Surprise flickered through Noel and then her spirits lifted a little. Lunch time meant they were over half way through their shift! Only a few more hours of deadly boredom and she could go to her apartment and stare at the f’ing walls! “Hot damn! We get off in a couple of hours! You want to do something tonight?”
“First lunch,” Monica responded succinctly.
Noel stopped in her tracks, dismay replacing her mood of moments before. “We do last lunch,” she said irritably.
“Not today.”
Surprise flickered through Noel and then a touch of hopefulness. “Why not today?”
“Because you’re driving me out of my fucking mind!” Monica snarled under her breath. “I figured it would be better to take a break than choke you to death. I don’t want to end up being the first colonist executed for a major crime.”
“Me?” Noel demanded indignantly. Fortunately they were outside the lab by that time and in the corridor leading to the cafeteria. A man and woman coming from the opposite direction cast a glance at them when Noel raised her voice and then quickly looked away when they saw the frown of indignation she was wearing. “What did I do?”
Monica rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I think it’s the breathing … in and out ….”
Noel gaped at her. “You aren’t serious,” she said a little doubtfully.
Taking her arm, Monica guided her determinedly to the closest exit instead of continuing toward the cafeteria. She shook her head again. “It’s all the twitching—the deep sighs—the drumming your fingers ….”
Noel blinked at her friend, casting her mind back, but she didn’t remember doing any of those things. “I didn’t ….”
“Yes, you did,” Monica said, interrupting her denial. “You’ve been at it since you got here this morning.”
Noel glanced around to determine where they were. They’d emerged from the building into the tiny ‘garden’ area between the science building and the med-center, but Monica was heading briskly toward the gate that opened onto the main thoroughfare of the colony. Confused, she sent Monica a questioning look as she paused to open the gate with her retina ID.
“I haven’t …. Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to explode if I spend another minute in there!”
Despite her irritation at what she perceived as unjust complaints, Noel perked up at that. “We’re going to … uh … play hooky from work?”
Monica threw her a startled look. “What’s hooky? And how do you play it?”
Noel frowned at her. “You’re the sociologist! You ought to know—truancy? Absent without permission.”
Monica frowned, but thoughtfully. “Oh. Well I’m a xeno-sociologist, damn it! I specialize in alien sociology! My god! That’s archaic! Where did you hear it?”
Noel felt a lump form in her throat. “My grandmother ….”
Monica bit her lip. “Sorry!” She gripped Noel’s arm, squeezing it sympathetically. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Noel smiled with an effort. “No. It’s ok. I like remembering ….”
It was the truth—to an extent. She did enjoy remembering her grandmother and the happy childhood she’d had because of her.
But it hurt so bad to know she was gone forever, to only have memories!
She’d never really known her parents. They’d left her with her maternal grandmother when they’d taken jobs mining on one of the new outposts/colonies in the asteroid belt because it was deemed too dangerous for children. They’d planned to make their ‘fortune’ mining and return with enough credits to buy a home to raise a family, but they’d never made it back. Someone had broken into a gas pocket and the entire asteroid had exploded into pebbles, killing all 600 miners—including her parents.
Fortunately, she’d been too young to really feel the loss. She hadn’t been too young to see her grandmother’s grief, though. And her grandmother had never gotten over losing her only child. Noel knew her grandmother had loved her and that she’d brought her grandmother some comfort, but nothing ever healed the wound of loss.
She thought it hurt most to think her grandmother had been glad to go ….
Which sucked for her because she’d been the one left alone.
As sorry as she felt for herself, though, she was ashamed for feeling that way. Her grandmother had endured a lot of suffering to be there for her as long as she had.
Besides, a lot of the people who’d volunteered to colonize were in the same boat—alone—which was a major incentive to start over somewhere else.
It sucked that she’d traveled so far only to discover that you can’t leave grief behind by leaving everything familiar! That just made you miss everything else on top of missing the person you’d lost!
“You aren’t the only one that’s bored stiff, you know!” Monica said testily, effectively distracting her.
Noel shrugged. “I know.”
“You at least have something to study!”
“Dead things?” Noel let out an irritated huff. “You have the recordings from the probes if it comes to that.”
Monica rolled her eyes. “I have memorized that shit! I have analyzed it ad nauseum! The social structure looks very reminiscent of the mythology about Amazon women,” she said irritably, “but that’s just a wild guess based on the fact that they appear to be warrior women and there doesn’t seem to be any men—or at least a separation of the sexes, I suppose. That’s pseudo science at the very best! You could’ve guessed that much!”
Noel frowned. “What do you mean by that?”
“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” Monica snapped. “I was just pointing out that I wouldn’t have to have a degree in xeno-sociology to ‘guess’. I need hard facts! I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get them cooped up in here!”
Noel completely empathized with her—she was desperate to do some ‘real’ research herself—and yet the moment Monica expressed a desire to leave the safety of the colony she felt a shiver creep up her spine. “We haven’t been here even a week—well by this world’s time.” She frowned, thinking. “By Earth time ….”
“What difference does Earth time make when we’re here, damn it? This time matters!”
Noel huffed an irritated breath. “Ok, already! Don’t bite my head off!”
Monica looked vaguely uncomfortable. “Sorry! But don’t try that ‘holier than thou’ attitude on me! You’re bored stiff, too! We don’t have any fresh material and I’ve studied that shit the probes collected until I feel like puking every time I look at it!”
Noel shrugged. “The delegation is bound to be back any time now. As soon as we know for sure that we have a peace treaty with the natives, we can leave the colony and do a little real exploring. It isn’t like either of us could really do our jobs without the treaty, you know.”
“I can’t! You’re a xeno-biologist. There’s plenty of biology you could study.”
“Hey! You can study the social behavior of the lower life forms just easily as I could study the biology! We just can’t tackle what we’re really interested in.”
Good point. Monica still wanted to argue that she was worse off than Noel and had more room to complain. They both knew that the social behavior of the lower life forms wasn’t nearly as important to the future of the colony as studying the natives.
The problem was that Noel had already made that point—none of the alien life forms were as important as the natives—because they were intelligent and could create more problems than pretty much any of the other life forms.
Of course the chances were high that they were going to run into problems with all sorts of things. They could upset the eco balance if they weren’t careful. They didn’t belong in this particular food chain.
* * * *
The impulse to skip out on their afternoon shift had been a poor one. Noel and Monica had reason to be glad they rethought the impulse and headed back once they’d had lunch at the apartment they shared. If they hadn’t, t
hey would very likely have been written up as displaying rebellious and/or irresponsible behavior and that could have had all sorts of unpleasant repercussions. The most important being that they wouldn’t have been there for the ‘special treat’ everyone was allowed late in the shift.
The department head had managed to wrangle permission to leave the compound to collect new specimens for study.
Noel and Monica were both instantly nearly hysterical with excitement and sheer terror and struggling to hide both as they left the facility with the small group of ‘chosen ones’ and headed toward the main gates of the city, lugging specimen containers and equipment.
Noel was inclined to think that was a punishment of sorts in and of itself. They had robots for god’s sake—a lot of them! Eighty percent of the construction bots that had built the sprawling complex that made up their first city while the colonists themselves were en route to it had been ‘decommissioned’ and reassigned other duties once they weren’t needed for construction anymore—ten of the twenty percent held in reserve for future construction projects and the other ten reprogrammed for maintenance. All of the robots hadn’t been reassigned to handle security—most, but not all. One could have been spared to haul equipment!
But the colony president, when contacted, had decided that the request for a carrier violated the self-sufficiency pack the colonists had sworn to when they’d signed up.
Noel was damned if she could see that scientists exerting themselves physically was beneficial to the colony and not exerting themselves wasn’t! What if somebody strained something and wasn’t able to work? What if they dropped something heavy on some body part and it was damaged? It wasn’t as if they had everything that was available back home! They were living on the edge—on a primitive colony! It seemed to her that there was the possibility of a lot more bad things coming of them hauling the damned heavy equipment than good!
What if somebody fell down and damaged irreplaceable equipment?
They’d arrived on Gemini less than a month earlier. Nobody was completely acclimatized to the gravity and pressure of the new world! She weighed twenty pounds more than she was used to! And she was one of the lucky ones—smaller and lighter than average and fairly athletic due to her passion for dancing. Some of the colonists wouldn’t even have qualified for inclusion due to their physical condition if not for their expertise in their fields. They were carrying around an extra forty pounds or more—without the damned heavy equipment they had to carry!
“If you don’t quit muttering under your breath …,” Monica hissed.
Noel glanced at her in surprise. “I was talking out loud? I thought I was just thinking hard.”
Monica gave her a look but since their supervisor called a halt at just that moment, it redirected their attention from each other to their surroundings.
Noel felt a prickling sensation creep up her spine and lift the fine hairs on the back of her neck. An involuntary shiver skated through her.
“You cold?” Monica whispered in surprise.
Noel glanced at her friend, her mind tumbling the question around while she ‘felt’ with her senses. It was winter, but they were close to the equator and so far the winter on their new home world had been mild—mild enough it hadn’t actually caused much of a die off of the plant life. The wind was cool, true, but they were working on the plain and there was little there to cast shade and shield them from the sun’s warming rays. Finally, she shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied. “It just feels … weird to feel wind against my skin after so long.”
Monica looked irritated—as if Noel had unnerved her and she felt like it had been a false alarm. She grunted but since she had leaned down to set her equipment down Noel wasn’t sure if that was a comment or just an expression of exertion. She settled her tote full of specimen containers on the ground and looked around.
She didn’t see anything that would account for her reaction. They hadn’t moved more than a few yards beyond the main gate. She could already hear a few muttered complaints from some of the others that they weren’t far enough from the colony to make it likely they were going to catch any specimens that could run.
The botanists were already busy, however.
Noel was in no great hurry to follow suit and chase bugs. Instead, she studied her surroundings for many moments, trying to decide what her primal instincts had been trying to warn her about—if there really was some threat or if it was purely a reaction to the alien environment. After thoroughly examining everything around her, she finally decided it was the latter. All of her senses were screaming at the strangeness of her surroundings.
The force field that protected the colony allowed them to see through it. Sounds could also penetrate it, but nothing else. She hadn’t, she realized abruptly, truly experienced the new world before now. The sights and sounds of the busy colony itself prevented her from really seeing or hearing the world beyond it and the smells they’d captured with their specimens had been corrupted over time with the chemical preservatives and even scents from their own environment.
She was so bombarded so abruptly by everything of an alien nature she was just stunned that no one else seemed as effected as she was. Even the warmth of the alien sun felt completely different.
And yet, she could see living proof all around her of panspermia.
Which had been accepted as scientific fact at least a decade earlier, but she didn’t think she’d fully appreciated what it meant until now.
Because as alien as everything seemed in some ways, it was also familiar in others.
Gemini certainly wasn’t Earth’s identical twin, but it was close enough to be a sibling, or maybe a half sister? The bottom line was that everything about their new home was close enough to make the place suitable for them—for Earth life—and, because of panspermia and predictable factors in the evolution of living things, and Gemini’s similarity to Earth much of the life they’d discovered on Gemini was also similar to life forms on earth.
That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be dangerous deviations, unfortunately. There were also bound to be things that simply didn’t seem logical.
The higher life forms, for instance.
No one had been able to come up with a solid theory as to why the natives were androgynous or at least seemed to be.
Or even why they appeared to be fairly primitive.
Gemini, as far as they had been able to determine, had been around at least as long as Earth had—and some speculated that it was a good deal older.
Of course the appearance and development of a species of higher intelligence could have come at any time. Maybe, despite the age of the solar system/planet, the species had emerged far later than humans? Maybe they’d experienced more catastrophes and those had forced the species to start over, building from the bottom up repeatedly? Or maybe there’d been an earlier civilization that had been wiped out completely and the current natives had arisen since?
That didn’t seem to hold water, though. There didn’t seem to be enough time for that possibility to be likely.
Humans had been brought to the brink of extinction several times by natural disasters on Earth. There was no reason to think that might not be the case on other planets. The universe was a dangerous, unpredictable place—likened more than once to a cosmic shooting gallery.
Shaking her thoughts finally with the reflection that she wasn’t going to figure it out without some data, Noel turned her attention to trying to find a specimen of something they hadn’t already examined since she hadn’t been particularly intrigued by anything their probes had brought them.
And, in any case, most of them had already been snatched up as pet projects of the senior biologists in the group.
She’d just crouched down to examine what she’d first dismissed as a rock covered in something like lichen when a noise she’d only been vaguely conscious of finally reached an identifiable level.
It sounded like a herd of something heavy coming their way!
Just as Noel was beginning to feel the discomfort of the suspicion that she might have reacted to a threat that didn’t exist, a scream—a human scream—abruptly rent the air around them. It sent a shockwave through everyone on the plane and, hard on the heels of that, blind panic. Unfortunately, most of them were so shocked they were paralyzed and those not paralyzed with fear seemed confused as to whether they should run or not since no one else seemed inclined to run.
“Open the gates! Open the gates!” the man in the lead bellowed as he came into view.
“Run!” the man behind him yelled when he spotted the group gaping at them.
Both screamed orders, Noel discovered, came from the delegation barreling toward them at the best speed they could manage—the delegation that had left days ago to hike over to the nearest village to try to negotiate a treaty with the natives.
And directly on their heels was an army of Amazons, who abruptly began screaming like banshees the moment they spotted the group, Noel’s group, just beyond the safety of the colony!
The screams released some from their indecisive paralysis.
It had the opposite effect on Noel.
For a space of critical heartbeats, Noel merely stared wide-eyed with mouth agape at the barbarian horde heading straight for them from the path through the forest that edged the plain where they’d built their colony.
Monica, who’d already whirled to charge toward the gate and safety, spotted Noel and changed directions abruptly. Charging toward her, she slammed into Noel in her efforts to grab her. Their feet tangled, and both of them sprawled out.
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