by Samuel Best
Looking down at the ground, he noticed that the edge of the gray covering had moved again. More lead-colored rocks were visible at its nearby edge. In another few hours, he realized, the edge would move past his escape pod.
It was a simple thing to wait, given the alternative.
Later, when the waning light of day cast long shadows from bare tree trunks, Tulliver stood up in his pod. The edge of the gray patch had receded a meter behind him.
He hopped down to the soft ground and backed away from the gray.
It didn’t move toward him. It didn’t rise up to cover him.
Cautiously, ready to run in the opposite direction, Tulliver knelt on the moist, springy ground and looked beneath the slowly-moving gray sheet.
Thousands of segmented crab-like legs moved in the narrow space below, churning slowly. Small, barbed spines protruded from the segmented joints.
Looking at the organism from the side, it appeared as a field of smooth gray with small, gray pyramids dotting its surface.
If Tulliver cocked his head just right, he could hear the faintest whisper of movement.
A primal fear bloomed inside him — a fear similar to the one ingrained in the DNA of humanity from a time when they were not the pinnacle of the food chain on Earth. He quickly turned and hurried in the opposite direction, brushing off the sleeves of his jacket as if to be done with the entire ordeal.
The sun was setting, and he wanted shelter. The pods were supposed to have landed near the colony site, but he saw no hint of a settlement.
Climbing a low hill, he came upon another escape pod, this one properly on its back, its ground spike undeployed.
A young boy sat within, knees tucked up to his chest, squeezing a small object in his hands.
Tulliver approached slowly.
“Gavin,” he said.
The boy’s head snapped up. He shoved the object in his pants pocket as he stood. Tulliver held out his hands in a friendly gesture as he stepped closer to the pod.
“Don’t be afraid” he said.
The boy wiped his nose and sniffed. Tears streamed down his cheeks. His small face scrunching up in anger as he touched a thumb to his forehead with his fingers splayed wide.
“I don’t understand,” said Tulliver, “but you can understand me, can’t you?”
The boy’s anger passed as soon as it had appeared, and he sat down with a huff.
Tulliver rested one hand on the edge of the pod and surveyed the horizon. A slight grin passed his lips when he noticed a cluster of pinpoint lights less than a mile away, at the edge of the forest: the colony.
“You’re a brave boy,” he said, “but you’re not safe yet.”
Gavin looked at him sharply.
“We need to find the colony before it gets dark,” Tulliver added.
Even without knowing sign language, Tulliver could intuit the meaning of the boy’s next gesture.
“Because we’ll be safe there.”
Gavin looked up.
“The ship is gone,” said Tulliver. He extended a hand toward the boy. “I can find the colony. I can protect you.”
Gavin hesitated, then took the offered hand and allowed Tulliver to help him down from the pod.
“There’s a brave boy,” said Tulliver.
He patted Gavin as they began walking down the hill, his open hand covering the entire width of his small back. The boy was extremely small for his age, Tulliver realized.
He felt for the locket in his jacket pocket and gave it a tight squeeze as he smiled down at Gavin.
“Your father was brave, too,” he said. “Bringing you all this way must not have been easy.”
The boy’s scuffed the soles of his shoes on the ground as they walked. Soon the noise became daggers in Tulliver’s ears, stabbing him with each step.
“Stop that,” he growled.
Gavin looked up at him defiantly just as a man carrying a glowing lantern appeared over a hill. He wore the gray uniform of a colony warden and carried a thin stun-baton slung over one shoulder.
“You there! Colonists!” he shouted at them. “This way!”
Gavin ran ahead. He tripped and got his hands out in time to stop his fall, then scrambled to his feet and kept on running without looking back.
Tulliver grunted and followed after, though he took his time. He was breathing hard by the time he reached the top of the small rise.
The warden offered him a hand for his last few steps, and Tulliver feigned gratitude. The young man had a thin blond mustache and a boyish face. A wedding ring dangled from a chain around his neck.
“I thought we’d seen the last of the survivors,” he said as he patted Tulliver’s back in far too friendly of a manner.
“I was…delayed,” said Tulliver, thinking of the moving mass of gray ground cover.
“What about the boy? Is he your son?”
Tulliver chewed on the question a long moment.
“I’m his caretaker.”
The warden nodded. “I expect we’ll need a lot of caretakers in the weeks to come. Not every passenger is handling the situation well. Some of them weren’t supposed to come down to the surface at all.”
Tulliver grunted. “Why would they handle it well? And what about you? Colony wardens are on two-year tours, right?”
“That’s right.” The man looked down at the wedding ring on a chain around his neck, then quickly away. A soft breeze ruffled his mop of light brown hair. “No point in wallowing in despair just yet. We still have a lot of work to do.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” agreed Tulliver.
In the near distance, a human settlement sprawled across a wide clearing inside a ring of towering tree trunks. Strings of lights connected to anemic solar generators formed a drooping canopy over temporary white shelters and circular, hard-shelled tents, bathing the settlement in a warm glow.
Colonists moved about the grounds, carrying supplies, supporting the injured, or staring in resonating shock at the darkening sky, wondering where their ship had gone.
“There’s food and water,” said the warden, walking ahead, “and clean clothes, if you want them. Orientation is scheduled for the morning. My name is Diego. Find me if you need anything before dawn.”
Tulliver nodded when the warden glanced back, then his gaze drifted down to the colony, lit so cheerfully under the strings of lights.
He took a deep breath of the clean air, rubbed the toe of his boot into the soft, welcoming ground.
Yes, he thought with a contented sigh, a man could be happy here.
PART THREE
FINDING HOME
CHAPTER TWELVE
MERRITT
The air cooled slightly as Phobis lowered in the sky. The denouement of Galena’s twenty hours of daylight offered a brilliant sunset which had lingered for two hours while Merritt, Niku, and Ivan trudged through the forest of bare tree trunks.
They held a course more or less directly in line with where the mushroom cloud had bloomed on the horizon, keeping the sun on their left as they marched away from the gray ocean. A few brief, forced detours had delayed them, the longest of which saw them trailing the edge of a narrow chasm that cut across their path until they could find a safe spot to jump across.
The chasm dropped twenty meters into the ground, then pinched together at the bottom in a wedge. Various debris had lodged at the bottom. Most of it was rock, but there were several odd-shaped pieces Merritt could not identify, and his mind wandered toward the animal life of Galena.
“I heard about your team on the ship,” he said to Niku. “There are three of you, right?”
“And one corporal,” Niku answered. “Though he was a last-minute addition.”
“Military escort?”
“Only gun on the ship, from what I saw.”
A smile threatened to pull at Merritt’s lips. “Expecting hostile natives?”
“I wasn’t expecting any of this,” said Niku. “When our lab won the government
contract, I thought it was a chance to finally do some actual research instead of spending my days trying to cram more vitamins into a single serving of vat-grown soy.” He sighed. “We thought we were coming to study the planet’s ecology.”
“What changed?” asked Merritt.
“Our contact on Earth is a man named Kellan. Just before we left, he burdened us with retrieving a sample that would allow him to secure funding for more trips to Galena.”
Merritt frowned. “They’re going to stop the service?”
“Cygnus Corporation’s contract with the government was set to expire when the Halcyon got back to Earth. The government couldn’t afford to renew, so Cygnus planned to cancel voyages through the Rip and stick to dinner cruises over the Twin Cities instead.”
The chasm turned at a ninety-degree angle and briefly narrowed. Merritt jumped across easily, followed by Niku.
“What means ecology?” asked Ivan. He kicked a rock into the chasm and watched it fall, then hopped over to join the others.
“The study of how organisms interact with their environment,” Niku replied.
“This is your job?”
“Something like that.”
“I never met your coworkers,” said Merritt, “but I saw you around the ship a few times.”
Niku stopped to catch his breath, hands resting on his hips while he looked up at the tree trunks.
“In The Velvet Speakeasy, you mean,” he said.
Merritt stopped as well, leaning over the edge of the chasm to look down.
“I didn’t want to lay it all out there, but yeah.”
“I should have gone into a tank right from the start,” Niku admitted. “Would have saved a whole lot of money.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it.”
“Why’s that?”
“None of the digital transactions on the ship passed through the Rip. All of your money is still in the Halcyon’s data banks, waiting to be relayed from the other side.”
Niku grunted thoughtfully. “With every cloud, a silver lining,” he said.
The group resumed their trek along the chasm.
“There’s still hope,” said Merritt. He patted his chest, feeling for the leather pouch he usually carried around his neck, only to remember he’d given it to Gavin. The thought of his missing son tightened his throat and shortened his breath.
“Hope for what?” asked Niku.
“Alcohol on Galena.”
Niku laughed suddenly. “I tasted fermented soyflower before I left Earth. It’s undrinkable.”
They passed a small pool of fresh spring water. Niku told them that, according to information he received during his briefing on Earth, the water was safe. He cupped a handful of it into his mouth, drank, and didn’t die, so Merritt joined him. Ivan waited until after the other two men had their fill, watching them closely, then knelt beside the spring and scooped up fast handfuls, drinking thirstily.
Many more springs boiled up from small pools as they walked through the forest, but native food was nowhere to be found. Merritt’s stomach rumbled loudly as he reached the top of yet another small hill. The entire planet seemed to be made of them, rolling endlessly through the forest.
A beat-up hypergel tank rested on the ground just over the hill, at the terminus of a long scar in the soil. Its occupant was still encased in pink gel within the dented outer shell. The plexi window had stopped against a small boulder, shattering it in a white spiderweb pattern.
Merritt hurried down the hill and peered through the cracked window. A man with white hair was suspended in the gel, curled up in a tight ball.
“Help me get the door off,” said Merritt.
He tried to roll the tank onto its back, but it wouldn’t move. Ivan and Niku stood beside him and shoved, rocking it in place until they eventually managed to tip it over with a loud crunch. Merritt lifted a warped safety panel next to the plexi door and turned the manual override key. The door popped open an inch and stopped.
The three of them grabbed its edge, their fingers sinking into thick pink gel, and pried it open, straining against twisted hinges. They got one of the doors to swing open, but the other wouldn’t budge.
Merritt reached down into the gel, sinking his arms up to his biceps, and began to pull out the occupant. He slipped from Merritt’s hands when he was halfway out and flopped to the ground like a fish, landing with a slap.
“Henry Tolbard,” said Merritt, kneeling down next to him.
“Haven Henry Tolbard?” asked Niku.
Merritt nodded.
“What is Haven?” Ivan asked.
“One of the twin cities on the moon,” said Niku. “Did you really not know that?”
Ivan shrugged indifferently. “What is moon to man like me?”
Niku ran his hand along the dented shell of the tank, then looked around. “There could be more of them in the forest.”
“They’ll head for the wreckage, same as us,” said Merritt, standing up.
“They might need help finding the colony.”
“We need help finding the colony. This is already taking too long.”
“I don’t want to burden you with more bad news,” said Niku, “but we might not even be on the same continent as the colony.”
Merritt turned to face him. “Be honest. How likely do you think that is?”
Niku sighed and looked away, at the setting sun. “We’ve only seen one ocean so far. Two oceans border the colony’s continent, one north and one south. Narrow seas to the east and west. We’re heading north, away from the ocean.” He thought in silence a moment, then said, “I was shown a hologram of Galena before leaving Earth. There is a wide river that divides our continent, running between the northern and southern oceans. The colony lies on the eastern half, between the river and the sea.”
“So if the beacon sends us east,” said Merritt, “and if we hit an ocean before we find the colony…”
Niku nodded. “Then we are on the wrong continent.”
Merritt clenched his jaw and turned away.
“But most are connected by land bridges,” Niku added. “We can find a way.”
“Food!” said Ivan.
He hurried away, a huge grin on his face, and stopped in front of a twisted, spherical bush at the base of a tree. He plucked a softball-sized brown fruit from its sharp branches and took a big bite. Juice spurted from the fruit and splashed over Ivan’s hand as he chewed with his mouth open.
“Ivan!” shouted Niku, running over to him.
Ivan stopped chewing, narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, and said, “Hmm.”
Then he spat out the fruit with disgust and threw the remainder into the forest.
“Is no good,” he said as Niku skidded to a halt next to him. “Is bad. Don’t try.”
“Don’t try any of it!” Niku said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “We haven’t tested anything!”
Ivan slapped his shoulder as he walked past. “Calm down. I have eaten worse.”
Henry Tolbard groaned and stretched out on the ground next his hypergel tank. He rolled onto his back and swiped gel from his eyes, then blinked at the orange clouds glowing in the light of the setting sun.
A smile slowly grew on his lips.
“Galena,” he whispered.
He spasmed and flipped on his side, then retched gel from his lungs.
“Mouth numb,” said Ivan, smacking his lips. “Can’t feel tongue.”
“That’s what you get for biting weird fruit,” Niku scolded him.
Merritt knelt next to Henry as he strained to sit up.
“I didn’t expect to arrive like this,” he said with amusement, staring at his gel-coated hands. He wiped them against his gel-covered body suit. His white hair and beard were tinged pink from the goop.
“We’re heading for the wreckage of the Halcyon,” said Merritt. “It will be dark soon, and we can’t linger.”
Henry’s smile faded. “Wreckage?”
He stood up shakily, taking Me
rritt’s offered hand for support, and looked to the horizon.
The mushroom cloud had all but dissipated in the sky above the wreckage. All that remained were snaking wisps of blue and orange smoke, trailing up toward the twilit sky.
A mile to the east, five thin, dark streams of smoke rose from the ground, their tops smeared horizontally in a strong wind.
“What are those?” Henry asked.
Niku shielded his eyes against the setting sun. “They weren’t there before.”
“Hull thrusters,” said Merritt. “Five boosters on the port and starboard sides. The ship must have broken apart as it fell. That’s where the front of the ship landed.”
“What about the mushroom cloud?” asked Niku.
“That’s the back of the ship. A detonation that large could only be caused by the antimatter engines. The hull thrusters are standard rockets. That smoke is from their burning fuel.”
“So where we go?” asked Ivan.
“To the front,” Merritt answered. “Most of the ship’s black boxes are up there. We’ll have a better chance of finding a nav beacon.” He turned to Henry. “Are you ready?”
Excitement glinted in the older man’s eyes. “I’ve been ready for a long time.”
Merritt lead the way, Henry following close behind. Niku held up a warning finger as Ivan passed him.
“No more fruit,” he warned.
Ivan grinned with swollen lips.
An hour later, the last traces of sunlight huddled near the horizon, smothered by a sky rapidly darkening from purple to black. Six particularly bright stars glimmered in the twilight directly overhead, clustered together in the curved shape of a harp.
“The first six stars they found through the Rip,” said Niku, looking up as he walked. “Phobis was the seventh. I wondered what they would look like from the surface.”
“The first atmospheric scans of Galena were false,” Henry said. “Thrown off by the massive amounts of methane deposits near the southern ice cap. Apparently the probes landed in a field of it and thought the entire planet was toxic. The scientists very nearly wrote it off as uninhabitable.”
“Those scientists,” said Niku, shaking his head. “Always making mistakes.”