Free Aurora (The Exodus Trilogy) by Andreas Christensen Page A

were now hospitalized with hypothermia and frost injuries, but the doctors said they would recover just fine. The third of them though, Harry something, was the one who’d been shot. When he reached the hospital it was already too late, and he died a cold, miserable, and meaningless death. Tina shook her head at the tragedy. She’d seen war, but mostly from the bird’s eye view of a scramjet, which tended to make everything a bit too technical and impersonal to really take in the suffering. Besides, this wasn’t war.
    Harry would be buried in a few days, just outside Fort Andrews. The kid was the first person to die on Aurora, and people were already talking about naming the cemetery after him. Won’t happen, Tina thought wryly. Too embarrassing. Thinking about it made her shake her head in disgust. Sometimes she felt immensely relieved not to be a soldier anymore. This was one of those times.
    GEORGE HAVELAR
    George Havelar sat in a lounge chair in his office, with Ramon Solis, Thomas Dunn, and his chief of security, Colonel Shoshana Quellar. No one said anything; they all seemed to wait for him to speak. One thing Havelar missed from the old days in the Consortium was the discussions. He didn’t feel he held anyone back, but the need for a clear chain of command, and the necessary security measures, had made people wary, it seemed. It saddened him sometimes to discover that his closest associates didn’t have more faith in him. Thomas seemed to be the lone exception though, with his brash behavior, often bordering on rude, but he suspected even he held back now and then. He looked at Ramon, his old friend, who sat silent, not even touching his cup of coffee. Ramon had been drifting away from him during the last few years of the project, and now only held his seat in his circle of friends because of their shared history. He missed the old Ramon though. If he could come up with some suitable task to put him back on track, he would gladly do so for his old buddy.
    This accidental shooting was a setback, but Havelar expected it to blow over in a few weeks. The soldiers had just been doing their job. How could they have known the kids would be there, when they were expecting armed saboteurs? Major Quellar knew, of course, but Ramon and Thomas had no idea. He had decided it was time to tell them though. They both deserved to know. Not everything, of course, but most of it.
    “I expect you to have guessed the official explanation is a pile of shit, right?” he barked, and both Ramon and Thomas started. He smiled wryly.
    “Balders… Hah…” He turned toward Quellar.
    “Couldn’t you have come up with something slightly more believable?” Her face turned red, but she said nothing.
    “All right, I guess you need to know the truth.” He leaned back in his chair and noticed Thomas move a little closer to the edge of his seat. Good , he thought, I have his attention . Ramon only looked at him, and no one could tell what he was thinking.
    “When the project first got started, a few of us, meaning the president, Director Shaw, and I, decided we needed to make sure the future colony would survive whatever it might face. One of the things we feared was intelligent life forms that might turn out to be less than friendly. So we decided to bring a few items, just to make sure we didn’t survive Devastator just to be wiped out by hostile aliens.” He didn’t say nukes, and he didn’t intend to.
    “There were four containers. Throughout summer, all four of them landed in remote areas, away from what would become Fort Andrews. I cannot tell you what they contain, only that they were meant as a safeguard, and hopefully we will never need them.” He glanced up at their expectant faces.
    “Just a few weeks after landing, one of the containers was sabotaged. I have no idea how anyone here could possibly know its location. Only Colonel Quellar and I have the codes to locate the containers, and only when these codes are linked