Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  "Zoology are always getting themselves in trouble. They let the animals get to them, you know? A couple of months ago, a lab assistant had her hand torn off when she tried to pet one of their wolves. She claimed that she and the wolf were deeply connected - spirit mates, or something, and that it must've hurt her by mistake. I mean, it's not like Botany doesn't suffer the odd mishap, but at least it's not because we think the plants speak to us."

  Duncan remained silent, and the quiet chafed. She wanted to move, to run through the ship, to fling open its air locks and step out into fields of swaying blue grass. Instead, all she could do was keep talking.

  "My friend Elodie - she's a zoologist - if she were here, by now you'd probably have heard a dozen stories about how incompetent us tree-huggers in Botany are."

  Elodie. Rainbow-haired, brazen Elodie, whose penchant for body modification set off every metal detector in their office building. Where was she now? Bones in the ground; ash on red Martian soil? When Joy had said her farewells, she'd known that they might be final. But might be wasn't the same as definitely were, not even close.

  As she fought back the tears, Duncan finally spoke.

  "You talk too much. Good shot though. For a botanist."

  Words bubbled in her head, fizzing and popping, bursting to be let out. She wanted to tell him about Finn, because if anybody deserved to be mentioned, it was Finn and his insistence on being prepared, and how after ten years of weekly visits to the range, she knew all about guns; how to shoot, how to maintain and clean them, how to carry them and how to be safe.

  Fair enough, she talked too much - but here, in the crumbling ship and the icy cold, where arachnids scampered through the ducts and one hundred and nineteen years had passed - here, silence was like the breath of death, and she was afraid.

  "Excuse me." A voice rang out, as confused as it was polite. "What is going on?" The woman in the cryo pod blinked and rubbed her eyes.

  2. Joy

  Her name was Dr Susan Voirrey, emphasis on doctor, and she was a very pragmatic woman. When Joy showed her the date on Duncan's tablet, Voirrey examined it quietly and thoroughly before calmly handing the tablet back. The look in her dark eyes was distant and thoughtful.

  "Do you have family onboard, Joy?"

  "My brother. He's head of security. I know where his cryo pod is, but Duncan thinks we may not be able to access that part of the ship, that we should try to find help first. I don't know..." Joy gave Voirrey a hopeful look. There was a trustworthy professionalism about the woman. If she were to contradict Duncan, Joy was more than willing to follow her lead instead. "And you? Any family?"

  "Two adult children - both doctors - and my husband. But I'm afraid Duncan is right."

  Voirrey must have noticed Joy's disappointment, because she smiled slightly. Comfortingly? Or condescendingly? Her own emotions being as raw as they were, Joy found it hard to tell.

  "Using the ship's network, opening doors, even breathing - all these things strain the systems. What we need to do is reroute all available power to Cryogenics and leave the ship. Until we find assistance, or some way of supplementing the ship's power, our families are better off asleep."

  It sounded logical, sensible even, but all Joy could think of was Finn staring unseeing through a porthole as arachnids wove thick webs around his pod. Leaving him might be the wiser choice, but it felt hollow. Wrong. Definitely not what Finn would do.

  "I take it you're not a medical doctor." Duncan gave Voirrey an appraising look.

  "Incorrect. I'm a neurosurgeon at - well, previously at Kirkclair Royal. I did however also read engineering and chemistry at Cononish."

  "I went to Applegarth myself. Seem to recall we gave you quite the thrashing at last year's college cup finals."

  "I am sure the Cononish Kelpies have reclaimed the trophy many times over the past 119 years."

  They smirked at each other, a growing kinship in their smirks. A bond to connect them beyond the fact that they were survivors of some mysterious disaster. Joy felt increasingly surplus to requirements, though she supposed that was better than being the sole focus of an unbalanced mind.

  "And you, Joy? Cononish does have a renowned institute of botany."

  Joy couldn't be sure, but she thought there was a sly glint in Dr Voirrey's eyes, as though the woman already suspected what the answer would be.

  "I studied at Atwood."

  "Well," Duncan said, his smirk widening. "That explains why you know your way around guns."

  Duncan and Voirrey both laughed, and Joy tried to not let it get to her. They were in a difficult situation; surely none of them were their normal selves. It was entirely possible that both Duncan and Voirrey were perfectly pleasant people, and also possible that Joy might have found the remark funny under other circumstances.

  It wasn't as though the students at Atwood didn't know the reputation of their college. While the universities at Cononish and Applegarth were palatial buildings set in green-grassed grounds, Atwood was a big grey brick plonked down onto tenement-surrounded tarmac. Finn had taken one look at the area and then spent the next three years personally dropping her off and picking her up every day.

  I'm always afraid, he'd told her, and she understood that now, understood it and wondered what he would think if he could see her.

  ◆◆◆

  The soft patter of eight-legged creatures never ceased, as though they were being stalked through the ship, but no spiders leapt from the shadows. They passed darkened server rooms and cargo holds, and when a section of the ship turned out to have collapsed in on itself, they stood silent and shivering for several minutes as Duncan tapped his tablet, searching for another route.

  When they finally reached an airlock, Voirrey went to the panel at its side. "The external scanners are online. The readings are..." She frowned. "Complex. An excess of data combined with heavy interference make it difficult to say exactly what awaits us. But the environment appears to be habitable."

  "Gainsborough?" Duncan asked and Joy detected a note of hope in his voice. Whoever he and Voirrey had been before, however they acted now, they had at least one thing in common with her - they'd all dreamed of the blue planet.

  "Only one way to find out."

  Voirrey pushed a button, and the airlock hissed with effort as hidden mechanisms clunked away inside the walls.

  They stepped into the space between the two locks. The external porthole was dark, the outside world devoid of light and features.

  "Wait." Duncan nervously eyed the way they'd come. "What if the interior door jams behind us and the external one won't open. I don't fancy being trapped in here."

  Joy hadn't considered that particular nasty outcome, far too busy envisioning the outer lock opening to a torrent of water, or a nice cloud of toxic gas to really add some spice. Or maybe just more spiders. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Or a huge one, that would reach in and scoop her up with its gnarled chelicerae and...

  "Don't be childish. There are manual overrides." Voirrey tapped another button. A bright bell rang out, informing them that the process had begun. The inner lock shut - with a loud and very final clank.

  "Here." Voirrey handed Joy a pair of goggles and a respirator mask. "I picked these up for you. The air should be breathable, but all readings point to a low temperature. Not freezing, I don't think. God, I hope not."

  "Thank you," said Joy, regretting any unpleasant thoughts she'd entertained about Voirrey.

  And then the outer lock began to open.

  Come on, blue skies. Come on, sweetgrass. Come on, rescue teams; come on, a laughing Finn pleased with his particularly elaborate prank. Come on!

  In a roar of dust, the new world introduced itself. Not the rusty red of Mars, but a fine-grained ash-grey powder blowing in on a stunningly cold wind. Voirrey and Duncan, though right beside her, instantly became dark and hazy shapes.

  Dust was nothing but the fine particles of minerals. It had no sentience, and still Joy couldn't help but sense
malice in the swirling choke. She pressed the mask tight to her face, tighter, so tight it hurt - but the dust was already inside of her. Tickling the back of her throat, coaxing a cough from her lungs, prompting a panicked press of her med-bracelet.

  Duncan was climbing up the piling dust, his feet kicking more into the air. He disappeared, and Joy thought she could hear him shouting.

  The powdery dust clung to her thighs, rising higher with every step. Voirrey pushed ahead, stirring up a thick cloud. Joy turned, hacking a cough, and pressed the trigger on her med-bracelet a second time.

  Okay, so the sky probably wouldn't be blue, but there would be a sky. A sun, a moon, a smattering of constellations. And somewhere in that vast expanse, home.

  When she could breathe again, Duncan grabbed her arms and pulled her out of the airlock; up and into the dark shadows of darker mountains. Dust-choked winds hissed between the peaks, whispering down dunes. The sky was hidden behind a haze of fog, a twilight shimmer the only hint that there even was a sun.

  In that bone-pale light, at the bottom of a massive crater, the wreckage of the Ever Onward glittered. The ship had gouged a deep valley into the pockmarked ground. Debris, charred and burned, lay scattered on the ground and embedded in stone. Long scrapes had clawed open her white hull, steel and gold wire spilling out like innards. Its tail-end, where Joy now stood, had caught high on jagged rocks and torn loose. A twisting spine of metal still connected it to the rest of the ship, hundreds of metres below.

  "If this is Gainsborough, it's nothing like the pictures in the brochure," Joy said, and to her surprise, both Duncan and Voirrey laughed. Maybe it was the dire surroundings. If there ever was a planet made for gallows humour, this was it.

  "There's too much atmospheric interference to get any reliable readings." Duncan waved his tablet in the air, wiped dust from it and tried waving it in another direction as if that might help. "An electrical cluster to the north, maybe. Or nothing at all."

  "We won't last long at this temperature." Voirrey zipped up her jacket to cover her goose-pimpled skin.

  "How are we going to climb down there?" Joy looked down into the valley. Runnels of dust slithered in channels down the steep cliff-face. A perilous climb, but lights still burned here and there inside the wreckage. A landslide had buried the bow, but the section where Finn slept appeared intact.

  "We're not," Duncan said.

  "It'd be suicide to try," Voirrey said.

  They were right - but not trying felt worse.

  "On our way to the airlock, we passed a small hangar. I reckon I could get one of the hovercrafts going, even after all these years," Duncan said.

  A good idea, everyone agreed, and he went back inside along with Voirrey, who meant to see what could be done about rerouting the power.

  The airlock wheezed shut, and Joy was alone. Maybe all alone - the only person on the planet's surface. The thought was staggering. As one of the oldest colonies, Mars was a crowded place, and none of its cities were more busy than Kirkclair. Joy's apartment building, one of several identical structures meandering along the main traffic artery, had housed over 6,000 people. Standing alone underneath an ashen sky, on potentially virgin soil, made her feel free - and very, very small.

  To north, the mountain range turned into sloping hill-country. The gnarled shapes of trees cast long shadows across the landscape and the wind whistled sharply through their branches. They were black things, twisted and dead. Even so, a tree was a sign of life. If this planet once had supported vegetation, there was a possibility it still did.

  The ground beneath the dust was smooth and glossy, almost frictionless, and her boots found little traction. The layer of dust was thinner near the trees, powdering a black crust shot through with flecks of green. Its surface was cold and smooth as ice.

  It was impact glass, Joy was almost certain. Kirkclair had been built on the edge of a crater that most days was barely visible underneath a blanket of smog. Mines and boreholes had turned it into a black pit, riddled with holes. Only some of its top crust remained, but enough that, on clear days, the crater glowed deep red as the sun caught the colour of the iron-rich impact glass. It had been created long before humans colonised Mars, when a meteor had struck the planet surface. The energy of the impact had melted the rocks and soil and once cooled, ore and dust had hardened into glass. Art, created by nature.

  It did seem strange that a forest should have sprung from such soil. Glass hardly made for fertile ground. Even after centuries of terra-forming, nothing grew in the craters of Mars.

  Then she reached the first tree and saw that the branches, stretching towards the sky in thunder-bolt shapes, weren't covered in mossy bark, but crystalline crust. The trunk hadn't grown from the earth; it was the earth - dust, melted and fused by electrostatic discharge.

  Petrified lightning. She touched a delicate branch, and it crumbled into green dust. Similar to impact glass, but created by lightning strikes, not meteors. Fulgurite was its proper name, but the poetry of petrified lightning appealed to her.

  The glassy forest stretched forebodingly into the distance. She'd never seen fulgurite formations of such height and complexity. The conditions that might create such things - well, she didn't really know, but she was certain they were not hospitable.

  Not conducive to human life.

  And then, as the whir of a hovercraft engine came drifting on the wind, she saw a sign of hope. Lichen, brittle and coral-pink, draped across the branches of a tree. She felt the bristly fruticose tassels between her fingers. Not much - not much at all - but it was life and it was hope, and she whispered a quiet thank you to the universe.

  When Duncan and Voirrey arrived, she showed them the lichen, but they were far more interested in their open-top hovercraft.

  "Quiet, isn't she?" Duncan sat in the driver's seat, wiping dust from the windscreen. "I knew I could get one going; Hierochloe engineering is second to none."

  "Won't last though. The dust out here'll clog the engines before too long." Voirrey said.

  "So let's not waste time. The craft's scanners are picking up that electronic signal. Comes and goes, but it's definitely there."

  "It's our best bet for now. Keep going north."

  North, through the forest of petrified lightning. North, across rolling dunes and onto a vast plain where the horizon was a rumbling, tumbling dark churn of dust, shot through by flashes of brilliant lightning.

  Joy didn't need to look at her med-bracelet's display. She always kept count. Eighty-one was the number.

  Eighty-one doses left, and then this planet would kill her.

  3. Cassimer

  In the blink of an eye, familiar constellations were replaced by alien stars. The shuttle had completed its fold, no longer inside protected space, and Cassimer could feel it. It was an emptiness of the soul; an instant longing to return home to the embrace of the Primaterre Protectorate.

  He shut his visor against the dark and made himself the armoured fortress a banneret commander was meant to be. To keep the demons at bay, he had to remain calm and pure.

  The flight crew didn't seem to feel the difference as he did. Perhaps they had seen enough space to be immune to the corruption that crept in shadow and nothingness.

  "I've double-checked it, Commander; the signal's definitely there. The ship deviated from its course and landed on XR-755."

  The navigator indicated one of four planets displayed onscreen. Rossetti was not a large system, and only two of its worlds had seen attempts at colonisation. That was good news for Cassimer and his banneret team, but one of those colonies was on XR-755. That was bad news, though whether it was bad news for them, or for the colonists, remained to be seen.

  "Coordinates?"

  "The trace ends before the ship even hit orbit. Scanners can't narrow it down any further. There's a lot of atmospheric disturbance - I shared the details to the team's primers, but long story short - the weather on XR-755 is shit. I hope everyone remembered to pack their umbr
ellas."

  "Mind your language, Lieutenant."

  "Save the preaching for your banny boys, Cassimer. You don't lecture my crew, I don't lecture yours, all right?" Captain Albany turned from her flight monitors to arch a finely-plucked eyebrow at him. Her uniform was as impeccable as her record, but she had an habit of wearing her hair in a regulation-skirting manner. Currently, her blonde locks were gathered into a sloppy braid. One strand of hair tumbled down the side of her face, where it had spent the past few hours irritating Cassimer.

  "Apologies, Albany."

  She rolled her eyes. "Can't wait to get you lot off my ship. Earth have mercy; I need to make it clear to Bastion that Captain Albany does not run a taxi service for the banneretcy."

  It was beyond Cassimer how Captain Albany ran anything, let alone her own ship. The impression her spotless record had given him did not much correspond to reality. He suspected it might have been polished by one superior or another, promoting her to be someone else's problem.

  "That said." She turned to her navigator. "You watch your mouth, yeah?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "ETA to XR-755?" Cassimer accepted the navigator's share request. The details on the planet were downloaded to his primer, and he filed them in the appropriate mission-related folder. The primer, a synthetic modification of his DNA, provided more digital storage than he could ever hope to fill, but that was no reason to be disorganised. Order was everything.

  Once properly labelled, he called the information up to the heads-up-display on his visor. While impure, the navigator's choice of language hadn't been inaccurate. The planet was a dustbowl, ravaged by electrical storms. The fact that colonists still remained on XR-755 - or Cato, as it was known locally - was incomprehensible. It was hard to imagine a more bleak existence.