Hella

by David Gerrold

  If this were a movie, of course, a gigantic hungry-saur would charge out of the trees, surprising everyone, eating a few members of the road crew, and getting into a ferocious fight with the power suits. But this wasn’t a silly movie, we had taken all the appropriate precautions, our surveillance was good, and nothing awful happened. We were on our way again in less than thirty minutes.

  Of course, I assembled a video for the people on the Cascade. I had to explain that everyone on the crew wore helmets with full heads-up displays. And the turrets were fully manned. And the umbrella was up. And the skyballs hadn’t shown anything. Because the first rule was always safety. Be meticulous. Be methodical. If there had been a predator of any size in the neighborhood, we would have smelled its stink, felt its footsteps, and maybe even heard its rumbling, long before it got close enough to stalk us, let alone surprise us.

  We hit the lowlands just before dusk and halted. A storm was coming. There are no small storms on Hella. We’d known about this one and had hoped to outrun it, but it was moving fast and hard. The winds were already whipping the trees. Lilla-Jack decided not to try driving through the weather. She recalled the skyballs and drones, and all the rolling-bots as well. She ordered all the trucks to anchor themselves, driving thick spikes into the ground for stability. As the wind rose, she even ordered each truck hitched to the vehicle ahead, forming a mechanical centipede and assuring even more stability.

  We only got hit with the edge of the storm, but it was nasty enough. It rocked the Rollagons and slapped us with sleet and hailstones, broken tree branches, even the occasional small animal. Lightning flashed overhead, uncomfortably close and painfully loud. Water streamed down all the windows and a small flash flood rushed around the base of the vehicles for an ugly half hour. It was unnerving, but then Lilla-Jack hollered, “Is this all you got, bitch?!” We all laughed, but then Hella responded with a series of three quick lightning strikes and a falling tree, and even though it was funny, it was also scary for a moment too.

  The storm went on for half the night, nobody slept, we just sipped hot tea or soup and rolled with the punches. Nobody could sleep with the noise and the rocking anyway. I took sandwiches up to the lounge, and the crew there went suddenly silent, so I knew they had been talking about stuff they didn’t want me to hear, probably Councilor Layton’s idea not to let all the Cascade colonists land. Only the good ones. People not like me. Even though nobody was talking about it, everybody was still talking about it. Just not where they would be heard. I think they were all afraid of starting another big argument. So everybody was just waiting for me to leave before they started talking again. I passed out sandwiches and then went back to the galley. Abruptly, just before midnight, the storm stopped and everything was silent again.

  Lilla-Jack put up an umbrella of skyballs with extra night-vision and ordered the crew chiefs to check for damage. We had a few cracked windows, a lot of minor dents, several serious-looking ones, and plenty of deep scratches. But for the most part, the vehicles came through the storm okay. They were armored with graphene-layered lattice-metal with a fifty percent compression ratio, and enough flexibility to bounce back, so there wasn’t any real damage from the assault.

  There were a few minor injuries to tend to—a couple of panic attacks, and a woman who’d slipped and fallen when the truck she was in was punched by a rolling tree branch. She’d bruised her hip and elbow, but a quick scan showed that nothing was broken. A crewman on another truck slipped in the mud. He’d fallen hard off the forward deck above the roller and cracked a couple ribs, but he got himself taped up and went right back to work.

  The ground was still wet and muddy from the storm, so the trucks used jets of liquid nitrogen to freeze the dirt ahead. Scuttle-bot surveillance showed that we were going to have even more trouble with the large swampy areas ahead. The marshes were usually dry lake beds by the end of summer, but the early autumn storm had left nearly a meter of water in its wake and the lake beds were filling up with runoff. It was a wide plain, tilted slightly east, so most of the water would spread across the lowlands like a sheet, but if we drove straight through the soft earth, the rollers of each truck would carve a channel. Each truck would deepen it. The last few trucks would be rolling through very deep mud or even water.

  Lilla-Jack called a halt for a conference with the drivers. They even had to wake the off-shift teams. If we went west for half the night, toward higher ground, we’d only have to cross two shallow rivers. It would cost us most of a day and eat up the rest of our margin, but it would be safer. Some of the drivers wanted to push straight across the lowlands, they said they’d seen worse, and they were sure their trucks could handle a little mud, but some of the older drivers were skeptical. They said that the aerial scans of the terrain looked dangerous, especially the radar scans and ultrasonic pings. Look at the charts, they said. There are just too many places that look too soft. An unwary driver could easily get bogged down. And it wasn’t so long ago that a whole truck had sunk irretrievably into deep muddy quicksand, almost taking an entire crew down. It was that last remark, I think, that helped Lilla-Jack decide. “We’ll go west.”

  That’s what I wanted to do. Go west. I didn’t want to see a truck sinking into quicksand. And even more, I didn’t want to be on a truck sinking into quicksand.

  Lilla-Jack called Captain Skyler to let him know, and he agreed with her assessment of the situation. “You didn’t have to call me,” he said. “You’re the on-site manager. It’s your call.”

  “Thank you, Captain. But I wasn’t asking you, I was informing you.”

  He grinned, nodded, and logged off.

  We started rolling again almost immediately, turning west to follow the secondary route that wound around and through the foothills of Why Bother.

  When I awoke again, we were still an hour away from the first river. I took a shower and had a sandwich. Every living module on a truck has a shower. It’s the same water recycled over and over, so it’s just like home, you don’t have to worry about any strange alien bugs or anything. I like showers. They’re very relaxing. But on the truck, I have to keep it short, because other people need to shower too.

  We got to the first river and slowed to a stop. Lilla-Jack lit up the crossing with skyballs. It didn’t look good. White water rushed over jagged rocks. The narrowest place looked too steep. The wider crossings were strewn with boulders. A recent landslide had blocked part of the access. Last month’s overlay showed just how recent.

  Lilla-Jack sat for a moment, steepling her fingers in front of her face and breathing into the hollow between her palms, like she was praying, except she wasn’t. She was saying some words in an old Earth language, probably German. Jamie says German is great for swearing. Lilla-Jack didn’t do it for long, though. She sent skyballs whirring upriver and down, looking for a better passage. She studied her displays for a while, then she said some more words in German. Then she got on her com-set and chatted for a moment with the engineers.

  After a bit, a strange-looking truck rolled up. It had tracks like a tank and a weird-looking heavy framework on top. It drove down into the steep gully all the way to the bottom and anchored itself there with feet that jammed hard into the riverbed. Then very slowly and mechanically, the framework on top stretched, unfolded itself, first one way, then the other, and then both ends stretched some more to become a bridge that reached almost from one side of the gully to the other. The ends anchored themselves with their own deep feet.

  Lilla-Jack conferred again with the engineers. The bridge across the bottom would hold, but the muddy sides of the ravine still bothered her. They talked about possibilities—laying down sheets of chain or perhaps more bridge sections—but all of those ideas depended on the sides of the gully being stable and they definitely were not.

  Eventually, they decided to string multiple heavy cables to Atlas trees on both sides of the ravine, with block and tackle rigs atta
ched to both the front and rear jacks of the trucks. With these security lines in place, each truck would pull itself down this side of the gully, over the bridge, and then safely up the opposite side of the stream. It would be time-consuming, yes, but it would be the safest way.

  Captain Skyler always made it clear where we should put our priorities. “You can sacrifice safety for speed or you can sacrifice speed for safety. Which would you rather lose? A day or a life?”

  But sometimes, for some team captains, it wasn’t always safety that shaped a decision and that could have consequences. Any team captain who lost a team member or caused the loss of any human life would never be a team captain again. The First Hundred started that policy and no one had ever gone against it. According to the loss projections, the colony’s population was still way ahead of where we might have been if they hadn’t instituted such rigorous safety procedures.

  While the engineers were setting the cables, Lilla-Jack checked in with Captain Skyler again, letting him know that we had arrived at the crossing and were rigging safety lines. We would probably end up a half-day behind schedule. He approved the decision, and while she waited for the engineers to finish, Lilla-Jack sent out a corrected schedule to Winterland and the rest of the trucks in the convoy and even to the folks on the Cascade, because they were following our progress too.

  The Cascade was less than a month away now. She’d had to come around the sun, racing to catch up to Hella. She was already burning off her excess velocity and would be falling into a docking orbit a few days after we reached Winterland—if we stayed on schedule. They were going to drop three cargo pods and a twenty-member advance team. The rest of the passengers would winter in orbit. We needed to arrive at Winterland early enough to unload at least three trucks and trailers and send them out to pick up the first cargo pods from the Cascade. Right now, they were targeted to land in the high desert, fifty klicks inland from the station—which was conditional on the winds, of course, but the landings were important. The Cascade promised to download as much medical supplies and fabbing equipment as they could spare. Mom could synthesize the medicines we’d need to make it through the winter, but it takes time to synthesize anything, so the more units you can put to work, the better you can maintain your stock. We needed to build up our stores before the twelve hundred arrived. They would certainly be bringing enough microorganisms that we could expect a few weeks of sniffles and colds as the two populations mixed.

  We could have fabbed some of the medical processors ourselves, but that would have meant taking fabber time away from other projects even more important. Mostly, we needed to fab more fabbers. Adding twelve hundred people to the colony was going to put an enormous strain on our existing resources unless we began preparing now. We’re always in a state of permanent preparation for the next arrival, but we’re also always playing catch-up too, because we never know everything we’re going to need until the ship arrives, and this was the biggest arrival ever, so it was practically a crisis. A survivable one, but still a crisis.

  Most of the passengers wouldn’t start landing until spring, which meant they’d be coming down to Summerland Station where they’d come down on the grasslands, which meant we’d need trucks and trailers. Then we’d have to expand the cafeteria or reconfigure the meal shifts. And we’d have to expand the meeting facilities, the dorms, and the bunkers. And after that, we’d see about new homes. But there wasn’t a lot of room left in the inner circle for any more pods.

  One plan under consideration was to use the space around the innermost fence. We’d never had any dinos get that far, not even during the Big Break-In. They’d cracked the second fence, but never got over it. And we’ve strengthened all the fences since the Break-In. If we went with this plan, first we’d bury pods all along the inner side of the fence. We’d link all of them with a secure underground corridor and passages to the bunkers underneath every lookout tower. And we wouldn’t let anyone with children live in those pods, only people with weapons training.

  Another plan, one that a lot of people liked, would be to clear a few existing structures out of the way and then build downward in the same lots, dig out four or five stories to start with, more later, convert the landing pods into homes and stack them in the hole, add vents and pipes and fiber optics, then refill it. Dug-in skyscrapers. Core-scrapers? Whatever. Best of all, they could double as bunkers for year-round habitation. We could have larger stay-behind teams, Summerland Station could be a year-round facility. Over time, we could build a whole city of core-scrapers. We could go five or ten down, if we wanted. The engineering on it was clever. Instead of a building that had to support its own weight, the structural load could be offloaded into the surrounding dirt and rock. The outer walls would carry the weight and that would open up even more interior space.

  There were challenges, of course. It would require a lot of time and labor to dig in, and then we’d have the problem of what to do with all the dirt we’d be removing. We’d probably compress it into rammed-earth bricks and use them to strengthen the walls of the thing.

  This was one of the projects Jamie wanted to work on. The underground structures would require a lot of design and after that a lot of maintenance, and that would require a lot of energy, so we’d have to expand the solar farms and the windmills. The whole thing would need a lot of air circulation. And then there’d be the problem of ground pressure and vibration from the continuing migrations.

  Jamie said that it would be like building a whole city. It would be weather-proof and leviathan-proof and people could stay at Summerland all year long, they wouldn’t have to evacuate to Winterland, so we would save by not having to run more convoys and Winterland wouldn’t have to carve apartments to hold them.

  One time when he was telling me about all this, I asked him about the people who would live in those dug-in bunkers? Wouldn’t it be just like living in their pods on the Cascade again? Would that be fair to them? Jamie said that maybe they’d find them familiar and comfortable. We wouldn’t know if people wanted to live in them until we built some.

  * * *

  —

  It took fifteen hours to get all the trucks across the ravine, then wind up the cables, bring the portable bridge up from the bottom, and unhook the block and tackle rigs we used to help the bridge haul itself up. The next convoy would have to repeat the procedure. We couldn’t leave our bridge-vehicle behind, we might need it again.

  Lilla-Jack allowed a twenty-minute rest break for the various crews, including one glass of beer per person. Everybody cheered and drank—except the on-shift team of drivers, they deferred their drinks until they went off-shift. The sun was already high in the sky, and the day was getting hot. It might have been late summer, but despite the rising winds and the first trembling storms, the air was still a muggy blanket.

  The various teams powered up their trucks and ran through their checklists. Team Sixteen spent a quick twenty minutes on an emergency repair to their rear port side roller, fortunately it was nothing critical, just a loose bolt, then gratefully climbed back into their air-conditioned cabin.

  And we were moving again.

  The southern edge of the great grasslands is a band of foothills. On the other side, the hills give way to the great salt flats. That was the subject of my next big video.

  Mountain rivers rushing to the ocean had carved a lake here millions of years ago. Over time, as the glaciers receded, the lake grew larger and larger. But at some point, the lake grew so large the water was evaporating into the air faster than the glacier could replenish it, and after that, there wasn’t enough water to flow downriver. When that happened, the river reversed and the salty waters of the Broad Sea poured into the lake. I had a lot of aerial footage here, but I had to cobble up some simulations too.

  The more the surface area of the lake expanded, the more the evaporation increased. During the heat of the summer most of the lake would evaporate, so the
Broad Sea just kept pouring more water into it, every year, all summer long, delivering salt and salt and more salt, tons of it. Eventually, the lake was five hundred klicks across and the Broad Sea was feeding it as fast as the water could flow, adding as much as a centimeter of salt every year for thousands and thousands of years, so many years that the salt was a kilometer deep in places.

  And then, tectonic forces lifted the eastern edge of the continent high enough that the channels to the Broad Sea disappeared. The lake continued to evaporate until there was no lake left, only a massive salt flat. The mountain rivers still puddled up on the eastern end, seeping into a deep salt marsh so alkaline nothing can survive there except a certain kind of brine fly, creatures which serve no apparent purpose except as food for annual migrations of birds. We don’t send a lot of probes in to study this little ecology because of all the corrosives in the air. Maybe someday.

  The First Hundred saw this great white patch from space. They knew what it was even before they landed. But they didn’t name it until they could drive up to it and look across the great white emptiness. That’s why it’s called OhMyGod. Nothing else. Just OhMyGod.

  Maybe someday we’ll have some industrial use for all this salt—maybe we could make gigantic underground batteries to store excess electricity. But at the moment, we don’t have any excess electricity. It’s too bad that the channels to the Broad Sea are gone, we could have built hydroelectric generators there. Or maybe not. Salt eats up machinery something awful.

  When we finally arrived at the OhMyGod, everybody who could went to the forward observation deck to peer out at the dazzle and say, “Oh my God!” It’s a tradition of the journey. The salt flats are painfully bright to look at. They’re a color beyond white. Jamie calls it “actinic.” It’s the color of Hella’s sun, a little too much blue, not enough yellow.