Broken Worlds: The Awakening (A Sci-Fi Mystery) Read online

  The shortest one he could find was an Asian woman. He stopped in front of her and carefully let go of Cassandra, but she clung to him like a life-raft.

  “Honey, I need you to let go so I can remove her boots.”

  “Won’t I float off?”

  “Not if you stay still.”

  “Okay...”

  As Cassandra released him, Darius bent down and tried to lift one foot of the corpse. The frozen body refused to bend at the knee, and the mag boots had a strong lock on the deck. Darius tried again, and this time he used as much force as he could. Motors whirred to life in his suit, and something inside the body gave way with a sickening crack, but it worked.

  Both boots lost their hold on the deck, and the dead woman floated free. Darius spent a moment examining the clasps on her boots to figure out how they worked.

  Three straps, each with simple mechanical clasps. He pinched the catch-releases to open them and removed the first boot.

  “Try this,” he said, passing it to Cassandra.

  She pulled it on, but her movements started her tumbling in mid-air. Darius grabbed her arm to steady her as she strapped on the boot.

  Once all three clasps were fastened, he asked, “How’s it feel?”

  “A little loose,” Cassandra replied.

  “Try standing in it.” Darius pulled her leg down until the boot made contact with the deck. It clicked smartly against the deck, and Cassandra stood there on one leg, wiggling her whole body like an eel as she tried to get a feel for the boot.

  “I can make it work,” she said.

  “Good.” Darius removed the other boot and helped her put it on. “Now try walking.”

  She took a few ponderous steps before getting the hang of it. “Mega snaz!” Cassandra said.

  Darius heard heavier boots clanking across the deck as someone approached. He turned to see Lisa coming with a pair of rifles.

  “Here,” she said, holding one of them out to him.

  “Thanks.” Darius had left his weapon drifting by the cryo pods. Lisa kept the second rifle for herself, leaving it to dangle by a strap from her shoulder. Blake walked up behind her. He had two more rifles, one hanging off each of his shoulders. “Is the safety off?” Darius asked, turning his rifle over in his hands.

  “I don’t know,” Lisa replied.

  “We’d better try them and see,” Darius said. “Aim at the ground, but mind your feet.”

  Blake grabbed each of his rifles and aimed them at the nearest corpse. Two blinding white bolts of energy flashed out with a crackling roar. Frozen flesh exploded and clouds of red steam erupted from the body.

  “Hey! I said shoot the ground!” Darius said.

  Blake shrugged. “They’re dead, anyway.”

  Darius scowled. He aimed his rifle at the deck and pulled the trigger. A flash of light erupted from the barrel with a loud crack, and a molten orange circle of super-heated metal appeared. Lisa fired her weapon next, also at the deck, with the same result.

  “Let’s go,” she said, already leading the way.

  Blake followed her without complaint. He released his rifles, letting them float at the ends of their shoulder straps, and spent a moment blowing into his hands to warm them.

  Darius hung back and walked over to his daughter. “Stay between them and me, okay?”

  She nodded and ran to catch up with the others. Darius jogged after her. He glanced over his shoulder as he went, checking the eerily standing corpses one last time. What had they been fighting? Was it still on board?

  Until now, the cold had been his primary concern, but with that problem now solved, finding whatever had killed the crew, and making sure they didn’t all die the same way was paramount.

  As they neared the doors of the cryo room, the flashing crimson emergency lights disappeared and a steady white light swelled in its place, revealing the carnage floating all around them in gruesome detail. Frozen clouds of red blood and guts hung in the air, along with severed body parts.

  “Someone is definitely fixing the ship,” Blake said as he pushed through the clouds of human debris.

  Lisa swore under her breath as a floating head bounced off her helmet, and Cassandra made a strangled sound as she passed through the carnage.

  “I wonder who?” Lisa asked as they passed from the cryo room into the corridor outside.

  “Survivors from the crew,” Blake suggested.

  “Maybe. If so they should be able to tell us what happened here,” Darius said.

  “And why we’re here,” Lisa added.

  They came to the T at the end of the corridor and turned down the next to find a bustle of activity.

  “Look! Robots!” Cassandra said.

  Gleaming machines rolled to and fro, grabbing bodies and floating debris with mechanical hands and dragging them away.

  “They’re cleaning up....” Darius said.

  “Did you see them here before?” Lisa asked.

  “No.”

  “Hmmm,” Blake said.

  Darius shook his head. “This is a good sign.”

  “Is it?” Blake asked. “The ship has robots to clean it, so it probably has more of them to fix itself.”

  “In other words, there might not be any survivors....” Lisa said.

  “Exactly,” Blake replied.

  Chapter 6

  As they went through the ship, robots kept streaming out of alcoves and storage rooms, dragging away the dead and anything else found littering the ship.

  “Where are they taking them?” Cassandra asked, watching the nearest robot drag two bodies away simultaneously.

  “Probably to the nearest airlock, kid,” Blake said. “Unless they’re going to recycle them into something useful.”

  “Like what?” Cassandra asked, sounding horrified.

  “Maybe mulch for whatever greeneries we have on board.”

  “Yuck!”

  “That’s enough,” Darius said.

  They continued on in silence, doing their best to identify the different areas of the ship as they came to them by popping their heads through ruined doorways.

  Darius poked his head into what appeared to be some kind of access chute with rungs leading up and down to the different levels of the ship. He counted the number of hatches above them, and then counted the number of hatches below. “There’s fifteen levels above ours, and another five below,” Darius said.

  “Twenty decks? That’s one big ship,” Lisa marveled.

  “Pretty big,” Darius agreed.

  Cassandra stuck her head into the chute after Darius withdrew. “I wonder what’s on the other decks?” she asked.

  “Don’t wonder, kid,” Blake said, shaking his head.

  “Stop scaring her,” Darius snapped.

  “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “No, for a guy who claims to have had a daughter of his own—”

  “Two,” Blake replied.

  “Even worse! Poor girls.”

  Blake gave him an icy look. “You want to take that helmet off and say that again?”

  “Enough. Let’s keep going,” Lisa said. “We need to try to find the ship’s control room. Maybe we can figure out what’s going on from there.”

  Blake snorted. “That’s a good idea, start pressing random buttons on a spaceship.”

  Lisa glanced at him. “I’m not stupid.”

  “You sure about that, Blondie?”

  “Screw you,” Lisa replied.

  “Don’t mind if you do. It’s been a while—cryo and all.”

  Lisa blew out a breath, but said nothing to that, and Darius glared at the back of Blake’s head. He knew the type. Maybe it was dealing with terminal cancer that had made him the way he was, but Darius didn’t buy that. Cassandra had the same death sentence hanging over her and she was an angel.

  As they proceeded through the ship, every so often they found more of those access chutes. They looked wide enough to fit someone in an armored suit, but they all agreed that it didn’t make
sense to go exploring another level until they’d finished with this one.

  After a few more minutes, they reached a second T and started through the crew quarters where Darius had found the jumpsuits. After that, came what looked to be a dining hall, followed by rec areas, and then hangars full of small, aerodynamic spaceships. There were dozens of them.

  “What are those?” Cassandra asked, pointing to the ships from the threshold of the hangar’s ruined doors. A matching hangar with more racks of spaceships lay on the other side of the corridor.

  “They look like the space equivalent of jet fighters to me,” Blake said.

  “So this is a warship?” Lisa asked.

  “Maybe,” Darius said. “Look—those fighters have wings. They can probably fly in atmosphere, too, not just space.”

  “You want to test that theory, Spaceman?” Blake asked, sounding amused.

  Darius bridled at Blake’s sarcastic tone. “I might. I have a pilot’s license.”

  Blake snorted. “Yeah? Is it rated for spaceships?”

  Darius didn’t bother replying this time. He looked away, back to the hangar. Here, the bodies were just as ubiquitous as everywhere else, and it looked like they’d died trying to get to the ships. One of them was halfway up an access ladder to a cockpit, his arms frozen around the rungs, while his legs ended in ragged, bloody stumps, cut off just below the knees.

  Darius shivered. “It looks like they were trying to escape.”

  “Maybe we should too,” Blake said.

  “Even if we could fly one of those ships, they’re single-pilot vehicles,” Lisa said, shaking her head.

  “What about that shuttle in the cryo room?” Blake asked.

  “I couldn’t even find a way to turn it on, let alone fly it,” Lisa replied. “Everything is in another language.”

  Blake scowled. “I didn’t go into cryo to escape cancer just so I could wake up and get eaten by some alien monster,” Blake said.

  “We’re armed,” Lisa replied.

  “So were they!” Blake roared.

  “Alien monster?” Cassandra asked in a quiet voice. “Is that what killed everyone?”

  “What else, kid?” Blake asked. “What rips open doors, tears off people’s limbs, and rips out their guts?”

  Cassandra stared open-mouthed at Blake and Darius glared at him.

  “What?” Blake said.

  Darius gave Cassandra a reassuring smile. “Whatever did this, it isn’t here anymore. Before I came back for you, I found one of the cryo patients who woke up before us. He froze to death. He wasn’t eaten.”

  “So...” Cassandra trailed off, shaking her head.

  “So, if the monster that killed the crew was still around, it would have found that guy, and taken a bite out of him too.”

  “Think again, Spaceman,” Blake said. “If this thing were killing out of hunger you wouldn’t find bodies with their guts spilling out and limbs missing. You’d find bones picked clean. That cryo patient froze to death before the creature could find him, so it didn’t bother with him. Us on the other hand, we’re still very much alive, and one of us is already missing.”

  “Dad, I’m scared...”

  Darius glared at Blake once more. “You don’t know when to shut up, do you?”

  “He’s right,” Lisa said slowly. “But that means we’re not dealing with an animal.”

  “What are you talking about, Blondie?” Blake said.

  “If it—or they—aren’t killing for food, then they’re killing for sport, or some other reason that goes beyond simple instinct. That means whatever we’re dealing with, it’s intelligent.”

  Darius felt his skin prickle with dread at the thought of a sentient alien monster prowling the ship, looking for its next prey.

  “She’s right,” a new voice said.

  Darius jumped and spun toward that voice, his finger already tightening on the trigger of his rifle.

  There was a man standing there, right behind them in a plain black jumpsuit, just like Blake’s and Cassandra’s. He was tall, pale, and thin with piercing gray eyes and black hair that was slicked back from his forehead.

  “Who are you?” Blake demanded.

  Chapter 7

  “I’m Gatticus Thedroux. Who are you?”

  “You’re not from the cryo pods. You must be one of the crew,” Darius said.

  “What makes you think that?” Gatticus asked.

  “Your name, for one,” Darius said. “I’ve never heard of anyone with the name Gatticus, so I don’t think you’re from the twenty-first century.”

  “He’s speaking English,” Lisa said. “Not the language in our helmets, so he must be from our time.”

  “I speak many languages, including the dead language of English,” Gatticus replied.

  “Dead?” Blake echoed. “What do you mean dead?”

  “It is no longer spoken.”

  “So why do you speak it?”

  Gatticus shrugged. “I cannot remember, but I believe the thousands of people in cryo could have something to do with it. I speak other dead languages, as well—Chinese, Russian, German—”

  Darius held up a hand to stop him.

  “Definitely not from the twenty-first century,” Blake muttered.

  “Can you tell us what’s going on here?” Lisa asked.

  Gatticus shook his head and the corners of his mouth turned down in an exaggerated frown. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I have a problem with my memory, and the ship’s surveillance logs appear to have been erased.”

  “A problem with your memory? You mean amnesia?” Lisa asked.

  Gatticus inclined his head to her. “That is an adequate description.”

  “Great,” Darius said. “So you don’t know any more than we do.”

  “That depends on what you know,” Gatticus replied.

  “Do you know what year it is?” Darius asked.

  “Of course. By your calendar it would be the thirty-fifth century. Thirty-four sixty-two AD, to be precise. To the people of this time, it is the year fifteen twenty AU.”

  “More than a thousand years have passed?” Lisa breathed.

  That confirmed Darius’s suspicions. “AU?” He asked quietly. “What does that stand for?”

  “Well, I am translating the acronym, of course, but it means after union,” Gatticus replied.

  “After Union?” Cassandra echoed.

  “Yes, after the formation of the United Star Systems of Orion, or USO for short.”

  “United Star Systems of...” Darius trailed off, shaking his head. “Is Earth a part of that?”

  “As of recently, yes.”

  “So nothing happened to it?” Cassandra asked. “No disasters?”

  “That depends what you mean by disasters. The war left most of Earth uninhabitable for many centuries. In fact, the Union has only begun rebuilding it recently.”

  “I guess that explains why we’re not waking up on Earth,” Blake said.

  “Indeed, I believe it does,” Gatticus replied.

  “What war?” Darius asked.

  “Perhaps I’d better start at the beginning,” Gatticus replied. “There was an asteroid headed for Earth, due to arrive in the year twenty seventy-six AD. It would have wiped out all life on Earth.”

  “Would have?” Darius asked. “You mean we found a way to stop it?”

  Gatticus shook his head. “We built several spaceships and sent them away to other worlds. One was a generation ship, a long-shot headed for Proxima Centauri. The others went to the existing colony on Mars, but before the asteroid could hit, something happened that no one was expecting: the asteroid disappeared.”

  “What do you mean it disappeared?” Blake demanded.

  “Someone intercepted it,” Gatticus replied.

  “You mean aliens?” Lisa asked.

  Gatticus nodded. “Their ships appeared in the sky soon after they destroyed the asteroid.”

  “What happened next?” Cassandra asked eagerly.
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  “We tried to make contact, to thank them for saving us. We sent a shuttle up to meet them with emissaries from Earth. The shuttle boarded one of the alien ships, and we lost contact with it. Soon after that, one of their ships came down to us. It was carrying our emissaries. All of them were dead.”

  “I don’t get it,” Cassandra said.

  Blake snorted. “Seems like a pretty clear message to me.”

  Darius agreed with Cassandra. He didn’t get it either. “They saved us just so that they could kill us themselves? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “The Ghouls and Banshees are alpha predators, born killers. Their greatest pleasure in life is to hunt and kill other sentient species—animals too, but Earth didn’t have any that were challenging enough to interest them.”

  “I doubt we were much of a challenge either,” Darius said. “If they came to us from another star system and vaporized an asteroid that would have wiped us out, then their technology must have been leagues ahead of ours.”

  “To make it more challenging, they typically hunt their prey without any weapons or armor—though they have weaponized their claws and teeth most effectively.”

  “You seem to be remembering a lot for someone with amnesia,” Blake pointed out.

  “My short-term memory of the events aboard this ship is what’s missing, not my long-term memories,” Gatticus replied.

  “You must be from the thirty-fifth century if you remember what happened to Earth,” Lisa said.

  Darius frowned. “You mentioned two species—Ghouls and Banshees. Are they allies?”

  “Even closer than that. They’re Interrelated. They share enough genetic material that they can breed with each other, but their offspring, the Chimeras, are reviled.”

  “Why would they breed with each other, then?” Darius asked.

  “The Ghouls are hermaphroditic. They cycle genders. During their female cycle they become... insatiable. To avoid falling pregnant all the time, they seek male Banshees as concubines. Cross species fertility rates are very low, so it’s an effective means of birth control for the Ghouls. Births do still occur, but the Chimeras are born sterile, and they are either sent away to be raised by other Chimeras, or killed at birth—depending on what their parents decide.”