Chapter 23
Kazi Depot, Kazi
Osara, Ballas Branch
Sure, they were all going to die. But at least Johns got to fuck over Raymond Duke on that way out. That was something.
Inside Kazi Depot, things were a mess. They didn’t have enough room for everyone from the Research Station to have their own quarters, so hundreds of cots had been setup in various nooks and crannies around the main corridor.
They had all seen his video broadcast by then. Johns couldn’t walk ten steps without someone asking him what was going on, how far the helldogs were from their door, or if rescue was on the way.
He didn’t know what to say. What do you say to someone when they ask that? “No rescue, sorry, we’re all going to die here.”
Instead, he told them that he had just sent a message to Osara Prime requesting an update and that he’d let everyone know what the plan was as soon as it was solidified. In truth, the plan was already set. Help wasn’t coming. The only plan that they had was to fortify Kazi Depot to the best of their ability and if, or when, those fortifications failed they would fall back to the bunkers. In the meantime, they’d try to kill the third queen. But with thousands of helldogs loitering around the impact site, the chances of them even being able to make it to the queen seemed slim. But they had to try.
The bunkers beneath Kazi Depot were not going to fit 10,000 people. At maximum, they might hold 500. Maybe 600 if they really pushed it. That wasn’t really any better, though. They’d all starve down there. Their reserves would last them just a few weeks and close-quarters housing like that would breed disease. That might be preferable, though. Maybe they’d all be dead of pneumonia before they starved to death. All Johns knew was that he was keeping at least one bullet for himself.
As Johns analyzed the situation at the remaining impact site, which was swarming with thousands of helldogs protecting the entrance to the queen’s cavern, he was coming to terms with the fact that they were doomed. They didn’t have enough men left to fight their way into the cavern and kill the queen. They’d never even make it into the cavern. They had no explosives left, either. Sure, they could probably cook some up in the laboratory. But there would never be enough to take care of everything at Site C.
These thoughts bubbled around Johns’ head as he went about his work in the warehouse. He was working with a logistics officer on what supplies needed to be moved down to the bunkers when a grizzled long-haired man that Johns didn’t recognize walked up to them.
“Sir, permission to speak?” the man asked.
“You don’t need permission just speak, man.”
“We found something I think you need to see.”
Johns could see the insistence in the man’s eyes. He nodded, and gave a quick vague point of the finger to lead the way. The man led him back into the stacks toward the back of the warehouse. About ten feet from the back wall, Johns could see that there were many supplies that had been pulled away from the shelves and spread out in a semicircle around floor, beneat the bottom row of shelving. Several men stood around, staring at the shelving, then looking down the aisle toward Johns and the man, then back.
The man headed straight for them, stopped, and pointed. Johns pulled up right beyond him and looked. And there they were. Three long, cyndrillical pieces objects, made of composite metal.On either side of the objects appeared to be tracks. Johns recognized them instantly. They were fuel cells.
“Well, looks like some of us might be getting off this rock after all.”
***
When Johns finally made his way across the facility, he found Sara sitting in Command with her head in her hands.
“You alright?” Johns asked. Sara looked up.
“Depends on what you mean by ‘alright,’ I guess. I’m not dying yet if that counts for anything.”
Johns nodded. There wasn’t much that a person could say to that.
“You want to know something funny? I had another job offer on Osara Prime. I took this one because I wanted to be here.”
“Sounds like you made the wrong choice,” Johns said, a smile creeping across his face. Sara let out a chuckle through the light flow of tears.
“That seems to be a recurring theme in my life,” she said.
“Same,” Johns said. He could tell from he demeanor that she hadn’t seen his broadcast yet. “I did something.”
“What did you do?”
“Turn on your handheld. I’ll send you the feed,” Johns said. Sara watched the same news broadcast that Johns had just watched. She made surprised eye contact throughout the broadcast. When it was over, she set her handheld down gently on the table and stared blankly at the table.
“Well…that’s that,” she said.
“That’s that.”
“You’re not worried about causing a panic?”
“No. Well, not really. It might happen. But I think the people deserve to know,” Johns replied. “Besides, it’s been out for an hour. No one has been shooting each other or looting everything yet.”
“That’s why you did this? The people should know the truth? You’re sure it wasn’t driven by some blood fued?” she said accusatorily.
“Well,” Johns said, gathering his thoughts for a moment before speaking. “That certainly makes it easier to do it, knowing that I get some small semblance of payback on Raymond Duke before we all die. But yes — I think the people of Osara Prime deserve to know. Hell, I think people everywhere should know about this. The Core will definitely want to know about what happened here. If these things turn up on another planet in the Core Systems and they don’t know how to deal with it, a whole lot more people than ten-thousand are going to die. If I can save some lives and give Raymond Duke a punch in the gut while doing it, I’ll do that one-hundred times over.”
Sara nodded despondently. She seemed to believe him. Or at least didn’t care what his reasons were.
“What’s the status on the third impact site? Do we have a chance to get in there and kill the queen? Has anything changed?” Johns asked, already knowing the answer.
“No,” Sara said, breaking her stare at the table. “Not really. They seem to be…learning. Before, the helldogs were all hanging out around the farthest reaches of the goo. They pushed as far off of the growth as they dared. But now, more than half of them are hanging back at the lair and impact site. They seem to know that it will be a target.”
“Great,” Johns said, sinking into the seat next to her. “And we used all of the explosives in the bombing run before we knew about the queens. And…well…Rick.”
Sara choked back tears. “We’re all going to die.”
“I might,” Johns said. “But you won’t.”
“Yes I will,” Sara said. “No one is coming. We’ll sit down in those bunkers until we rot.”
“I will, you won’t,” Johns said, pushing her glass of water closer to her. “You’ll be on the Capela here in a couple of days on your way back to Osara Prime.”
Sara looked up, studying Johns face. Her tear-streaked cheeks and nose were red from what looked like a bucket-worth of tears.
“But I thought we didn’t have fuel cells for it.”
“We found some in the warehouse. Some older ones. But still compatible with the drive in the Capela. They’re more than half-gone. Probably just enough to get the ship out of the atmosphere and a bit of thrusting to Osara Prime. The ride will be long. I haven’t run the numbers, but probably a couple of months at least. I have a team working on figuring out exactly how we can support the maximum number of people, and you’ll be one of them.
Sara sat for a moment, her mouth hung open. She closed it, and wiped the tears from her eyes. Johns could see her working through it. It would take anyone some time to process it. She had gone from thinking that she would die in the worst way to know that she was going to get to continue to live. Though Johns had to admit that he was hoping for a little more of a chipper reaction when he explained this to her.
They sat in silence for a few moments while she considered, occasionally taking a sip of her water. Johns buried himself in his handheld to break the tension until she found her words. He felt a bit silly, considering there was no Network connection on Kazi at the moment.
“Why Me?” she finally asked.
“What do you mean?” Johns replied.
“Why do I deserve to go home?”
“You’ve helped us learn everything we know about the Goo. Without you helping us kill those first two queens, Kazi Depot would have been overrun a long time ago, and everyone would be dead. You gave us a fighting chance.”
“How many people does the ship hold?” she asked.
“Maybe 150 if we’re lucky,” Johns said. “We have to fit food and water into it as well.”
Sara nodded and immediately dove into her handheld, flicking her way between screens and using her fingers to write.
“What are you doing?” Johns asked.
Sara held up one finger, shushing him as she flipped through her final few screens. “Kazi has 621 children living here currently.”
“And I wish we could send all of them home.”
“Yes. Of course. But then why the hell would I be on that ship? I can’t be on that ship. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that I got to live while a child…was….ripped apart by those monsters or die from hunger down in the dark bunkers. How can you expect me to live with that?”
Johns looked over his shoulder to make sure there was no one in earshot. Command was still clear. Everyone was probably off having a few drinks or trying to hook up before this whole thing came crashing down.
“Look. I get it. I really do. I wouldn’t want to do it either. But the simple fact of the matter is that you’re the Head Scientist. You know the most about these things. You’ve studied them. Sara, you’re the voice of record on this. Only you and I have been here through the whole thing. We’ve seen everything. We know how it all happened. There needs to be someone on board that ship to tell the story.”
“And why is that? You sent out the broadcast. You sent them all of the data. But they need me? For what?” she asked, her voice raising.
“To clear up misconceptions. To speak to people when they have questions. To represent what happened here. Besides, I can’t send back all children. There has to be some adults aboard.”
“That’s true,” she said, before getting up, tapping Johns on the shoulder, and walking away.
That was what Johns loved about Sara. She cared. She genuinely, thoroughly, gave a shit. That was why he was going to make sure that she ended up on that ship. The system was better for it.
Chapter 24
Kazi Depot, Kazi
Osara System, Ballas Branch
Within a few short hours Johns had the broad strokes in place for locking down Kazi Depot and keeping the helldogs off of their backs for at least a period of time. He knew that no matter how well he kept the helldogs out, the acid from the toads would eventually burn through whatever they put in the way.
See, Kazi depot was nearly a circular compound. There were airlock entrances at various points around the structure. On the front side that faced the rising sun, there were a series to long rectangular windows about four feet off of the ground. They could eventually break their way through the airlocks with a little bit of persistence, but they were most likely to come through the windows, just like they had at the research facility.
Those windows were quadruple-paned, reinforced glass that was meant to withstand the harshest of elements — everything except a pack of helldogs clawing at them until their claws were nubs. They’d get through and judging from how long it had taken them at the research facility, they weren’t going to have much time to prepare for it once they arrived.
Rather than fight the obvious and try to stop them from getting in, Johns embraced the inevitability that the helldogs would easily be able to breach the station and rolled with it. That side of the building all funneled into the Main Corridor. It was the Corridor that ran from one side of the Depot to the other and handled most of the foot traffic in the facility. It was about thirty yards wide.
It was there that they would make their stand.
Johns made an announcement over the intercom that they needed the help of every able-bodied man and woman. First, Johns knew that to have a shot at keeping them from easily making their way into the gut of the facility, they were going to have to slow them down. They started by pulling all of the heavy equipment that they had on hand — vehicles, industrial equipment, furniture — and stacked it in the hallways leading up to and at the beginning of the Main Corridor. These weren’t meant to stop them, of course. They were just meant to log jam them a bit so their flamethrowers could light them up.
On either side of the corridor were various shops and rooms. They were going to use those to their advantage and place flamethrowers and gauss rifles at every entrance. Anyone with welding experience was enlisted to weld the doors off. Of course, if a helldog wanted to tear their way into those rooms, a metal door wasn’t going to stop them. But Johns was going to make sure that they were hitting them from all angles.
As they went farther down the corridor, more equipment was stacked along the walls to funnel the helldogs into a small lane at the center of the corridor. It was unlikely that all of them would go there, as some would undoubtedly just jump over and find alternate routes, but as long as they pushed enough of them together, their flamethrowers would be incredibly effective.
A young man had come up to Johns about halfway through the setup and shown him that he had jerry-rigged loading and unloading drones to fire the flamethrower weapons. This was perfect. They pulled whatever drones they had included in the heaps of equipment and set them up at various points throughout the corridor. They worked with a simple signal. When sent, they fired. All of them. They were either on and filling the Main Corridor of Kazi Depot with flamethrower bursts — god that was weird to think about — or they were off and doing nothing. Anything that they could do to save a few lives sounded great to Johns, so he gave them to go-ahead to set them up wherever they could do the most damage.
But a few cars and carts weren’t going to be enough to stop the helldogs from getting through. To buy them time, Johns had teams pull the giant scaffolding from the warehouse. They positioned those behind the carts and carts and turned them into giant walls by having the welders hastily weld any metal that they could find onto the sides. Behind the metal sheets were shooters with rifles trained at the beasts, raining bullets down on them.
Of course, Johns fully expected that anyone positioned in the rooms or on the scaffolding were going to meet an unceremonious fate. He didn’t tell them that. But Johns knew that they weren’t getting everyone out of here without some serious losses. That was just an unfortunate fact of war.
Another team took metal poles and sharpened their endpoints, attaching them to any surface that made sense. The hope was to impale as many of them as they could when the intital wave came through. He was happy to see that in a few short hours, they had sharpened hundreds of poles. Not every one of them would skewer a helldog. He fully expected most of them to break. But it was something.
Later in the day, while Johns was overseeing the effort to rip off all the doors to rooms in Kazi Depot, so that they could be welded to something in the main corridor. Johns was in a constant flurry of decision making. Every second, a new person had something they needed to ask him. He missed Rick.
An old man waddled his way up to him. He waited patiently while Johns barked instructions at a young man that was helming the torch apparatus.
“Sir,” the man finally said when there was a lull. “Excuse me.”
“Yes?” Johns replied, letting his irritation slip obviously into his voice.
“I’m Cyrus Lennal, former groundskeeper here at Kazi Depot,” he said as he reached out and shook Johns’ hand. “I have something that I think may help.”
“Alright,” Johns said. “Since when have we ever had a groundkeeper? We don’t have grounds.”
“Ahh,” the old man said, smiling. “You’re right. That’s why I said that I was the former groundskeeper. See — until about 15 years ago, we needed one. We had to beat the jungle growth back on a daily basis. We’d beat it back about twenty, twenty-five feet every single day. The next morning, it would be pushing up against the walls of Kazi Depot again.”
“Interesting,” Johns said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, until they found a chemical compound that stopped new growth entirely, eliminating my job. Today I tend bar over at the Strazzy.” Johns nodded but wondered where this was going.
“Anyway, to beat the foliage back, we used all sorts of tools. We had giant custom-built ride-on machines. We also used dynamite.”
“Dynamite?” Johns asked, surprised.
“Yes, dynamite. It was cheap. We’d dig down into the soil, bury them, run the fuse through a tube, and blow the jungle up roots and all. That is also what I think I can help with. See, we had an old storage shed out by the communications station, in a growth dead spot out of the way due to what was inside. In that shed, last I saw, there was maybe fifty sticks of dynamite. I was probably the only person who even knew they were there and I doubt they were ever removed when my job ended. The only thing in that shed was groundskeeping equipment.”
Johns eyes widened. “Wait…you are saying there are fifty sticks of dynamite…in a shed…not far from the communications station?”
“Yes, that—”
Johns didn’t wait for the man to finish. He grabbed him by both sides of the head, pulled him in, and laid a kiss on his forehead.
***
It didn’t take Johns long to mobilize a team and find a puddlejumper pilot to take them out to the site of the old Communications Station. He had taken just two men, not wanting to take away from the effort to fortify Kazi if he didn’t have to.
The impact site and what was left of the Communications Station had finally stopped smoldering. For weeks after the incident a thin whisp of smoke could be seen rising in the sky above where it had once stood.
The three of them slid down the rope and landed on the outer edges of the impact site, where there was still some flat ground. The old man had explained to Johns that the shed was approximately 200 yards back in the woods, directly East of where the secondary airlock had been on the back side of the station. Of course, there wasn’t any station left. That made it difficult to gauge exactly where the airlock would have been. They decided to take their best guess and simply start searching.
Johns used his handheld to access the Communication Station’s blueprints to help them approximate where the airlock had been, then began swinging away at the foilage with machetes. They worked in a line, about 20 yards apart from each other. The hope was that if they spread out some, they’d increase their chances of finding the shed, which was certainly almost completely overgrown after fifteen years without maintenance.
It was slow going. After about an hour and seeing that they had only cut about twenty yards into the forrest, he started to realize just how long this was going to take. It made the stakes a little higher on where they guessed the airlock had been. If they were wrong, they may not even find the dynamite today.
As they cut, Johns thought about what they would do with the dynamite. Obviously, they could use it to blow that last queen to shit. That would be ideal. But it was going to be a little bit difficult to pull that off. Sara had said that there were thousands of helldogs guarding the entrance. Dynamite might be their only legitimate shot to kill enough of htem to get into the cavern and even have a shot at killing the queen.
They could use drones, but that was going to present some problems too. First, they were going to have to strap these pieces of dynamite to the drones. Who knew what condition the dynamite would be in. There was a decent chance that it might be unstable, based on its age.
Even then, they were going to have to figure out how to get the drones safely into the cavern, which was going to mean going through the sphincter with dynamite strapped to it. Then they’d have to get in and get all the way to the queen, landing an almost direct hit to do the necessary damage.
Or they could save them for defending Kazi Depot. If their plan to funnel the helldogs into the corridor, a few well-placed sticks of dynamite could take out a significant number. They probably wouldn’t have enough dynamite to kill them all, but it could certainly make a dent in their numbers.
About two and a half hours after they had started chopping the forest that was regrowing behind them, the young man to Johns right shouted “Got it!” Johns stopped chopping and tried to peer over toward his location through the lush forest.
Johns rushed back out of his own trail and over toward the voice. He pushed the regrowth out of the way and pushed his way down the trail to find the young man hacking away at vines clinging to what appeared to be a small raised metal structure. The third man followed behind him and together they all began chopping the vines away from the old shed, sending leaves and particles flying into the forest around them.
When they had managed to free the enterance from the entanglement, Johns tried to open it. The metal door had been rusted shut and it took all three men pulling on it with all of their might, but the door finally flew open.
There in front of them were four large crates, stacked two-high. Across the top of the boxes it read “EXPLOSIVES,” in big yellow lettering.
Chapter 25 – Send Final Message
Kazi Depot, Planet Kazi
Osara system, Ballas Branch
The blue goo had advanced more quickly than they had anticipated over the next week, cutting their estimated amount of time until the helldogs arrived by nearly three days. Still, they had had plenty of time to continue their fortification of Kazi Depot and, for the first time in a long time, Johns was actually feeling relatively good about where they stood.
He still knew they were all going to die. But they might have bought themselves an extra week or two of holding out before they’d be locked into the bunkers while awaiting sweet release.
Toward the end of the week, Johns had allowed himself one more trip to the ship. His excuse had been that he was going to ready it for transport. The ship could hold 150 with some slight modifications, such as welding in some additional crash couches, which he had tasked those with welding experience to handle throughout the week. He kept it to two guys and was counting on them not to talk about it. If word got out, they’d have a good old-fashioned riot on their hands for a seat on that thing before it took off. Johns had chosen two single men for the job to incentivize them to keep quiet and promised them seats on the ride back to Osara Prime. No family to worry about on Kazi. Since they didn’t have any actual ship mechanics on Kazi at the moment, they would serve in that role should anything go awry. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be needed.
They had decided that they were going to send 145 children and 5 adults home on the ship. For the adults, they had one mechanic, a pilot, a backup pilot, a doctor, and Sara. Johns had wished they could send every single child home, but that just wasn’t going to be possible. Some were going to have to die with them on this planet so that the others could live. It was a reality that he had understood from the beginning. Sara was still coming to grips with it.
During his last visit to make sure that everything on the ship was ready to receive them when the time came, he indulged himself by tuning into the feeds and checking on the fallout of the message that he had sent. To his surprise, the fallout was surprisingly significant.
His message had sparked serious debate across the system about what was happening on Kazi. There were those that said that Johns’ couldn’t be believed due to his past — that it was somehow a trick. That was a development that he had known would come down the pipeline. But there were also riots in several burroughs of the capital. The families of several Kazi citizens were in the press, begging for President Raymond Duke to send help.
As best as Johns could tell, Raymond was thus far standing up to the pressure. At least there hadn’t been an announcement that they had launched a rescue mission. But he had also gone to ground. Other than your standard political-fallout-style response right after Johns’ message had been broadcast to the entire system, he hadn’t commented. That certainly wasn’t helping him at home, but it kept him from saying anything that would make this thing cascade. That was smart of him.
Johns wasn’t holding his breath for help. He knew that in all likelihood it was never going to come. Even if they sent some ships out now, it would be weeks before they got here. Everyone would probably be dead by that point — except the people that went home on this ship.
Johns sat for a moment, weighing whether there was anything that he could do to push things over the edge — something that he could send to stoke the fires. They were close to having public opinion firmly on their side. A small nudge could do the trick.
Johns booted up the dashboard and opened the ship’s lightbeam system. He sat in the chair in front of him, cleared his throat, and recorded one final message to Raymond Duke and the people of the Osara System.
“This is Nicholas Johns. I see that everyone received my last message. It’s good to see that we have the support of the people. I regret to inform you that this is the last message that I will be able to send. The aliens will soon descend upon Kazi Depot and we’ll be forced to go underground into our bunkers. There, we might make it three weeks if we are lucky. We have one ship on the planet. We’ll be sending 145 children, chosen by random drawing, and 5 adults back on the ship to tell our story. If we don’t make it — don’t let this tragedy go unpunished. Nicholas Johns, signing off,” he said, then scheduled the message to send a half hour after the ship was scheduled to take off.
****
Getting the children to the ship undetected by the rest of the station was going to be more difficult than Johns had anticipated. First, there was the fact that these children that would be going home had parents, siblings, and friends that were not going to be going with them. Many of the 145 children would be orphans when they arrived back on Osara Prime.
Sara and Johns had debated at great length how best to go about it. If they told the parents, most would let their child go for a chance to live. Still, others wouldn’t. They would be a problem. At least until the ship was safely off the planet and headed back home.
Parents that put up a fight would have to be restrained and detained until that time. That meant that they were going to need security personnel to help restrain them — which meant that more people were going to be in the know.
Further, this was going to be something that was going to have to happen under the cover of darkness. If everyone was awake and Kazi Depot was bustling, they were going to have a hard time getting the children to the ship without a full-blown riot starting. Even at night, they were going to be going into quarters and waking people up that were sleeping in various corners of the station. They probably wouldn’t even be able to find everyone, threatening the legitimacy of the raffle that they had put together to keep things fair.
All in all, they were doing the right thing, but it was going to be a shit situation regardless.
In the end, they decided that the best thing to do was to bring in a small handful the remaining security officers and to do it as quietly as they possibly could. They would remove the families to the gym in the East Wing, under the guise of a health screening, before telling them the news. Then, they’d inform them that there children had a chance to survive, leaving the planet in a ship. Ultimately, if the parents refused to send their child, they wouldn’t force them. But they’d explain it was their best chance at survival. Then, the parents would be kept in the gym until the children were in the ship and the ship was safely offsite.
There was no way that they were going to be able to stop the word from getting out, and people were going to be sour about not getting the chance to be on that ship. Sara had convinced Johns’ that it was best that they just announced what had happened as soon as the ship was off. Then there would be nothing for them to fight for and they could be mad all they wanted — the helldogs would be at the door within the next 48 hours.
They had decided that the operations would start at midnight. Johns caught a few hours of sleep in preparation, then woke at 10:45 and started to get ready. He could feel a knot in his stomach the size of a small boulder.
He should have felt good about what they were doing. They were saving lives. They were saving children. But that ship was a beacon of hope in the back of Johns’ mind. Once that was gone, he was damning the rest of them to a cold, shitty death — and he hated himself for it.
***
By 3 AM, all of the families had been awoken and were standing groggily in the gymnasium on the east side of the building. They sat in familial groups, anxious to hear why they had been part of the small group that had been singled out.
Johns, Sara, and a stout young man in a pilots suit came in from the office door at the far side of the gymnasium and walked over to stand at the head of the group, Johns’ boots clonking on the wooden floor with each step he took. The crowd in front of them grew silent.
“Thank you for coming here today. I want to ease your fears—I have good news for you today. The best kind of news. But before I can deliver, I need all of the children to leave the room. Children, if you could follow Ms. Sara to the locker rooms for just about five minutes, I have something that I need to discuss with your parents,” he said as he motioned to Sara.
The children and their parents exchanged glances nervously. A few started to mosey their way over toward Sara but many didn’t budge.
“I promise, this will just take about five minutes. I just want your parents to be in charge of how you hear the good news once I’ve told them. It’s just a precaution so no one gets mad at me kids, now please, make your way with Ms. Sara toward the locker rooms,” Johns said with a forced smile. Several parents gave their children permission to go with a nod and slowly, they started to make their way across the gym. “Thank you!”
Johns waited until the locker room doors shut and echoed throughout the gym before saying another word. His gut was cinching up. Of course, what he had ot tell them was good news. They got to go home. Their children were going to live. But they also had to say goodbye. They were probably never going to see them again because it seemed almost certain that everyone was going to die in a few short days.
“As many of you may know, we have a ship, the OCN Capela, sitting on the launchpad. The pilot who had brought it here took a shuttle back to Osara Prime a few months ago. And the ship was here in waiting for a shipment of fuel cells that was scheduled to come here in just a few weeks. We have some good news relating to that — we were able to locate some old fuel cells we had lost behind the stacks, in the back of the warehouse. They have enough juice to get the ship off the planet and out of orbit, floating back toward Osara Prime.”
A handful of people audibly gasped. A murmur came over the crowd. “We’re going to go home!” Johns heard a woman in the front row say.
“Now hold on,” Johns said, holding his gloved hand up to the crowd. He stroked his increasingly unkempt beard. Now for the hard part. “The OCN Capela is a patrol boat, not a transport ship. It came here on a private charter.”
He paused for a moment, waiting to see if the crowd was picking up what he was putting down. They weren’t.
“What that means is, is that the ship can hold 150 people, maximum. And even that is pushing it. But that’s how many we are boarding, because we need to save as many people as possible.”
He watched as the crowd started to look around and survey their numbers. Some understood. For others, it wasn’t dawning.
“There are 10,000 people on Kazi. Of those, 600 of them are children. We figured the only right ting to do was to save the children. We held a random drawing, and the 145 children that were chosen to go on the ship….are sitting in that locker room,” Johns said, pointing. “The other 5 spots are going to a pilot, backup pilot, a doctor, a mechanic, and a science liaison. Only the roles we need to make sure that the children get home safely.”
It rode over the crowd like a wave. Johns could see the realization hit them like a ton of bricks.
“We don’t get to go with them?” one woman frantically cried out.
“No, you don’t,” Johns said matter-of-factly.
Immediately, several mothers burst into tears in the front row, their husbands consoling them.
“You’re out of your fucking mind if you think you get to tell me what happens with my kid,” a red-faced many said as he stepped forward. Several people behind him gave “yeahs” of approval.
Johns nodded and raised his eyebrows while looking at the floor. “That’s fine. If you don’t want them to go, they don’t have to go. It’s up to you. But I’m telling you right now…the chances of survival, if they stay on Kazi, are not looking good. Once these things are at our doorstep, we might hold them off for a few days. Or maybe a week. If we are lucky. But eventually, we are going to end up down in those bunkers, waiting for a rescue that has already told us that they aren’t coming.”
“We’ll take off into the jungle,” the man said. “I know that goo shit grows fast, but not as fast as we can run. We can buy ourselves some time, and figure out a way to stay alive.”
“Sure….sure,” Johns said, nodding. “I thought about that too. And maybe it is viable for one, two, or maybe three people. Maybe. But I’ll tell you, we looked at this as a potential move for the whole station. We just didn’t have enough oxygen and oxygenators to support that many people. But yes, I see your thinking. With a small group and a couple of oxygenators, yea, you could in theory stay out there indefinitely. But you can’t live in an environment suit forever. Eventually, you will need to take it off for something. If you live long enough, the oxygenator might just die. Then the viruses will get you.
And just because you solve the oxygen problem, doesn’t mean that you solve the other problems. Good luck traipsing through that jungle. In the thick of it, at full strength, you might be able to move two miles per hour. Sometimes less. And you won’t be at full strength for more than an hour of chopping your way through. If you haven’t been out there chopping your way from one place to the next, you wouldn’t understand. But let me tell you, I might choose death over chopping through that damn jungle for the rest of my life. Not to mention about ten thousand different types of wildlife that can kill you. There are no good choices here.”
The man pondered what he said, took a step back, and shut his mouth.
“Alright,” Johns said once the commotion had died down a bit. “You can do whatever you want. If you want your kid to stay here at Kazi Depot and not go on the ship, we will go get them out of the locker room for you and you can leave right away. All that we ask is that you not tell anyone until we’ve had a chance to make the announcement in the morning.
The rest of you can choose whether or not you want to say goodbye, or let them to go straight to the ship,” Johns said, and he could see the reaction of the crowd. “Look, I know how that sounds. But if you say goodbye, I know some of these kids are going to throw a fit or refuse to go. And we can’t put a child that is kicking and screaming on that plane. So if you think that is going to happen, my recommendation is that you not say goodbye. Keep in mind that once this ship is off-planet, and with the Communications Station destroyed, we have no way to communicate with the satellite anymore. So you, in all likelihood, will never get to speak with them again.”
More mothers burst into tears.
***
In the end, only three families had pulled their kids from the ship to stay at Kazi Depot. A healthy percentage decided that they needed to say goodbye, and of those, only two kids ended up saying. So 5 out of 145 dropping out wasn’t so bad.
“Don’t we have alternates?” Sara asked as they put on their environment suits to head down the path toward the launchpad.
“No, then we would have had to pull those families into the gym and let them know that their cusp of surviving, but might not get to go after all.”
“That’s five spots, Nick.” she said. Johns raised his eyebrows. No one here called him by his first name and it took him off guard. “We need to fill those seats. That’s five kids.”
“There’s no time. We need to get the ship off this rock as quickly as possible, before the rest of the station finds out that it’s taking off soon.”
Sara stopped in her tracks, squeezing the gloves in her hands.
“I can’t live with myself if five kids die that could have lived,” she said shortly, staring directly at Johns. “I’m going to go knock on doors and find five more kids. I’ll be quick, and I’ll meet you with them out at the launchpad.”
Johns stared at her. Over the years, he had seen many people with this kind of fire in their eyes. And he had learned that if it wasn’t going to ruin everything, to just let them go ahead and do whatever they had their mind set on. It was easier that way, than trying to push back all the time.
“Be quick,” Johns said with a nod and watched as Sara ran off with half of her environment suit still there waiting to be put on.
***
The group of 155 or so people walked down the narrow, chemically-cured path from the back airlock of Kazi Depot to the launchpad. They walked in tight-knit groups of 10, to avoid being picked off by any cereliuns, the local lion-like creature that was native to the area of Kazi Depot. Generally, they avoided humans at all costs. And giants groups of humans would certainly send them bounding off into the thick of the jungle.
There was nothing quite like the night sky on Kazi. The stars and Milky Way shined here in a way they never did on Osara Prime, which was a much brighter and larger planet than Kazi. With almost no significant outdoor lighting, the night sky here looked as bright as Johns had ever seen it.
The forest on either side of the gravel trail was as dark as could be. You could see eyes shining back from the trees, reflecting from the lanterns that each group was carrying. The rocks beneath their feet crunched heavily under the weight of the metallic environment suits.
After about ten minutes of walking, they rounded a corner, and the trail opened up to an open chemcially-treated field. There, in the middle of the field, was the OCN Capela, sitting lit up on the launch pad, shining like a beacon in the blackness. The children were excited to see it, and several in the front took off running for the ship.
“STAY TOGETHER” Johns yelled through the coms channel. If the cereliuns were going to pick anyone off, it was going to be in the middle of an open field.
They walked their way down to the ship, which was already busy being loaded with supplies. Johns had the children line up, and in groups of five they would be loaded into the ship and strapped into the makeshift seats that had been welded into various sections of the ship to to accommodate 150 people in a ship that was designed to carry about 15.
And so in groups of five, the children were led into the ship and strapped into what of the available crash chairs. It took about an hour to get all 140 children loaded and there was still no sign of Sara.
“We’ll wait 10 minutes,” Johns said, and just as he finished saying it, he saw their flashlights round the bend in the darkness and come out from the forest trail. He wasn’t sure at first, but as she got closer, Johns could see that Sara had six children with her, not 5. She better not, he thought.
“Why the extra?” Johns asked insistently when they got close.
“Don’t worry about it,” Sara said, deflecting. Johns grabbed her environment suit. “Let go of me. Right now.”
He did. “You’re not planning on going on the ship, are you?”
“No, I’m not,” she said with a slight sheepishness creeping in.
Johns took a deep breath. “Why Sara?”
“Because Nicholas. I can’t live with myself if I get to live and know that I left some child here to die. I just couldn’t. I’d rather die than live with that for the rest of my life.”
Johns stared at her, tears welling up in her eyes. He wanted to beg her to reconsider. She had to. He opened and mouth and started to say so, but paused and never quite got the words out. It wasn’t going to work anyway. And she was doing the noble thing. Of course she was. He sucked in through his nose, looked down and nodded at his feet to hide the tears that had welled in his eyes. “Alright,” he said.
