Surviving The Theseus (16 page)

“I guess we’ll find out if your cloak is
see-through or not.” Rachel smiled. Blair did not.

“Computer,” Rachel said, “go proximity active
to . . .” There was so little space between any of them. “. . . to
ten feet, alarm only, full stop at five feet. Acknowledge, voice
authority, Rachel Winslow.”

“Acknowledge,” said the tinny, female
computer voice of the shuttle. “Proximity active as requested.”

“I think you’re going too fast,” Blair
said.

She smiled at him. “Going as slow as I can
go.” She slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, I’ve used these
proximity controls before. The ship will stop if we get too close.
What scares me is if one moves on us, we probably won’t have enough
time to bolt.”

Blair started bopping his right leg up and
down. “Gee, thanks. You’re so reassuring and comforting.”

Rachel spoke every word slowly and
distinctly. “You are welcome.” She looked over at Blair for a
second, staring.

“What?” Blair said. “What the hell are you
looking at me for?”

Rachel throttled right down and stopped
again, just before they reached the mass of mines.

“Look, Blair, the windows in these shuttles
suck. These ships are probably almost always on autopilot along the
grid, but I won’t be able to see shit, and the proximity controls
will be stopping us every two seconds. We’ll have to abort mission,
because it will take too long.”

“What do you want me to do about it, go
outside and point to them?”

“I don’t suppose that camera outside can be
linked to my monitor, can it?”

Blair nodded. “Actually, it can.”

A minute later, Rachel was looking at the
mines on her monitor.

“I tilted the view so it’s a 180 degree view
forward,” Blair said.

“That is perfect. Thank you.” And she meant
it. The first un-obnoxious thing he had done.

Rachel throttled up one notch, as slow as she
could go. “Honestly, I think if the mines could detect us, it would
have happened by now. I think we’ll be okay.”

Blair breathed out heavily.

Rachel flew for the biggest opening she could
see, which was a hole about twenty feet between mines, and then it
got worse. She flew using the monitor as a guide.

As well as she flew, there was no way to
avoid getting closer. The proximity alarm went off.

Blair started bopping his right leg up and
down again.

The alarm was faint, just as a warning. Five
seconds after it began, it shut off, and two seconds after that, it
began again for a few seconds. This continued as Rachel made her
way through what seemed an endless amount of mines. The mines must
have been two thousand feet deep, but she flew through them with no
problem. The proximity got to five feet a couple times and they
were stopped automatically, but she got going again, getting
through, and continued on.

Twenty minutes later, they were through, just
above the ionosphere. “We’re through,” Rachel said out loud so the
crew below would know. “I’m going to orbit until we find a land
mass we can tube down to.”

A deep voice returned over the speaker.
“Thank you.”

“Blair, find me some land on the monitor in
front of you, as I orbit.”

Five minutes later, Blair found a sizeable
chunk of land. “I got it,” Blair said. “This place has to be at
least eighty five percent water. I think this might be the only
land mass on the whole planet.”

“Lock it in over a low point, center
mass.”

Blair polled for topography on the center of
the land mass and found what he was looking for. “Done,” Blair
said. “Open field, with trees on one side, mountains in the near
distance.”

Rachel disabled the proximity control and set
the computer to synchronize orbit over the coordinates that Blair
locked in.

“All right boys, and possibly girls,” Rachel
said, “we are locked in and you are good to go. Repeat, you are
good to go. Mission time is at one hour and fifty minutes. I’m
estimating we’ll need two hours to get back safely. That gives you
all two hours and ten minutes to get your asses back on this ship.
I leave, regardless, after that time has elapsed.”

“Understood,” came the same deep voice over
the speaker.

“So, explain this to me again, because I’m
curious.” Rachel batted her eyes at Blair and he flushed red.

“Ahhh, okay. It works on electrical current.
Depending on the amount and type of current, the flow will change
in the tube.”

“Yeah, but what is the actual tube?”

“I can’t tell you that. But for argument’s
sake, it’s basically a very dense, semi-solid substance, which
reacts to electricity. It can go several hundred kilometers without
losing viscosity. It’s really quite incredible. There’s nothing
else like it, and it’s only affected by internal electricity, so
the atmosphere, especially the electrically charged ionosphere,
will not affect it. All you need to do is suit up and jump in, and
it will take you at an electrically controlled speed to the
ground.”

“What about falling out? And where does it go
when it hits the ground?”

Blair smiled, proud of his supposed
invention. Rachel assumed it to be the work of many people.

“They can’t fall out. The answer to your
second question will prove this. The amount of current not only
sets speed, but also distance. The video explained this to the crew
going down. The tube device can gauge distance to target and set
electrical flow accordingly. Just before the ground target, the
flow will come back around and over itself, in a circular motion.
It never quite hits the ground, hovering about four feet above so
the traveler can get out. The flow down takes the traveler down,
and the flow coming back up -- a thinner layer, mind you -- acts as
a barrier that cannot be penetrated. And, before you ask, it is
reversed to bring them back; it just means the flow is going the
other way.”

Rachel got the gist of it, but Blair felt the
need to explain further. “That is, the outer flow goes down towards
the planet, and the inner flow goes up towards the ship. The only
intervention I have to make is reversing the flow after the crew
has gone down to the planet, so they can get back up.”

It baffled Rachel how it could possibly work,
but she took his word for it, happy enough to have a general
understanding. Blair was arrogant, but he did know what he was
talking about. “So even though it starts out as the little tube we
put into the hole in the ship, it spreads out, keeping the same
thickness.”

“Yep. Very dense material, yet very light. It
has a consistency near water when flowing, but a little thicker.
You would not survive it without a suit.”

As Blair spoke, Rachel watched on her screen,
linked to Blair’s camera on top of the ship, as the tube descended
through the atmosphere and down to the planet. Seconds later, a
dark shape appeared in the green substance.

Blair also watched. “It looks like the first
one is on their way.”

“I’m assuming,” Rachel said, “that we can’t
fly down to the surface on the risk that the descent through the
atmosphere would fuck up our little invisibility cloak.”

Blair sniffed. “Correct you are. It would
destroy it, in fact, and we would never get back through the
mines.”

Ten minutes later, after the crew had tubed
down to the planet, and after Blair switched the flow of the tube
so the crew could get back, they waited, and speculated, or at
least Rachel did. She assumed Blair did, too.

Rachel pondered what she and Blair talked
about previously. Alien life? Could it be? Why so hostile? Why
would they kill anyone who comes to their planet? Do they think of
us as we think of a bug, or do they have something to hide? And
what makes us think we can get away with what nobody on the Theseus
got away with? She had so many questions, probably none of which
would get answered, except the whole do-they-get-away-with-it
situation. She wondered whether she would have taken the job,
knowing the history of it all. And, if the planet doesn’t kill her,
will the ones who set it all up?

Rachel blankly let things run through her
head, and then, after forty-four minutes, everything went to
hell.

Blair stared at the screen. “There is
somebody coming back up. That was fast.”

Rachel immediately got a bad feeling. It was
fast. Too fast. They wouldn’t come back this early. Yet, there it
was, a shadowy figure moving up the tube to the ship.

They both waited, saying nothing, just
watching the screen. No other shadows appeared in the tube.

“I think we should go down there,” Rachel
said.

“No. We can’t. You know we can’t.”

“My ship, my rules. It’s a need to know
thing. I need to know the situation, because I’m not hanging around
if this ship is in danger.”

Rachel got up.

“No!” Blair said, but remained seated.

“Blair, we don’t know if what came back up
was human. Do you want to wait around and find out?”

Blair got up, slowly. “Fine, but you’re going
first.”

Rachel made her way through the cockpit
hatch, and looked toward the back of the passenger area at the
engine room door. Closed.

As she approached the engine room door, she
listened for any sort of sound, hearing nothing. Her palms sweated,
and she could feel her heart beating in her chest. She forced out a
whoosh of air, not realizing she had been holding her breath until
just then. She concentrated on taking deep breaths.

Blair crept ten feet behind her.

She put her ear to the door.

Blair stopped, five feet back. “D-do you hear
anything?”

“No. Nothing. Fuck.” Rachel tapped in the
door’s electronic keypad code. A red-lighted lock symbol on the
keypad turned to a green unlocked symbol.

She slowly turned the knob, trying not to
make any noise.

A shuffling noise came from the other side of
the door. Or, at least she thought she heard something. She turned
and mouthed the words “Did you hear that?” to Blair.

Blair shook his head.

Her hands were so sweaty, the doorknob
slippery. Almost there. She closed her eyes, putting all her
concentration on the knob not slipping from her grasp and making a
noise, alerting who -- or what -- on the other side.

A moan, only a whimper of a moan, came from
the other side of the door.

The doorknob made its journey, her grip
precariously close to being lost.

Rachel looked at Blair with questioning eyes.
He nodded. She took that as an acknowledgement of the moan she
heard.

She took a deep breath, held it, and quickly
went into the room. In hindsight, not a great idea, being as she
had nothing to protect herself with. But it was done.

The three cylinders loomed above, and below
that, half in and half out of the tube, was a man in a skintight
space suit, with a form fitting see-through helmet. He wore a pair
of glasses on his face. Two tanks adorned his back, fitted like a
backpack. He was not moving.

Rachel ran up to him, Blair in tow and in no
hurry.

She took off his tanks and rolled him over,
revealing a still breathing man, with two bloody wounds in his
stomach. Were they bullet wounds?

What the fuck!
she thought.

The man moaned in pain.

Rachel got his head gear off.

“What happened?” Rachel said. “Where are the
others?”

“D-dead,” the man said in a weak, deep
voice.

Rachel wondered for a second if they all went
crazy. “Who the hell shot you?”

“R-run.” The man grabbed Rachel, pulling her
closer to his face so they were only a foot apart. “Run for your
life!” He said this as loudly as he could muster, which was barely
above a whisper.

And then he died, his head lulling to one
side.

Blair watched, astonished, standing just
above them both. “Jesus!”

“We’re leaving,” Rachel said, standing up and
immediately walking towards the door.

“We can’t. We have an obligation here, to
wait for the rest.”

“You heard him, Blair. He said they are dead.
I, for one, do not want to find out how.” She stopped and turned to
him. “Look, you’re scared, and so am I. Take a breath and think
clearly. We stay, we die. Remember the Theseus. Nobody survived it,
including those that never went to the surface. Someone would have
remained behind while the others went to the surface, and nobody
survived. We’re leaving. Now.”

Blair looked at the body and bent down and
dragged him out of the tube, with some effort, because he was a
large, muscular man. He then turned the power off to the tube.
Whether alive or dead, nobody was coming back off of the planet
surface.

Rachel wasted no time when she got back into
her pilot’s chair. “Computer,” she said, “go proximity active to
three feet, alarm only. Acknowledge, voice authority, Rachel
Winslow.”

“Jesus! That’s fucking suicide.”

“Acknowledge,” came the tinny, female voice
of the computer. “Proximity active as requested.”

“Rachel!”

Rachel throttled up, much more quickly than
when they were coming through the mines.

Blair’s face beaded with sweat. His eyes
looked ready to pop out of his head. “We won’t have enough time to
maneuver if the alarm goes off. What if we hit one?”

Rachel weaved between the mines, using the
screen as guidance. Without looking at Blair, she said, “You are my
eyes, Blair. That alarm goes off, I need to know where it is. Yell
out a direction. Left, right, below, above, front, back, I don’t
care. Just let me know where it is. Got it?”

“But --”

“Got it?” she said, louder.

“I got it.”