Astronomicon 1: Inception Point (Finished)

22 - Cold

Chris woke in the night shivering. He was seated beside the hatch, part leaning on the wall of the module and part leaning on two large boxes His knees were against Lucy's on one side and Fletcher's on the other. He could feel immediately that Lucy was shivering too, even though she was still asleep. It was dim in the module, the only light from the single torch they had left shining on the wall above them.

Struggling to see clearly in the low light, he looked around at the hooded faces of the other crewmembers. It suddenly struck him that as they were no longer flying on a spacecraft between star systems, but rather exploring the surface of a planet, it would be more appropriate to call them colonists rather than crewmembers.

Fletcher was snoring loudly. Diego and Anil were breathing raspily but not actually snoring. Calvin was silent. Melissa, Amanda, Kate and Lucy looked the most comfortable as they had stretched the only blanket across the four of them to help keep warm. Everyone seemed to be sleeping well but it was much colder now than it had been when they all went to sleep.

He moved his hand nearer one of the heating elements, expecting to feel a pleasant warmth, but felt nothing. That woke him up properly. He sat up, reached for the heater and quickly discovered that one of the wires had become detached, disabling it. To reattach the wire, he had to remove one of his gloves. Working quickly before his already-numb fingers seized up completely, he retwisted the exposed wire and felt the element rapidly heat up.

It would be a while before the improvised heater would make any difference, but it was weird that it had suffered the failure. As their lives depended on the heat from those devices, he thought it prudent to check the others too. He leant forward to the next nearest heater only to find that was stone cold too. He picked it up and found that it too had a single wire detached. It was easy to fix, but now he was suspicious. It seemed incredibly unlikely that two of their improvised heaters would have the precise same fault.

He dropped forwards onto his knees and tested the remaining two heaters and, sure enough, both of those had suffered the same fault too. Clearly, someone had tampered with them, but why? The team might have all frozen to death during the night. It was not guaranteed, of course, but what would that achieve? The person who did it risked dying themselves.

He looked around at his sleeping companions again, wondering who would even think of doing such a thing. For all he knew, one of them might be pretending to be asleep and was now aware that he knew that someone was not on their side. Memories of the message he had received just before they set off from the Command Module poured back, especially the phrase "a Holy Earth agent has infiltrated your crew".

At the time, he had not given it much thought, but now there seemed to be a distinct possibility that one of the people sat around him was a Holy Earth agent. He studied each face in turn, trying to replay in his mind anything they might have said which was out of place, but nothing seemed amiss.

Fletcher was not the sort. Diego tended to keep to himself, but he was always keen to help. Chris had known Anil for years before the Colonisation Program. They were not exactly friends, more friendly acquaintances, but he showed no sign of being even remotely religious. Calvin was a late addition to the crew after the originally-assigned astronomer suffered a medical setback and was pulled just three weeks before they left.

Chris did not know much about Calvin, but he seemed nice enough and had proved to be good at his job. He was possibly a little on the young side, but it was hard to imagine him keeping up any level of subterfuge successfully. Chris was wondering what he would say to each of them in the morning when he noticed the lack of condensation from Calvin's open mouth.

Grabbing a torch tucked between two boxes, he clicked it on and shone it in Calvin's face. He was not just pale, as they all were, but bordering on blue. Knowing that something was horribly wrong, Chris dived forwards and shook Calvin's thigh. There was no response, so he shouted his name and climbed closer.