Echoes Of Destiny by Craig A. Falconer

Author:Craig A. Falconer [Falconer, Craig A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

26

Lately it’s started to feel like my victories are getting shorter and shorter lived, but this has to be a record.

No more than a few seconds after I’ve removed my headset, Santino’s ominous words have removed all feelings of success.

“What’s not good?” I ask him. “What’s happening down there? Is it one of Simone’s tests?”

“You should come downstairs,” the young man replies before setting off without me. His face looked paler than I’ve ever seen it. Whatever this is, it’s seriously troubling him.

I turn to Mountjoy. “You should come,” I say, keen to work him into the group dynamic.

His expression, clearly uneasy even through his helmet, doesn’t waver until he holds a hand out to lead me out of the door. “Let’s go,” he decides.

It’s a fairly short walk to the stairs that will lead us down to the main labs, although I guess that’s relative to the lunar trek I’ve just taken. It still takes us a minute or so to get there, and then another to reach the labs.

To anyone who hasn’t spent as long as I have in underground survival bunkers, I’m sure the stairway and tunnels would feel extremely claustrophobic. But still, everything does feel even narrower than I’m used to. That could simply be down to the added difficulty and costs of building a compound as deep as this on the Moon rather than on Earth, where there are already a lot of technical challenges to contend with.

Aside from the tightness of the corridor we emerge into at the bottom of the stairs, it feels like I’m inside a pretty typical research building. The walls, flooring and lighting have a comforting element to them, evoking any number of university settings. This is nothing like the weirdly empty corridor in the medical facility where Tom and his colleague brought me, or indeed the very utilitarian materials used in the ERF’s bunkers.

Inevitably, though, the comfort ends there.

Even though Santino rushed back down here after telling me there was something I had to see, I would easily have found him and the others without Mountjoy being here to lead me to the labs Simone has been using. That’s because their voices are echoing down the corridor in my direction, with more than a hint of concern in each of them.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” I hear Clyde say. As our only trained exobiologist, it’s not good to hear that coming from him.

“She’s not going to be wrong about this,” Driver replies.

I figure she’s talking about Simone. But when I reach the lab they’re all in, I can quickly tell that it’s actually Maya who has said something Clyde is querying. The fact he’s looking at her and Driver, with Simone by his side, makes that clear.

“What’s going on?” Mountjoy asks, beating me to it with the obvious question on the tip of my tongue.

All eyes fall on Maya. “I am not familiar with the biology of this sludge,” she states.

Maya always speaks in the terms we do, quickly

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