Rendezvous With Rogue 719 Read online

  It helped Claudia focus and shake off the dregs of her shock. After about an hour of checking, when they discovered everything was in working order, she began to feel a tiny bud of hopefulness.

  They were alive—so far—and it looked like they might have a little time before that situation changed.

  Maybe just enough time for regrets.

  Maybe enough time to ensure their survival.

  She knew there had to be damage and they just hadn’t found it yet, but she was insensibly cheered by the lack of evidence thus far.

  When Reyes returned some time later with the intelligence that he hadn’t found any hull breaches her cup runneth over!

  Especially when the com-unit squawked.

  “Houston to Inner Planetary Expedition One. IP Expedition One. What’s your status?”

  “Oh my god! The radio’s working!” Shelly exclaimed unnecessarily.

  “I went out and fixed the antenna,” Reyes said off handedly. “It was still attached--just loose.”

  Everyone rounded on him with looks of disbelief just as the auxiliary lights flickered on and lifted the absolute blackness.

  “You went outside?” Commander Wilkes demanded.

  Reyes studied the Commander for a long moment and flicked a glance at the other crewmembers staring at him. “You said check for damage.”

  “I didn’t …. Never mind. What does it look like out there?”

  “More ice than I’ve seen in one place in my life,” Reyes said with a touch of humor. “Pretty much like we landed on the North Pole.”

  “The ship?” Wilkes prompted with more than a touch of impatience.

  Reyes sobered. “Air pressure’s dropping—really slow, but still dropping. I think we’ll be stuck in the suits until it can track the breach down and seal it.”

  “We’re lucky it’s just minimal damage we have to worry about,” Wilkes said after a long moment.

  “Actually it looks pretty bad on the outside, but it seems to be mostly cosmetic damage.”

  In a way, Claudia agreed with the assessment—no major holes meant they got down in one piece and everybody made it. Hairline fractures were hard to track down, though, and they indicated a weakening in the hull integrity that didn’t bode well for the possibility of blasting off the rock they’d landed on even if they found the wherewithal to do that.

  Of course that possibility, as far as she knew, was virtually nil anyway, but any cracks could be critical if they did manage to launch because they weren’t likely to hold together long.

  “Let’s just focus right now on repairing the most critical damages first and work back to least important. Once we have that much taken care of we can assess our supply situation.

  “Adams—tell Houston—mission accomplished—we’re pretty sure we’ve discovered what caused the disturbance in the ort cloud.”

  Chapter Two

  Claudia didn’t know about the others, but even the focus on survival—at least in the near term—was barely enough to keep hysteria at bay. She managed to control her terror sufficiently, she hoped, to be thorough in the tasks assigned to her. But the fear and frightening questions clawed at the back of her mind the entire time they worked on securing the ship.

  They’d been almost miraculously lucky. The ship was damaged but repairable—at least as far as they’d been able to determine.

  It should have been scattered in pieces all over the surface of the rock they’d ‘landed’ on. The air pressure was minimal due to the fact that most of the atmosphere was frozen—assuming it had atmosphere. But their calculations put the size and mass very close to Earth’s and it had gravity very close to Earth’s—which explained why they hadn’t had enough power to break the pull.

  Not that they had any way to launch the ship into space again even though it at least seemed to be space worthy.

  They might have if they hadn’t had to ditch the hab wheel, but they had—and it was either still in space—maybe orbiting this rogue world—or scattered all over the place like the main hub should have been but thankfully wasn’t.

  Houston contacted them for a status report hours into their clean-up efforts and they were able to give them an updated, fairly comprehensive report.

  Fourteen hours after their forced landing/controlled crash, Houston responded and told them to ‘hold tight’ they were working on the problem.

  The five man crew exchanged long, speaking glances at that.

  It was a comfort to hear from home—to know the supply chain/communications system they’d established was functioning as hoped—but they all knew they weren’t likely ever to see home again.

  “Standing by for orders,” Commander Wilkes responded and then glanced at the rest of the crew. “I think we’re secure for the moment and we all need some down time to stay sharp. Try to get some sleep. We’ll go out in the morning and assess the damage from the outside.”

  Claudia was pretty sure she was still wound too tight, despite her exhaustion, to sleep at all.

  Turned out, she was wrong. She dropped from reality almost the moment she closed her eyes and composed herself for sleep.

  As she reached the dream state, a truly bizarre dream began to play out.

  She found herself standing in what appeared to be an orchard, although the trees and even the fruit were unlike anything she was familiar with. Looking down, she saw bare dirt beneath her feet, but there were patches of some sort of short, bluish green vegetation not unlike grass in shape.

  When she looked up at the sky, she saw it was a strange, unnatural looking color—possibly due to the twin stars the planet seemed to revolve around—one orange, the other more red than orange.

  A well modulated male voice that made her heart flutter in response spoke almost directly beside her, making her jump reflexively and whip a look toward the sound.

  He was blue and he was big. Both of those impressions sent shockwaves through her that made it difficult to absorb more for many moments. He had muscular definition—not bulk, but demarcated from a lack of excessive body fat. His chest was bare and hairless or virtually so. He was wearing some sort of drapery that covered him from the waist down—not actually skirt-like or trousers but somewhere between.

  When she looked up, the expression on his exotic face seemed—kind and amused.

  He was handsome enough to send flutters of acknowledgment through her womanly parts.

  His hair was long and inky black.

  He spoke again, gesturing toward the suns.

  Claudia frowned, wondering why she couldn’t understand him. True, he was speaking a language only vaguely familiar to her, but it was her dream. Shouldn’t she understand what he was saying?

  “I’m sorry. I can’t understand what you’re saying.”

  Instead of responding, he reached out—his index finger extended—and touched a spot on her forehead just above the bridge of her nose. When he did, images exploded in her mind and she jolted awake.

  Her heart was thundering in her ears.

  “Your heart rate is way too rapid, Milner. Slow it down.”

  The comment jolted Claudia out of her shock. She sucked in a deep breath, held it a couple of beats and then slowly released.

  “Good girl! That’s much better.”

  Irritation flickered through Claudia, but she determinedly dismissed it.

  NASA’s answer to the danger and distraction of sexual rivalry, apparently, was to choose their crew based on a lack of sexual interest/appeal. Commander Wilkes was gay and apparently completely devoted to his husband of 15 years—or just completely disinterested in the two other males on the crew.

  She could see his point insofar as Johnson went. That man repelled her in every way, on every level.

  Reyes … well she thought he was kind of cute, but he was not only more than twenty years her senior, he seemed to be very happily married with grown children. She couldn’t imagine any interest in either man for the other.

  Shelly Adams was also gay. Rumo
r had it that she and the navigator Claudia had replaced had had a torrid affair, but Claudia doubted it was more than rumor or NASA would have pulled both of them from the program.

  Besides which she was clearly lesbian and the other navigator had been a man.

  The mission—a very, very long one—required team work—which ultimately meant that team members had to be eunuchs or just disinterested in one another on a personal level.

  They seemed to have achieved that part.

  Except Claudia could barely hide her distaste for Johnson since he’d gotten a little too forceful with her during training when he’d managed to catch her in the locker room alone. If she’d been attracted to him—at all—she supposed she might have reacted differently, felt differently, about his forcefulness.

  But she hadn’t been attracted to start with and his behavior had frightened and repulsed her.

  She was pretty sure that was why she hadn’t made the A list and had only been brought on at the last minute because she was the most qualified.

  If it had been up to her, Johnson would have been the one pulled for that display of sexual aggressiveness. But the ‘good old boy’ network was still alive and well. Johnson had a … Johnson … so naturally that boosted his competence immeasurably.

  Being a woman, she had to be twice as good to get half the respect and, unfortunately, she just couldn’t seem to convince them she was twice as good.

  Not but what she wasn’t sorry now that she’d replaced the original crewmember.

  She was very sorry she wasn’t on Earth—reeling in shock over the news that the IP Expedition One was down and not likely to escape whatever fate awaited them on the Rogue planet.

  “Looks like the sun’s up. Check your suit, everybody, and let’s head out.”

  Claudia could see even before the exterior door on the pressure chamber opened that ‘sunrise’ on this world wasn’t anything like sunrises she’d experienced elsewhere. In fact, if Wilkes hadn’t informed her that the sun had risen, she wouldn’t have known it. They were so far out it was almost impossible to tell the sun from any other distant star.

  Almost.

  She could see one that seemed ‘bigger’ in the blanket of darkness and it seemed the pitch blackness that had engulfed their ship had lightened a little.

  She wasn’t entirely certain of the last because the ice reflected the starlight and glowed eerily and that was enough in and of itself to light their surroundings.

  It was also slippery. She nearly busted her ass when she stepped out on the ice.

  Johnson caught her, steadied her.

  It took all she could do to be civil about it since he ‘accidentally’ caught her by her boobs. “Thanks.”

  “Just watch yourself. An injured crewmember is a liability to the rest of us. And I ain’t planning on dying up here.”

  Couldn’t help being a dick, could you? Claudia mentally berated the bastard. She struggled with the urge to ask him how he thought he was going to survive, but it wasn’t good for morale to voice that kind of doubt. And poor morale could kill them faster.

  As far as that went, she wasn’t ready to accept that she was going to die. In the back of her mind she knew there was no hope, but she had to struggle as long as she had strength.

  It was creepy standing in the darkness on a frozen, alien world.

  She knew it just wasn’t possible that there was anything living on the Rogue that could be a threat, but she still felt her flesh creep as if something was watching from the darkness.

  As Reyes had said—it was a lot like pictures of the poles on Earth. Like him, she only knew it through pictures because she’d never visited either one, but a frozen landscape was a frozen landscape. There weren’t a lot of features besides the ice and the sky—which looked like a night sky.

  It was still alien to her because she’d never actually been to either pole—on Earth or Mars.

  To the good—there was nothing living going to come out of the dark with the intention of having her for dinner. It was a dead world. It couldn’t be anything else when it had been drifting through space god only knew how long.

  She was able to focus on searching the hull of the ship when she finally managed to get into position near the nose of the craft.

  Wilkes had decided they should work their way down as a group to try to avoid missing anything since visibility was extremely limited. It seemed like sound logic—although the overlapping search was also somewhat awkward.

  Shelly, stationed inside, called the thirty minute mark.

  Everyone checked the readings on their suits and then headed back to the airlock.

  Claudia turned as she entered, scanning the deep gray and white landscape.

  An image arose in her mind strong enough to blind her to the visible spectrum for a handful of seconds and then it vanished before her brain could even fully process it.

  Frowning, struggling to pull it back, make it fully form, she made her way back to her post, but she was only partially successful.

  Still, she knew it wasn’t anything from her dream. It was an entirely different image and it conjured more than curiosity. It conjured fear.

  Was it just … dreams? Imagination?

  Or was she dealing with a psychotic break brought on by the shock of the crash? Hallucinations brought on by something dangerous going on inside her?

  She didn’t know, but she was afraid to say anything to the others and that made it even harder to deal with or dismiss.

  * * * *

  They had two week’s worth of emergency rations in the ship/main hub, which was a delightful surprise to Claudia who hadn’t thought they had that much. They’d been too shook up from the crash and too focused on testing the integrity of the hull and affecting repairs as needed to devote much time to thoughts of the food and water issues. They’d just grabbed rations and gulped them down when they had a moment to attend to grumbling stomachs. By the third day, however, they’d settled enough from fear of immediate threat to be able to begin considering more long term survival.

  For that, they needed food and they didn’t have a hell of a lot of it.

  It was at this point that Reyes volunteered the information that he’d reprogrammed the small booster rockets—that had been designed for nothing more than starting and stopping the centrifugal spin of the hab wheel and minor positioning adjustments—to swivel toward the planet’s surface and fire short bursts as it went down in an attempt to slow it down.

  Claudia’s heart leapt with hope, briefly, until it occurred to her that they didn’t know if it had helped bring the hab wheel down with sufficient control that suggested a possibility, at least, that supplies could be found and recovered or not.

  “When did you intend to report this?” Commander Wilkes asked in a voice rife with suspicion.

  Reyes gaped at him in surprise and then dawning anger.

  Claudia was stunned if it came to that.

  “We’ve been a little … occupied,” Reyes responded finally, his voice tight with suppressed anger.

  “Not too occupied for that kind of report,” Johnson chimed in. “I’d think that would be considered highest priority for most people.”

  Reyes’ lips thinned. He hesitated, but Claudia thought that was because he was trying to get a grip on his temper. “I thought so. That’s why I risked my neck to stay and attempt the reprogramming when we thought we’d crash at any minute. I don’t know that it worked. I just figured it was worth a try … just in case we actually made it to the surface in one piece. But there was no navigation. I couldn’t program any kind of landing or pick a spot. I just activated the beacon and reprogrammed the boosters.”

  Claudia leapt in before Wilkes or Johnson could say more. “Well, thank god you had the presence of mind to do that much! At least we have a chance of locating more supplies.”

  “We might have a chance,” Wilkes said, rather grudgingly Claudia thought.

  “It’s better than zero chance!” Shelly chime
d in. “Thank you, Reyes! We’re lucky we had someone who thought about it and was willing to take the risk.”

  Reyes looked uncomfortable. Finally, he grinned. “Well I figured I’d like to eat if we made it down.”

  Shelly chuckled. “Yes, me too.”

  Claudia smiled with an effort. “Yeah, it’s a bright spot, all right.”

  Wilkes and Johnson both seemed to relax fractionally, but their suspicion of Reyes had unnerved her—confused her, too. What did they suspect him of? Trying to hoard the supplies all to himself? What good would that do him? It was going to take all of the skills all of them had to make it—if they made it. They had to work as a team to survive.

  Of course, if there was one among them that had more survival skills than anyone else it would be Reyes, she was sure, maybe more than all the rest of them put together.

  He’d grown up in poverty and he’d honed his survival skills because of that rough beginning, learned to be resourceful—to use his brain and anything he could find to make or repair to get by. She doubted any of the others knew. She’d managed to piece it together because of a few things he’d let slip, but then she’d actually talked to him on a friendly, personal level and she was pretty sure none of the others had. They’d simply assumed, because he was from a different generation, that nothing he knew would be pertinent to them.

  And wondered aloud why gramps had been included in the mission.

  She’d heard it. She didn’t doubt Reyes had since it was clearly intended for him, but he didn’t seem particularly insulted about it.

  Of course, he could be hiding his resentment ….

  She shook the thought. She wasn’t going down that road!

  “Milner!”

  The command—just short of a shout—jerked her mind back from its wandering.

  “Pay attention! You and Reyes—I want you to collect some ice samples and analyze them. If we’re lucky, the water will be something we can use. Johnson—grab a couple of the drones and let’s do a little reconnoitering. Adams—Keep an eye on the radar. You can help us navigate the terrain. I don’t want to lose a drone.”

  Resentment swelled in Claudia’s chest. She was the ship’s navigator. Didn’t it make more sense to put her on that task rather than collecting ice to analyze?