Astronomicon: Behemoth

Chapter 18 - Shaft

Megan climbed up the ladder and into the Control Room, where Walter was doing his daily diagnostic runs on all the Arcadian's systems. He was at the command console and nodded at her as she stepped onto the room's floor.

"Has Santiago said any more to you about the gel incident?" she began.

"He checks me over every evening but has found nothing amiss, so far," he replied.

"No side effects at all?"

"Apart from I slept really well the first night after my error."

"Don't you usually sleep well?"

"No, I've always been a bad sleeper. I rarely get more than a couple of hours in one go."

"I couldn't cope without six hours," she laughed.

"We'll keep a close eye on you for now. It seems it was harmless, but I don't want to take anything for granted in this place. Something's going to bite us at some point, I just know it."

"The only higher lifeforms we've seen have either been friendly or dead," he replied matter-of-factly.

"Well, I don't think the hairy creature was killed by the Lobsters, but you never know. Have you had a chance to look at our supply situation?"

"Yes, commander," he nodded, "At our current rate of consumption, we have sixteen days food left."

"Sixteen! That's not as much as I'd hoped."

"If we ration food a little, it shouldn't be hard to extend that to twenty days or a little more, but after that, we'll have to open one of the supply pods, Commander."

"I want to treat that as a last resort," she replied, slowly shaking her head.

"That doesn't give us very long to get out of here then, Commander."

"Walter, if we drop one of the supply cylinders, we can't reattach it to the ship. If we do get out of here, we'd have to survive with half our equipment, shuttles and food missing. That's going to make life extremely hard."

"So, do you want me to ration the food?"

"I don't see there is a choice," she sighed.

"And we have to escape from this place within three weeks."

"Ideally, I would suggest we defrost more crew and ramp up our exploration efforts, but more crew means less time to explore before the food runs out. Meera reckons we can probably eat fruit from the orchard, but she's got more tests to do first."

"Then I'll work out a daily food ration for us all," Walter replied.

"Good. I'll announce the ration when the others get back from gathering samples."

* * *

Having retrieved more samples of fruit and a bag of the compost-like material around the base of the fruit trees, Aron and Meera were loading everything into the plastic storage-bin on the back of the buggy. Ekono sat waiting in the driving seat, ready to set off when ordered.

Meera began to climb into one of the rear seats as Aron clipped the bin's lid shut to keep the samples from bouncing out.

"We've made excellent time so far!" chucked Aron as he made his way around to the front passenger seat.

"Good, we can get home early and I can get on with the tests on these soil samples," replied Meera.

"They won't be expecting us back yet. Why don't we see if there's another room further along the corridor? It will only take a couple of minutes now we've got transport."