Sixth Cycle

  Sixth Cycle

  BY

  Darren Wearmouth & Carl Sinclair

  Copyright © 2013 Wearmouth & Sinclair

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This edition published in 2014 by Phalanx Press. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. The rights of the authors of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Chapter One

  Captain Jake Phillips lay flat on his back, surrounded by a quiet electric hum. He parted his lips and attempted to take a breath. His body failed to respond to his brain’s command.

  He panicked and forced open his heavy eyelids. The surrounding blur formed into an enclosed space. A familiar light pink glowing sarcophagus. Waking from stasis wasn’t supposed to be like this. Flight Lieutenant Mills, the second in command for his Orbital Bomber shift, was supposed to supervise his procedure and open the pod.

  Jake struggled against his inert muscles and stared at the hazy, thick plastic lid above. A distant synthetic female voice mumbled something. He fought with his body. Winced as he flexed his legs. Attempting to cry for help only produced a weak croak.

  A moment later his system responded, and he gasped for air.

  Fully conscious, Jake regulated his breathing. Mills would get his ass kicked for this. He was normally reliable. A solid partner for their six-year mission in space.

  He thumped his trembling fists against the lid three times. No response.

  To his left, a series of cherry red circular buttons ran along the internal wall, lit up by a thin blue neon strip-light. He pushed his elbow against the one circled in yellow. An emergency opening button he thought he would never have to use.

  The lid groaned, shook and raised several inches with a penetrating screech. It smoothly slid to one side with a pneumatic hiss. The overhead lights in the stasis chamber were out. Cool air flooded into his pod. Jake tensed his cramped arms around his body and shuddered.

  He remembered the instructor’s words during stasis training: Waking after two years is gonna feel like the worst hangover in the world.

  Jake grabbed both sides of the pod, pulled himself to a sitting position, and scanned the chamber. A console at one end cast a thin blue glow around the basketball-court-sized room. Out of the twelve pods, his appeared to be the only one with power; the rest looked like metallic tombs.

  The lack of light suggested a skeleton mode power configuration. A crash landing procedure that channeled the energy cell to only the vital parts of the ship after grounding. The stasis chamber to preserve life, and the main communications console that sent out a distress signal.

  If the other eleven crew members escaped or were recovered, why did they leave him here?

  He glanced back inside his pod at two compartments by his feet. One stored a reintroduction support pack. The crew used to joke about using it; Jake certainly never expected to quench his thirst with the water inside.

  He slid open the thin plastic compartment door and pulled out a white metal drawer. It contained a bottle of water, nutrient tablets and two foil energy gel sachets.

  A synthetic voice mumbled again, sounding like somebody trying to talk with a pillow stuffed over their face.

  Jake grabbed the water and twisted off the cap. His fingers stung against its grooves. He popped two tablets out of their foil casing and swallowed both with a mouthful of water. His stomach initially protested and tried to force the liquid back into his throat. He tore the corner off a gel pack, squeezed blackcurrant-flavored slime into his mouth, and swallowed with an exaggerated gulp.

  The other compartment contained a weapon. He flipped up the long thin door, grabbed a rifle he personally zeroed on the range before takeoff, and slammed home a full thirty-round magazine.

  Once Jake established his location, he could inform HQ of the ship’s position. They couldn’t have known because he was still here, unless he was in enemy territory. That might explain the lack of crew. Nothing else made sense.

  He staggered over to the steel bench in front of the console and flopped down. Most controls and readings were out. A few on the central panel remained, but were indecipherable below the faded, formerly transparent shielding.

  The unintelligible voice spoke again. Something about ‘resources’.

  He pressed the console speaker button. It initially resisted, then cracked down after he applied more force. “Captain Jake Phillips. Endeavor Three. Status.”

  The allies kept four bombers constantly in orbit as the threat of nuclear war loomed large. Six-year missions. Crews of twelve. Two always on duty. They rotated in stasis to allow them to stay in space for extended periods. It cut costs significantly and provided an excellent deterrent. He and Mills were the sixth cycle.

  Something had gone wrong. The year was 2075, or it had been when he'd last entered stasis.

  “Fleet Control. Do you copy?”

  Nothing. Not even the confidence ping that confirmed successful transmission.

  Jake groaned on standing and limped to the closest stasis pod. His olive green flight suit felt loose. He tightened up his belt and folded up his collar, protecting his neck from the chill.

  On closer inspection, the pod gleamed. Its black casing and silver trim were polished to the kind of standard he expected. He hadn’t been left here for long.

  Unnatural shapes ran across the floor from his pod to the door. Jake knelt and instantly recognized muddy footprints. Hundreds of them. All with zigzag tread. Somebody, or somebodies, had visited the stasis chamber. The mud confirmed they were on dry land. The trail confirmed him as the person of interest.

  There was no way to tell the freshness of the marks. A hundred-year-old footprint was still visible on the moon. The thought occurred that the ship’s core power could survive two thousand years on skeleton mode. Drip feeding the essential areas. Stasis fried the brain after several decades. All of Jake’s senses were returning.

  Whatever the age and wherever they were, Jake felt an increasing sense of urgency building inside. He needed to understand his situation and react accordingly. The Fleet taught him survival skills on top of his flight training, but this was new territory.

  He shouldered his rifle and decided to move.

  * * *

  Jake’s stiffness and pain reminded him of the morning after his first day of grueling activity at Fleet Academy. His body adapted to the regime as time went along. He told himself this would get easier.

  His right knee buckled, and he dropped to a crouch. He paused to compose himself and squinted through the gloom at the exit pad next to the door. Fingerprints smudged across its shiny black surface.

  Jake reached down to the bottom of the door. A draft gently blew against the back of his hand. The sign of a compromised outer structure, and not the comfortable climate control system that pumped around a fully working ship.

  He shook his head and pressed the pad with his thumb.

  The door vibrated. Seconds later it jerkily screeched along its rails and banged open. Not the smooth mechanism he remembered that confidently punched open at a consistent speed.

  He took a sharp intake of breath and propped his arm against the wall for support. The corridor outside ran along the side of the ship on the front upper deck, with a long external viewing window. It used to be a bright, well-lit space where he and Mills would eat while gazing at the stars.

  White emulsion splashed across the high-temperature quartz glass windows. In a few
places where the paint had cracked and fallen off, thin shafts of light streamed in, providing an eerie ambience. The formerly white walls were a filthy cream color. A mud trail led from the stasis chamber to the end of the sixty-foot corridor, where a larger area of light shone through. One of the emergency exits.

  A breeze gusted through the opening, echoed along the corridor, and whistled through a crack in the roof. A dry leaf danced along the floor.

  Jake pressed his left hand against the wall for support, held his rifle against his right hip, and shuffled forward.

  Thirty feet along the corridor, he came to the entrance of the Endeavor’s food locker and twisted the handle of the thick steel door.

  Its hinges groaned and it opened a few inches. Jake shoved his shoulder against it to widen the gap.

  Natural light shining through cracks in the paint illuminated the stall-sized room. Painted wooden carvings of his ship and a stasis pod were neatly stacked on the metal shelves. A straw broom and red plastic bucket sat in the corner. He cursed under his breath. What the hell is going on?

  The place looked like a second rate souvenir shop. Somebody must be having a cruel joke at his expense. He wondered if his parents even knew he was back on Earth and MIA. They would be the ones that worried about him. To the rest of society, he was probably long forgotten. The isolated career of a bomber crew saw to that.

  Perhaps they were in enemy territory, and the crew were being taken out one by one for interrogation. If so, he would need all of his escape and evasion skills. Guards might be stationed outside.

  He crept to the emergency exit, took a deep breath, put a round in the chamber, and swung to face the outside world.

  The sun beamed through a gap in the gray could sky.

  His eyes immediately shot down. A wooden staircase, four feet wide, ran from the emergency exit to the ground below. Fifty steps were supported by large planks of wood in a lattice formation, like an old railroad bridge he’d seen in twentieth-century films.

  At the bottom of the structure, in a small clearing, a large signpost faced away from him. A well-beaten trail disappeared into woodland behind it.

  Beyond the trees, three industrial metal chimneys poked out of the top of a red brick building. White smoke belched out of the middle one and drifted away on the breeze. This wasn’t like any factory Jake had seen before.

  To the left of the factory, rows of smaller brick buildings with hipped slate roofs formed in neat lines of ten. Maybe five hundred houses in all. A huge stone wall surrounded the whole area, with square towers at regular intervals. Jake’s ship was also inside the perimeter. Definitely a foreign place. Maybe one of those old industrial towns in Eastern Europe. It had that kind of feel.

  Jake scrambled away from the door, crouched against the wall of the ship, and tried to think of a plan. The perimeter wall looked around ten yards high. He needed to find a gate and surprise any guards. Staying in the ship wasn’t an option, and he had to move fast to avoid detection. Whoever was outside probably thought he remained safely secured in stasis.

  If he could get to the cockpit, the communications console might still be working. It could give him a time for when the other crew woke up and a GPS reading. An idea of his location might give a clue to what kind of people he faced outside.

  To his left, at the end of the corridor, a door led to the cockpit located at the front of the ship. Its aluminum coating had split and curled away in parts, leaving strips of dark red rust in its place.

  Cobwebs covered the waist-height, square black entrance pad. Jake swiped them to one side and thumbed the pad. Nothing happened.

  At the right-hand side of the door, behind a small hatch, a winding mechanism provided a way to manually open the door, in case of power failure. Jake knelt and squeaked the decaying bolt up and down. Specks of corrosion dropped as he eased it open.

  The hatch swung out with a swift tug.

  On the inside, an arrow on a faded sticker pointed in a clockwise direction. He reached in and grabbed a handle attached to a small wheel with cable coiled around it.

  The mechanism creaked, but didn’t move. Jake sat with his knees up on either side of the hatch and placed his feet against the wall for leverage. He pulled with as much force as he could muster.

  The handle snapped.

  He fell backwards and his shoulders bounced against the cold floor.

  Tools would be needed, but Jake didn’t want to hang around any longer.

  With his mind made up, he decided to move with conviction. He hadn’t shot up the ranks by messing around. If something needed to be done, he was the man for the job. This was his own personal job. Improvise, adapt and overcome.

  The platform at the top of the staircase felt sturdy. Jake surveyed the areas below through his sights and descended, placing his feet gently down on each step.

  Trees rustled in the breeze and birds tweeted, but he couldn’t detect any human sounds. As he got lower, the trees obscured the buildings.

  Halfway down, he glanced over his shoulder at the ship.

  The black exterior of the three-hundred-foot, arrow-shaped vessel had turned charcoal gray. The ships markings were enhanced with white paint. None of it made sense.

  Something clanked in the distance, like a hammer striking a block of iron.

  Jake moved with urgency to the bottom of the staircase. He sprinted across the clearing and ducked behind a large tree next to the trail. Footprints led to and from the town. At least he knew the location of the visitors, but who and why remained a mystery.

  He looked back at the signpost in front of his ship and gasped. An arrow pointed to the staircase, and the words ‘Come and see Earth’s oldest man!’ were daubed below it in green paint.

  Chapter Two

  Skye Reed passed the dead oak tree and shivered, an unwelcome reminder that she was home. The warm humid air ignited the scents of wet moss and pinecones. Fresh rain hid the usually strong stench of decaying undergrowth and clay. The downpour softened the pine needles, masking her progress through the forest. They would not hear her coming.

  Three people passed this way less than an hour ago, dragging another. To an untrained eye it would be impossible to tell. Skye had tracked this forest for years. A stone out of place, a broken twig or muddy imprint would be missed by most. Not by her. For Skye, the signs of recent human disruption were obvious.

  She kept low and moved from tree to tree, never staying still for more than a moment. Nobody would follow her to this part of the forest. The people she tracked wouldn’t realize they were being stalked.

  A gust of wind blew through the forest. Something moved in Skye’s peripheral vision. She ducked behind the nearest tree and pressed against its rough bark.

  Shadows cast from the canopy played with rays of sun to create the illusion of movement. Satisfied nobody was there, she continued her pursuit.

  Light rain began to fall. She couldn’t wait for summer. The stronghold needed water for crops and drinking, but the endless cycle of being soaked and never quite drying out grew tedious.

  Skye’s sodden leather boots squelched against the ground. She moved further away from the safety of her tower and focused on her prey.

  She hated being this close to her former settlement. Painful memories of that night always flooded back. They refused to remain buried and still vividly scarred her mind after ten years.

  The charred remains of the western watch tower appeared through the undergrowth. Now just a pile of stones and brittle black timber.

  Overgrown fruit trees, long recovered from fire damage, littered the landscape. The bountiful home of her youth had been transformed into a graveyard in two vicious hours.

  People had traveled dangerous routes to taste her mother’s famous harvest. Those roads were now overgrown and the settlement avoided at all costs. Citizens in Omega called it the bone orchard.

  Skye knelt and inspected the foliage. Pine needles scattered near the base of a large trunk. A struggle had taken p
lace between the men and their captive, that much was clear from the spread and pattern. A crimson smear stained a nearby rock. She brushed her finger against it. Fresh blood.

  They were within striking distance.

  The footprints had no tread. A sign of wastelanders or outlaws, not citizens of any of the eight strongholds, who had the recognizable patterns of Zeta-produced shoes. Those outside of society often had little to lose. It made them dangerous.

  The tracks separated after the watchtower. Two sets of prints had scrapes in the dirt between them. An unconscious third’s heels, dragging along the ground. They headed north away from the settlement. The other person headed for the central ruins.

  Skye removed her standard-issue pistol from her hip holster and followed north, conscious that she might be facing a threat from two directions. If they did suspect they were being followed, one might be waiting to deal with her.

  Thunder cracked in the distance. Heavy rain battered her head and shoulders. She had a decision to make.

  She could turn back to the tower and avoid punishment, follow the single set of prints to the ruins, or head north after the group. She didn’t have time for more than one.

  Her head told her to turn back, her heart to go into the ruins. Skye always followed her gut instinct. This was more than a dispute between outsiders. A citizen’s life was at stake.

  * * *

  The forest thinned and the trail became more obvious in the saturated thick grass. Skye paused behind the settlement's crumbling north tower and made sure the person heading for the ruins wasn’t following.

  Raised voices echoed ahead of her. They could not have been more than forty yards away, coming from inside a tightly packed copse.

  Skye thrust her pistol forward and crept within twenty yards. Still no visual.

  She felt a mix of trepidation and excitement. Climbing a tree to gain a better vantage point was out of the question. It would pin her to a single location if they spotted her first.