ATLAS 2 (ATLAS Series Book 2) (10 page)

The landscape before me was bleak, barren, slightly blanched by the too-bright sun. Geronium-275, the precursor to the radioactive fuel that powered starships, filled the view from horizon to horizon, looking for all the world like black shale. Or perhaps black dunes made of flattened fingers of rock was a better description. My boots were covered in utility tape, because those sharp rocks were a perforation hazard, and had already worn away the outer fabric.

My suit protected me from about fifty percent of the radiation the Geronium-275 emitted. Before I’d abandoned my shuttle for good, I’d installed the last two subdermal anti-rads beneath my skin, which were timed to drip-feed the necessary radiation poisoning treatments into my blood.

I only had about one week of treatments left. I wasn’t looking forward to suffering from rad sickness. I supposed, on the bright side, the radiation wasn’t as bad as some places farther north, where the SKs had detonated powerful nuclear warheads in their attempts to clean out the beasts. Still, only one week of treatments left . . . I reminded myself not to look too far past the present moment.

That night I slept under the stars, with Queequeg on watch beside me. He didn’t actually remain awake, but the animal had ears so sensitive he may as well have. He’d shoot upright if a pin dropped ten meters away, and the warning laugh he’d unleash would rouse me from the deepest sleep. Not that I slept very deeply. Not anymore.

I woke up late that night, drenched in sweat. I’d had the nightmare again. Rade and I were fully suited, on a spacewalk outside the hull of the
Royal Fortune
. A red-orange gas giant floated above us. Somehow, I lost my footing, and the line that tethered us broke. Rade caught me before I floated off. His gloved hands wrapped around mine, and he promised he wouldn’t let go. Still, I was slipping away. Rade became frantic. I wasn’t sure what frightened me more: the fact I was about to die, or that Rade was going to be forced to watch. Finally I fell, plunging toward the gas giant, which had become a black hole . . .

Queequeg lay beside me, watching me. Even the slight change in my breathing as my body shifted from sleeping to waking was enough to rouse him, even though the sound was muffled by my helmet.

I gazed at the stars. At first they had seemed so foreign to me, these stars eight thousand lightyears from anything I’d ever known. But I’d seen them so many times by then that they had become my new normal. I’d even invented constellations for them. There was the Robed Witch, holding the Apple. Retina, the eye, looking down on me. And there, the Claw—whenever I traveled by night, its bright red tip guided me.

While I had grown accustomed to these new stars, I truly missed the old ones, the constellations of Earth I had grown up with as a child in the warm summers of France. Aquarius, Hercules, Lyra. Sagittarius.

I missed the bright yellow moon.

The murmur of the ocean waves.

The salty, warm kiss of—

I closed my eyes.

Those days were gone. Best to forget them. I had fought with regret and melancholy many times before for this day, and nearly lost. I had sworn never to do so again. Such emotions only interfered with my survival.

Still, I was so alone . . .

No. That wasn’t true.

“I have you, Queequeg, don’t I?”

Queequeg lifted his head inquisitively.

I scratched him above the nose, and closed my eyes. “I have you.”

The next morning Queequeg and I made good progress toward the Forma pipe. In about four hours, the structure grew from a slim finger flipping me the bird on the horizon, to a vast concrete chimney stabbing the heavens, its long shadow devouring the landscape and making the dark ground darker. The pipe extended even farther underground than it did skyward, its telescoping limbs expanding like an organic root system, its acids breaking down the mineral impurities in the crust to extract oxygen for later release into the air.

This pipe, and the forty-nine others that circled the equator of this planet, comprised merely the first phase of the terraforming process. There were other Forma pipes designed for the sole purpose of scrubbing the atmosphere and filtering out toxins, but those would be installed in the later phases.

I had to laugh. There wouldn’t be any later phases. Not anymore. The SKs and UC had completely abandoned this planet, and destroyed all Gates leading to and from the system. Heck, I’d destroyed one of the Gates myself. There was no way back, not even if I could somehow get into orbit. Not even if I could somehow reach the Slipstream. Because without a Gate, I was trapped.

I knew this would happen when I’d volunteered to stay behind. And I chose this. To save the ship. And the crew.

To save Rade.

I shut my eyes.

Get out of your head, Shaw. You’ll find only despair there.

As predicted, at this point I had about eight hours of oxygen left, including the contents of my bailout canister. I would’ve preferred to have more, but this definitely wasn’t the worst low-oxygen scenario I’d found myself in.

I walked into the shadow of the Forma pipe, making my way toward the base of the structure.

The Forma pipe was constructed entirely out of concrete poured into a rebar frame. If you imagined an arch-gravity dam on Earth like the Hoover Dam, you wouldn’t be far off from what I was seeing in terms of composition and scale. Except take that dam, turn its half-circle arch into a full cylinder, and send it towering into the sky, and you had a Forma pipe.

At the base, a corroded metal staircase led to a door roughly three meters above the black ground. There was no door handle or key code box—entry was entirely via embedded ID. Of course, I was never on the list of recognized IDs. That didn’t stop me from climbing the stairwell and attempting the door anyway.

It didn’t open. The way the steel panels smoothly irised shut gave me no purchase to pry it apart. The surgical lasers in my gloves might have been able to poke needle-sized holes after ten minutes or so, but my suit would run out of power long before cutting away anything useful.

There was another way inside though.

A ladder scaled the outer surface of the concrete chimney, all the way to the top. I ran my gaze upward, watching the perspective lines of the ladder recede into the sky. I couldn’t see it from here, but a ventilation shaft/maintenance tunnel near the top offered a way inside. Why they would build the maintenance shaft so high
was beyond me. Even if I had a working jetpack (which I didn’t), I’d
only be able to reach maybe a tenth of the way to the top before I ran out of fuel.
I suspected the ladder was more a leftover artifact of the construction than anything else, kept in place as an unessential afterthought, because of course the main door would never malfunction, right? And if it did, the crew could just send a maintenance robot up the ladder.

Fortunately, once I was inside, it was easy enough to program the door to accept my ID. I had the SACKER installed in the internal database of my embedded ID, which was the Swiss army knife of privilege escalation kits. I’d taken a cyberwarfare elective back at my rating school, which gave me the clearance and training to use the kit. The SACKER was loaded with hundreds of known software exploits that allowed me to obtain administrator access on a variety of platforms, assuming any potential backdoors on a given system hadn’t been patched. Thankfully the door sensor unit inside the Forma pipes utilized outdated software—all I had to do was interface with the sensor, run the privilege escalation kit, load the software’s admin interface, and add my embedded ID to the list of accepted entrants. Then I could come and go from the Forma pipe as I pleased.

But first I had to get to that door sensor unit.

I doffed my rucksack and retrieved a universal charging cord for my suit battery. I tied the cord around my utility belt, then set the rucksack down beside the door. I didn’t need the sack burdening me the whole climb, and I knew I could count on faithful Queequeg to guard it.

I took my rifle-scythe and secured the strap over my shoulder. Then I started the climb.

Queequeg was whining and hopping to and fro, trying to figure out how to join me. He always did that.

“Hang tight, Queequeg. I’ll be back in no time.”

I did my best to sound hopeful, for Queequeg’s benefit, but to be honest I had a bad feeling about this one.

Scaling a ladder in a jumpsuit could be tricky, because the bulky gloves and boots caused the mind to misjudge the thickness and position of each rung. Sometimes I’d step or reach too high or low, and I’d momentarily miss a rung. It was easy enough to recover of course, but still somewhat terrifying when you were so high up. Also, I was squeezing each rung a bit too hard, and the tendons below my wrists were killing me. The wider grip forced on me by the thick gloves didn’t help matters. Nor did my fear of heights.

The tendon pain eventually got so bad I had to pause. Swinging the crook of my elbow over one of the rungs, I shifted my body weight and rested. I didn’t dare look down, or even toward the horizon. I always got vertigo when I did that. I was an astrogator, used to the empty, heightless void of space. I honestly didn’t know how planetary pilots could constantly land and take off without getting sick. Sure, I’d passed my Planetary Shuttle Qualification in training, but only after heavily medicating myself. The instructor was a flirtatious petty officer who ignored the fact I seemed slightly inebriated because I gave him my vid conferencing number. My fear of heights was why I was partially glad my shuttle’s autopilot hadn’t awakened me for the crash-landing on this world—I wasn’t entirely sure I could’ve done a better job.

I was about one kilometer up when I came across a missing rung. It had probably broken off some time after construction, because the robot workers certainly wouldn’t have missed it. The winds gusted quite strongly up here, and I supposed it wouldn’t take much to break off a shoddy component.

Still, that missing rung made me leery. How many more had fallen away farther up? What if a rung broke off while I was putting my weight on it, and I plunged to my death?

Curse all designers and engineers.

I wanted to turn back, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. I needed the oxygen inside this Forma pipe.

I reached past the missing rung, stretching my body, and wrapped my fingers around the next one. Straining because of the awkward position, I pulled.

Don’t break don’t break
, I chanted in my head.

When my chin was level with the rung, I folded the gloved fingers of my other hand around it, then I shoved off from the lower rung with my boots and yanked myself upward.

The winds buffeted me extra hard, and the strap securing the rifle-scythe to my back decided to break just then.

I reached behind as the weapon fell away, and tried to grab it with one arm.

Missed.

I watched the weapon plunge. It became pin-sized in only half a second.

My eyes focused on the continent far below, and an incredible sense of vertigo filled me. The winds continued to gust, swaying me, and I froze up. My gaze was locked on the distant ground, which looked like an expanded version of a Heads-Up-Display map. My vision swam, and the continent turned round and round below me.

The jumpsuit wouldn’t cushion a fall from this height. The suit would puncture of course, but that was the least of my worries. All the bones in my body would break at the same time, and the impact trauma would pulp all my organs, including my brain. Especially my brain.

I was still only gripping the rung with one hand, and my entire arm was burning. Physically, that lone hand was incapable of holding on much longer, despite the strength-enhancement of my suit. I knew I had to get my other arm up there, helping out . . .

But I didn’t move. Couldn’t.

The winds gusted, trying to tear me from the ladder.

The ground below continued to rotate. As did the Forma pipe.

I became momentarily disoriented.

Where was I? In space? On a spacewalk?

My fingers slowly slipped . . .

I shut my eyes.

Fight on, Shaw. Fight!

Without looking, I slammed my other hand upward, and fumbled with my gloved fingers until I gripped the rung with both hands.

When I opened my eyes again, I was gazing straight ahead at the cement.

The vertigo was gone.

I pulled myself to the next rung.

And the next.

One rung at a time.

The moment of crisis was over.

Still, I’d lost my weapon.

I hoped it didn’t matter.

An hour later, I reached the entry shaft and pulled myself in. I paused inside the rim to catch my breath. I only gave the outlying landscape a fleeting glance, because I was worried I’d trigger my vertigo again.

Thirty meters above me the Forma pipe ended. When operational, the pipes belched a circular stream of oxygen from their upper rims. The expelled oxygen was visible as a heat haze of sorts, due to the temperature differential. I didn’t see any haze today however, which meant this Forma pipe had already failed.

That shouldn’t be a big deal—the tanks stored a month’s worth of oxygen. Still, I was beginning to wonder if the Forma pipes planetwide had been shut down.

The previous Forma pipe I had relied on for oxygen had mysteriously ceased operating two months after I started using it. My camp had been two klicks away from that pipe, so I didn’t see what had disabled the machinery. Maybe it had just failed on its own, from lack of regular maintenance. Or, more likely, one of the alien mists had sabotaged it. What Rade had called the Phants.

In any case, after I’d exhausted the failed Forma’s monthlong supply of oxygen, I set out for this next pipe.

And here I was.

I clambered on my hands and knees through the shaft, arriving at the hollow, cylindrical inner core of the Forma pipe. A ladder led down into the dark depths. There was no lighting, not in a failed pipe, and the stray daylight from the shaft only illuminated a short way inside.

I kept my focus on the topmost rung of the inner core, lest the vertigo return. I stared at that rung with trepidation, keenly aware of my missing weapon.