The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 7, Pt. 3

Dann smiled at her in spite of himself. Rose replied, “Yes. I was summoned to assist the awakening of Lt. Cobb in my physical form.”

“Lt. Cobb—you mean Fred Cobb? He survived?” Dann felt a bit of weight rise off his shoulders. He didn’t know the Lieutenant well, but had met the man on several occasions. Jackson looked mildly interested as well, more at Dann’s own tone than in the circumstances, he thought. “Where is his cryo-pod?”

“Hang on there,” Jackson said, “you’re not thinking of going after them are you? We’ve got an objective to reach already here.”

“One we don’t know how to find without Rose. I’m sure she intended to rejoin us anyway, didn’t she?”

“One moment, Dann.” The computer’s voice paused for a moment. “Yes, though Lt. Cobb suffered an extended wait and is very weak, I’m afraid. It will be some time before they can catch up to you.”

“I say we meet them half-way. We’re going to need Rose to navigate the rain forest anyway. We almost got eaten here, I can only imagine what’s waiting there.

Jackson scowled. “Fine, we do it your way. But we do it tomorrow. And I say we do it alone; leave the popsicles frozen for now.”

Dann returned her scowl and started to open his mouth to reply when Rose cut in. “I would advice against reviving any more people than is necessary, Dann. The larger the group, the slower we move.”

“Fine. Okay, fine. You’re right; you’re right. I just …”

“As long as you leave the door secured when you leave, the pod will be safe.”

Dann didn’t like that that, but privately admitted the sense of it to himself. They dug some of the unnecessary hospital gowns out of storage for use as blankets and settled in for the night.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 7, Pt. 2

They moved into the interior, the banging of the animals outside subsiding to faint thuds that eventually stopped entirely. Around them, pods waited silently, holding the bodies of those who would never arrive on the new world they’d been promised.

Jackson ignored the pods, finding a spot against a wall to sit. She immediately began cleaning and inspecting her weapon again. Dann picked a spot not too far off and watched for a bit.

“What was your department?”

“I am in security,” she said, not looking up.

“That explains the weapon clearances I guess,” he said. She just nodded noncommittally. He wished suddenly for some of the conveniences they’d had to leave behind them from the world before; personal entertainment devices that fit in pockets or on your wrist had been dismissed from the journey as distractions they couldn’t afford to have. Eventually they’d be made available again, but that would likely be years away.

He found himself looking over the room, eyes drawn by a dim green light. He stared at it for several minutes, lost in his thoughts, until finally the image caught up with his mind. “Hey,” he said, startled.

Jackson looked up, surprised herself at his sudden outburst. “What?”

“Hey, that one’s green. Another of the survivors is here!” He got to his feet.

“So? We’re not after this one. We need someone to get us closer to figuring out this computer issue, give us some idea of what’s going on.”

“Shouldn’t we wake as many as we can along the way though? We can’t just leave them here!”

“Why not? They’ve lasted five hundred years, and whatever went wrong didn’t get them twenty years ago. They’ll keep.”

“What if they start waking up?” Dann was a bit affronted at what he saw as her casual disregard for her fellow crew.

“Why would they just start waking up for no reason?”

“I did!”

She frowned. “Rose must have awakened you.”

Dann frowned as well. “I didn’t ask. I was too busy feeling like I was dying.” He cursed himself for not having thought of it earlier. “Rose? What caused me to be awakened?”

“Your pod was awakened on the originally specified schedule, Dann.”

“I was? But … wait, why was I the only one? Was I the only one? Are there others out there?”

“There is one other revived maintenance crew in addition to yourself and Pvt. Jackson.”

“Only one?” Dann’s heart began to sink.

“No other surviving maintenance personnel were scheduled to wake up at this time.”

“Does this have something to do with where Rose went?”

“Ugh. We definitely need to rename one of them,” Jackson complained.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 7

They’d been traveling for hours and the “sun” was beginning to “set” when Rose left them.

Her departure was sudden; she had lead them across the forested biome were nearing the passage into the rain forest section when she’d stopped dead in her tracks for almost two minutes. She’d been completely unresponsive, standing like a statue while Dann and Jackson tried to get her attention to no avail.

Finally she reactivated, as though a switch had been thrown. “I’m sorry,” she’d said. “A situation has come up that requires my attention.” She’d dropped the supplies she’d been carrying; extra food and some ammunition for each of them, and then she’d run off with no further explanation. She was far too fast for them to catch her, so they’d simply stared after her, stunned.

When it became clear she was going to be gone longer than ten minutes and that they were going to have to find somewhere to hole up for the night, they divided what she’d left and set out.

“She couldn’t take ten seconds to direct us to a cryo-bay or armory to stay in?” Jackson growled.

“Given the choice, I’d take an armory,” Dann said. “We’ve already woken up once this century surrounded by the bodies of our crew. I’m not anxious to do it again.”

“It’s better than staying out here. A lot of predators are nocturnal.”

“True. We know they’re dug into the ground, but rise above it. We should check any small hills we see.”

His words were punctuated by a low, ghostly sound that reminded him of nothing so much as a wolf call, as though the wolf were whispering.

He grabbed the pistol out of his belt and gripped it tight. “What was that?”

“Keep moving,” Jackson said. She kept her voice low; her eyes were narrowed in the dimming light. There was no actual twilight on the ship; the compartments didn’t contain enough atmosphere or the proper lighting to simulate the effect. It was all too good at impairing their vision though.

The sound wasn’t repeated; cautiously they kept moving. They’d checked several hills as they went on in the same direction Rose had led them in. They’d found nothing so far, but there were several more directly in their path.

After a few minutes, the sound came again; it was both closer and quieter, and nearly caused Dann to jump out of his skin. At the same time, Jackson exclaimed, “Got one!” and pointed at a barely-visible door recessed into the sheer side of a hill. They ran for it just as a chorus of answering whispered howls echoed through the air.

Dann reached the door first, and immediately started wrestling with the latch. A glance told him there was no keypad; a cryo-bay then, not an armory. Jackson stood behind him, weapon drawn, keeping watch.

The door wasn’t as thick and heavy as an armory door, but it was heavy enough, and hadn’t moved in centuries. The latch felt like it was gummed in place; he could move it, but slowly, and only with a lot of effort. “Um, Chambers? Now’d be a real good time,” Jackson said.

Dann jammed his body against the latch and felt it give; when he’d lifted it as high as it’d go, he pulled on it with his body weight and the door rasped open. “It’s open!”

“Get in!” Jackson yelled, and fired several bursts from her weapon. The air filled with growls that sounded far more wolf-like than the howling had.

Dann didn’t wait to be told twice. He all but dived in and stood by the door; Jackson followed and together they began hauling it shut again. Before it closed Dann caught the image of a long-bodied, low slung wolf form with grey-white fur and piercing, ice-blue eyes snarling at him before the door slammed shut with a solid thump. Several more thumps spoke to the ferocity with which they’d been hunted.

They caught their breath in the near dark; much like the bays they’d awakened in, the only light came from bank after bank of controls with brightly colored LEDs shining away through the centuries. Dann found the light controls and hit them, lighting up the bay.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 6, Pt. 2

Nothing was as populous as the ever-present insects. Neither Dann nor Jackson could take more than 3 seconds without waving some sort of bug away, and both received several bites before they finally arrived. On the plus side, this kept them distracted enough to stop worrying so much about predators, which Rose kept an eye out for for them.

The armory was a small building designed like a bunker. The doors were similar to those on the cryo-bays, but even heavier looking. Rose punched in a code on what looked to be a physical keypad, then dragged the heavy door open. It groaned and protested every year it had remained closed, sliding outward with a grinding noise Dann was sure was enough to wake the dead. It left a scraped up, scratched brown patch of earth through the underbrush that had grown in front of the door.

Dann stepped forward to peer in. The space beyond was dark, but there was very little dust and there were no cobwebs to be seen, at least in the immediate area the simulated sun lit up. “Huh, I would’ve expected it to be dirtier after all this time. You get in there to clean often?” he said to Rose.

“No, Dann, but the armories are built to the same specifications as the cryo-bays; they’re air-tight when sealed. They need very little cleaning.”

Dann was about to comment when a rustling sound near his foot caught his attention. He looked down just in time to see a long, dark green and brown blur rearing back to strike. He stumbled back with a yell.

A grey blur of motion swooped in from the side. When Dann recovered his balance, Rose was kneeling in front of the door, a hissing and angry snake held by the neck in her hand. The large brown triangular head fixed beady eyes on him, mouth agape, long fangs glinting in the sun.

“Be careful where you step, Dann. Rattlesnakes have been spreading through this biome for the last few hundred years. They can sometimes be difficult to see in the spectra of light you use.” She stood straight up, still grasping the snake. She coiled its body around her arms and carried it some distance before letting it go. As she did so, the distinctive rattle sound sent shivers down Dann’s spine.

“Scared of snakes?” Jackson looked irritatingly calm after the encounter. But then, it hadn’t been rearing back at her.

“Wasn’t till now,” he said. “Never really had to deal with them before.”

Rose returned after a few moments. “It shouldn’t bother you now.” She turned her attention to the vacant doorway and hit a switch inside, flooding the dark interior space with light.

“Wow,” Dann breathed. “There’re enough guns in here for a small army!”

“A very small army,” Jackson said. “More like a platoon or small company.”

Rose equipped herself with a sub-machine gun, small caliber pistol and ammo for both, then handed the same load-out to Jackson. Jackson cracked a smile for the first time since she’d awakened and immediately set to inspecting and cleaning the weapons.

To Dann, Rose handed a pistol and ammo. “What about the other gun?” he asked.

“I’m sorry Dan, but maintenance crew aren’t authorized for more than basic arms, and you don’t have any personal certification for weapon grades higher than that.”

He frowned and looked at it, then looked around at the vast stores around them. “Do you really think anyone’s going to care about the regs given that almost the entire population is dead?”

“We can discuss exceptions with a officer once we revive someone of sufficient rank, but for now I can’t issue you anything more.”

“Yeah,” Jackson chimed in. “You don’t know what you’re doing with a bigger gun. Stick to the pea shooter for now. No offense. With somethin’ bigger you’d probably just end up shooting me, and that’s somethin’ you really don’t want to do.”

He sighed and set about inspecting and cleaning his own weapon. She was right; he’d only had the most basic weapons training. He’d never thought he’d need to use a weapon. He’d certainly never thought he’d need it to defend against wild animals on board the ship.

Rose disappeared into the back of the armory. She returned by the time Dann was done cleaning the pistol; Jackson had long since finished both of her weapons. The sleek android handed each of them a sheathed knife, and then a much longer bladed weapon.

“Swords?” Dann wondered aloud.

“Machetes,” Rose corrected. “We’ll need them. The bay we need to access is located in the rain forest biome. The vegetation there is much denser than it is here.”

They rested a short time, eating and drinking more. Dann was starting to feel almost human again, and Jackson was looking better too. Finally they set back out into the woods again.

Rose led them off in the same direction they’d been traveling to reach the armory. It was mid-afternoon and travel would be slow. In the event of a proper awakening with an intact crew, there would have been elevator-like lift cars available near each cryo-bay, but the shuttles were secured before launch and they were going to stay secured for the foreseeable future without anyone to prep them for use. That meant going the long way.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 6

Dann, Jackson and Rose marched at a slow but steady pace. According to Rose, the nearest armory wasn’t far; there were armories intentionally placed near all of the cryo-bays in anticipation of problems with predatory animals, no matter how unlikely it seemed that problems would result.

They moved as quickly as they could through the lightly forested landscape. Over and over, Dann was struck by how natural the place felt. It was only when he looked up high enough to see the superstructure of the ship that he remembered he was not actually in some forest on Earth.

The “sky” was a bit unsettling, but also beautiful to behold. The biome enclosures were massive wedges fitted around the central spine of the ship. The enclosures spun around that spine, providing an adequate simulation of gravity for the land-bound inhabitants. Birds and bats that flew too high would sometimes run into some trouble.

Because the land occupied the outer edge of the wedges, the air space above the ground was limited. This limited the ability for spontaneous internal weather to occur, though it didn’t prevent it entirely. Heat sources under the ground would vary land conditions and encourage micro-climates under Rose’s control, and likewise, she could pump rain into a biome when she felt it was needed.

There was some sort of directional light source that did a very good job of looking like sunlight, and was matched by a bright spot on the interior hull that stood in for a visible sun. The part of the sky that faced space was translucent and blue and beautiful; the difficult part came from looking more into the center of the ship, towards the spine where the biomes joined. The division between the biome wedges was semi-transparent and bluish, but it was all too easy to feel like you were staring down at the ground from a very high place if you weren’t careful. Seasons were simulated by both light and temperature control; they were in late spring, about to go into summer.

Dan had discovered that during the first hike on the way to Jackson’s cryo-bay. He’d been fascinated by the views of what looked like very small islands in a sea, some sort of much more heavily forested region and one that was craggy, snowy and rocky, some sort of sub-arctic habitat. The one directly opposite them on the ship was too difficult to see to get an idea of what it looked like, though when he’d asked, Rose had told him it was patterned after an African savanna.

Jackson seemed uninterested in the view after her first shocked sighting of it. She’d stared as though unsure whether she wanted to study it or be sick, and then paid it little mind thereafter. Dann had tried to talk to her few times as they moved on, but she was brusque, intent on reaching the armory as fast as possible.

They saw no sign of the predators on their path. Dann did notice there were paths here and there throughout the woods.

“Rose, did you create these paths we’re using?”

“My passing through the biomes has aided in maintaining them over the years, Dann, but most of the trails are natural animal trails.”

They did hear plenty of small wild animals, and sometimes caught sight of them too. Squirrels and chipmunks, rabbits, deer and moose were all represented, among others. Predators included fox and wolves, some wild cats, snakes and bears. There were predatory birds as well, primarily hawks and owls.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 5, Pt. 2

“What happened to the rest of the crew, Rose?”

“A majority of the crew were confirmed dead almost 20 years ago, Pvt. Jackson. Remaining crew are either here right now, or unconfirmed in non-responsive pods.”

Jackson was silent a moment, still struggling to process the information. Dann could relate. “So wait, the survivors are in the pods that were NOT responding to control?”

“Yes, that’s correct, Pvt. Jackson.”

“Jackson, are you feeling up to moving on? There are lots of others to check on, all over the ship.” Dann felt a bit more at peace with Jackson revived; if nothing else he knew he wasn’t trapped in the future alone, but they still needed to be sure the remaining pods didn’t fail, or at least find out if they already had failed.

“Sure,” she said. She was tall, but looked every bit as emaciated as Dann himself did.

“You’ll feel better quick once we’re moving, at least as long as you don’t chug that down too quickly.”

“Pvt. Chambers learned that the hard way,” Rose added helpfully.

“Thanks, Rose,” Dann sighed.

Jackson didn’t smile. They exited the bay, where she blinked and looked around at the woods in wonder. Dann at least had seen the initial setup centuries before. This was Jackson’s first time seeing any of it. They passed dense thickets, meadows lit by ship-central overhead lighting designed to mimic the sun, thick bramble bushes covered with berries—many, many edible plants were included in the ship’s biomes—and crossed two streams within minutes of each other.

After they’d walked for about fifteen minutes through the wild brush, she spoke up. “What caused all of this?”

“Centuries of wild growth. And evolution, Rose says.”

“No, not this. What caused most of the crew to die? What went wrong?”

“Ah, yeah. Rose told me—” Dann’s head snapped up, eyes wide. He remembered something Rose had said while he was still too fuzzy-headed to have been clear about it at the time. “—Rose, you said there was a signal from the planet we were sent to colonize!”

“What!” Jackson exclaimed.

“Actually Dann, what I said was it was from the approximate location of the planet. I wasn’t able to confirm the source with absolute certainty.”

“You didn’t ask about this?” Jackson ground out.

“Hey, you know how you felt when you’d just woke up? That was me, okay? Cut me some slack here.”

Jackson snorted. “Rose, tell us exactly what happened, everything you know. Why’d so many pods fail all at once?

“I …” The android stopped, stood unnervingly still in the shadow of a massive old oak. Her eyes glowed faintly from within; Dann saw them scanning back and forth, almost as if she were reading something. Dann glanced at Jackson, who looked back, puzzled.

“Rose?” Dann prompted.

“I’m sorry Dann, Pvt. Jackson,” Rose said. “I’m having trouble accessing the archival data caches. My access is blocked.”

Jackson coughed, looked up in consternation. “What? Who can block your access?”

“Rose can,” Rose said. “The ship’s computer.”

“But you are Rose.” Dann knew there was a physical separation between the two systems, but—

“That’s not completely true, Dann. I’m designed for autonomous operation, and so I’m largely self-contained. I can access the resources of the shipboard systems to augment my own performance, but I am subject to system-level permissions. I’m locked out of accessing the records of the incident that led to the deaths of the crew 20 years ago.”

Dann was having trouble processing the notion that Rose was Rose but wasn’t Rose. “We’re going to have to rename one of you, I think.”

Jackson nodded. “Definitely. This is making my head hurt even worse. Rose—ship’s computer rose, I mean—why are you cutting off Rose’s access to those records?”

There was no response. “She can’t answer audibly from here, there are no speakers. If you want to talk directly with her we’ll have to wait until we reach the next bay. Or if you prefer, I can act as a relay.”

“Let’s do that. What does she have to say?”

“She says the lockout is a safety protocol.”

Dann frowned and looked at Jackson. She shrugged. “I’m no computer tech.”

“Me neither, I just fix mechanical stuff, mostly pipes and conduits.” He had a sudden thought. “Rose, those other pods, do any of ‘em have computer techs in them?”

“Several, yes.”

“Maybe they can help us get to the bottom of this. I don’t even know what questions to ask,” Dann said. “What’s the closest one?”

“Computer techs were kept in a cryo-bay closer to the computer cores. We’ll have to travel through several of the biomes to reach them.”

“A bit of a hike won’t hurt us,” Jackson opined.

“We will have to visit an armory before we make the attempt.”

Dann blinked. “Armory? Why?”

“In case we run into higher-order predators.”

“Predators?” Jackson blurted out. “Why the hell are there predators on the ship?”

“The biomes needed to be self-sufficient for centuries. Food webs were established to ensure that, and healthy food webs require high-order predators to keep herbivores and other, lower-order predators in check.”

“Well what keeps the predators in check then?” Dann asked.

“Availability of food, territory and competition with other predators. There aren’t a large number of them; a ship this size, as large as it is, couldn’t support large populations of carnivores. In your weakened state though, it’s best to be safe and go armed.”

“You didn’t think to tell me this before we went after Jackson?” Dann was nervously keeping an eye on their surroundings now, certain they were being stalked on all sides.

“There may be protocols in place for armed escorts out of the biomes, but if so, they’re not part of my defaults. They would have been implemented by the crew.”

Dann groaned. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing whoever had designed this ship was long dead.