Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) (10 page)

The footfalls outside the ready room stopped and didn’t start again. No sound came from the corridor, only ambient noises of the stricken colony ship filling my ears. I wondered what Reichs was doing. As I sat in the corner, the gunshot wound in my arm fed the warm patch of blood soaked up by my fleece top. Drips fell to the deck with a soft patter, creating an expanding red puddle. I held the gun to cover the door and rose to my feet, becoming a bigger target but a more mobile one once Reichs came in. I remained in the corner and waited. Then I waited some more. Whatever this guy Reichs was, I could say one thing about him—he was patient. Maybe he figured time was on his side and I’d need to come out sooner or later through impatience or blood loss. Or just thirst or hunger. He’d have a long wait.

Ten minutes passed but nothing had changed, so I trod silently over to the corpse sitting in the front row, constantly eyeing the door. I reached the skeleton with the slumped head and crouched down in front of the long-dead crewman. His nametag read,
Jaya,
and below it was what I’d gone there for—his intercom badge. I removed the badge, keeping my head below chair level in case Reichs decided to burst in. Next, I unzipped my fleece and activated the badge inside, muffling the usual start up tone.

I whispered, “Intercom, set badge volume to twenty-percent.”

“Volume at twenty percent,” came the quiet voice.

“Intercom, locate AD-005 and its distance and bearing from me.”

“A straight-line distance of one-five feet, bearing one-eight-five degrees referenced to
Juno
bow north.”

I switched off the badge and returned to the corner I’d recently left, placing the badge on the floor there. I crept toward the door, then eased myself down until I lay on my side looking under it. The quarter-inch gap revealed what I’d suspected and I wasted no time in padding back to crewman
Jaya
in the front row. I pulled out a fresh clip, hurriedly replacing the depleted one. Kneeling down behind the chairs, I took aim and fired a double-tap, the muzzle flash lighting up the room and the loud crack filling the space. Then another and another, until sixteen rounds had sliced through the lightweight door at five-thousand feet per second.

With a ringing in my ears, I stopped and tried to hear past it. I’d heard nothing while shooting—no return fire, no cries of a man hit by high velocity rounds.

Moments later, the door opened and through came Reichs, his chest peppered with entry wounds, the light blue top covered in blood. He stood in the doorway, gun aloft, sweeping the room, but his face strangely neutral—no signs of pain, whatsoever. My jaw slackened at how little the wounds had affected him. He didn’t spot me at first, still and low profile next to
Jaya
in the dimness. I adjusted my aim, sighting his forehead. This guy was too dangerous to do anything else.

Goodnight, you murderous bastard,
I thought as I pulled the trigger, almost instantaneously drilling a neat round hole where I’d intended. But Reichs didn’t fall, he just stood there emotionless, eyes facing forward. Then he looked straight at me, readying his aim. I rolled to the side as he fired, all three rounds burying themselves in the chair. Crouching on one knee, I let loose the clip’s last three rounds, the first two hitting the side of his head near the temple. The final shot went inches left of the first two, entering his eye socket, stilling his movement. I watched open mouthed as Reichs simply stood like a statue, blood trickling from his eye, head and chest. Examining the walls both inside and outside the door, I saw no evidence of exit wounds—no blood splatter, no gray matter. Moments later his gun arm fell slack and he toppled, face-forward, to the deck.

I exhaled deeply, closing my eyes for respite but not wanting to keep them shut for long in case this guy rose from the dead, movie-style. Getting to my feet, I kept my gun trained on him. In hindsight, this guy was unbelievable and on reaching his body, he seemed even more so. Four rounds had entered his cranium, yet there was no gaping exit wound as I’d seen too many times back on Earth. It was possible that all four nine-millimeter rounds went in and stayed there. But taken as a whole—the mere trickles of blood, the clear lack of body-armor, the sheer number of wounds and his lack of reaction—Reichs was an exceptional human being.

He wasn’t breathing. I leaned down to feel for a pulse, but there was none. In fact, I couldn’t find an artery at all, which was weird. He felt warm to the touch but less so than I’d anticipated. With no exits wound on his back, I rolled him over his body stiff, almost rigid. That too was odd. Rigor mortis could never set in that quickly. Then I saw the wound in Reichs’s forehead. I pulled up his top to clear away the blood, trying to confirm what my eyes saw but my mind wouldn’t believe. Once most the blood was gone, I knew this wasn’t Reichs at all. The shiny metal inside the forehead hole told me this wasn’t even human.

Back on Earth, I knew of only one case involving an android like the one lying in front of me. Not a case I’d worked on, but one in another country altogether—an assassination in the formerly independent country of Ukraine where anger at Russian occupation still smoldered. That was the killing of nationalist leader, Igor Andropov, back in 2063 while he made a speech in neighboring Poland. As the android had tried to escape, security forces gunned it down, revealing its true nature. The political firestorm it unleashed—in both Europe and the US—was the top story for months since the only manufacturer of such androids was an American company. The whole mystery about how an advanced US-made android found its way into SVR hands then killed a political adversary still hadn’t been solved by the time I’d left Earth. But all the coverage had told a thing or two about the infiltrator androids in question. They were the same type that now lay dead on the
Juno Ark
. The two things that set them apart from other robots were their AI and their ability to pass for humans. Living human tissue, complete with hair and blood vessels covered their armored endoskeletons making them incredibly lifelike and incredibly tough. Even on infrared they showed up as human and it was rumored they could fool life sign monitoring on things like security panels and computer terminals. I pulled the android’s gun from its hand—a .45 caliber, military issue. I looked to my bloodied upper left arm. Any more than a graze from such a powerful round and I’d have been either seriously wounded or seriously dead.

I searched the android but found nothing save for two spare clips and the intercom badge. No clues as to who it was working for, or what its mission was—other than to kill unsuspecting survivors without warning. Still devoid of answers, I left the ready room and took a right, back toward the navigation suite, passing through it and making another right toward the bridge.

Once through the set of jammed-open sliding doors, I cautiously entered the gloomy bridge. Situated at the blunt nose of the ship, the spacious seat of command had an irregular shape with a curved front bulkhead. In the center was a fifteen-foot-wide cupola with the darkness of space beyond. Aura’s light shone at right angles to the dome, illuminating it, but not penetrating far into the room’s interior. Large displays covered the front and side walls. All were dark and inactive. A large, black, leather upholstered chair sat opposite the cupola with a less grand-looking chair flanking it on either side. A once-transparent-now-grimy control screen hung in front of each chair on the end of a thin, articulated arm. And seated in each chair was a body, skeletal just like crewman Jaya’s in the ready room. Closer to where I stood, in the center of the bridge, was a smaller version of the holographic table in the navigation room. Just like there, a number of small stools surrounded the table. This time, though, they came complete with three more bodies in crew uniform, all of them slumped over the table. Four more bodies lay on the deck, beside the wall displays—two on the left, two on the right. A total of ten dead lay in the long-abandoned bridge, the place that once commanded the largest, most technologically advanced ship in history. With my arm aching and hunger growing, I approached the nearest corpse. From the now patchy collar-length hair that still held on, I guessed this was a female officer. Like the other three around the nav table, she wore a blue crew uniform of trousers and long-sleeved shirt. I could see from her epaulets that she was a sergeant. I found her 9mm service pistol still in her belt holster. On ejecting the clip, it was clear that not a single shot had been fired. I took the full clip and replaced the depleted one in my own gun. The full magazine told me something, but the most striking thing about her was the single bullet hole in the back of her skull. The other crewmembers around the nav table and by the wall displays were the same—all shot in the front or back of the head, all with their side arms still holstered. The fact they actually wore side arms was yet another sign of the strife onboard at the time. Not all of their magazines were full, telling me they’d probably been used in anger at some point. But not on the bridge as there were no other signs of violence—no bullet-riddled wall, no blast damage, not even a chair overturned. Whoever had managed to take out ten crew like that was efficient beyond belief. Only the android could have done it like that.

I stepped forward and examined the three officers seated at the front. With my back to the cupola, I leaned down and read the nametag on the officer in the blue uniform seated center. It read,
Gutiérrez
, as in Captain Emilio Gutiérrez, the ship’s captain. His face was once familiar to all on board, but now his skull looked like all the others up to and including the neat hole drilled into his right temple. His distinctive gold crucifix still adorned his neck.

“I hope you found your peace, Emilio,” I whispered.

On his left, sat First Officer Fiona Devereux who died the same way, her arm still wrapped across her face as if she knew what was coming. These people had been executed, coldly and efficiently.

The corpse on the right wore a different uniform—not the blue of the crew, but the green of the marines. The nametag told me this was none other than General James Stewart, in life a tough-looking giant with a booming voice and ruddy face. Cause of death: just like the others.

Whatever I’d thought about crew versus marines evaporated at the sight of their two most senior members side-by-side in death. This was the place I’d come to seek answers. Now I needed a terminal to power-up or I might as well have not bothered. This time, my luck was in and all three glass-like panels in front of the command chairs had a standby light aglow. As the ship prioritized its power supply, the command panels would’ve been the last to go dead. I felt it more respectful to leave the officers’ remains be, so I sat down on the deck beside General Stewart, angling the panel on its arm so I could see. After tapping the display twice, the startup screen came to life under the film of dust and filth. I rubbed it clean enough with my fleece sleeve and saw the white login screen with its message above a red rectangle.

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

The terminal went about reading my RFID chip, my fingerprints and my life signs.

Welcome Daniel T. Luker (JA-01015).

Tiro is non-operational ... Using recovery AI routines.

Unlike the voice control I’d used on the Module 5 terminal, this time it was basic touchscreen menus and an on-screen keyboard, like something from the last century. Technically, I guess it was.

While I sat, reading the list of options and thinking what to type and search, an alert message appeared on the display. Moments later, before I’d read the first, another message joined it. Both were yellow windows with red borders and black text. Both read,
Urgent Alert,
at the top.

I tapped the lower box—the first to appear—hoping it would expand and give me the full story. But a temporary dialogue popped up reading,
Clearance Level Insufficient.
I tried the other message and got the same result, so I read the few lines I was able to read in the thin alert box. The lower, older alert was dated March 18, 2075 and read:

Quantum transceiver data detailing the initial survey of Aura-c has been received from the fast recon probes. Earth Similarity Index has been revised to 0.94. Planet Habitability Index has been revised to 0.98. Primary landing zone and site for Colony-001 has been confirmed as site 57a (‘Hyland-Alpha’). No evidence of existing civilizations. Expand to view full report and raw transmission data. [CONT’D]

My eyes widened as I re-read it, assimilating the news. This confirmed that Aura-c was nearly as habitable as Earth itself. The message had arrived five years into the voyage. Everyone would have been in stasis, unaware that our new home was even more Earthlike than expected.

The upper message was dated eighteen months later, on September 7, 2076.

Elevated security protocols now in effect. Lockdown under way. All future alerts only via secure Epsilon system. [END]

I read, then re-read it several times, trying to decipher its meaning but coming up short. I think I understood the part about
Elevated security protocols
and
future alerts via secure Epsilon system
—something or someone had switched to restricted channels, which only selected crew and possibly marines would have access to. But what was meant by,
Lockdown under way?
And why they’d gone high-security baffled me. Did it mean a computer network lockdown or lockdown as in a prison, with isolation of inmates behind lock and key? Or was it something else entirely?