Space Bound: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology

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Space Bound: A Dragon Soul Press Anthology Page 6

by J. E. Feldman


  Carl and Kendara held her upper arms and marched her to an empty chamber. Anna didn’t resist. She stepped into the chamber willingly. Kendara said, “Athena, activate chamber number CH3-34987.

  The glass lid slid closed. Anna smiled and lifted her left hand to her mouth. She bit down on her ring and swallowed. Her body was flash frozen in less than a second.

  No one noticed the three drops of blood on her lips.

  Nina Munteanu

  Nina is a Canadian ecologist and novelist of eco-fiction, science fiction and fantasy. Nina has written over a dozen eco-fiction, science fiction and fantasy novels. An award-winning short story writer, and essayist, Nina currently lives in Toronto where she teaches writing at the University of Toronto and George Brown College.

  Nina’s book Water Is… (Pixl Press)—a scientific study and personal journey as limnologist, mother, and teacher—was Margaret Atwood’s pick in 2016 in the New York Times The Year in Reading. Nina’s most recent novel A Diary in the Age of Water released in 2020 by Inanna Publications, is about four generations of women and their relationship to water in a rapidly changing world.

  Learn more at NinaMunteanu.ca

  Fingal’s Cave

  Nina Munteanu

  Her hand slipped again and Izumi realized with a frisson of panic that she was going to die on this godless planet.

  She’d landed on a tree root, and dangled over the yawning darkness of the sinkhole. A pungent hot mist rose out of the deep like a beast’s cloying breath. Pulses of putrid steam spiraled up, soaking her sweaty body and slicking her hands. The pain of holding on burned. She’d hurt herself in the fall, perhaps broken something. A deep low rumble below her gave way to a reverberating chime. Within minutes, her grip on the dripping tree root would tear way and she’d plummet into the abyss, smashing into pieces in the invisible darkness below; cooked food for whatever nocturnal life form lurked there and emitted that eerie sound.

  Izumi realized that her discovery would go with her: what she thought were “pools” covered in green scum were actually vents from the hot core of the planet. Sources of heat, energy, and drinkable water in the form of vapor—if not more.

  It was her fault for going against Earl’s orders. Her fault for leaving the tent camp of the crash site to explore on her own in the out-of-bounds forest. She just needed to get away from them all. From the incessant whining and complaining.

  She hated it and she hated them.

  She hated them for how they desperately clung to life’s routine order. Many still foolishly hoped to be rescued. Two months had passed since the crash and they were seriously running out of supplies. No one, except the rare well-armed expedition, ventured out for fear of getting eaten by ferocious hexes—giant six-legged tiger-like scaly predators—or the mysterious killer that lurked in the forest. Colonists searching for drinkable water confined their minor forays to the open meadows and avoided the thick forests that harbored some lightning-fast predator that had already taken two exploration parties.

  She hated them for clinging to one another with the glue of useless hope: like naive children finding comfort in holding hands as they marched into the furnaces of Auschwitz. There was no comfort in death, thought Izumi. There was only death. Followed by decay and absorption by an amoral and harsh ecosystem. You just disappeared into the darkness. The end.

  Izumi had slipped out of camp daily to explore the dangerous forest. Since Patricia’s and Viktor’s exploration parties had disappeared in there, Saz had declared the forest out of bounds. The forest was an anomaly, overly rich with nutrients and diverse flora on an otherwise fairly bleak savannah planet. Izumi felt that in there lay their answer to survival on Mega. Using a RAPSODI™ drone device that she’d stolen from stores, Izumi had mapped a hundred-hectare area of rich and diverse forest. She’d instructed the drone to fly a 20-metre-high grid over the forest, which she was now ground-truthing. The imagery and her ground-truthing had confirmed the spectacular oddity she’d glimpsed on the planet’s surface as the colony ship plummeted toward it—seconds before the crash. A million tiny “lights” winked at her from what looked like a lit beehive. Earl and Jason told her it must have been the reflection of the nearby star on a series of ponds.

  They were probably right. But there was more to it. Her RAPSODI revealed that the forest was riddled with small hexagonal clearings, covered with a film of fluorescent green algae. In some areas they’d aggregated, literally forming a honeycomb. After studying the drone’s readouts, Izumi decided that these open hexagons of fluorescent green might be the key to the colony’s energy and clean water shortage. Those lights were more than reflections, she reasoned.

  But convincing Earl to let her use more of their precious instruments to conduct field experiments on the ponds was another matter. Two exploration parties looking for freshwater had already disappeared in the forest. Soon after each party went in, an ominous rumbling sound had echoed in the valley. Then the party disappeared. Everything disappeared with them, including their tracers—which were indestructible and whose signals were traceable through anything, even inside a beast’s stomach. It was as if the explorers had winked out of existence through a dimensional door.

  Earl had been avoiding her, but Izumi finally cornered him outside the food ration tent.

  He lashed at her like a trapped animal. “We’ve already lost precious equipment in the crash. Now you want to go out in the forest—after I gave express orders not to—and run tests using the only Hydrolab that works? You never asked if you could use one of the only two functional RAPSODIs. You just took it!” Earl wagged a finger at her as though she were a misbehaving child.

  She hated being restricted by someone else’s fear. She felt her mouth tighten with frustration. The idiot was behaving like a greedy miser. After her theft, he’d locked the stores, preventing her from taking the Hydrolab and forcing her to ask for it now. If it was up to him, everything in stores would stay locked up. These things were meant to be used, she reasoned. That’s why they’d brought them here to Mega!

  He wasn’t finished though. “Listen, Ohkawa, I like you.” His eyes squinted at her and he scrunched up his face as much as to say that he couldn’t fathom why. “But you need to get with the group here. Collaborate with the team. We do things in reasonable time, keeping safety in mind. Those hexes are dangerous and the forest is harboring something even worse. We can’t afford to lose more people. We have to figure things out before we lose the entire colony. You’re a rogue. That’s dangerous.”

  She wanted to tell him that it was rogue behavior that led to her discovery of water’s phase coherence communication on Mars. Instead, she muttered, “Rogue thought helps figure things out—"

  “That’s not the point,” he cut in sharply. “The point is we’re a team here and if we’re going to survive, we need to act like a team. You’re a great scientist and all, but you’re too much out there on your own. Disobeying orders.” He shook his head at her. “Chaos, Ohkawa. We’ve already lost four people in that forest. We have no idea what took them, but whatever it was, it’s at least as fast as that hex and equally lethal…Maybe the mother of hexes…or worse. No one had a chance to even call us on their communicator before they got taken…”

  She remembered the first casualty. Only half an hour had passed since Patricia and Stan had penetrated the forest when a terrifying deep alien “roar” and crashing trees silenced the entire camp with a pall of terror. Izumi saw it in their faces; the expectation that some huge behemoth would emerge from the forest and finish off the camp. But nothing followed the silence. Except that clouds rose over the forest like steam and soon after, it rained.

  “…Then you go deep into the forest—”

  “Not deep, just on the edge. RAPSODI went deep.”

  “…you go into the forest…You slip out of camp without telling anyone and sneak back without telling anyone you’re back—”

  “I’ve got my tracer—”

  “You mean like the
ones that keep disappearing?” he retorted.

  Izumi frowned and studied her worn boots for a moment.

  “We can’t afford that attitude,” Earl went on. “That kind of attitude kills people, Izumi.” She preferred it when he used her surname. She raised a finger and opened her mouth to speak, but he drilled on, “You seem to care more for your data than the people you’re trying to help.”

  She swallowed hard and felt her heart race with the truth.

  He leaned forward with a smirking frown and she fought from recoiling. “And what happens if you don’t come back?” He arched a brow. “A hex snags you or you fall and break a leg and that forest thing ‘disappears’ you. We lose yet another RAPSODI…and the only Hydrolab we have…”

  The asshole. Now who wasn’t thinking of others? She set her jaw and straightened, trying to meet his height. He was a tall son of a bitch.

  She cleared her throat to speak, but he wasn’t finished. He’d saved the best for last.

  “I told them not to put you on the mission.” She’d suspected that. “It was too early after your…well…” He shrugged then pursed his lips. “If you weren’t so obsessed with your science, maybe you wouldn’t be a widow now—”

  She wanted to slap him. Instead, she clenched her hands by her side and cut in, voice warbling. “If those ponds are what I think they are, we’ll have infinite stores of drinkable energized water as well as a source of energy and light to compensate a million times over.”

  He crossed his arms and frowned with skepticism.

  She drew in a long breath and continued, “RAPSODI’s seismic readings suggest that each of those pools is at least as deep as Lake Baikal. And there are scores of them. Plus they’re heated.” Her voice had risen with excitement and she realized that she was affirming some of what he’d accused her of.

  He shifted his feet, impatient.

  She pushed on, “The film and the vapor cloud above them are remarkable, Earl. The vapor cloud over each of these ponds is a ripe mix of oils and water vapor that demonstrates birefringence. That might explain some of the odd optical phenomena some of your crew have been observing by the creeks.”

  His eyes started to glaze over.

  Asshole, she thought. She drilled out faster, “Initial drone scans suggest that this water is sweet—not like the contaminated saltwater of the streams and probably the lake. I think it’s drinkable! We need water, Earl. The readings suggest a high nutrient content and some interesting anomalous properties in the algae on the surface. They give off light under certain conditions. And they’re made of high proteins and fibers!”

  His eyes kept darting away, as if he was looking for an escape.

  “But we need to get in there with the Hydrolab,” she continued, hearing her voice go shrill. “We need to sample for palatability, confirm structure and behavior, and measure the BTUs generated and why they give light sometimes and not other times…” She trailed off.

  He’d rudely turned his back on her to talk to another technician about toilet facilities. Waving his hand at her in a dismissive gesture, Earl glanced back at her over his shoulder and quipped, “Write it up in a report and give it to Saz. Bill’s on an expedition now to the lake. We’ll set up a committee to look into it when they get back.” Then he abandoned her in the middle of the compound and steered the young technician toward the toilets without looking back.

  God damned asshole!

  She was on her own for resources. Izumi sighed and gazed up at Mega’s ring—the reason they’d crashed. It cut a jagged line of glowing amber against the blue sky. She sighed and wandered the camp aimlessly, letting thoughts and memories surge in like an ocean’s endless surf.

  Back on Earth, she'd studied bioluminescence in algae and had determined an energy relationship with water vortices. Her work led to the Mars mission with Doctor Kurt Weisenbaum, an independent researcher with the ESA. They worked in Gale Crater where a massive ancient sea had once teamed with exotic algae and other life forms.

  Her research with epitaxy and frequency had revealed that water worked like a quantum computer. Under certain circumstances, water self-organized and displayed quantum coherence. Through its hexagonal crystalline structure, water stored “memory” and communicated over vast distances—instantly.

  Water was quantum entangled.

  Algae, both connected and directly energized by structured water, featured critically as both Martian food and energy source. She and Weisenbaum published a paper in Nature outlining a new theory on the role of water coherence, fueled by planetary frequency, to form and sustain unique life. Despite the paper’s suggestion that the mechanism was a form of communication, Weisenbaum refused to take the next obvious step: to explore intent and planetary intelligence. He’d accused her of being a hopeless romantic. “Still looking for the God particle, Izumi? There is no meaning and no God. There’s only existence; and science to explain it, of course.”

  Izumi sat down at a makeshift table on the edge of the camp with a view of the turquoise grassland. A herd of yellow oval-bodied herbivores roamed lazily, feeding. They were totally unaware—or unconcerned—about a pair of hexes she spotted in the far distance. The huge beasts were sunning themselves on a large rocky hill that overlooked the meadow. They were obviously sated for now.

  Izumi checked the TIDI™ on her wrist and reviewed the images of the ‘honeycomb’ pools from her drones. There was something strange and utterly wonderful about this network of hexagonal pools, whose steaming mists of faint green vapor enveloped the lush forests in a mysterious gossamer web. Was it just a coincidence that the uber-predators—the hexes—also had six legs and hexagonally shaped scales or that most of the vegetation was configured in multiples of threes and sixes?

  Mega wasn’t unique in the universe for this, thought Izumi. During her early studies in exo-fluid dynamics, she’d explored the persistent hexagonal cloud pattern over Saturn’s north pole; a result of severe velocity gradients surrounding a turbulent cyclone—and a signature of Saturn’s unique frequencies. Earth also featured many hexagonal structures.

  She summoned images of the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland, basalt columns formed in a Palaeocene lava flow, where she’d taken Albert on their honeymoon. The causeway led them to Fingal’s Cave, a melodious sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa. Fingal’s otherworldly song echoed throughout the cathedral-like chamber, a combination of chortling waves and something else. Struck by its moaning beauty, they’d stripped and lay on one of the basaltic hexagons then gave themselves to its love-dance. Nine months later, Daiki was born.

  Izumi drew in a halting breath and considered how the hexagonal shape was common in organic chemistry. It provided a naturally strong and resilient structure when stacked, like graphite. Diamond and quartz crystals, epithelial cells in the eye, and the snowflake were good examples of the natural hexagon on Earth. So was the honeycomb structure of a beehive.

  Occultists suggested that the number six symbolized love, communication, balance, and union.

  And family…

  The recruiter shuffled his papers methodically before lifting his head to gaze directly at her. "So, Ms. Ohkawa, you have no currently living relatives?" His face was deadpan. Although they never admitted it, she knew the recruiters preferred candidates with no attachments. It made leaving Earth simpler. Less complicated. New beginnings and all that shit. Nothing left behind. Only, everyone left something behind. Then took those ghosts with them.

  She cleared her throat and swallowed. "None," she said in a hoarse voice. “All dead.”

  He glanced back down at his papers. No doubt it was all there in front of him. Her parents had died in a car crash when she was five. She lost her older sister and aunt to the Asian Plague when she was seventeen. Then there was the accident a few months ago on Mars that took the lives of Albert and Daiki, and by some freak, left her untouched. Albert hated flying, but he’d braved the trip to see her. Rather than interrupt her critical studies on Martian life-gen
eration, she’d arranged a special pass for them to travel the dangerous terrain to where she was stationed so she could continue her work. Only they never arrived; a freak electro-magnetic storm crashed the ship and they perished. If she’d taken the shuttle to meet them, she would have met the same fate. Her husband and son had been casualties of her obsession with life. Lack of compassion had saved her life while condemning theirs. If she hadn’t insisted on continuing her work on Mars, forcing them to come to her, Albert and Daiki would still be alive.

  When the recruiter finally looked up again, his eyes softened. That look found its way past her barrier like no sword could and pierced her heart. She swallowed hard and fought the tears stinging her eyes. She preferred his deadpan expression.

  When the pastor had sat down with her at the funeral, he’d said, “We can’t expect to know the ways of God or what God intends for us. You were spared for some reason that only God knows.” He thought he was comforting her, but he was torturing her.

  Three months later, she was sitting here in the IASA recruiting office. Because of her research on Martian planktonic energy, water epitaxy, and vortices, they had pre-selected her as one of their exo-biologists on the Mega-mission. She’d grabbed it.

  Izumi picked her way through the soggy forest dominated by hexagonal-scaled trees.

  “Magnetic-Electro-Gravitational-Anomaly. That spells MEGA,” Izumi said to RAPSODI™, the recording-measuring drone resting on her shoulders like a miniature backpack. “We still don’t know what causes the anomaly,” she continued, “but that’s why we’re here.”

  “That’s right, Izumi,” the drone replied.

  They’d come here because Mega was a Goldilocks planet. It had water and obviously supported life; rich life, albeit primitive and unfriendly. When she’d read about what the probes had revealed, she remembered smiling. Mega possessed some very intriguing properties. Its diameter and mass were larger than Earth, yet its gravity was slightly less than Earth’s—suggesting a lower density and fewer heavy metals like iron. Its global electromagnetic field on the other hand was sizable and fluctuated synchronously over the seasons, accompanied by spectacular auroras. As if it was self-organized. What was producing it and what orchestrated its synchronous dance? There was something missing from the Mega picture, she thought. Something they weren’t getting.

 

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