Colony

by Leigh Matthews

  Hadley didn't know what to make of the phenomenon. It had to be connected to the crystalline organism, but the Chief and Antara hadn't reported anything quite like this. The mulch beneath his feet certainly didn't seem benign, but as long as his suit remained intact, he didn't feel like he was in immediate danger.

  With nothing indicating that Antara was still in the dome, Hadley decided that he should just get the samples and get out as quickly as possible.

  He moved forward and found the workbench where Antara had been carrying out the tests on the swabs taken from Dominic. He needed to retrieve samples from both bodies. Hadley was curious to see the phenomenon first hand, but felt some reluctance too as he remembered the haunted look in the Chief's eyes. To quell any sense of fear, Hadley focused on the task: find both bodies, take samples, and get back to the SEV.

  It was likely that Antara was also dead. He would need to locate her body and collect samples for analysis, but he didn't want to have to search the entire biodome. Every second he stayed in the dome left him exposed, and he couldn't shake the feeling that the mulch beneath his feet was getting thicker.

  Knowing that Dominic's body was close to the workbench, Hadley used his scanner and located a residual radiation signature. As he followed the readings on the scanner, Hadley drew closer to the body and felt a shift in the air around him. The mulch was thicker here, and the plant growth even more lush. He had to fight through some foliage to find the remains of Dominic's body, slumped against one of the dome's struts.

  At first, Hadley could barely recognise the body as that of a human, but with effort and some guesswork, he could just about make out what looked like Dominic's limbs. Where his head had been there was simply a mass of crystalline filaments, static in the still air of the dome.

  Faced with the reality of the corpse, Hadley wasn't sure how best to obtain a tissue sample. There was no visible human tissue. It was like Dominic's body had been rapidly digested and extruded through his skin, exploding in a proliferation of crystals with a vaguely humanoid shape. He approached cautiously and leaned over what had been Dominic's head, scraping a sample into the radioactive material container.

  The hair-like crystals broke away easily from the central mass, making Hadley think of dandelion seeds blown in the wind. Digging down, Hadley held his breath, knowing he would likely hit flesh the deeper he went. As he scraped away more of the crystals he felt his knife plunge through something softer. He cut a vaguely circular section and then leveraged this into another container. As the sample came away from the body, Hadley saw that what he had extracted was a fragment of Dominic's skull, the bone reformed as a sponge-like tissue. There were crystals growing on both the outer and inner surfaces of the skull, and where there should have been grey matter, there was just a tangle of what looked to Hadley like enoki mushrooms. The organism appeared to have sprouted from Dominic's brain, feeding on the fatty tissue and eating through the bone to explode in a frenzy as it pierced the skin.

  Hadley sealed the containers and stepped back, keen to get away as quickly as possible. He moved back to the workbench and put the RMCs and samples from the M-Lab into a tote, then he turned around and began to make his way back to the airlock.

  After a few steps, Hadley felt the floor getting more and more slippery until, finally, he lost his footing and tipped forward, dropping the tote with the samples. With the weight of his suit, Hadley struggled to stay upright, and his gloves plunged into the mass of mulch beneath him. He pulled his hands free as quickly as he could and tried to shake off the white flakes, but they clung to his gloves. He looked around for something to wipe them on, but almost everything was covered by the growth. A splash of green caught his eye and Hadley quickly moved towards a row of plants with withered blue flowers surrounded by a mass of small green leaves. Hadley broke off a handful of leaves and rubbed the vegetation between his gloves to remove the white mulch. When he was satisfied that his gloves were mostly free of the organism he used the pulpy mass to wipe away the label standing beside the plants: Clitoria tenatea, Butterfly Pea.

  Hadley pulled the label from the ground and grabbed another handful of the leaves. The floor had begun to pulse at his feet, and the flakes seemed to be getting thicker every second. He ran back to the airlock, clutching the leaves and label in one hand and the samples in the other. He reached the exit and put out his hand to press the airlock release, then stopped. Someone, or something, was standing on the other side of the glass, watching him from the outer dome.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The creature entered the south airlock close to the storm shelter and saw Hadley moving around inside the dome. As he headed in the direction of the corpse, the creature stood silent and still, watching.

  When Hadley cut into what was once Dominic's flesh, the creature recoiled. The filaments of crystal caught the light from the inner dome and the creature twisted in pain. Once the knife was out, the crystals quickly closed around the wound. The pain receded and the creature took a step toward the airlock door.

  The creature's gait was human-like, bipedal, but alternately stiff and languid. It was as if its limbs were held together by muscle memory alone. As it moved toward the control panel, it left a trail of red dust, which lingered for a moment, then paled and began to coalesce into a sea of white flakes.

  Reaching the control panel, the creature, an excrescence of a wider consciousness, surveyed the switches, then looked up at the blank screen. Catching her reflection, Silver calmly considered how her appearance had changed. Her skin was now finely coated with small, almost fluid crystals, creating a luminescent complexion that altered with every movement or change in light. Silver could feel the metal under her feet and the switches beneath her fingers, but she also felt the ground beneath the biodome, and the rock of the planet itself. She was more deeply interconnected now with the other symbiotes.

  Hadley moved inside the dome, catching Silver's attention. He took the samples to the workbench, where he would be able to see the readouts from the nanobots Silver had injected into her blood sols before. She had scrambled the information transmitted to Octavia, afraid of what Aliyaah would do with the results. Now, though, Hadley would be able to see the raw data as well as her calculations and experiments with the plant extracts.

  Silver couldn't know for sure if Hadley would understand what she had been working on, but if he took her test results back to the station someone might be able to decipher the data.

  The samples taken from Dominic were now highly suggestive. The microbialites had formed fruiting bodies in the test tubes, almost cracking the glass. Once their connection to the wider organism was severed, however, they had grown dull and grey, then died, leaving a fine residue of crystals.

  Silver watched Hadley closely. She saw him stumble and was glad he had not removed his space suit when he entered the inner dome. If he had, Silver wasn't sure that she could stop the rapid colonisation of his body. He was infected, as were they all, but the organism's growth was slow in him and the excrescence had not yet formed a strong connection.

  Silver watched as Hadley looked around in desperation, holding his gloves out in front of him. As he clutched at the Butterfly pea plants, Silver felt relieved that he was beginning to make the connections in his own mind. She didn't yet have a clear grasp of his consciousness, but it would come.

  Silver's own consciousness, while entwined with the wider organism, retained a certain independence. The organism had fought for full control, but Silver had held fast, slowly adjusting the environment in the dome to match conditions outside, on the planet's surface. In this environment, Hadley's body would be an ideal substrate. The residual GCRs would likely catalyse an unstoppable reaction if he were fully exposed. Silver respected Hadley, liked him even. She didn't want him to die unnecessarily, but she couldn't let him take that data back to Schiff, not until she knew more about Schiff's intentions.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Hadley didn't recognise Silver at first, seeing only a pa
le distorted figure through layers of glass. With his glove hovering over the airlock button, Hadley studied the figure, wondering if he was delusional.

  For several seconds neither of them moved. Then the reality of the burgeoning mass around his boots broke through his stupor and Hadley began to back away from the airlock.

  Silver pushed the button on the door from the outer dome and Hadley stumbled backwards, realising now that he was looking at his officer, or what remained of her, and not some ghost he had conjured from the recesses of his sleep-deprived mind.

  Part of Hadley's consciousness whispered to him to stay, that everything would be OK. But he pushed the voice aside, and turned back, running as quickly as he could to the other side of the dome. He hoped that his memory of the dome's schematic was correct and that he was heading towards the south airlock and not a dead end.

  Silver walked into the inner dome and took a moment to let her feet sink into the mass covering the floor. She started towards Hadley, barely lifting her limbs, as if she were being carried by the fibrous morass now rising in the dome.

  Hadley fought through the growing sea of what he now saw were tiny crystalline filaments like those he had taken from Dominic's remains. It felt like he was running through a river bed. The organism rose to clutch at his legs as if a damn had burst. It wasn’t until he finally reached a clear area of the dome that Hadley allowed himself to look back. Just a few feet away the floor undulated in a frothing sea of limbs, torsos, heads, like a raging river rushing drowning people towards him.

  The excrescence was now barely ten feet behind Hadley and gaining fast, rising above the undulating morass. He dropped the samples and the plants and ran faster. He had little hope that he would make it to the airlock and get through the door before Silver reached him, but he didn't want to think of what would happen if he couldn't get out of the dome in time.

  As he passed through a sector clear of plant life, Hadley bolted right and cut through two irrigation structures dripping with crystals. The visor of his suit grew cloudy with the white material and Hadley wiped it away with his glove, making a futile effort to flick the gunk to the ground as he ran.

  Hadley was no longer in Silver's line of sight, but he didn't need to be for her to sense where he was. She felt his feet hammering against the floor as if he was tapping at her skin. Every footstep was a blow against the wider body of the organism. She followed his progress and moved right, along the edge of the plants. Then the footsteps stopped. Hadley was still. Silver struggled to figure out where he was hiding, then she heard a popping sound and turned around.

  Silver saw Hadley holding something in front of him, but before she could make out what it was she was felled by a sharp, freezing pain. She twisted on the floor, clutching at her limbs. She dragged herself forward, trying to reach Hadley to make him stop. As she drew closer, her body became cold and numb. Her movements slowed until she couldn't go any further. She struggled to look up and saw Hadley's boots emerge from the receding wave ahead.

  Hadley stood just ten feet away, holding a fire extinguisher. He had covered the ground around him with suffocating foam, underneath which the excrescence turned grey, then black and still.

  Silver tried to crawl towards him, and Hadley stopped for a moment, hoping to see a glimmer of humanity in her eyes. The pain spread through her body and beyond, and Hadley saw that Silver's eyes were no longer hers alone. The crystalline organism had created a new lens through which she saw the world.

  Hadley held the canister aloft and pointed it at the excrescence. Silver waited for the last of her consciousness to die away, for the freezing foam to cut off her body from the air on which she still relied. She waited and waited, but the cold, suffocating sensation of death did not come. Hadley had backed away and was already in the airlock, and Silver watched helplessly as he ran out, holding the samples and her data in his arms.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Aliyaah stepped through the outer airlock into the upper hangar, gesturing for the crew to stay behind her. They were just as on edge as she was, having overheard the desperate call for help back at the station.

  Inside, there was no sign of the remaining crew, or Rover Four. The emergency lighting system had been activated and the life support system appeared to be malfunctioning. The oxygen levels were dangerously low, as was the temperature. Aliyaah assigned two men to work on the climate controls and told the rest to go through decontamination ahead of her.

  She checked the rover's location using its on-board guidance system. It had arrived at the hangar an hour earlier, well before the transmission that had caused Aliyaah to rush back to the station. By now, the engineers should have been well on their way to disassembling the vehicle.

  Despite the transmission having devolved into screaming, there was nothing out for the ordinary in the hangar, aside from the malfunctioning climate controls and the missing machine and crew. If something had happened to the life support system in the upper hangar the crew may have taken the rover to the lower level for disassembly. While this made sense, it didn't allay Aliyaah's growing concerns. The crew should have kept her apprised, and she wondered if something had happened to prevent contact until that last message.

  She checked the climate inside the rest of the station to see if it was a system-wide issue. The temperature and oxygen levels appeared normal everywhere else, but she kept her suit on and her breathing apparatus connected as she exited the airlock into the station's inner hallway.

  The crew was waiting for her inside the station and, as she joined them, she pulled one of the engineers aside and ordered the rest of the men to go to their quarters to get a couple of hours of rest. Payload Specialist Barclay had logged a lot of hours with the rovers, and when she asked him to stay behind he didn't wait to ask why.

  "What's going on, Chief? Where is everybody?" Barclay said, triggering a volley of questions from the other men, who hadn't moved.

  "Yeah, where are you going? Why the suit?"

  "Should we suit up too, Chief?"

  Aliyaah shook her head. "Go to your quarters, lock the doors, and get some rest. Barclay and I will track down Rover Four and the rest of the crew. Report back to the hangar in two hours and we will get to work on the last sections of the walkway."

  "What do you think happened to the crew and the rover?" asked one of the younger engineers. Aliyaah looked at him and saw that he was sweating profusely. He was smiling at her, grinning almost. He looked almost euphoric, not terrified, and the effect was distinctly unsettling. She wondered if she should take him with her to find Schiff, in case he needed medical care. She hoped his odd demeanour was an effect of tweaking. That would be bad enough, but was better than the alternative: that he was infected and symptomatic. She hadn't seen how the organism manifested in the Commander or other men at the station, but she had witnessed the strangeness in Dominic's eyes when he had attacked her.

  The men were waiting for Aliyaah to answer, but she was at a loss for what to tell them. She didn't know much more than they did, but understood that the lack of information would allow their imaginations to run free.

  "We all heard the distress call, which may mean that the rest of the crew is holed up somewhere with Rover Four. I'm going to do a sweep of the station with Barclay, and I'll see you all back here in two hours, when I'll have more information." She paused, then added, "Some of you don't look so good. Go eat a couple of bars, get some sleep, and make sure you take your anti-rads. And no dosing of T, got it?"

  Some of the men didn't move, and Aliyaah glared at them. "Dismissed!"

  Still the men didn't move and Aliyaah glared at them. The men looked at each other and then at Mission Specialist Ansen, the most senior member of the crew. After a moment, Ansen stepped up beside Barclay and said, "Chief, there's safety in numbers. I'll go with you."

  Aliyaah saw that of all the men, Ansen looked to be in the best shape. She nodded at him, reluctantly admitting to herself that it was probably good to have back up, even if
she couldn't entirely trust that the men would act rationally. "OK, Ansen and Barclay you're with me. The rest of you, get some rack time."

  As the men walked away, Aliyaah turned to Barclay and said, "Go check the rover's nav feed. It might be that we can track it down by looking at its last movements. If the speed is off, it's possible that the rover malfunctioned before arriving at the station. They might have had to hand-bomb parts to the lower hangar. Suit up before you go down there, and keep me apprised."

  Barclay nodded and headed down the corridor to the hatch for the lower hangar stairwell. As he walked away, Aliyaah gestured at her suit, then at Ansen. "You'll need to suit up too. We're heading to the new medical bay, and there may be bodies in there that pose a risk of contagion. We need to minimise exposure."

  "There's another suit right by there, Chief. In the airlock," Ansen said.

  Aliyaah nodded. "OK. Let's go."

  As they made their way down the corridor, the artificial gravity kicked back in, making her suit an even greater encumbrance. She began to fall behind, but Ansen didn't notice and rounded a corner far ahead of her. She had a feeling they were walking into trouble, but she needed to find Schiff and see what was happening in the medical bay. There had been no communication from inside the station since that last frantic call, and it was almost a full sol since anyone had heard from the doctor or her assistant. It had also been several hours since her last check-in with Hadley. She tried to hail him as she continued her slow walk down the corridor. If something bad had happened at the biodome, she might now be first in command, making her responsible for the remaining crew as well as the civilians who had been under the doctor's supervision in her and Hadley's absence.