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Chapter 24
Cora Keaton: 2053
Cora couldn’t get the image out of her head.
Light exploding through the sky. Fire erupting on the horizon. The confusion and panic that followed. Boarding the cruise ship. The wave of flames growing closer and closer. Jason appearing at the entrance to the launch bay with a second swarm of employees. Carver giving the order to shut the doors, claiming they would all die if they waited any longer. Launching. Fire consuming the launch bay. The growing darkness. Open space, stars every way she looked, no gravity.
The two days they spent drifting in orbit, with nowhere to dock or land. The careful rationing of food and water. The hunger. The exhaustion. The Gateway manifesting out of thin air, prompting weak cheers from everyone onboard the cruise ship. Docking to the station. And finally, seeing Zach.
At first, it had seemed like a desperate hallucination, a vision created to suppress the rumbling of her stomach. But the moment Zach spoke, she knew he was there. Alive and well.
Seeing him just made her so happy. Confused, too, but that was a separate issue. She hadn’t failed after all. He was still breathing and well-fed, which she couldn’t even say for herself. Her cheeks had gone hollow in those two days of near-starvation—she could feel her ribs through her shirt. But she was alive, and so was Zach. That was all that mattered.
Then, her thoughts returned to Jason, and she suddenly felt guilty. He was so close to the ship, so close to safety, but not close enough. She didn’t want to leave him behind, but she had no choice. It was Carver. He made the call. And yet, she still felt responsible. Was that how Zach felt about Ryker, always thinking it was his fault? Cora had tried to assure him that it was purely a mistake for which no one was to blame, but he could never accept it. This is what it was like for him. I understand now.
Jason had always wanted to see outer space. On those summer nights when he, Cora, and Zach would sprawl out a blanket on the grass and stare up at the stars, he’d speak of venturing to Saturn. The remarks were usually met with wild suggestions of surfing on its rings, ending with them all laughing. But instead of seeing outer space or working to study it, Jason became a security officer. He hated that job. Though he never said it, Cora could always tell that going home was the only good part of the day for him.
Now he was dead, after working a job he despised all his life. It was truly sad. Cora wished she could turn back the clock, but she couldn’t. Time only moved forward. She would have to accept that.
Cora sighed, then focused on the immediate problem before her: opening the cryobay. Over the past few days, a team led by Cora had attempted to find a way to get the cryobay’s doors open. It seemed like such an easy task. But it wasn’t.
On the first day, the priority was to get into the system. That was simple and something small enough to get their heads around after the traumatizing events of the prior week. But after five hours of failure, Cora retreated to her bunk and let the coders do their job.
The second day, she awoke to some amount of success. During the night, they had cracked the firewall and had gotten into the logs. But where to look? The entries seemed to extend for miles, and they decided to take shifts scanning through them. For obvious reasons, Cora didn’t stay within her timeframe. What if they found something while she was getting food or asleep? She didn’t even know what they were looking for, exactly; just something that would explain the door’s shutdown. A hint.
As she paced back and forth across the dimly lit room, she bit her nails and kept her eyes open for fear of missing some great discovery. She feigned confidence, nodding to unheard words in her head, thinking of Zach. They would figure out a way to open the cryobay. With so many talented coders and engineers, there had to be a solution.
“Anything?” she asked, leaning her hands on the programmer’s shoulders as he sat slumped in the chair, eyes red with exhaustion.
He wiped his nose and gave a deep shake of his head. “I’m not even sure what to look for. So no, nothing.”
The logs were endless. Unlike those that Mission Control kept, the entries on the Gateway detailed everything that happened on the station, as well as external commands sent from Earth or Prescott.
“Keep looking. We’re not going anywhere if those doors don’t open.” Cora hooked her hands on her hips, sauntered a few paces to the side, and leaned against a dusty shelf. “If we don’t do it, no one else will.”
“Yep. If you want something done right, do it yourself,” the programmer took a sip from his twenty-year-old soda, “as they say.”
“As my mom says.” Cora laughed, remembering the wisdom her mother bestowed upon her as a child. Then her shoulders slumped. “Said, I mean. As she used to say.”
It pained Cora that she couldn’t say goodbye to her mother. With no knowledge of what was coming, Sarina most likely died sitting in her home with the TV droning in the background. Maybe she passed in her sleep. Hopefully.
“Just check the logs from the last ten years. If something happened, it probably happened within the decade,” Cora said, although she had no way to back up her hunch. She figured the cryobay being locked may have had something to do with Ryker going home. She wasn’t sure why, but the station worked in weird ways, and Ryker claimed he couldn’t remember the cryobay being locked while he was on the Gateway. He had also confessed that he’d never actually gone inside it, but without any other concrete clues, Ryker was their most promising lead.
The programmer reduced the logs to the last ten years. As Cora looked through them, none seemed to jump out as significant.
“Go another five years back,” Cora instructed.
The programmer set the new starting date as 2038, slightly broader. But the logs they found were minor, most not even regarding the cryobay. Many of the entries were most likely from Ryker and his time there. The ones about cryo possessed an emboldened CB beside the entry title.
“Look, I’m not finding anything. We should tell Carver and start figuring out a way to break the blast door open…” said the programmer in frustration.
Cora pushed him aside, his rolling chair scraping across the perforated metal floor. “I’m setting it to the past fifty years.” A little overkill, but it would get the job done.
“The Gateway hasn’t been around for fifty years.”
“Exactly. That means it’ll give us the full history. See?” Cora leaned over his shoulder and took the mouse. She clicked the filter setting, then set it to a complete timeline. When it showed up, she filtered it further to only entries labeled CB.
The list shrunk to a few lines, and several stood out. The first was from 2029, likely from the ship’s early testing. Another from early 2030, when they departed for Prescott. One labeled a month after, the moment they reached Mars. It was the last one that confused her.
August 26th, 2030.
Exactly a month before Zach returned from Prescott.
The entry claimed Mission Control had sent the command to shut down the cryobay. Cora didn’t know why or how, but that was their answer. The ground disabled it. But why?
“It’s been locked for decades,” Cora thought out loud, piecing together the details in her head.
“Well, there we go,” the programmer said.
Cora cleared her throat and furrowed her eyebrows. “How do we see who sent the command?”
“We can’t. The Gateway’s computer can only see a command was received from Mission Control, but not who sent it.”
“There’s no way to find out?”
“Not unless you’ve got access to Mission Control. Which…” The programmer trailed off, his point already understood. Mission Control was gone.
Cora frowned. “All right. Well, let’s tell Zach what we found.”
When Zach got to the computer room, Cora brought him up to speed on the situation.
“Mission Control shut it down? Are you sure?” Zach asked.
Cora glanced at the programmer, who nodded in confirmation. “Yeah,” Cora replied. “We’re sure.”
“But why would somebody do that?”
“That’s the problem. We can see that the command was sent from Mission Control, but not who sent it. Or why.”
“There has to be a way.”
“Not from here,” Ryker said from beside Zach. “The logs on the Gateway only log what’s happening on the Gateway.”
Cora sighed in defeat. “Who could even have sent the command? Who would have had that kind of authority, I mean?”
“Your dad, for one,” Ryker said, rolling a pen in his fingers, eyeing Cora. “He ran the place.”
“What? No. He wouldn’t have done that.” Cora knew her father would never mess with the Gateway.
Zach leaned against the wall. He stared at the floor, deep in thought. After a moment, he perked up. “Wilford. Wilford was the Head of Communications. He would have had clearance.”
“But why would he bother messing with the cryobay?” Cora asked. As far as she could remember, Wilford’s role was limited to maintaining radio transmissions to and from the Gateway. While he may have been able to access the Gateway’s systems, there’d be no reason for him to do it.
“I don’t know,” Zach said. “But I do know Wilford had copies of the logs on his laptop.”
“Wilford had logs from the Gateway?” Ryker asked.
“No,” Zach replied. “From Mission Control.”
Cora’s eyes went wide. “Please tell me you still have the laptop.”
“No,” Zach said. Cora deflated. Zach smiled. “But I can go get it.”
After retrieving Wilford’s laptop from his quarters, Zach placed the computer on the desk and flipped open the lid. A few seconds later, the screen flickered on, and OSE’s logo appeared. Zach navigated to the logs he had found before their journey to Mars. “Yep. Here they are.”
“We need the logs from August 26th, 2030,” the programmer said.
Zach entered the requested date, but no logs labeled CB appeared. The only other entries from that day seemed to be routine checks of the Gateway’s systems.
“There’s nothing about the cryobay,” Zach said and frowned. He looked at the Gateway’s computer, double-checked the cryobay shutdown command, then looked back at the laptop. “It’s not here.”
“That’s not possible,” the programmer said. “Let me see.” Zach stepped aside. The programmer squinted at the logs, then grunted. “Hmm.”
“What?” Zach said.
“It’s not here.”
Zach threw up his hands and walked away.
The programmer opened a terminal and tapped out a few commands. He read the output, then shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. There’s no way the Gateway received a command that Mission Control didn’t send. Every command gets logged. It’s all automated.”
“And logs don’t just disappear, right?” Cora asked.
“Right.”
“So what does that mean?”
The programmer looked up at her with a troubled expression. “They’ve been deleted.”
Deleted? Cora thought. A bad feeling began to brew in her stomach as she shifted her gaze to meet Zach’s. “Is there a way to get them back?”
The programmer took a sip of his soda. “Maybe. This laptop’s ancient, though. I’m not sure I know my way around it.”
“Just try,” ordered Zach.
The coder puffed out a breath. “Yeah, okay. Give me a few minutes.” He turned back to the laptop and began typing.
Zach, Cora, and Ryker stood in a small circle on the other side of the room, discussing. After about ten minutes, the programmer gave an exhale of victory. The three of them rushed back over to his side.
Zach leaned down to look at the screen. “What did you find?”
“Check it out.” He pointed at the screen. Where there had previously only been one log, there were now two. The second was marked with a capitalized CB. The programmer opened the file. A sequence of commands appeared.
34°12′6.1″N 118°10′18″W
(OSE* #
## = Initiate Cryobay shutdown ## ; access number: B59j4h7
authorization status # = Confirmed (Proxy 67) ; 09/03/30
send location ^^ === Mesosphere ** Gateway Station
system failure stage + airlock ( 10 ) disable
1% gradual (-3) repeal; 6^
program initiate == CARVER, NICOLAS
Cora scanned the log until she reached the end. Carver? What did he have to do with this? As she read it over again, she stopped again at the last line. Program initiate. Her stomach churned as the words registered.
Nicolas Carver had shut down the cryobay.
Zach Croft: 2053
Carver must have had a valid reason to justify shutting down the cryobay. He never did anything on a whim; he always had a detailed plan accounting for a thousand contingencies, anticipating every possible failure. It was the way he operated.
“There had to be something wrong with it,” Zach said. “He must have done it to save us from something.”
“Or to get rid of us.” Ryker struggled to sit still. He beat his foot against the floor impatiently.
“We can’t jump to that conclusion,” Cora interjected.
“Why not?” Ryker replied, seething. “Cryo kills the Red Plague. We suspected that, even back then. If the cryobay had been open, Zach’s father would have put everyone under before they got sick. And they’dstill be alive!”
Zach understood what Ryker was getting at. He didn’t like it one bit. “No. There’s no way. Carver couldn’t have known what would happen. He’s a lot of things, but he’s not a murderer.” It was hard to even consider that Carver would have locked the cryobay, knowing it would end with the remaining colonists dead. Zach’s father dead.
Staring at the screen, Cora approached the programmer and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Go. You’ve done your job. You don’t need to be here for this.”
“But—”
“Please. Don’t tell anyone what happened here. If anyone asks, say the logs are still a dead end. Okay?”
After a moment, the programmer nodded hesitantly. “Okay.” He took his stuff and left.
Ryker sat in the empty chair and rolled it up to the laptop.
“What are you doing?” Zach asked as he took a seat.
Instead of answering, Ryker went straight to the filter settings. He typed out a name, last name before first.
Carver, Nicolas.
“Let’s see.” Ryker landed on three entries, each labeled with Carver’s name. The first was the cryobay shutdown command that they had just seen. Ryker clicked on the second entry, an audio log. A recording began to play.
It was an exchange between two men. One sounded like Carver, only younger, which made sense given the age of the tape. The other voice was familiar too, but it spoke with such desperation that it was barely recognizable. Zach felt sick listening to it. And he felt sicker when he realized who it was.
It was his father.
Quinton spoke in fragments, getting out little information at a time. He ranted about the Red Plague, leaving the sick colonists in Prescott, and people on the station growing ill.
Carver asked Quinton what they were doing to stop the infection, and Quinton shakily mentioned that he believed cryo would kill it. So, was the cryobay still working at the time of this recording? Zach looked at the bottom corner of the screen, seeing the date. It was less than a day before Zach and Ryker were put in the secondary pods. Less than a day before the cryobay was disabled.
With conviction, Quinton said that he could get the survivors into stasis for the journey home, and all OSE had to do was be prepared. Suddenly, the connection to Mission Control was lost.
“Hello? Hello?!” Quinton called out.
The audio player closed. The screen returned to the list of logs, where only one remained unclicked.
Zach stared at the screen, struggling to comprehend what he had just heard. Carver had known that cryo was their only way to survive. Quinton had told him, clear as day.
Beside him, Ryker shook with rage. “You still think it’s just a coincidence? That less than a day after this, he shut the cryobay down? He knew what he was doing! He was killing them!” Ryker shot out of his seat.
“Ryker, hang on—”
“Do you not realize he killed your father?” Ryker shouted. “Think!”
“Zach, we don’t know that—” Cora tried to interject.
“He didn’t kill him.” Quinton had done that to himself. At the same time, he wouldn’t have had to do it if the cryobay hadn’t been locked.
He would still be alive.
“There has to be an explanation.” Zach looked at the third entry with Carver’s name, dated a month later. In dire need of an answer, he opened it and watched a block of data appear on the screen
EMERGENCY PROTOCOL
send location ^^ === Mesosphere ** Gateway Station
system failure stage + airlock ( 16 ) disable
pressurize maximum #
0.00006% gradual (13) repeal; 9^
re enable date "" NA
PROTOCOL initiate == CARVER, NICOLAS
Emergency Protocol?
Zach mentally replayed the events from the last day he spent on the station before going home. He remembered how they jettisoned his father’s body out to space, how they went to the docking bay and boarded a dropship, and how Ryker ran off the ship just before a blaring siren sounded.
“EMERGENCY PROTOCOL ACTIVATED.”
Then, the airlock closed. Zach was sent home while Ryker stayed behind. Had OSE known they were coming back?
“He…” Ryker trailed off, looking around the room with heavy breaths. “He left me here.”
Zach had no clue what to say.
Ryker hurried on. “You were right. You were right from the fucking beginning. It was him.” He stood and kicked a trash can at the wall. “It was him!”
“Ryker, wait,” Cora said with conviction.
Zach recalled how effortlessly Carver had deceived him. “You think I’d leave a kid up there if he was still alive?”
Why had Zach been so quick to believe Carver? How could he have been so gullible? Zach thought of his plan to visit Wilford in his search for answers, recalling that the cabin was on fire when he arrived. Could Carver have had something to do with that too?
No, there was absolutely no way. That would be outright murder.
“S-Something must have been wrong…” Zach stammered.
“Fuck something being wrong! He ruined my life!” Ryker appeared to hold back tears but masked them with red-hot anger. He drove his fist into the wall so hard his knuckles turned bloody.
Listening to Ryker’s hand thud against the metal, Zach looked back at the screen. Realization hit him like a kick in the stomach.
“I wasn’t supposed to come home either, was I?”
Carver had tried to kill Zach the same way he had with Ryker. To erase him from society, so whatever secrets were on the Gateway would stay there. The betrayal tore at Zach’s chest. He had trouble catching his breath.
Carver had only pretended to be a father figure all those years because his plan to eliminate Zach had failed. So, what motivated Carver to look after him? Guilt? Concern? Fear of the truth—that Carver had killed the colonists—coming out?
He had used Zach, just like he used everyone. You’re like a son to me. How many times had he said that? More times than Zach could count.
He said it, knowing very well that he had tried to murder his so-called son. Zach began to shake. Was that why Carver didn’t want him to go to Mars? Because it would mean going to the Gateway, trying to use the cryobay, and finding out what Carver had done?
Cora quickly blurted out, “Zach, we still don’t have all the information yet.” She tried to comfort him, her voice breaking in the process. “Why would he want to leave you guys? Especially you, Zach. He cared about you.”
Past tense. Cared. For all Zach knew, it could have all been a sham, a lie. An act to keep everything under Carver’s control. If the evidence before Zach didn’t make that clear, he wasn’t sure what would.
“It was a mistake. It had to be,” Cora said.
Ryker wiped his bleeding knuckles on his jacket. “People don’t make mistakes like that.”
“I don’t think he would have left two kids to die on purpose.” Cora tried to show reason, but nothing she said seemed to stick.
“There are too many failsafes installed to make a mistake like that,” concluded Zach, the words bitter on his tongue. “That was a manual command.”
“That son of a bitch,” Ryker roared, then looked at Zach. “Where is he? And don’t cover for him!”
Cover for him? Zach was done helping Carver. “I don’t know.”
“I’m going to kill him. I swear to fucking god I’m going to make him pay.” Ryker moved for the door.
Zach stepped in front of him. “Hang on. Let’s just figure this out for a second—”
“Get out of the way!”
“Just stop. I can help.”
“I don’t need your help!” Ryker shoved Zach hard enough that he fell back on the desk. “I needed your help when you left me here for dead! Where were you then?”
“Ryker, they told me you were dead. What was I supposed to do?”
“Use your fucking brain! That’s what you were supposed to do. You knew I was alive up here. You knew it!” Ryker squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth.
“Fine. You’re right,” Zach said sarcastically. “As a single, orphaned child, I could have done more to help.”
“Everything that’s gone wrong has been because of you. You think you’re some saint helping everyone, but you’re just a… a…” He attempted to find the right word. “A parasite! A parasite that latches onto people and fucks up their lives!”
“I was a kid! What did you expect me to do? Fly back and get you myself?”
“Okay, then what about on Mars? You made us go into that damn crater when we were kids! Or what about when the Emergency Protocol went into effect? You let me leave the dropship!”
“Me? I went into that crater because of you, because you were so upset about what happened to your dad!”
“I didn’t want to go into that crater. You made me! You’re always so ready to put other people in the line of fire as long as you don’t get hurt!”
“That’s funny coming from you. Have you ever considered that maybe you’re the problem too?” Zach moved in on him. “That if you hadn’t taken our stash of crystals and shown all your friends, maybe our parents would still be alive?”
Ryker laughed. “That’s my fault? Your dad killed himself, for fuck’s sake.”
Zach punched Ryker in the face and was quickly met with an elbow to the nose. As he doubled over, Ryker turned for the door. “Maybe if you stopped worrying about everyone else, you’d realize you need the most help.”
Coughing, Zach tried to stand up straight. “I’m sorry that I gave a shit about other people. But I guess that’s not your strong suit!” He clutched his stomach. “We’d all be better off if you never came back!”
Ryker stopped at the doorway. “You’d all be dead if I hadn’t come back.” He stormed through the exit and slammed it behind him. Then, he did something Zach didn’t expect.
He locked the door.
Ryker Gagarin: 2053
The gun was easy to get.
With hundreds huddled in the living quarters, the armory was left unattended. Ryker slinked in, hands closed in tight, white-knuckled fists, and grabbed the first pistol he could find. As he made his way to Carver’s new office, he thought of the ways he would make the bastard hurt. Hurt just as much as he had.
When he reached the entrance, Ryker cocked the handgun and threw the door open. Carver looked up in surprise, barely uttering a “what’s going on” before Ryker grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head on the industrial metal table. A line of blood emerged from Carver’s brow. He reached up to feel it.
“What the… what…” he stuttered.
Ryker pulled Carver’s head back again and shoved the gun in the man’s mouth. He wanted Carver to beg for mercy. He wanted him to feel every ounce of pain that Ryker had felt. It took all the self-control in the world not to blow his brains out right then and there. “Beg,” Ryker ordered.
With his eyes full of fear, Carver tried to shake his head out of Ryker’s grasp. “Are you deaf?” Ryker shouted. He pulled Carver’s hair harder. “Beg for mercy!”
“Please! Please, I’m begging you, Ryker,” Carver pleaded with a mouth full of metal. His voice was muffled nearly to the point of indecipherability.
That wasn’t good enough. All the years Ryker lost because of this putrid excuse for a human, and that was all he got? He shoved the gun farther between Carver’s teeth. “Tell me why you did it! Tell me why you fucking left me here!” The urge to pull the trigger ran through Ryker, but he quickly silenced it. That would be too easy on Carver. He pulled the gun from Carver’s mouth and pointed it at his leg, deciding to start there.
Carver began to hyperventilate, looking around for someone to help. But there was no one to save him. “I— I don’t know!”
Ryker pistol-whipped him across the cheek. “For once in your goddamn life, tell the truth!”
Suddenly, Zach burst into the room. Seeing the gun, he held his hands up, making a surrendering gesture. “Put the gun down, Ryker!”
“This isn’t your fight,” said Ryker.
“Just drop the weapon, and let’s talk.”
“He doesn’t deserve to talk!” Ryker brought the barrel up, pressing it into Carver’s neck.
“Do you want to be a murderer? Can you live with that?” Zach took a few steps forward.
“Is that even a question?” If becoming a murderer was necessary to rid the world of this filth, Ryker would take that chance. And who was Zach to stand in his way? He had gone home and lived a happy life while Ryker was left alone. He knew nothing.
“This isn’t you, Ryker. Please. Put down the gun.”
“He tried to kill you too! How are you still defending him?” Ryker gritted his teeth. “He deserves to die!”
“Because we’re not that kind of people.” Zach shot a piercing look in Carver’s direction and shook his head. “We’re not him.”
For a moment, Carver looked wounded. Then he quickly went firm again. “Please, just let me explain!” he shouted. “I didn’t want the Red Plague to make it back to the ground! You know tha— that it would have killed everyone! But I never meant for you to get hurt, Zach. It—it wasn’t even me that executed the command! I know it says my name, but Wilford was the one who did it! He logged in with my account unauthorized! And I’ve felt guilty half my life that we couldn’t get you home.”
“You’re lying!” Ryker growled.
Zach studied Carver with a crinkled brow. “Why did you never search for him? In twenty-three years, you never made a single attempt to get him back.”
“I told you the truth when you came home. We found no heat signature, no signs of life—”
“Then how was I alive?” Ryker barked, pressing the gun so hard against Carver’s throat that it looked like his jugular could explode. “You’re a fucking liar. That’s what you are! You tampered with the logs to make it look like you searched for me!”
He should unload the clip in Carver right now to get it over with before Zach found a way to stop him. Ryker didn’t care what happened after, whether he was arrested or blasted out an airlock. It didn’t matter as long as Carver was lying in a pool of blood.
“I’m sorry!” Carver begged. His dignity and composure broke down. “I wish we hadn’t done it. I do! Please, please, please, don’t kill me! Please!”
His eyes finding the floor, Zach spoke quietly. “We can’t just execute him.”
Ryker gaped at Zach in disbelief. “You want to let him off?”
“No,” Zach said. “I want him dead too. But not like this.”
“Like what, then?” Ryker couldn’t believe what he was hearing. There were no laws or codes they had to follow anymore. Justice was justice. “He ruined my life!”
“Let’s give it a minute. We’ll lock him up, calm down, then figure out what to do. Okay?”
Shaking with anger, Ryker smashed the pistol into Carver’s face, knocking him out cold. Carver’s body dropped to the floor with a thud.
“Fine.” Ryker tucked the gun into his waistband. “But I’m not gonna change my mind.”
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