Chapter Nine

“WHAT THE HELL are you talking about?” I demanded. “I woke up two and a half days ago.”

Caspersen rested a hand on my shoulder. “Johnson, I need you to stay calm.” She said it in a friendly tone, but it wasn’t a request.

And somehow, it seemed to kick off my soldier’s instincts. I clenched my jaw and nodded. This was crazy talk, completely nuts. But they seemed to understand. I could too. “Okay. But what do you mean?”

Dr. Ellis sat down beside Caspersen. “When you started our reanimation sequence, you stopped at mine. We had to wake everyone else afterward. Remember?”

“Yeah. I saw the Thing outside.”

“Right. Well, did you check out the remaining chambers?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You know Blakely’s unit? Two doors down from us? And Anders’s?”

I nodded. They were the two rooms nearest the storage unit, on the mountain-facing side.

“They were crushed,” Kayleigh returned. “Well, Dr. Blakely’s was. His unit was smashed through. Dr. Anders’s was mostly intact, but his cryochamber was smashed.”

“Smashed? So, he’s…dead?”

“Yeah. But it didn’t happen on the way down.”

“What do you mean?”

“The end of the ship that ripped apart in the air? It’s charred. The hall, the rooms—they all show signs of burning consistent with separation in the lower atmosphere. Anders and Blakely’s rooms were intact until we hit the ground.”

“It was the impact, then?” I couldn’t help but think how much it would have sucked to have survived the spacecraft’s midair disintegration, only to be smashed to death on the rocks below. At least they were in cryofreeze, so they wouldn’t have seen it coming.

Caspersen confirmed this with a grim nod, and Kayleigh continued, “But not here.”

“Not here?” I frowned.

“No. The ship didn’t land here. It landed up-mountain.”

“There’s a trail,” Caspersen put in. “From about two hundred feet up. It’s all fresh, just a few days old. Scraping on the rocks, paint, that sort of thing.”

“There was a rockslide,” Kayleigh explained. “A big chunk of the mountain broke away—part of what the ship was resting on. We came careening down here and landed on this ledge. We found a trail of rubble from the landslide quite a ways down.”

Caspersen played absently with an end of flaxen hair that had somehow slipped out of her tight coif. “It’s probably what broke your window and initiated your reanimation sequence.” She didn’t need to mention how close I’d come to sharing Anders’s and Blakely’s fate, although I guessed it was on her mind; I had something of a sense of it already.

“We found the spot where the ship had been too.” This was Kayleigh again. “Before the collapse, I mean. But the thing is…we’ve been here for just better than three thousand years. When I tested Anders’s remains—there aren’t any of Blakely’s left—they’re more than two thousand years old, and less than four thousand. The vegetation around the ship’s landing site…it resembles a species of Earth lichen…it’s several thousand years old too.”

“You mean…we’ve been sitting in deep freeze for thousands of years? Just sitting there?” Stunned didn’t begin to encompass what I was feeling right now. I’d known something had gone wrong. That was obvious. But this kind of wrong? The kind of wrong where the ship split apart, and no one came looking for us? Where they left us in the deepfreeze for thousands of years?

“Exactly.” Caspersen nodded. “We’d still be there if not for the rockslide.”

“Fuck.” The odds against us were absolutely staggering.

“Yeah.” Ellis looked grim as she spoke.

“So those bones I found in the Thing’s cave?”

They perked up at that. “Well, in a way, they’re good news,” Caspersen said. “Not that they’re dead in the cave, obviously, but they signify there are other people here, on Kepler. Some of the rest of the crew must have survived, must have populated and settled the planet according to the mission.”

“That is good news,” I conceded. “Albeit delivered in a shitty manner.” She smiled at that, and a little tension eased out of my brow. “But…if they made it out alive, why didn’t they come looking for us? Why leave us here?”

Caspersen shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t realize anyone else survived. We’re in the mountains, probably not visible from the valleys below. They might have assumed this piece of the ship splintered. I’m sure there were plenty of us who died like that.”

“So, you see,” Kayleigh persisted, “you can take the bedrest. If they waited three thousand years for us, a few more days isn’t going to hurt.”

I frowned, but this time I didn’t argue. I didn’t have the stamina for it. Not after that news. No, all of a sudden, a few days of sleep didn’t sound half bad. I still had one more question though.

“If there are people out there…why don’t we try to find them instead of worrying about filtering water here? Surely, they would have had to do that already?”

“Probably.” Caspersen nodded. “But three thousand years is a long time. We don’t know what kind of civilization they have here; if they even have any memory of the original mission; if they’d be friendly or hostile.”

“Hell,” Kayleigh put in, “if there’ve been subsequent missions. In that time span, Earth might have sent new ships, new crews.”

I nodded slowly. The realization was slowly dawning that pretty much anything might have happened during our Rip Van Winkle interval. Our people on Earth might or might not have found a way to solve the climate crisis; our home governments might or might not have survived; our countries might or might not have survived.

Somehow, that was the most jarring possibility to me. I might have signed on to a long-shot life on another planet. But even as a settler on Kepler-186f, I was still—always, first and foremost—a United States Army Ranger. Now, I’d woken up in an era where there might not even be a United States of America. And I might never know, one way or another.

“I think I need that bedrest after all, Doctor.”

*

I TUCKED INTO a makeshift bed in one of the chambers where Dr. Ellis had modified the air filtration systems. I didn’t know, as I lay down, if I’d be able to get any rest after the day’s revelations.

I opened my eyes some twelve hours later and realized through a yawn that my concerns had been misplaced. Sleep had come almost without warning and had been deep and dreamless. Night had settled, probably hours ago. Outside my window, the sky had darkened and the wind whipped by. It wasn’t raining, at least, nor was there much cloud cover. Now and again, the silvery-pink glow of moonlight illuminated the world, and then it would dim and vanish.

I drifted to sleep again and woke in the morning to the sounds of someone walking about in the room. “Captain Johnson?”

I blinked. “What?”

“It’s Lieutenant Cohen, sir. Captain Caspersen sent me to check on you. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

I nodded, sitting up. “It’s okay. I…what time is it?”

“A few hours after sunrise.”

“What are we doing as far as…calls of nature, Lieutenant?”

He nodded. “We’ve got a sort of latrine rigged up. Behind the ship. If you’re up for walking, I can take you there.”

“Of course. This bedrest is the doctor’s idea, not mine.”

Lt. Cohen led me to the pit—which was more or less all our toilet facilities were at the moment. It was a short hike, but it left me completely winded. By the time I returned to the ship, I was ready to sleep again. I wouldn’t let on to her, but I was beginning to concede that maybe Kayleigh hadn’t been entirely wrong. I couldn’t remember being this tired or generally feeling so spent.

I slept until evening and woke only because it was time for my checkup. I felt better, and it showed. Other than a lingering slight fever—my body fighting the infection, she said—I was doing well.

“You’ll be on your feet in a day or two, provided nothing changes,” Dr. Ellis told me.

“Any chance of getting something to eat in the meantime?”

“Sure. Anything in particular? I hear you were really fond of the fajitas.” This was said with a grin.

I shivered at the recollection. “Anything but the fajitas.”

She laughed. “Matt said you were a big fan. All right, I’ll be back in a minute—with anything but fajitas.”

She was as good as her word, and in a few minutes had returned with a packet of beef stew. “It’s cold,” she cautioned.

I shrugged. “It’s going to suck either way, so…”

Kayleigh nodded. “Good call. You know, when we first got out of the cryofreeze, Connor and some of the others were talking about locking the MREs up. So no one would run off with them or eat more than their allotted share. And then we tasted them.”

I laughed, even over the remarkably sobering odor of my stew. “No wonder they didn’t have us eating them prior to blast off. Half the crew would have gone AWOL.”

“Yeah.” She paused and seemed to hesitate for a long moment. When she spoke again, she’d lowered her tone. “Hey, you know, Caspersen’s going to give you a briefing later, but I figured you’d want to know… We’ve picked up a signal from the Genesis’s locator.”

“A signal? You mean, we’ve found the rest of the ship?”

“Looks that way. The professor can explain, but he figured out some way to…bounce a signal off it, I think.”

The professor was Dr. Carter, an electronics and computer systems guru. His singular demeanor and fierce devotion to his work had earned him worse names, but professor seemed to be the one that stuck. Probably because it never failed that talking to him felt more like a lecture than a conversation.

“It’s still working? After three thousand years?” I was more than a little incredulous.

“Well, not really. It’s supposed to send a signal, but it isn’t emitting anything. The battery probably died a few decades after we landed. But the professor managed to rig something up to bounce a signal off of it.”

I frowned, trying to work through the mechanics of that. “How?”

“Don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess the signal relay mechanism is still working, there’s just nothing powering the signals it’s supposed to send. At least, that’s what I got from the professor’s class on deep space locators this morning.” She was grinning again, and I nodded. We hadn’t had much chance to get acquainted with our fellow passengers during training, but some personalities stood out too much to be overlooked—sometimes for all the right reasons, but usually for all the wrong ones. The professor fell into the latter category.

He was one of those brilliant asshole types, who thought a lot of degrees and a good brain made up for a dearth of personality or decency. It didn’t. Still, the professor was smart—damned smart—and hypercritical. Even during our very short acquaintance in training, his keen ability to detect flaws had made itself known. He seemed particularly incensed over shortcomings in technical know-how and had no reservations about correcting the offender, whoever and wherever they might be. Perversely, it didn’t help the professor’s standing in public opinion that he was generally right. Instead, coupled with his bellicosity, being right felt like proverbial salt in the wound to whoever found themselves on the receiving end of one of his dressings down. I’d had that misfortune myself once, and that had been all it took to teach me to avoid him when at all possible.

So I nodded, taking her meaning in full. “I’m sure that was enlightening.”

“Very.”

“But he thinks he found the rest of the Genesis?”

She nodded. “Yup. Caspersen will talk to you about it later, but we’re thinking—once you’re on your feet—that’ll be the first place we head.”