Citadel: First Colony (30 page)

Penny knew she was probably letting her experience with Corey impact her judgment of the man, but his
zeal
, his
arrogance
, his
pretentiousness
—it seemed so clear to her now. As she had watched Taggart move through the crowd at the crash site, she had become certain that he and Corey shared some common bond. They were two of a kind. They had agendas beyond their wealth and fame, and they saw human beings as tools.

Penny knew she was considered a party girl by the public. She knew what it was to live one life in the public eye and quite another in private. She had maintained her party girl image over the years because, well, she
enjoyed
it. Just as she enjoyed rock climbing and hiking and competing. It was a
game
to her. It was the social equivalent to strategic sports. But in all of her time as the consummate party girl, mixing-in with celebrities and playing games with the press, she had never felt like she was in the presence of evil until she had met Corey.

And then Taggart.

She shivered once again.

Alan ordered two of the engineers to stay behind with the woman they brought back to base camp. They were to set up camp while the rest of the team moved on to the next pod. This time they would go together for two miles east, then split up to cover more territory as they came to the general area where the next pod should lie.

“We’ll be in teams of two,” he said. “Penny and I are team one.” He split the remaining four people into two groups, and they began their trek.

At the two-mile marker, they split up and Penny found herself alone with Alan—someone who was so different from anyone else she’d ever known, she wasn’t sure how to deal with him.

“Why don’t we have exact locations on the pods?” she asked him, hoping maybe their common ground might make things more comfortable.

“We only have the one platform in orbit right now. We need at least three other satellites to give us triangulation. No other satellites have been launched yet, so we have to rely on the platform’s array to guide us. That means we can only narrow it down to a mile or so. Give or take.”

Penny nodded, then thought. “Wait, isn’t there supposed to be another satellite in orbit already? The probe?”

Alan answered carefully. “There was
supposed
to be.”

Penny thought about this for a moment. “Where is it?”

Alan didn’t answer. Instead he consulted the map. “We’re in range of the pod now. This terrain is kind of wide open. We should be able to spot it. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Penny let it go. He might be under orders or something.
Who cares anyway
, she thought. She had problems of her own.

She had to find her father so she could beat the crap out of him.

––––––––

T
he
pod gleamed in the sun
and as they approached Penny had to force herself not to break into a run. The terrain was rough and treacherous here. A misstep might cause her to twist an ankle or even break something. Years of adventure racing and hiking expeditions had trained her to keep herself in check in rough terrain. She held out.

As they approached, it became clear that something was wrong.

“The pod’s upside down,” Alan said. She could hear a slight tension in his voice.

“Aren’t they supposed to have some kind of stabilizers? To keep them upright and help them land?”

“Yes,” Alan said, picking up the pace a bit.

She matched him. “So if it’s upside down ... ”

“The stabilizers might have failed altogether. This could be bad.”

They reached the pod in moments, and together they took hold of its sides and began to hoist. It took all of their effort, but finally it rocked and tilted, then rolled into place.

Alan wasted no time. He pulled the control panel open and sparked wires together, shorting them to cause the lid to release. With a
woosh
it popped out of its seam, and Alan and Penny practically yanked it open.

Penny nearly screamed when she looked inside.

“Daddy!” she shouted.

The man inside the pod was indeed her father, but he was in very bad shape. The ride to the surface had been a rough one for him, and only the pod’s internal buffers and shock supports had prevented him from being scrambled like a yolk inside an egg. Still there were wounds on his forehead and cheek, where he had collided with the inner ridge of the stasis pod.

“Don’t,” Alan said, grasping her hands as she reached in to try to help her father out.

“Let me go!” she shouted.

“Don’t move him. He may have a neck injury or something. We need to check him out first.”

Penny was vaguely aware that this was a good idea. Some part of her screamed at the slow pace of the process, though, and she felt herself resenting Alan just a little. She wanted to tear the pod away from her father and free him. It was quite a different desire than what she’d felt for the past morning, when she had wanted to hurt him for being at the root of all of the fear and suffering she’d been through lately. Now she just wanted to hug him and have him tell her everything was going to be alright. She’d smack him later.

“P-Penny?” he asked, coming to consciousness.

“Daddy,” she cried.

“Penny, where’s your mother? What’s happened? Why does my head hurt?”

“You’ve been injured, Mr. Daunder. Try to remain still. I’m checking you for internal injuries now.” Alan was a dean of efficiency at the moment, with unquestionable authority.

Penny helped keep her father calm and still by placing her hand on his uninjured cheek.

It took half an hour, but Alan eventually deemed it safe for her father to be pulled from the pod. Penny helped him sit up, and then guided him to the ground as he stepped out and over. He was wobbly and weak but otherwise stable. “Where’s your mother?” he asked again.

“We haven’t found her yet, Daddy. She’s still in a pod somewhere.”

“What ... what the hell happened?” he asked.

Alan spoke up, “There was a problem as we came into orbit, Mr. Daunder. We crashed here. Your pod and several others were thrown out of the colony module. We’re attempting to rescue everyone now.”

Her father nodded. “Good. What ... what about Taggart? Has he been recovered?”

Alan and Penny glanced at each other, and it was Penny who answered, a bit of ice creeping into her voice. “Yes, Daddy. Taggart’s fine. He’s back at the base camp.”

“Good, good,” her father said, slumping against the pod. He looked terrible, weary, and injured. Penny tried to support him as best she could.

Alan moved away from them while he called to the rest of the search team. When they arrived, he had them begin to salvage the food and med kits from the pod. “You should take your father back to base,” he told Penny.

“What about my mother?” she asked.

“We’ll find her. Get him back safely.”

Penny looked at her father for a moment before coming to a decision. “Daddy,” she said. “Go with them back to base. I’m going on to find Mom.”

“Penny ...” Alan started.

She stared him down. “I’m going to find my
mother
. I’m the only one who really knows what to do out here. The rest of you spent most of your lives in a soda can in space. So don’t try to stop me.”

Alan looked at her for a moment, then nodded. He gave orders to one of the team to take Mr. Daunder back to camp, and then he and the rest, including Penny, set out to find the next pod on the list.

T
homas
was cautious around the others.
He kept to himself as he went about making adjustments to Citadel’s systems. He tried not to concentrate on the irony that he was doing work meant to save these people, even though everyone here thought of him as the most vicious murderer of all time.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true, was it? They didn’t know, yet, that he was John Thomas Paris. They only knew him as Thomas. So far.

Taggart hadn’t told anyone yet. It had been a day since their impromptu meeting in Somar’s command center, and Thomas had slept fitfully the night before. Somar had assigned Billy to the same tent, as his guard, though Thomas wasn’t at all sure it would have mattered. If the crowd suddenly discovered his identity, there might be nothing that could stop them from tearing him to pieces.

He fought to concentrate on the work at hand. These computer systems were much more advanced than those of his time, but he had been a quick study. Immediately after coming out of stasis, he had read every technical manual and white paper he could get his hands on. For weeks he had poured over documentation, schematics, and source sites to bring himself up to speed. He had studied computer technology his whole life, and even though there had been many advances since he’d gone under, the principles were still very much the same.

It was the mechanical engineering that was throwing him for a loop.

Who would have expected that star travel would revert back to older, much more ancient technologies? The computers were still there and still vital. But to operate at faster-than-light, racing along the lightrail, required pure mechanics. The nature of faster-than-light travel made it impossible for computers and wireless systems to function. Mankind had to depend, once again, on gears, cranks, pulleys, and hydraulics.

In some ways, this pleased Thomas more than he could say. It was like awakening to find he’d slipped backward—not forward—into time. The first time he had encountered a hand-cranked communicator, he had laughed out loud, prompting strange looks from the people around him. It seemed so archaic and yet so brilliant. It was elegant in design, and yet it functioned better than any device he’d known in his own time. It was enough to make him feel somewhat ashamed of the world he’d left behind, where technology was becoming so much plastic and silicon junk, replaceable at a moment’s notice and, therefore, disposable. This mentality led to even more cheap junk, and before long it was nearly impossible to buy something of any quality. Quality had become an endangered species.

But now, in this time when mankind had returned to technological simplicity and elegance, the earmarks of quality could be seen again. Because resources onboard a lightrail ship could become scarce in an instant, great care was taken to preserve everything, to reuse and repurpose everything.

Thomas couldn’t get over how much had changed. The world, yes. It had no choice but to change, with the mass exodus of many of the Earth’s inhabitants. With the creation of new technologies and the inhabiting of new worlds.

And humanity had changed so much in the past century. In some ways for the better—there seemed to be a unity to humanity that had been utterly lacking in Thomas’s time. But in some ways for the worse—with working class distinctions taking the place of racial prejudices. Thomas wasn’t sure what was worse—bigotry over class or bigotry over race, religion, and gender. Maybe it was impossible for humans to just “be.” Maybe they couldn’t exist without that component of hatred for the “other.”
So in that respect, humanity hasn’t changed so much after all
, Thomas thought.

Then again, as he looked at the elegant computer system before him, framed more in brass and wood than in plastic, and as he noticed the attention that had been paid to every detail and the high quality of every component, he felt that humanity now, once again, seemed to care about the quality of what it built. It took pride in its work. That was something Thomas hadn’t seen in his time. It was a concept that belonged to the world a hundred years before he was born. That was how humanity had changed during his absence—it had gotten a work ethic.

Most surprising, Thomas was startled to discover, was that he himself had changed.

To think that his biggest ambition over a hundred years ago had been to sit in a room with thirty or forty other men and women and watch a spacecraft launch into space! It seemed so useless, so passive now. Here he was now, on an alien world! Not watching it, himself static and unchanging. He was
participating
! He was living his life, it seemed, for the very first time.

It would be a shame if that life came to a sudden and tragic end over crimes he’d never actually committed, over a hundred years ago.

“Mr. Taggart told me,” Thomas heard someone say. He looked up from the computer terminal and saw two Blue Collar workers walking past. They paid no attention to him, and he realized suddenly that he’d expected them to glance his way. He had expected them to say that Taggart had revealed his secret. He hadn’t realized he was so paranoid.

“But how can it be true? I know some of them, and I’ve met a lot more since we got here. I don’t think it’s true.”

“Why would Mr. Taggart lie? What’s he got to gain?” the first Blue Collar man said.

The second thought for a moment. “I can’t think of any reason. But it just seems wrong somehow.”

“What’s wrong,” the first said sternly, “is that you and me have spent more time on this planet than any other planet we’ve ever been to in our whole lives. Don’t you think its funny that we ain’t heard from Captain Alonzo even once since we’ve been here?”

“Yeah,” the second said. “How come?”

“Mr. Taggart says that the alien’s keeping everything to himself. He’s shut off the comms. And the White Collars are helping him. Especially that ... ”

It was then that they finally noticed Thomas, who at this point was making quite a show of being engrossed in the computer in front of him. The two men silently but quickly made their way from his vicinity, and Thomas spared a glance toward them as they left.

This was not good.

Taggart was sowing seeds of discord among the Blue Collars, getting them worked up against Somar. But more than that, he’d tied the White Collars in as the enemy as well.

A civil war between the White Collars and the Blue Collars would be a disaster here. It would hurt everyone’s chances of survival, including Taggart’s. Without the support of the White Collars, things would grind to a halt quickly. So what was Taggart’s game exactly?