by Hana Starr
When the automatic door swished closed behind her, he slumped over and put his hands down on the blank part of his console, near the wheel which controlled the ships directional tailfans.
Honestly, the situation was worse even than Karree knew. The old commander shared the secret of the ship with him before passing on, and now it was his alone to bear.
Their food stores were positioned only at the front of the hold. The same went for the seed stock. The rest of the holds were blank and empty. Every few days, he accessed them from a secret entrance and pushed the remnants forward to make it seem as though there was still more in the back.
At this rate, they would starve before the year was out.
And now that the old memories were gone, he was left alone with this current dilemma all through the rest of the night as he covered Karree’s guard shift.
At what point did a man responsible for hundreds of lives break the news that they were all going to die?
Chapter Two
One month later and he had the solution to the dilemma. It came to him one busy evening as his crew rustled around in the lower section of the command room, far below him. They were running diagnostic, performing the basics tasks of maintenance that they had either picked up or learned from programs stocked in the librariums. Most of those actions were just busy work, not done with any actual accomplishments or purpose in mind, but Eban insisted that his people were never idle.
Even during their leisurely flights. Just for that purpose, he had insisted upon requirements for flying that no one would ever have dared to do before. They included such simple rules that at least two hours a day must be spent in motion of some kind –not including the mandatory exercise hours that followed a strict plan- and that an individual must never perch for longer than 5 minutes during a flight. He knew his people. He knew himself as well. Idleness was such a trap. They were prone to perching in the rafters, upon one of the many exercise contraptions he commissioned the building of in every large hallway, simply watching and observing.
It was the curse of their minds. So much of this was. How different would thing have been if they a more active species? They would never know.
But, the solution came to him very suddenly and for no reason. And it was simply this: he wouldn’t tell them.
When the last meal was eaten, the last sip of water consumed, he would let all the air out of the ship and suffocate them all. Blissful sleep would rob them of any agony of starvation and dehydration. It was the only way.
Let them hope until the end.
Bitterness filled his mind suddenly. He turned his head away, not even certain what emotions played on his face, but certain that he didn’t want anyone to see them.
“Sir!” a voice came suddenly.
He looked up at the voice coming over the intercom, snapping out of his thoughts and back to himself. No matter what, he was still the commander and should act as such. Reaching out, he slapped the intercom button and spoke into the nearby microphone. “This is Commander Eban speaking. Who’s calling?”
Karree sounded annoyed. “You know exactly who it is! I’m the only one allowed on this channel. You said that yourself.”
“Of course,” he said, pretending to be apologetic just to appease her. “What were you needing, Karree?”
“I think you should come down and see this for yourself.”
Grumbling, he started to stand. “Alright.”
“Hurry,” she urged, and that was what finally reached him. Hurrying now as she commanded, Eban swung over to the edge of his platform, grabbed the ladder, and slid down it with his legs free and his hands loosely gripping the sides. There were some murmurs amongst the gathered crew, as no one had ever gotten used to the fact that he often went wingless. They thought he took risks with that ladder but in all honesty, it was a nuisance.
Of course, once upon a time it had been fun, but most fun things grow old with time.
Landing on the ground, he looked around and quickly pinned down where Karree stood. She wasn’t at her station closest to his platform. Her desk and navigation console were empty, the chair tipped over and on the floor.
Instead, she was several decks lower at the single communications desk. That was normally the station where he placed someone to punish them, or where he pulled a random name for the day just to have someone to man it. Honestly, it was a waste of time, resources, and space, but he couldn’t let anyone see him allow a single thing to be neglected.
Right now however, the lonely little desk was surrounded by a crowd of crewmembers who had abandoned their own stations. That was shocking, and sent a tingle of…something…thrumming down his spine. Anticipation or dread, he did not know, only that it grew stronger when he realized Karree was sitting in front of the console herself.
Who was supposed to be there today?
He tried and failed to remember. However, the important thing right now wasn’t the rampant position abandonment, but whatever had caused his first mate to ask him to hurry.
“I’m here,” he called, and sprinted over to her. The ship’s low gravity caught his footsteps, turning his strides into leaps. The throng parted to allow him access, and he glided right through and skidded to a stop with only a slight bump against the edge of the desk. “What is it?” he asked, and leaned over Karree’s shoulder.
At first, he saw nothing on the console screen but empty blips. He didn’t understand and was about to get angry when suddenly, one of the blips turned green, hung in the balance, and then dropped away again.
And his jaw dropped with it. “By the flighted,” he swore, and gripped the desk. “A signal? Out here? But, this system is too small to support life! There are only eight planets here, and a single star.”
Karree shook her head with astonishment, clearly as surprised as he was. “Technically, there are nine planets. The last one out is slowly losing its orbit, however. But, this has been occurring on and off for the past half an hour. I don’t know what to make of it, sir. I thought it might be interference, or a malfunction, but it’s too regular to be anything but species-made.”
Eban swore again, and then ran his hands backwards through his hair with utter disbelief. He could hardly believe this. All the time they’d spent searching hopelessly through densely-planeted star systems and the first sign of intelligent life was out here in the midst of nowhere? That was absurd, and so wonderful that he hardly knew what to do with the emotions churning in his chest and stomach. And this could not a fluke. Somewhere on one of these little planets was a civilization intelligent enough to reach out into the cosmos –and similar enough to the Icari that their signals registered with the ship! That was even more astonishing.
He struggled to keep his thoughts to himself even though his mind was racing like crazy. What could this mean for them? Would this species be friendly? Perhaps, hoping against hope, they might be invited to settle down and share knowledge. Their lives together would be so beautiful and fruitful, and all their worries would be gone.
“Can you find it?” he asked. “Pinpoint where it is?”
“I can track it if you go back up and transfer command over to this console,” Karree breathed, watching the monitor raptly as the green blip of signal showed up on the screen again. It was the only signal for light years around, a beacon in the dark and empty. “You still know how to transfer navigation control, don’t you?”
Some of the others who were gathered laughed nervously, obviously anticipating one of their commander’s famous outbursts, but he only grinned widely. Their laughter became genuine as his grin mellowed into a smile. “I’m the pilot of this ship. There’s quite a bit that I don’t know!”
He left them to their laugher and leapt back up the ladder, taking the rungs three and four at a time. Once he was back within reach of the landing, he grabbed it and heaved himself up into a roll that took him all the way back to his chair. Lurching up, he pulled out the keypad and danced his fingers in the air over the keys. They lit up ben
eath his stroking, blue and then yellow and finally red, and then faded back down.
His screen greyed out, fading into watchfulness as the navigation transferred over to the very unlikely communications desk. When he looked over, he saw Karree start to tap coordinates into the screen.
For the first time in forever, the ship filled with whirring and humming as the engines burst into life. No longer drifting, they headed across the solar system centered around a young, yellow sun in search of the answer to their problems.
Chapter Three
Saffron was tending to her garden out on the ranch when the crash happened. Before that, it was a rather nice day.
Even after that however, it was still a nice day. The crash didn’t change the clear blue sky or the fall-tinged wind which swirled her shirt around her. All it changed was her peace of mind. Quite honestly, she had a great deal of that.
What other women in the world had nine square miles of land all to themselves before they were even thirty? And to think that she owed all of it to being a hippy! Well, not really. She really owed it to her mother being a hippy. Her father was a businessman, but he delighted in her mother’s apparent strangeness and enthusiasm for things he didn’t understand. Saffron remembered very fondly the sight of him sitting in his armchair, leaning over his folded hands as her mother went on and on about connected energies and how the world ran in a circle. Such things shaped her young mind to an openness that rivaled even the brightest in the world, but it wasn’t even that which inspired her so.
No, that was the gardening.
When Saffron was five years old and her family lived in an apartment in NYC, the only experiences she ever had outside were rare trips to Central Park. Flowers were a luxury, and trees were giant friends. But, she mostly knew the grey of city blocks and the wilting shrubberies around her kindergarten building, so it was quite a surprise on the day when her mother purchased a windowsill gardening kit.
“Plants inside?” she asked doubtfully, looking up at her mother as she spooned careful amounts of dirt and seed food into miniscule pots. “Is that legal?”
That was her favorite phrase of the week, picked up somewhere she didn’t remember, and it made the adults laugh every single time. “Of course it is, sweetie,” her mother said, smiling down at her.
And so began her education as the seeds sprouted and began to grow. They were merely herbs, rosemary and basil and cilantro, but they grew rapidly and extremely under her mother’s expert guide until they were too large and growing too fast to be used. As a result, the plants eventually died.
That was two years later however, and around that time Saffron’s father was given a promotion. They moved, abandoning the city for the country, and to a small townhouse with enough room for a garden. And so there was a garden. And so, Saffron was hooked. There was such beauty in plants, such worth in working the soil, and such absolute satisfaction in consuming what was grown by your own hands, that she never looked back. Her interests never wavered. Her life ran on an unwavering path that saw her heading to college to study plant science.
One thing led to another. Her senior year of college, she was running some routine tests and stumbled upon a compound that wasn’t in her textbook. Confused and assuming she’d made a mistake, she saved the sample to show to her professor.
Only, he couldn’t make heads or tails of it either. He couldn’t recall such a complicated little link of proteins and DNA in a plant before, whether it was in the pages of a book or in an actual applied situation. Several days of searching turned up nothing, by which time the sample had decayed. Following her train of thought, the professor assumed she had made a mistake on the assignment and watched her repeat the procedure. And again, she found the compound.
So began the research, the experiments, the twirling of the world around her as her professor called in his contacts, and his contacts called upon theirs. Every day, there were visitors to the lab. The media took notice. Entire days of classes at the campus were canceled due to traffic and a sheer amount of travelers for which the college was unprepared.
And still, no one knew what she had found until one day, she finally managed to extract its basic elements and found it to be the simplest thing: a natural growth hormone. That was all. It was nothing exciting, and everyone went away disappointed.
“It must just be a mutation on this strain of samples,” the professor sighed, fondling the leaves of the lab plant she had been using in her work. “It’s a shame, really. You were onto something there for a while.”
And it was a mutation, once-occurred and nothing more. Yet, Saffron couldn’t stop thinking. Even after graduation and acquiring a job as an agricultural consultant for nearby farms, she buried herself in research at night to further her education on certain aspects which had been drastically lacking during her class subjects. Mainly, that was genetic modification. That wasn’t quite what she had in mind, though. That freak incident had her thinking. There was such natural potential within plants themselves. Surely she could somehow harness that to enhance a plant itself? Encourage it to mutate naturally, to behave in the same way it always did –only faster?
Three years of experimentation, most of it done in secret upon small areas of her clients’ crops. One day, she added her newest serum to the earth within which a new crop of corn had just been planted.
The next day, the corn had already sprouted and was pushing buds up to the surface while the rest of the field remained barren and flat.
Just like that, she had done it. This time however, she let the world do the heavy work this time. It didn’t take long when all the farms in the area were suddenly able to produce four different generations of corn in the same season. Of course, the process left the field devoid of nutrients but simple rotation solved that problem.
And now? Now, she had given the whole world the formula for her growth serum. The mixture accessed the same potential in plants that she had noticed in the mutation, and sped up growth to four times the natural rate. Food prices were noticeably lowering, and poor areas were suddenly not quite as poor. She supposed that not having to spend as much money on things to eat meant that there were more savings to put towards fixing windows, taking care of yards, replacing what broke.
And that was simply how it should be, she thought with contentment, lowering onto her knees and shuffling over to pluck a weed from the sweet-scented soil at the edge of her vegetable garden. The world often balanced itself out. Things ran in circles, highs and lows. And she was blessed to have been involved in it.
But, while her mother would have simply ridden through the good times and enjoyed the success for what it was, Saffron was a bit more practical than that thanks to her business-minded father. She had invested immediately at the very start of all this, and watched her bank account balloon over and over.
That was how she had come to be here. This life was still new, barely a month gone by. Her fields were still overgrown and unplowed for most of the length of her property, as this ranch had sat alone and empty for quite a bit before she took over it. She was hopeful however, humming softly under her breath as she worked at the garden. Things would turn out exactly as they were meant to.
Then, it came.
There was a sound like an airplane taking off, but in reverse. A flash of light like a bolt of lightning ripped through the sky, and then the ground heaved beneath her feet. Saffron cried out and fell over, unable to keep her footing. Panic flooded through her body and she tucked her head down against the ground, grass tickling against her cheek. Her breath shook, and so did the world again.
Her mind raced. An earthquake? A plane crash?
There was a flush of heat, and then nothing but whipping wind and silence.
Hardly daring to breathe, she looked up and saw it. It was out in her field, something straight from a cheap science fiction movie. A disk of curved metal, with stubby winglets out to the side, was halfway buried in the top of her overgrown field. Whatever it was had slammed into th
e apex of a hill, smoking faintly far above her.
This is a dream, right? she thought, so baffled deep in the core of herself that she didn’t even know what to make of all that confusion. There were only so many explanations for this. Was it some sort of secret military vehicle? Apparently there were quite a lot of those.
If so, it was dangerous and she had best just stay here until someone came to take care of it.
But, there might be someone inside. It looked like such a hard crash, could the occupant even still be alive in there? And if they were alive and suffering, she couldn’t just sit around and do nothing. She wasn’t that kind of hippy.
Sitting up, Saffron grabbed her headband from where it had fallen onto the grass and pulled it back on. The strange metal contraption sat utterly silent, windowless. It was covered in dull lights, and was also intact as near as she could tell. That was perhaps the most astonishing thing to her. That little ship had not only crashed hard enough to pierce the stony soil of her unplowed fields, it had probably exploded, and yet it sat there looking like a solid and unbothered piece of artwork.