“You’re making a mistake,” Straley says darkly, leaning back across the crash couch.
Grace rolls her eyes and settles back in her chair. “Think of it as a chance to prove yourself.” She looks back. “…You’re not sleeping there.”
“Stop me. All the people who could throw me out are on my side.”
“Fine. Fine.” All Grace wants to do is stretch out in her chair and pass out for a few hours, not argue over space she can afford to share. “But if you snore you’re going right out in the snow.”
*
The first thing that’s gone up at Aurora’s site this morning is indeed an exterior camera, though Grace, parked in front of her new six-view monitor, doesn’t see or hear much more than blowing snow and groaning wind, interspersed with occasional gust-torn shouts. It’s distracting enough to make her turn off the audio.
Don Ebisawa had apparently gone sleepless last night, because he’d shown up at Signy’s door right at sunrise with his newly-crafted ossuaries, ready to clear Aurora’s cryo tubes. Bleary-eyed and full of coffee, Grace had dutifully accompanied them back to the crash site, back into the ship’s half-destroyed cryo mod, helping Ebisawa open the tubes while Signy, in surgeon’s mask and an extra layer of gloving, had removed the skeletons piece by piece. It had been a silent and remarkably scentless affair: with the decay processes long completed, the only odor released in opening the pods was a thick dusty one like powdered chalk. Signy had worked quickly, saying they could be reverent later.
Almost immediately afterward, Signy was waking Ebisawa’s daughter; he’d been adamant about Grace keeping her word. Toweled off and dried, stuffed into a tiny smart suit, Kiana Ebisawa’s only answer to Grace’s greeting had been a tiny squeaked “Hi,” as the girl blinked owlishly, still half-asleep, one hand wrapped around her father’s arm and the other clutching her disheveled teddy bear. She’d been a shy child even in her family’s presence, back on Enceladus, and being surrounded by strangers on a brand-new planet hasn’t changed that.
She’d gone out to Aurora tethered, as promised, clipped to her father’s suit like a puppy by six feet of thin steel chain.
Well. Don had been as good as his word. Back in the command center, Grace turns up the heat and makes a fresh batch of coffee. She’s still not quite happy with having Kiana awake and about, or with Don’s promise to keep her off the fractured ship, but she’s mostly still occupied with whatever had happened to the rest of Aurora’s crew. She has to flip through a lot of blank pages in Vicki Jeffress’s diary to find the next entry, and some of the blanks slip out in her hands; after a century of subnormal temperatures, the book’s breaking down in the warmth.
19 March 2186
Somehow we’ve maintained power to the forward section, though only at sixty percent. Thank God the atmosphere on this planet is breathable.
I’ve healed. Bill’s healing. Something like spring is coming, or at least the snow is starting to melt and the air’s warmer, and the others have been out exploring in the slush. Yesterday Brandeis and Smada found a stand of woody plants, like young conifers. Carter broke the ice skin over a pond and caught some kind of fish—large, bony, with mouths full of sieving teeth, like relics from prehistoric Earth. Scooped them right from the water with his hands. The bony plates had to be snapped off with knives, bit by bit, but we cooked them over a fire of conifer twigs and the flesh, once free of the bones, was clean and salty. The most pristine air humans have probably ever breathed, and we’re already polluting it…but none of us are sick yet, so I think we can say that the fish are safely edible. Brandeis wants to try one of the hawks next. He calls them hawks: bird analogues with beaks and talons, but leathery, scaly skins instead of feathers. They’ll flap away if you get to within a few inches, and they seem to be silent, but you can get quite close. Bill’s tablet still works, so he’s using it to take pictures.
We’ve started naming things, I guess. Bill’s named the sun McMurdo, he says officially, and he’s calling the planet Shackleton, though intrepid Antarctic explorers we’re definitely not. I just want to find out where we really are, how far the Star pushed us off course, and whether we’ve got power to blast a message back to Earth. It’s a pretty planet, in a bleak sort of way, rocky under the snow, and with flowering mosses starting to peek through the melt, but it’s not home. It’s not going to be home. The supplies we do have are going to run out soon.
Grace sips her coffee. “And a hundred years later, here we are. Welcome home.” But the thought nags at her: half of Aurora’s crew survived the impact that killed five people and crippled the ship. What about the five that had made it? They can’t still be alive with no access to longevity treatments, so where are the graves, the signs of even temporarily settlement? She turns a page—carefully—and scowls into her coffee.
Seventy-two light years.
Our course was for Mu Arae, just less than fifty light years from Earth, with an advanced civilization rumored on one of the outer planets. But when the displacement drive malfunctioned and spit us out, we’d crossed one and a half times that distance...in some direction. Bill says this system is an unknown, it doesn’t match anything in the catalog. Nobody on Earth has an idea in hell where we are. I can’t even guess if they’re looking.
I don’t want to stay here. I don’t. We’re hearing noises at night, since the thaw started. Yips and howls, like a coyote pack is nearby, though we haven’t found any animal tracks yet. We can’t get the airlock doors to close now, so we’ve started barricading them at night with the crates we’ve salvaged from our cargo. But the noises are closer tonight than before, and I don’t think a hundred kilos of dry rations is going to keep anything out long—
Grace’s console lights up with a whoop. Emergency message. Shit. She drops the book and cranks up the channel audio, filling the space with the noise of wailing wind. “Nick?” She screams it. “Jessica? Harry? Is anyone there?”
“Grace!” It’s Nick Straley. He’s breathing heavily, coughing; in the background, just audibly, someone’s screaming. “She’s gone! The kid! Something got the kid!”
*
“You said you’d take care of her, Don! What the hell happened?”
Grace doesn’t mean for the words to come out as a scream, but they do, ringing around the tiny confines of Signy’s makeshift medical office. Don Ebisawa just huddles in his chair, wrist still dangling the length of steel chain; the carabiner at the free end now holds only a torn piece of Kiana’s suit and the loop it had been clipped to. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t let go, she didn’t run—we were standing alongside the stern of the ship, I was trying to get her to come in close out of the snow.” His shoulders heave; his breaths are quick and shuddery. “She loved it. She was dancing in it. Then the line went taut and I thought she was playing—I couldn’t see for all the snow blowing around—and something growled and it went slack, and I—I—”
He puts his face in his hands. “That’s enough,” Signy snaps. She’s sewing up a gash in Straley’s cheek. “From both of you.”
“He’s right. About the growl,” Pierce says. “I heard that, even with the wind.”
“I saw it. Something.” Straley takes advantage of a break in the suturing to talk. The blood that had been frozen down his face when he’d come back into camp is thawed now, running freely from the two gashes Signy hasn’t stitched yet. They look disturbingly like the scratch marks Grace had seen on Aurora’s clawed cryo tube. “White, maybe gray, ran on four legs. I was bent down and it just knocked the hell out of me, I didn’t know it had—”
Signy puts a gloved hand over his mouth. “Shut up and be still.”
“We couldn’t see,” Jessica interjects. “It’s not Don’s fault, we couldn’t see anything either.”
“Right. Everybody out.” Signy’s got her ‘I’m in charge’ voice on. “Nick, sit down and let me sew up your goddamned face. Dr. Ebisawa, you stay, I have something to give you. The rest—out. Let me work. Then we’ll plan.”
*
Twenty minutes later, Signy’s striding into the command center with both men in tow, Straley grimacing beneath his layers of bandaging and Ebisawa looking distinctly woozy. She has a mini-tablet in her hand. “Captain. We can find her. We can find her right now.”
Grace has been sitting with Pierce and Jessica, just waiting, trying not to talk about animal attacks and hypothermia, but Signy’s pronouncement brings her to her feet. “How?”
“Transmitting microchip,” Signy says. “I put so many of the blasted things in colonists’ kids on Enceladus, I damned nearly went blind. Don’t remember chipping Kiana, but I checked my records and found her name and frequency, so…” She waves the tablet. “We can start back at the crash site. As long as I have this, I can track her.”
Jessica whoops. Grace sinks back into her seat, feeling suddenly boneless. Is it really going to be this easy? “Harry, Jessica, what kind of weapons do you have? Pistols? Rifles? Whatever did this, there might be more.”
“Both. Plasma,” Straley answers for them. “You’re not leaving me here to sit on my ass. Get up, Grace, we’ve got a crawler to load.”
Signy guides Ebisawa into a seat and squeezes his arm. “Just sit tight, Don. Try to rest. We’re getting your little girl back.”
*
The crawler makes slow progress in the driving snow, but Signy’s tracking app picks up a signal half a kilometer past Aurora, a regular little click that gets louder and faster as they get closer to its source. Grace glances around at the three UEF officers and can’t help asking: “Shouldn’t we have picked up the rest of your team?”
“Crocker and Haskins?” Straley shakes his head; a little blood oozes out from under a bandage. He lets it lie. “Overkill. Their job’s keeping eyes on the construction sites and the scientists. You saw how fast the word got out about Aurora—the sooner we can get the girl back before too many people notice she’s gone, the less panic we have on our hands.” He manages a scowl. “Damn, Signy, drive faster, I want to get to this brat before she’s last week’s lunch.”
“Not there yet.” But the tones from Signy’s tablet are picking up speed, and in another half kilometer they’re a constant trill. She slows the crawler, squints through the windshield. “Visual’s no good, too much snow cover, but she’s close. Let me switch to geolocation.”
The tones die, and for a second she studies the screen, then cuts the crawler’s engine. “Right. Got a fix on her. Looks like six hundred meters. Come on, everybody out.”
*
Signy’s tracking leads them to the sloped mouth of a cave, partially obscured by snow. Almost gleefully she shoves her tablet into a pocket and bends to scoop the snow away by hand. “Looks like we’ll have to crawl part of the way, it’s so angular,” she says. “Jess, you’re thin, you can go first.”
But they’ve barely started their single-file trek into the cave mouth—more a downward-sloping tunnel—when Jessica stops. “I hear something.”
Pierce makes a doubtful noise. “I don’t.”
“Guys, wait.” Grace cocks her head, straining; the tunnel walls have swallowed any sound from outside. Then she gets it: a faint cry like a high-pitched bark. “No, I hear it too. Come on. We need to hurry.”
What she thinks, but doesn’t say, is yips and howls.
*
They see the light before they reach the end of the tunnel: wavering, flickering, distinctly blue.
Jessica makes it out first, then the others, finding they can stand now. They’re in a roughly round cavern, stalactites and stalagmites showing the passage of the water that had hewn it out, but the source of the blue light isn’t water; it’s a bioluminescent pool in the cavern floor.
“Pretty,” Signy quips, “and here I am without a sample kit.” More tunnels branch off from this room, arching upward or downward, and the pool’s shimmering glow doesn’t reach far past its edge. In that near darkness, something moves.
Pierce draws his pistol at once. Signy just calls out, “Kiana? Honey, is that you? We’ve come to res—”
A hunched shape shuffles closer to the pool, into view, and Signy’s voice dies in her throat, because this…creature…isn’t Kiana Ebisawa.
Not entirely. Not anymore.
“Jesus Christ,” Straley breathes. The thing—Kiana—inches closer. Her clothing is gone, only a few scraps of suit remaining around her waist; her skin is chalk-white and waxy-looking, the paleness broken here and there by splotches of her natural pigment. Only her face is mostly unchanged, though one eye has gone purple instead of brown and a single fang has broken through her lower lip. She eyes them listlessly and hobbles closer still, bent in a kangaroo-rat posture, still clutching her tattered teddy bear with hands gone long and clawed.
“The pool,” Signy begins, “it must be something in the pool—Kiana? Did you drink the water? Talk to me, baby.”
“Stop wasting time,” Straley snaps. “Jess, grab her and let’s go—”
Kiana lifts her head and chitters.
Almost immediately, a larger, paler creature slinks out of one of the tunnels on all fours, hissing and growling. Pierce shoves Grace out of the way and lifts his pistol to put a smoking wound in the thing’s rump; it shrills, bares its fangs, and starts to back up the cavern wall before whirling and breaking for its tunnel.
More yips. “Get the kid,” Straley demands, “now!”
Kiana just sits. Jessica goes to her, takes her spindly arms and tries to pull her along. Grace, looking over Pierce’s shoulder, sees a flash of lanky white. “Jessica, move!”
Another animal charges out of the upward-turned tunnel, yipping and snarling. It gathers its limbs and lunges—
Pierce grabs his plasma rifle and puts a hole in its chest. Grace flinches away from the sing of the weapon and topples onto her side, watching in seeming slow motion as the creature’s extended body plunges into the glowing pool. Jessica, struggling with Kiana, turns just in time to catch the luminous splash full in the face.
Her screams are thin and high.
*
They’re crowded, again, in Signy’s clinic, minus what’s left of Kiana Ebisawa; the changeling girl had been locked into the back of the crawler, trussed and heavily sedated. No one’s had the heart yet to tell her father.
Jessica’s screams had become whimpers by the time they’d reached the outpost, her eyes swollen shut, her face blooming with spreading chalky patches. Under anesthesia, she’s quiet altogether; and though Harry Pierce is first on his feet when Signy emerges, grim-faced and bloody, he’s not the one she beckons to. “Captain? May I have a word?”
Past the inner door, the cargo module housing Signy’s practice is partitioned with half-walls of corrugated metal. Jessica’s out of sight behind one of them, though a beeping monitor betrays her presence. Signy waves Grace into a chair and starts stripping off her bloody scrubs, stuffing them into a large biohazard bin. “Well. She’ll live.”
Grace swallows nervously. “Will she be all right?”
“Eventually, with some scarring.” Signy pulls on a fresh scrub top and takes her own seat. “I’d need a pure sample to be completely sure, but my guess is that the stuff in that pool is some kind of potent mutagenic bacterial soup. I had to do the same surgery on Jessica I’d do for skin cancer—just peel the layers away until I hit clean flesh. It’s a pretty apt comparison. Instant tumor. Her eyes…” Signy pauses. “You can’t peel layers off a person’s eyes.”
“Can she see?” Grace asks.
“I won’t know until she’s awake. But the swelling’s gone down, that’s a good sign.” Signy huffs out a long breath. “That’s all I know right now. I wanted you to hear it first; you’d better let me break it to Harry.”
Grace nods, standing slowly. “What about Kiana?”
The doctor’s quiet a long moment. “My guess is that she ingested the liquid, or those creatures tried to immerse her in it. Given the uneven coloring, I assume the latter. It seems to work fast—Jessica g
ot off lucky.”
Grace guesses that’s true, after a fashion. “What are you telling Don?”
“When they’re both awake? The truth.” Signy waves at the door. “Now shoo.”
*
21 March 2186
There are intelligent predators here.
They’re the creatures we’ve been hearing at night. Bill calls them howlers. Carter’s given up his favorite fishing spot since he saw one there two nights ago. He said it stood on all fours, thigh-high to a man, white with purple eyes, looking like a skinned dog with a fish in its mouth.
It wouldn’t run from him, so he ran from it.
30 March
Sidereal year’s 378 days here. I don’t know why I’m using Earth terms. We’ll never see Earth again with this ship.
Bill’s gone.
After Carter’s sighting, Bill took Brandeis to go howler-hunting. He wanted to catch one, study it. That’s been six days ago, and I hear the howls all the time now, and sometimes I think they’re screams. If they were all right they’d be back by now.
Smada’s taken to huddling on the floor, mumbling to himself. Last night I caught him trying to pull down the barricades. Let them in. He wants to let them in.
I’m tired. Tired of failing, tired of this place. I want to go home. I want my husband back.
Our power’s starting to fail. If I’m going to send that message out to Earth—to anyone—I have to do it now. I have to try. I owe Bill that much.
Grace squints and rubs her eyes. The book’s binding has split completely in two, and loose pages keep falling out. Only one more page bears any writing.
Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Page 21