Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  He’s promised he’ll take us to Montana when the time’s right.

  To the inhabitants of New Skaarsgard, this is John Smith, Mayor of Camp Pedro, Planet Earth, signing off.

  End transmission.

  Robert M. Campbell Biography

  Robert M. Campbell hails from the east coast of Canada, having recently returned to New Brunswick after extended stays in Toronto and Ottawa. An early love of astronomy and technology eventually led him to a career in software engineering. Robert studied Computer Science and Anthropology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

  After twenty years working in the aerospace, government and open source software sectors, he has written his first science fiction novels, Trajectory Book 1 and Book 2 – the first instalments of a projected six in the New Providence Series. Seedfall: New Providence Series Book 3 is out now.

  Robert and his wife Deb live on their small hobby farm on the river where they focus on writing and art.

  Author Page | Website | Newsletter | Twitter | Facebook

  Howl

  By Scarlett R. Algee

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Grace Morgan sits on the edge of her waiting cryo tube, studiously ignoring the scowling UEF security officer looming over her. Instead, she looks over his shoulder, out the viewport, where she can see the first hab dome going up panel by fabricated panel. We should have brought a better fabber, she thinks, then reminds herself, but one’s coming. Still, not bad for three weeks of work.

  She meets the officer’s gaze and smiles a little. “It’s a perfectly good idea, Mr. Straley. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since we left Enceladus, and that’s been eighteen Earth years ago, if I have to remind you. Somebody had to ensure the rest of you woke up properly, so I think I’ve earned a week or two to rejuvenate.” Grace knows she could have gone into cryo with the rest of them, of course, trusted the bulk of the journey to autopilot or at least a copilot, but she’s never liked to rely on a ship’s computer that heavily—or other people. Too many little things can happen. “Look. I landed thirty people on this planet—”

  “In a snowdrift,” Straley answers sourly.

  She shrugs. “It’s winter in this hemisphere. Couldn’t be helped. Besides, most of it melted as we set down, but that’s not the point. Thirty people. Take me out of the equation, and you and your little crew, and the Ebisawa girl…”

  Straley looks down the row of cryo tubes, and Grace can’t help following his gaze. There’s only one tube in this module still occupied, by the nine-year-old daughter of one of the hydroengineers. Grace hadn’t liked bringing a child along—she should have been on the colony ship with the rest of her family, still nearly half a year out—but the girl’s father is necessary to getting the water processing systems started, and a berth for his daughter with the advance team had been one of his sign-on conditions. A ragged teddy bear sits atop the tube, a slump of pastel fluff that might have once been purple, with a ratty pink ribbon around its neck.

  “Anyway.” Grace brings Straley’s attention back; the thin line of his mouth has softened a little. “Take the seven of us out of the equation, and that only leaves twenty-three people who need looking out for. Four point six apiece. I know the UEF probably still wishes Lansing would’ve had room for more than five of you, but I’m sure you can all keep the scientists and engineers fed and rested and reasonably entertained. The two biggest known predators on this planet are a two-meter bony shark and something like a hawk with scales, it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Grace takes another peek out the viewport: snowing again, windy. “Give it about five months, when Shackleton’s twenty-five thousand appointed colonists show up with seed stock and starter plants and embryos and breeding fauna. Everything from krill and plankton to penguins and leopard seals, even polar bears and caribou…they’ll be bringing species that didn’t even live together on Earth. God knows what that’ll do to the local ecology. At that point you might actually have your work cut out for you, but at least it’ll be summer and you’ll have a few hundred extra hands. Now if you really don’t mind, I’d like to catch up on my sleep—”

  The comm unit on Straley’s belt chimes. He sighs, still glaring at her, and thumbs it. “Yeah.”

  “Hey, boss? Is the old bitch down yet?”

  Straley makes a choking noise. Harry Pierce: his second in command, as if that means anything with a security complement so small. Grace recognizes the New England nasality in the man’s voice and sits up straighter. “Well. I’ve been called worse things.”

  “Captain, I’m sorry, he’s—”

  “A little rough around the edges, like all of you. Lighten up, Nick.” She grins, rocking on her perch; eighteen years out of cryo means she’s got twenty years on him easily, surely that warrants a first-name basis. She plucks the comm from Straley’s unresisting grasp. “Harry. This is the old bitch herself, what can I do for you?”

  “I. Um.” Pierce goes dead silent for three seconds. “Ma’am.”

  “Indeed.” Grace glances down at the cryo tube longingly. The damned thing is starting to look almost comfortable. “Get on with it, please.”

  “Um. Right.” Another tick of silence. “We’ve found a ship, Captain.” Pierce clears his throat. “What’s left of her. Pretty sure she’s FCF, but she’s torn up pretty bad.”

  Straley’s eyebrows go up. Grace gapes at the device in her hand. A First Contact-era ship on this snowball, where the survey’s never shown there’s anything here to make contact with? “How far out are you?”

  “About five klicks, almost due southeast,” Pierce answers. “We’re clearing her off now.”

  “Right. Suiting up and on my way.” She slaps the comm into Nick Straley’s hand and hops to her feet. “And I was looking forward to that nap.”

  *

  Straley tromps away as soon as he’s stopped the crawler.

  The vehicle’s temperature sensors give an external reading of minus sixty Celsius. Grace pulls the hood of her parka up as she steps out onto a patch of refrozen snow; the cleats in the soles of her boots engage on contact, nipping into the ice beneath the snow crust with a faint crunch. She takes a deep breath and immediately regrets it; Shackleton is a colder planet than Earth, even when it’s not the middle of winter, and the frigid air bites at the back of her throat. She reaches into the neck of her parka for the soft-rolled collar of her smart suit, and stretches the material up over her nose and mouth; still, the exhalations she makes through the fabric escape as smoke.

  Then she looks up and her eyes refocus. “…My God.”

  The FCF ship lies atop a ridge of icy rock at a slight angle, strangely flat-bottomed, her outer and inner airlock doors completely retracted, her belly ripped open. Some of the outer hull plating along the tear has crumpled; some has ripped off, edges sticking up out of the wind-drifted snow, pitted and rust-eaten and lichen-covered. Straley’s little security team and a few of the outpost technicians are picking their way into the ship or across its surface; Grace can’t help being reminded of a gutted whale carcass mobbed by starving seagulls.

  “Impressive spectacle, isn’t it?”

  Grace turns. The voice belongs to a thin woman bearing UEF insignia—one of Straley’s, then, pale and blonde and bare-headed. She has to wrack her brain for the name; too much of what’s happened since her own ship Lansing had left Enceladus has become a blur. “Anders, right? Jessica?”

  “You remember me.” Jessica Anders grins, picks up a handful of sugar-fine snow in an ungloved hand and lets it drift through her fingers. “You have no idea how glad I am to stretch my legs properly.”

  No hood, no mask, no gloves. The smart suits ameliorate the worst of the cold, but the tech still has its limits. Jessica hasn’t seemed to notice yet, and Grace frowns. “Aren’t you at least a little cold?”

  “Oh, not really. I grew up in Iceland, I’m accustomed to the great frozen north. Besides, the gloves get in the way.” Jessica pulls her face mas
k up—humoring her, Grace guesses. “My last job before being assigned to you and Lansing was evacuating the American researchers from their Antarctic bases. The ones that would leave. Most of them wanted to stay just to see how fast a billion years of ice would melt as Sol started changing.” Jessica smiles and pulls her hood forward, stuffing her hair into it. “Believe me, I got used to the cold fast. This, this isn’t so bad.”

  She bends over, and Grace, looking down, realizes the younger woman is standing over something. It takes her a second to differentiate the sleek white-cased rectangles from the snow surrounding them. “Tablets?”

  “Tablets,” Jessica confirms. She holds one out: the screen is spiderwebbed with large cracks that are full of ice crystals. “Harry’s brought eight out, and he says there are a few more aboard, but they’re all like this.”

  Completely unusable. Dammit. Well, it would have been foolish to hope otherwise, after more than a century. Grace scans the length of the fatally wounded ship. Snow’s piled high around the nose and tail; she can’t see any markings. “Any idea of who she is?”

  “Aurora, I think.” Jessica pauses in pulling on her gloves to gnaw a fingernail. “That’s what Harry called her; he found the data recorders too, but they’re just like these old tablets—frozen over and dead as hell. Still, it’ll give the eggheads something to play with.”

  “Yeah.” Grace watches the bustle of activity for a few more seconds. Like Lansing, Aurora had been a modular ship, at least from appearances; unlike Lansing, separated into its constituent parts to set up their outpost, Aurora is still in one piece, except for that awful rip. “Any signs of the crew? Bodies inside?”

  Jessica shakes her head. “Haven’t been in there yet.” She scans the people, waves at one woman, then raises her hands to her mouth. “Signy? Signy! Captain’s here!”

  A plump, short woman detaches herself from a small knot of people and trots over, her boots churning up the powder-dry snow into little plumes that scatter like salt. “Captain Morgan? I didn’t think we’d see you up and about for a while.”

  “Dr. Sigurson.” Good: her name comes readily. Grace smiles wryly, more than a little relieved. “Oh, I couldn’t miss the action.” She steps away from Jessica, who’s picking through the sync cables still attached to some of the tablets, swearing when they snap apart in her hands. “So. What do you think happened here?”

  “Captain, I’m a doctor, not a technician.” Signy doesn’t quite grin at her own joke, but the protective fabric stretched across her lower face ripples faintly. “If I had to guess? Some sort of critical failure. Harry says the landing gear didn’t deploy, it’s still locked in. Whatever happened, they came down hard, and I doubt this was their intended destination.” She pushes her fingers into the hood of her parka, toying with a lock of dark red hair, then beckons for Grace to follow her to the dead ship. “None of the modules seem to have retained power at all. Nothing works, even though the mods should’ve had fission batteries of their own. Cryo’s smashed to hell, must’ve taken a direct hit, but three tubes are still intact. They have bodies in them, although…”

  They’ve reached a slanted piece of rusty steel grating that leads up to the airlock doors. Grace eyes it dubiously; icicles hang from the edges of some of the openings, while others stud the earth visible underneath, broken off by the pressure of footsteps. She steps up onto the edge and it bends a little under her weight. Grace looks down at Signy, who’s not following her. “Although?”

  “That’s it. Just three.” It’s Harry Pierce who answers, leaning out the airlock, reaching for her hand. “Watch your step, Captain, it’s not too sturdy. Sorry about earlier.”

  Grace leans up and grabs his wrist. He leans back, letting her use him as leverage. At the edge of the doors, a fragment of grating snaps off under her foot. “Don’t mention it. Thanks.” She steps through the open doors and adds, “What do you mean, ‘just three’?”

  “What Signy said,” Pierce answers. He doesn’t let go of her hand till they’re through the inner doors, which are crumpled at the top; he has to duck to clear them. The deck plating is rucked up under their feet in a half-meter-wide corrugation that runs both fore and aft, but grows more pronounced as it traces rearward. “Don’t step on that, it’s not stable. Anyway, Signy’s right, we’ve only found three bodies. And I know this tub had more people than that, she’d have been kitted out to the teeth.”

  “Of course.” Grace studies the dislodged plating. “Which way?”

  “Cryo?” Pierce nods aftward. “Back there, but you’ll have to go through the hab mod and there’s stuff thrown all over, and that’s if you can get through, you’re taller than Signy. It’s not pretty.” He grimaces. “Galley was on the lower deck, which was smashed clean flat, and if anybody was in the engine room, well, there’s nothing to find anyway. We’ll have to get a drone or a bot in, scan for…whatever you’d look for.”

  There’s a clank from a forward compartment, and Pierce turns toward it. “Shout if you need us. Watch where you put your feet.”

  *

  It’s too quiet.

  That’s a foolish thing to notice, but it’s what sticks out in Grace’s mind as she picks her way along the damaged deck into Aurora’s hab module. Pierce had been right about the mess: bits of plating; scrap metal of all kinds, bent and twisted; bits of weather-smoothed glass. The rust stains under her feet tell her the precipitation’s been inside more than a few times. Some of the racks have collapsed entirely, torn from the walls; a few hang listlessly by their drooping supports, as if waiting for a stout wind to finish the job. She knows that Pierce is still within the ship, and probably Straley, too, but she can’t hear voices at all, or even the wind that should be whistling through: just her own uncertain footsteps, and the creaks and groans of the wounded metal.

  In any case, one of them had had the sense to bring in a string of LEDs—tiny bulbs, but at least she’s not stumbling along in complete dark. Something yellowish catches her eye on the floor: a piece of discarded fabric, maybe a shirt once, now moldy and bile-colored. Grace picks it up tentatively; it falls apart in her hand. Another broken tablet lies propped against one crazily-angled fallen rack. It doesn’t disintegrate at her touch, but the cracks in the screen and casing are wide and mossy.

  There were people here. That much is obvious from what’s left behind: this tablet; scattered heaps of clothing rotted by a century of freeze-thaw cycles; too-faded photographs in shattered frames; a half-melted mess of wires and plastic that might have once been a music player. Aurora had a crew. Even assuming the worst, they have to be here somewhere. There should be more proof of people. Bodies. Something. She counts the racks. Twelve. Aurora had room for twelve.

  Grace tucks the tablet under one arm and trudges onward.

  *

  The doorway leading into cryo is crumpled at the bottom by the spreading impact ridge, and bent inward at one side. The ceiling is far too low, as if a ton of snow has shoved it inward. Maybe it has; Pierce had made the observation that Grace was taller than Signy. Trying to duck through the doorway and simultaneously avoid the unstable plating that rises from the deck like a new mountain range, Grace has a new appreciation for his remark.

  She shoves the aging tablet into her suit to keep it from crumbling further. Finally, after a sideways wriggle that her hips don’t appreciate, Grace is in the cryo chamber. The LEDs continue here; Signy must have dropped a few when she’d come in. Not enough for Grace’s preference, but the cool bluish light lets her see the worst of the damage. Twelve tubes, four along each of three walls. The room should be humming, the cryo mod’s fission battery should be good for another century or more, but all Grace hears is her own quickened breathing and the snap of cold-brittle acrylic shards with almost every step. The floor is littered with the stuff; five of the twelve tubes are utterly ruined, exploded from the landing impact, and two more have great cracks and holes in their lids; even if they could be removed, they’d never be used again.


  That leaves five tubes reasonably whole, and as Grace crunches toward them, she notices a slight upward incline to the floor. Aurora’s landing had been a little off-center, and she grits her teeth against the sudden illusory feeling that the deck’s tilting under her. She reaches the nearest cryo tube and latches onto it.

  The lid is scored by long thin marks that don’t penetrate the surface, super-sized versions of a cat’s impatient scratching. Curious, Grace peels off one glove and runs her fingers over the icy acrylic: the scratches have left palpable ridges in the material at several angles, and spreading her fingers to fit the marks suggests that whatever clawed at this lid had paws as wide as her hands. Grace tugs her glove back on hurriedly and shakes her head. The surveys say there’s not a known predator on this planet with dimensions like that. It must be a fault in the lid, or another effect of exposure to the elements.

  She finds the three occupied tubes Signy had mentioned, but there’s very little inside them now. Skeletons in rotting uniforms, wisps of hair still stuck to their skulls, resting in beds of cracked, murky sediment. Grace looks away and pulls her mask back down, grateful that the air is only chill and faintly metallic, grateful that these tubes are completely sealed.

  “Please say you’re not thinking of opening that.” Grace turns around; Nick Straley is standing in the doorway, gripping the crooked frame; he has to stoop to lean through, and the posture makes him look ridiculously outsized for the space. “Captain? Why don’t you come forward and look at the command deck? At least we’ll have room to stand up straight.”

  Grace coughs at another frigid lungful, nods jerkily, and starts to pick her way to him. The cold makes her throat burn, but it’s almost welcome. Finally she gets her breath back. “...Have you found any of the crew up there?”