Jasleen returned to consciousness with a groan. She heard an incessant buzzing, and it took several moments for her to realize it was taking place between her ears. Her skull throbbed, and she sat up slowly, the coppery taste of blood making her feel queasy. She sat with her back against the doorframe of Leneski’s office, getting her bearings. She mentally assessed her injuries. She probably had a concussion, and she was definitely going to be sore for a few days, but nothing was broken.
She turned from her injuries to focus on the outward situation. It had grown eerily quiet. The alarm she’d heard earlier had ceased, and she couldn’t hear anything except the buzzing inside her own head and the steady hiss of the air handlers as they worked at half power to scrub out the carbon dioxide and maintain the oxygen levels.
She climbed unsteadily to her feet, looking around for her weapon. She found it and holstered it. Then she exited the blister.
The corridor was strewn with debris. She checked her slate again. The screen was cracked, and the feed was still down. She shook her head to clear it and picked up her pace, heading toward the cargo bay. It was time to unwrap General Steen’s gift.
She came around a bend and stopped as half a dozen frightened technicians and engineers ran toward her. She grabbed one of them, a slight man with dark hair, pulling him out of the crowd as they passed. He looked frantically from Jasleen to the group, then turned his head to scan the corridor behind him.
“You’re all right,” Jasleen said, her hands gripping his shoulders. She riffled through her mental index of employment records, searching for a name to go with the face “What’s going on, Carl?”
This seemed to snap him out of his panic-stricken reverie, and his eyes focused on her as if seeing her for the first time. “We’re under attack,” he said, the disbelief palpable in his voice.”
Jasleen nodded, feeling the buzzing in her head subside. “Have they hurt anyone?”
“Only if they resist. They’re herding everyone into the mall. I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know. I and some others just ran, got the hell out of there.”
“You did the right thing. Now go and hide somewhere. Somewhere safe. I’m going to go take care of this.”
Carl looked her up and down as if trying to reconcile her heroic words with the tangled mess of bruises and blood he saw before him. Then he nodded once and ran off in the direction he had been going before he had been waylaid.
Jasleen continued in the direction the frightened Luna personnel had come from, wondering what dangers might lie around the next bend in the corridor.
She thought about what Leneski had said, considering what he was up to. Whatever his plans, the CME had sped them up. She drew her weapon and broke into a run, wondering what good a gun would do in this situation. When all you have is a hammer, every problem has to be a nail.
She ducked into a side corridor as the sound of many booted feet approached. More fleeing Luna 1 personnel followed by a group of ten or so men and women wearing black coveralls sporting the Daedalus logo and almost completely covered in Proteus goo.
Her blood went cold as she realized they were coming from the direction she needed to go, to the cargo bay and Steen’s Cracker Jack prize. She waited until they had passed, then continued onward.
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Jasleen ran as fast as she could, which on the Moon turned out to be pretty fast. She yelled at everyone she met to seek cover, return to their quarters, and hide. She helped a startled woman armed with a fire extinguisher hide in an office. If only she had communications she could get her team to set up a perimeter. They were well trained, most of them ex-military, and would do the best they could. She heard a bark of automatic weapons fire from somewhere far behind her, and that made her feel a little better, even though she was no longer sure if the stuff infecting those people would allow them to be killed.
She wished she could at least call Mara and tell her to hide somewhere until she came for her. But her wife would have to do the best she could. Just like everyone else. Without the base’s feed people would be startled, confused, and unable to gather needed intel about the danger they faced. There would be no help from Earth any time soon. They were cut off and in the beginnings of an invasion. Their only hope was whatever was in General Steen’s care package.
Jasleen holstered her gun. The hallways were empty now, only the flashing emergency lights and the sounds of distant screaming to indicate that anything was amiss. She jogged to the end of the corridor, where a pressure door had slammed shut, blocking her path. She slapped the thick metal in frustration.
Looking around, she found the metallic rungs of an access ladder bolted to the wall on her right. She scrambled up, careful not to push off too hard for fear of bonking her head on the hatch above. Designed to be opened even if the power was out, it opened with a click of the handle and she was up and in the dark. Using the light on her slate, she navigated through the cramped space toward her distant goal. She could navigate over and around the breached airlock and get to the cargo hold. She had to. It was the only thing she had left.
She wiggled past thick coils of fiber optic cables sheathed in plastic sleeves, careful not to touch a power conduit. Something flitted over her hand, and she moved her light just in time to spy a cockroach scampering off on some insect errand. “Blech,” she said in revulsion, recalling some long ago briefing informing her that yes, there would be bugs in space, no way around it. They came up on shipments of food and were as inevitable on the Moon as they had been on Earth. She continued, quickening her pace as she pulled herself along with her arms. For once she missed the null g of space, as this would be much easier aboard a vessel in orbit. The Moon’s lighter gravity wasn’t as much of an aid to her here, and her head was still throbbing.
She stopped once, hearing screaming and weapons fire. Someone barked an epithet-laden order. The commotion stopped. She kept going. She called up an offline map she had downloaded to her slate and used it to guide her to her destination.
At last, Jasleen punched out a grate, sending it falling slowly to the floor, and slid down head first, flipping upright before she landed easily in Luna 1‘s main storage bay. It resembled a large, well-stocked warehouse, and she didn’t know how she would find Steen’s care package inside the vast space.
She heard muffled screams and small arms fire, sounding far away. She wanted to be out there helping, but something told her to follow Commander Teague’s instructions. Whatever Steen had sent up here was important enough to secret away, which meant it was a potential asset. And they could use every resource they could get at the moment.
She ran toward a tall rack of crates marked Food, unsure of what she was looking for. It would be something out of place. Something that didn’t belong. Something big. She turned right, jogging down the long side of the warehouse past boxes of plastic and metallic pellets, raw materials for the base’s several industrial printers. That’s when she saw it, a sarcophagus-shaped container stacked amid the more squat, rectangular crates. It was sitting on a high shelf over Jasleen’s head. She jumped up onto the shelf, thankful for the one-sixth lunar gravity, and examined the storage container, her heart leaping into her chest when she realized what it was. She pushed it, checking its lunar weight, then guided it carefully to the edge of the shelf and let it drop to the floor, coming down behind it to catch it in case it tipped over.
The sarcophagus wobbled and bounced, but she wrapped her arms around it to keep it from falling on its side. If she were right about the contents nothing inside was damaged.
Jasleen moved around to the container’s front, placing her left thumb against the biometric lock. The sarcophagus opened with a click, and Jasleen pulled it open, whistling through her teeth when she saw what was inside.
She smiled, the pain in her skull all but forgotten. “Oh. Yeah.”