Kazi Depot

Kazi, Osara System, Ballas Branch

The alarm was so loud, so incredibly all-encompassing, that for a moment, Johns had felt as if he had ceased to exist. Like his body had been plucked from existence and was now floating in some sort of other space between the dimensions.

The old drunken man had dropped immediately to the floor. Others, he believed based on their facial expressions, had started screaming, but he couldn’t hear anything over the alarm — just opened mouths and panicked faces. The high-pitched wail reverberated off of the metal walls of Kazi Depot, its pitch bending up and down.

The alarm system was wired to sound throughout all three stations. They weren’t fucking around either. Every single living soul on that planet would hear it.

In the more volatile decades in the history of the Osara System, the alarm system had been designed to signal an incoming attack and allow the residents to take refuge in the bunkers, where the critical research data storage units were housed.

Kazi had never been a point of military interest, but the separatists had made a point throughout the war to blow up cultural points of relevance, and the three stations on Kazi had always fit that bill. The idea was to protect the data and research — and as many people as they could, realistically. Fortunately, that day had never come. Since, the alarm system had only been used during a few emergencies, and not since the explosion at the Research Lab over a decade ago.

Johns leaped to his feet and un-holstered his weapon. His mind automatically switched to analyzing potential scenarios. What was causing this? There were a few things that would cause an automatic trigger of the alarm system. An explosion somewhere was the most likely cause. Perhaps some sort of biological mishap or virus at the research lab. That was the nightmare scenario. Maybe some sort of natural disaster. Flooding, maybe. But it wasn’t the rainy season. And facilities had all been built out of diamond reinforced neosteel composite, which can withstand just about anything that you throw at it.

“SIR?” Rick mouthed, unable to raise his voice over the alarm system that echoed off of the walls of the station.

“COMMAND,” Johns screamed in an attempt to be heard over the piercing shriek of the alarm, but slow enough so that Rick could read his lips.

Rick nodded.

Immediately, the hallways outside of the bar filled with a rush of panicked civilians making their way toward the bunkers. The last time the alarm had sounded, nearly one hundred people had died in an avoidable explosion. Johns could tell that those memories had been hanging in the back of their minds.

It was chaos — he should have expected that no one would follow the evacuation procedures. But the alarm sounding was such a rare and jarring occurrence, he didn’t blame people for being a bit panicked.

The offshoot corridors were thin, with maybe enough room for four people to comfortably walk next to one another. Trying to jam the entire station into them all at once was like stomping mud through a drain.

Johns and Rick shoved their way toward the Main Corridor, the opposite direction of the bunkers. People pushed in every direction, concerned only with getting to wherever they were headed.

Johns watched as an older man fell and was trampled several times before pulling himself closer to a garbage can that had been chained to the side of the hallway, where Johns helped him to his feet. He nodded his thanks and disappeared into the sea disorganized panic as the alarm deafened them all.

Johns and Rick pushed against the crowds as they made their way down the narrow hallways, making headway as they tried to make their way the three-hundred yards or so to the main corridor. They had to get there. At least it would give them some room to maneuver.

People knocked into them and pushed them. Fighting against the flow of traffic was slow going, and Command for was on the opposite end of the station from where The Commotion had been.

Johns was used to chaos, but it had been awhile. The unpredictable chaos around him drudged up his old memories. He had tried not to think about them for so long now that they all blended, both during the war and in the aftermath.

At one point, Johns had toppled over a younger woman that had unexpectedly emerged from a doorway. He had stayed just a few seconds, looking her over and holding her steady on her feet to make sure she hadn’t broken anything before he started swimming through the sea of people again.

It was as hot as the Osarian sun amongst the sea of bodies. They couldn’t have been moving more than a dozen of meters per minute. The thicker the crowds got, the more their patience waned. Johns was certain that somewhere in the station, someone was being trampled to death right then. At times her worried if the tight pack of bodies in the thin corridors wouldn’t lead to them all getting stuck. He could feel his ribs pushing into his chest as the hallway compacted.

A sprint to Command should have taken about fifteen minutes, but it was hard to tell how much time they were taking. Although the alarm was still sounding, Johns barely heard it anymore. He barely heard anything, just an intense ringing in his ears. There was no telling if it had damaged his hearing or if his brain had just started to filter out the noise.

When they were about three-quarters of the way to the main corridor, Johns felt a familiar vibration in his feet. This vibration, however, grew much more quickly than the vibration from the alarm had. It grew until it encompassed his entire body, then for a brief moment, it felt as if his body wasn’t there at all. Like his bones had turned to gelatin. A deep grumbling started to cut through the noise of the alarm. It grew with confusing acceleration. It built until Johns was certain that the planet itself was cracking under the strain, then grew some more. Johns brain rattled against the sides of his skull. Rick screamed beside him, bracing himself against the corridor walls. It was as if tens of thousands of bombs were being set off simultaneously in some faraway place. For a moment, he was certain that he would die. He only thought of Anna.

It had been maybe twenty seconds before the rumble had reached its frightening crescendo. The building was shaking so violently that Johns covered his head with his arms, preparing for the eventual onslaught of steel and concrete that would rain down onto him. He felt legs give out beneath him and he fell to the ground only to find Rick laying next to him. The walls seemed to bend to a point that he wondered if they might snap in half, leaving them all exposed to the open Kazian environment. A blast so powerful thundered and he could see the floor waving like a sea beneath him.

Seconds later, a second explosion sounded. With it, a new round of screams echoed throughout the hallway. Like Johns, they too were probably fearing that this may be the end. This one was even louder. More powerful. Closer. They lost power. Finally, the alarm stopped ringing. Everything went dark. Johns could feel debris falling around him on all sides. Every window that lined the walls on either side of the corridor shattered.

The dust had only settled for a moment before a third explosion shook Kazi Depot, this one a bit less powerful. The station shook again, and Johns couldn’t think of anything but her. He should have done better. If he died here, would she be able to forgive him?

He laid there on the cold metal floor of Kazi depot. Thick dust hung in the air, much of it shaken free for the first time in decades. People coughed and moaned throughout the hallway. Some time passed as they waited for the building to finish swaying beneath them. How much time, Johns wasn’t sure. Could have been one minute, could have been ten.

The backup generators kicked on. The floodlights gave an eerie glow, as people lay sprawled across the floor on the ground, holding on for dear life. Several people appeared to be badly hurt, a few may be dead. The corridor was still standing, but there was no guarantee that the rest of the building was.

Johns stood. He helped Rick up from the ground, then watched as he struggled through the crowd with scarlet red blood dripping from a giant gash in his right arm that smeared and flecked onto passersby.

“EVERYONE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE BUNKERS,” Johns screamed as he pulled Rick to his feet. “FUCKING CALMLY!”

The crowd must have been waiting for direction because everyone started moving in unison, more calmly than Johns had expected they would. Fear tends to do that sometimes. Johns helped get the injured to their feet and escorts to either the bunker or med bay, depending on their condition.

It occurred to Johns at that moment, that they might be under attack. A terrorist bombing, maybe. And there was nothing that they could do about it. Kazi Depot didn’t have any sort of defense system. There was, until today apparently, no reason to think that anyone would want to blow it up.

As Johns and Rick made their way down the corridor toward Command, softer explosions sounded, noticeably fainter or farther away or quieter than the first three. Steam shot out through the floor from pipes that had burst below them, giving the ground a wet, misty vapor that hung up to their knees.

About five minutes later, they exited the slim hallway into the Main Corridor. It was huge, comparatively. The Main Corridor acted as the central hub for Kazi Depot as a whole. The train system that connected the three stations was accessible to the south end, which ran from one end of the station to the other. It was fifty meters wide, lined on both sides with restaurants, salons, shops, grocery stores, watering holes, pawnshops, and a variety of other stores.

Examining the Main Corridor allowed them to assess the damage. It wasn’t too bad. Some pieces of the ceiling had fallen and smashed the dining tables below them. There was what appeared to be a crowd gathering around a man who had been killed by falling debris maybe one-hundred yards down the corridor. Several of them tried to flag Johns down, but there was no time for that now.

“Is he dead?” Johns asked.

“Yes,” a woman who had come jogging over answered.

“I’ll send someone to deal with it. I can’t do it right now,” Johns said as they took off in a jog toward the Northside of the corridor, on the end of the station that butted up directly against the forest.

There were still many people running through, but the width and expansiveness of the main corridor gave everyone much more room to move. No one was being trampled, but there was still the buzz of panicked commotion.

Within minutes, they’d arrived at the giant neocomposite steel doors of the Command Post, completely out of breath. Johns panted as he placed his face in front of the sensor that measured his facial features and analyzed his retina, while placing his hand on the sensor below it before the Command Post door opened with a whoosh.

The room was filled wall-to-wall with displays and consoles that controlled the various systems within Kazi Depot — the research lab, and the communications station. Security. Oxygen systems. Airlock controls. Communications. Logistics. Anything and everything ran out of this room.

Already, the room was buzzing. Security personnel, researchers, and management types buzzed around the room, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Some scrolled through data, while others accessed various video feeds. A few stood in shock, trying to understand what was going on around them.

Johns and Rick caught their breath for a few seconds by the door and then began to make their way across the large room.

“Aye, boss is ‘ere,” a red-bearded man said from across the room.

Immediately, Johns was swarmed. They came at him from all sides. Each one shrieking about a different problem. Something had happened, that was clear. But trying to decipher what it was among the ten different conversations he was engaged in wasn’t going to work.

“STOP!” Johns screamed.

The room fell silent.

“Thank you. Now Officer Raimes, tell me what the fuck is going on.” Gerald Raimes shifted uncomfortably.

“Erm. Here, follow me,” Gerald said as he led Johns over to the display above his workstation and began to filter through the files. “About ten minutes ago, we detected incoming space debris on course for a direct hit within a minute.”

“Our early detection systems didn’t catch it?” Johns asked.

“Appears not. Not until it was on top of us anyway. What happened about ten minutes ago is that we were hit. Three times. At first, we thought it was a meteor that had slipped through the atmosphere and broke up on the way down. But…,” Gerald said as he brought an image up onto the display and stepped back from the screen, holding his arms out with palms flat toward the image.

It took Johns a minute for him to make sense of what he was seeing. The screen showed an image, presumably taken from a drone. The image wasn’t a meteorite, at least not one that Johns had ever seen. Johns squinted and leaned in over Raimes’ shoulder to get a closer look. Not even close. It was long and pointed. Flaps of something hung down from what appeared to be the top of the object, with long appendages behind it, pointing toward the sky. It was rigid, aside from one appendage, which was tucked up along the upper side of its body.

It appeared to be a long, squid-like creature against the sky as a backdrop. The photo was blurry due to the creature’s high speed, but the shape was fairly consistent with what Johns’ brain registered as a squid. He could tell that he wasn’t the only one in the command room that hadn’t seen what was going on, as several gasps came from the people crowded behind him as he leaned into the monitor to get a closer look.

Johns stared for a moment, trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Rick’s mouth hung open.

“Jesus. And the site?” Rick asked.

“We have our drones en route now,” Raimes said. Johns nodded, making side-eye contact with Rick.

“Well this is new.”