Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  “No.” He reaches out to help her through, stiff and unsmiling. “No. It’s the damnedest thing.”

  “Nick, come o—” Grace stumbles getting back through the ruined doorway, and only Straley’s grip on her arm keeps her upright. She scowls. “Come on. If there aren’t bodies inside, there have to be graves outside. Have you seen signs of scavenging? Predation? In this climate, we should at least be finding bones.”

  Straley just shrugs and leads her along. “Could be graves. We’ve thought of that. There might have been survivors for a while. But that’ll take equipping a drone or two with ground-penetrating radar, maybe infrared. Magnetometry, if you want to look for evidence of survival.” They’re back alongside the gaping airlock now, Straley guiding Grace’s steps away from the wrecked deck plating; a strong gust blows in granulated snow that sticks to the metal, and she covers her face again, grateful to have her parka’s hood around her face. “But the fact of the matter is, we’ve got two hab domes, an agridome, and a water processor to finish in the next four months, and the techs are already asking if we can cannibalize this thing for materials. So doing anything else is kind of low on the list of priorities.”

  “True enough.” Grace has to admit it stings a little, listening to this man tell her their mission, but… “You’re right. We can remove the ship, mark the site, and have it excavated when the colony’s running. I’m not here to play archaeologist.”

  She walks past him into Aurora’s command module. The deck is less damaged here, though she still looks down before making a step, and the tilt she’d felt in cryo is definitely not her imagination. One workstation is toppled, another wobbles when she walks near it, and the captain’s chair is decidedly askew. There’s a faint scent in the air here that she hadn’t noticed elsewhere and needs a moment to identify: mold. “Cozy.” Another small stack of tablets fills the lopsided seat, and she takes out the one she’d found and adds it to the pile. “Relatively speaking.”

  “Grace, look, I don’t like it either.” It’s the first time since they’d met on Enceladus that Straley’s called her anything but ‘Captain,’ and Grace frowns. “Something went wrong here. Really wrong. Whatever made Aurora crash here, it sure as hell wasn’t some urge to say hi to the locals. That’s what worries me. What’s here on Shackleton, what’s in this system, that we don’t know about? The sun—” Straley pauses, biting his lip. “The sun here’s got three other planets. Only this one was part of the survey.”

  She crosses her arms, scowling. “You think we have hostile neighbors?”

  “I don’t know what to think—oh, what the hell.” Straley’s been picking at the pile of tablets, chipping bits of plastic off their brittle casings. Now he lifts the stack and paws beneath it, pulling out a battered, blackened metal box. “Harry must’ve found this, whatever it is.”

  He fumbles with its tiny latch. Jessica had been right; the gloves get in the way. Grace pulls hers off and takes the box from his hands, wincing at the burn of frozen metal. Peeling her fingertips carefully from its scarred surface, she tugs at the latch. It snaps loose in her grip, and the lid follows, falling completely off. “…Well.”

  Straley glances down. “All that for a book?”

  “Yeah.” Grace gathers the pieces of the box and deposits them next to the tablets. The book it had held is the size of her palm, thick coarse paper bound in flaking hand-sewn brown leather. “This looks like a diary.” She opens it with care, grimacing at how the binding crackles and begins to split, but the flyleaf inscription is still legible, written in large neat letters. “Captain Victoria Jeffress, FCF 2039E Aurora, August sixth, twenty-one eighty-five.”

  She half expects Straley to hold out a hand and claim the thing as UEF property, but he only leans on the back of the captain’s seat and studies her. “Think that’ll have your answers?”

  He holds up the box and lid. Grace lays the little book back inside, pulls her gloves back on, and takes the box back, clamping it shut with both hands. “I think it’s a start.”

  “Good. What do I tell the techies about the ship?”

  Grace hesitates. She doesn’t like the idea of Aurora being picked over like a chicken carcass, but the old ship will never be safe or spaceworthy again. Another gust comes through the airlock, this time with a whistle behind it, and Aurora’s hull groans, shuddering with the audible scrape of rock on steel. It’s time to go.

  “Get someone to open up the way into the cryo chamber,” she says. “I want those remains removed so they can be buried properly when the soil thaws. If that means removing the tubes too, I want it done.” Grace starts back toward the airlock, trying to ignore the rising noise of the wind and the faint judder coming through the soles of her boots. “If they do that first, then they can scavenge the rest.” She catches Straley’s arm and pulls him round to face her. “Tell them to start tomorrow.”

  *

  After seeing the wreck of Aurora up close, Grace has a fresh appreciation for Lansing, even if her own ship was split into its separate components nineteen days ago. Sure, the hab module—detached from Lansing’s other independently-powered modular elements and set somewhat to one side, for some illusion of privacy—is just as cramped as it ever was, and she really just prefers to sleep in her command chair because the thing reclines, but it’s warm and dry, nothing’s covered in mold or littered with glass or rotting away, and most importantly, no one’s dead.

  One of Grace’s eyelids twitches. Probably just as well she’s not going into cryo anytime soon. Those images will need a while to go away.

  Lansing’s command module has become the core of the outpost, the structure everything else is centered around. The viewscreen’s a five-way security monitor now, displaying high-definition video from the cameras set up thus far: one inside her own mod, one inside the hab, one at each of the current construction sites, one watching over the tiny outpost as a whole. She guesses they’ll have to add one to monitor Aurora now; even with just thirty people, there’s bound to be at least one good fight over whose projects get which parts. She leans back in her seat and eyes each of the views: silent, dark, still, except for the thick blowing snow in every exterior frame. The only area she doesn’t have eyes on is the detached cargo module Signy Sigurson’s using as clinic, surgery, lab and living quarters. The doctor has some setup of her own; she’d been quite firm about patient confidentiality.

  As if anything that happens here stays secret long. Grace turns her attention to the frail black book she’d retrieved from Aurora. Captain Jeffress’s diary: she’s been gently turning it over in her hands for ten minutes, tracing the seams in the old leather. Now she opens it carefully. The binding crackles but stays intact.

  6 August 2185

  We launch in six hours and Bill’s just handed me this, now that everything’s stowed away and I’ll have to shove it inside my suit. Says he had it made last month when we visited Northern California. I love the man, but I can’t imagine what he was thinking. I’m an FCF captain out to make contact with alien worlds and he thinks I’ll have time to write anything by hand? Has he ever even seen my handwriting?

  Grace chuckles. Vicki Jeffress’s handwriting is angular, but does have a certain half-formed looseness to the letters that suggests it wasn’t exactly a skill she used much. It makes her wonder about her own handwriting, neglected for decades. She turns the page.

  Maybe I’ll start writing in this thing once we’re properly under way. It really is sweet of him. Right now I have more important things to do. Signing off.

  The next page is a list of names, with Victoria Jeffress and Bill Brady at the top. Grace scans the rest, some catching her eye: Dezmon Riley, Kordelja Czakja. Ten in all, rather than the full twelve Aurora could accommodate. She wonders which three are the skeletons in the cryo tubes.

  She turns a page, then another. Nothing else has the exuberance of the first entry; instead, the diary becomes a maintenance log, sparsely updated. The only thing she learns is that their original de
stination had been the outermost planet in the Mu Arae system.

  More pages, mostly undated, increasingly blank, as if Captain Jeffress had got bored of the ‘diarist’ idea quickly. Then one page reads 17 February 2186, and the script is sharp-edged with anger: If Riley and Carter don’t stop squabbling over Kordelja, I’m putting them both out the airlock. She’s not even interested. I’m putting all non-essentials in cryo for the duration because I’m sick of having to deal with this.

  The very next page says, Cryo plans suspended. Bill’s found an anomaly. He says it’s coming toward us. I’m afraid it’s the Star.

  Grace puts a finger in the diary and lays it in her lap. Empyrean. She should have known. It all comes back to Empyrean; hell, the rogue sun-killing star is the reason humanity’s fleeing Earth by the millions, the reason she and the crew of Lansing have set up here on Shackleton to receive a loaded colony ship.

  She opens the diary again and turns a page.

  oh god it’s following us

  The next three pages are blank. When the writing resumes, it’s much looser than before, shaky, almost childlike.

  I don’t know where we are. I don’t know what day it is. I haven’t slept. I think I have a concussion. I think it’s bad.

  O’Leary and Losnedahl are dead. They have to be. They were strapped in down below when we came down, and the lower deck pancaked when we hit the ridge. We’re not getting life signs from down there. Riley died this morning from his head injuries. Sarai and Kordelja have multiple internals, and probably won’t last the night. We’ll have to put them in the cryo tubes. Brandeis has a broken leg. Carter and Smada seem okay except for bruising, but I have a concussion and Bill’s got broken ribs, and Kordelja is our doctor. I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’re losing heat.

  Or was that yesterday? Nothing’s clear anymore.

  There’s a large blank space, and then the handwriting resumes. It’s a little tighter, a little clearer.

  This is my fault. That’s clear.

  The Star caught us by surprise when we entered this quadrant. I thought we could evade it through displacement. I didn’t expect it to follow us, or make the displacement drive stop responding. When we snapped back into normal space, we were already burning hard for the ground.

  I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop it.

  I can still hear the hull ripping screaming

  The writing ends there. Grace takes a deep breath. She knows full well what the war was like; she’d lost family members on the warship Resolute, and they’d died looking Empyrean in the face. In the days of first contact, when the mere mention of “the Star” had practically been a proclamation of death…no wonder Captain Jeffress had panicked. Just the name makes Grace’s own heart race now.

  She flips back through the pages, trying to put full names to Aurora’s known dead. Dezmon Riley, Kordelja Czakja, Sarai Cooper: they’re the skeletons in the cryo tubes. Vincent O’Leary and Craig Losnedahl, crushed when Aurora had fallen out of the sky. Grace can only hope it was instantaneous.

  Beep.

  The noise makes her remember her headset, stuffed into her seat’s storage pouch; it’s beeping insistently. A glance at the viewscreen shows incoming audio, so she fumbles the headset out and on and opens the channel. “Morgan.”

  “Goddammit, Grace, do I have to freeze to death out here?”

  Nick Straley. Grace swears under her breath and slaps down the button that opens the outer door. A few seconds later the inner opens with a chime, and Straley stumbles through, flinging his arms to shake off the snow. “Jesus Christ, woman.” He makes his way to the crash couch and drops heavily, pulling off his gloves and throwing his hood back, yanking the stretchy fabric of his face mask down and letting it snap into a rolled collar around his neck. “Stuff only works so far.”

  “Nick, what were you doing out there?” She studies the split screens; all the external sensors are still reporting gustier winds and heavier snow. “There’s a storm coming in.”

  “Thought I’d take one last look around.” His hands and face are pale; he scrubs his fingers through his cropped sandy hair, making it bristle. “Minus eighty-three out there, probably falling. These smart suits are only good to seventy-five below, and then you start feeling the cold damn fast.” Straley shivers. “Please say you have coffee.”

  “Of course.” Grace scrambles from her seat; he’s shaking too badly to fetch it himself. One of the perks of being captain, once they’d come solidly aground, is that no one had objected when she’d lifted a coffeemaker from the galley. She checks the water, dumps ground coffee into the filter, punches a button, and in twenty seconds has steaming black brew in a thick-walled recycler-friendly cup. Straley takes it with both hands, and Grace turns back to her console to nudge the temperature up a little. “You’ll be warm in a minute, Nick, catch your breath.”

  For a few seconds he just pants between sips of coffee. Then he spots the book. “Learned anything?”

  “Empyrean,” she says flatly. “Aurora crashed because they were running from Empyrean.”

  Straley stares at her, then shakes his head. “Shit. Again.”

  “Pretty much.” Grace’s headset beeps again, right as the viewscreen pops up another ‘incoming audio’ message. “Nick, is anyone else out? Harry or Jessica?”

  “Jess, maybe, she’s a snow bunny.” Straley gets up stiffly, comes to the screen, taps the option to route the audio through the speakers. “Who’s there?”

  “I-i-it’s D-Don. Ebisawa.” The engineer’s teeth are chattering audibly. “L-let me in, p-please.”

  “What in the world,” Straley mutters, but Grace is already punching Ebisawa in.

  Ebisawa doesn’t stumble, though his safety goggles are completely fogged. He’s dressed just as thickly as Straley is, but the little exposed flesh she can see has a bluish cast. Grace ushers the man into a seat; a corner of her screen shows an outside temperature of minus one hundred Celsius, and a fast drop. They’ve already surpassed Earth’s coldest recorded temperature. She just makes another coffee for Ebisawa. “Is there a reason my crew’s trying to freeze themselves to death tonight?”

  “N-no ma’am.” Ebisawa takes the goggles off and drinks steadily for a few seconds, and some of the grayness leaves his face. “I’ve been g-going over the water processor plans at the site, m-making tweaks for the next phase of construction…” He drains the cup—Grace takes it back—and the steadiness is back in his voice. “I lost track of time, and of how cold the weather’s getting. But I had an idea for Aurora I wanted to run by you.”

  Grace hands him a fresh dose of coffee and holds her hand out for Straley’s cup. He shakes his head, watching Ebisawa. “We’re listening.”

  The lanky engineer fidgets. “I understand there are some remains to remove before we can salvage the ship for fabrication.”

  Word travels fast. Straley scowls. Grace just nods. “That’s right. Go on.”

  “I thought we could spare enough material to fab some ossuaries,” Ebisawa says. At their combined blank looks, he fiddles with his slowly clearing goggles and adds, “Bone boxes, though that’s a little oversimplified.” He traces dimensions in the air with his hands. “About seventy-five centimeters long and twenty-five centimeters high, since we’re dealing with skeletal remains. It’s perfectly respectable, it makes storage and burial easier since we’re waiting for a thaw, and you don’t have to remove the cryo tubes.”

  “Because you want to scrap those too,” Straley guesses.

  “It’s not like we’ll be using them.” Grace has to admit, the idea makes sense. It could be weeks or longer before the weather warms enough to make standard burials possible. “All right, Don. You have my approval to go ahead. You can start tomorrow, provided we’re not mid-blizzard.”

  “Thank you, Captain. It struck me as a good idea.” Ebisawa doesn’t get up yet; he has his fingers laced around his cup and a hesitant set to his mouth. “There’s…I have a request, if you don’t mind
hearing it.”

  Grace glances at Straley; the security chief is just watching intently. “All right, let’s have it.”

  “After the remains are removed…” Ebisawa gnaws his lip. “I want to wake up my daughter.”

  “Don—”

  “No,” Straley says flatly. “No. Not happening. That’s not in the agreement, Ebisawa, and we’ve got enough to do here without a kid running around—”

  Ebisawa holds up a hand. “Just hear me out, please.”

  “You signed a contract,” Straley begins.

  “Nick.” Grace sighs. She’s tired and headachy and doesn’t need an argument. “Just listen to the man. Don, you’d better make a good case.”

  “It’s the ship. Aurora. I want Kiana to see the ship.” Ebisawa lowers his head. “I know, I know, she’s supposed to stay in cryo till her mom gets here. But Aurora will be scrap by then and I want her to see it intact. From the outside; I wouldn’t take her in.”

  “Hell you wouldn’t,” Straley growls.

  “She’d be suited up properly. I can tether her to me if I have to.” Ebisawa’s pleading now. “Kiana’s nine, Captain Morgan, she won’t just run off. Please. Just give us this one thing. I’ll put her right back under afterward, if that’ll make everybody happy. I just want her to see that other people were here.”

  Grace studies him. A child at large is still a risk in Shackleton’s weather, unless she holds him to the tether idea. “Nick?”

  Straley frowns, shaking his head. “Your call. Not mine.”

  Of course. He’d told her on the first day, her job was to give the orders, his was to save people from themselves, but now he’s putting all the responsibility on her. Grace musters a smile. “Since you’ll have other people on hand, and if you’re serious about the tethering…it should be fine. Provided the weather’s okay. Go get some sleep, Don, we’ll see in the morning.”

  Ebisawa jumps to his feet. “It’ll be fine, Captain, I’ll take perfect care of her. Thank you. Thank you.” He puts his goggles on and pulls his suit tight around himself, and when Grace opens the door, letting in a swirl of snow, he makes a run straight for the hab module.