1. Chapter 1 #2
As fortune had it, the biodomes responsible for growing all the produce for the research station happened to be housed on level thirty-one.
I had more vegetables and fruit than any one person could eat, most of it rotting away, because I had no damn idea what was safe to eat.
I craved protein worse than my childhood dog, Rex.
He could knock you out with one whiff of his bad breath, but I’d trade a whole biodome to have him here with me now.
Which reminded me—I needed to have a look at the waste collection system.
The biodome smelled more like death by compost than life these days.
Hours later, I called it a day and slumped into an old pod with a broken door I’d found in the maintenance area.
The corrugated metal ridges offered no comfort, digging into my ass through the thin mattress as I gulped down my meal.
Another graneth grass smoothie. It was so healthy it made me want to puke.
“Thermal Station C,” I said to the AI. “Please hold off all alerts until 7:00 suns unless dire.” I wanted to say ‘unless all hell broke loose,’ but Thermal Station C had no sense of humor.
“Alert system switched to holding pattern until 7:00 suns.”
“Thank you, C. Good night.”
“Good night, Sterling Peoples,” she said in her cheerful voice.
I rolled my eyes at the full formal name C insisted on calling me.
She preferred the pronouns she/her, and who was I to argue with my only companion?
As had become habit over the last month, I stared at the external camera display above my crappy mattress, wondering how long I could go on like this.
Wondering whether the citizens of Tern had been evacuated before the spores reached them. Wondering if I’d ever be evacuated.
Wondering if my mom was thinking of me.
As usual, the aboveground camera showed endless fields of graneth grass, white in the moonlight and iced with winter frost, with the odd cow-like mantu grazing. I drifted off to sleep.
My sixth sense woke me before the AI, and I jolted upright on the flimsy mattress.
The external camera flashed green, flickered an electric blue that turned to icy white, then flashed green again.
Outside, the sky lit up with solar flares so bright that I had to squint until my eyes adjusted in my dim pod.
Half-asleep, I smiled at the kaleidoscope of swirling colors.
Then the cycle repeated itself, like an endless lightning storm.
As much as I wanted to lie down and watch the show like I used to watch the northern lights back on Earth, a heavy sense of foreboding told me this was not a good thing. My sleepy smile dropped away when Thermal Station C’s voice came through the speaker system.
“The Fires That Cleanse have been deployed Sterling Peoples, you will need to remain on level thirty-one for a minimum of six months.”
That didn’t seem like much of a problem considering the damn locked door.
I stared at the camera in the ceiling, wondering if there might be some kind of sleeping pill down here that lasted six months.
A syringe full of some kind of hibernation potion.
Something to take the edge off? Anything to stop the spiraling sense of loneliness creeping in from all sides.
Last night’s light show had ended, and now the external monitors displayed nothing but pink. Wind churned the soil, whipping it into the mother of all sandstorms. “Thermal Station C, please expand on the Fires That Cleanse.”
“The Fires That Cleanse are employed in rare cases when extreme outbreaks cannot be curtailed through medical intervention and the risk of cross-planet contamination is too great. All organic life on Tern has been destroyed.”
Jesus Christ! I squeezed my eyes shut.
A hard lump built up in my throat. The whole fucking planet? No life or lives remaining. Except me. All to study a stupid bacterium. They’d better have found the life-saving enzyme they were looking for, or this incredible loss would be for nothing.
I closed my wet eyes, praying the city had been evacuated, and spoke a silent prayer for all the lives that had been lost here.
Six Months Later
“External air filters require replacement.”
Well that’s right as rain, except for the fact that the fucking door is still locked down. “And how do you propose I do that?”
“You will find the door lock has been disengaged, Sterling Peoples. The spores have been eradicated by the Fires That Cleanse.”
A paralyzing fear trickled down my spine. What if the spores were still out there? I’d been trapped down here for seven months, alone. The air smelled riper than a silage pit, but I’d kept myself alive. Most systems were running…enough. A little recirculated air wouldn’t kill me.
The external air filters could wait another day.
I twisted the one faucet that still had potable water and filled my canteen.
The tepid water slid down my throat, barely quenching my thirst. The auto-waterer would turn on any minute for the long blue cucumber-like fruit, tinga, so I gathered a cleanish set of coveralls and a towel and headed to the biodome.
With my clothes and towel slung over a tall fruit tree branch, I stood between the rows of tinga.
Water washed over my skin from a long overhead sprinkler while I mentally listed everything I needed to do that day.
Mist the hiti mushrooms, unclog the recycler, harvest the graneth, replace the coupler on the heat injection pump, tighten the clamps on the ventilation system…
“Sterling Peoples, the external air filters still require replacement.”
I swore the more time we spent together, the cheekier she sounded. Yep, not happening. The air’s just fine down here. Spore free.
The more I ignored the warnings, the more labored my breath came. Even hauling the lightweight synth-tech hose was arduous. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds as I heaved it toward the mushrooms and misted them.
My feet dragged as I walked to the southern end of level thirty-one and began the time-consuming and mind-numbing process of tightening each overhead clamp along the ventilation system.
Three clamps later, the torquer fell from my tingling fingers to the mesh grate floor, just missing my foot.
Chest heaving, I bent over to pick it up and propped my hands on my knees to catch my breath.
Fuck, the air’s as thick as gravy.
“Air filtration system below optimal. Immediate attention required.”
Dizzy and panting, I made my way toward the oxy tank beside the exit and typed in the code to release it from the harness. With the mask fitted tightly over my sweat-slicked hair, I opened the valve and cool, sweet, oxygenated air filled my lungs.
“So, smart guy, what happens when you run out of oxy tanks?” The mask fogged with my breath.
I walked toward the round door the same way I’d walked away from my cheating boyfriend after he’d introduced me to his girlfriend—without looking back. The only thing Mateo had been good for was filling my head with empty compliments.
The round wheel seemed to grow as I stared at it. My shallow breaths whistled inside the mask. As if on autopilot, I spun the lock mechanism. The cool plasmasteel freewheeled in my hand, but this time when it had completed three revolutions, it stopped spinning and hissed as the seal broke.
I paused, the wheel slick in my grip, and took long deep breaths of safe air through my mask. C’s warning grew more dire each time it came through my headset.
Here goes nothing.
I ran my hand along the smooth mantu leather tool belt around my waist before opening the door, stepping over the threshold, and through the round opening.
Oppressive silence greeted me. Emergency strip lighting lined the edges of the walkway as I made my way to the hovertube, and I stepped carefully, glancing over my shoulder as if someone was watching.
Under my damp palm, the reader turned green, and the hovertube descended.
The engine jolted to life with a loud whir as I climbed in and the door sealed me inside, and I crouched to steady myself as it rose.
For some strange reason, the hovertube jerked to a stop at level eight.
When the door whooshed open, I realized why. I gulped a breath of clean air through my mask and closed my eyes. You can do this. You have to do this.
I forced my eyes open and my legs to work.
Right foot forward, I stepped around the bloated dark-skinned body of a Boola, about to tip inside the open doors, then over the next two blue-furred Lornians wedged together, arms around each other.
I held my breath as I passed a fourth, fifth…
I stopped counting after the twelfth, gulping down long, cleansing breaths when I reached the stairwell.
Shit, that was a lot harder than I thought it would be.
Knowing that their deaths had been instant kept me sane. According to C, the spores had acted immediately, filling their lungs with a toxic vapor that killed on contact. But seeing their friends go down one after another must’ve been hell.
“Sterling Peoples, your heart rate has spiked. Are you well?”
No, C, I’m the fucking opposite of well. “C, are there spores trapped inside these bodies?”
“The spores have a short lifespan when exposed to warm temperatures. They cannot survive inside host bodies unless they’re frozen below minus twenty degrees Celsius.”
Though knowing they wouldn’t infect me should’ve helped, it didn’t diminish the horror.
I’d been living under a mass grave for seven months.
Blocking that thought out, I started climbing the eight floors to the surface.
Only one person had attempted to escape through the stairwell—a tawny-furred Tig.
My friend Jetep had been a Tig. My legs trembled as I climbed, and I forced that thought away.
At the third floor, the stairwell changed direction, and I pushed the door.
When it didn’t budge, I shoved my shoulder into it, praying it wasn’t blocked by another decomposing corpse.
Instead of a carpeted hallway leading to a decadent dining hall, a gust of pink sand nearly blew me off my feet.
My jaw dropped as I scanned what remained of the top three floors of the research station.
Blackened metal, charred and twisted into molten lumps, spanned the area that used to house top-of-the-line labs, luxury pods for tech researchers and an observatory that put stargazing on Earth to shame.
Bits of broken mesh grates banged against the skeletal remains, rattling like macabre wind chimes calling in the dead.
All I’d seen on the external cameras, besides pink dust, was the light show from the Fires That Cleanse six months back. If I’d seen the magnitude of the wreckage, I don’t know if I would’ve made the trek to the surface at all.
Who was I trying to bullshit? I would’ve waited until every damn oxy tank had run dry first.
“Fuck. Will the external vents even be intact?” The wind sandblasted my exposed skin as I left the meager shelter of the open stairwell.
I crossed my arms in front of my face and ducked, bracing myself against the freezing temperatures and lashing grit, working my way toward where the aboveground utility chamber used to stand.
I let out a relieved breath, fogging my mask as the building appeared through the sea of pink.
One corner of the door had curled under, and the remains of the palm reader lay in a mess of congealed wires at my feet.
The wind beat at the hose of my oxygen mask, sending it swinging like an elephant’s trunk as I wedged a piece of rebar through the gap.
After seven months of confinement, the wind in my hair should’ve felt blissful, but it had grown unruly, and the long strands whipped around my neck like choking fingers.
I eyed the huge refrigeration units responsible for temperature regulation. They’d collapsed around the utility chamber, and I prayed they’d protected the interior from the supercharged flames.
“C’mon, you little bugger.” I heaved on my pry bar. Oxygen hissed into the mask, drowning out the howling wind battering me.
After the third attempt, I tossed the useless length of rebar into the debris and searched for a longer piece in the nearby wreckage.
“That oughta do it.” Standing higher on a makeshift step I’d dragged over, I wedged the longer bar into the hole, then I hung all my body weight from it. The lock disengaged with a thunk and the door swung open in a smooth arc.
’Bout time something went right around here.
My boots left tracks in the layer of pink silt that had drifted to cover the smooth floors.
I sighed as the electric panel came into view.
Fully functioning. Thank you, whoever the hell was watching out for me.
I quickly sourced the filters, placed the old ones into the recleaner and inserted the replacements into their slots.
The display showed levels five through thirty-one had been restored to one hundred percent.
Thermal Station C’s AI had been telling me that the other floors were safe to occupy for the last two weeks, but I wasn’t going anywhere past thirty-one without an oxy mask on, even with clean filters.
Best get back to that heat injection pump. Don’t want the magma overheating the whole damn system.
Securing my mask, I braced for the storm.
The door bashed against the side of the utility chamber as the wind caught it, and I wrangled it back into place, propping it closed with some mangled equipment.
Once again, the relentless wind played havoc with my intake hose as I leaned into the gale and made my way back to the station.
As I turned to close the research station door behind me and plod back down stairwell five, my eyes began to play tricks on me. Through the gusting pink sand, I swore I spotted something hurtling toward the ground.