/BEGIN TRANSMISSION
Crew infected with ESH virus. Initiated quarantine on Day 9 of mission and restricting crew to crew deck. Locking down remaining decks. Five dead, three worsening. May God have mercy on our souls
/END TRANSMISSION
Six weeks and three days later, the Juniper supply ship landed without incident at Huygens Outpost. The transmissions from the crew had ceased entirely three weeks earlier.
Two fully suited colonists entered the lower levels of the ship, and over the next two weeks, working in stages with two other teams, unloaded the vessel of all the needed supplies and then revived the 30 Mars colonists, taking readings of each before bringing them inside of the colony.
Then they programmed the computers remotely to send the ship back into space on a short journey, one just long enough to turn around and send back to Mars. The thrusters set it on a collision course for the far side of the red planet, at full thrust, and the resulting explosion ensured that they had removed all danger of contagion.
The transmission packet was deployed to Terran Planetary Command the following day.
Transmission Packet
MHO to TPC
/BEGIN TRANSMISSION
Confirm arrival of JSS. All hands lost. Retrieval of Cryo occupants complete. All advised quarantine procedures followed. No evidence of virus found in Mars colonists. JSS destroyed
/END TRANSMISSION
Cabbage and Beets
“There are no conflicts which cannot be resolved unless the true promoters of them remain hidden.” – L. Ron Hubbard
Date: 04.22.2103
Calypso Colony Ship
Sam’s hair was tousled, the short haircut she had given herself last week was curly and generally unkempt. Staying over at Daniel Medry’s coffin was close and uncomfortable, but recently, it had been almost necessary. It helped her not give in to the despair she had felt since learning of Earth. She knew too that she was falling, hard, for Daniel. Plenty of others were seeking comfort, and the Couples Billets had been claimed several nights in a row. Daniel and Sam had found something reassuring about the closeness of Medry’s coffin and Sam staying overnight had become a regular thing. Legs and arms entwined, sometimes making love, but more than anything just being close to one another, a reassurance that they were not alone.
She slipped into an open Ready Room and rinsed her face, smoothed the bigger spikes of hair down, and keyed in her personal code for a clean jumpsuit from the clothing dispensary. Damn it, she was late. Not that it mattered that much. As the current head of ‘Ponics, she had some flexibility on arrival time, but she was hyper-aware of how important it was to maintain a routine, especially now.
Although the ship had learned of Earth’s fate over a year ago, the information packets and responses from Earth were scattered and infrequent. Mix in a few solar storms with bureaucratic ineptness and you got an endless series of missives that seemed to contain nothing but heartbreaking news.
Sam was struck by the lack of foresight from Earth. Yes, they were going through the biggest crisis the world had ever seen, but you would think that someone would recognize the need for coherent, organized information. There were 250 souls on this ship, all with families, friends and lives back on Earth.
And with every single one of those people, the first question upon their lips when they heard of the ESH virus was, “My family, are they alive?”
Sam’s heart ached still, thinking of Tom. He had been almost five years older than her, and it was his interest in space, in becoming a captain of a spaceship that had first infected her with the yearning for traveling to new worlds. Growing up, they had been close, closer than most siblings she knew. He had never kicked her out of his room, not even when his friends were over, not even during the teenage years when a ten-year-old kid sister was usually the opposite of welcome. Even after they had grown up and headed their separate ways they had kept in touch.
He had been so excited, and a tiny bit jealous when she had been approved for the mission to Zarmina’s World.
“You got me licked, Sis,” he had said, “But not for long. I’ve applied for the Kepler mission.”
The Kepler mission had been slated to leave in 2105.
There had been a spate of extrasolar inhabitable planets found shortly after Gliese 581 was discovered (and temporarily discredited) right before The Collapse. When the James Webb Space telescope had been launched, those planets were quickly identified and D.O.V.E. vessels sent to Kepler and other systems. Kepler’s mission had been announced in 2095, just three years after Gliese 581. The D.O.V.E probe to Kepler was equipped with the prototype Alcubierre-Mesner warp drive that Calypso had. The probe hadn’t had to deal with human crew, so the warp hops were quicker. It had returned from Kepler with fantastic views of a planet very Earth-like in appearance. For that colony mission the entire crew would be in Cryo for nearly 35 years, emerging from stasis only after the ship had achieved orbit around the planet.
One of the packets that had been given to her shortly after the news of Earth broke had been from him. He had been accepted for the Kepler mission. That had been the plan at least. Until the world had died. A mission which would never happen now, couldn’t, she imagined.
When the word had come that he and his crew died somewhere in space she had been wild with grief. Why hadn’t they picked him for Calypso’s crew? Why her? Why did he have to die?
Perhaps that is when she had begun to fall for Daniel. He had listened, not offered any senseless platitudes.
Tom was gone, and she wasn’t.
Daniel had said, “The key to actually living our lives is understanding and accepting that.”
Sam slipped into the clean jumpsuit and pulled on her ship shoes. They were a soft, stretchy fabric with a thin layer of memory foam insole that molded to her feet perfectly. Time to stop wallowing in her sadness and get on with her day.
She was just leaving the Ready Room, nodding to another crew member who was waiting for his turn, and was heading for the cafeteria for something she could take with her to the ‘Ponics Deck to eat when her suit com crackled. It was Laney Deeds, her newest assistant, one of the youngest of the crew members at twenty-two years.
Upon hearing the news of Earth after being taken out of Cryo three months ago, she had spent the first two weeks crying before finally snapping out of it, focusing on her work with a quiet intensity.
“Sam? Sam? We have a huge problem in ‘Ponics, something happened to the temp controls!”
“Be there in a half a tic, Laney.”
Sam sprinted for the tube. The tubes were small, two-person affairs, elevators of sorts that ran between the decks. They were constantly in motion. One only had to step onto the ledge and step in quickly, and the tube would take the single occupant to the next floor, or the next, only reversing when it had come to either end. There were eight floors in all, but only four of them were in use right now.
The rider could jump off the tube into a pocket double airlock, and if already in a spacesuit, progress through the airlock doors into those decks. There was no need to do so for anyone but those tasked with performing routine monthly inspections or supply retrieval.
The decks were not currently pressurized or heated since they were intended for storage. That would change once they arrived and established orbit. Everything that a new outpost would possibly need was down in the lower levels, including the machines that would make the building and manufacture of their new society possible.
Sam jumped off of the tube and took the remaining three meters to the ‘Ponics Deck door at a fast jog. The corridor was clear, and she felt a burst of cold air as she slipped through the doorway onto the ‘Ponics Deck. Cold air. Frigid. Her breath puffed out in clouds as she took in the disastrous scene in front of her.
Plants glistened with frost. They were limp, bunched up and dark green, some already black. She looked at the long rows of potatoes, lettuce, and her eyes locked on the delicate carrot seedlings that had been emerging in R
ow 5, along with the strawberries in Row 6 beyond that. All of them indisputably dead.
“Pull the reports, Laney, I want to know when the temps dropped and why.” Sam barked.
She closed her eyes. This was a disaster.
The ship depended on this food. It made the MREs more palatable, raised morale, and meant that their food stores would last longer. They needed every possible morsel of food to stretch. Who knew for sure if crops would grow in the alien soil? They could conduct all of the experiments they wanted to, but the reality was until they were actually working the soil on Zarmina’s World, it was all a crapshoot.
Shit. It had gone wrong on her watch. No matter what the outcome, Sam felt responsible. And this just two months before her shift ended and Nagel Lowry took over. He was an exacting man, and she knew he would find a way to blame her. Despite all of the screening processes of the Selection Committee, in the end, they had filled the ship with highly intelligent, no-nonsense, innovative types who tended not to play well with others. The Committee had discussed it at length and decided that it was worth it. No matter how hard one tried, not everyone was going to get along. Overall, the crew of the Calypso were hard-working, exacting, and meticulously detailed. It was better than having the opposite inclinations.
Laney was shivering as she began scrolling through records.
Sam tapped NARA to life on her comm mike, “NARA, crewmember one-nine-oh, please connect me to Environmental.”
The computer program handled the communications network on Calypso, tracked all personnel and handled information retrieval for over ten different databases that contained the combined knowledge of 50 different countries.
Her voice responded in a cheerful monotone, “Connecting to Environmental Engineering, one moment please.”
“Environmental...Jenkins here.” Zach was a close friend.
“Zach, Sam here. I’ve got frost in the ‘Ponics Deck.”
“Come again?”
“The temps are currently reading one degree Celsius in here,” Sam replied.
Zach paused, “Negative on that, I’ve got all systems showing 18 degrees Celsius. Sam, is this some esoteric April Fool’s joke?”
Sam allowed herself a small smile, “Sorry Zach, I’m not kidding. I can see my breath down here and we’ve got massive damage to all the crops. It must have been this way most of the night.”
“Sonuva...I’m coming down now. Jenkins out.”
Moments later, Zach arrived. He was clean cut, his short black hair spiked. The usual smile was gone from his features, replaced by a grim expression.
“Holy hell, it’s cold. What did you do to it, Sam?”
She gave him a pained look, “Right, blame me.”
Zach headed for the control panel and opened the door, digging into the pack he had slung over his shoulder for a mini-laptop and jack. Plugging into the system, he began running a diagnostic.
After a few moments of staring at the screen, watching the code scroll, he hit a key, pausing the readout.
“Well, that’s not right. What the...”
Sam, who had moved down the rows, checking the individual plants, looked up.
“What have you found?”
“A piece of code that, well, it doesn’t make sense.”
His brow furrowed. It occurred to Sam that Laney was watching him with an intensity that seemed a little more than just professional. Sam couldn’t help but grin, and hid the motion by turning away.
The girl had been so sad, and Zach was single and quite attractive. One of his sisters was also on board. Zach had come from an interesting background, a family filled with seven siblings, all adopted, from all corners of the world. Zach had been adopted from Taiwan. His adoptive mother had been white, and his father was from Nigeria. He had made Sam laugh over tales of growing up in a predominantly white town in Tennessee.
“It looks like perhaps a programming glitch. I can’t explain how but it looks as if there was a command embedded that reduced the temperature down to one degree Celsius at 0100 hours this morning.” Zach shook his head, “What it doesn’t explain is why the alarms didn’t go off. We have redundancies on top of redundancies to protect from this kind of thing happening.”
He looked up and met Laney’s eyes and smiled a wide, white-toothed smile. The girl looked embarrassed and turned back to her work. Zach glanced over at Sam and quirked his eyebrows in confusion.
Sam gave him a significant look, tilting her head towards Laney, who was arms deep in plants, and nodded. Guys needed help sometimes, it seemed, and after a moment, an “oh” of surprise had formed on his face and Zach smiled even wider.
Sam figured she would be seeing Zach around ‘Ponics more, and not just because of the malfunction. He had moped when she hooked up with Daniel, and she hadn’t realized until then that he had wanted anything more than friendship. It wouldn’t have mattered, whatever Zach’s fantasies were, he was firmly a colleague in Sam’s eyes.
“I need to report this to the Captain,” Zach said and headed for the door.
“Let him know I will be there as soon as I’ve got an accurate count of our losses.” Sam answered in return, “And please get the heat back on in here. Otherwise, all we will be eating is cabbage and beets...and maybe not even that.”
Zach nodded and slipped out the door.
Sam and Laney got to work.
How the World Ends
“All the evidence shows that God was actually quite a gambler, and the universe is a great casino, where dice are thrown, and roulette wheels spin on every occasion.” – Stephen Hawking
Date: 08.17.2099
Earth – Seattle, Washington
He was all alone. And he was hungry, cold, and scared.
The line advanced slowly, sometimes it unraveled, jostled, and he often lost his place. He was small, one of the few remaining children that had been put on long yellow school buses and driven for what felt like days to the middle of nowhere.
Dad was dead. Mom was dead. I guess that means the baby she had been growing inside of her was dead too.
Toby scratched his head, it itched constantly and had for weeks now. He could feel the hard bumps of the lice on his hair. He dimly remembered a lice outbreak at his school when he was six, and they had immediately told all parents to treat their children, so it hadn’t been bad. Some weird smelling stuff in his hair, a thorough combing and inspection and it was done. This, however, was far, far worse. His scalp crawled. His hair, now long and unkempt, was greasy and lank.
Another jostle in line. He caught an elbow in his chest and fell in the mud this time. The scab on his knee from an earlier scrap over bread opened up and the blood began to flow freely. He didn’t cry, it didn’t do any good to cry here. Crying was for babies, the older ones had taunted him, and he had enough to measure up to, his small size a mark against his survival in this harsh place.
He wasn’t prepared for the soft, warm hand on his arm or the woman who had left her position leading a group of scientists to give him aid. He had seen them as they walked through the camp, a small group of clean white coats. They were the only clean thing here. Even the people running the camp wore stained and dirty clothes and looked worn out.
She helped lift Toby back on his feet and her bright green eyes stared at him, taking in his ragged appearance.
Years later, watching her across the table, he would wonder why he, of all those lost and frightened souls, had made her stop. Why him? Perhaps it had been fate that had drawn her to him on that day.
“Sweetie?” her hand gently raising him up out of the mud, taking in the bruises, the hollow circles under his eyes, and the knee now running with blood, “Are you okay?“
His eyes had flickered with surprise, some shock. No one had been kind, no one had really even noticed him since he was ushered onto a bus and taken away from the only home he had ever known. The weeks that had passed, maybe longer, since anyone had held him, loved him, and told him it would be okay.
; “I...I’m fine.”
His voice betrayed him, cracking a little. He wasn’t fine. Not at all.
“My name is Julie Aaronson, what’s yours?”
“Toby Medry.”
The camp director nudged her elbow, “Dr. Aaronson if we could just...”
“Yes, yes,” Julie answered, looking distracted, “just as soon as we can patch this young man up.”
“Of course, I’ll have one of the staff take him to the First Aid tent,” the director responded, signaling to a nearby staff member.
Her hand relaxed for a moment, almost letting go.
Later, years later, she said, “It would have been so easy to let you go. Certainly, that is what the staff there would have preferred. Besides, what did I really know about children? My brother Michael, he would have known. He had had five, which seemed like an impossibly large number to me. I had simply never felt the urge to have kids. Until you came along I was fairly certain I had been born an adult.”
She hadn’t let go. Instead she reached down and took his hand, “No, I can take a moment to get this young man looked at.”
Just a moment turned into an hour, the rest of the medical delegation left to be shepherded by a flustered camp director while Julie saw to Toby’s scrapes and bruises.
“Oh dear,” Julie said, taking a close look at his hair. “That must itch terribly!”
Toby nodded.
“Well, I’m afraid we are going to have to cut it off, Toby. It’s the quickest way to treat it, and I’ve been told they are out of Nix. But don’t worry, I’ll find a handsome hat for you to wear if your head gets cold.”
She pressed the stethoscope to his bare chest, listened to his heart, lungs, and checked his eyes, ears and throat.
“Well, Mr. Medry, I can see you haven’t been eating enough and you look like you are dehydrated as well. Let’s see if we can’t get you fed and after that, you need a bath and some clean clothes. I’m going to make sure you get all the care you need.”
Julie Aaronson stood up and beckoned to one of the camp workers.
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