Colony

by Leigh Matthews

  The man had disappeared. In his place, in the centre of the workroom, was a crystalline growth that formed into an arch that stopped at its apex. Almost finger-like, the crystal seemed to be pointing directly at the door, at Silver.

  seventeen

  The area around the central control panel was empty when Silver arrived to meet Aliyaah, pushing the M-Lab ahead of her. She did a quick visual check of the area and then looked at the panel itself to see if there was any indication of Aliyaah's whereabouts.

  The biodomes were not Silver's domain, and while she understood some of the functions on the panel, the rest were unfamiliar. She activated her intercom and tried to hail the Chief.

  Aliyaah responded immediately, and moved from behind one of the central columns of the biodome into Silver's line of sight. Aliyaah began to walk towards the doors to the inner atrium but Silver held up her hand to stop her.

  "I got the M-Lab. But we have a problem."

  On the other side of the glass, Aliyaah frowned.

  "I encountered the... well, what looks like the same organism we saw in the west wing." Silver struggled to put words to what she had seen. "It, I guess, consumed another man right in front of me. I mean, he was there, then there was just heat and crystal and light."

  Aliyaah lowered her gaze and Silver could hear her breathing on the intercom. She seemed to be taking steady, slow breaths, and Silver began to do the same, realising that her heart was pounding. She had reached a level beyond terror, beyond her training, perhaps even beyond her ability to keep holding it together. Aliyaah's breathing was calming, reassuring, even if she was on the other side of the glass.

  "Chief?"

  "I'm thinking."

  After a few seconds, Aliyaah looked up at Silver and said, "If you were in close proximity to the organism, you need to go back through decontamination. There's no other way for you to enter the inner dome without risking bringing in the organism with you."

  Silver stared at Aliyaah, wondering where this was heading.

  "You have to flush the whole system. The whole outer ring. Decontaminate all of it."

  "The scientist in the lab wasn't wearing a suit, Chief. And if there's anyone else in here they'll suffocate."

  "I know." Aliyaah's jaw was set, and she held Silver's gaze.

  "Can we send out an alert to see if anyone else is here?"

  "We would have to be on an open channel to do that, and we would have to identify our location."

  "What about a system-wide alarm localised to this biodome?"

  "The domes aren't set up that way."

  Silver nodded, seeing why Aliyaah had hesitated to give the order. There didn't seem to be a way of alerting anyone who happened to be in the biodome to what was about to happen.

  Aliyaah and Silver stared at each other for a few more seconds and Aliyaah started to order Silver to begin decontamination, but Silver interrupted her.

  "What about a solar storm alarm?" Silver said, and Aliyaah cocked her head and thought for a second, then gestured Silver to continue. "Because of the crater, this biodome might get hit by solar storms before the station, right?"

  "I haven't had to use the system, but you're right. There is a separate storm alert that would tell everyone at the dome to suit up."

  "So, if we sound that alarm, anyone who is still here would have to come out of hiding."

  "Presumably." The Chief frowned.

  "We should at least try," Silver said.

  Aliyaah nodded and talked her through how to activate the alarm and for a second Silver felt relieved. Then she thought back to the man in the workroom. Had he been running towards the door for fear of his life, or had he been running right at her? There was something about his expression that scared Silver. Not just the grey colour of his skin, but something in his eyes. It hadn't been fear exactly, but something more akin to rage. As she recalled his expression, she felt increasingly certain that he had been running at her, not to her.

  When the alarm began to reverberate around the dome, Silver jumped, suddenly afraid of who, or what, it might bring out into the open.

  Eighteen

  The sound of the alarm rang in Silver's ears as she watched for anyone emerging from other areas of the biodome. Aliyaah waited and watched from the inner dome, and when a transmission came in from Hadley, it made them both jump. Hadley told Aliyaah to check the new message from Mission Support, so she accessed the array through the device attached to her suit. As Aliyaah listened intently to the message, Silver backed up against the wall so that she would have a full view of her periphery.

  After a few minutes, Silver began to feel reassured that she and Aliyaah were the only ones left alive in the dome. She moved forward to check the control panel for any signs that interior doors had opened or closed. As she checked the panel, something flickered at the edge of her vision. Something inside the dome, behind Aliyaah.

  "Chief?"

  Aliyaah didn't look up from the screen, still focusing on whatever guidance Mission Support was issuing.

  There it was again. A shadow of movement behind Aliyaah, just beyond a small plot of corn.

  "Chief, there's someone in there with you, or something," Silver pointed behind Aliyaah, and the Chief looked up, hearing the fear in Silver's voice.

  Aliyaah turned, just as a man in dark blue overalls ran out from the corn and threw himself at Aliyaah, almost knocking her to the ground. Aliyaah recovered quickly, and dodged a second swipe from the man, then jammed her foot behind his ankle and flipped him quickly onto his back. Crouching down, Aliyaah held her knee on the man's chest and pinned his hands above his head.

  The man thrashed beneath her for a few moments and then fell perfectly still.

  "Chief?" Silver cried, standing with her hands against the glass. "Are you OK?"

  Aliyaah leaned over the man and watched to see if the outside of her visor fogged up. After a moment, she stood up slowly, confident that he was at least breathing, then she released him and glanced up at Silver, saying "He passed out." She kept a wary eye on the man while looking around the inner dome. "I need something to bind his hands with. In case he wakes up and is in the same state of mind."

  "What's wrong with him?" Silver asked as she grabbed some cable lying nearby. "Do you think it's like what happened with the Commander?"

  Aliyaah didn't respond right away. Instead, she used the cable, designed to support the trusses of the experimental tomato plants, to tie the man's hands together around the base of one of the dome's heat lamps. When she was done, she looked up at Silver and said, "Whatever that was, it wasn't just normal fear or panic. He looked like he wanted to kill me. Like he didn't know who I was." "Or maybe who he was?" Silver said, remembering what Hardeep had said in the mess hall earlier. "If he doesn't remember who he is or why he's here, suddenly realising that you're not on Earth could be enough to make anyone come unhinged."

  With the man secured and unconscious for now, Silver went back to the control panel. There were no other signs of movement in the dome, so after confirming with Aliyaah, she hooked her suit to the wall of the outer dome and initiated a complete decontamination. As the air rushed out of the outer ring, Silver watched through the glass as Aliyaah started talking, presumably to Hadley.

  After a few minutes, Aliyaah opened a line with Silver and said that there had been a further death back at the station. Another specialist had suddenly become disoriented and violent and had needed to be restrained, dying just minutes later after struggling to breathe. Doctor Schiff had set up a temporary medical ward, salvaging what she could from the wreckage of the lab. The Commander's body, and the body of the specialist, had been moved to the medical ward for examination.

  Patching herself into the same line as Hadley, Silver suggested that the remaining survivors take extra doses of anti-radiation meds. Aliyaah added that it would be good for Doctor Schiff to perform an autopsy on both the bodies.

  "What do you think she'll find?" Hadley asked.

 
; "Well, if they're dying of respiratory failure, it makes sense to look at the lungs and throat first," Aliyaah said. "If something affected their breathing it could be causing hypoxia and confusion. That might explain their behaviour."

  "Like the disorientation you can experience with altitude sickness," Silver said, nodding. Then she pointed at the prone figure behind Aliyaah and said, "He's still breathing though, right?"

  Aliyaah checked again and nodded. She wanted to pull off a glove and check his pulse, but along with the risk of exposure, there was also a risk he would wake up and grab her. As he wasn't wearing an EV suit there was no easy diagnostic panel she could access while he was unconscious. She wondered if the M-Lab had a first aid kit. It would at least have some diagnostic equipment that she could use to monitor his vital signs. Maybe they could even run some samples and start to figure out what was going on.

  Curiously, Aliyaah's sweep of the inner dome had revealed no undesirable or unknown biosignatures. Whatever had affected the crew wasn't showing up on their sensors.

  "What if it's something in the brain?" Silver said, interrupting Aliyaah's thoughts. "What if it's just space-brain from massive amounts of radiation? That would kill off neurons in the prefrontal cortex and lead to a loss of control, memory, and executive function."

  Silver waited for Aliyaah to respond, but the Chief hesitated. Then, slowly, she backed away from the man and began to remove her gloves.

  "Chief?" Silver shouted, and watched as Aliyaah removed her helmet. "What if it's airborne?"

  Aliyaah set her helmet down on the ground and shrugged. "If he's been exposed, it's likely I have too."

  Silver considered this, but stayed silent. Aliyaah continued. "If it's airborne, we would have been exposed back at the station and in the hangar. And if it's radiation, the two of us have more exposure than most. Our scans say there's nothing in the inner dome, but you should get in here with those anti-rads and the M-Lab and we should get to work."

  "Doing what?"

  "We'll wait to see if he wakes up, and then we're going to swab him and see if we can find anything that didn't show up on the sweep of the dome I ran earlier."

  "And if he doesn't wake up?" Silver asked, not without hesitation. She saw the way Aliyaah was looking at the man, and the gentle familiarity with which she now pressed her finger to his neck to check his pulse. Aliyaah knew him, as more than a colleague, and maybe as something other than a friend. "Chief, what if he dies too?"

  Aliyaah stayed silent for a moment as she crouched by the man's side. Then, satisfied with his slow, but steady, pulse, she stood up and looked Silver in the eye. Without blinking, she said, "Well, if that happens, we'll have no choice but to do an autopsy ourselves."

  NineTeen

  With the outer dome decontaminated, Silver moved quickly through the airlock into the inner dome, taking the M-Lab with her. Aliyaah met her with a handful of tomatoes, snap peas, and carrots. Silver fought the urge to laugh.

  "We need to eat," Aliyaah said. "It's not much, but we should eat something with the anti-rads, and I'd much rather fresh food than another protein bar."

  Silver agreed and bit into a carrot as she handed over half of the meds. Aliyaah gave herself a shot, then helped Silver set up the M-Lab next to the corn patch. They cleared a small workbench and moved it over to the lab equipment.

  Silver looked down at the man lying on the ground and recognised him from the mess hall. She looked up at Aliyaah, but the Chief's expression revealed nothing.

  "He's one of the biochemists, isn't he, Chief?" Silver asked, and Aliyaah hesitated before looking over at the man.

  "A biochemist and botanist, yeah. Mission Specialist Doctor Dominic Watson. He's part of the team running soil experiments here." As Aliyaah spoke, Silver noticed that she was playing with the ring on the chain around her neck.

  "Are you close?" Silver asked, then backed off, saying, "Sorry, I shouldn't have asked." She felt the heat rising to her cheeks. She wouldn't normally ask about a colleague's personal life, especially not her boss, but she had known Aliyaah a long time and the events of the last sol had shaken up the normal order of things.

  Aliyaah didn't answer right away, but when she did, she looked Silver square in the face and nodded. "We've been seeing each other for a little while now. We were keeping things quiet. You know how it is with a small crew in close quarters. Everything is so unreal here, it's hard to know what will work and what won't."

  Silver nodded and changed the subject, asking Aliyaah about the message from Mission Support.

  "They didn't have a lot to say, unfortunately. They're as stuck for answers as we are at this point," Aliyaah said. Then she added, quietly, "But they are delaying the launch of Octavia II. Until there's a clearer picture of what is happening."

  Octavia II was the cargo flight due to launch in the next sevensol, with touchdown on Mars scheduled for five months from now. Once Octavia II landed, she would be refueled and readied to return to Earth. The crew would stay on Mars to provide assistance to the current team at the station. Octavia was scheduled to launch twelve months after her sister-ship landed, taking non-essential crew back to Earth. Silver was supposed to be on that flight, but she wondered now if they even had the right personnel to get the ship safely home.

  If Mission Support decided to launch Octavia II, they would have to completely overhaul the crew manifest to ensure they replaced key crew members lost in the explosions and to the organism. Silver wondered if Hadley had provided a list of the remaining personnel. She shuddered as she thought about how short a list that might now be.

  Mission Support would need to send people to rebuild the damaged parts of the station, and Silver knew there would be discussion about postponing the next passenger flight. Postponing a launch was phenomenally expensive, and NASA would face pressure from SolarEx and the other private companies invested in their personal vision of the colony. If NASA delayed the launch of Octavia II, would there ever be another mission to Mars? Depending on what they found in the samples, and in the autopsies, maybe NASA would reconsider the whole endeavour. Perhaps no one else would be coming to the red planet.

  Silver watched Aliyaah crouch down beside Dominic and check his pulse. She was cautious and gentle in her movements, looking at his face while she counted. When she was satisfied that his pulse was regular and strong, Aliyaah rejoined Silver at the workbench. Silver saw Aliyaah tuck the necklace with her wedding band back into the collar of her suit. She moved her hand to feel the reassuring presence of her own wedding ring, smiling as she thought about how lucky she was to have Cooper and Cosima waiting for her on Earth. She was surprised to feel the smoothness of her skin where the titanium band should have been, then reality hit her hard. It felt just like the earlier blow to her chest, when Aliyaah knocked the wind out of her as she ran down the station corridor. Silver focused on her breathing, trying to force the panic back down. She had forgotten that she had taken off the ring, and why.

  She couldn't think clearly and as her breath came in fits and starts, her vision narrowed and the edges of the world crumpled into blackness. She put out a hand to grab the workbench and when Aliyaah said, "Sil?" her voice seemed very far away.

  Aliyaah took Silver's elbow, holding her up and then gently easing her to the floor. "Sit down. Take a deep breath. And again. In and out. In, and out." Aliyaah crouched in front of Silver and placed her hands on Silver's knees, looking up at her. Gradually, Silver's vision returned and the weight on her chest lifted. "What happened just then, Antara?" Aliyaah asked, standing up and looking down at Silver. Her voice was firm, with a slight edge to it that Silver had not heard from her before. "Do I need to be worried?"

  "No. I'm fine. There's no need to restrain me, Chief," Silver said, and felt the prick of tears. Even now that she had remembered Cooper's last message, it didn’t seem real. She hadn't had time to process anything. She had never given herself enough time, even when she wasn't in the middle of a crisis.

  Silv
er knew there were more immediate concerns, but it seemed impossible that she could have somehow forgotten something so important.

  She blinked and wiped her eyes, then looked up at the Chief and said, "I had some bad news from home earlier, is all. I'd forgotten it for a moment. I think I wanted to forget."

  Aliyaah nodded and said, "that makes sense, given everything that's going on." She smiled, then helped Silver onto her feet again. "Want to talk about it? We could be here a while."

  Silver laughed. "It's a little early for gallows humour, isn't it?" she said.

  "I meant we might be a while waiting for Dominic to wake up. What did you think I meant?" Aliyaah asked.

  "Oh! That we're stuck on this planet, with no one coming to rescue us." Silver laughed again. She knew her emotions were getting the better of her, vacillating between despair and disbelief, but she needed a moment to get herself back under control.

  Aliyaah nodded, then asked again, "So, do you want to talk about it?"

  Silver didn't respond, and Aliyaah didn't push her. Silver was clearly hurting.

  After a few seconds, Silver said, "You know, it's fine." If we survive this, I promise I'll talk to you, or to someone at least, about everything."

  "OK, Antara, you do that."

  Silver thanked Aliyaah and thought about when she would next talk to Cooper. She would be mad at Silver for not having responded to her last message.

  Forgetting protocol for a moment, Silver asked Aliyaah if she could send a transmission to Cooper.

  "You can't," Aliyaah said. "We can only talk to Mission Support, remember? We can't contact our families, or anyone else."

  Silver nodded and said, "Yes, yes. Absolutely." She sniffled and closed her eyes, then let out a long breath.