Quarantined Planet (9 page)

Gordon and Frey are well into freeing and reviving the others.

“He told us the plan was to firebomb this place if the Greys wouldn’t release these people,” Frey says, “if they wouldn’t let us go home, go back to Earth.”

“How the hell does that make any sense?” Gordon replies, attempting to bring Nix out of his brief hibernation.

“Marshall and I were the only ones foolish enough to buy it, I think. The others were just waiting for the right moment to get away from him.” Frey eases Jane out of her cocoon. “Then he tells us this is Earth.”

“You believe that? You think he’s right?”

“Yes, I do. It might explain why he’s gone so nuts. I mean, he may have been losing it anyway, but Earth is all he ever talked about—all he wanted was to get back. If this is Earth, then there’s nothing to go back to.”

Gordon shakes his crewman. “Nix, wake up. Come on, donkey.” He resorts to slapping the young man across the face a couple of times.

“Stop it.” Nix swats his captain’s hands away. “Where’s Chloe?”

“Frey thinks she’s with Earl.”

“She went with that crazy son of a bitch?”

“Not by choice, I’m sure.”

“Is she okay?”

“We don’t know, Nix.”

The young man finally gets a look at his surroundings. “Where the hell are we?”

“You have to leave here now,” Frey says as Jane wakes Tivis from his short coma. “It’s a long way to the surface.”

Tivis is focused on Earl’s anti-matter bomb. “How long ‘til that thing goes off?”

“I don’t know. He can activate it from
Lilith
.”

“How does he know it’ll work?” Gordon asks.

“He has an uncanny ability to understand and manipulate their technology. It’ll work. This one will set off the others.”

“Others?”

“One on each of the next four levels. I’m gonna take it to the bottom and push it over the edge.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s an abyss.”

Jane raises her hand. “So, how do we get out of here?”

“Well it’s, umm…I, ah—,” Frey stammers.

“You lead them out of here—you know the way,” Gordon tells Frey. “I’ll do it. I’ll push the damn thing over.”

“No, let’s just go.” Nix grabs on tight to his captain’s arm.

“What about all these people, Nix? Can we free them, Frey?”

“It’ll take,” Frey says as he glances around, “forever, right? You should hurry if you’re gonna do it, Gordon. He could fire it any time.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’ll get lucky?”

“Just come with us, Gordon,” Nix urges.

“Look, find Chloe, yeah? Don’t let anything happen to our girl,” Gordon tells the young man before addressing Tivis. “The ship is yours, big boy.”

“Damn it, Gordon,” Nix pouts.

“How far down is it exactly?”

“Don’t know—miles,” Frey points to an elevator, “last stop on that lift.”

Gordon peers over the edge. “Alright. Go then.” He begins rolling Earl’s bomb toward the lift.

Nix steps up to help. “I’ll go with you.”

“Nix, stop. Find our girl, yeah? She’s in trouble. She needs you. I’ll catch up. Now, go!”

The others sprint off, but Nix stays, backing away slowly until Gordon is on the lift and out of sight.

A thunderclap gets Chloe’s attention, making her look skyward and straight up at that broken moon. It’s now visible through a break in the clouds and jelly creatures. After wiping away some tears, the young woman, with all the strength left in her, rises from kneeling—as if in prayer—and slowly gets to her feet. She knows what she has to do, the most horrible, unthinkable thing, and putting one foot in front of the other, she stumbles along
.
Her legs are heavy, but her pace quickens, and soon somehow she’s running—running headlong into the darkness.

***

Jane, Nix, Tivis, and Frey zing through the bottomless caverns in another People Mover. Jane cradles Frey, who drifts in and out of consciousness.

“How far to the surface?” she asks him.

“Far,” the badly injured man responds, “it’s a long way back.”

***

Gordon’s lift careens with neck-breaking speed further and further into the planet’s interior, but it’s still not fast enough for him.

“Oh, bloody come on.”

***

High above the world and its ring of orbiting debris, what remains of old space-race junk,
Lilith
drifts along; she’s been there for some time.

In the ship’s flight deck, Earl stares vacantly out the forward ports into space. His trigger hand twitches nervously and taps around the same switch he’d held while alone in Cocoon Cavern. Some doubts about what he planned to do are eroding his resolve.

An alarm sounds from a station behind him. He first checks a display on the helm and then stretches for a look outside his ship just in time to see
Sephora
make a sharp turn and accelerate in his direction.

It’s just seconds before he hears the piercing sound of crunching metal. He’s thrown across the flight deck.

Chloe lifts her head from the control panel, blood running into an eye from a cut on her brow.
Sephora
’s power flickers, the helm turns red, and several alarms sound. It was another hard jolt for a ship that’s had one too many and wasn’t constructed for such poundings in the first place. The vessels break apart, and bits of each sail off in all directions.

Earl drags himself up off the floor and ambles to
Lilith
’s communication terminal. “Well, that was unexpected,” he broadcasts to the other ship.

Chloe’s
Sephora
manual is on the helm beside her. She had a plan but wasn’t fast enough to make it work. Looking out the forward port, she is certain that
Lilith
has drifted too far.

Earl pipes up over the static on her craft’s hollow-sounding radio. “That can only be you, Chloe.”

With a few finger strokes,
Sephora’s
engines ignite, and the battered vessel barrels toward
Lilith
.
Chloe straps herself into the pilot’s chair and braces for another impact. Her eyes close tight, and she turns away just as the ships smash together.

Sephora
pile-drives
Lilith
in the moon’s direction, but Earl pushes back with all his ship has. Breaking loose from
Sephora
isn’t easy, but after a long moment of grinding metal, the craft is free and blasts away. The force catapults
Sephora
into a lateral spin that Chloe quickly corrects. However, she loses track of the other ship and leaves her seat, darting from port to port, until she spots
Lilith
at a distance.

Earl’s on the radio again. “Violence is catching, isn’t it, Chloe? There was a time you couldn’t hurt a fly. Now, look at you, trying to smash me to bits, proving my point about us.”

While she watches, the other craft comes about and rockets in her direction. Chloe scrambles back to the ship’s controls. With all the weary craft can muster,
Sephora
hobbles toward a sea of ragged moon bits.
Lilith
is gaining.

Chloe looks over her shoulder to no avail. The rear ports are too small to see much of anything, and in that moment of distraction, she fails to realize how quickly her ship has arrived at the rocky debris field.

Sephora
steers away from a hefty moon chunk while
Lilith
catches up and rams her from behind.

Chloe is bounced out of her seat to the deck, and
Sephora
’s power flickers and then flames out along with her artificial gravity. All is silent except for static from the radio. Chloe floats off the floor. Her head aches, her broken fingers are throbbing, and her ribs hurt. Fatigue from so much adrenalin pumping through her for so long is beginning to take its own toll. She’s exhausted.

Lilith
, like a shark swimming in for the kill, begins to circle
Sephora
. A couple of moon chunks zing by while Chloe pulls herself from
the floor and
back to the helm.

“Come on, come on.” she says, tapping on one button after another as she desperately attempts to revive her ship. There are a few sparks, a whiff of electricity, and everything comes back to life. A second or so later, gravity returns. Chloe smacks her head on the control panel before hitting
Sephora
’s floor again.

“Oh.” She curls up in a fetal position and stays there for some time.

***

“You still alive over there?” Earl asks with a hint of concern.

Chloe wakes and climbs back into the captain’s chair. Everything is blurry, but her adrenalin kicks in again, and she puts
Sephora
in motion.

“Don’t overthink it,” she says to herself.

The crippled, dragonfly-shaped starship bolts for a spindrift of moon rocks.

***

Gordon rolls the anti-matter cell along a dimly lit walkway. The device is much heavier than it looks, and he struggles to get it onto a nearby railing. He lets go of the cylinder, but it doesn’t fall far, clanking and rolling to a stop on some surface just a few meters below.

“Oh, bugger me.”

Gordon jumps into the darkness and lands on a metal outcropping. He feels along for Earl’s bomb and, upon finding it, pokes around for an edge. With great effort, the Brit pushes the cell over and holds perfectly still, waiting to hear it hit anything.

“Please be bottomless,” he says. There is only silence.

Back in the elevator, Gordon whacks a button, and it takes off.

***

Sephora
weaves in and around swirling chunks of moon.

Chloe maneuvers her ship between quick dashes from porthole to porthole for a glimpse of the other.

“Come out, come out,” Earl sings over the crackly radio.

Lilith
enters the rocky field a few hundred meters below
Sephora
and trails about as far behind.

The wake from Chloe’s ship disturbs a couple of good-sized boulders, and they soon splinter out
Lilith
’s forward ports. Earl cringes when fragments begin pelting his craft, sounding like water droplets on a tin roof. It jogs his memory.

“…and when the rain beats against my window pane,” he sings quietly, “I’ll think of summer days again and dream of you.”

Chloe spots
Lilith
under a floating mountain and pulls the seatbelts around her, only to find they’ve snapped.

“You singing over there?” she asks, hoping to keep him distracted.

“It’s a song I’ve been trying to remember the words to,” Earl replies, “‘A Summer Song.’”

“A song about summer?”

“‘A Summer Song.’ That’s the title. Reminds me of long Sunday drives with Mom and Dad. They had a Buick with an 8-track tape player. Sing me a song, Chloe. Something from the radio you recall.”

“Please tell me you haven’t set off your bomb,” she says, checking her ship handbook against a grouping of controls above and off center from the rest.

“I haven’t.” She can hear a smile in his voice. “I’ll give them a few more minutes.”

After an angry and yet relieved sigh, Chloe says, “I don’t remember any.”

“Come on. There must be one?”

Chloe puts
Sephora
in motion and takes a nosedive right into the river of stone. Earl has no time to react as
Sephora
appears from behind a massive rock and barrels toward him. Chloe tangles herself up in the broken seat straps as the two space vessels crunch together.

Sephora
’s power fails again, and everything goes deathly quiet except for the disconcerting sound of slowly fracturing alien glass. Chloe can do nothing but watch as her ship’s forward port begins to crack in the pattern of a spider web.

Aboard
Lilith
, things aren’t much better. Indicator lights are red across the helm as Earl gingerly slides off it. Having been thrown forward by the impact, he’d inadvertently flipped the switch that ignites his anti-matter bomb.

***

At that same moment, a sudden thunderclap is followed by a horrible, low-pitched rumbling beneath Gordon’s elevator. The tough Brit crouches down and holds on tight.

An eruption of light, fire, and fine, rocky debris fills up the abyss. Gordon’s lift is soon engulfed by the storm.

***

Jane and Tivis stagger past the severed alien heads on their way out of the bunker. Just a few meters from exiting, Nix props up Frey, whose injuries are getting the best of him.

“This is it, yes? We’re out? I’m going back,” Nix informs the other man even as the ground quakes, and there’s a thunderous roar underfoot.
“Jane!” he calls out. “Help me!”

A couple of moments pass, and Nix yells again, “Jane!”

The Chinese woman appears.

“I’m going back for Gordon.” He doesn’t wait for a response, and Jane knows he wouldn’t listen to one anyway. She helps Frey out of the bunker, and Nix disappears back inside it.