisoners in the facility, there were clearly hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people being held there!

Right at that moment he caught a glimpse of himself in the window.

"It can’t be possible," he thought. There, standing amongst the desert of his bald scalp was a small patch of freshly grown hair. "
The strength, the endurance…
" He looked at the palms of his hands again and he was sure that his skin was looking healthy again. He
had
been let free - he had been cured.

"Who
were
you?" thought Ryder as he shook his head incredulously, thinking back to the old man and girl in the prison. They had unlocked a powerful secret and chosen him to take it back to Earth.

He slumped himself into a corner, trying to process everything that had just happened. Agitated by something in his shoe he took it off and emptied out some muck and dirt on the ground. He picked it up and looked at the dirt closely. Wriggling inside his palms amongst the dirt were some earthworms.

"Come with me, friends. I know a few trillion people down there that might be interested in getting their hands on you."

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V.M. Gunn was born in southern New Zealand and from an early age became enamored with the country's mythical mountains, forests, lakes, oceans and of course - stars. Moving to Europe in his teens he became fascinated with the continent’s history and diversity of cultures, regularly writing not only novels and short stories but also games and comics for his own amusement.  While later studying science and engineering he started creating and distributing works to wider audiences. He quickly found that his life and educational experience had given him enormous inspiration to draw from resulting in often unconventional works. V.M Gunn currently resides somewhere across Europe writing and studying the "theory of everything".