Colony

by Leigh Matthews

  Aliyaah took Silver's hand in hers and said gently, "Whatever's going on, Sil, I'm sorry. Right now, though, we all need to have our heads in the game to deal with…"

  "Whatever we're dealing with," Silver finished the sentence Aliyaah had left hanging.

  The two women held each other's gaze for a couple of seconds, then a noise startled Aliyaah into dropping Silver's hand, and they both turned to look at Dominic.

  Twenty

  "Ali?" Dominic said slowly and uncertainly as he woke. He shook his head and screwed up his eyes, as if trying to dislodge something. When he realised his hands were tied to the heat lamp, he struggled and then looked up at Aliyaah, his eyes wide. "What's happening, Ali?" He saw Silver and asked again, "Chief?"

  "How are you feeling, Dom?" Aliyaah crouched down beside him and touched him gently on the arm. He glanced up at Silver and then back at Aliyaah, who said, "It's OK. This is Silver, Flight Engineer Antara."

  Dominic was quiet for a couple of seconds, then asked again, "What's going on? Why am I tied up?"

  "What's the last thing you remember?" Aliyaah asked.

  "I... I don't know. I think I was taking some water samples back to the workroom. Yeah, I had a joke to tell Alvarez," Dominic grinned for a second, but the look Silver gave him made him shake his head and sit up straight, as if he had suddenly remembered he was tied up and being interrogated.

  "And then?" Silver asked.

  Dominic's eyes darted around as he struggled to grasp at memories. "The storm alarm sounded. Yes, that's it. The alarm sounded and I tried to get into the workroom, but the door was stuck. I had to force it open. I wanted to leave the samples there and then get to a suit."

  "And after that?" Aliyaah asked.

  Dominic frowned, then looked up at Aliyaah and shook his head. "I don't remember," he whispered.

  "Did you get into the workroom?" Silver asked, "Did you get to tell Dr. Alvarez this joke?" she added, trying to avoid any edge in her voice.

  "Maybe? I don't really remember."

  "Did you see or feel anything unusual when you got to the door of the workroom? You said it was stuck? Could you see why?" Aliyaah asked.

  "Why are you asking me about the workroom?" Dominic said. "What happened, Ali?"

  "Think, Dominic. It could be important. Did you get the door to the workroom open? Did you get inside?"

  He hesitated, then his expression changed and he looked up at Silver. "It was hot. The door. The door was hot to the touch, like there was a fire in the workroom, but that wasn't what the alarm was for, and I couldn't see a fire. I put the tray of samples on the floor and pushed against the door. Alvarez was supposed to be working in there, but I couldn't see him."

  Dominic hesitated again, and Silver asked, "Do you know what Doctor Alvarez was working on?"

  After a moment's silence, Dominic shook his head and said, "I don't remember. I'm sorry."

  Silver and Aliyaah exchanged a look and then Aliyaah explained that he had appeared in the biodome and, as Aliyaah framed it, hadn't been acting like himself.

  "I don't understand," he said. "What was I doing here?"

  Aliyaah didn't reply. Silver gave her a few seconds, then looked at Dominic and said, "You attacked the Chief."

  Dominic stared at Silver in disbelief, then reached out to Aliyaah, groaning as the cable ties prevented him from touching her. He looked into Aliyaah's eyes and pleaded to be untied. "Why would I do that?" He lowered his voice and said, "I'd never do anything to hurt you. You know that, Ali."

  Aliyaah brushed her hand against his cheek and murmured something as Silver looked away. He lowered his head and Aliyaah asked Silver to bring over the medical kit. She explained to Dominic that they wanted to take some samples and run some tests to see if they could find a physiological cause for his aberrant behaviour.

  He nodded, then asked what had happened to Alvarez. "I didn't hurt him, did I?"

  Silver shook her head and said that they weren't sure what had happened. She brought over the medical kit and told Dominic she was going to run a full body scan. He nodded and Silver gave him a small pinprick injection to populate his blood with nanobots. As these worked their way around his body, assessing levels of minerals, cortisol, neurotransmitters, insulin, and other things in his bloodstream, Silver flashed light into Dominic's eyes to check pupil response. Then she asked him to follow the light as she moved it from side to side and up and down. She could see no evidence of nystagmus or any other signs of ocular nerve damage.

  Silver also examined his ears, nose, and throat, and saw that some of the membranes were inflamed and thick with white mucus. She asked to take swabs, and he nodded again, watching Silver with a smile she found unnerving. Silver stowed the swabs in sealed containers and then picked up a scanner, placing it in position over Dominic's heart. His heart rate was a little elevated, but Silver would have been surprised if it had been normal, given the situation.

  The nanobots began to relay readings to the device Silver had handed to Aliyaah.

  "Your cortisol is high, but I think that's probably true for all of us right now. Your insulin too, but that's also a pretty normal response to stress or shock." Aliyaah handed the device back to Silver and pointed at something on the screen. "What do you make of these figures?"

  Dominic had extremely elevated levels of dopamine in his bloodstream. There were also elevated levels of a string of substances Silver didn't recognise: NSE, GFAP, and S100β.

  Silver shook her head. She couldn't even hazard a guess, so she located the device's diagnostic program, which would suggest possible conditions and any further tests they might want to carry out. The analysis barely took a second, returning a single result: traumatic brain injury.

  Silver tried to remember if Dominic had hit his head during the struggle with Aliyaah. She didn't think so, and even if he had, that was probably not long enough ago to have these kinds of biomarkers in his blood.

  "Do you feel unwell now, Dominic?" Silver asked. "And have you had any unusual symptoms the last few sols?"

  Dominic said that he hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps a headache, but he had been working long hours trying to determine why some of the plants weren't growing like the others.

  "And I guess I've been feeling a little nauseous and sweaty, but I always feel like that when there's something at work that is a bit stressful."

  "Do you have a headache now? Or nausea?" Silver asked, and Dominic nodded.

  "But… it's not bad. More a dull throb and mild nausea. Nothing that explains how you're saying I behaved."

  "Have you bumped your head recently?" Aliyaah asked.

  "Not that I remember."

  "Any loss of motor control or vision?"

  "No. Why? What do you think is wrong with me?"

  Aliyaah shrugged. "I don't know. But your bloodwork suggests a TBI, and maybe that would explain behavioural changes."

  "Like a stroke?" Dominic laughed. "I definitely didn't have a stroke, Ali. I feel fine, I really do." He smiled at her again and Silver thought she saw him wink at the Chief, but she couldn't be sure.

  Aliyaah nodded slowly, then tried to offer him a reassuring smile before asking Silver to contact Hadley and get Schiff to check the others for similar biomarkers.

  "What are you thinking, Chief?" Silver asked, but Aliyaah clearly didn't want to lay out her theory in front of Dominic.

  He looked back and forth between Silver and Aliyaah, his eyes wide open. Abruptly, Aliyaah asked him which plants were struggling.

  Without missing a beat, Dominic answered, "Sector Five. The soy, Aliyaah. I'm sorry. I was going to tell you, but I wanted to try to figure out what was happening first."

  "It's not growing at all?"

  "Oh, it is growing. It's just how it's growing that's odd." Dominic paused, then said with a grin, "I can show you. But...."

  Aliyaah looked over at Silver, who shrugged. "Your call, Chief. I will run these samples through the lab and see if anything
comes up, but without a head CT or a functional MRI, there's not a lot else I can test for."

  Aliyaah put her hand on Dominic's shoulder and said, "OK, I'll remove the restraints, but if you start to feel anything unusual at all, you let me know and you agree to let me restrain you again. Deal?"

  He laughed, then nodded at Aliyaah and suddenly turned serious. "Why are you both at the dome anyway?" he asked.

  As she untied the cables, Aliyaah explained what had happened with the Commander and at the rest of the station. Dominic listened in stunned silence, then took her hand when she offered to help him up. Aliyaah gestured for him to lead the way to Sector Five, and as he moved ahead of her, Dominic asked, his voice cracking slightly, "How many of us are left, Ali?"

  Silver didn't hear Aliyaah's reply, but she ran the calculations herself. Assuming no one was taking shelter in a storm bunker or at one of the two other biodomes, and given the three deaths in the last hour, there were now fewer than thirty people left alive on Mars.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Silver was careful not to reveal her location when she contacted Hadley, saying only that they had found another survivor. She informed the Commander of what she had witnessed in the workroom, and let him know the results of the medical tests she had run on Dominic, who she didn't identify by name.

  "I'll let Doctor Schiff know to check for those things in particular. And, Antara, I'm curious, do you and Chief Diambu have any thoughts on what might explain those results and the abnormally aggressive behaviour?"

  "No, not really."

  "The Chief has no ideas?" Hadley said, pressing Silver again.

  "Well, a TBI caused by a blow to the head or a stroke would usually present with more consistent symptoms."

  "And it would be odd for all three victims to have incurred a similar TBI in separate incidents."

  "Yes."

  "And this patient of yours has no other symptoms?"

  "There is some inflammation in his mucus membranes, with no obvious cause, and he says he's generally felt well other than a headache and some nausea."

  "Could this just be radiation sickness?"

  "Perhaps." Silver's voice was clipped.

  "Antara, are you holding something back?"

  Silver closed her eyes and exhaled. "Sir, I think we might want to focus on the possibility that each of the victims was exposed to something in the environment. An organism, perhaps."

  Hadley considered this, then asked, "And, Antara, in your opinion, do you think this hypothetical organism might be linked to the crystal phenomenon you have seen?"

  "I'd say that's a distinct possibility, Sir, yes."

  "You understand what this means, don't you?" Hadley paused and Silver shuddered as he said what she and Aliyaah had been thinking for a while now. "If the Commander and the others were exposed and are showing symptoms, the likelihood is that we are all infected."

  "Yes, Sir," Silver said. "And if there's a chance we're all infected then we can't risk taking this thing back to Earth. There's no point getting Octavia ready to launch."

  "Let's not give up, Antara," Hadley said, gently chastising her for her defeatism. "Readying the ship will give the crew something to focus on, while you and the doctor try to work out what we're dealing with exactly. We may yet be able to stay on the planet."

  "Yes, Sir," Silver said again, but this time there was no conviction in her voice. At the rate this thing was killing the crew, she wasn't sure they'd survive long enough to get the ship off the ground.

  After Silver had closed the connection with Hadley, she took another vial from the medical kit and fitted it into the mini-dart. Holding out her wrist, Silver took a breath and then injected the nanobots into her arm. The more information they had on this thing the better, and if they were all infected, at least this way she would have readings on a patient before they became symptomatic.

  As Silver considered herself as a patient, she realised that she had already experienced what could be symptoms of cognitive dysfunction in the previous twenty-five or so hours. She had forgotten about Cooper. She had forgotten about the SEV. Her emotions had been all over the place, which wasn't at all normal for her. She could put the memory lapses and changes in mood down to acute stress and fatigue, but she also knew these could be signs that there was something eating away at her prefrontal cortex.

  While she waited for the nanobots to start returning results, Silver ran the swabs from Dominic through the M-Lab. If there was an unknown organism in the samples, she might be able to isolate it and study it. She would send the data back to Mission Support and the scientists there could work out what to do next.

  The thought of divesting some responsibility was a relief to Silver, and as she let go of some of the tension in her body, she took a moment to look around. The glassy walls of Biodome Three rose high up above the plants, supported by an intricate web of white scaffolding. This network of tubing contained the oxygen scrubbers and intake valves that filtered gases from the Martian atmosphere down into the dome itself. The web also collected and filtered water released as vapor from the leaves of the plants, and was even designed to simulate rainfall.

  Silver had never been inside one of the domes during a rain cycle. Unlike some of her colleagues, Silver missed the desert, not a good downpour. Still, it felt good to be surrounded by greenery. It was a reprieve from the utilitarian grey of the station. Silver thought of her garden back home, where Cooper and Cosima had sown lettuce and radish seeds when Cosima was two, and where she had planted an avocado pit just before leaving. Silver had joked that when she got home from her trip, there'd be an avalanche of avocados. She felt a stab of pain at the memory. Cooper was leaving her, and selling the house, their home. With all the death around her now, Silver wasn't sure she could handle any more loss. She suddenly realised what Cooper must have felt, watching her leave, not knowing if she would ever come home.

  Silver felt angry that Cooper had given up on her, even though she could understand why. She knew that in some small way she was also angry that Cooper didn't fully appreciate her commitment to Project Arche and to Mars itself, or why, finally, she had decided she had to leave. Cooper seemed to have folded herself neatly into family life, but that hadn't happened for Silver. She loved her family, but that love wasn't everything to her. Cooper hated that about her, but Silver knew she couldn't change. Silver had never been OK pretending to be someone she was not. She couldn't make herself less complicated, less ambitious.

  She hadn't met her parents' expectations either. She had chosen to study biochemistry, engineering, and astrophysics, instead of marrying a nice man and having an average life of tedious contentment. Her mother had presented her with a vision where her only pleasure would come from her husband's successes.

  She wanted to believe that her parents had followed her career over the years, perhaps even seen her waving and smiling on TV as she made her way to the launch pad and Octavia. Maybe they were proud of her after all. Silver tortured herself with the thought that, if she had stuck around for longer, given them another chance, her parents might have loved her even if she hadn't achieved so much. Perhaps her dad really was capable of kindness and love, and her mother better able to stand up to him now.

  Silver had tried with Cooper and Cosima to avoid the mistakes she had seen her parents make. She wanted to love them both for who they were, not what they achieved, but it was hard, and Silver begrudgingly admitted to herself that things had changed when Cooper resigned her post at NASA to stay at home with Cosima. With her resignation, Cooper had lost some of Silver's respect, and Silver couldn't help but see Cooper's choice as a rebuke of her own dogged pursuit of her career. Rationally, Silver could see that this assessment was unfair, but she couldn't make herself feel differently about it. She was disappointed in Cooper. Not that she would ever say such a thing to her wife, nor to anyone else, but she knew Cooper could tell she was thinking it.

  Now, some two hundred million miles away, Cooper was living her life
without any further need for Silver. She was just a memory to Cooper now, and the Cosima she knew had gone, had grown into a much older child who might not even remember her other mom. Silver stared up into the dusty sky surrounding the biodome and found this thought strangely comforting. If Silver never made it home, she wouldn't run the risk of disappointing her daughter over and over again every time she chose to go on just one more mission. Perhaps it was for the best, Silver thought, if she never went back. Cosima wouldn't miss what she couldn't remember.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the biodome's air filters kicking up a notch, and Silver looked up once more, seeing that the sun was low in the sky. The light was fading quickly and at dusk the biodomes' artificial ultraviolet lighting, used to boost the plants' photosynthesis, would switch off. Silver wasn't sure if Aliyaah had changed anything to keep the dome lit after that.

  Silver activated her intercom, intending to ask Aliyaah about the lighting. But, before she had a chance to speak, Silver heard a single, short scream from the other side of the dome. She left the samples in the processor and ran in the direction of the scream. As Silver scrambled to find Aliyaah, the nanobots coursing through her blood began to relay their results. If Silver had still been standing by the lab, she would have seen that, like Dominic, her cortisol was elevated, her blood glucose was low, and she, too, had the unusual biomarkers suggesting something was affecting her brain tissue.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Aliyaah was face down on the ground when Silver reached her, and Dominic was nowhere in sight.

  "Chief?" Silver cried as she ran across one of the vegetable beds, not caring if she flattened any plants. Aliyaah didn't respond, and when Silver crouched down beside her, she saw a ligature around Aliyaah's neck. She assumed it was Aliyaah's chain at first, but that seemed to be missing, replaced by the cable that the Chief had used to bind Dominic's hands. There were scratches on Aliyaah's throat where she had clearly tried frantically to remove the ligature before she passed out. Silver grabbed the utility knife that was attached to her belt and quickly cut the cable, trying not to nick Aliyaah's skin.