Aurora (The Exodus Trilogy)

by Andreas Christensen

  “Okay then. I guess that’s enough about sex for now,” Thomas finally said. Ben let out a deep breath of relief, which Thomas seemed to notice.

  “So, let’s move on to the mental issues, shall we?” he grinned, as Ben slumped back in his chair.

  MARIA SOLIS

  The rains had come earlier than expected, and the second harvest had been only partially completed. Almost half the crops spoiled. With winter upon them, the extra supplies from the Exodus would come to good use; if not for them, everyone would be starving by spring. Despite the failed crops, there was still optimism in the air, Maria thought. The kids had been a challenge, and a lot of people were grumbling about the restrictions on movement, but still, most seemed content that their little community was slowly developing. And besides, they were safe inside the perimeter. There were predators out there; balders and who knew what, and most seemed to accept the restrictions as a safety precaution.

  But at the moment, Maria was wallowing in disappointment. She’d originally been part of Jeremiah Lowell’s team of scientists, set to explore the area to the west, and she’d really been looking forward to it. Then, just half an hour ago, Jeremiah had entered her living quarters, red faced and fuming.

  “The bastards won’t let us go,” he’d said.

  “There was no explanation, other than saying the mission was canceled.” Maria had to sit down.

  “They canceled it? But that makes no sense,” she said. Jeremiah nodded.

  “Yeah, they sure did. And no, it makes even less sense now that the crops went bad. Hell, we could have discovered something useful out there, you know. Like food…” He shook his head. Neither of them said anything for a while, and just when Maria was about to say something, Jeremiah interrupted her.

  “Well, I guess there are more important missions going on right now.” Of course. After Jeremiah’s original request to explore the south, where the photo from the Exodus had shown the single plume of smoke, a military detachment had been sent to investigate. There had been talk of intelligent beings being the only ones capable of producing it, even among the skeptics. The soldiers had come back empty handed, but they did find the origin of the fire. Weeks later, a team of scientists, including Jeremiah, had been allowed out to survey that very same area. Though the soldiers had dismissed the ash and charred sticks scattered on the ground, the scientists had brought them back to Fort Andrews to conduct chemical analyses of the remains. Upon their return, Jeremiah had proposed his own survey, and Maria knew he’d intended to conduct a much larger sweep, including large areas where no one had ventured so far. But so far, that had not been approved.

  “You’re probably right,” Maria said. Jeremiah said nothing, and she was still upset about his original expedition being canceled, thus leaving her out of it, so she just kept on talking.

  “There are rumors they’ve found traces of hydrocarbons. And from what I’ve heard, that got everyone all fired up, because there is nothing to indicate that hydrocarbons should occur anywhere near that spot.”

  “Unless someone, or something, brought it there.” Jeremiah looked up sharply, interrupting her. Few people said it aloud, but Jeremiah had never been shy to speak his mind, even back on Earth. “Well, I guess this means the western expedition will have to be postponed for now, but look at the bright side, the larger sweep of the south is still on, isn’t it?” she said. Jeremiah gritted his teeth.

  “Yeah, for now. But the longer we wait, the colder it gets, and given the speed with which those bureaucrats operate, you can be certain winter will be upon us before we get an answer. So it’ll probably have to wait till spring,” he said and exhaled slowly.

  “So I guess we’re in for a long winter then,” Maria said, as she saw her dreams of discovery postponed once again.

  Chapter 4

  BEN WATERS

  It had been Drew’s idea from the beginning, but he’d pulled out at the last minute, mumbling something about science lessons as he darted off. When John never showed up, that left Ben alone with Lisa and Harry. The three had decided to go anyway. Just yesterday the five of them had been sitting inside their warm cabin while the rains poured down outside, with nothing to do, quarreling over nothing, and growing more restless as the day went by. Drew had been grumbling about not being allowed to venture outside the perimeter, and finally said they should do it anyway. There was an entire world to discover, he’d said. If they didn’t explore their new world, who would? Both Ben and Harry had objected, while John remained silent. But boredom tore at them as well, and when Lisa said that if they didn’t do it together, she would go alone, the rest of them reluctantly agreed.

  So here they were, the three of them, in the woods just southwest of Fort Andrews, watching as the passing patrol disappeared in the distance. The rains had slowed to a drizzle, and they were all eager to get moving. They wore several layers of heat-retaining, breathable fabric inside their rain-repellant shell suits, and they had stocked up enough supplies for a couple of weeks. They even had a rifle to share, so they could always add some game to the menu if the opportunity presented itself.

  Ben thought they were as well prepared as one could expect. Even so, this was forbidden territory, and there were dangers out there, such as balders that could rip a grown human in two with a stroke of its clawed paw.

  “All right, I think they’re gone now,” Lisa said, rising. Harry and Ben followed suit, and wiped mud from their clothes. They all picked up their backpacks, and trotted off, away from the perimeter.

  Within two hours, they had already spotted a couple of rat monkeys, a shindie, and a few jerrybirds, small featherless birds whose official name was completely unpronounceable, commonly named after a comedian who used to be big back in the 1990s. The shindie was an especially peculiar creature, kind of a miniature cow that had the sharpest fangs ever, but with an undisturbed demeanor. Ben noticed the drizzle had stopped completely, and Cancri rays began to warm them nicely. He smiled as they plodded on. This was going to be an exciting journey.

  After four hours of walking without anything but short breathers, they stopped for the night. Lisa and Ben put up their tent, while Harry prepared a warm meal from MREs. Soon after, they got a fire going and sat by it chatting about this and that for a few hours. As the fire died out, the stars became more vivid, and Cancri’s moon Rotane crept up past the horizon, bathing them in an eerie light. Something in the upper atmosphere added a greenish hue to the light from Rotane, which gave it an almost supernatural feel.

  “Jeez, that is powerful,” Harry almost whispered. Ben only nodded.

  “Yeah… You can’t see it like that back in Andrews,” Lisa said, almost reverently.

  The next morning, they packed up their tent and rolled up their sleeping bags, and headed out. Soon enough, they reached a lake surrounded by marsh and a few rivers, and had to detour around it, which took them until noon. Once on the other side, they made a quick lunch before moving on. The weather was nice, though it had gotten colder over night, and none of them suggested any long breaks before it was time to set up camp again.

  Throughout the next few days, the temperature dropped steadily, and one morning they woke up to a thin layer of snow on the ground.

  “So what do we do? Turn back or move on?” Drew said as they peered out from the tent. Lisa laughed as she stepped outside.

  “Come on, boys, this is beautiful!” she said. As they took in the magnificent vista, Ben couldn’t have agreed more. It was the landscape of a fairy tale, with naked trees that had just a hint of fresh snow covering the tops of the branches, Cancri light glittering off a thousand snow crystals, and most of all, silence. Not even birds chirping or the rustle of leaves in the breeze. The silence of snow muffling every sound in the world of winter. They eagerly packed up their belongings and moved further into the unknown, relishing the beauty and sheer awesomeness of the new world.

  That night the blizzard took them completely by surprise.

  KENNETH TAYLORr />
  “Come on in, girl, it’s freezing out there,” Kenneth said as Maria came in, brushing off the worst of the snow before entering. He held the door just long enough to feel the chill himself even though inside it was warm and cozy. Maria looked like she was thinking hard, and Kenneth didn’t know why she was here, so he waited as she hung up her coat and placed her shoes by the door.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Taylor, but I talked to Geena Travis, and she told me to speak to you…” Kenneth smiled. He and Geena went back to Selection and were close friends, even though she was almost half his age. Common experience can do that, he thought. He motioned for her to follow him into the living room / kitchen / office, and Maria sat down as he went over to the counter and got them both a nice cup of hot chocolate. He said nothing as he handed her the cup. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her or anything, but he was a scientist at the core. He liked having all possible information at hand first.

  “So I guess… I should tell you that it’s not because you’re a psychologist or anything…” she said. Kenneth motioned for her to continue.

  “But Geena said you know so many things… That you sometimes see things from a different perspective…” She sat up a little straighter.

  “Well, what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know why certain things have happened. And I desperately need to know, because it’s driving me crazy. Because it makes no sense to me! Because what is happening isn’t right, and nobody will listen!” She sat back and averted her eyes from him.

  “I’m sorry. I got a little carried away.” Kenneth waved it off.

  “Don’t worry about it. And by the way, I’m not that kind of psychologist.” She smiled back at him.

  “More of a scientist actually. Such as studying how people cope with cutting off all physical ties to their past and building something new. Or how people adapt to new environments when old reference points prove to be invalid.” He paused.

  “But enough about me. What has happened?” Maria told him how the Havelar administration had effectively stopped Jeremiah Lowell’s plan to explore the area west of Fort Andrews, and her hopes of joining such an expedition. She continued by telling him all about the postponed mission to the south, and how every attempt to get some exploration going tended to get bogged down or outright forbidden.

  “You see, it’s not just that they stopped the expedition, though it makes you wonder.” Kenneth nodded. What are you hiding out there, Mr. Governor, he thought.

  “What I’ve been thinking about lately is the fact that someone can just decide that you can do this, but you can’t do that, and so on. It’s not like we elected him or anything.” Kenneth didn't answer immediately. He didn’t know much about the inner workings of the Havelar administration, but he knew that Maria’s father, Ramon, was one of their leading figures. He would have to choose his words wisely. Still, he wanted to help the girl, and she seemed sincere.

  “You think we should have an elected governor?” he asked.

  “Yes. Absolutely. But that’s not…” she hesitated.

  “Actually, I think that’s just part of it. I didn’t realize this back on Earth... Well you know I was sort of... pampered, I guess... But now that I think about it, I think it was just the same back there. We had President Andrews, and the rest of them were just to make it appear democratic. Everyone knew who’d win, almost like the old dictatorships, you know, China, Russia, Germany…” She trailed off, and he smiled at her.

  “Not that bad, you cannot mean that. The U.S. never put people in camps, or mass murdered opposition, even after Mars. And thank God for that!” Kenneth said. Maria mused for a second, before speaking.

  “You’re right, of course. As far as we know, the U.S. under Holloway and Andrews never went that far. But I wonder… If Devastator hadn’t shown up, how long would it have taken…” She shook her head, and put her still-full cup back on the table.

  “I’m digressing. What I mean is that America has quietly, for years, been moving down the road taken by so many others before, a road that seems so even and smooth at first, but ends up in a deep dark hole. But I never realized it. I had no idea, and it wasn’t because Daddy’s rich or anything. I don’t think he realized it either. I think most people just went on with their business, and lived their lives, and felt a little safer every time the government told them that new measures were being taken to fight terrorism.”

  “So you think it was terrorism?” Kenneth asked.

  “Maybe. What do you think?” Kenneth thought for a moment before answering. He had blamed terrorism as well, until he thought about the enormous amount of power such a theory credited the terrorists with. A power he frankly never believed them to be capable of handling.

  “For a long time, I believed Seattle to be the turning point.” He took his time. It had been a long time since he’d talked to anyone about these things.

  “And in some ways, that’s probably right. After Seattle, things definitely changed, with new laws and the reforms, crackdowns on interest groups, leftists. Hell, even long-standing members of congress were ‘interrogated.’ Bet you didn’t read that in your history books in school.” He stood and turned up the heater. It was getting colder by the hour, and the howling winds outside made everything feel even colder.

  “But I think everything changed years before that.” He sat back down. “I think it was the Mars incident,” he said. Maria looked puzzled.

  “The Mars incident? You mean, the colony?” she asked. He just nodded.

  “But why? I mean, everybody knows it was a disaster, but why should that…” He smiled sadly.

  “I think the Mars incident was the turning point. Up until that point, there had been a lot of international cooperation, not just in space, but everywhere. Business, art, culture, politics, science. You name it.” He sighed heavily as he remembered how different everything had been back then.

  “You know, the Mars colony would have been a huge achievement. And it would have belonged to all of humanity. It was a huge project; Americans, Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Indians, and a lot of others were involved. No wonder everyone cheered and celebrated when they landed safely…” Maria was sitting on the edge of her chair now.

  “So it was the terrorists that changed everything,” she said, but Kenneth shook his head.

  “Terrorists? We’d known terrorism for ages, and we’d dealt with it before. There were some hard blows back in the early 21st century, and we made a lot of mistakes, but in the end, we dealt with it. It never broke us. Or changed our basic ideas of liberty.” All of that had been before Kenneth’s time, but he’d read the books and heard the stories. And the fact that there had been controversy and changes in direction afterward told him that the attacks never broke the ideals upon which the country had been built.

  “No, the terrorists never really changed anything.” He shifted in his seat. “I don’t know how much of the details you know about the whole Mars incident, but let me sum up a few major points, all right?” Maria watched him as he searched for where to begin.

  “All right. By the time Scott and Reynolds first landed on Mars, the terrorists had infiltrated several of the space programs involved, including ours. So when the time came to establish the first colony on Mars, there were terrorists both among the colonists and on the crews running mission control. Well, at first everything seemed fine, and it wasn’t until three weeks after landing, when one of the colonists doing a routine inspection discovered that one of the return vehicles had been tampered with that suspicions began to arise. The broken return vehicle wasn’t anything crucial. It just meant that the technicians who were scheduled to return after their jobs were done wouldn’t be able to in a couple of years. Nothing they weren’t prepared for. Sadly, it was just a diversion, and what happened next took everyone by surprise.

  “When the reactor blew up, things changed profoundly. With barely enough power to keep the oxygen levels up, time started running out, as life support systems started failing one a
fter the other. The situation soon became critical.”

  “They starved to death…” Maria said.

  “Yes, in part, that’s what killed them. Although some killed each other first, thinking they had exposed the terrorists, or just fighting over dwindling resources. We’ll never know the whole truth, just that in the end, man’s darkest side showed itself in the red dust of Mars.” Kenneth closed his eyes, knowing that if not for his mistakes while in Space Academy, he might have been one of those who fought to be the last human standing on the red planet. He opened his eyes.

  “Well, Maria, the rest may or may not be known to you. It’s nothing they hid, but it has become rather obscure in the history books.” Maria nodded.

  “They said it was poor security that killed the Mars mission. That such a level of international cooperation naturally led to the opportunity for terrorists to work their way into the teams.” Kenneth shook his head slowly.

  “It’s not entirely incorrect, but not entirely true either. Yes, the terrorists made it happen, no one else should be blamed for that. But there was a rescue attempt. Back at NASA, they calculated that some might survive for the two years it would take to get the rescue mission up there. That if the colonists pooled their resources and managed to keep essential systems going, air, water, heating, they could make the food last a while, and even resupply some of it, to make it last long enough. So a team was assembled. The Chinese wrote their people off from the beginning, and withdrew from the effort. I’m not even going to try to understand why. They have always made their own decisions for their own reasons. But soon after, the Russians followed suit, as the civil war claimed all their attention. So then it was just us, the Indians, and, of course, ESA. In the end though, an engineering failure in one of the rockets of the Mars lander kept the rescue team in Mars orbit with no chance of getting the lander safely down. By the time they were ready to try to get down to the surface, the mission was aborted. The colonists had been silent for weeks, and with the dodgy rocket, mission control decided they didn’t want to risk any more lives.” Kenneth shivered, thinking back on those poor souls stranded on a hostile, dead world. What must they have thought when no one came to their aid?