Colony

by Leigh Matthews

His upper body was cold, but he felt warmth covering his feet and spreading up his lower limbs. The sensation wasn't entirely unpleasant. It almost felt like a slow massage by a thousand tiny fingers, and Barclay's rage slowly subsided. The creeping warmth lulled him and he laid his cheek against the floor. His breath came softly now. The only sound was the low whistle between his lips, and as the hangar door opened and the air thinned, he closed his eyes, forgetting about the rover, the Chief, Mars, Earth.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Aliyaah and Ansen stepped over the body of the engineer towards the door to the improvised medical ward. As much as she wanted to get out of there, Aliyaah had to find out what the doctor had been doing in her absence.

  The door was almost completely covered with the organism, and when Aliyaah pulled the handle the door didn't budge. She tried it again but with the same lack of success.

  "Here, try this," Ansen said, unhooking his utility knife from his belt. Aliyaah ran the knife around the edge of the door frame as Ansen used his gloved hands to scrape away the material below the handle. After a moment, he could see the red stripe that indicated the door was locked. He slid open the catch and smiled up at Aliyaah, but her expression killed his smile instantly.

  "She locked them in," she said quietly, more to herself than to Ansen.

  "What's that, Chief?" he asked. "Should I open it?" Aliyaah nodded and he wrenched open the door. As the seal broke, frigid air rushed toward them. The temperature in the medical lab was only five degrees, but even this was significantly warmer than the sub-zero temperature of the ward.

  The ward was lit only by emergency lighting, and it was impossible to see to the end of the room. Perhaps the doctor hadn't been treating patients here at all, Aliyaah thought. Maybe it was being used as a morgue instead.

  She quickly scanned the room, but saw no evidence of the organism or the doctor. "This is very odd," she said, mostly to herself.

  "Relative to what exactly?" Ansen said.

  "Do you have cats-eyes?" she asked, and he shook his head.

  "I'm too old school for that. I like to see what I'm actually seeing."

  Aliyaah entered the room and turned on her flashlight to get a better look. There were a dozen beds on either side of the room, and while those closest to the door were empty, it was hard to tell if any were occupied at the farthest end of the room.

  As she inched forward, she saw that the sheets were crumpled and soiled. There were the tattered remains of restraints tied around the beds. Someone had been holding people there against their will, and Aliyaah had a horrifying suspicion that she knew why.

  "Chief?" Ansen said, beckoning her over to one of the beds. "What does this look like to you?"

  She took a closer look at the sheets on the bed and then looked up at him with a frown. "I think it's blood," she said softly.

  "But blood doesn't normally congeal like that," he said, and she murmured agreement, seeing how the blood rose from the sheets in little geometric nodules, like stalagmites.

  He moved to another bed and said, "Same over here, Chief. But more of it, and the growths are larger, with clear facets." They both took a side of the ward and moved quickly from bed to bed. Each one had the same strange residue.

  As she reached the middle of the ward, Aliyaah stopped and held up a hand to make Ansen do the same. She pointed to a bed near the back of the room, where something moved in the beam of her flashlight.

  "Hello?" she called, activating the speaker on her suit. "Identify yourself."

  Whoever it was didn't seem to respond, but as she listened more intently she detected a whimper. She moved closer and saw one of the crew she had assigned to work on dismantling the rover. The man was tied to the bed and was naked except for a thin covering of the lichen-like organism.

  "Corporal Finlayson? What happened here?" Aliyaah looked down at the red welts on his wrists and ankles, where he had fought against the restraints. She wanted to release him, but who knew what the doctor had done to the man.

  Finlayson seemed feverish, but his eyes finally settled on her face as she repeated her question.

  "Chief?" he said, his voice scratchy. He looked up at Aliyaah and his eyes caught his reflection in the visor of her helmet. He screamed and started tearing at the restraints.

  Ansen and Aliyaah held him down, and asked again, "What happened? Where's the doctor?"

  Finlayson struggled against them, then gave in and fell back onto the bed, closing his eyes. He whimpered unintelligibly and Ansen shook him gently. "Fin, what happened here?"

  The whimper turned into a moan and Ansen released his grip, allowing Aliyaah to cover Finlayson with a sheet from the adjacent bed.

  The corporal opened his eyes and spoke so slowly and quietly that Aliyaah had to bend down beside him to hear. "Mandatory testing. Just routine. Mandatory testing." His voice trailed off into silence as he stared at her, then he tried to sit up again, hit by a flash of memory. "No! Where are they? What did you do to them?" He thrashed against the restraints, and Aliyaah realised he thought she was the doctor. "You killed them!" Finlayson screamed, over and over.

  She backed away and said, "Corporal, Finlayson, I'm the Chief. I'm not going to hurt you, but I need you to tell me what happened."

  Finlayson looked at her with suspicion, but then seemed to recognise her again and after a moment said, "The doctor infected us all. Made us hosts for the thing. To grow it and test it. The others…." He trailed off as he tried to look around the room.

  Ansen lifted his flashlight and shone it across the rest of the seemingly empty beds. "Is anyone else here? She took some of them." Finlayson said. "So why am I still alive?"

  Ansen nudged Aliyaah as he spotted two beds that seemed to still have occupants, albeit unmoving. She nodded at him and pointed for him to check out the one closest to them.

  He approached the bed slowly, and carefully lifted the white sheet.

  "Is there another survivor?" Aliyaah asked, and he shook his head.

  The body beneath the sheet was also naked, like Finlayson, but the clothing piled neatly by the side of the bed suggested that this was a civilian, not a member of the crew. Ansen checked the ID badge that lay beside the clothes and saw that the body was most likely that of a thirty-five-year-old man. The corpse was almost entirely covered by the organism, making a visual identification impossible, especially as there was significant tissue damage in the face. The man's head was barely recognisable as human. Where his eyes should have been, there was now only a cluster of crystal, and the rest of his face seemed to have become a garish crystalline caricature of itself.

  This was different from the lab assistant. It was as if the growth had been directed, following the contours of the man's face.

  Ansen let the sheet drop to cover what was left of the man, and went to check the second body. Again, the corpse showed signs of controlled, systematic colonisation. This man's head had a similar pattern of organic growth, but he also had symmetrical patches of the fungal organism across his arms and legs. "Chief, take a look at this."

  Aliyaah left the Corporal's bedside and went to join Ansen. As she surveyed the second corpse, she noticed a tray of lab equipment beside the body. The equipment included an empty RMC, and when she checked the label she saw that it was one of the radioactive samples from the refiner. It seemed that something had survived the Commander's attack on the lab, although all that was left inside the container now was a little red dust. She looked again at the body, then back at the tray. There were seven spent syringes beside the RMC, and she could count seven distinct sites of fungal growth on the man's body.

  Aliyaah shivered, realising that the doctor must have been planning her experiments even before the Commander blew up the medical bay. Had the Commander known? Was that why he had taken such drastic action? He hadn't been in his right mind, but if he had thought he was saving his crew in the long run, it might explain why he had tried to destroy the samples and destroy quarry operations. The doctor had saved at
least one sample though, and as Aliyaah thought back to her notes she wondered if the Commander had really died of an electrolyte imbalance.

  "I know what the doctor was doing," she said. "She was deliberately seeding them. Monitoring the spread of the organism to see what factors affect its growth in human flesh."

  "Why in god's name would she do that?" Ansen said. He lowered his voice and added, "This guy must have still been alive, and the others too." He glanced at the Corporal, who began to cough violently.

  They rushed back over to Finlayson, but the Corporal had already fallen silent, his body still. His eyes were wide open, and Aliyaah watched as the dark brown of his irises slowly clouded over with a film of white. Finlayson's whitish-grey features were spattered with blood, and they watched as the carmine spray turned a dark grey, then lighter grey, before fading to the same shining white of the rest of his skin.

  Forty

  Rover Four skipped over the surface of the planet, with its radioactive cargo safely strapped to the roof of the vehicle. Wearing just an EV suit, Doctor Schiff walked beside the rover, her steps light, but keeping pace with the machine. Like Silver, her gait was loose, but strong.

  In the distance, the doctor could see Biodome Two: a nearly perfect blank canvas for the next stage. The weak sun had almost dipped below the edge of the Schiaparelli crater, and the doctor smiled, feeling the drop in temperature. Everything was going according to plan. The oncoming night would help her to acclimate more quickly as she walked.

  She opened her visor to the Martian atmosphere, then closed it after just a second or two. Breathing in the extra oxygen from her suit, the doctor checked her vital signs and was pleased at her progress. She wasn't quite ready, but it wouldn't be long before full symbiosis occurred and she could do without the suit.

  The doctor glanced at the station behind her, considering the evolution of the colony. The reallocation of life was unfortunate, she thought, but every new discovery had a cost. With the Antara excrescence overseeing the seeding of Biodome Three, and Chief Diambu still alive, if not yet symbiotic, it shouldn't be long before they had full control.

  It is a shame Chief Diambu is so resistant to metamorphosis.

  The thought slid across the doctor's mind and she turned to the woman walking beside her. The civilian looked at her, and the doctor saw that the woman's visor was open and her skin emitted a pale, iridescent light.

  Perhaps I should have stayed at the station to study Chief Diambu more closely, the doctor thought.

  The nanobots will track her progress.

  Yes, the doctor conceded, and our priority is to seed Biodome Two, before the samples decay. Once the men are all immobilised and subsumed into the body, Chief Diambu will begin to see things more clearly.

  The woman beside the doctor smiled, and another voice added itself to the mix.

  It will be wonderful to examine Diambu's physiology more closely.

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes, said the doctor. We will see why she has been so resistant to joining with us.

  I am excited to learn.

  Yes. And it will make us stronger.

  Yes, but we have work to do first. The doctor walked on and turned to look again at the twelve men marching in silence by her side.

  FORTY-ONE

  "Chief Diambu, this is Hadley. Come in, Chief. Chief?"

  "Sir, this is Mission Specialist Ansen. I'm with Chief Diambu now. Where are you Sir?"

  "Ansen, good to hear your voice. I'm heading to - "

  "Sir?"

  Hadley was quiet for a moment, then he turned the question around and asked, "Where are you and the Chief, Specialist?"

  Ansen paused, unsure whether or not to answer. He looked over at Aliyaah, who was staring in disbelief at two small children who were huddled together in a corner of the station's gym. It seemed that the officer left in charge of them had vanished hours before, and the children had been hiding in the gym, eating snacks from the vending machines.

  The children had no idea what was happening across the colony, nor where their parents were. One of them, a little Russian girl who was probably no more than three, had whispered to her that she thought it best if they went back to Earth now. Aliyaah, whose Russian was a little rusty, had wondered at first if she had misheard, but the little girl repeated herself and she could do nothing but nod at the child.

  When Ansen finally got Hadley on the line, Aliyaah was clutching at long-forgotten Russian vocabulary to try to find a way of asking the girl, without prompting panic, what had happened to them. Given the enormity of the situation, the two children were remarkably calm. The other child, a small boy she guessed was around four year's old, was sitting against the wall eating a bag of apple chips, looking as if he hadn't a care in the world. Perhaps it was quite normal for these children to be left to their own devices in strange, militaristic buildings.

  When she had listened to the crew talk about their families, Aliyaah felt relieved that she didn't have kids of her own to worry about back on Earth. She had forgotten for a moment that SolarEx had allowed children to come along on this mission. The idea had never sat comfortably with her. There were so many potential risks, their current circumstances being a case in point.

  "Sir," Ansen interrupted her and pulled her aside, out of earshot. "Hadley wants our location but isn't saying where he is."

  She dragged her eyes away from the two children and looked at Ansen. "Did he say anything about the dome? About Antara?"

  "No Sir. He just said it was good to hear my voice."

  "OK. I'll talk to him. You…" she gestured at the children. "Er, you look after the kids."

  Ansen raised his eyebrows, then walked over to sit beside the boy. He introduced himself first in Igbo and then, once he realised his mistake in assuming that the boy was Nigerian, he began to speak in Russian.

  Aliyaah activated her headset. "Commander? It's Chief Diambu. Did you find Antara?"

  "Chief, where are you?"

  "Sir, I need to know that you're not infected."

  "Damnit, Aliyaah. Tell me where you are."

  She took off her helmet and rubbed her eyes. "Sir, I want to trust you, but given the circumstances, I'm not sure I can."

  Hadley was quiet for a few seconds, then he said, "I understand, Chief. I understand all too well."

  "Where are you, Sir? What happened at the dome?"

  Hadley exhaled audibly before he spoke. "I'm in the SEV. I'm heading to Octavia. We need to get all remaining survivors the hell off this planet."

  "Agreed, Sir."

  "But we can only do that if we trust each other," he added. "I'm asking you to trust me, Chief. Can you do that?"

  Aliyaah took a breath, then asked again, "What happened at the dome?"

  Hadley didn't repeat his question and instead said quietly, "I'm sorry, Chief. Antara is as good as dead. I don't know how to explain exactly what I saw at the dome, but Antara is no longer herself. The place has been overrun by the organism, and Antara seems to be connected to it somehow."

  Aliyaah leaned back and whistled through her teeth. She wondered how it was that she had been spared, so far. "Sir, I understand. I think the doctor might be helping the organism. Judging everything we just saw in the lab, she may even be behind the events of the last few sols. I'm fairly certain she was experimenting on the men, Sir."

  "Experimenting how, Chief?"

  "It looks like she was trying to figure out how to control this thing, not to cure it, but to keep it from killing its human host outright. I'm not sure why."

  "Just the men?"

  "Yes, Sir. The adult males. It seems to affect male and female physiology differently. We found some of the doctor's notes, and some... evidence. From what we can tell, higher testosterone levels, coupled with radiation exposure, fuel rapid and uncontrollable growth. It looks like the doctor was attempting to control that growth and direct the organism to invade certain tissues."

  "Which tissues, Chief?"r />
  "My hunch is that the prefrontal cortex is key. I suspect that this is why we've seen the paranoia and aggression; the weird behavioural changes could be the organism taking control."

  "So, it's parasitic, perhaps. But the doctor and Antara haven't displayed those symptoms."

  "No, Sir. They may have developed a sort of immunity, or a symbiosis with the organism. It's hard to tell. Schiff is missing, Sir, along with most of the crew and the civilians." She glanced over at the children. "The adults at least."

  "And you, Chief?"

  "Me, Sir?"

  "Are you also... becoming symbiotic?"

  "No Sir." She looked over at Ansen, who had stopped talking to the children and was watching her closely.

  "But you can't be sure, can you Chief?" Hadley said quietly.

  "No Sir."

  "Any sign of the civilian women?"

  She looked over at the children and said, "No, Sir. There are just two children here."

  "Good god. What were we thinking bringing children to this place?"

  "I don't know, Sir. But now that they're here, what should we do with them?" Aliyaah paused, then decided she had no choice but to trust Hadley. "We're in the gymnasium, Sir. That's where the children have been hiding. The rest of the crew are in their quarters, except for PS Barclay, who I sent to check the lower hangar."

  "OK. Round up everyone left at the station and prepare them to move to Octavia. I'll head back in the SEV and begin transporting people to the ship. When the walkway is done, we can load her up."

  "Yes, Sir. I'll keep you apprised of the head count. We may be just fine with the supplies already on Octavia."

  "Thank you. And, Chief…" Hadley hesitated.

  "Yes Sir."

  "Once we're on board, we should consider quarantining all but essential personnel, for the duration."

  Without thinking, Aliyaah asked, "Sir, do you think we stand a chance of getting home?"

  He hesitated, then said firmly, "Work the problem, Aliyaah. Always work the problem."