Orion Colony Complete Series Boxed Set J.N. Chaney (books for new readers .txt) 📖

“We’re going to start at the bridge,” Stacy said as she joined me, looking up at the titanic structure. “Elon was piloting the ship when it went down. Arun would have gone to him. We need to make sure they’re still alive and get Iris up and running while we’re at it.”

“Agreed,” I said as Ricky joined us.

“Let’s get going,” Ricky said, stretching his arms and legs. “I don’t want to spend another night out in the open. It gives me weird dreams.”

“Yeah, I bet,” I said as we made our way toward the ship.

Mutt whined next to me as we walked forward.

“You got to stay here, buddy,” I told him reaching down to scratch the underside of his jaw. “It’s dangerous and unstable in there. Stay. Do you understand ‘stay’?”

Mutt gave me a look like I was kidding. He rolled his eyes at me, sat down, and whined.

“Okay, stay there. I’ll be back,” I said. “I can’t believe this. I’m reassuring a dog.”

“You’ve changed for the better since I’ve known you,” Stacy said with raised eyebrows. “I mean that.”

“Just don’t let the word get around.” I grinned back.

Ricky was ahead of us, already examining the best way to enter the craft and how to get to the bridge.

“The stairwell will be the easiest way to the top, or maybe the elevator, depending on how damaged it is,” Ricky said, coming up to the smoking ruin that had once been our home. “Either way, we’ll have to walk. It won’t be an easy trip to the top. I’m guessing there’ll be something like a hundred and fifty levels we’ll have to climb.”

“What in this trip has been easy at all?” Stacy asked with a huff. “Come on; let’s get to it.”

The three of us pulled our way to the stairwell on the edge of the Orion. The going was tricky. There were debris and loose items everywhere. I was almost fried at one point, reaching for the next handhold when a live wire singed my hand.

We climbed the perimeter of the Orion, more than four stories up, before we found the stairwell. Like Ricky guessed, it was clogged with debris ranging from food, clothing, and of course, bodies.

The smell was already setting in, making me look away and spit. Death was never an easy thing to stomach, and I had already seen my fill of it.

“We should take the elevator shaft,” Stacy said, working her way further into the ship. “Depending on where the elevator stopped, we may have to travel through it, but hatches are on both the bottom and the top, so we should be all right.”

We clicked on our flashlights. The emergency lighting in the Orion flickered off and on in a bizarre pattern. It was like it was trying to give us a coded message of some kind.

We continued forward mostly in quiet as we made the long trip to the bridge at the top of the ship.

Lucky for us, the elevator was in the lower half when it had been torn apart. This meant we wouldn’t have to navigate around the cylinder-shaped container.

Sweat poured off my face as the steel tunnel warmed in the light of the day’s suns.

It wasn’t too much of a surprise that Ricky was the one to break the comfortable silence halfway through our journey.

“Do you think the escape crafts have enough in them to reach space and go back to Earth for help?” Ricky asked. “That must be the plan, right? We have to go back. Or do you think they’ll send help?”

“I think they’ll try,” Stacy said as if she were talking to herself. “Sooner or later, they’ll realize something went wrong. The only problem is where do they search? We don’t even know where we are. How are they going to know? We have to get Iris up and running again. Once we figure out where in the universe we are, we’ll be able to make a plan.”

“Right, right,” Ricky agreed, chewing on his lower lip. “We’ll figure it out.”

His words were courageous, but I knew the guy well enough to know he was scared.

We made the rest of the way to the bridge as the tunnel sloped ever so slightly upward. Stacy pulled out her red holo card and tapped a few buttons, bringing a diagram of the Orion up for all of us to see.

“I think we need to go three more levels up, and we should be there,” she said, wiping sweat from her eyes.

So far, we had traveled the elevator shaft with the doors to every level opening on our left. We followed Stacy’s instructions, heading up three more floors before coming to a set of closed doors that led to the bridge.

“Here,” Stacy said, reaching into her pack and pulling out a short steel crowbar. She jammed one end of the rod into the door.

Ricky and I pressed our fingertips into the wedge in the elevator door, ready to pull the two pieces of metal apart.

“On three,” I said. “One, two, three!”

Stacy muscled the crowbar as Ricky and I tore at the steel elevator doors. Slowly, they opened, allowing us to get a better grip on the doors in front of us.

I anchored my feet into the ground and braced my back. My arms quivered as I threw everything I had into pulling at the door.

Stacy abandoned the crowbar now that the doors were opening. She wedged herself in between the doors, putting her back on one side and pushing with her hands on the other. The door gave more until it finally opened all the way and locked into place.

We looked into the bridge, completely unprepared for what we saw next.

28

“Stacy, Dean!” Arun said, limping to the doorway. “You’re alive.”

“And Ricky too,” Ricky said, probably feeling left out.

I was going to respond, but between the state of the bridge and Arun herself, I held my tongue.

The bridge was a disaster. Emergency lights flickered on and off,