Colony Lost

by Chris Philbrook

  The top of the stalk was indeed flat as Dustin had surmised. Almost twenty meters across with a shallow depression filled with rainwater at its center, the top of the mushroom commanded a view the richest citizens of Pacifica would go broke to own. They could see the southern tip of the Dampier peninsula, and the frothy white and blue ocean beyond. To the west, east, and south, beaches covered in silky white sand hugged the coast. Selva looked to be the paradise they had hoped for, until the men looked north. In that direction they could see the cratered battlefield abutting the forest edge and the settlement of Stahl atop the slight hill it had been built on. Built and destroyed on. Where the small stream to the north of Stahl met the ocean, the white waves turned pink.

  Dustin couldn’t ignore the need to watch and remember the events below. He watched the smoking ruin of Stahl through binoculars. He sat with crossed legs and tired eyes as the Selvan creatures crawled over the smashed hulls of the Armadillo tanks, stirring up billowing columns of smoke from smashed electrical motors and discharged ammunition. Those explosions had faded hours ago. His eyes followed the ant-like movement of the smaller insects as they crawled over the torn-down tents and the habitat roofs across the base. He could see some of the rectangular hab airlocks with their rounded corners. Some of the doors were open with stains of blood smeared at their entrances, but many of the units were still sealed and had power. They could be sanctuaries, or tombs.

  “Any signs of life?” Waren asked Dustin as the taller man sat down beside his new unit leader. He passed Dustin a plastic canteen filled with purified water from the puddle.

  “Nothing.”

  Dustin set the binoculars down on the hard surface of the tower, took a swig of bitter, lukewarm water from the canteen, and handed it back to Waren. “I don’t know how they’d signal us without letting on to those things.”

  “Well, we lit the fire. If they can see out a window in this direction they know someone is alive,” Waren said, looking back at the small fire they’d built near the edge of the platform atop the tree. One of their fireproof thermal blankets insulated the wooden surface from catching ablaze while the handful of tiny branches they dared gather burned. They’d need more wood soon.

  “Yeah. Give ’em hope help is coming at least,” Dustin said. “Anything on the radio?”

  “Ha. You’d already know if I heard anything. Fucking magnetic interference is messing with everything,” Waren said, sounding tired. He pointed up at the undulating waves of color dancing across the sky. “I don’t care how pretty it makes the night sky, the magnetic fields can suck my balls.”

  “I hear ya. Ping-Pong finally rack out?”

  “Yeah. I threatened to hit him with a tranquilizer if he didn’t try to catch some shut-eye. He’s out.”

  “You clock out yourself. It would appear we’re safe enough up here. Assuming of course these smaller fucking bugs climbing around up here aren’t poisonous.”

  “Venomous.”

  “Fuck off, whatever. Get some sleep. Eat something. Be sparing though. We don’t have much to eat.”

  “We’ll find something to eat. We’re marines. We’re trained to eat anything because they don’t feed us otherwise.”

  “That we are. I’ll wake Ping-Pong in three hours. Get some rest.”

  Waren nodded and Dustin watched as the fatigue rolled over his friend. Above, the continent-sized swirls of aurora colored the twilight sky. The gentle rumble of snoring came soon after, and Dustin turned his attention back to the flames of Stahl far below and away.

  I hope someone is alive in those habs. Someone had to have had the good sense to lock the damn door when shit went south.

  Someone had to.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Stahl science habitat, town of Stahl, planet of Selva

  2 October 163 GA

  The night had descended on the men and women trapped in the science habitat. Only the tiny echoes of moonlight and the iridescent pinks, greens, and yellows of the auroras in the atmosphere shed any light. The electronics were powered down to conserve batteries. The interior of the sterile lab ate up all the ambient noise and left the space feeling hostile, and invasive. Though they were in the room, it felt more that the room had gotten inside them.

  “Hail,” Phil Eckstein whispered in the dark. He huffed a single exhalation that doubled as a laugh without being funny.

  “Phillip? What?” A startled Margaret Ford replied.

  “Sorry, Margaret. Back on Ares in the temperate plains, we would get these storms that would develop hail.”

  “What does frozen rain have to do with our predicament?” The botanist sitting in the dark of the hot science habitat scoffed. The other survivors stayed silent and listened.

  “Only rarely would the hail get big,” Eckstein continued, unabated “Bigger than a thumbnail, that is. Anything smaller was harmless. But those big hailstones . . . they could knock you out cold or dent metal. Imagine a piece of ice the size of your fist falling from a cloud three thousand meters up . . . ”

  Some of the technicians and scientists were making noise now. Sharing memories of their own home weather or letting slip a muffled burst of crying. Micah Balashov shushed the others in the hab. They couldn’t afford noise, not with the monsters still roaming the ruins of Stahl just meters away outside the walls.

  “That’s what their feet sound like on the roof.” The little ones sound like the pinging of little hailstones bouncing off the sidewalk roofs during one of those storms back on Ares. I couldn’t remember what the sound reminded me of, but it just came to me. Funny, huh?”

  The science team huddled inside the coffin of their habitat and looked to the black ceiling. Sure as the carnage that had ripped their settlement apart the day prior, a rapid series of metallic pings rattled above. They sounded as Phillip described; like small stones falling from the sky and hitting the hull. More sobs came from the shadows.

  Balashov could sense unrest growing. As he approached Phillip, he saw a calm resolve in the meteorologist’s eyes.

  “Relax, Dr. Balashov. I’m not crazy yet,” Eckstein said.

  “I am hardly qualified to make an assessment on your mental health, Dr. Eckstein. I study biology, not psychology. I am naturally inclined to give the man with the gun the benefit of the doubt on the day after he saved so many of my colleague’s lives.”

  Micah fished out one of his last cigarettes from a pack in his stained shirt pocket. He lit it, and took a drag. He offered it to the weatherman.

  Eckstein chuckled, declined the cigarette with a wave, and said no more.

  Micah set his cigarette down on the edge of a counter, lit end dangling over open space. He picked up a piece of sheer, shredded black cloth. The fabric had begun the journey to Selva as a woman’s cotton shirt but now had been ripped and torn into a single flat piece the size of a plastic cafeteria tray. He’d begun to rip it into strips to use for bandages when the wounded were dragged into the habitat, but they died out far too fast for him to bother finishing. Now the shirt remnants served him as a translucent hood he wore when he dared to approach the narrow window of the habitat and the horrors beyond.

  Something caught his eye.

  The massive shape of a walking rock bug right in front of the window made him reel back far enough that he began to fall backwards. He cartwheeled his arms in wild circles, trying to arrest his fall in the vacuum of self-imposed silence, nearly blowing off the fabric mask and revealing his face to the thing.

  Micah felt Selva’s gravity take hold and pull him backwards to a fall that would surely break his back, or crack his skull, and cause enough noise to alert the creature to their presence. Their delicious, malleable presence.

  A pair of firm hands pressed against his lower back preventing him from falling. He looked over his shoulder and saw a straining Margaret Ford. She had saved him. Maybe all of them. With a grunt she pushed hard and Micah righted atop the counter.

  “Thank you,” Micah said to her with lungs far mo
re empty than full.

  “You’re welcome,” an equally winded Margaret replied. She turned frightened eyes up as the shadow of the swaying rock bug passed the window. “Be more careful please.”

  Micah nodded. “Absolutely. I apologize. I saw something outside.”

  The hab window faced half in the direction of the fleet’s landing fleet and half at the ruined expanse of the insects’ assault. The wall of greenery to the right of the peninsula forest could be seen in the distance–blue-gray and black in the moonlight–complete with the mushroom towers looming above. At the very tip of a tower Micah could see a tiny flicker of orange and yellow. A flame. He ignored the horror of the shambling, half monstrous humanoids as they searched about for whatever it was they needed to continue their wretched existence. He tried not to think about the thick strands of ropey saliva laced with blood that fell from their jaws and all the new hinges they’d grown on their faces.

  “Is that fire?” Phillip asked as he approached the window.

  “I think so. A small one,” Margaret answered. “Could it be from lightning?”

  “We’ve had no lightning. That’s manmade,” Phillip said.

  “Marines escaped,” Micah whispered. “They got to the jungle and somehow climbed to the top. Those trees are enormous. Getting to the top must’ve been exhausting.”

  “Not necessarily,” Phillip said. “Expeditionary Marines have grappling gun adapters for their rifles. They could get to the top in a hurry as long as their rifles maintain a charge. It has to be them. Lionel and Theo’s guys. Hardcore. Thank God.”

  Hushed celebration ran around the hab. Sweaty, smelly scientists hugged one another and danced barefoot. They simmered down after several minutes and huddled in closer to the counter to look at the tiny, distant light. In the scientist’s eyes the small fire flickered brighter than a hundred suns, shining down a single meager ray of hope on the trapped men and women.

  “So now what?” Margaret asked. “There are survivors a kilometer away at the top of the tallest trees in the Gharian system, with an army of gigantic bugs that spit some kind of brainwashing, metamorphic acid between us and them. They might as well be back on Phoenix for all the good they do us where they are.”

  “Margaret, please try to stay positive,” Micah said. “Insurmountable difficulties are merely challenges to those that put their mind to sorting them out. Selva’s brightest minds are in this room. Let’s put our brains to task. Can we hail them on the network?”

  Dr. Lima Rasima already stood at the wall-mounted communications panel. She tapped on the touch screens and brought the system out of passive standby and touched the button that would transmit a message on all the expedition frequencies.

  “Is anyone out there?” Lima asked. “This is Lima Rasima. I’m trapped inside the science habitat with eleven other survivors. We see fire in the southern jungle at the top of a tree. Can you hear us?”

  When she let go of the button the faint hiss of interference came awake on the speaker. Selva’s magnetics continued to play havoc with the electronics.

  “Just like before,” one of the lab technicians said, sounding defeated. “Nothing works when we need it to.”

  “Perhaps so,” Micah said as Lima’s shoulders dropped. “I suggest we start thinking of less sophisticated ways to communicate. Something more medieval I think. Oh, my cigarette.”

  Micah reached down to the floor and picked up his mostly burnt cigarette. He finished it off with a pull and a smile.

  The greatest minds of Selva waved the smoke away, sat down where they could, and got to work on a solution.

  Outside–just meters away–hungry mutants collapsed on the corpses of their own fallen and feasted with new mouths, new teeth, and no sense of the horror of what they were becoming. The saliva ran thick as they sated their new, alien hunger.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Pioneer 3 conference room in Gharian orbit

  4 October 163 GA

  Daron Courser, Melody’s father, chaired the meeting of citizens of import from across the colonies. Politicians from each moon, police and security forces, marine officers and civilian scientists were all gathered in a packed conference room aboard Pioneer 3’s rotating ring.

  Most of the room looked to Daron, but some looked out the mammoth bay window that opened the room to the endless expanse of space. Outside, the length of Pioneer 3’s main hull and dormant cylindrical engines could be seen, and beyond that the vision of Ghara itself; the gas giant that cradled the moons the Gharians called home. Distant orbs of reflected light hung motionless above Ghara in the distance. The moons of the colony. Life-giving homes for millions of human lives.

  Humans who continued to find new and inventive reasons to fight and bicker.

  Melody looked around and assessed the demeanor of Leah Kingsman and Dan Aribella, the marine officers she was closest to in the room. Dan remained cool, sitting in a chair on the wall side of the room with his arms crossed and his eyes lost in the stars outside. He had little to worry about and waited patiently. Leah, on the other hand, stirred. As flight commander of the mission, the responsibility of lost flight crew rested on her shoulders. Her career and reputation swung in the balance of the meeting and, rather than act worried, she channeled her emotions into clenched fists. Melody shunted her imagination to the side and fought the urge to rub her stomach, to try and touch the tiny life that budded there. She watched as her father called the meeting to order.

  “I’d like to thank everyone for making the time to join us tonight. I know everyone is running ragged and I wanted to express my personal thanks, as well as the thanks of the entire Gharian Senate. This is a time of profound unrest and that makes me frustrated, but it also heightens my resolve to push forward on the Selvan agenda, as well as get to the root of the sabotage that cost us good marines. The Gharian people need us to be at our best.”

  Daron turned to a middle-aged police official sitting two seats down the table. He wore a perfectly maintained storm-gray uniform of the Gharian federal police and sported a handlebar mustache that was all the rage in the socially elite circles of Phoenix. “Captain Percival, if you would explain to the group what your investigation has discovered.”

  Percival stood on strong legs that suggested to Melody he was a runner, or a weightlifter, and produced a small electronic control from his jacket. He thumbed a switch on the remote and the black wall behind Daron flashed to life. An image loomed of the bomb’s recovered parts and the violent effect it had on the Rhapsody. Shredded metal and plastic, speckled with bright red human blood. The image was villainous. Violent and alien to the people of the peaceful colonies.

  “Before I continue I need to assert that what we’re about to discuss is of extreme sensitivity and is need-to-know of the highest order. If the media should obtain what I’m about to show you, we would be dealing with a whole new set of issues.”

  Captain Percival paused his gravelly speech, and the image on the wall screen changed to a series of close up pictures of metal scraps, wires, circuit boards and various objects that could only be bomb materials.

  “I would like to thank the Pioneer 3 maintenance teams for all their work containing the debris field and bringing in everything they could for us to examine. Also the Pacifican bomb experts for their assistance on the identification of the bomb parts, as well as the Colonial Marine explosives team for the same. With their collected assistance we were able to determine that this bomb does not follow any construction pattern that the anti-expansionists have ever used. Our marine contacts identified the materials in images 1-A through 14-A as unmistakable in origin. These are marine parts.”

  Unhappy chatter erupted from all corners, along with hostile stares aimed at toward the military men and women in the room. A uniformed marine–one from the explosives team Melody surmised–produced a tray from a side table and sat it on the smooth steel table. He pushed it into the middle of the table for everyone to see and withdrew. On the tray were complet
e versions of the broken bits shown on the screen.

  Percival and his mustache continued. “Please, everyone, pay attention and remain polite. As you can see on the table, here are the parent parts. They are issued for demolition purposes. The marine bomb experts were able to determine that the methods used to construct the bomb follow the training a more specialized marine would get.”

  A female politician sitting at the table near the back of the room raised her voice over the growing clamor.

  “What do you mean by specialized marine? My knowledge of the military is limited but I would assume that not all marines get that training.”

  “Miss Adams, you’re correct,” Daron offered. His expression regarding the woman was hostile. “Explosive ordnance teams, expeditionary marines, engineers. Five percent of all marines would learn this skill set and become competent at doing it on their own.”

  “Thank you, Senator Courser,” Sarah said. “Now what are you supposing Captain Percival? That one of our own marines on the expedition built and planted the bomb on Rhapsody?” Sarah seemed offended by the implication.

  “Yes ma’am. I’d like to go further,” Captain Percival said, smoothing out his mustache with thumb and forefinger. “With the help of Pioneer 3’s maintenance crew we were able to salvage debris from Rhapsody as well as some of the bomb pieces you see on screen. We were also able to remove and make safe the bomb planted on TOV Beagle. Our forensics teams were able to pull several fingerprints. We ran the partials against the database of everyone who made the trip, and found a match.”

  Percival flipped the images using his remote to show close-up images of fingerprints on shards of scorched metal, warped plastic and glass. More robust prints were recovered from the bomb that nearly killed Melody and her crew. Calibration software laid out grids atop the swirls of the mystery bomber’s prints and highlighted the markers that made them unique and identifiable.