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Chapter 11
Zach Croft: 2053
Zach lowered himself through the hole in the floor where Ryker had fallen. The darkness enveloped him, broken only by the thin beam of light emanating from the phone in Ryker’s hand.
Zach strained to take in his surroundings. His eyes drifted past a dusty concrete staircase leading up to a metal hatch, then settled on a series of rust-scarred metal shelves. Zach approached one of the shelves and picked up a dusty ID badge. Emblazoned with the OSE logo, the card sported a small photo of Wilford from decades before. He looked so young; his dark skin appeared smooth and without blemishes, his eyes a piercing amber. Zach thought of the dead man upstairs and had trouble associating the two.
Beside the ID card was a box that shared the OSE emblem. Zach pulled it to the ground and began sifting through it. His hands dashed across the various papers and keepsakes, eventually landing on a thin black laptop with the OSE logo embossed on the lid. Zach opened the laptop, but the screen remained dark. Flipping the computer over, he examined the serial number sticker on the bottom. It was a 2028 model. “Perfect.” He smiled and began digging through the box for a power cord.
“What is it?” Ryker asked.
“An OSE computer. There could be something on here that we can use.” Zach found the cord. “Take the box, and let’s go.”
When Zach and Ryker got home, Zach immediately plugged in Wilford’s laptop. It took a few minutes before it had enough charge to power on. In the back of his mind, Zach couldn’t stop seeing images of Wilford’s burnt corpse. And he couldn’t forget the smell either. Whenever he thought of it, he had to suppress a gag.
When the laptop finally powered on, the screen lit up with a brilliant blue OSE emblem. After a few more seconds, Wilford’s desktop appeared. Dozens of folders were scattered across it. Below each one was a title.
SATELLITE 37-b
BALLISTIC H-6
EDEN
Zach located one labeled PRESCOTT and clicked on it. The file explorer overtook the screen and prompted Zach to choose a sub-folder.
“Where do we start?” asked Ryker, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed and leaning over Zach’s shoulder.
“Right here.” Zach clicked on the Communications Logs folder and scrolled through a long list of files. “I just need to find the date…” Zach trailed off.
“September 26th, 2030. The day we came back, right?”
“No, the days after that.” Zach filtered the logs by date to find those for the week following his return, then furrowed his brow in concentration. If there was proof of foul play, he would find it. He had to. For Ryker, for Prescott, and for himself.
Once the filter was applied, fourteen entries remained, two corresponding to each day. As Zach opened each log and scrolled through it, his heart sank. His breathing went shallow. He wasn’t sure whether to feel relief or disappointment.
There was no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of OSE. Each log detailed an attempt made by the agency to contact Ryker, including biometric readers, motion detectors, cameras… everything. It seemed like they had used every possible means of determining whether Ryker was still alive. It was exactly as Carver had said. Did that mean he hadn’t lied? But then why would he make up that bullshit story about foreign spies landing the dropship? Why would he want to cover up the fact that it was Ryker?
“What’re you seeing?” asked Ryker.
“Nothing,” Zach said simply. His eyes were empty as he stared at the screen.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. They weren’t lying. They looked for you.”
“Then why didn’t they find me?” Ryker stood up. “I’m alive! I was up there, and you’re telling me they didn’t know?”
“The logs say that they found nothing. No signs of life.”
“How is that possible?” Ryker angrily flung his arm, then balled up his fists and rubbed his eyes. “No. That’s bullshit. They knew I was alive. Keep looking.”
“Where were you on the station? After I left, where did you go?” Zach glanced at Ryker in the reflection on the screen.
“Why does that matter?”
“It just does. Where were you?” Zach kept his voice low, not wanting to enrage Ryker more than he already had.
“The dropship bay. I didn’t want to miss them if they came backfor me.”
“Maybe there are no life support readers in there. Or maybe the system isn’t sensitive enough to detect one person.”
“So we’re speculating now?”
“The station was abandoned for a month before we woke up. Who knows what equipment fell into disrepair? Maybe the sensors were damaged somehow.”
“They would have found something! Heat signatures, motion, airlock open requests. Something!” Ryker looked at the ceiling and blinked half a dozen times.
Zach sighed. “Maybe you’re right. But there’s nothing in the logs. They’re useless.”
Ryker Gagarin: 2053
Ryker watched soot spiral down the drain, then lifted his face to the water. The cool shower soothed his heat-damaged flesh, washing away the pain of the day and the uneasiness of what was to come. He had no idea what he was going to do now. As far as society was concerned, he was still dead, and the agency that left him behind had done everything under the sun to save him.
Ryker took a big gulp of water and then shampooed his hair. A faint cry from the other room caused his ears to perk up. It sounded like Zach was shouting.
“What?” Ryker called. He listened for a response, but the steady drum of the water hitting the tile floor made it hard to hear. There was another muffled shout. Ryker turned off the water to better hear what Zach was saying. “What?” he called again.
Suddenly, Zach burst into the bathroom. “I got it!”
“The fuck!” Ryker yelled. He reached for a towel to cover himself.
“You’re not gonna believe this! Come on!” Zach hooked his hand on the door frame and bolted back into the hallway. Groaning, Ryker quickly dried himself off, pulled his pants on, then followed Zach across the hall.
Zach’s bedroom was a disaster. Papers were scattered around the laptop. More were strewn about the bed and littered on the floor. On the far side of the room, a printer pumped out more sheets into a messy pile on the carpet.
“You found something?”
“Yes! Yes, I know how to save the fucking world!” Zach swiveled in his chair. He brushed some papers off the bed to clear a spot for Ryker. “Here. Sit.”
“I was gone for fifteen minutes.” Ryker leaned against the edge of the bed.
“A lot can happen. Check this out.” Zach started handing Ryker pages full of graphs, data tables, and calculations. “I started going through the other folders on Wilford’s laptop. It’s a goldmine.” He passed Ryker a satellite photo. It appeared to show a view of Prescott from orbit. Zach tapped the logo embossed in the corner of the photo. “That’s from Owen Industries. Wilford’s company.”
“What does it have to do with me?”
“Nothing. Look. Here.” Zach tapped the area of the photo showing the meteor crater where the Prescott processing plant used to be. It was partially covered in blue and purple dots. “You see those?”
“Yeah…”
“Now, look at this.” Zach handed Ryker a printout entitled Irogen Multiplication. “Irogen. Multiplication,” Zach said, emphasizing each word. He picked up another printout from the desk. On it was an exponential equation next to an emboldened graph. “You get it?”
“Get what?”
Zach ran his fingers through his hair. “Irogen has been multiplying. And it’s on the surface. Not underground. On the surface. That’s what Wilford’s company was working on. Or at least researching. I don’t know.”
Ryker put his hand on Zach’s shoulder. “Zach, I understand you’re excited. But I have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”
“Listen. Prescott was a mining colony, right?”
“Right…”
“Why? Because irogen had to be mined. It was only found deep under Mars’ surface. After Prescott failed, OSE would have needed to set up a whole new colony if they wanted to continue mining irogen because the first was a biohazard. But Carver said that was too risky, too expensive. So, the Board canceled the Exodus program and poured all of OSE’s money into Carver’s magnetosphere restoration project instead.” Zach picked up a pile of printouts. “MagRes, of course, isn’t working, and we’re all gonna die because OSE doesn’t want to ‘waste’ funding. But if irogen is on the surface, the whole game changes. There’s no need for an expensive mining colony, no risk of long-term exposure to the Red Plague. All OSE has to do is send a small crew to pick up the irogen and load it onto a dropship. It’ll cost pennies compared to Prescott.”
“If it’s so easy, why didn’t Wilford’s company do it?”
Zach turned to Wilford’s laptop and began scrolling through a long document. “It looks like they tried, but their funding dried up too. At that point, everyone had given up on leaving Earth for Alpha Cen.”
“Except you.”
Zach nodded. “Except me.”
“What makes irogen so special? I never got all the details.”
“Warps spacetime,” Zach said bluntly.
“And that’s… a good thing?”
“You could say that.” Zach reached across his desk for a blank paper and a pen. “Say this is Earth,” he drew a dot on the left side, “and this is Alpha Centauri.” He scribbled another dot on the right side. “Even traveling at near light speed, it would take decades to get from here,” he started drawing a line from the Earth dot to the Alpha Cen dot, “to here.” Next, he pushed the edges of the paper together so that an arch formed in the center. “By warping spacetime, we can effectively shorten the distance between here and Alpha Cen, allowing us to get there in a fraction of the time. But there’s only one element in the universe with enough raw energy to power a continuum drive.” Zach picked up Wilford’s satellite photo again. “Irogen.” He indicated the cluster of blue and purple dots. “You’re looking at humanity’s second chance. If we can get this irogen, we can restart the Exodus program and get the hell off this planet before it turns to ash.”
Suddenly, Ryker’s problems seemed a little less important. “All right. So, let’s say OSE wants to send a crew on the Gateway to retrieve the irogen,” Ryker proposed. “How would they get to the Gateway from Earth? That’s not free, right? OSE would still need to build a shuttle of some sort.”
Zach deflated a bit. “True.” He raised his eyebrows. “Unless…” A broad smile formed on his face. “Unless one showed up at our door.” Ryker gave Zach a puzzled look. “The dropship, Ryker! Your dropship.”
Zach grabbed his Harvard sweater off the hook on the wall, then rushed out of the room, leaving Ryker alone and mystified.
“Zach?” Ryker called. “Where are you going?”
But Zach was already out the door.
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