T-Plus 14

  After leaving Vaughn and Chief Samson behind to mind the excursion crew's tethers, Esther followed the rest of the survivors out into the Bay's hallway to further divide their search parties. They formed a strange circle of technicians, Navigators, and scientists, a sight that wouldn’t have been seen if they hadn’t banded together to overcome the current situation. A strange thought, seeing how all of them worked on the same floor.

“Okay, so ignoring the hospital on the second floor, we need to head over to the two clinics on this floor and the two on the first floor,” Soup summarized. “There’s one within our range of operations and can easily just walk over there right now, but...”

“The PC in there is useless,” Esther finished.

  Everyone looked to her for an explanation, seeing how the one around the corner was the clinic she supervised. She only shrugged and gave a one sentence explanation.

“Water got on it during one of the quakes.”

  Soup nodded in confirmation.

“Okay, then we should split into two teams. One to go to the other one on the other side of this floor, and the other will aim for the two on the first floor. Does anyone have a preference on where they’re going?”

“Other than asking to be given the one with the least amount of aliens, no,” Audrey said, raising her hand.

“Whichever is the closest, please,” Esther added, raising her own hand.

  An explanation wasn’t needed for either of them, and the circle fell into silence as Soup looked around to see if anyone else had anything to say. No one else gave their opinion.

“I’m not sure how large the alien concentration is where any of us is going,” Soup said, scratching his nose. “As for Dr. Emerson, the closest one should be the one on this floor. However, we haven’t explored as far as over there, so I’m not sure if there aren’t any obstructions.”

“It’s fine. We’ll figure it out,” Esther said, waving away his concerns.

“As for the least alien concentration, ARCNAV has a nest and so does the entrance down to the second floor,” Soup continued to reason. “After running errands down to the second floor, Jiang and the others have lessened the numbers of the second floor’s nest, and from the last run, none of those have evolved yet. Ms. Zimmerman’s best bet is for the first floor.”

“Then I will go with the team going downstairs,” Audrey declared with a huff.

“Is everyone else fine with random slots?” Soup asked.

  Once again, no one voiced their refusal. The scientist nodded, splitting the rest of them into balanced groups. Going downstairs with Audrey were Lucky and Johnson, the two remaining technicians that weren’t hopping around outside. With Esther were Soup and Aaron.

“How’d you manage this set up?” Esther asked as everyone prepared.

“We haven’t explored the first floor after we ran up here,” Soup explained. “Anything could happen down there, so I wanted to make sure the downstairs group knows what they’re doing.”

  There wasn’t much to prepare. Most of the contents of their backpacks didn’t change from previous escapades, and this one wasn’t much different then their previous supply runs. They all headed toward the stairs, passing Esther’s clinic on the way.

  They poked their lights in over the debris blocking the still doorless entranceway, and spotted her work computer that had crashed onto the floor and piled its sad remains in the corner. Her beloved desk plants’ pots and shattered on the ground, its original contents dried and dead beside the computer’s remains. Her words confirmed, they continued on to the stairwell’s entrance.

  Their groups split there, waving at each other before continuing on their way. Esther’s trio continued past the hole in the floor. The men’s steps were quick, and the ground became increasingly filled with small bits of rubble and debris, but she followed them the best that she could. The current pace wasn’t too bad, but Esther wished they’d found her wheelchair in the chaos of the Station.

  As they rounded the first bend, Kuznetsov and Aaron finally slowed their pace. Their flashlights were pointed around the bend, and they pulled her over to hide behind a tall pile of rubble. They pointed their lights at another pile that seemed to have collapsed on itself and covered the entire length of the corridor just a bit ahead of them, glaring at it.

“What’s wrong?” Esther asked, keeping her voice down to match the atmosphere the two of them were giving off.

“This is where we found those rock aliens,” Soup said.

“What’s his name, Hensley, pulled the tether out and squashed most of them under the rubble, but we didn’t actually confirm if they were all gone,” Aaron explained, sweeping his light over the rubble again.

“Can you actually tell the aliens apart from normal rocks from over here?” Esther asked, seriously about to be impressed by their phenomenal eyesight even in this dim lighting.

“No, but I wanted to try,” Kuznetsov replied honestly.

  And there went her good feelings. Esther sighed, berating herself. She should’ve known.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He got up first, approaching the pile slowly. Aaron gestured for her to wait for them as he followed the scientist to inspect the rocks. She watched with her own flashlight pointed at them, keeping the darker corners lit so unwanted surprises wouldn’t creep up on them.

  The two of them touched some of the closer rocks, turning them over and tossing them around as they climbed to the top of the pile. After turning a few more of them over, walking all over the rubble, and even hopping up and down to send pebbles cascading down one side, they waved her to come over.

  She approached them, and, with their help, she climbed up to stand beside them. Soup tapped the rubbled beneath them with his foot.

“Well, nothing’s moving, so I’m assuming that either they’re still alive under all of this and can’t move, or the weight of these rocks was enough to completely take them out.”

“If they’re still alive, they’d eventually eat their way out,” Aaron pointed out.

“Hmm, let’s make this a quick errand then,” Kuznetsov decided, climbing down on the other side.

  With Aaron’s help, she followed the two of them, touching down on part of the Station that they hadn’t explored yet. Kuznetsov brought out his usual spray paint, adding several lines of red over the entirety of the rubble pile before catching up with them. He kept his arm out, a bottle of orange paint pointed at the wall beside them, and sprayed a line along the way they came. Aaron stayed in the front, stopping before every big pile of rubble and making sure aliens weren’t hiding in its shadows. They continued onwards like that until they got to the next bend.

“Where’s the other clinic again?” Kuznetsov asked as they waited for Aaron to confirm they were in the clear.

“It should be a bit further past this bend,” Esther said, pointing her light past where Aaron was checking.

“Do you think we’ll find a working computer?” the scientist asked as the Navigator waved them over to join him.

“Honestly? No. All the clinics are structured in a similar way, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this one looks as bad as mine.”

“Good to know. I hope there’s a working computer somewhere then.”

  They reached where Aaron was standing and continued on their way. The further they went, the more stray aliens they found. Eventually, they started encountering the occasional group of aliens, but with some well placed alien goop, they managed to skirt around the danger.

“Why do you think they prefer eating each other than us?” Aaron asked as they stuck close to the wall.

  The group of aliens they encountered this time was the largest one they’d run into so far, and it took the last of Kuznetsov’s jars to completely grab their attention. Now they only had the two Esther had brought and Aaron’s last one of the original four. They jogged as close to the wall as they could, keeping an eye on the aliens just in case one of them took notice of them again before they could get past them.

“Most creatures only cannibalise if there’s no other choice,” Aaron continued. “But here we are, obviously a good choice of food for their evolution, but they still prefer another alien’s preserved body over us.”

“It just means their fellow aliens are a better choice of food for their evolution,” Esther said simply as they sped up after clearing the pile of aliens against the wall.

“Is that how they keep their evolution so uniform?” Kuznetsov asked, catching up with them. “Thinking back on it, their initial evolution, if you count getting indents in their bodies that look like faces an evolution, happened more or less across the board at about the same time.”

“It could be a racial feature,” Esther said with a nod. “The best defense for the race as a whole is to evolve by consuming each other. It’s working so far from what I can see.”

“So theoretically,” Aaron said as they cleared the large group of aliens and ducked behind another pillar of rubble, “if one alien partakes in only eating fish while another alien only partakes on the flesh of birds, and they both die, then a third alien could eat their corpses and absorb parts of what the other two had evolved toward.”

“Perhaps,” Esther said, turning the science over in her mind. “That would make most sense with what we currently know about them.”

“That doesn’t bode well,” Kuznetsov gave his own statement, pointing his light back in the direction of the aliens they'd just passed. “It means we shouldn’t throw these jars around haphazardly in fear that we’ll cause them to evolve too far.”

“We can think about that when we find a more efficient way of throwing them off of us and perhaps more observation of their evolutions,” Esther said, ending their conversation. “Look, we’re here.”

  She pointed at the door to their right. It had the standard white door that every room in the Station had, but printed in blue on top of it was the caduceus symbol that hadn’t changed throughout the centuries and still remained the society’s symbol for medicine. This was the entrance to the third floor’s secondary clinic.

“I wonder how the doctor here faired,” Esther muttered as she stepped forward to the door.

  The doctor pushed against the door just enough to fit her flashlight in. The other two crowded beside her, fitting their lights in as well, and together, they peered into the empty clinic. Much like hers, there was medical equipment scattered across the ground, sent askew from the back-to-back quakes. Unlike hers, the cabinets that kept chemicals and medicines locked away behind their secure locks had shattered, and their contents were strewn across the floor alongside all the other medical equipment.

  Seeing nothing dangerous within the vicinity of the door, Esther pushed the door open a bit further, allowing Kuznetsov to step inside first. He swept his light over the clinic, waving the two of them in. With Aaron’s help, they propped open the door and followed the scientist in.

  Esther picked up some of the intact medicine bottles, tossing them into her backpack. Although they weren’t low on medicines back at their base yet, it was always good to keep their stock from ever reaching that low, especially with the way all the men in their group liked to go out of their way to rush in headfirst.

  The other two walked further in, shuffling around the furniture that had slid out of their usual positions. While keeping her flashlight on the ground to look for more supplies, she followed after them. In the end, Aaron found what they were looking for first. And as she expected, it wasn’t in the condition they needed it to be.

  They gathered around this clinic’s computer, or rather, what remained of it. Like her clinic’s computer, it had toppled off its perch on the desk and wedged itself beside one of the beds’ wheels. Its screen was shattered beyond what repairs they could make right now, and it seemed like all its innards were scattered around it.

“Well, this was as expected,” Kuznetsov said, pointing his light right down on it. “Do you think there are any others on this floor?”

“I mean... all the spare parts to fix this would be with the technicians in their Bay,” Esther said, pointing her light down on it as well.

“And that could be anywhere in that sea of boxes, huh,” Aaron sighed, rubbing the back of his hair in frustration.

“Should we bring this back with us anyway? It’s better than nothing. We can bring yours in with us as well, just in case it’s in a better state than this one.”

“That’d be the best plan for now,” Esther said with a nod, crouching down beside the dead PC to poke at it. “This scavenger hunt for parts and tools continues on, huh.”