Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) Read Free Page B

teenager. Both were just like Evert Rietmuller—very decomposed and very dead. Their youth saddened me more than I otherwise would have been. It made me change my strategy too. From then on, I’d first wipe the info plaques clear before checking inside. This was for one simple reason. Although I wasn’t squeamish—I couldn’t afford to be in my former job—there were some things I never wanted to see again. The corpse of a child was near the top of that list. A dozen stasis pods and a dozen dead later, the plaque read:
    Charlotte Ross
    DOB 21-Jun-2065
    United Kingdom
    Colonist JA-01028
    I closed my eyes, frowning deeply, my mouth downturned as I realized she was just five years old. I shook my head at the lunacy of it all. Why do we humans try to be so damn clever all the time? In the case of the Juno Ark , I knew of course. Many of the reasons for the voyage were the same as for my ancestors that arrived on the shores of America three hundred years before. None of this lifted my heart, though.
    I was done with seeing the dead. They’d yielded no clues as to the cause. But there was one person I needed to find. My only real friend on board: Mike Lawrence. I needed to know if my own Level 8 was the exception or the rule.
    I took a moment to visualize the module’s layout. There were between one and thirteen aisles on each of the twenty levels holding 12,521 people and 12,800 pods—a little over two percent spare capacity. The engineers must’ve been pretty confident in their technology to have so few spares. From the mounting body count, it seemed they shouldn’t have been. At opposing ends of each level’s central aisle were steel-grate stairways up to the next level and down to the one below; it was the same on every level. The hull got narrower toward Level 1 at the bottom and Level 20 at the top—so there were fewer aisles on each level. By time one reached the top or bottom, there was just one aisle on each. It was a natural consequence of the stasis module’s cylindrical shape. Overall, the double-skinned module measured three hundred feet in diameter and the same in length. The population of a small town was crammed into the something the length of a football field, although many times the area. The aisles ran in the direction of the Juno’s axis with. Access to the adjacent modules—Modules 4 and 6—was via link tunnels on Levels 1 and 20. One of my more useful virtues was my good memory. Not quite photographic, but nearly. Mike Lawrence was just one level above me on Level 9. If recall hadn’t failed me, then he was on aisle five, stasis pod fifteen.
    The gloomy, cold place still showed no evidence of life. I listened intently but still had only the sounds of the Juno Ark to keep me company. Before set off, I tried shouting one more time.
    “Hey, this is Luker, colonist zero-one-zero-one-five! Can anyone hear me?”
    Nothing.
    I tried the intercom badge again. My hopes weren’t high, but they hadn’t gone completely. I double-tapped the badge, powering it up from standby.
    “Tiro, connect me with the nearest crew member.”
    My pre-recorded friend replied, “Tiro is unreachable. The communications network is inactive.”
    It was sad but true to say I actually enjoyed the female tones of the intercom.
    Is this the first step to madness? I asked myself.
    I said, “Intercom, initiate direct badge-to-badge communications. Any node.”
    “No active intercom nodes within range.”
    “Intercom, repeat last command.”
    “No active intercom nodes within range.”
    Repeating the same thing, expecting a different result—perhaps that was the first sign.
    Maybe my intercom badge was faulty. I went back and tried Everts’s. Same result: comms network down, no one else within range. I couldn’t face seeing Kate’s lifeless face again and neither intercom badge showed signs of malfunction, so I’d just try again later.
    I needed to keep busy. Sitting still in the deafening silence reminded me how