Colony Lost

by Chris Philbrook

  “You can’t go. It’s too dangerous for the baby. How are you feeling?”

  Melody took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’m fine. Sore in places I can point out in private, and nauseous. Very tired. I need you to check the male, protective thing hard right now and hear me. I’ve been thinking about this, and I need you to hear me good and well.”

  “Alright fine. Go ahead. Wait. Don’t say anything.” He leaned across the table and put his hand on hers. He pulled her gently toward him and they kissed. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Thank you for saying that. I was . . . worried.”

  “Yeah? Don’t be. I love you. We’re going to be great parents.”

  “Time will tell on that. So we need to talk, I know. There’s a lot to talk about,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  Melody cleared her throat. “Mission-wise there’s no way they can find another experienced pilot with clearance in time for our departure. There are no spare crews or ships. If I back out, it’ll put my crew at risk with a replacement co-pilot or, even worse, it’ll mean Beagle gets yanked and Dan and Andy will miss out on the chance of a lifetime. Never mind the idea that a new crew will be months behind in training. That’s eating me up.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t do that to them. Or you guys. I just can’t. I also can’t find a way to live with myself knowing that I sent my husband and father of my unborn child off to an unexplored world without me being by his side. And I can’t live with the idea of you pulling yourself off the trip to stay with me somehow and sending Waren and Lionel off without you, and I know you’re already thinking of a way to do that, and I already know you’ll hate yourself more than you realize if you do that.”

  “You raise a valid point. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Shush. Can we agree that mission-wise I need to go, and you need to go, so that means we’re going together?”

  Dustin puffed out a big exhalation that flapped his lips. A well-dressed man at the table nearby looked over with disdain and he smiled apologetically. Dustin poured more wine. “Yes, that’s all well and good.”

  “And whatever happens to me happens to me, regardless of the kid inside my uterus. There’s precious little added danger for me on the Selva expedition. I already have a dangerous-enough job.”

  “Great, wonderful, whatever. How are we going to work this with doctor’s appointments? You’ll need a ton with ultrasounds, blood draws, genetic work plus vitamins and whatever. The doctors will know soon enough, and you’ll get yanked from the rotation, and this plan all goes to shit. In a hurry, I might add.”

  “I got in touch with Captain Castellano off the record and she’s down to handle my medical needs on the side, as long as she can. She understands the mission could suffer.”

  “That’s great, but doesn’t that put her at risk? That’s not fair.”

  “Yeah, a little, but she’s a captain with some pull, and it’ll all wash out. I’ll be making the flight back either way right around when I start showing, so it’s moot. I can deny it to shit, and she can play dumb. Plenty of options.”

  “You’re risking your career. So is she. If they find out you hid the pregnancy . . .”

  “I’m making our baby. I’ve already got plenty of land for us on my own, never mind what you already have. If I get discharged, it’s not the end of the worlds. Let’s not even talk about how much hazard-duty pay we’ll collect on this. We could use that money. For the baby.”

  Dustin felt a crawling fear rummaging around his belly, scratching at the walls. He poured another glass of wine on it and tried to drown the resilient emotion digging about. “A dishonorable discharge? They’ll take away some of your civic duty credit and maybe some of your land. Selling that land could be a big deal for our future. Or using it to set up a business. Or just a home. We could be major landowners on Selva, right at the cusp of its settlement. There might never be another opportunity like this.”

  Melody put her hand on his, then lifted it and kissed the back above his knuckles. “Dustin, my dad is a senior senator, and we’re media darlings right now. We spin it. The first baby to travel to Selva. Selva’s first mom. Selva’s first dad? Hell, maybe I’ll give birth there if they ground me. There’s no way the Colonial Marines are going to risk that kind of public relations nightmare and there’s no way they’ll force it through my dad. I can leverage anything they try to do to Captain Castellano against the loss of face in the public. We are doing exactly what the colonial government wants, right? Explore new worlds and make babies to populate them with, regardless of the danger. This’ll work Dustin. Have some faith.”

  “It’ll work, won’t it?”

  Their waiter approached carrying two plates. The man had a faint Asian appearance to Dustin and for no reason he could identify, he liked that. It felt exotic in the fancy restaurant.

  “Miss, your broiled filet,” he said as he sat her plate down. “And sir here is your hamofish steak, seared to medium rare.” He sat Dustin’s plate down and spirited away the debris of their appetizers.

  When the waiter departed Melody dug into her steaming food, devouring a bite of the firm, white fish. She swallowed and grunted in appreciation.

  “Delicious. I read this article that back on Earth pregnant women couldn’t eat fish because of possible mercury poisoning. Can you imagine that? Mercury in the seas?”

  “That’s fucked up,” Dustin said as he cut off a piece of his steak. The same neighbors at the table nearby shushed him, and he glared at them in response. They looked away, and he returned to his meal.

  “So we’re agreed?”

  A white light flashed. The dark red of the curtains and tapestries turned bright and where the metallic surfaces could’ve been brassy, they flared to bright yellow gold.

  Dustin looked to the restaurant’s entrance and saw a pair of men just inside the door holding cameras with long lenses. He and his wife had been spotted. The intruders snapped more pictures with their brilliant flashes.

  The young hostess in her middle years of college stood at her faux gold-and-walnut podium looking back and forth from the photographers to Melody and Dustin. The cameramen snapped more flash-filled pictures, showing no signs of respecting the business, the patrons eating, and especially Melody and Dustin.

  “Can you ask them to stop, please?” Dustin asked the girl loudly. “I didn’t come here for a photo shoot.”

  The girl’s eyes popped open like she’d just discovered the ability to hear. She gathered her wits and ushered the two picture-takers out with spread arms and soft, kind words. After a few second’s worth of commotion and a half dozen more photos taken, they exited the front door, and the restaurant returned to normal.

  If “normal” was everyone staring at Melody and Dustin.

  The husband at the table nearby looked at the couple and wagged his butter knife in their direction as if tapping on a snare drum.

  “I knew I recognized you. You’re the two marines who got married on Ares. At that pretty place on the mesa. You’re part of the Selvan expedition.”

  Melody put her wrists out as if she was to be cuffed. “Guilty. We were hoping to have a quiet dinner tonight. I apologize.”

  The wife–a woman wearing so many pearls Dustin thought they might’ve been a new kind of Pacifican neck-freckle–made a big show of it being completely all right.

  “Nonsense. Nonsense. Newlyweds deserve a little privacy. Plus aren’t you the daughter of a senior senator? You know what, in fact, your dinner is on us. Eat like a king and a queen. Get more wine. Something good, like a ’47 Merlot from Phoenix. Waiter!”

  Dustin looked to Melody and shook his head, laughing.

  The worlds are a weird place.

  I’m going to be a dad.

  Chapter Eight

  An undisclosed military base, Pacifica

  20 July 163 GA

  Free of fanfare, the expedition departed the moons of Ghara.

  One vessel
at a time they lifted off from the Pacifican base, their engines thrumming, their occupants frightened and thrilled.

  First to leave the ground and claim the honor of leading the expedition was the Transorbital Freighter Titan, captained by Leah Kingsman. Its design originated before the Pioneer vessels left high-Earth orbit and it had not failed in any way in the centuries since. Able to land on solid ground or in water Titan guaranteed a massive payload to the most distant imaginable places. For this journey every square centimeter of space inside it was filled with gear, medicine, food and water.

  Along its hundred-meter long gray fuselage eight massive cylindrical engines rotated on pylons until they rumbled and threatened at the ground below. Propulsion spewed into the tarmac and the ship shifted and moved upwards. As it gained altitude the engines slowly tilted, spewing cyan energy in tight cones. The military cargo ship slid forward in the sky, ascending to the void of space above. On its tail fin Titan bore a new painted image unique to the seven vessels in the Selvan fleet: the image of Ghara surrounded by olive branches, the same as on the hat its commanding officer wore.

  Following Titan were the Transorbital Vessels Rhapsody, Svoboda, and Riptide. The smaller, faster, louder ships quickly caught up to the Titan and flanked it, forming a delta pattern in the image of their central wing in its wake. When the first four ships of the expedition crossed the threshold of the clouds and started toward space, the next ships launched.

  Transorbital Freighter Kenya led the second wave. Shorter than Titan by a quarter, its eight engines grinded against the runway, hefting it off the moon and into the sky as a thousand marines and a dozen reporters watched, cheering. Kenya tilted its nose to the puffy white clouds above and moved off and away, following the bigger Titan’s blue engine flares as it led them to Selva. On Kenya’s heels came the final two vehicles in the expedition; TOV Clarity, and Melody’s ship, Beagle.

  Inside Beagle’s cockpit was her three person crew, and in the same cargo bay they had sat in during their departure from Sota sat Waren, Lionel, and Dustin. With them were the other three First Expeditionary Marines who would put foot on Selva with them first. Titan’s claim of first to flight be damned, theirs would be the true honor.

  At their backs across the fleet were 101 infantry Marines, seventy aviation Marines, fifty-seven civilians, three armored all-environment personnel carriers and a single main battle tank. All of which were aboard the seven vessels that made up the Selva expedition.

  228 total souls bound for a world humans had only scantly laid eyes on, never set foot on, and might never again after what they might find there.

  No one aboard any of the seven vessels knew about Melody and Dustin’s unborn baby.

  Chapter Nine

  High orbit above Selva, aboard TOV Titan

  14 August 163 GA

  The seven ships exited the thick and damp Pacifican atmosphere, piercing layers of sky with their engines pushing them outward, and onward. Beyond liftoff, the voyage through the void to Selva had gone down exactly as it had been planned. After colonizing four Gharian moons there was good reason for the pilot to get it right.

  The first step after leaving Pacifica was to perform a slingshot maneuver around the nearby moon of Phoenix, gaining momentum from its gravity. When the ships broke from that orbit they rocketed silently through the void of the Gharian system, leaving the embrace of the massive gas giant behind and heading to an intercept point following the safe path in the center of the maelstrom of magnetic fields. The mathematics were pure, and the science perfect.

  They were the first humans from Pioneer 3 to leave the proximity of Ghara in 163 years.

  It took twenty-five days to thread the needle of the Maine Trough and reach the highest layers of the upper orbit of Selva. Considerable skill was required to navigate the fluctuating fields of energy, to calculate acceleration and deceleration, and coordinate with mission control on Pioneer 3 suspended in Gharian orbit in their wake. Even with all their skill and hard work, a full day was lost to the process. Twenty plus hours was a minimal price to pay in the face of what recklessness could purchase the expedition. Lost lifetimes could never be made up for.

  Leah Kingsman’s helmsman aboard TOV Titan led the charge with steady hands, and eyes that allowed nothing to escape her notice. When Titan and the rest of the fleet finished slithering the length of the safe passage in the invisible energy fields and reached the location where the trough opened like the mouth of an invisible and lethal river, she matched the rotation of the world, and the other ships fell in line as uniform as the cars of a train. Through narrow cockpit windows as thick as the palm of man’s hand they watched the clouds grip tight to the water, soil and stones of the new world below. From orbit, Selva was the most beautiful thing any of them had seen. Greens, browns, blues, whites and a cavalcade of everything organic and wonderful in between were arranged in a chaos that became something beyond words. It held their attention, and their wonder.

  Pioneers were never the same after blazing new ground and feeling pure wanderlust. These men and women would be no different.

  “Captain,” the helmsman said.

  Leah Kingsman already knew what her younger marine had to say. “Yes, Helmsman?”

  “We have reached high orbit around Selva. I can confirm that the fleet is locked in a synchronous orbit in the center of the Maine Trough with us. All Titan systems are nominal and all ships are reporting the same.”

  Leah sat belted into her captain’s chair and digested the words. The tired officer wiped the grime off her forehead with her fingertips. She rubbed her fingers clean on her olive green flight suit leg then smiled.

  “Thank you, Aubrey. Well done.”

  She undid the clasp on the belt that held her still and let her body drift upwards in the gravity free environment of her command bridge. Artificial gravity continued to belong in the realm of science fiction, to her dismay. She turned her body using the armrest of the chair, ducked under a bulkhead and pushed off, gliding over to her communications officer at the rear of the somewhat claustrophobic command deck. Big spaces were bad with no gravity.

  “Captain?” her communications officer asked her as she glided his way.

  She glided toward her communications officer, grabbed a rail mounted near his station and muscled her body until it was upright. She pushed her bottom down on the hard steel rail that edged the keyboard panel beside him and came to a rest. “Hail the fleet, tell them to broadcast this to their entire ships, and record this.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  The comms officer called out to the other six vessels in space near Titan and with short, simple commands and got them to do as his captain asked. Once everyone was ready, he held out a small, hand-sized, corded communication device. It floated in the air where he left it in her arm’s reach. “Go ahead.”

  Leah saw the excitement on his face.

  She held the device for a second, then thumbed the transmitter button, and made history.

  Crew and passengers of the Selvan Expedition this is Titan Captain Leah Kingsman speaking. It is my distinct pleasure to announce that we have safely reached high orbit above the planet.”

  She let go of the button as her bridge crew cheered, clapped and hollered. Not all of what they said seemed suitable for history’s recording. When they calmed down, and when she figured the rest of the people on the other ships did the same, she continued. “We will remain in a maintained high orbit for the next two Selvan days, which translates to forty hours. If signs from the surface indicate a landing is possible, then we will dispatch Beagle with our First Expeditionary Marines, and we will put human feet on a world that has never seen them before. May God bless us, and thank you all for your patience and hard work these past twenty-five days as we crossed the millions of kilometers of space together.”

  She handed her communications specialist the handset back, and patted him firmly on the shoulder as a thanks.

  “Transmit the recording with
burst laser back to Pioneer 3. Let the colonies know we’re knocking on our new home’s door. Thanks.”

  Leah pushed off the railing, making her way back to the central chair that was hers to occupy. She changed her mind as she put her butt down. She turned to her executive officer, her second in-command. “You have the bridge, Lieutenant. I’m headed back to apprise the scientists of the situation.”

  “Aye-aye, sir,” her lieutenant replied and moved toward the captain’s chair, floating from his spot near a panel of screens monitoring the fleet.

  Leah ducked again as she left the oval hatch and headed back toward the cargo bay. It would take her the better part of ten minutes to get there with no gravity, and she wanted to know exactly what she had to hear and say by the time she got there. Her mind went to work.

  The scientific brains of the Selvan operation were already at work in the portion of the cargo area filled with the laboratory habitats.

  The ancient makers of Titan and Kenya–all of the freighter designs that left Earth, truthfully–had designed a series of cells for exploration that slid into and out of the rear bay doors of the ship in sections. The structures were linked while inside the ship by sealable tube corridors, were environmentally sound for space and foreign worlds, and were in all ways self-contained. Four of the “habs” were dedicated to research, and that’s where Captain Kingsman went, dirty and ready to get off her ship after three-plus weeks. With luck she only had to wait a few days more.

  Using the worn chrome rails that had been replaced countless times along the dim corridor she guided herself to the series of labyrinthine passages that led to the mission scientists’ habs. Marines and crew got out of her way, holding themselves to the walls of the tunnels to make way for her. The civilians didn’t follow the protocol, frustrating her. She’d earned the right to move on her own ship as she pleased.