by Samuel Best
“No!” Merritt roared. He pounded the screen. “Where did it go?!”
He smashed his fists down into the box, cracking the screen and breaking switches.
He couldn’t stop. Blood spattered the broken screen as he hit it again and again.
Niku grabbed his arms and pulled him away forcefully. Merritt struggled to break free. He wanted to rip that box to shreds and stomp the pieces to dust.
Niku tripped and they both fell backward. Merritt jerked out of his reach and lay on the charred ground, his chest heaving with each raging breath.
“We know the colony is to the east,” said Niku calmly, wiping dirt from his hands. “We’ll find it.”
“Is okay?” Ivan called down from the ship. He had paused a few meters off the ground to listen to the radio call.
Merritt stood and brushed off the front of his smeared coveralls.
“We have to leave right now,” he said.
Niku lowered his voice and said, “It will be slow going.” He nodded toward Willef.
Merritt looked at the injured foreman. “Then the sooner, the better.”
The ground rumbled beneath the wreckage, rattling the hull. A piece of debris tumbled from one of the decks and fell, narrowly missing Ivan.
A crack burst open between Merritt and Niku with the sound of a gun shot, sending them both stumbling to the side. Merritt regained his footing and shoved Niku farther from the ship as the crack widened and the ground fell.
He fell with it, plunging into darkness, then landed hard on his shoulder and cried out in pain. Clumps of blackened soil pelted him from above. He rolled onto his back to see the surface five meters above. Niku’s head appeared as a silhouette against the bright blue sky.
The ground rumbled and dropped another meter. Merritt wiped dirt from his eyes and saw the bulk of the Halcyon opposite Niku.
“Move!” Niku shouted.
The Halcyon was sliding into the hole.
Ivan stared into the pit with horror, clinging to the open end of the ship as it slid.
Merritt climbed to his feet, took a step into nothing, and fell again.
He pitched forward, falling face-first, and landed in a shallow puddle of liquid, his head cracking against the hard rock beneath it.
Groaning, he rolled onto his back in the puddle. The cool liquid sloshed around his ears, muting the sound of squealing metal as the Halcyon loomed in the void above him, obscuring the outline of the sinkhole.
A chunk of the ship teetered on the edge of the hole for a brief moment, and almost seemed as if it would settle back on its hull. Then the edge of the sinkhole exploded in a dirt firework and the ship slipped into the void, gaining momentum as it slid at an angle to crash into the opposite side, blotting out the sun.
Dirt and debris rained down on Merritt from above. He shielded his face and rolled to the side until he bumped against a wall.
All he could do was wait as the shaking ground rattled his bones and the world collapsed around him.
TULLIVER
Tulliver pulled the radio’s battery from its cradle, killing the power and ending his conversation with Gavin’s father.
He stood in the admin tent, alone. On the table next to the radio, the flashing blue light of the colony’s nav beacon splashed intermittently against the interior walls, pulsing from the top of a short metal rod sticking up from a slender aluminum barrel.
A thick black cord ran from the back of the barrel to a power bank beneath the table. Tulliver ripped the plug from the back of the barrel and cast aside the cord. The beacon’s blue light flashed, then dimmed, and was extinguished.
Open document binders covered nearly every table surface within the circular admin tent, alongside empty cups and various bits of equipment still packed in padded green wrapping.
Tulliver found an incomplete topographical map pinned to the side of an equipment crate. It showed the area around the colony site to a distance of half a kilometer. A small red circle with an X in the middle had been drawn in to the north, at the base of a hill near a large boulder.
Tulliver tapped the X and whispered, “Gotcha.”
The canvas doors flapped loudly as someone ran into the tent. Diego pulled up short, breathing hard as he swept back his mop of brown hair.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” he said.
“Yet here I am,” Tulliver replied.
Diego’s gaze flicked to the colony’s nav beacon, then down to its disconnected power plug snaking across the ground. He moved forward to grab it, but Tulliver stepped in front of him, blocking his path.
“We need to have a little chat,” he said gravely, looking down at the short warden.
“Plug it back in!” said Diego urgently. “We have to broadcast our location for the pods—”
“—which have all landed by now,” Tulliver finished.
“Someone might still need it,” said Diego as he tried to push past.
Tulliver shoved him. Diego stumbled and fell to the ground, looking up at the bigger man with a mixture of fear and confusion.
“This won’t take long,” said Tulliver. He slid over an equipment crate and sat on it, then pointed at the topographical map. “That red X is where you parked the shuttle, right?”
Diego appeared briefly dumbfounded, then swallowed as he regained control of his senses. “No, that’s just a…an area of interest.”
“Mmm,” Tulliver said thoughtfully. “So you didn’t take a shuttle from the ship. Did you pack all this equipment into an escape pod?”
“It was delivered remotely before we got here. On previous visits.”
“You seemed pretty well set up by the time the colonists arrived.”
Diego looked around the tent nervously. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead. He seemed to realize he was running out of lies.
“It wouldn’t do you any good anyway,” he said. “You could get to orbit but there’s no ship.”
Tulliver laughed, his belly shaking. He readjusted the crate beneath him. “I don’t want to escape in it. I want to live in it.”
“What?”
Tulliver held up his hand and closed one eye. He looked through the arch of his thumb and forefinger, as if imagining it was a viewfinder. “I got a nice spot picked out on the edge of the colony. We’ll move your admin tent there, too. Kind of like a…like a city hall, that’s what we’ll call it.”
“You can’t live in the shuttle,” Diego protested.
“Listen,” said Tulliver, growing serious. “Our first few weeks here are probably going to be the hardest. The status quo you establish will set like concrete, and chiseling any alternative methods of operation will be…difficult.”
“What are you talking about?” said Diego.
He tried to stand but Tulliver shoved him back down to the ground.
“Sit down,” he growled. Then he cleared his throat and proceeded more calmly. “I’m talking about how you and I will be working together.” He grinned. “For the betterment of the colony.”
“I don’t want to work with you,” said Diego.
Tulliver scratched his chin. “How do you expect to maintain peace amongst nearly sixty people who are angry at their situation? They’ll need someone to blame, and you’re a government rep.”
“Cohen and I can handle it,” said Diego. He glanced at the entrance, as if waiting for the big warden to burst through.
“Here’s the thing,” Tulliver told him, scooting closer to the edge of his crate. “What if you can’t?”
“Then we’ll figure it out. We’re the wardens.”
“I have a lot to offer the colony. I bring people together. I connect them.”
“No, you don’t,” said Diego, shaking his head. “You take from them. You put them in debt and you keep them there.”
“They come to me of their own free will.”
Diego shook his head again. “I know what you are.”
Tulliver grunted with amusement. “Oh? And what am I?”
Diego’s eyes blazed with anger. “You’re everything we tried to leave behind.”
Every trace of amusement vanished from Tulliver’s face, replaced by a stone mask from which his lightless eyes regarded the pathetic little man on the ground at his feet.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said softly, bending down to reach for Diego’s neck.
Diego scrambled backward and bumped into a table, spilling a stack of binders to the ground beside him. He picked one up and beat at Tulliver’s extending hand. Tulliver swatted it away and grabbed a fistful of Diego’s uniform jacket. He picked the short man off the ground and stared into his terrified eyes.
The tent flaps burst apart as Samar, the supply manager, ran into the tent.
“One of the colonists is dead!” he said breathlessly. He suddenly realized he had intruded on an uncomfortable scene between Tulliver and the warden. Samar gestured outside and said, “This way!”
Then he was gone.
Tulliver snarled as he lowered Diego to the ground. The warden pushed away and ran from the tent, the canvas door flapping in his wake.
The bright midday sun beat down on Tulliver’s bald head when he emerged from the tent. Two colonists ran past, boots thudding the ground. He followed after them at his own pace, smoothing down the front of his baggy jacket as another colonist hurried past.
A group had formed in an open area beneath the towering trees a short distance from the center of the colony. Tulliver shouldered his way through them to stand next to a cold campfire.
Warden Cohen lay on the ground, curled into a fetal position, skin gray as ash. Stale white foam covered his mouth and neck. His bulging eyes stared past the dead fire, into the distance. Tulliver glanced in that direction and saw two large roots forming a cozy nook at the base of a tree.
Cohen’s arm had fallen into the fire before it burned down. It was charred up to his elbow, his hand nothing more than a blackened claw.
Diego knelt down beside Cohen and gently rested a hand on his shoulder. Then he stood and walked to a nearby tree. Bending down, he scooped up two flasks, one metal, one made of red plastic.
Tulliver found Samar in the crowd. The supply manager smirked and nodded ever-so-slightly.
His expression was one Tulliver had seen a hundred times, from a hundred other people who thought they had him pushed into a corner.
Diego sniffed the metal flask and frowned. Then he sniffed the red one and jerked his head away, coughing and wiping his mouth. His suspicious gaze lingered on Tulliver a long moment before he walked back to the campfire.
“Go back to your business,” said Diego, addressing the crowd.
“You can’t just leave him there,” said a colonist.
“I don’t plan to,” Diego shot back heatedly. He took a quick breath to calm himself down. “Please give me some space, and go back to your business. This is my responsibility.”
“You don’t have to do it alone,” said someone else.
Diego nodded. “I appreciate that.” He looked down at Cohen’s body. “We’ll have a meeting later today. I’ll let everyone know the details.”
Tulliver grimaced and pushed his way out of the crowd as it began to disperse, walking briskly.
Samar caught up with him and strolled at his side.
“Interesting thing, that red flask,” he said.
“Choose your next words carefully,” Tulliver warned.
“Now it looks like you owe me.”
“You sure you want to play that game? Because it’s one I’ve been playing for a very long time.”
Samar smiled, showing bright white teeth and two particularly sharp cuspids.
“I don’t see that you have a choice,” he said.
“You were the only one with access to those flasks.”
Samar shrugged. “I leave the crates on the ground for all to see. Anyone could have stolen from them. Besides, who do you think people will believe? Our two reputations are very different.”
“Is that so?” asked Tulliver. He stopped abruptly and stepped close to Samar, putting the back of his open hand against the supply manager’s chest. “And what does mine say about what happens to people who cross me?”
Samar stepped back, smiling and unafraid. “We are linked now. My success is yours, and yours is mine.”
He turned and walked back toward the colony. Tulliver spun angrily and stomped away, heading north.
A few minutes alone in the sparse forest was enough to temper his emotions, and soon he was holding his locket as he looked at the treetops, recalling a memory from Earth — a time when he had visited an arboretum with his young daughter, before he’d lost her.
Tulliver eventually emerged from a line of trees into a wide field of brown and green ground cover. A small hill rose before him. On the far side, a massive rock shaped like a skinny pyramid reached for the sky. It leaned slightly to the side, as if the ground beneath had softened.
The shuttle was there, on the ground between the hill and the rock. It was a mono-wing craft in the shape of a triangle, with a bulbous oval cockpit window and flared wing-tips. It rested on three jointed landing arms.
Tulliver grinned as he shuffled down the hill, sweating inside his heavy jacket.
His smile turned to a frown as he stood beneath the shuttle, looking up at its underbelly. Running his hand over the smooth hull, he realized he didn’t know how to get inside.
Thought you were smart, Tully, scolded the disembodied voice of Warden Cohen. The big warden, it seemed, had joined the chorus.
Tulliver growled and paced the entire underside of the shuttle, but could find no control panel of any kind. He stopped for a rest, wiping sweat from his brow as he leaned against one of the landing arms. He glanced up at its juncture with the hull, briefly wondering if he could squeeze his bulk into the narrow opening from which it emerged.
“Open up,” he said loudly. “Door open,” he tried next.
He walked to the front of the craft and looked up at the shining heat shield hugging its nose. Behind the heat shield was a small, rectangular screen alongside three buttons flush with the hull.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Tulliver said in disbelief.
He patted his pockets until he found his red ticket, then pulled it out and looked at it, then up at the screen.
Anyone shorter would have had to find something to stand on, but Tulliver was able to stretch on his tip-toes and swipe his ticket over the panel. The buttons lit up green. He jumped and hit the first one, and nothing happened. He tried the second, and the panel beeped. The hull split in a fine line behind the screen. The line opened wider to reveal the inside of the shuttle as a hatch ramp lowered to the ground.
Tulliver put his ticket back in his pocket and scaled the ramp into the shuttle.
Always so clever, said the voice of Cohen in his mind. It’s going to get you in trouble some day.
But not today, thought Tulliver.
He took a deep breath of the cool, stale shuttle air, then climbed a short ladder at the top of the ramp. The ladder led to a small, spherical airlock, which was open, and on to the spacious cockpit.
Tulliver sat in one of the two pilot chairs and grabbed the H-shaped flight stick with both hands. He grinned from ear to ear as he turned the stick and leaned to the side.
Behind him, three padded passenger seats formed a small arc below the widest part of the cockpit window, which was an elongated oval starting just over the nose of the triangular craft.
Now for the hard part, thought Tulliver, studying the controls in front of him.
He flipped a couple of switches experimentally, but nothing happened.
Never let a little thing like not knowing how to fly slow you down, no sir, said the internal voice of his old crime partner, Roland Day. Nothing stops Tull the bulldog, does it? Not when he’s got a scent.
Tulliver shook his head to clear away the ghostly voice and wiped sweat from his eyes.
A rectangular black screen w
ith etched grid lines was set into the control panel just behind the flight stick. Tulliver pushed a small orange button next to it and the lines glowed bright green. A moment later, a white dot pulsed from the center. Then a light blue dot appeared in the upper right corner.
Tulliver smiled like a hungry shark, his fleshy cheeks pushing up to smother his eyes.
Diego had reactivated the colony’s nav beacon.
Tulliver tapped the white dot and a small dialogue box popped up on the screen: SELECT DESTINATION.
The box faded away, and he tapped the light blue dot. A dotted white line appeared, connecting the two dots. Tulliver settled back into his seat and gripped the flight stick, even though he suspected he wasn’t going to have to do anything during the short journey.
The control panel buzzed at him and a red dialogue box popped up on the screen: WARNING: LANDING ZONE OBSTRUCTED. ABORT?
Tulliver pushed NO.
The shuttles twin engines whined to life at the back of the craft, shaking the hull. Then the two underbelly engines kicked on and Tulliver’s vision blurred like a plucked guitar string. He clamped his jaw shut to keep his teeth from rattling as the craft lurched upward, leaving the ground. Almost as an afterthought, he pulled on his safety harness and buckled it over his chest.
Its nose swung around, over the pyramidal rock, and Tulliver could see above the tree tops, toward every horizon. He saw mountains, oceans, and wide open fields decorated with gray rocks of all shapes and sizes — all of it topped by a boundless blue sky studded with the burning yellow jewel of Phobis.
The nose dipped slightly, then leveled out as the shuttle accelerated over the forest, heading for the pulsing, light blue beacon. Tulliver gripped the arms of his chair with sweaty hands, his knuckles white.
After several moments of not crashing in a ball of raging fire, he forced himself to relax, sinking deeper into his cushioned chair.
The shuttle decelerated sharply to hover above the light blue beacon, which pulsed on the center of the screen. The aft engines rotated downward and the craft hovered in place until it stabilized, then slowly descended.
Tulliver leaned forward in his seat, wishing he could see the colony below.