Citadel: First Colony (20 page)

It was littered with stasis pods.

“Oh my God,” Reilly whispered. “They’re
everywhere
.”

Thomas surveyed the scene, and then looked at the two women beside him. Reilly was clearly shocked by the site of the pods scattered over the terrain. Penny’s reaction was more enigmatic. She was quiet, for once. Her expression, though, was nearly blank. Her face seemed ...
heavy
. Her body language seemed to contradict the expression of her face, however. She wasn’t stiff, as if in shock, but was slightly sagging. Her posture was bent just so, enough that her shoulders sank by a barely perceptible degree.

Thomas wasn’t sure how she would react, but he did what he would do for anyone who was suffering. He reached out to her, placed a hand on her shoulder. “You ok?”

To his surprise, she didn’t pull away or answer with scorn. She stood and stared and slumped, as if she were unsure of where she was or what she should do. Then, slowly, she folded inward, collapsed, fell into his chest and began to sob.

“It’s ok,
shhh
,” Thomas said, comforting and holding her. “It’s going to be ok. I’m sure your parents are fine. We’ll find them, I promise.”

She couldn’t answer as the sobs wracked her body, and Thomas found himself once again feeling ashamed for the way he’d thought of her. Of course, she really was a snot. He shouldn’t blame himself for his opinions. But right now, at this moment, she was a human being who was scared and worried and tired. She might have led a pampered life before, but that had been suddenly yanked away from her. Now she found herself in a life she had not chosen, one that was out of her control entirely.

Thomas could relate.

He glanced at Reilly, who watched in concern for a moment before turning to survey the acres of scattered pods before them. “We’ll never get through them all today,” she said. “But we need to get going. Every second may count.”

Thomas nodded. “Give her another minute, ok?”

Reilly gave a brief nod in return and found a tree to sit against, taking advantage of the slight lull to get some rest.

Penny sobbed a few more times, and then slowly, quietly began to come out of her grief. She suddenly straightened, pulling away from him and turning her face so he couldn’t see. She sniffed indelicately once, dabbed her eyes with her wrists and then folded her arms across her chest as she defiantly looked out over the field of pods.

There was something about her then, Thomas felt, that made her seem
strong
. He had never been one to judge someone as weak because of a show of emotion, but he had assumed that her posture, her arrogance, her purposeful stride were all part of a cover she’d made for herself, and that the weeping and fear were what was really inside of her. He’d been wrong. She was strength, after all. And maybe she was spoiled and had some sense of entitlement, but it was just as likely for that to be the façade and the strength to be the real girl underneath, hidden out of necessity to accommodate her life as a wealthy socialite.

It had never occurred to him before that wealth and social status might be a responsibility of sorts.

“Can we save them?” Penny asked. “Can we wake them up, like you did me?”

“Maybe,” Thomas said. “Reilly’s right, we can’t get to all of them today. But we can try. Let’s get going.”

Reilly rose and joined them as they took up the last leg of their journey to the pods. As they walked, she called Mitch and Alan on the wireless to give them a report. They responded by saying it would be another day, at least, before the shuttle would be fully operational. They could come now, though. Should they?

“No,” Thomas told them, taking up the wireless. “Get the shuttle back to full working condition. We may need to ferry people out of here and back to Citadel a handful at a time.”

The
numbers were growing.
It had taken only a short time to realize that they were going to have to wake people up. It was too impractical and sometimes too risky to leave people in stasis here. Thomas realized right away that in order to accomplish their objectives and keep the people alive, he was going to need all the help he could get. The more hands, the better.

Many of the people they rescued were willing to jump to and lend a hand as soon as they realized what had happened. Some, though, were like Penny. Entitled. Resistant.
Only
, Thomas thought,
Penny isn’t even like Penny. Is she?

Since breaking down at the sight of the pods scattered everywhere, Penny had been different. Still arrogant at times. Still making demands and expecting that people would meet them without question. But Thomas had been watching her, and when she met resistance, she paused as if thinking. He hoped that was it, anyway. It seemed like it. Like growth.

But he couldn’t be too concerned with Penny right now. He and Reilly had their hands full with the colonists as they awoke. They hadn’t brought enough provisions for everyone, and many complained of thirst or hunger or nausea. There wasn’t enough food, water, or medicine to go around.

“There are kits in the pods,” Reilly said. “I almost forgot about them.”

Sure enough, each pod contained a small kit with emergency rations, including bottles of water and a minor first aid kit. As they moved the pods into rows, they pulled the kits from them, and Penny distributed them to people as they awoke.

Soon enough, a few of the colonists had recovered enough from their sleep that they were becoming a work force. And in due time, they had liberated well over a hundred people and had moved the pods into neat rows to be picked up by the shuttle at a later time.

Among the awoken colonists was a man named Taggart. He had been among the first few pods recovered, and he had caught Thomas’s attention at once. For one thing, his pod was different than the others.

It wasn’t the standard issue pod assigned to colonists like an airplane seat. It was tougher. It was built with more safety features, including its own set of atmospheric thrusters and a repulsion drive. The casing was made of the same adamant alloy used in the hulls of starships, and it was quite a bit thicker than the standard, due to the heat tiles. This thing could withstand atmospheric entry.

It wasn’t so much a cryo pod as a miniature shuttle.

Taggart, it seemed, was a man of great importance. But despite this, he immediately took to helping them with the others, even before the effects of cryogenic sleep had fully worn off. He was a fit man with a great deal of stamina, and it wasn’t long before he was out-pacing Thomas and Reilly and the others.

Thomas had to admire him. He was a natural leader. As people awoke, he spoke gently to them, encouragingly. And when they regained their strength, he assigned duties to them. He never made demands. He merely charged them with a duty and then turned away, utterly confident that they would do as they were told.

If anyone bristled, he would smile, clap a shoulder, or maybe laugh lightly and say something to the effect of, “It is tough, isn’t it? It’s hard to pull together after such a tragedy. Thank you for representing the views of these people. You are a good leader to them.” And just like that, the person turned from a potential enemy to a staunch ally, willing to sacrifice comfort and dignity in the aid of others.

Thomas was busy with his own tasks, but on occasion, he would come side by side with Taggart. “You have a way with people,” he said to the man.

Taggart smiled and shrugged. “They do what they do. I make suggestions and offer opinions.”

“Yeah, but they take those suggestions and opinions and run with them because they trust you. That’s not an easy thing to pull off.”

Again Taggart smiled, then clapped Thomas on the shoulder and laughed, nodding. “Too right. You’re a very observant man. And you’re doing a fine job getting these people to safety.”

Me too?
Thomas thought.
He’s handling me too?
He hadn’t considered that somehow Taggart had insinuated himself into a leadership role on this mission. But now he saw it plainly. The way others turned to Taggart for answers and advice, for direction. What, for Thomas, had begun as a bit of truly wanted and needed help had turned into something else. What, exactly? Thomas wasn’t sure, but it was giving him an uneasy feeling.

He returned to the work at hand, but first made his way closer to Reilly. When he and the pilot were out of earshot of everyone else, he said, “Keep an eye on Taggart, ok?”

“Why?” she asked. “He seems like a good guy.”

“Yeah, he does.”

“You think he’s got some kind of agenda? He just woke up from stasis!”

Thomas nodded. “You’re right, of course. I know that. And, I don’t know, maybe I’m being paranoid. But there’s something about him that isn’t sitting well with me. He’s a natural leader, sure. But it’s almost like he’s simply ...
handling
people.”

Reilly was quiet for a moment, looking off towards the tan, well-built man as he helped carry pods and gave gentle instruction to those around him. “ok,” she said. “I’ll let you know if I see anything that doesn’t sit right.”

Thomas nodded and went back to work.

Penny
was trying not to panic.
She was, after all, heir to the Daunder fortune and holdings. It wouldn’t be dignified for her to break down here among these people, the way she’d broken down in front of Thomas.

She felt ashamed.

But below the shame, deeper within her, she felt a rising panic. They had opened hundreds of pods already, and she had yet to find her parents. This was enough to put her on edge, to frighten her to the point of curling up into a ball and sobbing. But it wasn’t the worst of it.

She was unsure if they had ever been on the starship in the first place.

It was too horrible to imagine, that Daddy had gone through with his threat. It had been a joke, surely. A cruel joke meant to scare her into obedience. She was, she admitted, a bit rebellious. She spent her nights on the social scene and had more than once contributed to a scandal. She was known in the tabloids as a “party girl.” Too rich to care about the little people and too bitchy to care about the rich.

But she wasn’t really like that at all, was she? Sure, she loved the parties and the clubs. She loved being photographed everywhere she went. She loved being the center of attention at every event. Penny Daunder, heiress and party girl. But underneath it all she felt she was much more.

She was famous for more than just being a scandal. She was a climber. She had scaled rock faces in some of the most dangerous places on Earth and the Near Colonies. She was also an athlete, competing in competitions on several worlds. Competing and, most of the time, winning.

This she did without her family’s money. She earned her way into these competitions by being good at what she did. Running, climbing, jumping ... the act of physical competition had been her way of rebelling against the pampered life her parents had insisted on for her. It was her way of telling them that she was her own person.

So what if she spent her evenings partying with celebrities and the
über
-wealthy? So what, if on occasion, she had too much to drink or did too many drugs and ended up with photos on some trash news site that no one of any importance ever read anyway? Was that any reason for her father to treat her the way he did?

“I’m cutting you off,” he had told her, as he had on numerous occasions.

She had laughed. First, because he would never do it, not for long. Second, because she had her own money now, thanks to her fame. He could never touch it and never take it away from her. It gave her power, even over him. And she was, after, all, the only child. She was the heir to the Daunder fortune and holdings. They’d never forget that.

But maybe this one thing, this final thing, had been too much. Even for her, maybe she’d gone too far.

It had all started when she had attended the Earth First rally.

She had no real interest in these people or their ideas, but Corey did. Corey, an A-list actor with a hundred movies under his belt, was very active in the anti-colony movement. He attended their events. He threw gobs of money at them. He threw wild, outlandish parties and invited all of the A-list crowd to attend, including Penny. These parties were, of course, thinly masked fundraisers and recruitment events for Earth First.

“Why does a group that’s been around for more than a hundred years need to recruit anyone?” Penny asked during one of these parties. She was spectacularly drunk and more than a little horny for Corey. The two had been dating for three months now, a record for both of them.

“Fresh blood,” Corey said. “A new generation to take up the cause.”

“What a cause,” someone said nearby. Penny never learned who. “We’ve already colonized other worlds. Why are they still kicking that old dead horse?”

“It’s about more than colonization,” Corey said. There was an intensity in his voice that Penny had never heard before. “Earth First wants to reunite humanity. The more we spread out, the weaker we become. Look at this war with the Esool.”

“The war is over,” a woman said. She wasn’t an A-list guest. She was someone Penny didn’t know.

“For now,” Corey nodded. “But what about the next war? What about the next alien species we encounter? How many humans will be born, live, and die out in space without ever knowing what it’s like to walk here on Earth, to feel the sun on their skin?”

This seemed like no real tragedy for Penny. Earth had become the center of things, but it was hardly the best of the worlds. She could think of at least a dozen Near Colony worlds that had cleaner air, better views, more beaches. There was one world, called “Arctica,” where you could ski year round on one of thousands of different mountains. The snow never melted, and it covered the entire world.

“We are spreading ourselves too thin out there among the stars. We’re forgetting our heritage. We’re forgetting who and what we are, and fooling ourselves into thinking we’re some grand species spread across the universe. But we’re not grand—we’re fragile. And we’re in danger. If we don’t pull everyone back home, to Earth, then we’ll soon die out as a species and leave a void in the universe forever.”