Chapter Twenty-Seven

DR. KIM WAS still thoughtful and quiet when morning rolled around but seemed in better spirits than he had the night before. I had gotten to sleep as soon as my shift ended and woke in decent spirits myself.

I didn’t have a chance to ruin it by thinking, either, as Caspersen wasted no time. Breakfast was the first order of business, and from there, we got straight to work. She had the idea of fortifying the hall facing the open end of the ship.

“No idea who or what might have picked up our trail,” she explained. “Before we start anything else, let’s make sure we don’t wind up getting taken off guard.”

We turned our attention to the pod doors down the hall from us. They were solid with high-quality windows, designed to withstand everything from bullets to deep-space conditions. They’d be a good barrier against pretty much anything—certainly, any of the weapons we’d seen the cannibals wielding.

In theory, the pods were supposed to disassemble easily. In theory. The reality was a little less rosy. The violence of the ship’s landing, in combination with subsequent years of exposure, had left many of the fasteners less than cooperative. A few were too twisted to budge at all, and others put up a hell of a fight. In the end, we managed to pull off four doors and a few wall panels. Put together, they assembled into a very serviceable barrier a few doors past our storeroom. It stretched from ceiling to floor, except in the very center, where Caspersen had fashioned a sort of machine gun nest.

The M60, propped up on its tripod behind the barrier, pointed ominously toward the open end of the ship.

“There.” Caspersen nodded with a satisfied grin that reached from under her mask to her eyes. “Nothing’s going to get past this. All right, let’s get this show on the road.”

The show, such as it was, would feature the scientists predominantly. But Act One was nothing more than a repeat of last night’s scene. Having left Matt and Ghoul with the gun, the rest of us did a sweep of the hall and pods we’d already cleared.

As on the previous night, we found the entire floor unoccupied. One feature of our search stood out to me, however. We’d seen the skeletal remains before, but in this light, we could pick out the strange scrapes and marks the recon team had reported. And I noticed a second feature they’d emphasized—the evidence of a gun battle.

The exterior of the ship and the frames of the pods were constructed to be as nearly indestructible as a ship could be. But inside the pods themselves, bullet holes marred the paneling and cabinets. Some areas remained untouched, but whatever had happened, it had clearly spilled into the crew’s quarters.

This was a curious point, to my mind. Whatever had come after the crew would have had to get past the doors into each of these chambers. Get in and get out, shutting the doors after them. What kind of animal could manage that? It didn’t make sense.

But we kept moving, and I didn’t have much time to ponder the problem. We made it to the bridge with greater speed than we had the day before, thanks to the light. The state of devastation was more pronounced than the evening had revealed.

The great windows overhead had been severely damaged in the crash. Long, spindly fractures ran through the glass. Here and there, pieces had fallen away, shattering over the floor.

We progressed down the rickety stairs one at a time until our entire group stood on the ground floor. Caspersen spent some time examining the apertures in the glass. After determining they were either too narrow or too far above the ground to pose an entry risk, she moved on.

In the meantime, we scoured the floor. We found a few remnants of bones here and there, weathered beyond recognition. I couldn’t determine if they belonged to humans or some other creature.

Vegetation had started to take over the bridge too. Mosses coated most of the metal surfaces, and bushes and ferns grew through the breaks in the floor. A few vines dangled from the stairs.

At first, I missed the evidence of gunfire under all the growth. Granges spotted it, brushing away a stretch of the furry green plant life to reveal a cluster of holes. “Attackers must have reached the bridge.”

We moved on. A minute later, Cohen was by a cluster of bushes. Tapping a fibrous husk with his toes, he called out, “Here’s where your friend was nesting, Johnson.”

“Oh, the infamous mole?” Kayleigh teased. Then, her tone grew serious. “Any sign of where it went?”

“Why, you haven’t skinned anything recently, Dr. Gein?” I needled.

“Our respirators won’t last forever,” Dr. Kimutai said. “Not a bad idea to have some extras on hand.”

“First things first,” Caspersen directed. “Let’s focus on why we’re here. Ellis, Wu, Kim, you have what you need to get started?” Three affirmative responses later, she continued, “Great. Granges, you stay with them; Cohen, Connor, and Johnson, come with me. We’re going to move on to the lower deck. Carter, you come with us. The rest of you can follow if you want or stay with Granges.”

Dr. Verner expressed an eagerness to follow. Madison and Lee decided to join him. Everyone else was content to stay at the bridge.

“All right, remain behind us, but don’t leave the group, understand?” When no one disagreed, she nodded. “Okay, let’s move out.”

The first thus concluding, we moved on to Act Two.

The server room lay directly behind the bridge on the lower level, and the recon team hadn’t been exaggerating when they’d described it as a mess. The damage we’d seen on the upper level and on the bridge was nothing in comparison to the state of the rooms on this floor.

The server room frame, with its shattered windows, bowed outward. I imagined this was a result of the initial impact. A force powerful enough to carve the kind of crater like the one that housed the Genesis would have been devastating to the ship’s structure.

Great heaps of dirt rose up outside the empty windowpanes, obscuring the light. The sides of the crater, I realized. In some places, musty soil spilled inside to form slopes that reached from the ceiling to the floor. All of it smelled dank and old.

Still, though the windows had been blocked, the server room wasn’t entirely dark. Light made its way in from the bridge, allowing a muted visibility in the interior that dimmed the farther back we got. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by—and enough to maintain some plant growth. I found more growing things here than on the bridge.

We made our way through, the professor groaning as we went. His laments followed us from section to section:

“Do you have any idea how much these machines cost?”

“My God, you know how long I wanted to get my hands on a piece of equipment like that? And now look at it.”

“This AI system was the most sophisticated known to man, a computer that dwarfed the intelligence of the average human being. I designed it myself. And someone put bullets in it. Fucking animals.”

Even without the professor’s play-by-play, it didn’t take much to figure out why he’d been unable to retrieve anything useful. Between the gunfire and the elements, these computers had perished many moons ago.

Having completed our sweep of the server room and finding nothing of interest beyond some colorful clumps of vegetation, we moved on. Once we left the bridge and tech wing, the lower level assumed the same model as the upper: a long hall, surrounded by pods on either side.

Now, the darkness started to deepen. Walls of dark soil obscured what remained of the windows on either side, and the farther from the bridge we traveled, the less its light did for us. Before long, Caspersen had to switch on her flashlight, and we picked our way through the solitary, macabre halls much as we’d done a level higher the night before.

We found no surprises here. The pods were generally in worse shape than those on the floor above, although a few had survived in relatively good repair. We’d anticipated that, based on the damage we’d already found.

The storerooms had been stripped bare of useful items, leaving only smashed or otherwise useless apparatus and—luckily for us—the signal device that had led us here. That matched the recon team’s report.

And eventually, the hall came to an end—not terminating in a proper sense, by some design, but compressing into a smashed heap of metal and dirt that blocked any further passage.

All in all, we found nothing more interesting than the evidence of a few more mole residences.

“All right,” Caspersen said, “anyone need to double back to anything in particular?”

“I’d like to return to the server room, if we can,” Dr. Verner requested.

“What for, you damned sadist?” the professor asked. “There’s nothing left.”

“It’s possible we overlooked something.”

The professor snorted. “Possible you overlooked something, you mean. I built half of those machines. I didn’t overlook anything.”

“Still,” Verner persisted. “Unless you’ve got something more pressing?”

“All right, if no one needs to go anywhere else, computer room it is.”

The professor groaned. In fact, he kept on complaining until we were there and all the while Dr. Verner examined the badly decayed servers.

Despite his protests, though, when Caspersen sent Cohen, Connor, and the two engineers to join the rest of the party, the professor insisted on staying. Griping the entire time, he waited out Dr. Verner’s investigations.

He quickly and gleefully laid to rest my curiosity as to why, exactly, he would stay when he so clearly found the exercise to be an agony. “So, we’re waiting, Dr. Verner…do tell us, what did you discover that I overlooked?”

Ignoring the professor altogether, the other man addressed Caspersen. “I’d been hoping to retrieve something of use, Captain, but I’m afraid we’re well past that point.”

The professor snorted derisively. “And since when does anyone, much less a physicist, have to confirm what I’ve already said? You might as well have asked a rock for a second opinion—it would have had as much chance at faulting me.”

Caspersen cleared her throat. “All right, I appreciate the effort, Dr. Verner. Let’s rejoin the rest of the crew.”

This was too much for the professor, who sputtered indignantly at the idea Verner had done anything whatsoever of use as he followed along.

The crew, as it happened, waited on the bridge, huddled together in hushed conversation. Seeing them, their backs to us, I had the uneasy thought the Final Act was upon us, and something told me this was shaping up to be a tragedy.

“Connor?” Caspersen called.

“Captain,” the other woman acknowledged, turning toward us. “Dr. Wu and Dr. Ellis have…news.”

My heart sank. Her tone matched Kayleigh’s grim expression. It matched Michelle’s haunted eyes and the troubled posture of the rest of the crew. And none of it promised good news. Fuck.

Caspersen sensed it, too, because she nodded resolutely and picked up her step. It wasn’t until we reached the rest of the band that she asked, “Well?”

Michelle glanced at Kayleigh, and Kayleigh glanced at Dr. Kimutai. Kim spread his hands and turned to Connor.

Finally, Kayleigh spoke. “The bones? The crew that we found in the pods?”

“Yes? What about them?”

“The marks that we saw on them? You remember, the marks Connor and Carter and Russell saw?”

Caspersen nodded. “I remember. What about them?”

Kayleigh met her gaze. “They’re human, Tracie—marks from human teeth and human tools.”

“You’re telling me…” Caspersen said measuredly, “the catastrophe that hit the crew…was human? The things that ate the crew…were humans?”

Kayleigh nodded. “There’s knife marks on some of the bones. Some look like they’ve been gnawed. And the cause of death… I mean, it’s impossible to tell in some cases, but some of the skulls? Blunt force trauma. Gun shots.” She shook her head. “Tracie, these people were killed—by other people. I don’t think this was any external catastrophe. I think…I think the crew turned on itself. Cannibalized itself.”