Seeding Ship Methodius, System Classified

  “Damn it!” Klement shouted as he ran through the narrow corridor.

  Of the entire team of seeding ship engineers, he was the only one left. By now all the rest were supposed to be dead, if they were lucky. Three shifts of fourteen people each gone in the blink of an eye…

  The sound of sirens boomed in the cargo compartment. A minute too late, they tried their best to acknowledge the problem, before suddenly stopping just as abruptly as they had begun.

  Saints preserve me! The technician crossed himself as he tried to initiate the emergency lockdown.

  Already the section was experiencing multiple breaches, exposing the inside of the ship to the vacuum of space. Yet, Klement’s greatest fear wasn’t that the endless void would suck out all the air, but rather that it wouldn’t happen fast enough. As he stood at the edge of the cargo area, all the dryad containers were violently shaking. Several at the far end had already breached, causing plants to sprout out into the larger area. And that was just the beginning.

  Every colony ship technician had gone through the same boring orientation videos. The church had made a point to provide a graphic illustration of what would happen if a dryad were to gain conscience before reaching her destination. Rumors always persisted, but no one really believed that it would actually happen.

  “Lord, help me survive this and I’ll dedicate my life to you and spend it in a monastery.” With trembling hands, the man entered the confirmation code. The spacesuit glove didn’t make things any easier.

  “Cargo section!” a voice came through Klement’s internal communicator. “What’s going on down there? We’ve lost visual and—”

  “Eject the cargo!” Klement shouted.

  The small panel screen flashed red. His command had been confirmed. Several steps away, the containment doors slammed shut, separating the man from the fury of the awakening dryads.

  How is this happening? The technician couldn’t stop shivering. The sedatives alone should have kept the creatures in limbo for months. The wake-up procedure took hours, if not days, to fully bring a dryad to a state in which she could function. And yet he had seen it with his own eyes. Several of his friends had died before his eyes, punctured by a birch branch that had spontaneously sprouted out of a dryad pod. He could only guess what had happened to the rest.

  “Cargo… section…” Words burst through the communicator once more, accompanied by a heavy dose of static. “What… Repeat? We have lost…”

  “Eject the fucking dryads!” he shouted again.

  There was no way that a few inches of carbon-steel would stop them. At best they’d hold out half a minute if not less. Gritting his teeth, the man rushed towards the main section of the ship. A secondary door blocked his path. Normally, the passage further in would be open, but the ship’s emergency system had imposed restrictions, despite failing where it really counted.

  “Daaamn it!” Klement shouted. Frantically, he tapped on the suit’s external pockets, trying to remember where he put his ident pass, when the door suddenly slid aside.

  Thanking his luck, the technician took a step forward only to stop in his tracks. Someone else was there. Wearing a black spacesuit with large crosses painted on the chest and helmet, stood the seeding ship’s cleric.

  “Holy Cleric?” Klement stuttered.

  The priest was neither tall nor imposing. According to the rumors, he had spent the last three decades overseeing seeding ships. Spending most of the time alone, separate even from the rest of the clergy, the man wasn’t very talkative, didn’t have any particular interests or hobbies, and rarely did much until it was time to launch the terraforming pods. Some said that he was serving penance; others that he had left the comfort of planetary life for the calm of space travel. Whatever the case, Klement hadn’t seen walk around the ship so far, let alone visit the cargo section.

  “How bad is it?” the old man asked, his voice dry as he had gone through a week-long water fast.

  “Holy Cleric?” the technician asked.

  “The dryads. How many are waking up?”

  “All of them?”

  A series of slams on the cargo doors brought the conversation to an abrupt end. Before Klement knew what was going on, the old man pulled him into the corridor, then tossed a pair of cylindrical grenades into the connecting space. Streaks of white smoke erupted from each. Seconds later, the door slid shut again.

  “What…” Klement felt his body give in. Even in the best of times he couldn’t describe himself as fit, and now the adrenaline in his system was starting to wear off. “What was that?” he managed to ask.

  “Incense grenades,” the cleric said. “They’ll calm the dryads down.”

  “No!” A new wave of fear swept through the technician. “It won’t be enough! We must jettison them into space! They’ve gone insane! The branches….”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “You’ve never seen a dryad wake up, have you?” Strength emanated from the cleric’s voice. It was perfectly calm, not in the least worried about what was happening two steel doors away. “It is the most terrifying sight one could behold. Everyone demands that more worlds be made fit for living, and at the same time no one cares how the terraforming takes place.”

  “They’re terraforming the ship?” Klement came to the first conclusion he could think of.

  “No. No dryad would create flora on metal, not unless she was desperate. For a whole cargo of dryads to simultaneously gain consciousness and sprout plants in the cargo bay, something must have happened.” The cleric looked Klement in the eyes. “What did you see?”

  “Nothing!” the technician immediately said.

  “Nothing?”

  Everyone in the Orthodoxy knew that it was a terrible idea to lie to a priest. Even so, the instinct to deny any wrongdoing was often stronger than rational thought. The power of the church was well established. It was common for colonists on newfound worlds to end up getting punished or even sent to a penal monastery. However, faced with two sets of fears, Klement decided to put his trust in the cleric; at least that way he was guaranteed to live long enough to be sent to a monastery.

  “We went to check a random malfunction,” he began. “Something was glitching out in one of the pod’s sensors. The pilots couldn’t localize it, so a few people from the third shift were sent. A few minutes later, we got reports of a cascade failure, so everyone else joined in.”

  “You were from the third shift?”

  “No… I was from the second shift. I had just finished a few hours ago, so I was taking my sleep break. The regulations allow it!” The technician quickly added. “It took me and the guys a few more minutes to suit up than the rest. When we got there, the rest had already gone deeper in…” he paused. “Or I thought they had.” Thinking about it, there was a good chance that they were already dead. “There were warning flashes on a pod panel midway, so we decided to check that. Then…”

  Klement couldn’t continue. Images flooded his mind, almost making him puke in his spacesuit.

  “Nothing else?” the cleric asked.

  “Isn’t that enough? I mean, there were branches sprouting from the—”

  “What about the hull?”

  The hull? Thinking about it, there was that issue as well. For whatever reason, it seemed insignificant in comparison to the real problem. If anything, it was the best chance of killing off the dryads.

  “Some of them must have breached it when they woke up.” Klemen nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Who else would have? None of us are crazy!” Abruptly he stopped.

  Raising one’s voice to a member of the church was never a good idea. The fact alone would be enough to see him severely punished. To the man’s surprise, the old cleric stepped away. Reaching into the utility belt, he took out a metal crucifix and a small pistol.

  “Here’s my ident card.” The cleric put the white polymer rectangle into the technician’s hands. “Get to the pilot’s cabin and tell them to issue a hazard warning.”

  Hazard warning? This was the first time Klement heard anything of the sort. No one just issued hazard warnings in space. Doing so required the authority of a captain, not to mention that they’d be condemning themselves to certain death. No ship was allowed to venture near a hazard area.

  “Get moving,” the cleric’s tone hardened.

  “But if… if I do that, we’ll die.”

  “We’re already dead.” The old priest faced the door, holding the crucifix in one hand and the pistol in the other. “The best thing we can do now is to save as many as we can.” He looked over his shoulder. “Do you wish forgiveness for your sins?”

  Finally, it dawned on Klement that the cleric wasn’t joking around. The reason he had freely given his ident card was because he didn’t expect to remain alive for long. Was the entire ship really doomed?

  No! The technician screamed internally. I won’t go down like this!

  Gripping the ident card, he ran down the corridor. He very much intended to reach the pilot’s cabin, but there was no way he’d sign their death warrants. There was one more way of escape.

  Nowadays, not many new, but many of the old models had an inbuilt security measure that transformed the pilot’s cabin into a makeshift escape pod. It wouldn’t be comfortable, and the air might be a bit tight, but at least they’d be safe and far away from the rest of this doomed voyage. The cleric’s ident card provided anyone with the authority to issue any sort of priority message, it seemed, so it likely could initiate the separation procedure.

  “The pilots will know about it,” Klement whispered to himself as he ran. “They’ll certainly know.”

  They would deny it, of course. Abandoning the cargo, not to mention a member of the church, was an offence punishable by death. Still, as long as they got their story straight, they might get away with it. And who knows, maybe they’d even manage to eject the dryads in time; then there wouldn’t even be any need for drastic measures.

  The ship shook. Something in the cargo bay must have exploded. Could the dryads have reached the engines? The vessel was constructed in such a way as to minimize the possibility, but it wasn’t out of the question.

  Why weren’t you able to sense the problem, you old fuck?! Klement mentally lashed out at the ship cleric. The whole reason the church put priests aboard seeding ships was precisely to prevent cases such as this. Instead, he had only come to act once it was already too late. Even the ship’s security systems were better. At least they had sensed something was wrong, not that they had done anything on the matter.

  Door after door, the man moved closer to the pilot’s cabin. The cleric’s ident proved rather useful. There was no need for secondary confirmation or even a basic biometric check. The church really was good towards their own.

  Skipping the internal elevator, the technician resorted to the emergency staircase. Even in the ship’s low gravity, the trip was going to take a bit longer, but it was preferable to ending up stuck. With all the ship’s systems on the frits, the less he relied on them the better.

  Finally, he was there. A single, poorly painted metal door separated him from safety. Someone somewhere had made an attempt to emulate the ship’s glory days, but had utterly failed, making it look outrush pathetic. Klement wouldn’t lie, even excluding the current circumstances, he wouldn’t miss this bucket of junk one bit. With luck, they’d transfer him to a proper ship once all this was over.

  “Polit, I’m heading to you,” he said, pressing the cleric’s card against the access panel. “The holy cleric has allowed detaching from the rest of the ship,” he lied.

  Confirming the credentials on the ident card, the metal door slid to the side.

  “Start the procedure,” Klement said. “I’ll—”

  Suddenly the mane froze still. His mind was incapable of comprehending the sight that had just opened up to him. The pilot’s cabin was far from the safest place on the ship. Half of it was gone, forming a gaming hole in the front of the vessel. And beyond that hole was darkness blacker than space itself.