Chapter 14: History
"When I had first found Gallo," Leland told them somberly, "he was dying. He had been wounded bad from a fight with a hunter. I dragged from the main hall into my home. I remembered first aid training and began treating him for shock from the blood loss."
Leland stood from their circular seating arrangement and began to climb back up the ladder to the high roost above them. He kept talking the whole time, voice as gray and dreary as a cloudy sky, "He told me that he was a member of the Flight Command, that he was the Lieutenant Commander that worked directly with the Captain on the bridge. They had apparently received a distress signal from Earth. It stated that that the Elysium was all that was left of humanity and mankind as we know it. Fearful, he said they ran a full sweep off the grid looking for Earth but it wasn't there anymore. It was gone."
"The Earth's gone?" Bower was incredulous.
"How?" Nadia implored him.
Mahn sat down, visibly shaken.
"You're all that's left of us," Leland quoted the last line of the transmission, "Good luck, God bless and God speed."
They sat in numb silence, each of them absorbing this terrible shock in their own way.
"He went crazy," Leland continued from his high perch, "and killed the Captain and the other Command Officer in the bridge."
"Everything wrong with the ship is the result of a mutiny?" Bower was still stunned.
"Gallo was the proud father of twins, a boy and a girl. He had also married one of the most beautiful and intelligent women I've ever seen. He had pictures of his family, you know? Well, he went bat shit crazy because our sister flight, the transport ship Utopia, was carrying all of the spouses and children of the Elysium's crew on board."
"I remember now," Bower said, "There were two flight ships sent to colonize Pandorum. One of them had all the techs, military and workers and the other one had all of the families. The Utopia launched a year after we did. It was supposed to give the Elysium's crew a full year to prepare for the arrival of their families."
Leland nodded, "That's exactly right. The problem was, the Utopia never launched."
"My God."
"It was destroyed along with the Earth?" Mahn asked.
"Poof, wiped away," croaked Leland, "One day the Earth and the Utopia were there, and the next, nothing."
"In one day?" Nadia sat down, hands over her mouth.
"It had to be nuclear or maybe an asteroid?" Mahn was trying to wrap his head around it.
"Does it really matter?" Leland asked quietly. "I guess at first the Captain had reported that the Utopia was fine, that its launch was successful. During the second sector, way after the transmission was received, Gallo secretly swept for the Utopia to make sure it was behind them and discovered that she was gone too. I can guess he didn't take the news too well. I mean, his twins and his wife were gone and he had been misled. That's why he killed the others on the bridge. He kept telling me they had lied. He was like a madman. Telling me over and over again that they lied. Raving."
Bower was frustrated, "So we're underway, all systems go and we get a transmission from Earth saying it was destroyed. That's bad enough, but the Captain decides to lie to the few crew members who are awake about the Utopia? That doesn't make any sense."
"Gallo was pretty badly wounded when I found him. He had lost a lot of blood, so at the time, I thought he was delusional, just raving, you know? After he started to recover, I got more information out of him. He told me that he had done things to the ship, that he had hijacked the computer system and that he had manually awaken some of the laborers from their cryopods and trapped them in the storage unit."
Bower's thoughts drifted to all of the empty pods that they had been chased through in the personnel chamber. He remembered Nadia saying it was their favorite hunting ground. He started to put things together. No way. No fucking way!
"From the bridge he had control over the entire ship. They were just games to him, that's what he told me," Leland's face was pale, "That the people he had trapped were just test subjects for his games. He was studying their behavior or so he said. At first, the trapped people formed a single big group and supported one another. As time passed and food started to get scarce they quarreled, divided themselves into smaller groups. He told me they pleaded with him, begged him to let them out. They groveled before him like he was a God, prayed to him that he would provide sustenance for them, so he did. Whatever group worshiped him the most got the food and water delivered to them. Of course, this started wars between the different camps within the massive personnel chambers."
They were silent, all of them just listening in horror.
No way.
"The years passed. The strongest tribe eventually killed off the weaker ones. Gallo informed the remaining people that he was going to sleep for a few years. He only left them enough food and water for about a year. I think his plan was for them to die off from starvation so he could start over with his sick power games. He had only manually awaken one of the six sections at that time, so he still had plenty of bodies in the personnel chamber to play with after he woke up."
No fucking way!
Leland continued, "His first sleep was set for three years. He woke up feeling great and he thought that the people would be long gone. Instead, he found them still alive but not quite human anymore. They were mindless, almost beast-like. He thought that maybe it was because of what they were eating."
"Oh God don't tell me." Nadia murmured.
"Cannibalism?" Mahn asked carefully.
"No fucking way." was all Bower could think to say.
"Yeah. Gallo told me that every time a new random pod opened every few days, they would attack the occupant, murder them and eat them. As if that wasn't bad enough, he saw them eating their own dead so he started feeding them to themselves. He would have them fight over the corpses. I guess it made him feel powerful or something." Leland climbed back down the ladder and sat down.
"So, what did he do then?" Bower was almost afraid to ask but he already knew the outcome of this story so he might as well hear all the details.
"Well, he said that everything was fine until they started breeding. The youngsters who weren't eaten by some of the other adults, could climb walls like spiders. They began to get into the air ducts and small service areas that weren't accessible to the adults. He wasn't sure, but somehow some of the youngsters found a way to get out. They managed opened a few doors that Gallo had sealed and let the adults out too."
"Too bad they didn't find and eat his ass." Bower hoped.
"Yeah. He escaped but was forced to seal himself within the storage control room for a few more years. During that time, the hunters continued to evolve into what they are now. I guess eventually he made his way out of that office and that's when I found him."
"After you found all of this out what did you do?"
"You should have imprisoned him and forced him to fix everything on the computers that he messed up," Nadia said fuming.
"Like I said before, I was having trouble believing his story." Leland told them quietly.
"What convinced you?" Mahn asked him, "Did you see something on a terminal that validated his claims?"
"No. After he had gotten back on his feet, he said I knew too much to live and he turned on me. After I had fed him, bandaged him and nursed him back to health, the fucker attacked me! Can you believe that shit? After I saved his ass! Anyway, I managed to drive him out and locked him out of this storage tank. I've been here ever since. I don't know what happened to him. Maybe he found a cryopod and is sleeping, maybe the hunters got him, I just don't know."
"So you know what the hunters truly are and you've been eating them anyway?" Mahn asked him quietly.
Leland's smile returned, "Ha ha! That was a joke, man! I've killed dozens but I always throw them out." He leaned towards Mahn, his voice hushed conspiratorially, "I just told you I ate them so you all would be less apt to try and turn on me. I figured you'd think twice about trying to attack me if you all thought I was a crazy sick bastard, you know? Ha ha!"
They all breathed a little easier but their situation was still grim.
"I've got food stored all over this hold," Leland was saying, "been rationing it out for myself 'cause I didn't know how many years I was going to get stuck here. I try to use the oldest stuff first-"
The ship vibrated violently and after the flashing lights and sounds had started to subside, there was a long metallic groan afterward. It sounded as though the vessel was ill.
Bower felt like a rat trapped aboard a sinking ship. He was clear and direct when he told them, "Listen, the power surges are becoming longer and more frequent. The groans mean that sections of the reactor are overheating. The reactor's in its final stage before complete shut down. We have less time than I thought."
Leland's eyes were wide, "Whoa, what?"
"The reactor needs to be reset or we're all going to die," Bower said calmly.
"That's why we were trying to find our way to the reactor bay," Nadia explained.
"If we can regain control of the ship's systems, then we can start reviving people, possibly find some friends or family and begin to exterminate these fucking monsters. Everything is riding on us resetting the reactor. It has to be done."
"How long before the ship dies?" Leland asked him somberly, "The truth."
Bower thought about lying and saying they had a little longer than he suspected but the urgency was too great. Honesty was the only chance he had to motivate this small group into doing whatever had to be done to save the ship. "An hour," he told them, "Maybe less."
Nadia stared at him. "That's not enough time."
"It has to be," Bower didn't realize he had placed a comforting hand on her shoulder as he spoke to her. He pulled his hand away and turned to Leland, "Do you have a communication device? A radio or anything? I think my comm unit is broken."
"Yeah I do," Leland said, "I'm not sure it works. But who are you planning to call?"
"My Lieutenant."