Farlost: Arrival Read online

  CONTENTS

  The End

  The Beginning

  The Shit Hits

  The In Between

  The Betty McKenna

  The Arrival

  The Aftermath

  More Humans

  The Troublemakers

  The Boomers

  Putting Heads Together

  The Hail Mary

  Warm Welcome

  Farlost: Arrival

  Copyright © 2016 by John Mierau

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and/or retrieval systems, or dissemination of any electronic version, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, and except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Nikki,

  I like you for Always

  THE END

  1

  Lou couldn't feel her legs. She pulled herself up to sitting against the metal side of the ship's nav-console and fought down her frantic panting.

  Suck it up Montagne! said her inner drill instructor. Your legs Do. Not. Hurt.

  "No, shit," she mumbled. "Can't feel 'em. How can they hurt?"

  Lou used her elbows to pull herself higher. She felt something wet coat her forearms. She hoped it was her blood, that she hadn't pissed herself. She looked, saw red and felt relief.

  Then she snorted at the stupidity of being embarrassed.

  She'd been stabbed in the back.

  She didn't see herself walking away from this one.

  Even if she could feel her legs.

  Doesn't matter, I don't need them to shoot.

  Something slammed against the massive, near-impenetrable airlock doors in front of them, hard enough to ring them like a gong.

  The cyborg beside her on the floor smiled at her lasciviously. The scar on his otherwise gorgeous face bent as his lips curved up. He looked good. Deep dish good, despite his shattered right hand sparking and sizzling as he held the ruined artificial thing against his chest.

  Not for the first time, but maybe the last, Lou wondered if the rest of him had any enhancements, as she looked him over wistfully. "Wish I'd jumped you when I had the chance, Sam," she panted through gritted teeth.

  He flashed a rakish grin, the effect half-ruined by a wince. "You really do."

  She nodded. "Yeah, I really I do." He laughed, and she laughed, and they both hissed with the pain it caused their broken bodies.

  His good arm shook his rifle, and he frowned. "This one's out." He tossed it away and pulled his antique nine-millimeter pistol from its holster.

  Emergency lights flashed from yellow to red as the airlock cracked open. A sliver of light poured into the dim, smoke-filled bridge bridge.

  "Shit," the cyborg grunted.

  They watched dozens of slick black tentacles pour through the slim opening, forcing the crack wider with the groan of metal.

  Lou grasped the stick-like, alien rifle tighter, pointing the business end toward the bulkhead doors.

  A shard of light fell over Lou as the door cracked another notch wider.

  Lulu 'Lou' Montagne slid the power setting on the side of the beam weapon as high as it would go.

  She felt it warm in her grip, heard the cyborg chamber a round against the cracked plastic of his ruined arm.

  "Don't shoot until you see..." he began and then stopped. "Actually, they don't have eyes."

  Lou laughed again, and aimed at the center of the slithering black mass of tentacles. "I'll take what I can get." She turned the ring-like trigger mechanism on the side of the rifle until the resistance disappeared. Safety off.

  Thicker, slime-coated tentacles pushed through the doors, blocking out the seam of light even as the doors groaned open, little by little.

  She ignored the pain. Ignored the wetness of the pool she lay in, her own blood. Ignored the likely outcome of this fight.

  We just have to hold them off a little longer.

  Just a little longer, for the others to get away.

  She rolled the ring all the way around, just as the cyborg let the hammer fall.

  They kept on firing as wriggling alien death poured through the door.

  THE BEGINNING

  2

  Six weeks out from Mars orbit, en route to Jupiter, HHL-6 -a Haskam Corporation asset- shone like only a made thing could as it pierced the darkness, steered by the dreams of the men and women inside her.

  Despite the poetry in the idea of the ship, the reality was considerably less inspiring.

  HHL-6 looked less like a spaceship and more like an art deco condominium with tube-like walls, knocked onto its side. A blistered black mushroom cap sat at the front and a hexagonal base scaffolding nine bright points of thrusting plasma sat at the rear.

  It was an ugly thing. Utilitarian, built for profit, not exploration. All the same, Haskam Heliocentric Lab 6 forged through the cold, empty black between Mars and Jupiter.

  Consisting of a series of reclaimed rocket fuel tanks and rigid cylinders of air united by cabling and connecting tubes, the pressurized sculpture carved its own path through the vacuum between Mars and Jupiter.

  Navigation lights blinked slowly and serenely on and off in the silence of the vacuum, while inside its hull all hands moved quickly but calmly, as they had trained to do in the face of the oncoming, anticipated emergency.

  "This is Commander Dwyer. We are T-minus thirty minutes to storm contact. Five minutes to roll call in the cellars, people. Let's get there early, shall we?"

  Security Chief Lulu ‘Lou’ Montagne heard the Commander's voice booming through the PA in one ear, and from the man himself in the other as she floated through the airlock into the busy room fixed into the nose of the craft, otherwise known as Command and Control.

  The CnC was ringed with four airlocks and four spacious multipurpose rooms along the walls in between. Four permanent workstations ran in a circle along the outside of the space, and in the center was the Commander's station.

  Dwyer was floating at his station - or rather, high above. On the ceiling were four more workstations in a circle and a matching center station, which by tradition also belonged to the Commander.

  Dwyer swam easily through the air, studying information on several of the large, positionable screens bolted around a central spire with an acceleration couch.

  He was lean, with short-cropped salt and pepper hair and mustache. He wore his Haskam red-blue-black crew uniform like he had his uniform, back in their service days: crisp and clean, but somehow the man inside the regulation fabric made the uniform look relaxed, approachable, and worthy of respect all at once.

  Lou watched him reach up and tap the radio controls. “Rodriguez, that PA blast was meant you and your boys, too.”

  “Understood,” came a confident female voice. “Murray and Raj are just pulling off their suits. We’ll leave a mess in the airlock and hotfoot it to the cellars, sir.”

  Dwyer nodded. “Thank you, Dina. How are we looking out side?”

  The collected, feminine voice came back. “My team gave every inch a close-up hairy eyeball, Commander, and I ran a full-spectrum sweep as far out as the umbilical would take me. We’re ship-shape, Commander. No loose threads for the storm to tug at.”

  Lou felt her face morph to show respect: flying a shuttle in close-formation while in transit was tricky, even when tethered by an umbilical cable.

  Even after all her time on board, Lou
probably couldn’t pick Dina Rodriguez out of a crowd, but the calm, controlled demeanor of the pilot’s voice was familiar to her, wafting from the ceiling of C&C. As always, the voice instilled confidence — something in short supply on HHL-6, as far as Lou was concerned.

  Another professional woman, and by all accounts a tremendous skilled pilot. So, Lou asked herself, why haven’t you made time to do more than pass her in the halls?

  Because you suspect her judgement, just for working here, she admitted to herself.

  “Just what I wanted to hear,” Dwyer told the pilot. “Now get your heads down. Out.”

  He tapped the screen again, and caught Lou’s eye. He cocked an eyebrow and beckoned her over.

  "We have a hold-out," Montagne said, tossing one informal salute to the Commander and another to the Lieutenant manning the sticks. She ignored the third officer floating above the large table display in the center of the room.

  Commander Ed Dwyer snagged a handhold to kill his momentum, then returned the salute. Rose Okoro, the dark-skinned woman strapped in on the ceiling at 'the sticks' - a holdover term originating with the pilot station on submarines – flashed her a warm nod.

  Third Officer Villanueva ignored her just as hard in return and looked back to one of his display screen.

  Montagne crossed the twenty feet of the bridge to the comms station, getting there about the time the Commander completed his zero-gravity u-turn to greet her. Dwyer scratched at the beard over his chin and watched her drift his way. "Let me guess," the man said, a wan grin reshaping his face. "Mr Charm again?"

  “‘Call him Doctor’ Charm, to his face, if you don’t want him to start listing PhD's,” Montagne said and nodded. "He's refusing to get into a cellar until we confirm the safety protocols for his Christmas lights."

  Commander Dwyer's face clouded. Montagne wasn't surprised that Beacham rubbed even the uber-mellow Ed Dwyer the wrong way.

  Beacham had that effect on everyone.

  "Protecting his precious experiment from us, is he? Have you or Forrest told him what happens when a body absorbs too much radiation?"

  "Yeah, the Doc waved the company by-laws at him, but he said he'd pay the infractions for the delay out of his own pocket. The boy genius is either too arrogant or too paranoid to let anyone else supervise the shutdown."

  Okoro flipped over backwards to face them.”First Officer Chu logged in: he's in Beacham's lab, walking him through the process."

  This time the jaw beneath the Commander 's beard clamped down. “What else would my First Officer need to be doing right before we're bathed in Galactic Cosmic radiation?” He reached out for screen beside the radio.

  Okoro piped up before he could engage the circuit. “Sirs: we have green lights on the special projects board. Beacham's prototype arrays are retracting. I have a message from Engineering that the First Officer will observe the head count for the aft storm cellar and, uh..” She hesitated. “Dr. Beacham is heading here.”

  Lou closed her eyes. “Commander, I'd be happy to forcefully escort him into one of the cellars-or maybe just uncap a cellar water shield and toss him in."

  Okoro coughed into her hand, politely swallowing her laughter, but the third officer glared hard until even the camouflaged amusement was choked off.

  “Show some respect, Nav Officer, Security Chief!” Villanueva growled. “Doctor Beacham's inventions have saved thousands of lives, and generated billions of dollars of profit-“

  “All thanks to him being a lab geek,” Lou said, wiggling her eyebrows at the Third Officer. "His being a dick is just a bonus."

  “Not to mention,” Villanueva continued, glaring back, “he’s a close personal friend of VP Burkov and Chairman Goss.”

  Commander Dwyer put a hand on the stocky Filipino third officer’s shoulder. “You’re right Arnel. He is personal friends with half the board, and it's duly noted that he’s made Haskam even more obscenely rich than it was before. We’ll be good when he gets here.”

  Villanueva nodded hesitantly to Dwyer. He didn't look happy with his Commander's response but all the ugliness on his face disappeared once he shifted his focus from Lou to the C.O. Dwyer pushed toward the door, tapping Lou on the shoulder as he went. “Float with me, Chief.”

  Lou's heart sunk. She knew she made things harder for him every time she broke courtesy with Villanueva, and she mentally slapped herself as she pushed off. It wasn't Dwyer's fault the world was what it was, and instead of swallowing the corporate BS the third officer continually spouted, she kept throwing it back in his face.

  Four months you've been paid to be a mall cop, she lashed herself silently, and you still act like you're military issue.

  She immediately regretted the thoughts, even silent as they were. Dwyer had brought her back to space. He’d saved her, like he had twice before when they wore their country’s uniform.

  She pushed herself off, following in his wake. She hoped she could start paying him back for the triplicate salvation soon.

  3

  ‘The Toad’s fine, D. Let’s go!”

  “Keep your panties on, Raj!” Dina Rodriguez called over her shoulder to the two men tugging themselves free of their armored space suits as she tapped through menus on the screen mounted on the oversized airlock door.

  On the screen, blocks of green halo’d the wire drawing of the anchors safely locking her ship into its cradle. She looked out the window and made a second pass with her flesh and blood eyes.

  The short range maintenance craft with the name ‘Bullfrog’ took up almost every inch of space in the massive craft and equipment airlock. Sure enough, the chunky anchors beneath the two heavy-duty equipment pods at the rear were engaged, and the two lighter front arms were fully extended, with their heavy-duty articulated hands locked around support struts built into the rear wall of the EVA craft storage tank.

  She really did look like a toad, Dina admitted to herself. All the sam e, she gave the craft a motherly nod, and began unzipping her own space suit.

  She directed her gaze to the mechanized EVA suit stored under the close side of the Toad - Mur’s mech. “How was the balance this time out, Mur?”

  She heard the airlock beep and hiss behind her and turned to see Murray tugging on the ugly plaid lumberjack he insisted in wearing over his Haskam issue jumpsuit. Pilots and EVA experts were expected to be a little crazy. She supposed that extended to fashion sense, too.

  “Frick’s not moving so stiff, since I took a hammer to his right ankle.” Murray scratched his patchy beard and grinned.

  She took another look at Frick. The mechanized EVA suits were fifteen feet tall, blue and white workhorses, built to provide both muscle and fine strength. Each had two sets of three-fingered hands and feet: one set capable of bending alloy and one set capable of carefully manipulating wires in enclosed spaces.

  The mental image of five-foot-nothing Murray cursing and wailing on the armor-plated mech was made more ludicrous by the crude happy face he’d painted across high, circular plating that passed for it’s head: a smiley face in a circle, painted carefully around the various sensors and lights.

  “That there is proof Frack’s a more advanced mech,” Raj taunted. “He doesn’t need any of that rough stuff.”

  Frack sat under the rear ‘foot’ on the far side of Bullfrog. Both had been designed in the same factory at the same time, and were materially the same except for their paint jobs, but don’t tell that to their drivers.

  “Advanced, right,” Murray said. “Is that why you gotta pipe that silly jazz through the group channel when you’re working?”

  “Kenny G is a master of improvisational jazz, and Frack’s a sensitive machine,” Raj grumbled as finished zipping up his work suit and draped a hat over his long, pony-tailed black hair. “He works better with the right mood music. Man, I need a nic-fix Murray, what have you got?”

  Murray froze, his rolled up knit watch cap halfway to his head. “I thought you had the patches!”

  Raj wi
nced. “Murray! We’re going into the cellar! For. Days. Now you’re telling me we’re going cold turkey too?!”

  Dina laughed, killing the lights in the vehicle storage tank and grabbing a black backpack floating on the hook with her name plate. “Relax, kids,” she drawled. “Mama packed for the trip.”

  She pulled out a shrink-wrapped carton of nicotine gum and waggled it in front of their eyes. Her crew whooped their appreciation as she cracked the carton and tossed a pack to each of them. They tore into the packs as she bounded past them through the open airlock. “Okay now, I promised Dwyer we’d haul ass, so hurry up!”

  They each popped gum into their mouths, then dutifully collected their kit and followed her up and out.

  The trio gathered inside the common area on the other side of the vehicle tank airlock, in a ten meter by ten meter curved chamber - actually a collection of airlocks, all currently open. ‘Above’ them was another tank, and to either side were were access ways to adjacent tanks. The passages formed a honeycomb of rooms, each connected to a different tank via the ceiling and floor.

  One airlock up and to the right would lead them to the starboard storm cellar. Two airlocks over and two tanks down on the left was a second storm cellar. Redundancy was the rule of the day on a space craft, to ensure the greatest chance of survival in case of a catastrophic event.

  Like the one about to bathe HHL-6 in radiation. Anticipated, practiced for and almost commonplace, but no joke.

  Dina and her crew were headed ‘up’, but they just caught a glimpse of a lean figure holding a grip beside an airlock heading ‘down’ one spoke away. He held onto a grip to the side of the airlock and helped an awkward-moving, green-looking couple of scientists into the open hatch.

  “Bill!” Dina informally called out to the first officer. “Command and Control is the other way!”

  First Officer William Chu stopped his forward momentum and launched back up and out of his chosen airlock in a slow spin. He smiled and waved as he rotated a few meters away, just visible halfway along the curving hallway.