Chapter Forty-One

THE PROFESSOR’S INITIAL plan of action involved sinking into deep melancholy and refusing to attempt anything further. He had a lot to say about his fate, and what he saw as a destiny to see his life’s work, to have it within his grasp, but to be denied the fruits of his labor. It was a weird blend of melodrama and quasi-Biblical theology, and it took Caspersen a long time to get him back on track.

But when he finally came round, he had a good plan. “If we can’t get power to the computers here, we have to take the computers to somewhere where we can get power.”

It sounded good until I realized he meant literally every computer.

“We’ll only need one or two boxes if I can get all the drives,” he explained. “I’ll need more eventually, but we can come back for them. In the meantime, the data’s the most important thing.”

“What about the medical database?” Kayleigh asked. The idea had been that she would download it onto a portable device. Without power, that was obviously not going to happen.

“I’ll take the drives from the databank as well,” he assured her. “And we’re going to need cabling. When we get back to the City, we can raid the rest of the ship for solar paneling. I should be able to rig a solar generator from that and get one of the machines up and running.”

And so the despair of earlier gave way to the plans of the present. The professor set to work at a near frantic pace, collecting everything he thought he’d need, de-racking the servers one by one, and disassembling them to retrieve their drives. And, all the while, he rattled off his plans—not only for how he would get these machines running back in the trees, but for how he could, with a few more expeditions, restore the ship’s original technology entirely. Fate and destiny seemed to hold no sway over the professor now.

As far as our role in these goings-on, the professor forbade us to touch or interfere with anything except as transport for the items. And he worked us mercilessly when the occasion arose, driving us harder than any set of pack mules had ever been driven. He barked out orders all morning and well into the afternoon.

“Set that over there—and be careful, damn it.”

“Come on, come on, I need it gone sometime this century.”

“Here, hold this. Not there, over here.”

When Matt stumbled over a cord lying across the walkway, while carrying one of the database servers, the professor nearly had apoplexy.

“What the hell are you doing? That’s one of a kind. Irreplaceable. Its value is beyond words. And you want to drop it? Well congratulations, you almost single-handedly wiped out thousands of years of human learning in one move. Not even Hitler hit the human race that hard—and he was trying.”

Working with him in general was a special kind of hell, but working for him was even worse. Somehow, though, we made it through the day without strangling him. And he, in turn, had loaded us with as much tech as we could reasonably carry. Then he moaned that it wasn’t enough.

We had two cases, a variety of cables that he deemed necessary, all the major data drives, and, of course, the drives for the professor’s AI system. The sun had nearly set by time we finished, so we camped in the server room for the evening.

The professor’s paranoia, which he had buried in his work, began to resurface. He woke us all up during the night, insisting he’d seen something—someone—skulking about in the hall. A quick survey of the hall turned up nothing at all though.

Still, it was enough to ensure we didn’t get much sleep after that. the professor, I think, got none at all. The next morning, he rose an irritable bundle of nerves with a single goal in mind: returning to safety with his precious machines as fast as he could.

“We still have to check the flight deck,” Connor reminded him.

“Why? If Sanders wasn’t able to find anything useful, how are we going to? We have a responsibility, not only to ourselves, but to the future of humanity, to the intellectual legacy of mankind, to get out of here in one piece.”

He found no sympathetic listeners though. He could convince no one to leave before seeing what lay beyond that last set of doors.

We secured the server room after us, both to keep its contents out of cannibal hands, and also to preserve it for our return trip. Then we headed to the flight deck. Here again, we relied on the mechanical input to open the doors, for the digital panel had been wrecked. The ruined keypad, though inoperable, still had power—a revelation that set the professor off on a tirade against the Genesis’s power distribution scheme and the “incompetent bureaucrats” who approved it in the first place.

His computers, apparently, had been assigned to the Tier II grid, which meant they were prioritized beneath the life support systems and locks. In practical terms, that meant in situations like our present one, where we had limited power due to the solar panels receiving minimal amounts of light per day, the needs of the cryopods and door panels came before the nonessential computers. In the professor’s mind, this was a problem.

And again, he found we were unsympathetic to his way of thinking.

Still, he hadn’t been too far off about the flight deck. We found things much as Sanders described them. The aircraft—a few helicopters and small planes—were scattered across the deck, some still fastened in place but many having slid toward the downward end of the hanger. Most had come to some damage in the original landing, but with the right tools, it would largely be repairable. Being up-mountain of the cannibals, however, meant we could do little without attracting attention to ourselves…and winding up someone’s dinner into the bargain.

But Caspersen wanted to scout the area for weaponry before we left. “Let’s make a quick catalog of everything, so we know what’s here if we can ever come back for it.”

She noted the fuel reserves all seemed present and accounted for too. “And that might come in handy later on.” The fuel had been stabilized for long-term storage to survive the trek through deep space; what condition it would be in thousands of years later, we could only guess. Nor could we take any back with us for testing as we’d already hit maximum carry capacity with the professor’s computers.

For his part, the professor did nothing but complain—first about the delay, then our proximity to the cannibals, and how hard he’d worked. He complained about his sore feet and aching back and, of course, about the perceived dangers to his computers.

Even Bak, whose anxiety at being so close to the cannibals had been off the charts since we left the trees, seemed to be tiring of the other man’s whining.

I’d been searching the cockpit of an attack copter and trying to ignore the professor’s protests when he stopped short. The change was so unexpected, since his stream of complaints had basically been a constant since we arrived in the hanger, that I glanced up.

Half a second before I spotted the professor, I heard the shot—one round, discharged from a pistol—ricochet off of something metallic.

A moment later, the professor’s panic-stricken voice screeched out, “Cannibal.”

“Carter!” We all screamed in near unison. Shooting this close to the Lava Dwellers was a sure and certain way to bring them down upon us.

I had already leaped out of the chopper when he fired a second round. I saw, now, his intended target—a fur-clad cannibal, snaking his way through the room for the door. And I saw where the professor’s first bullet had wound up: in the fuel tank of one of the helicopters, directly up the deck from me.

A long slick of fuel streamed out of the bullet hole and down the floor, past me and toward the far wall in the general direction the cannibal was headed. Then, the second round hit the ground. And just like that, thanks to friction and heat, we got the verification we needed that the fuel had indeed survived its time here on Kepler-186f. In a whoosh of flame and smoke, fire traced its way in both directions from the sight of impact, both up and down the deck.

“Fuck. Okay, time for us to get the hell out of here,” Caspersen directed.

We didn’t need urging. The Genesis had been carrying enough fuel to flatten half of Manhattan, and the professor had started a fire on deck. It didn’t really matter whether our skulking friend was on his own or with a crew today. We weren’t going to end up any deader fighting an army of cannibals than we would waiting for the fuel stores to light.

We caught only fleeting glimpses of the cannibal, who, by now, had a good head start on us as he raced for the open end of the ship.

Carter screamed frantically the whole time we ran. “I told you I saw a cannibal. I told you they were here.”

Despite the weight of our packs, fear gave us all the motivation to hustle we needed. We raced out of the ship and scrambled up the ravine walls as fast as we could go.

Our descent upon arrival had been difficult, but the ascent proved worse yet. More than once, one of us nearly plummeted to their death, grabbing for a flimsy handhold or trusting a treacherous foothold. The air grew heavy with the acrid odor of smoke, and glancing back at the ship, great, dark billows emerged from the open end. Fear gnawed at my stomach. Between this and the gunfire, there remained no question about whether the cannibals knew we were here. If the fire and the climb didn’t kill us, we’d still have to contend with them.

Despite the new gear we carried, we made good time. We reached the summit of the cliff and started retracing our steps. Bak led us toward the rear of the Mountain via the pass we’d traversed the other day.

That’s when it happened—an explosion so powerful, so terrible it threw us to the ground like so many rag dolls. I landed hard against a slab of stone and had the wind knocked out of me. The entire mountain trembled underfoot.

Gasping to collect my breath, I tried to push myself to my feet. I made it up, only to be knocked down again by the rocking. It felt as if the entire mountain was collapsing under me. Dust and smoke hung heavily in the air, and every breath choked me. I could see no one. I think I called for the rest of the crew, but my ears rang too loudly to hear if anyone responded.

And then a second noise sounded, not an explosion, but a splitting sound. I was still struggling to understand when, through the dust and haze, I saw the lower peak of the Mountain collapse.

I watched in a daze as foot upon foot of stone dropped before my eyes, plummeting downward.

A hand grabbed my arm, and I started. It was Kayleigh. I saw with relief that she seemed unhurt. She said something—I could see her lips move—but I couldn’t hear the words over the ringing in my head and the rumbling of the Mountain.

She pulled me onto my feet and started dragging me backward. I was transfixed by the sight before me until I realized the ledge underneath us had also started to crumble. Finally, my senses kicked in. I turned and took to my heels with her.

The rest of the crew ran with us. Bak took the lead, scrambling like a terrified mountain goat, leaping over obstacles as if they were nothing. The mountain shivered and groaned underneath us as my hearing ebbed back. But at least we’d reached solid ground, where nothing else fell away.

The explosion had obviously caused a collapse of the second peak, and the extent of the damage beyond that was anyone’s guess. By now, we were so far behind the major peak we could no longer see the lesser. We could only speculate about what had happened.

All I knew for sure was that it sounded as though the world was tearing itself apart, and I was terrified it would swallow us up with it.

We kept running.