Free IN NATURA: a science fiction novel (ARZAT SERIES Book 2) by David Samuel Frazier Page A

rifles, a shotgun, two handguns, some ammunition, and several knives.
      Tom was delighted. Unlike their food supplies, most of the equipment he had stashed in the second hermetic safe prior to their long sleep had miraculously survived. Anything metal, or a form of synthetic seemed to have remained mostly intact. It was a stroke of luck that we used this safe for the guns and other supplies, he thought.
      Most of all, he was happy about the guns. This would give them a distinct advantage in survival once they reached the outside, assuming there was anything alive that could threaten them, but the weapons and the ammunition were particularly heavy, so he had split his small arsenal into two bags and given the much heavier one to Mot to carry.
      It had taken them over an hour to find an exit, largely because the Arzats had been unclear about what exactly they had been looking for. A particular door of some sort, Tom the Pilot had explained, but there were many in the ARC that fit his description. Finally, in the near dark and working from his memory of the huge underground complex, Tom located one of the main elevator landing areas. Beside it was an emergency exit that he thought would never actually be used. Hell, he thought, I never really thought that this facility would actually be used!
      “It won’t budge Alex,” Tom said, as he strained with Mot, pushing on the exit door.
      “Why won’t the damn thing open, Tom?” Alex asked.
      Tom backed off and spent some time examining it in the torchlight.
      “I forgot. This thing is designed to unlock electronically. It looks like it has a battery backup, but the power failure must have drained it,” Tom said, continuing to stare at the bulky door and the large striker bar that crossed the center of it. Tom and Mot had been able to get the bar to depress, but the lock wouldn’t move.
      “Tom,” Alex said, the hair rising on the back of her neck, “you mean to tell me you guys built these emergency exits with no manual override?”
      Since Tom had been the lead construction engineer for this entire ARC project, Alex couldn’t imagine that he would have made what was now such an obvious blunder.
      “Sorry Alex, but I didn’t design every component, and I don’t exactly think that anyone really expected these things to last for eight thousand years,” he answered a little too sarcastically. “Frankly, I’m amazed that the friggin door is still even here! But, yes, I am just as surprised as you.”
      He and Mot both gave the door another try together to no avail. Tom backed away and put his hands to his knees, breathing hard from the effort. The large Arzat was unfazed.
      “Some emergency exit, huh?” he said to Mot, still gasping. “Batter was obviously more concerned about keeping people in rather than letting them out .”
      “Well, I doubt Batter had anything to do with the design of these doors either, Tom,” Alex said defensively.
      Batter had been Tom’s governmental boss and had been in charge of overseeing the construction of all four ARCs. Just before the asteroid strike, he had allowed Tom, Alex, and the two Arzats to leave the Nevada ARC where he had essentially been holding them captive. Tom had flown them to Utah in a helicopter that Batter had provided and the four of them had made it only minutes before impact. Ironically, the asteroid’s track had been directly on course with the Nevada site—a fact known only to Batter at the time—and it was presumably destroyed.
      “That may be true, Alex, but I am telling you, he had a photographic memory and knew more about the project than I did, and I’m the one who built it! Let me just think for a minute.”
      Tom squatted, regaining his breath, and stared at the electronic keypad. The diodes that should have been lit stared blankly back at him. It was really pretty simple, he thought. Without power they were fucked. He started thinking about how long it might take to