Second Earth (8 page)

  
Adams produced a small telescoping grabbing
arm from a pouch at his side. Gingerly plunging the device into the sand, he
slowly grappled onto his prize and withdrew the small object. A small, silver
metal case gleamed in the sunlight.

  
“What is it?” Shawn asked as Melissa reached
for and dusted off the artifact.

  
It was about two inches by three inches, and
perhaps only a quarter of an inch thick. She turned over the metal casing and
read aloud the inscription etched on its surface. “W.B.G.” she said
breathlessly, a lump forming in her throat. “This…this is my father’s. I used
to play with this when I was a little girl. He used it to hold his pass cards
and access badges, back before the Unified government switched to single
identity cards. I would hide it from him on the mornings I didn’t want him to
go to work.” She was certain her heart had stopped beating, and knew it
wouldn’t start again until she opened the case. Where she expected to see her
father’s cards, she instead found a small scrap of paper sealed inside a clear
bag. Extricating the note, she unfolded it and read it silently.

  
“What does it say?” Shawn asked with due
curiosity. “Is it from the Admiral?”
 

  
“I don’t know. It’s typed, not written. It
looks like an address…somewhere here on Delta Base.” Melissa then accessed her
electronic map and entered the address into the computer. The whole team
watched as the three-dimensional image panned away from their position and
fixed itself on a small building near the center of Crystal City, several miles
from their current location. “It appears to be a building. One that seems
fairly intact, I might add.”

  
Shawn leaned over her shoulder, his
excitement piqued, and spoke softly into her ear. “Do you think it’s from him?”

  
She turned to look him in the eyes, her lips
inches from his as a broad smile crossed her face. “There’s only one way to
know for certain.”

*
* *

  
The Marine hover carrier sped away from
Delta Base in a plume of dust, leaving the remains of the base to continue
their slow decay into oblivion. Sergeant Adams was at the controls, with
Private Montoya on the far right side and Raven between the two. Directly
behind them, Melissa sat silently beside Shawn and continued to study the
digital map for nearly five full minutes before she placed it back in her bag.
She sighed heavily, watching the surrounding countryside pass the carrier in a
blur.

  
Shawn, sensing her trepidation, leaned
closer to her. “Nervous?”

  
Melissa had begun to bite at one of her
fingernails as she continued to stare outside the skimmer. When Shawn spoke,
she removed her fingertip from her mouth and shook her head, as if his words
had broken a momentary trance. “What?”

  
“I asked if you were feeling nervous,” he
smiled.

  
She regarded him for a moment before turning
back to the view. “Thanks for your concern, but I’m not sure what there is for
me to be nervous about.”

  
Shawn shrugged almost imperceptibly. “About
what we might find out there.”

  
Melissa looked out across the open plain
that separated Delta Base from the destruction of Crystal City. The team still
had roughly ten miles before they reached the outskirts of the city, but the
spires of the Crystal Towers were already visible in the cloudless blue sky,
jutting from a line of trees just in front of the personnel carrier.

  
“This whole things has me on edge,” he said
without looking at her. “I don’t mind admitting that it’s got me very,
very
worried.”

  
The transport passed through a warm pocket
of billowing air that ruffled Melissa’s hair into her face. She swept it away
quickly, not wanting to miss a single detail of the city as it loomed closer.
She admired Shawn for his strength, and even more for his ability to be honest
about his feelings. She sighed deeply as she collected her thoughts. “To be
perfectly honest, I am.” As Shawn turned to her, she smiled weakly. “Thanks,
Shawn.”

  
He smiled casually, letting a silence fall
between them for a minute and then, as the carrier dipped down a hill, he
gently pressed her for more. “Do you think you could be more specific about
what’s eating at you?”

  
She smiled to herself. “It’s my father. He
was always like this with me when I was a little girl.”

  
Shawn raised a single eyebrow with regard to
her statement. “How so?”

  
“Well, it was always difficult for him to
tell me disquieting news. I think he felt I was more fragile than I really
was.” She turned to face Shawn, smiling as the memory played in her mind like a
movie. “Anyway, he would leave me little things like this,” she held the ID
card case up briefly, then set it back on her lap. “He’d leave little notes
that would direct me on a treasure hunt to find the answers.” She looked into
Shawn’s eyes staring back at her. “I guess it wasn’t such a big stretch for me
to go into intelligence after a childhood full of little adventures like that.
The notes were mostly benign until my mother passed.”

  
“What happened?”

  
Realizing she’d opened this particular
Pandora’s Box all on her own, Melissa knew she’d have to reveal the information
to him. Besides, she’d wanted to for some time; now was as good a time as any.
“She was a nurse…medical corps. She was on a cruiser…near the Epsilon Tiranan
nebula…when—”

  
Shawn reached out and gently covered her
hand with his own. After all, he knew fairly well where this story was going.
The explosion of the Epsilon star nearly twelve years ago lit up the skies of
every planet in Beta Sector. It had happened with precious little warning.
There had been a Sector Command fleet nearby, and a small resupply station just
beyond the rim of the nebula. No one expected the star to suddenly explode,
least of all the scientists sent to study it. The detonation wiped out three light-years
of the nebula and sent shockwaves that were recorded as far away as Anchor. “A
great, unpredictable tragedy of mother nature,” most had initially said
concerning the incident. There were, of course, grumblings that something else
had taken place, that a cover-up was hiding the truth, but nothing had ever
come of the accusations. Shawn had known that William Graves’ wife had passed
away before the Galactic War against the Kafarans, but he’d had no idea she was
at Tiranan. After all, William had never talked about it.

  
Seeing the pain in her eyes, he closed his
hand around hers with added pressure. “I’m so sorry.”

  
Melissa withdrew her hand from underneath
his and wiped a tear from her eye as she collected herself. “Anyway, after my
mother had died, he left a similar series of notes for me to follow around our
home on Thress. The trail finally led me to a picture of my mother that he kept
on his nightstand. There was a note affixed to it that said…to bring the
picture to his study, where I found him waiting for me.”

  
“That’s when he told you what happened?”
Shawn asked, even though the question was rhetorical.

  
Melissa nodded as another tear rolled down
her cheek. She inhaled a sharp breath as she tried to hide her pain under the
visage of the well-trained OSI agent she was. The skimmer dipped into a small
crater in the road’s surface, and the occupants shuffled slightly as the
carrier’s thrusters compensated for the slight drop. “I don’t want to find a
note like that ever again, Shawn.”

  
“And you think that’s what we’ll find in the
city?”

  
With her free hand, Melissa reached over and
brushed the top of the hand he’d placed near her. “I hope not. I really hope
not. Considering that we’ve found this first clue, it stands to reason there
will be more, possibly many more, until we come to the final answer.”

  
At that moment, Shawn wished he had the
right words. He looked out beyond the sweeping forward windscreen and to
Crystal City, to the northernmost buildings now only a few moments away, and realized
that any further personal conversation would have to wait. “Whatever happens,
I’ll be right there beside you.”

  
She smiled. “Of course you will. That’s
Krif’s standing order, isn’t it: to make sure I’m protected at all time?”

  
“It is,” Shawn said with a nod, and then
inspected his sidearm. It was one of the polished, silver blasters he’d kept in
a safe hiding place back on Minos. He examined the weapon, not really checking
for anything in particular. What he wished he could add to his statement was,
“I’m not doing it because I was ordered to,” but the words didn’t have a chance
to come out before Melissa spoke again.

  
“I promise not to get into too much
trouble,” she said sweetly.

  
“I’m not sure I like that promise,” he
replied, placing his weapon back into its holster. “A little trouble every now
and then is good for the soul. Besides, it’s been anything but dull since I met
you.”

  
Melissa nodded. “So it has, Commander,” she
said, and then turned her gaze back out to the side of the skimmer as the first
crumbling buildings of Crystal City slipped silently past the personnel
carrier.

  
Laid out in series of concentric circles
with the Crystal Towers at the heart of the sprawling metropolis, the city had
once been one of the most beautiful establishments in Beta Quadrant. The
buildings, most of them a consistent gleaming white, had shone like a beacon in
the lush greenery that surrounded the place. Now the city was little more than
a mess of collapsing edifices and land pockmarked with craters. Nearly
one-quarter of the buildings the team had passed were crumbled into the
streets, and there didn’t appear to be an unbroken stretch of pavement longer
than twenty yards.

  
The personnel carrier was currently
traveling along a road that had definitely seen better days. It had large
cracks and crevices in its surface, with dense overgrowth blossoming from
portions that yielded fertile soil. Shawn could see that the sidewalks—once
laid out meticulously—were warped and uprooted in places, making any prolonged
journey across their surfaces perilous at best. The trees that had lined this
particular street were long dead, having given up the last of their leaves many
years ago. The thick trunks that flanked the streets remained standing,
petrified monuments to the beauty that once was and would probably never be
again.

  
As the team continued down the wide road,
they found they had to occasionally avoid the odd vehicle abandoned in the
center of their path, or the collapsed building that blocked their way. From
time to time they needed to slow the craft down, giving Shawn and the rest of
the team ample time to survey what little was left of the downtown area. As Cal
Vross had described back on Darus Station, there were few human remains here in
the city. The occasional skeleton of a former inhabitant was lying exactly
where he or she had fallen. Some were in their vehicles, others were on the
streets and sidewalks, and still others could be seen inside any of the
numerous storefront and restaurant façades the hover carrier passed. Still, it
was easy to see that the vast majority of the population had died at Delta
Base.

  
“This place gives me the creeps,” Shawn
heard Montoya’s Hispanic voice whisper from the front of the carrier.

  
As the hovering carrier traveled through a
four-point intersection and rounded a corner, the team was greeted by the site
of a city park, its swing set long abandoned, the park benches blown over, and
the once-fertile fields of grass having long since decayed to dust. Sergeant
Adams nodded his head leisurely. “I hear that. And I thought the
Icarus
was spooky. The sooner we can get
out of here, the better off I’ll be.”

  
“Not afraid of ghosts are you, Sergeant?”
Roslyn asked from beside Montoya.

  
“Not usually, ma’am, but…I mean, look
around.” Adams waved a hand out toward the former park. “I think this place
qualifies as the exception to the rule. All these bodies—the ones here and the
ones at Delta—they all died exactly the same way and at exactly the same time.
What could have done that?”

  
Lieutenant Commander Brunel narrowed her
eyes as she contemplated Adams’ words. She craned her head over her shoulder at
looked squarely at Melissa. “Some form of viral infection? A plague?”

  
Melissa shook her head slowly. “I’m afraid I
can’t say at this point. I’ve only got basic medical training; I’m not
qualified to study these remains even if I did have the equipment to do so.”

  
“And where exactly are we heading?” Raven
asked without turning to face Melissa.