Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  We already had named one planet ‘Gingerbread’, and I resisted my urge to name the place something that reflected my fears it might be a trap. The UN would give the planet an official name if they decided to accept the place as a beta site. We held a contest to give the planet a temporary name, and there were a dozen candidates, mostly from mythologies of the various cultures of our crew. After three rounds of voting, we nicknamed the planet ‘Avalon’, the mythical home of King Arthur. Skippy thought that was appropriate. “To become king, young Arthur had to pull a sword from a stone, Joe. To get here, I had to pull a password out of my ass. Same thing,” he snickered. “Plus, like Arthur, I am a figure of mythical awesomeness.”

  “I totally agree, Skippy.”

  “Huh? Oh, I expected you to argue with me.”

  “Nope. Your awesomeness is entirely mythical,” I said with a wink toward Desai.

  “Well, it is gratifying that you have finally- Hey! You jerk!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  To make for a better story, I wish I could say that Avalon was a dangerous trap, and that we barely escaped with our lives by using courage and good old-fashioned monkey cleverness. Or that it was not a trap, and we found an enormous amount of valuable Elder artifacts, in the abandoned ruins of their fabulous cities scattered across the surface. Or even that the planet was a primitive jungle filled with poisonous reptiles, carnivorous plants and giant, blood-thirsty dinosaurs. It wasn’t any of those things. Avalon is a nice enough place. Free oxygen in the atmosphere was slightly lower than on Earth, with sea-level air pressure that was greater so it kind of evened out. Gravity was just about perfect at only three percent greater than normal, and the climate was warmer overall. Though the star was cooler than Earth’s Sun, Avalon orbited closer to its star and a greenhouse effect trapped heat in the lower level of the atmosphere, which is called the troposphere. Don’t ask how I remembered that nerdy fact, because I don’t know.

  The only interesting or unusual thing about Avalon was that it had a ring. Not a big, thick ring like Saturn. This ring was like the fuzzy one around Neptune in our home solar system, except Avalon’s ring was bright and shiny because it was made mostly of water ice. Skippy had no clue how it had gotten there, and he needed more time to study it. From the ground, it would create a thin line across the sky, something that I couldn’t wait to see. The only moons Avalon had were two small rocks, one orbiting inside and one outside the ring. Those types of moons were called ‘shepherds’ because their gravity kept the ring from drifting apart. Again, Skippy had no idea how the pair of moons got there, because the moons were made of rock instead of ice.

  Anyway, the Commissioners gave permission for a small initial survey team to go down to the surface, and we prepped dropships for the mission.

  After nine days, we finally got an All-Clear from the initial ground survey team. That was three days longer than the official schedule called for, but everything on this mission had taken longer than expected. No, technically it was not an All-Clear, because that would have required a bunch of squabbling scientists to agree on making a judgment call. What we got was a very reluctant and tentative ‘shmaybe’, which pissed Skippy off, because he wanted to reserve the issuance of maddeningly vague answers for himself.

  On a conference call, I was in my office, squeezed in with Desai, Smythe and three of the science team. It was a tight fit, but if I conducted the call from the Dutchman’s big conference room, I would have been obligated to invite the four Commissioners, and that was the last thing I wanted. The call was merely a regular evening check-in, although Chang had given me a heads-up that this call would be important.

  After greetings and pleasantries, I got right to the point. “Colonel Chang, when will the survey team have enough information to decide if we can go out onto the surface, without being sealed up in suits?”

  The ground team had been living in sealed shelters, going in and out through airlocks which bombarded their suits with harsh ultraviolet radiation, then sprayed them with a caustic chemical bath that was embedded with nanomachines to hunt for and destroy any native nasties that might be harmful. The mud was the biggest problem, people returning from the field had to stand on a platform and scrub their gloves, legs and boots off before proceeding into the airlock. The procedure slowed down the survey progress, and was really not necessary. Skippy had declared on Day Two that the life on Avalon was incompatible with human biology. Their microscopic critters could not infect us, and the critters we inevitably brought to that world, could not infect them.

  That incompatibility did not relieve us of one very serious responsibility, that the science team and Commissioners had debated about for a whole freakin’ day after the Dutchman establish a stable orbit. It was an important argument, a moral issue that I agreed was vital. But, it was also a subject that had already been debated ad nauseum by the United Nations and various scientific organizations back on Earth. The issue was: did we have a right to contaminate an alien biosphere?

  Our people on the surface wore suits, unless they were inside the shelters. The suits were decontaminated as best we could, in the airlocks before they stepped out of the dropships that brought them down from orbit. But, all of our best precautions could not completely prevent contamination of Avalon by microorganisms from Earth. The scorching entry in the atmosphere heated the exterior of the dropships past the point where bacteria was incinerated and viruses dissolved. But, there were nooks and crannies even on the outside of dropships, where microscopic critters could and would survive. Like, on the inside of landing gear doors, or inspection hatches. Plus, all the gear we had loaded into the dropships had a fine dusting of human skin cells, bacteria, viruses and even tiny insects. There was no way we could decontaminate every piece of equipment, and the heat required to kill all microorganisms would have ruined some of the equipment.

  Part of the problem with risking contamination were the dropships themselves. The birds we flew were built by the Kristang, Thuranin and Maxolhx, none of whom had any moral issues about destroying alien biospheres. As a result, their airlocks were designed to prevent bringing contaminants into a dropship, not to worry about letting potentially dangerous organisms loose upon an unknown world. The airlocks normally did not run a decon cycle when a person was going out, Skippy had to reprogram and test them all, and he warned the supply of chemicals aboard each ship was limited. So, it was inevitable that, once the ground team popped the rear ramp on our one big Condor dropship to unload equipment, we were releasing a cloud of tiny critters on a world where they had no natural enemies, nothing to stop them from spreading across the landscape.

  Why did we worry so much about contaminating Avalon, when we humans had already stepped on so many other alien worlds? We had not been concerned about contaminating Newark, for example. The answer was, every other world we had been on, including Newark, was already contaminated before we landed. A Kristang scavenger group had flown, driven and walked all over Newark long before we set down there. Plus, on Newark, we didn’t have a choice; it was either try to survive down there, or die in space.

  Avalon was different. As far as we knew, no one else had ever landed there. Despite an Elder wormhole being located conveniently nearby, Skippy saw no evidence the Elders had ever bothered to set foot on the planet. He had no idea why the Elders had bothered to set a wormhole in that part of the Universe, and that lack of knowledge bothered both him and me.

  Anyway, the UN had given us very specific guidelines to follow about landing on a potential beta world. The science team, not me or the Commissioners, had the authority to decide whether a world was considered safe for survey teams to venture out in the open. The problem there was the definition of ‘safe’. Few things in the Universe could be completely safe, and alien worlds were not on that list.

  The survey team on the surface, sixteen scientists of various disciplines from geologists to chemists to paleontologists and all types of biologists, could not agree on anything. I tried to cut t
hrough the bullshit. “Let me ask a question,” I waved my arms so people on the other side of the video feed would stop talking. “I have dozens of other scientists up here, eager to get onto the surface. If I replaced the sixteen of you with sixteen others from up here, would I get a straight answer?”

  “Colonel,” one of the scientists sputtered indignantly, I think he was a biologist, based on the color of his nametag. “Pressure tactics like that are not helpful. Of course the people aboard the Dutchman would be eager to come down to-”

  “Are you suggesting they would compromise their scientific integrity?” I asked. The answer to that question was clear. Most of the people stuck aboard the Dutchman would willingly be, let’s say ‘flexible’, for the greatest opportunity of their lives.

  “It is not that simple,” the biologist rubbed his temples while he spoke. Clearly, I wasn’t the only person with a headache. “We must consider-”

  Desai interrupted him. “Colonel Chang, I assume you have already heard all the arguments?”

  “Indeed,” Chang replied with a weary sigh. He looked like he was second-guessing his decision to sign up for the beta site mission.

  “Excellent.” She looked at me, and I nodded for her to continue. “Could you summarize the issues?” She asked, with an emphasis on summarize.

  Chang scooched his chair forward a few inches, closer to the video camera. “To use American military slang,” he winked at me, “I shall BLUF this for you.” He meant Bottom Line Up Front, get to the heart of the matter right away, with the details later. “This world is very likely safe for human habitation.” There were loud and angry voices behind him, and I heard Simms demanding silence. Few people were willing to argue with her, because she controlled access to all the equipment on the surface. “Thank you,” Chang continued as if he had not been interrupted. “The life here is roughly equivalent to the middle to late Devonian Period on Earth, with-”

  “Very, very roughly,” a male voice said.

  “That is an oversimplified comparison,” argued a female voice. “The biota here is-”

  “OK!” I shouted. “The next person who opens their mouth, and who is not named Chang Kong, will be on the first dropship back up here. Is that clear? Don’t answer me, just keep quiet and let Colonel Chang talk. You will have plenty of time to argue with the Commissioners.”

  Chang paused for a second, then was satisfied the protests had settled down to inaudible grumbling. “There are ferns and shrubs here, but no trees or flowering plants,” he explained, and I nodded. I remembered that the native life on Paradise had not yet produced flying insects before the first Kristang landed there. That was a problem for us back when I was in charge of planting potatoes. Without the right kind of flying insects, we had to pollinate many plants by ourselves. Soldiers had to walk around with tools that looked like big Q-tips or feather dusters, manually transferring pollen from one plant another. That had been a tough sell for me as a new publicity-stunt colonel, asking soldiers to exchange their rifles for Q-tips. By now, the Ruhar built tiny drones to pollinate plants, making the task much easier.

  Chang continued. “The biology here is not compatible with Earth life, so it poses little risk to us. There are large predators in the oceans, none on land. The main risk the science team is concerned with is in the medium term, not currently.”

  That puzzled me. “How can that be?” I expected that conditions on the surface would get better and more hospitable to humans, the longer we were there.

  “As you know, the level of free oxygen in the air here is eight percent less than Earth-normal. The sea-level air pressure is higher, so it will not be difficult for us to breathe. The carbon dioxide is thirty-two percent higher, which is not yet toxic to humans. The problem, or potential problem, is that recently the level of oxygen has been rising rapidly, and carbon dioxide levels have been falling dramatically. By ‘recent’, I mean,” he nearly rolled his eyes, “on a geological timescale.”

  “More oxygen will be better for us, right?” I mused slowly, not understanding why that could be a problem.

  Before I could ask the obvious question, Chang answered. “The plants on land here are pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, that is the where the free oxygen comes from. The bottom line, Sir, is this process is continuing, and intensifying. The team here believes the problem will get worse once plants from Earth are established here, because they are more advanced and could grow rapidly. The level of CO2 in the air could crash, leading to an ice age here. Something similar may have happened on Earth in the Devonian Period, during the,” he scrunched up his face, trying to remember the details. “Kellwasser and Hangenberg Events?”

  I looked at Desai, puzzled. For all I knew, the Kellwasser Event was a craft beer festival. Which made my stupid brain focus on one thought: Mm, beeeeeer.

  How the hell was I in command of a starship?

  I asked the obvious question. “What does Skippy think about all this?”

  “What I think,” his avatar shimmered into existence on my desk. “Is that foolish monkeys should focus on surviving the next two hundred years, before you worry about the next two hundred thousand. Atmospheric cooling will eventually be an issue, but that can be dealt with by mining asteroids here to create mirrors you could place in orbit. Chang is right, there is no reason you monkeys should not be able to scamper around down there. You have already gotten the place filthy with your microbes, and none of the native life is hazardous to you. Let’s get this over with and get back to Earth, so your high-ranking morons can wring their hands and delay making a decision. Stupid monkeys,” he muttered under his breath.

  The Commissioners waited another two freakin’ days before clearing the remainder of the science team to drop to the surface. In my opinion, the Commissioners were all eager to be down there, and they couldn’t justify going before they cleared the people who would be doing the actual work. Before we let a bunch of distracted civilians go scampering around down there, I sent the rest of Giraud’s security team to join him, then waited until Chang and Simms declared the little camp was ready to accommodate more people.

  I was in the docking bay, walking around the dropship for a pre-flight check. Most of the little Dragon-A was stuffed with supplies, leaving room only for two pilots and two passengers. I would be pilot in command, with Reed acting as copilot. I’m sure she thought of this as a babysitting assignment, but I am the commander and I needed stick time to maintain proficiency. She got to fly all the freakin’ time.

  Smythe walked into the docking bay, carrying a heavy duffel bag, followed by Doctor Friedlander who was carrying a heavy plastic box. When I heard Friedlander had accepted an offer to join the beta site survey team, I was thrilled. Then he told me he signed up only because the families of survey team members would have priority for moving to the beta site, if that became necessary. He explained that his time with the Merry Band of Pirates had taught him that if bad shit could happen, it would. So, he now had an insurance policy for his family.

  They set their burdens down near the rear ramp, and Smythe ducked under the wing to speak with me. “That’s the last of it, Sir.”

  I walked over and looked at the items they had brought, then at the rear compartment of the Dragon. The ship was already stuffed full, we would have to carefully close the ramp, and somehow find room for the extra gear in the forward passenger cabin. Safety protocol required leaving a passage from the cockpit to the side door, so we had to be careful how we jammed the gear in. “We’ll make it fit. Suit up, we should be leaving in about,” I glanced at my zPhone. “Forty minutes.” The Dutchman’s orbit meant that leaving earlier would burn a whole lot more fuel to get to the landing site, and we had to be careful about our fuel supply. We had to be careful about all of our supplies. That morning, the status report from Simms had warned we had already consumed seventeen percent more of vital items than expected.

  “Very good, Sir,” Smythe replied. “Doctor?” he gestured to Friedlander.


  “Um, Colonel Bishop?” Friedlander looked uncomfortable. “It’s just the four of us going down to the surface?”

  “On this trip, yes,” I closed an inspection panel and turned to him. “Why?”

  He pointed to me, Smythe, Reed and then himself. “Kirk, Spock, McCoy and ‘Ensign Rickie’ beam down to a planet. One of them isn’t coming back,” he shook his head.