Orion Colony Complete Series Boxed Set by J.N. Chaney (best detective novels of all time .TXT) 📕

“I know the company,” I told Lou. “I helped stock a lot of what’s on the ship.”

“Oh right, right,” Lou said, not to be outdone. “There are a few of us who have used the very top section as a place of worship and encouragement.”

“Good for you,” I said again.

We reached the very edge of the Orion, where the defensive wall began and ran an oval around the courtyard. Lou was up the scaffolding to the wall before I could ask him how we were going to reach the top of the ship.

“Just—we’re just going to climb all the way up there, huh?” I asked, watching as Lou made his way up the steel side like some kind of spider monkey.

“Don’t worry,” Lou called back. “It’s easier than it seems. We’ve been using all the elevator shafts on the perimeter of the Orion to work our way up. There are handholds in place.”

“Right,” I said, following the eager padre. Heights weren’t exactly my favorite thing in the world. Traveling in the massive seed ship was easy. I’d had tons of steel around me. Right now, scaling the outer rim of the broken ship without any kind of safety harness was something entirely different.

“Oh, what did you do today, Dean?” I muttered to myself as I searched for handholds on the shell. “Oh, nothing much. Talked to a gecko man, went head to head with an alien rhinoceros, and then climbed a spaceship.”

“What’s that?” Lou called down.

“Nothing; just enjoying the view,” I told him.

Lou smiled back at me through his white beard and continued upward. The speed at which the man pulled himself up made me think I needed to figure out what kinds of drugs he was on and start taking those too. Lou was a machine, carefully picking his footing and handholds, then pulling himself up to find the next.

We climbed four stories on the perimeter of the Orion before Lou took our efforts just inside the colony seed ship. True to his word, he used the elevator shafts. A few meters inside the elevator shaft where we stopped, someone had cut a series of square holes in what was now the elevator ceilings. Not only that, they had secured metal bars on the side of the walls to act as ladder rungs.

“Who had time to do all this?” I asked.

Lou gave me another of his manic signature grins in response.

“How long did this take you?” I asked.

“It’s not that bad,” Lou said with a shrug. “I just used a torch to cut out the sections leading one elevator shaft to the next then welded a few bars in place to act as ladder rungs.”

“How long?” I insisted, not letting him dodge the question.

“Who knows?” Lou stuck out his lower lip in thought. “I got the call as soon as we landed, then went on the excursion with you and then worked on it again. A few weeks?”

I was left standing inside the hall-like elevator shaft, the edges of the Orion and the setting suns of the planet only a few meters to my left.

Lou seemed to think our conversation was over. He climbed the steel rungs in front of us and disappeared into the next level.

“Come on, we’re almost there,” Lou said. “Only another twenty shafts to walk through.”

“What did you mean when you said you got the call?” I asked. “Hold up, maybe I don’t even want to know.”

“You know like when you feel like you’re being led, like when you’re doing something you know is right? Instinct, but on a deeper level,” Lou called back.

I spent the next few minutes climbing through shaft after shaft and the narrow headspace in between the elevators. These were maintenance halls that had been set up in case we needed to get to elevators without disturbing the machines from carrying passengers.

Sweat gathered at my brow as the lack of any kind of air-conditioning made the inside of the Orion warm and stuffy. I followed Lou the rest of the way in silence. Half of me wanted to ask him more about what he believed. The other half refused to pull the thread on that ball of crazy.

Slowly, the ground beneath our feet began to curve to the right, following the circular shape of the Orion. We were getting closer and closer to the top of the ship. To my right, I could look out of the different shafts and dead spaces we traveled through to track our progress.

Lou wasn’t wrong. The higher we went, the better the view we had. The planet opened up before us like some kind of map. The jungle to our north, rolling meadows to our west, and the forest to the south.

The swamp lands beyond the forest were too far away to see. My imagination picked up that empty piece of the map and filled it in for me. The stories Doctor Allbright had told us when we found her. Creatures in the mist snatching up survivors was truly something out of a nightmare.

“Here we are,” Lou called from the shaft above me.

I was glad we’d made it to the top. My arms were getting fatigued from climbing the different levels and pulling myself up through the square openings.

I dragged my body through the last one. What I saw took my breath away. Lou was being modest when he said a few had gathered here. There were at least two dozen individuals who looked at me, nodding. They stood, sat, or sprawled in the elevator shaft disappearing far back into the tunnel-like room. Lights were strung on the walls, powered by a small generator. They even had music playing, something old and soft.

Pillows and blankets were on sections of the floor, as well as tables and chairs further to the rear.

“Lou convinced another sheep to join the fold?” A woman came up to us and extended a hand.

“No, this