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Chapter 31
Zach Croft: 2053
Walking past a line of rumbling generators, Zach came to a slanted trap door fenced in by low metal rails. He knelt and tugged it open, groaning nearly as loudly as the unoiled hinges of the hatch.
Ryker stepped through the trap door and positioned himself on the ladder’s top rung.
“Do you need a light?” Zach extended a bright LED lantern.
Ryker waved it off and tightened his goggles. “I’ll let you know once I get down there.”
With the grim determination of a coal miner, he descended rung by rung before being swallowed by the darkness entirely. The echo of his boots thudding down the ladder lingered for Zach and Mabel to hear. Then, Ryker jumped to the bottom. His heavy landing echoed up the maintenance shaft.
“What do you see?” asked Zach.
“A big machine. Looks like an elbow,” Ryker snorted, knocking a fist against something metal and hollow. “Some pistons. A bunch of tubes.”
“Hydraulics,” Zach commented.
Mabel shouted into the darkness. “Any dirt?”
“Not here. Still looking, though.” Ryker stepped in what sounded like a puddle of water, muttering the word “gross.”
Zach contemplated joining Ryker in his search. They would need a lot of dirt to make enough fuel. “What are the odds we’ll be able to produce enough irogen?” he asked Mabel.
With a frown, Mabel shook her head. “Better than no chance.”
“Guys, it looks like there’s nothing down here,” interjected Ryker. “We’re gonna have to—”
CRASH!
Ryker screamed, prompting Zach and Mabel to lean over the edge of the hatch.
“What happened?” Zach called down. “Are you okay?”
No answer.
Zach feared that the landing gear had collapsed on his friend. But then a cough sounded from below. Zach turned on the lantern and shined it down, its bright light cutting through the dusty air.
At the bottom of the ladder, Ryker stood covered in red sand. It clung to his hair, his clothes, even his face. He made eye contact with Zach and coughed again. “Found some.”
“Give it here.” Mabel took the bucket of dirt from Zach and walked to the table where she had laid out the jars of bacteria. “I’m going to need some sort of container.” Zach found one in a closet and handed it to her. “That’ll work.” She emptied some dirt into it and smoothed it into a thick, even layer. With her finger, she made a few divots. “Jar,” she said like a doctor in surgery.
Zach gripped a container of gray sludge with both hands and held it over the Martian soil. “Should I pour?”
“Yes. Into the craters,” Mabel answered. “Just be careful.”
Zach drizzled the liquid into the container. The first divot filled up, and he moved to the next. Then, the next. And the next. Once they were all full, he set the jar aside and exhaled in relief.
“How’s it looking?” Erik said, stepping into the room. He rolled up his sleeves and assumed a position next to Mabel. “Is that…?”
Mabel nodded.
“How long’s it supposed to take?” Zach asked.
“Your blood only took a few seconds.” Mabel slid the microscope across the table, then took a spoon from the shelf. She drove the metal into the soaked soil, scooped out a small amount, and placed the sample beneath the lens. Peering through the eyepiece, she frowned. “Hmm. No reaction yet. Let’s give it a bit.”
After several excruciating minutes of waiting, the worry began to set in. Maybe they were wrong about the soil. Zach bit his fingernail and asked, “Why isn’t it working?”
“I don’t know,” Mabel said through clenched teeth. “Just wait, okay?”
But no matter how long they waited, nothing changed. Periodically, Mabel checked the microscope for crystals, then stirred the mixture more. “Is there something missing?” she asked rhetorically, pinching her brow with her index finger and thumb.
“You tried Zach’s blood, and it worked,” Erik said. “So, maybe the iron has to be liquid.”
Mabel poked the inside of her cheek with her tongue. “That would make sense if the dirt had been liquified on Mars. But it wasn’t. There’s no water there at all.”
“Maybe not, but we said the Red Plague might have been in permafrost. If the meteor melted the ice, that could have supplied the water it needed.”
“Could be,” Mabel admitted. “Here. Someone get me a bottle.”
Ryker walked to a sink against the wall and filled a large flask. He handed it back to Mabel, who poured its contents into the soil. She stirred it with a glass rod until the dirt mixed with the water and bacteria sample, turning it into a thin red slurry.
Then, they waited.
After what seemed like an hour, Zach cursed under his breath.
Ryker sighed, walking a few feet from the table with his hands on his hips. “What else can we do? Feed it floor panels?” he asked facetiously, thumping his heel on the metal floor.
“It’s unlikely anything up here is made of iron,” Mabel said.
Ryker gaped at her. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“No, the stupidest thing would be launching a ship made of iron into space. It’s too heavy.”
“Well, we know for sure that blood works,” Zach said, stopping the argument. “What if we wake up ten or fifteen people at a time and have them donate blood?” The hydrofarm was on its last legs, but it could still indefinitely support a small crew of people.
“Or we could just use Carver,” Ryker suggested.
“Stop,” Zach snapped. “Everyone on the ship can donate a pint. If we still need more, we’ll let people recover and do another round of donations. We can keep that going until we have enough.”
“How much would we need?” asked Erik.
“As much as we can get. It wouldn’t hurt to—”
“Hey!” Mabel interrupted. “Check it out.” She used the stirring rod to point to the edge of the container, where the reddish mud met the glass. A small cluster of blue and purple crystals had begun to form.
“What’s that?” Zach asked. His heart began to race.
“What do you think it is?” Mabel exclaimed.
“Are you sure?”
“Look!” She brushed some dirt out of the way to confirm what she saw. As she did so, another cluster of blue and purple materialized in the sand. Her face lit up with a giddy smile. “And there’s more!”
Erik rushed to the table and shoved in next to Zach so he could see. “Holy shit.” He stepped backward and rubbed his hands down his face. “We did it. We fucking did it.” He grabbed Zach’s shoulders and shook him a little. Zach laughed in disbelief.
“No,” Ryker said, staring at the crystals. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
Zach deflated a little. “Why not?”
“Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, every single time, for my entire goddamned life.” He looked at Mabel. “And you’re telling me it’s working?”
Mabel gestured to the container, where new clusters of irogen crystals were sprouting from the mud with increasing speed. “I’m not telling you anything.”
She didn’t need to.
They could see it with their own eyes.
Time passed faster after that. Every day, more and more irogen formed, consuming their soil stores but getting closer to the required amount so quickly that they didn’t care. A few times, Zach visited the cryobay to speak with Cora through the glass. He knew she couldn’t actually hear him, but he didn’t care. He chatted up their success with producing irogen, giving her credit for the discovery. After all, Cora’s pod freezing over gave him the idea.
Night after night, their weariness dissipated. Zach had less trouble sleeping. Walking by windows still unsettled him, though the fiery light of Earth had dimmed to a dull, muddy brown. And while it sucked to see his home planet so lifeless, he was relieved they had escaped it in one piece.
On the fourth day, Zach was awoken by Mabel pounding on his door. Did she ever sleep? She woke the others and led them to the Science Center, where a large vat had been erected. It was filled to the brim with irogen.
“We have enough.” With gloved hands, Mabel picked up one of the crystals like a diamond and studied its translucent surface. “It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”
Oh, it was beautiful for a lot of reasons. Chief among them… they were saved! They would live to see Alpha Cen and have the privilege of starting new lives. And this time, it wasn’t just a far-off dream. It was reality.
They carted the vat of irogen to the Spark’s engine room and deposited it into the irogen processing unit, watching through a glass window as feathers of heat melted away the crystals and boiled the liquid inside. A collective breath was held in fear of it not working. Of the Gateway rejecting the work they had done. Of their last hope for survival diminishing.
But when they ventured to the cockpit and loaded up the control module, Ryker gave them all a happy but astonished shake of his head. “We’re golden.”
“No, no, not yet. I’m not celebrating until I see that continuum bubble,” Zach said. “Get us on our way.”
“Glad to say goodbye to this place once and for all,” commented Ryker as he powered on the continuum drive. He sat back in his pilot’s chair, taking in the window with squinted eyes. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the armrests in anticipation.
Over the next thirty seconds, the space outside began to twist and stretch, just as it had when the Gateway escaped its fall out of orbit. Stars boomeranged back and forth, some coming so close to the ship that Zach worried they’d be burned. But then, he remembered nothing could hurt them inside the bubble. It was merely space working its way around the station.
The distant Earth distorted like a piece of putty, a wad of chewing gum. But there it lingered, not bouncing as the stars around it did, not coming close to the station, and not growing farther away. It simply watched them. Studied them. Said its goodbyes.
As the continuum bubble continued to form, Mabel asked Zach, “What do we do if this works?”
“When this works,” Ryker quipped.
Zach had put so much energy and time into getting them to this moment that he hadn’t even considered what they would do next. Luckily, the answer was simple. “We go into cryo.”
“And then?” Erik prompted.
Zach was surprised to feel a smile forcing its way to his lips. “And then we’re at Alpha Cen.”
Erik smiled, too, then nodded to Ryker. Ryker gave a slight nod back. It wasn’t a smile, but it was the most they would probably get at the moment.
When the continuum bubble was fully formed, the station appeared suspended in an orb of liquid water. The stars had diminished to hazy, wavering specks of light. The darkness seemed to tumble over itself as if it were not a void but a collage of somersaulting balls of smoke. Still, Earth glared at them.
“Gateway,” Ryker called out. “Set course for Alpha Centauri.”
“SETTING COURSE FOR ALPHA CENTAURI,” the intercom blared.
The floor started to shake. The space outside pulsed and vibrated. Then, with a high-pitched whine of the station, Earth shrunk to the size of a golf ball. The darkness of space began to brighten into a brilliant white light.
Zach realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled, then smiled again. “Now, we’re golden.”
Zach Croft: 2030
Seeing his father’s body drift through the vacuum of space left an emptiness in the pit of Zach’s stomach. He knew nobody was watching him. Still, he tried his best to keep the tears at bay. He wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. It was like watching a train crash or a building collapsing; horrifying but fascinating. Plus, this was the last time he’d ever see his father, even if all that remained of him was a stiff, bloated figure growing farther away with every passing moment.
They should have put him in a body bag. It would have been the respectful thing to do, but Zach couldn’t stand being around the corpse any longer than he had to. He could still feel the dead weight as he and Ryker dragged it through the halls on a sheet, headed for the main airlock. As they struggled with the body, Zach wondered how long it had been in the lab before he found it? A day? A week? A month?
As hard as it was for Zach to believe, he was now an orphan. They both were: him and Ryker. They were scared, hungry, tired, and, worst of all, alone. Alone forever.
What would happen to them on the ground? Certainly, OSE hadn’t a clue that any of the colonists were still alive; as far as Zach knew, the Gateway had never been able to get through to Mission Control. What would people think when two children showed up on a spaceship with no adults? Zach could imagine the shock on their faces, their jaws falling open as they realized Zach and Ryker had arrived alone.
He inhaled a weak breath of recycled air, zipped up the dark green sweatshirt he’d found, then shivered. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to address them. “Where were you?”
“I wanted to give you time to say goodbye,” Ryker answered.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Zach looked back at the glass airlock, searching for his father. Quinton’s body was an insignificant black speck against the vibrant blue backdrop of Earth. “None of this seems real…”
“I know.” Ryker nodded. “What do we do now?”
Zach reached into his pocket and felt the crumpled note from Quinton. “I guess we go home.”
Home. Such an arbitrary term. First, it was Pasadena, then the Gateway, then Mars. Zach wondered if they had a home to return to, being two orphaned children.
They made a pit stop in the pantry to grab some protein packets for the trip, then trudged to the docking bay and opened the blast door.
“Which one do we take?” asked Ryker, looking at the series of airlocks leading to the dropships.
Zach had no idea. The whole process was a mystery to him—getting a ship online, navigating to autopilot, then what? Just sit back and enjoy the flight?
Zach approached the dropship labeled with the number 5 above the airlock and pressed the door open.
There were so many seats. Hundreds that should have been filled with people were now painfully empty. He and Ryker were all that was left. Zach’s pulse thumped in his temples.
He had to do this. If he couldn’t resurrect his father, he could at least follow his instructions. Don’t radio. Activate autopilot. Go to the ground. Simple.
The control module loomed above him, dozens of flashing buttons fighting for his attention. He recalled the letter’s content, remembering the power button was somewhere beneath the command block. “Sit down,” he said to Ryker. Ryker didn’t move. “Come on. Sit.”
“I will.” But Ryker stayed behind him as Zach got onto his knees and reached under the control module.
He slid his fingers across the panel, felt a switch, and pressed it.
Zach Croft: 2054
Zach shot up with a start, waving away the icy gas swirling all around him. Shivering, he swung his legs out of the cryopod and jumped down.
“ARRIVAL AT ALPHA CENTAURI WAYPOINT IN T-MINUS THIRTY MINUTES,”the intercom boomed. “PREPARING TO DISENGAGE CONTINUUM BUBBLE.”
Zach snagged his t-shirt from the floor and pulled it over his torso. Then he rubbed his heavy eyelids and replied, “Gateway. Time passed?”
The station informed him that eleven-and-a-half months had passed, and they were currently transiting past the gas giant ACB-FOUR. Zach recalled the hazy images that OSE space telescopes had gotten of the planet, no more than a luminescent sphere. It would be fantastic to see it in person.
Ryker’s hand clamped on Zach’s shoulder. “Cockpit?”
“Go ahead. I’ll catch up.” Zach scanned the rows of survivors emerging from their cryopods until he spotted Cora. She leaned against the edge of her pod with a confused look. Her eyes bulged as she saw Zach weaving his way toward her. He raised a finger to his lips in a shh gesture. “Come with me.” He took her by the arm and led her into a small room adjacent to the cryobay.
As soon as they were out of earshot of the other survivors, Cora whispered, “We’re at Alpha Cen?” Zach nodded. Cora let out a surprised laugh. “How?”
Zach explained everything, from seeing the ice crystals on her cryopod to using the Red Plague to produce a new batch of irogen.
Cora stared at him in disbelief. “That’s crazy.”
“I know,” Zach acknowledged. “But it’s true.”
“So… we’re alive?”
“Yeah. We’re alive.”
Cora’s face morphed into a broad smile. She hugged Zach, squeezing so tightly that he could barely breathe. She laughed, released him, and apologized. “Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt you.” Then, she tugged him back in. “But this is just so great!”
“Okay, okay. Now, listen. I need you to help get everyone out of cryo safely. Have them go to the cafeteria so I can brief them, then come get me in the cockpit.”
“Of course. Anything.”
Zach entered the cockpit to find Ryker staring down at the control module. He could tell from how Ryker was chewing on his thumb that something was amiss. “What’s the matter?”
Ryker looked up at Zach, then gestured at the screen. “It looks like we’ve been running off the backup generators since we left,” Ryker explained. He rolled his chair away from the computer and came to a smaller rig against the wall, accompanied by a long array of command buttons. He pressed two of them, his brow pinched tight, and a model of the Spark flickered onto another screen.
“Why would we be on backup?” asked Zach.
Ryker pointed at the corner of the diagram. “Two of the power processing modules are down.”
“Why?” Zach leaned over Ryker and squinted at the screen. “We were in a continuum bubble.”
“It happened before we left.” Ryker gave Zach a grim look, then rolled back to the other computer. “When we fell out of orbit.” He tapped the computer’s display, which now showed the model of the station. He dragged his finger across the diagram before stopping on a crimson part of the Spark. He glanced over his shoulder at the other rig and remarked, “The shoe fits.”
Zach looked at the model of the Spark, noting the location of the red modules, then looked at the diagram of the entire station. “Shit,” he murmured, wiping his eyes of any remaining sleep. “How much time do we have?”
“They’re designed to last a year, but…”
Zach finished the thought for him. “That’s how long we’ve been in cryo.”
Ryker replied with a solemn nod, then angled his face to the ceiling. “Gateway, how long before the backup generators die?”
“FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, THIRTY-SIX MINUTES, TWELVE SECONDS.”
Ryker sighed. “Fuck, okay. That’s cutting it close, but it should be enough time, right?”
“Should be, if we begin our descent as soon as we’re in orbit around Alpha Cen. But we’ve got a lot to do before then.”
“Well, let’s go, then,” Ryker said as he stood. “Clock’s ticking.”
Standing upon a makeshift platform Cora had set up in the front of the cafeteria, Zach looked at the mass of people before him. The cafeteria was large, but even then, the more than eight hundred survivors stood shoulder to shoulder as they conversed with the people around them. Some wore spare Prescott sweaters salvaged from a supply room. The outfits gave Zach an eerie sense of deja vu, as if he was a kid on his way to Prescott for the first time. He pushed the thoughts out of his mind and focused his energy on the present day.
“I know this hasn’t been easy,” he said, pacing across the stage with the microphone. “But I’m happy to say that the announcement you heard on the intercom was right. We’re almost at Alpha Centauri.” The crowd buzzed with excitement, prompting smiles and hugs between people that may have only been strangers on Earth.
Zach took a moment to bask in their relief. After all their hardships and pain, they were almost to their new home.
“Look!” someone called, pointing at one of the many octagonal windows. Beyond the ship, the blank white of interstellar travel faded into darkness as the distortion of the continuum bubble dissipated.
A brilliant kaleidoscope of colors painted the space outside. Purples, pinks, blues, and oranges intertwined in distant explosions that seemed frozen in time. The crowd pressed toward the windows, standing on tippy toes, climbing on tables, and craning around colleagues to glimpse the vibrant cosmos. The light illuminated their faces with swirling colors, and a glimmer of hope Zach had not seen before their home’s destruction appeared in their eyes. A mixture of joyous laughter, relieved sobs, and expressions of awe rippled through the crowd.
“Look, look, look! There!” Another person pressed their finger against the glass. Zach followed it, leaning against his elbows against the pantry railing as a colossal planet appeared in the corner of the window.
It was ACB-FOUR, glowing and vibrating, with auroras swirling through its atmosphere. Long, winding neon stripes streaked across the outer layer of the gas giant. They pulsated, casting a greenish light on the Gateway that made Zach’s eyes water. The planet’s beauty was overwhelming. Would they be able to see it from Alpha Cen? Oh, that would be stellar. To look up at the night sky and see that gleaming orb alongside the moons. Things got better by the second.
Soon, ACB-FOUR passed out of view. There was an idle moment in the cafeteria as everyone savored what they had just seen. Then, the usual buzz resumed.
“All right, everyone! Listen up!” Zach said, bringing the crowd’s attention back to himself. “We’re almost to Alpha Cen. I need volunteers to take whatever we can from the supply rooms,” Zach pointed at the doors behind him, “and load it all into the dropships. Food, medical supplies, clothing, anything you can carry. We’re gonna need it all.”
“What about shelter?” Cora brought up from below.
“Good question,” said Zach. “There are some leftover building supplies from Prescott, some spare hab units and tents, plus the dropships we’ll fly down on. It’ll be a challenge, but we’ll make it work.”
“And clothes?” a woman asked. “I don’t want to wake up one morning and see Larry’s bare ass prancing through the streets.” She elbowed the man beside her, who gave a mock-ashamed smile as he fielded laughter from all around.
“Yes, yes. The clothes too. There’s more than enough in the living quarters, plus more in storage. All right? All right.” Zach clapped his hands. “Let’s go, people. Divide into groups and pack up anything you think will be useful. We’re not coming back here, so get your affairs in order and prepare to go home.”
A few whoops sounded as Zach descended the stage and headed for the supply room, accompanied by a dozen others eager to help. “Boxes are there, and canned goods are on the higher shelves,” Zach said once inside.
For the next fifteen minutes, Zach put himself to work. Over and over again, he loaded nonperishables into boxes and deposited them against the adjacent wall. He didn’t stop until a muffled voice in the cafeteria below called for him.
“What’s the matter?” As he emerged from the pantry, Zach found that a crowd had formed around the windows again. But unlike last time, they were silent, their forlorn expressions seemingly cast in stone. The excitement was long gone, replaced by a fog of eerie uncertainty that hung over the room.
The assembled crowd blocked his view, so Zach could not see out the windows until he was deep into the mob. He pushed his way through, ignoring the unanswerable questions that bombarded him. What was the matter? They were almost to Alpha Cen, right?
Just as he reached the windows, he was blinded by a hot flash of lightning.
“What the hell is that?” Ryker yelled, waving a hand at the cockpit’s front window. His cheeks burned red with frustration.
“A storm,” Zach answered simply, though the reality was anything but. It was no ordinary storm. The entire planet—all of Alpha Centauri—was covered in thick, tumbling purple-gray clouds, with miles-long bolts of lightning pulsing through the atmosphere. The lightning cracked the clouds like old porcelain, multiple bolts colliding in blinding white flashes that lit up the inside of the cockpit. Spirals of clouds resembling Earth’s hurricanes spiraled across the surface. The remaining murk drifted across the planet from left to right in long, billowing waves.
“A storm?” Ryker fumed. “What kind of storm looks like that?” A vein in Ryker’s forehead materialized. “Are we even in the right place?”
For a moment, Zach considered that the autopilot could have taken them to a different planet. “Gateway, where are we?”
“ENTERING ORBIT AROUND ALPHA CENTAURI.”
“No, we’re not,” Ryker growled in denial. “You can’t tell me this is it; this is your utopia? It’s a fucking nightmare.”
“It’s a storm. It doesn’t say anything about what’s on the ground below. Besides, we knew storms like this could happen. OSE studied them for years.”
“You knew about this and didn’t say anything?”
“I didn’t know about this!” Zach moved his arm in a fast, circular motion that traced the planet’s edges. “We knew that Alpha Cen had some wild storms. But they only formed once every few decades, and it’s not like we had a whole lot of advance notice—”
“Well, what do you know?”
“We sent a probe to the surface during one of them, but…” Zach trailed off.
“But? But what?”
Zach closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He suddenly had a massive headache. “It didn’t make it.”
“It didn’t make it,” Ryker repeated. He gaped at Zach in disbelief, then sighed. “All right. So, we wait for the storm to pass. We’ve got plenty of stuff to do in the meantime.”
The headache pulsing in Zach’s ears threatened to split his skull in half. “We can’t,” he said, his voice barely audible.
“Say again?”
“We can’t,” Zach said, louder this time. “The storms last for weeks.” The bitter taste of bile rose in the back of his throat.
Ryker dropped his arms. He sat slowly in a chair, then rested his elbows on his knees and lowered his face into his hands as he absorbed the implications of Zach’s words. After a moment, he looked up at Zach. “So, we’re fucked.”
“We’re not fucked,” Zach replied. He hoped that saying the words out loud would help him believe them. It didn’t.
Ryker laughed incredulously. “Or, what? You want us to fly through that?” He pointed at the storm outside the window. Another flash of lightning illuminated the cockpit. “You think that shit’s survivable?”
“What choice do we have?” Zach exclaimed, his voice rising. “Once the backup generators go, we’ve got no power. No power means no water. No food. No air.” He looked out at the roiling storm. “We have to try.”
“Zach,” Ryker said, trying to sound reasonable. “If we fly through that storm, we’re dead.”
Zach fixed Ryker with a steady gaze. “And if we don’t?”
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