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

she approached the pod. One look inside and she covered her entire mouth and nose. She turned away, shaking her head.

“You don’t want to look in there,” she gasped.

Boss Creed disobeyed her warning. I could see him nearly get sick as he too looked away and shook his head.

“What’s in there?” Doctor Allbright asked. “Does someone need medical attention?”

“No, they’re gone,” Stacy said, spitting on the ground beside her. She shrugged off her pack and used a shirt inside as a handkerchief around her nose and mouth. “We might need you to examine the bodies to confirm the cause of death, but they’re gone.”

The way Stacy was choosing her words made me understand something was very wrong. Curiosity won out, and I steeled myself as I walked forward to peek into the circular white escape pod.

What I saw I knew was no ordinary death.

15

Bile raced to my mouth. The stench was nearly impossible to bear. Two corpses sat facing one another. Both were unstrapped in their seats. One was slumped into the seat, his neck broken. His head hung off his shoulders like a drooping ear of a puppy. A knife was still firmly gripped in his right hand.

The dead man’s counterpart was a woman in her twenties. She had blonde hair pulled back. Black streaks ran just under her skin like new veins recently added. The veins ran outward from her mouth, eyes, and hands. I looked at the side of her head. More ran from her ears.

She was also slumped in her chair with multiple stab wounds in her chest and throat. I wasn’t a detective, but it didn’t take a specialized Civil Authority Officer to realize the two had killed each other.

Doctor Allbright appeared next to me with her own mask in place. Tom and Elon came next.

“Oh, Father, save us all,” Tom said before turning and puking out his guts on the ground beside me.

Lou, Boss Creed, Mark, and Hannah all seemed content to not look into the sphere.

“What was wrong with her?” Stacy asked, joining us. “What are those markings coming off of her mouth and ears?”

“It looks like dark ink coming through her veins,” Elon mused out loud.

“I don’t know what it is.” Doctor Allbright removed a small kit from a hip pocket. She gently lowered herself into the tight space between the two corpses.

I wasn’t the squeamish type, but even I had respect for Doctor Allbright at that moment. There was barely room enough for one other person to move around in the sphere with two bodies. I understood they were dead, but to be so close with the stench and death itself was a lot for anyone to handle.

To her credit, Doctor Allbright handled herself with an expertise I didn’t know she possessed. She placed light blue gloves on her hands and went to work examining the bodies.

“It looks like they killed one another. Judging by the bloat of the bodies and level of deterioration, I would guess that it was sometime in the last two to three days,” Doctor Allbright spoke to us as she maneuvered her way around the bodies. She gently examined the wounds, trying not to disturb the bodies at all. “Broken neck on one victim and blood loss on the other from multiple stab wounds.”

“How could they have only been dead for two to three days?” Elon asked no one in particular. “That means they landed and either stayed alive in the pod for a few days before killing one another or—”

“Or they landed, got out of the pod, and then came back for some reason,” Stacy finished the thought.

“Why would they come back?” I asked.

“Maybe there was something out there they were running from,” Stacy answered.

“I don’t know what this is,” Doctor Allbright said, examining the woman who had the black streaks coming from her mouth, eyes, and ears. “I could guess some kind of blood poisoning, but honestly, we’re dealing with an alien substance here so it could be anything. I’ll need to take a sample back to the Orion. With Iris’ help, we should be able to get a fairly good read on what it is.”

“Do it and let’s go,” Elon said, turning his head to take in a long pull of fresh air. “There’s nothing we can do for them now.”

I watched fascinated as Doctor Allbright removed a handful of plastic bags. Next, she began to gather the black residue from the dead woman’s corpse. Doctor Allbright swabbed her ears, nose, and hands.

The black liquidy substance reminding me of motor oil was most plentiful in her ears. Doctor Allbright was able to secure a large amount of the liquid there.

Stacy didn’t move inside the sphere as there was no room. She did, however, remove a pen-sized camera from one of her pockets, taking pictures of the scene.

“Whatever happened to this woman, whatever happened to both of them could happen again,” Elon said, thinking out loud the ramifications of such an event. “Doctor Allbright, how do we know whatever this is isn’t contagious?”

“We don’t,” Doctor Allbright answered. “However, the fact that the male body doesn’t have the same markings makes it improbable that whatever this virus is, is communicable through air or touch.”

She had a point. The dead man in his seat would have also had the black marks on his face and hands if the disease or virus or whatever it was transferred through the oxygen we breathed at the moment.

“Whatever that blackness is inside of her had to make her stronger, or she was a trained killer from the beginning,” I said, looking at the woman. She was average build and muscle tone.

“What do you mean?” Elon asked.

“That man’s broken neck,” Stacy said, catching on to my train of thought. “It looks like she did it with her hands. I don’t see any other weapon.”

“The trauma around his neck and marks would say the same,” Doctor Allbright said, finally finishing her task and removing herself from the sphere.

Elon