Survivor Skills

Prologue

Prologue

Gliese 581

Eighteen months, twenty-three days, four hours:

928,081,020 km/6.2 Astronomical Units (AU) from Earth.

“Two minutes,” Sergi Lazaroff confirmed into the microphone in his helmet, responding to the warning he had been given.

He reached out and gripped the side of a long panel. While his spacesuit was bulky, he moved with ease in the zero gravity within the complex alien machine. He had attached a string of magnetic lights at regular intervals, and there were additional lights mounted to his helmet – but outside of their limited range, the interior was pitch black. Josh waited in the large gap created by whatever had struck the gateway, ready in case Sergi needed help.

A feeling of awe still struck him when he allowed himself to think about the fact that he was inside an alien machine that had been abandoned who knew how long ago. The results of the carbon dating they’d done on the metal were inconsistent, much to the disgust of Mei and Julia.

A smile curved his lips as he thought about Dr. Mei Li Hú’s frustrated determination to extrapolate a plausible history of the object. Of course she would be better off waiting to theorize until they’d gotten more information, but some people were just too impatient.

Mei was one of the five crew members on this mission to investigate the unusual object discovered more than ten years ago by Dr. Harry Marksdale, a University of Arizona professor and amateur astronomer. Mei had ostensibly come to the mission at the behest of the Chinese space agency, and Sergi suspected the others were unaware of her secret objectives.

Her private mission was similar enough to his own that it had been relatively easy to recognize. She was a spy for the Ministry of State Security, the Chinese equivalent of Russia’s Federal Security Service Bureau. Mei’s father, owner of one of China’s largest technology manufacturing and research companies, had been a major contributor to Project Gliese 581g, which had made it easy for Mei to become a crew member of the mission.

Mei was one of two Mission Specialists aboard the spaceship. Her background in computer science, biology, and environmental systems was an invaluable asset to the expedition. The other three members of the crew were Americans.

Lieutenant Commander Joshua Manson was a career Navy man. He commanded the Gliese 581g mission with military precision and attention to detail. Along with Lieutenant Commander Ashton ‘Ash’ Haze, the pilot for this operation, he had been brought on after a helicopter accident killed the first crew chosen for this highly classified international suicide mission.

The last member of the team was the only member without any military training. Dr. Julia Marksdale, Harry Marksdale’s daughter, was there purely for her scientific expertise. Julia was in charge of navigation, medical, and contact support.

The project had been the brainchild of Harry and Julia. Sadly, Harry, along with the initial and backup teams, had been killed while returning to Houston. Sergi suspected the fatal mechanical failures of the helicopters had been contrived to ensure that he and Mei were added to the new list of recruits. Unfortunately, there had not been enough time to find out whether it had been his government’s doing or that of Mei’s.

His specialty was in mechanical engineering, payload, and weaponry. Sergi’s mission was straightforward: find out what was out in space, retrieve as much data as he could, and return home alive to share it with his handlers. Unfortunately, there was no way to transmit the data without everyone involved with the Gliese 581g mission realizing that he was a spy. The only way to pass on the information covertly was to make it back home in one piece and do so personally.

Of course, this mission came with greater risks than any other he had been assigned before. After all, if things went south, there was no one to extricate him – not that anyone would have come for him on any of his other missions either.

“Sergi, you need to monitor your oxygen level. You are down to eighty percent while Josh is still at eighty-nine,” Mei quietly said.

“Are you worrying about me, Mei?” he quipped.

The sound of an inelegant snort whooshed in his ear. “Dead people tend to soil themselves. I don’t want you to ruin a perfectly good spacesuit because you hooked up the hoses incorrectly,” she retorted.

“That is downright disgusting, Mei,” Ash dryly added his opinion.

“But true,” Julia responded. “The gas produced within a body after death combined with the incapacitation of the region of the brain that would normally control the muscles holding the sphincter closed would result in soiling. There are a lot of processes that begin after death that manifest in unfortunate ways because not all parts of a body die at the same time. Death creates more of a domino effect. As different types of muscles die, they can loosen, or they can contract, causing twitches and spasms after death. Plus, the blood still contains the nutrients it had before the heart stopped beating, and a person’s death causes the membranes of blood cells to become more permeable to calcium as they, too, begin to die, so for certain muscle cells, like those in a p***s, that are activated by calcium ions—”

“I don’t think I like where this is going,” Ash piped in.

Sergi shook his head inside the helmet. He didn’t know if it was the growing familiarity with the two women during the voyage or if he was getting soft, but both of them amused the hell out of him. If he stopped to think about it, the lighthearted affection and protective instincts he had toward the two women were actually brand-new experiences in his life. While his relationship, if he could even call it that, with Mei had always been like two tigers circling each other looking for a weak point, what he had with Julia was different. She was a quiet, intelligent, yet strangely innocent and naïve, scientist, and he sometimes silently compared her to a delicate flower so rare that he’d thought it extinct – because she was genuine, and she was compassionate, and she was single-handedly giving him hope that there might be more like her somewhere in the world.

Josh and Ash were good men to have with you in a storm. He admired Josh’s attention to detail and his ability to process information quickly and piece it together to form a larger picture. Ash, on the other hand, had a quick wit, easy smile, and impressive piloting skills.

As he listened to his team’s chatter, Sergi turned the cameras embedded in his helmet and suit toward the circuit in front of him, making sure they would record his every movement. The ‘unusual object’ appeared to be an alien gateway of some sort, and inside the mechanism was a treasure trove of technology unlike anything he had ever seen before. He wanted as much documentation of it as he could get. After over eighteen months in space on an experimental spaceship, he was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that they had proof that humans were not alone in the universe – or at least that they hadn’t been at one time.

He refitted the fourth of five panels he had repaired, and pushed off, floating nearly a half meter before he twisted and grabbed a bar to stop his upward momentum. He joked with Mei as he turned the cameras toward the damaged circuit in front of him. From the pouch attached to his utility belt, he pulled out the last circuit board he had reverse-engineered from the damaged alien boards. He hoped the components were a close enough match to work. When he had applied minimal power to it, the board had lit up the entire workroom.

Mei murmured that he was now down to sixty-nine percent, so he had better stop giving all the oxygen to his… head. Sergei smirked, imagining the pointed look she would be giving him if they were in the same room. He chuckled when he heard Julia’s voice falter in confusion. Julia was extremely smart, but sometimes suggestive jokes went right over her head.

“Ah, Julia,” Ash interjected with a laugh. “I think Mei was inferring that Sergi was feeding oxygen to his other head.”

There was a pause as Julia switched mental gears, and he chuckled when she groaned.

“Well, damn. I missed the real meaning of the conversation again,” she muttered.

“That’s okay, Julia. It’s just all that heavy breathing that gets to Mei,” Sergi teased.

As if on cue, he heard Mei’s exasperated hiss. “I believe your brain is definitely suffering from hypoxia, Sergi. I know men like to let their balls breathe, but really!” Mei retorted.

The sounds of Julia, Josh, and Ash’s muffled laughter made him grin. He knew which buttons to push to get a predictable reaction out of his impossibly easy to ruffle counterpart. His smile faded as the depth of his deception hit him. This small group had become more than comrades on a mission to do the impossible – they had become a family.

“Sergi, how much longer do you need?” Josh asked from near the entrance, breaking into his train of thought.

“This should complete the final connection. Whether these things have a built-in power supply that is still working is another matter. I’ve gone through this one, and it looks like it’s linked to the one before it and the next one, but I never found an actual power source,” Sergi replied, inserting the circuit board into the empty slot.

“We’ll deal with that when we get to it,” Josh instructed.

“Roger that,” Sergi replied, carefully adjusting the panel and feeling it click into place.

He pulled himself to the side. All the damaged panels that he could see had been repaired. Whether Earth materials and alien technology were compatible was another question, but the preliminary testing in the lab had shown a closed circuit. There was one more thing to do and that was to reconnect the line cable that he had noticed as he was entering. He wasn’t sure how he had missed it during his space walks.

He turned slightly and in the glow of the lights they’d brought he could see Josh watching him intently. Returning his focus to the cable, he pulled the end around and aligned it with the port. He blinked when a flash of red light illuminated the interior of the gateway.

“What the…?! Sergi, we need to get out of here,” Josh warned.

“Just a minute,” Sergi responded.

He twisted and pulled his body upward to a long bar where he had strapped one of his tool bags. His fingers fumbled with the clip when the gateway shuddered, then roughly vibrated. A soft curse escaped him when his thickly gloved hands slipped off the clip.

“Leave them. We need to get out of here now,” Josh ordered.

Sergi felt Josh tug on his foot. At the same time, he realized that the bag of tools, along with himself and Josh, were beginning to move. It took him a moment to comprehend that it was the walls that were beginning to spin, not them.

He twisted and nodded to Josh. With a wave of his hand, he motioned for Josh to go through the opening first since he was closer. Reaching down, he used the railing to follow Josh down to the gap in the outer wall. Josh braced his feet on a long crossbar and kicked off. A moment later, Sergi did the same and followed Josh through the gaping hole in the side of the gateway. His hand moved to unhook his tether to the mechanism. His hand stilled when he looked down the long line of circular gates and saw the other sections lighting up. He reached out and grabbed Josh’s arm.

“Josh, look!” Sergi exclaimed, lifting his arm toward the lights.

He heard the alarmed communications of his team, but he was more focused on what could only be described as a miracle. Each of the six gateways was coming online. The long rows of cables connecting them began to glow. Sergi watched in fascination as each gate slowly began to spin – and open. It took a moment to register in his brain that Josh was urgently ordering him to use his jet pack. When it did, he realized that they were in extreme danger.

“Hurry up, Sergi. We need to get back to the Gliese,” Josh said.

Struggling to unhook the tether, he grunted when the clasp refused to release. “I won’t argue with you on that,” Sergi muttered before he heard Josh’s repeated urgent warning in his headset.

Sergi released a long string of curses in his native Russian when he was jerked backwards away from Josh. His fingers slipped from the clasp as he spun violently. Fighting to twist around so he could grab the tether, he clenched his jaw when the line was jerked out of his hand.

“I can’t get the tether undone,” Sergi growled in frustration.

He looked in the direction he had last seen Josh. The other man was leaning forward, his determined expression visible behind the glass of his helmet.

“Hold on, I’m coming,” Josh replied.

Sergi released a nervous chuckle. “I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere. Though, I would appreciate it if you could hurry,” he reflected, seeing the other gateways beginning to spin even more rapidly.

Sergi’s breath caught in his throat when Josh struggled to grab him and missed. The tension on the tether was increasing and he knew he was seconds away from death. If Josh didn’t leave him, they would both be dead, and the mission would be in dire jeopardy. He reached out and gripped Josh’s shoulders when the other man was finally able to grab him.

Ash’s tense warning sounded in their headphones. “Josh, you need to get a move on,” Ash stated.

“I am,” Josh replied.

Sergi shook his head. He kept his gaze on Josh as they both rotated at an increasingly dizzying speed.

“Josh… Commander, leave me,” Sergi ordered in a quiet tone.

Josh ignored him and continued to work on the metal clasp. Sergi gritted his teeth and prepared to forcibly push Josh away when the tether finally broke free. Josh cursed before he warned Sergei to ‘Brace for impact’.

Sergi grunted when his back hit the spinning ring of the gateway, and his momentum sent him spiraling toward the glowing cable. For a moment he wondered if being crushed to death or electrocuted would be better. Unable to stop his trajectory, all he could do was hope that a second miracle would occur, and he would just be cast out into space.

He knew his luck had run out the moment he connected with the cable. The powerful surge of electricity flashed through his suit. For a brief second, he stiffened and thought his heart would explode, but it just stuttered and stopped. A brilliant flash of white light shot through his mind. He wondered if he had been given a glimpse of heaven to add to his misery.

Sergi wasn’t a religious man, but if there really were only two afterlife options – heaven or hell – he could see why a supreme being might give him a glimpse of what he could never have. It would make his eternity in hell all the more bitter. That was his last thought before his mind shut down.