Chapter one.

Twenty-One April, 2325 ad.

Senior Lab Assistant Ricky Meyers was on “Special Duty” today. His assignment was to monitor his boss, Doctor of Astro-Biology Guinevere Scholz. That was the lab personnel’s wry way of saying, "Doing whatever you’re told no matter how nonsensical it seems." He was trailing behind on her right hand side, keeping an eye out for any obstacles in their way.

Doctor Scholz was studying her computer tablet’s display. The slight woman was only a meter and a half in height. She had light brown skin, brown eyes, and platinum blonde hair that was cut very short. She had a lean oval face with a few wrinkles around the eyes and three lines on her forehead. Not laugh lines or any other such nonsense. She always said she had earned every line on her face. Ricky smiled. For a woman who had never spent more than a total of five hours in direct sunlight in her entire life, that was no mean feat.

Guinevere had a bad habit of reading while walking. She always maintained she had never caused an injury by walking into someone while distracted.

Seeing that she only massed fifty kilos, the odds of her causing someone’s injury by walking into them were pretty low. People occasionally got injured throwing themselves out of her way when trying not to bowl her over. Nobody wanted to be the one who plowed into the little old lady, even if she was walking around without paying attention to her surroundings.

The Director of the Astro-Biology Department had made an exception to the office dress code, just for her. Gwen had to wear a yellow and black reflective vest over her grey lab tunic.

Ricky and Gwen were on their way to the director’s office. As they entered the waiting room, Rick nodded and smiled at the executive assistant sitting behind her desk.

The pretty young woman smiled at him and then looked quizzically at the doctor in the yellow vest. Without stopping, Gwen said, “Ricky, I’ll be working here all day. Make sure you are available by comms, take lunch at the normal time, and try not to annoy Maggie too much.” She then continued on toward the doors to the office while Maggie just stared at her.

The doors opened at her approach. Gwen’s boss had a weird sense of humor. When opening, the doors made a sound played by hidden speakers. They played an audio file from a three-hundred and fifty-nine-year-old television show called Star Trek. It went, “Swoosh.”

As she entered the office, she looked up. Flinching, she almost dropped her tablet when she spotted her boss standing in the room’s corner and looking out the window. Anger flared. Godsdamnit, he should have been as far away from the office as you could get.

“Fuck me! Ollie, what are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dirt-side.”

Doctor Oliver Santiago was standing in the left rear corner of his office, silhouetted against the rear window with his hands clasped behind his back. He was of medium height and thin. He was bald, with a smooth and shiny dome, but his eyebrows and goatee were both dark brown. His skin was light brown and his eyes were blue.

He was watching Earth-rise out of the window. It was not a window, in fact. The engineers had built two very large ultra high definition displays into the bulkhead and made them look like windows. The camera it accessed being near the top of a communications tower that stood two hundred meters tall on the Lunar surface. The entire setup gave the impression of a corner office in the upper stories of a very tall building.

A virtual city filled the camera’s view. Towers and domes. Monorail tubes and cars. Two hundred years back, a programmer added code that occasionally made star ships from old Sci-Fi media fly over the city at high speeds.

Just last month, the Battlestar Galactica had made a fast and low fly-by over of the city. The planet Earth and the spaceport were the only parts of the image that were real. Everything else was a high definition illusion of a city on the surface of the moon.

In reality, Santiago’s office was two hundred and fifty meters under the lunar surface. All the living spaces on Luna were buried beneath the surface. The dangers posed by meteorites, radiation, and temperatures on the surface had forced the colony to be built in tunnels and caves.

Never taking his eyes off of the display, the doctor spoke. “There was a change in the transport queue. They bumped me.”

Gwen wrinkled her forehead. “As the head of the Astro-Biology department, you could have overridden that.”

“It’s only a four-hour delay, and it will have exactly zero effects on my travel itinerary.”

“Director, why don’t you want to go?”

“My dear, do you really want me to go into this?”

“It’s not for you, Director. You were there. The ceremony is for those that went and rescued you.”

“It was a terrible time in my life. And many men and women died because of it. Please excuse me if I don’t feel like making a celebration out of the incident.”

“It’s not for you. Get that through your thick head. This is the highest award that those two can get. They are getting these honours because they went to get you.”

Oliver scowled. He turned around, walked to his desk, and sat in his chair.

Gwen changed tactics. “You know, Penny and Elizabeth will be there.” She raised her hands to either side of her head and made air quotes, “As well as ‘That Man’ they married.”

“I am quite looking forward to seeing the three of them, thank you very much. My reluctance about the ceremony has nothing to do with spending time with them. It has to do with the aftermath. Even with counseling and medication, I still have nightmares and I wake up screaming and sweating. Ruth-Anne finds it very annoying.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“And you think they don’t have nightmares? What about everyone else that was there with you? Those soldiers risked their lives to retrieve you. They went through hell. Many of them died. How do you think the survivors will feel if you blow this off?”

Gwen walked around the director’s desk and faced him. He swiveled in his chair and faced her right back. Hands on her hips, she confronted him. “You are not a coward, Oliver Santiago. Stop acting like one.”

In an obvious effort to change the subject, Doctor Santiago asked. “Have you seen the data on subject Lambda?”

“That’s what I was looking at when you almost gave me a heart attack because you were in your office.”

“Why weren’t you heading to your office?”

“Your office is close to the food courts, the park, and the gym. Mine is over two kilometers under the surface and next to the stinkin’ ass Hydroponics section and the stinkin’ ass Sewage Reclamation Section. I’m doing nothing but administrative work, and I can do that from your cozy little corner office.”

“You would have space up here if you cut down on the laboratory, machine shop, auto-factory, and particle accelerator nonsense.”

“Well, since I need all that stuff to solve the problems you and I are supposed to solve, I don’t see why more cubic space isn’t a higher priority. I hate working down there. It’s been YEARS.”

Santiago grinned, enjoying the set up to what was coming. “Yes, I’ve been working on that.”

“Working on making it permanent, or working on getting me space somewhere closer to the admin offices?”

The director smirked. “Yes.”

Gwen locked her gaze with his. “My husband will smack the shit out of you if and when I require it, Director. Don’t you ever forget that.”

Oliver laughed. “Lucky for me, my friend Roger is in the asteroid belt right now.”

“I threaten you with Roger because he is much nicer than I am. I can and will make you regret every time you have annoyed me, Director.”

Her hand rested on one of her many belt pouches. Contained in that pouch was her multi-meter. Most biologists didn’t walk around with a multi-meter, but Gwen preferred to fix her own equipment and was quite proficient at electrical diagnostics.

Oliver stared at his friend. For such a little old lady, Gwen could be very intimidating when she wanted. It was the way she held the needle-like probes of her multi-meter, with a maniacal smile on her face. It being one of her favorite jokes. But sometimes, it could be hard to tell if she was really joking. He could almost believe she was looking for an excuse to install the probes in him. In the name of science, of course.

She was looking very annoyed. Doctor Santiago reminded himself that she was pretty damn strong for a woman her age and size. On the other hand, Oliver was not strong for a woman his age and size. The maniac worked out in one of the high gravity gyms. For fun.

Uh oh.

“Gwen, cubic space is hard to get on this level, and you know it. And even if you didn’t need your lab, an official office the size befitting your seniority would have you many kilometers from here. So you would still be far away from the office, your favorite food court, the park, and the gym. So you would have to take the tube and make several connections to get here. That is much worse than getting on the express elevator. I have been able to convince the Central Authority Planning Department that your research is being degraded by the situation. The constructors are going to install an airlock at the head of the tunnel to isolate the hydroponics and sewage facilities. They are also going to install another filter bank so you won’t have to deal with the smells anymore. Everything will be up and running in a fortnight.”

“I suppose that’s better than nothing.”

“I have been pleading your case for a very long time. You didn’t help things by annoying the man in charge of the facilities every six months at the public forum.”

“He’s an officious twat, more interested in controlling his little empire than in solving problems that need to be solved.”

“You know that, I know that, and so does everyone else. What he didn’t need was to hear was you describe him that way to other people. Because you didn’t know he was right around the corner in the hallway outside the forum chambers. I had to call in quite a lot of political favors to get this problem solved.”

Gwen just grumbled under her breath. Then her shoulders slumped, and she bowed her head. She mumbled, “I said I was sorry.”

Oliver sighed. She was a dear friend, but she could be quite the pain in the arse sometimes. She was brilliant. But she was also stubborn, and she could also hold a grudge over the strangest things. He was going planet-side, and he did not know how long she was going to be in Australia. But maybe he could throw her a bone.

“You are aware that Director Demarco died last Sunday?”

“Yes, I know. I signed the card for her husband and son.”

“Services is cleaning out her office, and the Emergency Services Department is being moved to tunnel LC-2.”

“Can I…”

“No.”

Gwen scowled.

“That office is being taken over by the Director of Systems Integration. Our Boss. However, that store room that Demarco used to have at the end of the Hallway is going to be converted into a cozy little office for you to do your administrative work in.”

“For fuck’s sake! Ollie, it’s a broom closet!”

“My dear, it is a very large broom closet. And more importantly, it is YOUR broom closet.”

Her eyes narrowed and her hand went back to the waist pouch holding the pointy things. She didn’t say a word.

Bloody hell.

Santiago coughed, “Lambda.”

All traces of anger disappeared. “The team at Birriliburu station has been able to date the Lambda Walker. It’s two hundred and sixty-five years old. They are calling it a “Lich”. That thing was alive when the world fell apart and it is communicating with others of its kind. The team is saying it might be sentient.”

She shook her head. “Your predecessor and the Director of Containment and Study were responsible the construction of Birriliburu station. It is surrounded by zombies, and has been since they brought that thing inside the walls. Birriliburu station was built at Lake Deborah, in the middle of the frickin’ Western Desert of the outback. Four thousand kilometers in the middle of nowhere. We built the station there because it is one of the least populated places on Earth. It beat out Antarctica only because everyone flat out refused to work there because of the cold. Everyone stood up and said "Fuck penguins."

"That thing’s transportation attracted several hundred walkers, and they now surround the station. Force Protection is getting a lot of targets to practice their marksmanship on.”

Gwen shivered. “Doctor, it is scaring the shit out of everyone. It’s a self aware zombie in mental communication with and control of other zombies. It’s an actual Lich.”

“When are you scheduled to observe the Lambda?”

“168 hours from now. I wish we could bring it up here.”

Oliver shuddered. “There will never be a zombie allowed on Luna. You know this. You will have to study it on Earth.”

***

Two hundred and fifty-five years ago, the human world had almost ended. The night sky had lit up and the recently dead had come back to life. Sick people near death had also turned. They had attacked the population and, just like in the old horror movies; they had turned their victims into zombies. Unlike the horror movies, there had been no “Patient Zero”, nor had there been a gradual spread of the infected. Tens of thousands of zombies had appeared at once over the entire night-side of the planet.

It had happened at the start of one of the semi-regular pandemics. The year was 2070 ad. At 2000 hours UTC on the Twenty-Fifth of May, the fall of humanity began.

They had squandered countless hours and large portions of national treasuries in search of the virus causing the horror. In a few weeks, after most of civilization had broken down had they had discovered that it wasn’t biological. The radiation which caused the Aurora Borealis to cover the entire planet had been the cause. By then, the reason for the cause was a moot point. The scientists who made the discovery had no real government to inform. It being hard to be a government when your citizens were zombies.