Colony Mars Ultimate Edition by Gerald M Kilby

Author:Gerald M Kilby [Kilby, Gerald M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Outer Planet Media
Published: 2019-11-07T22:00:00+00:00

19

Jing Tzu

It had gotten quiet, too quiet. Jing Tzu stood with his ear pressed against the locked door of the food processing pod, where he and the two other Xaing Zu crew had been imprisoned. Outside in the biodome nothing could be heard. Something was going on, and he didn’t like it.

A short while after Xenon and the other colonists had unceremoniously dumped them in here, the biodome descended into chaos. Shouting, yelling, the sound of a PEP weapon, then running. Now there was a deathly silence. Yet it could be an opportunity.

He and his crew needed to get out of here somehow. Better still, would be to get off the planet and return to Earth. They would have to leave sometime, COM couldn’t hold them here forever. But he didn’t trust them either. He wouldn’t put it past that maniacal VanHoff to just blow them out of an airlock.

He pressed his ear against the door again—silence.

“Anything?” His first officer, Chen Deng, called over from the back of the pod. He had finished tying up their mission geneticist, who had started to get that same strange look in his eyes that Dan Ma had just before he went psychotic. So they decided to tie him up, much to his consternation, before he started killing them all. He protested for quite a while before finally zoning out, or maybe he was unconscious, Chang couldn’t tell. Commander Jing Tzu moved away from the door and shook his head. “Nothing.” He looked down at the geneticist. “How is he?”

“Well, if he wakes up and goes ballistic, like Dan Ma, at least we’ve got him contained.”

“We need to get out of here, back to the lander if possible. There’s something going on out there, and I have a bad feeling about it. However, it might just give us an opportunity.”

“Back to the lander? How? We’d need our EVA suits.”

“Well you can stay here and go insane if you want.”

Chen looked down at the unconscious geneticist. “What’s happening to them?”

“It’s this place, it’s possessed by a corrupt biology. One that eats away at the mind. They warned us about it, remember?”

“But it was supposed to be eradicated.”

“Well, you can stay here and think about it if you like, or you can help get us out of this place.”

Chen stood up. “So we just leave him here… and Dan Ma as well?”

“Screw him. He’s a geneticist, the very people who create these abominations.” Jing Tzu moved closer to Chen and calmed his voice. “Two of our crew are dead, killed by COM. Dan Ma is probably dead too or may as well be.” He looked down at the geneticist. “And we can guess what’s going to happen to him. So the mission is over. There is nothing to be gained by staying here. We need to grab this chance and try to escape.”

Chen looked at him for a moment and eventually nodded. “You’re right, let’s get the hell out of here.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.