Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) Read Online Free PDF

line duties – if you were so stressed that you needed medication to cope, you were not considered to be fit for duty. This often meant that people carried on working in a stressed state when they could have been fine on medication, but the Diplomatic Corps held firm. If he took those pills, doing so would be signing himself off work with a mandatory assessment before he was allowed to return to front-line duties.
    So, he put the pills back in the box and tried doing some research instead, looking up what information the dome computer had about coping with this kind of situation. He found a pamphlet on isolation stress, anxiety and bioshock.
    It had not occurred to him before that he might have bioshock – that, after all, was a phenomenon he associated with living biospheres, a kind of allergic reaction to finding yourself in an environment so very alien to you that your body did not know how to cope with it. Reading the pamphlet, though, he realised that that might, indeed, be a factor. Though the dome had its own artificial gravity and generated that at a comfortable Chartsey-standard, there were pretty intense gravitational and tidal forces going on, there, with that gas giant filling the sky. He might not be able to sense them consciously, but perhaps there was some kind of infrasound effect that was creating a sense of dread, particularly at planet-rise.
    He felt a lot better, with what felt like a far more rational explanation, and managed to be quite calm, then, for several hours, feeling much more in control. He even dozed off after lunch, curled up on the couch.
    When he woke, though, it was with the disorientation of brief, shallow sleep, not knowing for a moment where he was or whether it was day or night. It had got dark outside again, confusingly, and he had to blink at the time for a few seconds to figure out that it was actually still the afternoon, that he’d only been asleep for twenty minutes. He felt awful, both sluggish and restless, not knowing what to do with himself. Feeling compelled, as so often, to go and face his fear, he got up and walked over to the window.
    Mist was creeping over the ground, moving towards the dome.
    He worked out, afterwards, that it was nothing of the sort – merely frost crystals precipitating a few centimetres above the ground, forming at lower altitude as the temperature dropped.
    It looked like mist, though, and it looked like it was flowing over the ground towards the dome. And in the next moment, Jermane Taerling was back on the couch, hugging a cushion in a foetal position and gasping like a terrified child, ‘ It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t real…’
    He had been in the dome for twenty two days, and the ice was forming just ten metres away, when the miracle happened. He was doing a puzzle with a movie on in the background, forcing himself to concentrate on the logic problem in the hope that forcing logical thought might help keep the demons away. Then, all at once, out of nowhere, the comms screen flicked into life, announcing with a buzz and flashing message that it was receiving signal.
    After the moment it took him to realise that that meant there was a ship, Jermane yelled, throwing himself off the couch and hurtling to the comm.
    ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday!’ he shouted, with an all-channels broadcast, as if shouting might make his signal carry further. ‘Help! I’m here! On the moon! Can you find me? Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there? Please ?’
    ‘Yes, we hear you.’ A woman answered, making him yelp with the sheer joy of hearing another voice. ‘Please, breathe,’ she said. ‘We know exactly where you are, and we are on our way. But we need you to tell us who you are, okay? Please, try to be calm, and identify yourself.’
    ‘Taerling – Jermane Taerling. I’m with the Diplomatic Corps. I was left here to wait for a ship. Is that you? I was told a ship would pick me up, but I have no idea – I’m here on my own, I don’t know