Nobody knew why the dragon-birds had attacked the tables or why they’d attacked and killed Beth and John. Dragon-birds had never done anything like this before. Everybody had a theory—maybe it was all our party lights, maybe it was the smell of the food, maybe it was something we still didn’t understand. Maybe it was just Hella saying, “You don’t belong here. You never will.”
Maybe one day we’d figure it out. I hoped it would be soon. Maybe the drones would find something. Then we could protect ourselves against it ever happening again.
That was the first emergency.
The second emergency was one we saw coming. A super-storm had been building up out in the ocean, heading northeast, toward us. Every storm on Hella is a super-storm, so any storm is serious. We’d been watching this one for several days and were well prepared for it.
This wasn’t the worst storm ever, but it was the worst one I’d ever seen anywhere. Flat Rock is on the east side of the Great Divide, the side that gets the worst pounding from hurricanes and super-storms and goliaths.
The first wave hit us shortly after dark, just as everyone was bedding down for first sleep. Thick clouds rolled in overhead, edge-lit by the moons—then suddenly, there was rain. Not just a polite drizzle, not just a steady downpour, but a great scouring torrent, wind-driven and ferocious. It slammed sideways into the trucks, rocking all of them like toys. The travel crews had anchored all of the Rollagons with multiple chains and buttresses, but we could still hear them grinding and groaning against the roaring winds.
Lightning lit the clouds, flashing back and forth like the gods were having an argument. Then it turned into a war, a battleground of furious electrical rage. There were more flashes per second than I could count, so many that they blurred into a flickering brightness that danced around the sky. The thunder boomed and cracked around us. Lilla-Jack let me watch from the bridge. I wasn’t frightened, I knew that all the vehicles were well-grounded, but we still worried about tornadoes and waterspouts.
The fury went on for the longest time. The wind was so violent the rain was coming in sideways. We had all our lights on and we had furious lightning everywhere, but the sheets of water were raging so thick, we couldn’t see anything. Whatever punishment the land around us was taking, all we could see were bright strobing flashes. As unnerving as it was, eventually it also got boring. A lot of people gave up and went off to get some sleep. A few others made sandwiches and monitored the situation from their posts.
But by the time everyone was waking up again for their dark shifts, the worst of the storm had passed, and we could send out drones again to scout for the best route ahead.
Several of the trucks had taken damage. Bits and pieces of flying debris had taken out a radar dome on one truck, and another had a sizable dent in one side from something big that had struck it, bounced around, and then vanished downwind. Probably a huge tree limb. A third truck had lost two of its anchors. It had been pushed sideways, sliding through thick mud, and three of its wheels had been pushed off their treads. That was going to take a day or two to repair—or they could drive off the treads and do the rest of the journey on wheels alone. But it was part of the northbound convoy, so I didn’t know what they finally decided until I looked it up later.
There was also some flooding in one of the trucks, because one of the younger children had opened a hatch to look at the rain. By the time they got the hatch closed, nearly a meter of water had flooded the lower storage deck. Fortunately, most of the gear was water-sealed—a normal precaution—but half the plant samples were lost, and a litter of glitter-pigs drowned in their cage.
There might be smaller storms on Hella, but nobody has seen one yet.
* * *
—
Of course, I uploaded all this to the Cascade.
Lilla-Jack agreed with Mom. She said, “The more they understand just how dangerous conditions here can be, the more likely they’ll learn how to survive. And the easier it’ll be for the rest of us.”
It didn’t take long for the questions to come bouncing back. There were a lot of them:
“How come everybody at Summerland wore rebreathers when they went outside, but not everybody at the Jubilee?”
“Isn’t anybody concerned about oxygen toxicity?”
“What about those people who went off to have sex? Weren’t they exposed to all kinds of bacteria and microbes?”
“You keep telling us that we have to be careful not to infect Hella’s ecology with Earth-life, but it looks like everybody disregarded that rule at Jubilee.”
“All that food on all those tables. Don’t the Hella-bugs get into it?”
“Why didn’t you detox at Jubilee?”
“Some of those dishes don’t look healthy. Are you monitoring your consumptions?”
I didn’t know how to feel about all the questions, some of them seemed kind of stupid, so I showed them all to Lilla-Jack and Mom and even sent copies to Captain Skyler and Jamie. Lilla-Jack and Mom smiled and said, “We asked the same questions when we first arrived.” Captain Skyler was still busy at Summerland, so his reply was very short. He said to answer all the questions honestly.
Jamie sent me a video message. “Hiya, kiddo. You done good. All those questions are good news. It means the Cascade people are paying attention. It means they want to know everything. It means they want to survive on Hella, they’re trying to understand. Some of them, at least. So this is a good thing, isn’t it?” Jamie is good at explaining things that way.
We couldn’t move on until we finished cleanup and repairs. There was a lot of cleanup and even more repairs, we were going to be here for a while, so I would have plenty of time to answer the questions from the people on the Cascade. There were a lot of them and more kept coming down.
I started with oxygen toxicity, because that’s the invisible problem, but also the easiest to explain.
Yes, there’s a higher percentage of oxygen in the Hellan atmosphere, but not so high as to make oxygen toxicity a serious risk. Most rebreathers add a little CO2 to the mix, but at higher altitudes, it’s not as necessary. Where there’s less air pressure, you take in less oxygen in a breath. Flat Rock Altitude Station is two kilometers above Hella sea level. The same reduced PSI would be found only a kilometer and a half above Earth’s sea level. So rebreathers aren’t necessary.
There are two other problems with the higher oxygen content. One is rust, the other is fire. Both happen faster on Hella than they would on Earth. Rust is the slow burn, but fire is the one that can kill you. So most of our machines are designed to keep any possibility of sparks contained. As for rust—we use aluminum, carbon polymers, graphene-induced ceramics, and other materials wherever possible.
Lightning from late-summer storms often trigger grass fires in the savannahs and sometimes if the wind is right those fires turn into massive firestorms. It’s part of Hella’s ecology, so most of the plants and animals have adapted to the annual conflagrations. But it’s still bad news for us. That’s why most of the permanent installations at Summerland are either dug in or completely underground.
The harder thing to explain was our behavior at Jubilee and the apparent lack of precautions against microbial and other contaminations. A lot of our precautions aren’t immediately apparent. Everybody is vaccinated of course, and our vaccinations are updated regularly, almost always a month before a migration. So that’s part of it.
Another part, which doesn’t show up well on the videos, are the drapes. Most of Jubilee happens under a great awning. It looks like a giant tent, but it’s actually several concentric tents and there are concentric circles of mono-fiber netting all around the sides. The netting is so fine it doesn’t show up on camera very well. It just blurs whatever’s behind it. So it’s hard to photograph, even coming at it sideways. I didn’t include it in any of my videos, so the Cascade colonists didn’t know it was there. Not unless th
ey read the manuals. But as Jamie says, “Who reads the manuals? Only if there’s a certification test, right?” The manuals say that even one layer of the netting can stop ninety percent of all airborne particles larger than a spirochete. Three rings of netting have been tested to ninety-nine percent efficiency. We use seven.
So getting in and out of the tent requires a person to navigate through a maze of nearly invisible drapes. But every trip, a lot of people go out into the open air. Jamie says that it’s a way to feel like you’ve had an adventure, just so you can say you’ve done it. Captain Skyler says that human beings have an emotional need to feel free, even if it’s a little dangerous, and sometimes even if it’s a lot dangerous, but especially if they’ve been cooped up inside for half a Hella-year.
So that was the real question that the new people were asking. “Are we going to be able to go outside?”
Well, yes. And no.
You can wear protective clothing. Or you can go naked. That’s what we call “going outside without protective clothing.” Sometimes we don’t call it “going naked.” Sometimes we call it “beta-testing.” There are some people who do it deliberately—just to show how big and bold and brave they are. Jamie says there’s a technical term for people like that. He says we call them “statistics.”
But there’s a certain value to beta-testing. It’s how some of our best vaccines have been developed. Some of them have even been named after the beta-testers. We have the Chris Hutchins vaccine to prevent leprotic scales, the Darrell Grizzle vaccine that’s eighty percent effective against explosive diarrhea, and the Mike Kok treatment which nobody talks about without giggling. Well, maybe Doctor Rhee can, she says she’ll tell me about it when I’m older. “In the meantime, just always wear clean underwear, okay?”
But the other side of that question—are we infecting Hella? That’s a lot harder to answer. Because the truth is, we already have. We started infecting Hella the first day we dropped a probe into the atmosphere, and every time a pod comes down and another colonist steps out, no matter how careful we think we’ve been, it’s one more bit of infection.
Jamie showed me a book from old Earth, not a very pleasant book either, so I won’t identify it or the author, but you can probably figure it out from my description. In this book, the author made the very uncomfortable argument that human beings are the most invasive species in the known universe. He traced our history from the very beginnings in the Olduvai Gorge and the diaspora that followed to show that, ultimately, we infested every continent on Earth, every climate, every ecosystem—and destroyed it, subverted it to our own hungry appetites.
And the result? Because we don’t know how to live in harmony, we used up everything everywhere. The Age of Waste devoured the Earth.
But the author didn’t stop there. He showed that we were already spreading out to all the other planets and moons and asteroids in the solar system—all that we can get to and exploit—and afterward, as soon as we can build enough brightliners, we’ll infest every other star system that we can reach.
His point? We can’t even get along with ourselves. How are we going to get along with anyone or anything else we meet out there?
Out here. Like Hella.
But even if we wanted to be the very best visitors, the most gracious of guests, we can’t. Every breath we take, every step we make (Jamie always sings those words), leaves behind a trail of personal microbes. So far, we haven’t wiped out any species, haven’t caused any extinctions—none that we know of, anyway—but we’re still trying to be careful.
So why do we act different at Flat Rock Station?
It all comes back to the rose bushes.
If anyone was going to plant rose bushes anywhere on Hella, Flat Rock is the least bad place. Captain Skyler says Flat Rock is “an ecological island,” a pocket in a much larger ecology, separate enough to be isolated but not isolated enough to be its own ecosystem.
To the west, there’s sharp mountains. To the south there’s a lot of desert and even sharper mountains. To the north, there are large barren salt flats. Also a river, very fast and very wide. And several times a year, Flat Rock gets scoured and washed clean by violent storms coming up from the gulf. So there’s not a lot of opportunity for anything we might do here to get out to the rest of the continent. That’s what we hope, and so far it’s worked out that way.
We think. And the rose bushes are the evidence that we might be right.
This was the hardest question of all to answer. I had to upload the whole history of the rose bushes, how they got planted, how we think they survived all these years, and all the arguments about whether to sterilize the area or let them keep growing as a test.
After all the arguments and discussions and meetings and evaluations, it was finally decided that all of Flat Rock Altitude Station would be a test bed, a place where we could find out just how dangerous we might be to the rest of the Hellan ecology without too much risk of the danger spreading.
So that’s why people get to wander around Flat Rock so promiscuously. Lilla-Jack confirmed that “promiscuously” is definitely the right word.
We don’t have the same risks at Winterland. The station is built into the side of a mostly dead volcano, sealed away from the surrounding terrain, which is mostly broken volcanic rock, with no soil and nothing even trying to grow there. Not yet, anyway. Even the nearby black sand beaches are barren. So Winterland is the most naturally isolated of all our permanent human settlements.
The last part of the video I almost didn’t want to send, but I finally realized that Captain Skyler was right. Tell them everything.
Because this was the real problem.
The argument has never been resolved and maybe it never will be.
What’s our final destiny here?
Some people say we have to respect the Hellan ecology, especially because there’s so much we can learn from it. But there are some people, like Councilor Layton, who think we should replace the Hellan ecology with our own and turn this planet into Earth II.
Jamie says that’s a stupid idea—we aren’t evolved for this planet, none of our plants or animals and certainly not us. If we’re going to survive here, we have to adapt, we need to learn everything we can from Hella, not wipe it out—otherwise that book is right and we really are the worst invasive species in known space.
I think that answered all the questions, all the important ones anyway. Anything else would have to wait till we got to Winterland. I was tired. I shut down my screens and crawled off to my bunk and fell asleep dreaming of dragon-birds and storms and mud so deep I couldn’t get out. I finally turned on that part of the noise that helps me get through the night.
* * *
—
But even after the trucks were ready to go, we still had to wait another long day. The drones told us that the storm had flooded a large part of the southward passage. We’d have to wait until the waters drained, and then maybe even longer for the ground to dry out so we wouldn’t bog down in swampy mud. That might cost us another day or maybe two. But once we could get rolling again and work our way around to the western side of the Vicious Mountains, we’d be on more tolerable terrain.
We’d spend two Hella-days crossing the dry lands that had escaped the worst of the storm. The Vicious Mountains were high enough to turn a hurricane back on itself, which might be good for the western side, but always caused a lot more damage on the eastern. Once past the mountains, we’d head down into the long southern desert which was supposed to be an easier trek, but not always. If the winds died down, and we didn’t get caught in any sandstorms, it’d be a trouble-free crossing, although a sandstorm could disable the vehicles—clog the air filters, scour the windshields, and sometimes even foul the tracks. If the winds started rising, we’d have to wrap the trucks and hunker down to wait it out.
On the far side of the desert, we’d climb over the Hum
p, wind through the Rumpled Blankie, and then finally roll down the Grand Downslope toward the coast and the long string of volcanoes that sat on the edge of the continent. Winterland Station was carved into the northernmost cone. The gulf winds were already pushing autumn storms north, and we had a fifty percent chance of hitting rain on the last leg. That would cost us another long day and, that close to Winterland, nobody would be happy. But we’d be close enough for help if we needed it.
Lilla-Jack didn’t need me on the bridge but she didn’t complain when I joined her. As long as I didn’t talk. Which was okay, because I was still mostly in my no-talking space. When I wasn’t on the bridge, I was in the galley making sandwiches for the road crew and engineers. Or I was in the lounge, answering mail. Or I was in my bunk sleeping. And every so often, in the shower. Washing.
Meanwhile, the people on the Cascade were very excited about nearing docking orbit and there was a lot of arguing about who would come down on the first landings. Charles had an older brother, Douglas, who was married to Mickey, and Mickey had worked as an attendant on Earth’s orbital beanstalk. Captain Boynton had used him as a Special Assistant for Residential Management aboard the Cascade, so Mickey and Douglas might come down in the second or third pod to help plan for the arrival of the rest of the Cascade colonists. Douglas was good at data management, and the plan was that Mickey and Douglas would coordinate with the Housing Committee to figure out who should go where when the rest of the colonists came down. So Charles wrote to ask me to please watch out for Douglas and Mickey and make sure that they were well treated. Of course. What a weird request. Why wouldn’t they be?
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