A Cold Black Wave (3 page)

The door behind him had its code overridden and Marshall barged in and grabbed Josh.

“Mom!”  He called as Marshall and Harman seized him, his hands reaching out as they pulled him away, but there was nothing they could do.  All Josh could see in the light was his mother’s face turned towards his, the darkness of the shadows replacing her eyes.  A macabre final image of his mother that would haunt his nights thereafter.

Josh had given up his resistance.  He was walking but not willingly, his mind blank as Marshall and Harman led him towards the shuttles like a lobotomized patient.  The Academy had already taken everything that he was and now the last connection he had with the world was gone.  There was no thing or person worth thinking of or caring for, and death called out to him for true escape.

As Harm
an led the way, gunfire
erupted ahead of them and Harman threw Josh to the ground as they all took cover.

“I thought Meyer was holding them off?”  Harman yelled between shots.

“I guess not!”

More ion rifles discharged from across the hallway and burned into the metal walls around them.  Iron and steel sloughed off the walls and choking smoke filled the corridor.  Issa’s men had already made it to the shuttles.  Marshall fired at them but a stream of ion bullets came flying back.  Holes were now appearing in their cover as it melted to the floor in pools of smoldering metal.

Then a round hit Harman in the lower arm as he tried to adjust his position, exposing himself only for a second and long enough for the ion round to burn straight through, leaving a gaping hole and strings of flesh and muscle.  He immediately collapsed and screamed in agonizing pain.  Marshall dropped beside him and produced a stim needle from his belt and jammed it into his leg.  Harman’s eyes flashed open as he came to, his heart pounding with adrenaline as pain-killing endorphins rapidly diffused throughout his body.

Harman went back to the firing position, raised his rifle with his good arm, and let out a rapid stream of gunfire, killing two attackers.  Marshall leapt up, aimed and killed the last rebel as Harman tried reloading, but his left arm wouldn’t respond.  Marshall helped him and they all took off down the corridor again.  Just then, the floor and walls shook as a nearby explosion rocked the ship.

Marshall shoved Harman from behind to move faster, “Go, go!”

“We need the girl too Marshall
, we need the goddamn girl!”

“We don’t have time, just go!”

Once they reached the shuttle bay, the main doors at the entrance had already been blown wide open and bodies were strewn everywhere.  Two guards lay mortally wounded and crawled along the ground screaming in pain as blood pumped onto the white floors.  A wounded rebel lay ten feet away, and Marshall nonchalantly fired a single round into his chest as they passed.

Blood from Harman’s wound spattered to the floor as he pushed forward through the hole of smoke and twisted metal beams to enter the shuttle bay with Josh in tow.

As they cleared the smoke the vast hangar revealed itself.  It was situated at the top of the massive UNC Westbound, with a high domed ceiling and which held the six specialized shuttles that were ringed in a half circle around the outer edges of the circular hangar bay.  Shuttle #2 disengaged from its compression locks and the engine roared, carrying the occupants into the coldness of space.

In fact, all of the shuttles were gone already except for one.  Issa’s rebels had succeeded in reaching the shuttles and selfishly left for their own survival.  If they weren’t immune they would all die anyway, and they had risked the fate of the human race in doing so.  In a way it didn’t much matter now as the only Academy student capable of getting onto a shuttle and immune, was Josh.

“Keep going, we’re almost there!”  Marshall yelled as they ran towards an empty shuttle.  A long ramp stretched towards the docking bay for each shuttle, and Marshall passed the slowing Harman as they ran.  At the foot of the shuttle door, two bodies lay next to each other, their death so recent the skin was warm to the touch.

One of the dead men wore the white and brown clothing of the rebels.  Next to him was a dead civilian, a middle aged man with dark hair and glasses.  They didn’t have time to figure out what had happened here, nor did it much matter now, but Marshall assumed someone had made it into the shuttle and he had to stop them from leaving.  Immediately.

“Wait with him Harman,” Marshall said as he entered the shuttle.  Harman slumped to the ground and pulled Josh down with him so they could take cover.  The wound in his arm was pouring blood and he had lost so much that he could barely stand any longer.

“Just stay low,” Harman said with drifting eyes.  Josh watched the creep of death drawing over his face.

At the blown entrance of the hangar bay, a handful of men and women in rebel clothing frantically ran inside with weapons drawn, desperate to get a ride off the ship as there was only one shuttle remaining.  By now all of the ship’s security details were either dead or tied up fighting elsewhere and there would be no help coming.

“Marshall!”  Harman called desperately.

Inside, Marshall crept with his weapon ready as sweat dripped down his face.  The shuttle wasn’t large.  It was dark, and there were corners.  He didn’t want to take any chances but he had to be quick.  Something moved.  He swung his rifle around and just when he would have pulled the trigger, a girl’s voice squeaked out from a dark corner.

“Who’s there?”  He asked.

“Please ...” Her voice quavered.  Marshall lowered his rifle and peaked around to see a lanky young girl about Josh’s age huddled with her legs to her chest and auburn hair that shimmered tinges of scarlet cascading around her face.

Marshall lived and breathed with every student in the Academy and didn’t recognize her, at all.  He asked incredulously, “Who are you?  You can’t be in here!”

The girl shrunk back in fear and said nothing.

With little time to do anything else, Marshall dismissed her and ran back to help Harman who was lying on his side, aiming and firing effectively at his attackers.  Josh was squeezing himself behind what cover he could find, unarmed and unable to do anything.  Marshall aimed and fired on the rebels with calm precision, and as he did, an incoming ion round burned through Harman’s chest and killed him instantly.  In one swift, desperate move, Marshall exited the shuttle and grabbed Josh
with both hands
and tossed him with ease through the door head first.

A
n ion round blew through Marshall’s shoulder and sprayed Josh in the face with blood as he was standing up.  The rebels scrambled down the ramp to try and get to the door before it closed, a panicked, hysterical group that was now tearing at each other to get ahead.

Josh looked on in horror as Marshall ignored his severed arm and used his other arm to close the shuttle door before pulling the compression lever to discharge it from the bay.

Marshall didn’t say anything as the door closed on the shuttle, but his eyes did as they bore into him in that final second, condemning Josh if he failed in his task.

Then the shuttle shook violently and threw Josh to the ground.

Blood, skin, and bone were plastered across Josh’s face and hair as he tried to wipe it off.  The shuttle shook another time and knocked him over as he tried to stand.  Josh staggered to his feet and took a few steps before falling onto the launch seats, pulling the bar down over himself to lock his body in place.

The girl.  He saw her across from him in the corner, staring up over her knees and crying.  Josh tried freeing himself from the bar but it was locked and he couldn’t figure out how to undo it.

“You need to get up here, like this!”  The shuttle jerked and knocked the girl flat to her face.
 
“Sit over there and pull this bar down, hurry!”

The girl was clearly stunned but realized enough that she had to listen to him if she didn’t want to be knocked senseless. 
S
he crawled her way over to the seat as the shuttle seemed to be on the verge of exploding making it difficult for her to
move
, let alone stand.  She made it into the seat but kept slipping from side to side from the constant motion.  She frantically tried to grip the launch bar and pull it down over her, but the sudden jolts made her body slip further down the seat and out of reach of the launch bar.

The onboard computer announced that the shuttle would engage its engine in five seconds.

Josh reached out his hand as if he could help and pleaded with her, “Pull it!  Pull it now!!”

With both hands and sheer focus, she lifted herself up, gripped the bar, and locked it over her body.  In those final seconds the shuttle turned dead silent, the wisps of their anxious breathing all that sounded in the air as their eyes met in mutual fear.  Then, the shuttle engaged its engine, sending them light speed into the universe like a streaking meteorite.

The shuttle was safely away
from the UNC Westbound, and the ominous colony ship slowly disappeared behind them.  The launch bars released them both from their seats and Josh jumped to action.  He opened the door to a supply room and pulled off his clothes, wiping Wangai’s blood and pieces of bone from his body and slipped into a grey jumpsuit with only the small emblem of the Academy stitched to the left breast.  He took another one and came back to give it to the girl. “Here.  Put this on.”

She stared at him, her eyes distant and unresponsive.

“Are you stupid?  Get dressed.” He tossed the jumpsuit at her and walked away.

The shuttle was small, but it contained three rooms connected by a single hallway.  The main room was the bridge, where they had been locked into the launch seats.  At the end of the bridge were the flight controls, entirely automated by four processors which ran synchronized, but each could be isolated from the others if any individual one malfunctioned.  In theory, the shuttle only needed one functioning processor to operate. Above the controls were three reinforced glass windows that offered them a view of the black ocean, within it the reflecting lights of trillions of ancient mysteries.

The supply room was the largest, containing boxes of food, clothing, and emergency supplies.  Josh stood in the final room, staring inside from the threshold of the doorway.  It was small but held two body-length capsules that were linked to a computer embedded in the wall.

Josh knew what these chambers were from his studies, but now they were in front of him and the repercussions of getting inside one were real.  It was one thing to use them in a simulation and entirely another to use one onboard an isolated shuttle with only a computer to keep him alive.  If there was a malfunction of any kind there would be no instructor to abort the simulation and save them, and there was no telling how long they would be adrift in space.

The girl appeared next to him, having finished putting the jumpsuit on over her clothes.  Josh turned to her and saw a fear and sadness to her that would not have been written on the face of a student from the Academy.

He couldn’t help but stare for a moment.  Her complexion was fair with scattered light freckles over her face and a small nose that seemed to be perfectly rounded at the tip.  Her mouth was slightly open and the corners of her mouth naturally edged downward as if they were staking her lips to the earth.

Something of her innocence gave him pause, and her viridian eyes enamored him with an innocent vulnerability that for a moment made him catch his breath.  He asked sternly, “You’re not from the Academy, are you?”

“The Academy?”

T
he shuttle’s computer stated flatly, "Oxygen will be depleted in 4 minutes.
 
Warning.
 
Insufficient oxygen levels."

Leah held her chest
, “Why are we already out of oxygen?  I thought this was supposed to save us!”

"It is.  Just not the way you think."

"So why are we here?  My dad ...”

"These are cryonic chambers.”

"What?”

“We don’t have time to talk about this.  You and I are getting into these chambers because we have no other choice.  If you were from the Academy ...”

“But I’m not, and I’m not getting in there until you tell me what it is.”

"Our only chance to live," he said as he opened his chamber.  “You get inside.  We live.  Simple as that.  You don’t get in here right now you’re going to suffocate.  Now get in!”

"There has to be another way.
 
We can fix the oxygenator or make contact with the other shuttles ..."

Josh made sure his eyes bore a hole straight through her head as he spoke. "Listen to me.  I don’t know how you got in here but there’s no going back now, do you understand?  We are the last people alive and if you don’t get into this chamber you’ll be responsible for the death of the human race.”  He grabbed her shoulder and pushed her towards her chamber.

The girl teared up and shook her head, resisting the pressure he was applying to get her closer to the chamber.  She said weakly as she pushed back, "I can't get in there.
 
I can't."

“Why not?” he snapped angrily.

Leah began to hyperventilate.  How long would they be drifting in space?  Would she ever wake again?

He spun her around and spoke so absolutely that the words bled on his teeth as they came out. "You’ll be put inside that chamber whether you want to or not.  I will not be left alone!”

He calmed himself after the terror in her eyes reached a more sensible part of his soul.  He continued softly and let his hands slip from her shoulders. “We go to sleep.  We’ll do it together, and we’ll wake up together.”

"Oxygen will be depleted in 2 minutes.
 
Warning.
 
Insufficient oxygen levels."

“Okay,” she said, her mouth quivering.  She stood near her chamber and stared through the glass.  “Okay.  I’ll do it.”

She cried and trembled with fear as Josh opened the glass casings.  Once open, she slid onto the cold mat and lay on her back, the casing slowly falling over her.  The glass would soon be secured around her and there would be no way out and any second thoughts to escape now would only turn into wild panic and she forced her thoughts back from that abyss and remembered Josh’s words, “You get inside.  You live.”

 
Josh slipped into his chamber.

“Wait!  What’s your name?”  She asked just before the casing closed.

“Josh.”

“My name is Leah,” she said.

“You’ll be fine, I promise.”  He said just as the chambers locked shut and sealed them in.

They stared at each other from behind the glass as a hissing sound filled their individual chambers with an air mixture designed to put them to sleep.
 
Josh's eyes became heavy and his body numbed with a dream-like heaviness.
 
The last thing he saw was Leah touching the glass and staring at him with terrified eyes as if she were about to drown.  This would be their last breath.

Then they were unconscious.  The computer system ran its program to put them into cryogenic stasis.
 
A needle found each of their arms and injected a substance that acted like antifreeze.  There would be no heat provided for them in the chamber, only subzero temperatures to halt their metabolic processes.
 
The humid air within the chamber covered their exposed body parts
 
with zyenen solutes, their skin cells absorbing it until the flesh became resistant to osmotic contraction.

The last two humans in existence went into cryostasis for the long journey into the unknown, in search of a miracle or a stroke of improbable luck to save the human species.

The shuttle that carried their bodies forth, a feat of great engineering ability, was constructed with precious metals that required the exploitation of men and land to extract, and which wars had been fought over to retain so that a select few could escape a dying planet.  It was a sacrifice only the privileged were capable of bestowing upon the less fortunate for the greater good.

As the years quietly passed, the shuttle maintained its energy reserves by capturing radiant solar waves, regardless of how miniscule and faint they may have been.
 
In order to conserve energy, only the shuttle’s sensors and transmissions operated, along with sustaining the cryonic chambers that were maintaining optimum living conditions for Josh and Leah’s frozen stasis.
 
Larger energy requirements were reserved for course adjustments and collision avoidance.

At one point, over the course of thirty six years, the shuttle passed through a dead zone that couldn't provide enough energy to replenish what was being consumed.
 
The shuttle went into hibernation which, had Josh and Lea
h been conscious
to know, was the closest they had
 
come to death.
 
Everything was shut down except to provide energy for the cryonic chambers.
 
No transmissions would be sent, no scanning of nearby planets for hospitable conditions, no collision avoidance.
 
It floated along in its last pre-planned course completely blind until, eventually, a sun that was
 
eighty three light-years away began providing increasing levels of solar atoms needed to restore its energy cells.

After that dark period the shuttle became swallowed by the mystery of space, a dark and strange world of colliding galaxies, fantastic supernovas and expanding volumes of amber-colored
 
gas so large it would take them a thousand light years to travel through had they passed into it.  In this void there was timelessness, with time only kept by the light of a trillion stars, quasars and planets that have been traveling through space for billions of years since their inception and even after their death.

The long-dormant console on the shuttle booted to life as information was relayed to its mainframe from the shuttle's outboard sensor.
 
A reading that had been picked up had drawn the shuttle towards a planet with promising conditions for life.
 
Enough detail had been downloaded to begin analysis on the planet's surface,
 
water, and type of atmosphere.

This was the only time the shuttle had ever picked up on anything considered worthy of further analysis.
 
The myriad planets it had passed were too cold, too hot, too violent, too dry, or
 
too toxic to sustain human life.
 
 
Countless trillions
 
of these rocks were all settled into a purposeful orbit among the universe, useless to humans, mere debris that had formed in the cataclysm of creation.

Until now.
 
One possible bright light that was submerged in the abyss.
 
The shuttle corrected its course to take it into proximity of
 
a planet capable of sustaining human life.
 
A program aboard the shuttle, written ages ago by a long dead development team
 
from earth, began executing its programming to take the shuttle into orbit,
 
calculating a course for entry and a location to land its precious cargo.

Inside the cryonic chambers Josh and Leah remained frozen in time, Leah’s hand still slightly outstretched towards Josh as it had been those many years ago in her last cognitive moment.
 
It would take days to fully reverse the cryonic process without damaging their tissue, including their brain cells and vital organs.
 
While the cryonic chamber had been designed to operate for decades, even centuries, it had been impossible to test the effects on organic tissue for that length of time.

There was no guarantee they could be revived at this point or that no permanent physical or mental damage had developed in that time.
 
Humanity's desperate attempt to avoid extinction had taken a long, perilous road into the deepest unknown mankind could ever imagine.

The shuttle computed a trajectory that would allow it to descend through the atmosphere without turning into a giant fireball.  Gravity reached out its irresistible grip and pulled their shuttle towards destruction.  Instead of being torn apart and bursting into flames, the shuttle angled its nose properly, and a white trail streaked across the sky as moisture from the engines crystallized in the freezing mesosphere.

Josh and Leah were in the process of reanimation as their shuttle tore through the sky.  The port side wing had been compromised long ago by space debris; minute rocks spewed forth from an exploding star, having punched holes in it through and through.  The shuttle couldn’t correct its course properly due to the extra drag being induced from the holes and peeled layers of metal, and the console lit up with warnings.  The projected landing sight was now impossible to achieve as proper adjustments could not be made.  The onboard computer processed a new course based on its inability to adjust for the drag tha
t pulled the shuttle to the right
.