Specimen 959 Read online

  Specimen 959

  By Robert Davies

  Text Copyright © 2012 Robert C Davies

  All Rights Reserved

  For Natalie

  Table of Contents

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Prelude

  September 19, 2182

  The Traps weren’t intended to cause pain or discomfort and Doctor Kol was silently grateful 959 would be unconscious throughout the process. On the day of his arrival so long before, it bothered her he had felt any discomfort at all. The other, earlier specimens may have suffered the headaches and soreness, but to Kol, they were impersonal annotations in a scientific journal; they were not dear to her, as 959 had become. This time, she knew, he would feel nothing when he awoke on the other side. The only pain would be hers – and the linguist’s – forced by the stupidity of the Pod Elders to send him back early. She would endure in silence, watching him go for the last time.

  It took only seconds for him to reach the Trap’s radiant envelope as Haleth monitored the machine’s power sequence on a display from the planet’s surface. 959’s abrupt departure would be far worse for the linguist than anyone, Kol thought sadly. She held tight as the Young One fought to hold back the tears, but it was useless. The linguist, trembling in Kol’s grasp, swallowed and blinked through swimming eyes as the Trap activated.

  Far above, 959 sat motionless, strapped securely into his seat; an unconscious passenger no more aware of his condition than he had been on the day he first arrived. The Doctor wondered if he would dream of other things. Would his brain somehow act to compensate for the memories now gone? Would 959 become the locus of fascination, or an object of suspicion and scorn? She hoped with all her soul that his prolonged absence would be dismissed by his people as only the unexplained product of a navigational anomaly and ultimately, the architect of his amnesia.

  Outside the cocoon of his vessel, the energy field began to build. Haleth counted down the final sequence far below and then it was done. The readout went blank. Somewhere across the deep void, 959 drifted alone and asleep, returned to where he began. Kol shielded the linguist in a warm embrace, but nothing could take away the emptiness and despair that gripped her. It had to be, and now, it was finally, mercifully over.

  As they filed slowly from the chamber, the Professor turned quietly to Haleth, holding him as the others walked solemnly toward the lifts that would take them to the upper levels.

  “He is there?”

  “Yes, the return signal was strong; 959’s transit was eventless.”

  “Leave it, now. Do not detonate the Trap’s destruct charges.”

  Haleth frowned.

  “Doctor Kol’s instructions were quite clear on this matter, Professor; the Trap was to be destroyed, once the return confirmation was verified.”

  “I know, Haleth, but she is acting out of fear. There is no way of knowing if it will benefit us later, but I don’t want to limit our options. Say nothing of it for now, but I assure you, she will approve after she’s had time to consider. We can always scuttle it later, but once done, it would remove all our options for a future retrieval.”

  “It could take years, Professor, and there is no way of knowing if he will even...”

  “Perhaps, but I am willing to wait as long as necessary; destroying the Trap is a step we need not take. We both know what is at risk, and leaving the Trap idle may one day make the decision obvious.”

  Haleth nodded and silently keyed in the commands that would put the Trap into standby mode. Where it sat silent in the ocean of deep space, the swirl of dazzling colors faded once more, the machine would wait quietly and faithfully for another time.

  Chapter One

  February 3, 2198 Local

  In the northern latitudes, darkness took its time before giving way, grudgingly, to the dawn. The stunning cold held fast, with little regard for the temporary, anemic warmth that would follow when distant, twin suns finally broke over the horizon on a mineral harvest planet they called SLC-28. Brief and cheerless daylight brought some small relief to those waiting out the days before spring. But soon, temperatures would plummet once more when the night returned. As it had been for a hundred million years, days and nights on that remote and desolate world had passed unnoticed, each blending quietly into the next. It would likely be so for a hundred million more.

  Even in that early hour, the wind was building as it accelerated from the west beneath a leaden sky. Inevitable pellets of sleet and freezing rain, driven onward before the advancing storm, would stab the faces of the unprotected like constant, unwanted companions of a condition that knew little seasonal decline. The wind rose and fell with a lonely moan as gusts coursed unimpeded through barren, rock-strewn valleys. Nothing moved. The dim glow through a thick overcast reflecting off the frozen surface produced a bluish, monochromatic effect that served only to disorient and frustrate depth perception. It was a place surely void of life. Only the snow, sculpted by a relentless wind into graceful arcs and drifts, offered contrast to the exposed striations of brown and red stone angling deep into the permafrost. On the Plain of Horab, winter’s residence went unchallenged.

  The frigid expanse of a drab, mostly featureless continent stretched 3,200 kilometers from east to west, and nearly that distance from sparse, arid lowlands in the south to an ice cap that dominated the planet’s northern polar region. Two small, turbulent seas defined the longitudinal borders separating it from the planet’s larger land masses. Across its surface, occasional, solitary plateaus – smooth across their flat, upper surfaces as though cleaved horizontally by a giant’s sword – joined several low mountain ranges as the only noticeable monuments to ancient, geologic turmoil.

  Between them, shallow gullies and canyons, some reaching kilometers from rim to rim, gave only slight relief to a dull landscape. The scarce vegetation made for bland, high desert vistas that could only have been duplicated in the most desolate of places. No one went there, save for a small army of miners, determined to secure their share of profits to be extracted from the cold dirt.

  At the top of a gently sloped incline nearly five kilometers long, Transit Station 8 stood alone on the road to the ore processing settlement at Demaeus. Darrien Norris looked out from the window of his apartment on the third floor of the habitat, watching a company personnel transport as it rattled to a halt on the far side of the yard, overtaken at last by the swirl of dust that had chased it since its departure from Demaeus.

  In the twilight of dawn, he could not make out the faces of three crewmen who stood beside the six-wheeler, waiting for a dozen grade laborers as they filed quickly from the Operations shack below. They scurried for the big bus, tilting their heads simultaneously like puppets against the cold, cutting wind.

  The station’s pale blue structures straddled a wide, hard-packed gravel road dividing the complex into roughly equal halves. Unseen tunnels below the surface connected each to another by a cat’s cradle of passageways, allowing workers and staff to avoid the typically severe weather when moving from building to building. Unlike most places on the Plain, Station 8’s footprint at the 2,000
-meter summit of a smooth, wind-swept rise afforded its inhabitants an unbroken, 360-degree view of the surrounding valley floor. But there was little to see from that lofty point, other than occasional, distant lights of land vehicles laboring on the road below.

  Station 8 had been constructed atop the remains of an isolated, unremarkable mountain that seemed to have been eroded and sand-blasted smooth over countless centuries by punishing wind storms to little more than a lonely, grandiose hill. A sober, utilitarian place, the station was still an important waypoint and repair facility for transport crews and their Centipedes making weekly journeys down from three open-pit production fields in the north.

  A Mag-Lev rail system would’ve made the task much easier, of course, but that was an extravagance not often found even on the Colonies’ heavily populated Inner Worlds, let alone on remote SLC-28. Centipedes could be cantankerous, but their sheer carrying capacity and ability to traverse the miserable terrain made them the next best choice. With their often eccentric behavior came a requirement for places like Station 8 to keep the ore moving ever-southward to the separators and ovens of hungry processing plants. From Demaeus, refined pellets of high grade ore were uploaded by heavy-lift shuttles to kilometer-long transports in low orbit, loitering until cleared to depart for industrial planets in six Colonial systems.

  Drivers had complained loudly against the prospect of coaxing a broken Centipede uphill when things went wrong with their machines, having sometimes struggled even to make headway on the flat expanses of the Plain. Many reckoned the Station should’ve been built in one of the valleys, so that the reliable, inexorable power of gravity could be counted upon to help pull the reluctant, broken giants downhill to waiting repair teams when engines or drive systems had deserted them at last.

  Instead, planners ignored the logic, insisting on a high-elevation spot to build their facility, serving an illusion of safety to be enjoyed by the visibility in all directions. In the end, they had merely surrendered to the mistaken belief that doing so would help to ward off thieving raiders and land pirates who once preyed upon remote work sites in the early days of the Frontier, long before heavily-armed, corporate security mobs arrived to dissuade the wicked.

  On the north side of the road stood three cavernous repair bays, each nearly 700 meters in length that bore a closer resemblance to military bunkers than garages. Built mostly below ground with gently curved roofs, the bays consumed the north side of the hilltop and were well-equipped to deal with breakdowns suffered by errant Centipedes that had come to grief on their way down from the mines.

  Long, sloping access ramps leading downhill to massive, clamshell doors admitted Centipedes and other stricken mine equipment into each bay for repairs. Adjacent to the eastern-most bay, an elevated landing pad for shuttles, 80 meters on a side, dominated the highest point of the complex. It was flanked by two communications and navigation arrays, still topped with obsolete acquisition lights and anti-collision beacons; each a testament to the past when automatic landing systems were not yet approved for corporate flight operations.

  Across the road, domed administrative and habitat buildings, like wind-lashed grain silos, huddled against the cold where most of the tenant staff spent their off-duty time. On another world, the view from them might’ve been breathtaking, but here, it only served to make worse the feeling of intense isolation that came with employment at Station 8.

  Nearby, ground-level buildings housed the support vehicles and treaded tugs occasionally needed to help pull reluctant Centipedes up the hill to the waiting repair bays. Beyond them, three large storage warehouses and the dispatch building flanked the entrance to the compound from the west. At the eastern edge of the station, a heavy plasticrete barracks for the security contractor’s guard detachment sat opposite an open, flat area for parked service and repair vehicles where the road began a long, wandering descent to the valley floor, curving southward to Demaeus.

  One by one, mechanics and technicians moved quietly through dimly lit, sub-level passageways to begin their day. The walls of access tunnels once gleamed with the sheen of new enamel, but after decades of uninterrupted traffic, a layer of grime, smoke and dust from countless shift changes and maintenance vehicles made it impossible to know for certain what color the walls had been when builders first set and grouted the tiles into place.

  Small groups shuffled through the corridors between the habitat section and the spaces where they tended to the needs of Centipedes. Those about to spend the next ten or twelve hours in the unheated repair bays waddled along in heavy coveralls and bulky, hooded jackets like a gaggle of penguins in a dust-covered rookery. Conversation was often loud and lively among the crews when the work day was just beginning, but starkly muted from others going off-shift, their spirits dulled by the effects of knuckle-busting work on the cold, filthy machines in their care.

  Extravagant pay had always been the most compelling reason men and women took to isolated duty in such harsh conditions, and its lure was powerful; few places in the Colonies could match the money. Laborers and technicians made their way to mineral planets almost entirely for monetary reward, willing to accept a few years of mind-numbing boredom and drudgery in exchange for ten years’ salary and bonuses.

  Unlike the adventurous spirit of Earth’s early off-world pioneers who were as temperamentally suited to living in the wilderness as they were financially compelled to do so, Station 8’s crew was utterly mercenary. They endured the tedium in a colorless wasteland, void of warmth and natural life, solely for the excessive salaries they would earn. Still, the reward came with a cost, measured by hard work in brutal weather that sapped the spirit and ravaged the body with a grinding tedium that somehow, almost imperceptibly, turned hours and days into years. Station 8 was not a place for the restless soul.

  Norris had spent half his life seeing to the machinery that fed Colonial expansion on seven different harvest worlds – some of them desolate and remote places not unlike SLC-28. His first tour was spent as a traveling repairman for Murcer Systems Transport, an upstart company trying to claw its way into a then-burgeoning market, but the bulk of his career was in the employ of the Earth conglomerate, CenturoCorp.

  It was supposed to have been temporary, this business of isolated duty, but the path he had once drawn out so carefully for himself in youthful days had changed. Yes, and he had changed, too. After his unfortunate, early release from military service, Norris figured that staying put for a few civilian tours out in the distant Colonies would bring considerable pay, plus the excitement that would no doubt accompany life as a pilot and engineer in the wilds of the Epsilon Sector. By the time he signed the contract that brought him to SLC-28 fourteen years later, all such notions of adventure had been washed away by the reality of stark solitude on the fringes of human experience.

  With so few life-sustaining worlds, even in the vastness of the Colonies, there was little to ignite the passions of a young man. In the end, nothing could’ve attracted him as forcefully as his ever-swelling bank account. Like his colleagues and co-workers, Norris had given himself over to the inevitable power of economics, discarding the illusory notion of excitement and adventure he once held so long ago. By his own hand, he had come for the money, and willingly so, yet the release from his self-imposed exile grew nearer with each passing day. His contract with CenturoCorp had nearly run its term and with that expiration, the life he had known for so long would change when the early retirement he had chased for well over a decade was finally within reach.

  Norris loitered at the curved window of his apartment, watching through thick glass toward the west as the weather turned. The leading edge of the storm raced onward, gathering speed as it crossed an open expanse toward the hill. The squall line seemed almost two-dimensional; a uniform wall of dark gray, steadily growing in height as it closed on the complex. Even the crest of a distant ridgeline at the far end of the valley, so prominent on clear days, had been swallowed up by the monster as it came on, ever wid
ening. He’d seen a thousand storms like this and felt the power of their fury - it was not a new experience. Still he watched, mesmerized by the hand of nature, unbridled and fierce in that cold and lonely place.

  As he watched the elegant arc of the storm’s snow and sleet, falling downward beneath the racing cloud mass, Norris’ mind wandered to other storms on similar, distant worlds. Time had once held promise for him. Time had been measured in future terms when he was young. Now, it had become an indifferent and thoughtless tormentor, forcing him to look ever backward to a life some would say had been wasted in the distant planets of the Colonies. His cost had been time; years away from family and friends, spent in expectation of an elusive vision that could never be realized. Time consumed by hour upon hour, battling with machines that seemed to wait for those most inconvenient moments to fail, demanding his sweat, muscle and even his blood before they returned to the road.

  The promises of possibility, the counterfeit illusions of youth that tease and flirt with the imagination, became dulled and forgotten - ultimately cast off under the weight of reality as the years passed. He began his journey to the outlands with the aim of becoming a special and enviable man, but he would end it as an ordinary. Time would leave him unfulfilled, except for the money he’d made, but time was running out.

  At last, Norris shook off the bitter, all-too familiar daydream and glanced at the small plastic table next to his bunk where a still-opened book lay upside down. He cradled it gently, frowning at the tattered back that had been broken by a hundred years of mistreatment at the hands of school children and bookstall browsers who held little regard for its delicate nature. On the torn and yellowed dust cover, the title Shakespeare’s Greatest Sonnets had been embossed in thin, silver foil that had flaked almost completely away. The grime of unwashed hands and dust now filling the indentations with a uniform stain, almost deliberate in its appearance so as to give a three dimensional contrast to the letters, made for a drab patina applied by the passage of years.