Chapter Nineteen

IT WAS A long week before I was able to start making myself useful and another before I could do much. The time passed with only marginally more excitement for the rest of the crew. The highlight came about a week and a half in, when we woke to find that the mountain mole had eaten through his pod and given us the slip overnight, leaving a slew of bereaved scientists in its wake.

Finally, during the third week—three and a half weeks after our recon team had left—we caught sight of Dr. Carter and Sergeants Connor and Russell. They were in a sorry state: footsore, haggard, scruffy, and chronically short of breath as they limped back toward us.

The first order of business after we got them back to the ship was medical attention. Kayleigh administered the exams while the rest of us waited. The results were as good as could be expected: low oxygen levels, high fatigue, and moderate dehydration. Otherwise, they had come to no harm.

Kayleigh said they needed rest before anything else. They had left before we’d discovered the useful properties of moleskin, so their blood oxygen was lower than she liked. We’d have to wait until they woke up to get a full account.

There were grumblings aplenty, but Caspersen backed her up with “doctor’s orders,” so grumble was all we could do.

Still, we were able to glean a little. Connor had confirmed, with a weary nod, that they’d found the ship. Russell shook his head grimly to questions about survivors. And the professor…well, he seemed to have shrunk during the journey from a confident, bellicose little man into a wary husk of a littler man. Aside from grunting a few acknowledgments, he ignored everyone.

We weren’t to know the extent until the next day, but we had the strong impression all was not well with the rest of the ship.

Russell woke first, and after quenching his thirst and sating his hunger, Kayleigh subjected him to a second exam. Finally, when he’d passed it, he told us what he knew.

“We followed the professor’s signal to the ship for a week and a half. It took about two days to get out of the mountains, to the lowlands. As soon as you reach flat land, the trees start. And it’s humid down there. Cold, but humid.

“There’s not much by way of smaller vegetation—no grass, not many bushes and stuff like that—except ferns. Not until after you get to the river; there’s a lot of dark, leafy plants there. And more ferns.”

Dr. Kimutai nodded. “And the soil?”

“Dark. We didn’t take any samples, but it looked rich, fertile. There were a lot of dead leaves, downed wood, that sort of thing.

“But we kept following the professor’s signal. The farther in we got, the more we got the impression we weren’t alone.

“It was subtle, at first. Imagination, we thought. Cooing, calls, strange noises.

“But we heard things. In the trees, I mean. Far, far above us. And when we’d camp, shadows, echoes. Like it was haunted or something. And every time we’d get near, it was gone, without a trace.

“Then we found the ship, on the twelfth day. What was left of it.” Russell’s face was grim. “It was all overgrown, covered in moss and fallen debris. But there was a lot of it left. The bulk of the ship, it was all there. Storerooms, armory, bridge, hundreds of cryopods.”

Despite Russell’s less-than-encouraging demeanor, a ripple of excitement escaped us.

“And the crew?” Caspersen asked.

“In a sense.” His gaze seemed to shift to some point beyond the walls of our enclosure. “It was a mess, Captain. A disaster. The ship was torn to pieces. Everything that wasn’t rusted to ruin was smashed, broken, doors ripped off, furniture ripped apart. I don’t know what the hell happened, but whatever hit them must have been incredible for its sheer destructive force.”

“And the crew?” Caspersen repeated.

“Bones. All bones. And…not only bones. There were teeth marks on them, like they’d been gnawed. And they were scattered, too, as if they’d been ripped apart.

“Most of them were just fragments. But some were well preserved, especially in the pods. There were a few pods that survived the destruction, were still operable. But unoccupied—other than the skeletons.”

“And the armory? Supply rooms?”

“Ransacked, completely emptied.” He spread his hands. “There must have been one hell of a battle. There were bullet holes in the ship, and everything was gone. And—”

“And?” Caspersen prodded.

“The noise? The echoes, the chatter in the trees? When we reached the ship, it stopped.”

“Stopped?”

He nodded, and there was an expression in his eyes so similar to the one I’d seen the night before in the professor’s that I shivered. “Completely. Not a sound, just dead silence. It sounds crazy, I know…but it was uncanny. It had followed us for days, but as soon as we got to the ship…” He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“What about the computers? Did Carter find anything useful?”

“No. We didn’t find anything useable anywhere. It was all either gone or exposed to the elements or smashed.”

“He wasn’t able to retrieve anything?” I asked. “Nothing?” This was bad news indeed, and not only because it meant one of the chief objectives of the mission couldn’t be achieved. Without the data from the Genesis computers, we had little hope of ever figuring out what had happened to the ship.

Russell shook his head. “The humidity did in whatever the landing and battle hadn’t.”

“Any remains of what they were fighting? Any clues as to what it might have been?” Caspersen put in.

“No. The only recognizable bones we found were human. And there weren’t too many of those.”

“What about the ship? Any indicators as to what brought her down?”

“No. To be honest, Captain, we learned very little, except that there’s a fuck of a lot we don’t know.”

*

CONNOR AND THE professor had little more to offer when they woke. The professor was spooked about the so-called ghosts. The noises in the trees had resumed as soon as they’d left the ship and followed them almost all the way back to the base of the mountains. This sequence seemed particularly significant to the professor as he emphasized it again and again. When he started speculating that it was “Like they wanted us to find it, find what had happened to them,” Kayleigh stepped in.

The professor was still not well and needed further rest and care, she said.

Connor’s tale proved a bit more lucid. They’d found the ship heavily overgrown near the breeches, but barer the deeper into the interior they went. “It looked like nothing had been there in years. Decades.

“The main server room was trashed. It had been open to the elements for God knows how long. Professor damn near died when he saw it. The backup server room was gone—that whole wing of the ship was missing.

“We found the signal emitter. It was in the storeroom. Whatever happened when they cleared everything else out, they hadn’t disturbed that.

“And that’s another thing; they didn’t touch the solar panels either. The pods were full of them. Some still functional. Hell, some of the pods still had power—the ones deep in the ship, where we found the…the chewed-up bones.” Her mouth drew back into a grimace that looked all the grislier for the scar that ran the length of her cheek.

“There’s enough paneling to power a city,” Caspersen observed. “To leave that behind, they must have had to leave in a hurry.”

Connor said, “And, I know you think the professor sounds nuts…and maybe he is. Maybe we all were. But the things we heard… They didn’t sound…real. Like, voices in the wind. But not voices. They didn’t make any sense.”

“There are some birds—” Dr. Wu started.

But Connor shook her head. “These weren’t birds, Doctor. It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t human. It was just…” She trailed off frowning and then shrugged. “I don’t know. But it scared the shit out of me; that’s all I do know.”

*

WHATEVER WAS GOING on, one thing stood out to all of us. We’d never figure it out stuck in the mountains or in one-off expeditions here and there. I’d seen the evidence of human occupancy in the Thing’s cave. Presumably, they were the descendants of the rest of our crew—whoever had survived the catastrophe that befell the Genesis. It seemed the likeliest cause, but we were far from certain on that score. For all we knew, the bones I’d found were the remnants of a second craft sent to the planet or another break-away portion of the ship, like ours.

However they’d come here, we knew we weren’t the only people still alive on Kepler-186f. Where the rest were, or whence they’d come, we had yet to discover.

As, too, we needed to know the source of the other life-forms we’d encountered—the hairy beast that had tried to make off with Dr. Kimutai in our riverside camp and the cooing spirits in the trees. Did the noises Connor, Russell, and the professor reported originate from the same creature Kayleigh, Matt, and I had seen? It was good at disappearing…was it that good? We didn’t know.

We made the decision by near-unanimous vote to pack what could be carried, lock up what could not, and venture together down to the ship. The professor was the lone dissenting vote.

“All right, then,” Caspersen declared. “We’re decided. We’ll start at the Genesis and see if we can figure out what happened. We’ll figure out what to do next after that.

“Bring what you need to stay alive and to do your jobs. Leave the rest. If we make it back, it’ll still be here, and if we don’t, well, you won’t miss it anyway.”