“Durskie and Birdel will sub you out in five,” Ciib said.
“Yes, sir.”
Neecie hated being paired up with Durskie. Sheemi hoped they wouldn’t kill each other by the end of their EVA.
“Who subs us?” Jimmy said to Sheemi, off-channel.
They drilled on, the water flowed, and hours ticked by. The pumps shut down twice, sending Sheemi and Jimmy scrambling to restart them. Meszaros kept out of it, and Sheemi thought that was for the best.
After their five, Fu and Jerrold cycled out. Neecie and Durskie went EVA to replace them. An electrical problem shut them down for an hour, but Jimmy fixed it. Work resumed.
Jimmy tapped her helmet, and Sheemi started from a dazed half-sleep.
“Tanks are full,” he said.
“Bring ’em home,” Ciib ordered.
“Reeling in the arm,” Janik said.
Sheemi sighed. It had taken thirteen hours, but they were finally done.
#
“Bad news,” Jerrold told her the next morning over breakfast. “Alpha’s back.”
Sheemi looked from one to the other. “Someone hurt?”
“Nah.” Neecie yawned. “They got nothing.”
Sheemi had no idea what the rubidium was for, but without it they were going nowhere. That much she understood.
Later that morning, everyone gathered in Command and Ciib explained the situation. “Doctor Omeri has analyzed Alpha’s samples from the asteroid belt last night. He found only trace levels of rubidium. It would take us over a year to collect enough by mining the asteroids.”
“A year?” someone said.
Sheemi felt an unspoken thought pass through the mod. Whatever was happening back on Earth would be long over by then.
“We’ve got an alternative,” Ciib said and waited for everyone’s attention. “Doctor Omeri?”
The scientist looked the worse for wear after his night of analysis. His bald head shone with sweat. “There’s some spectral evidence to support the hypothesis one of the planets in this system may contain rubidium in sufficient quantities for successful extraction. The planet in question is rocky, an Earth analogue, with an ESI of zero point nine six.”
Omeri’s statement drew blank stares from the crew.
“The Earth-type,” Sheemi said.
“Yes.” Omeri nodded, smiling and wiping his brow. “Although we don’t have any terrestrial probes to validate our findings, the planet may contain sufficiently dense ore deposits to meet our needs.” He explained how they would search for the right deposits and build a makeshift processing facility.
“We’ve been scoping it,” Captain Alvares said. “On two continents, there are what appear to be dry lake beds. We think we can land the shuttle on one of these sites, set up the mobile gantry for re-launch, get what we need, and return.”
Sheemi had heard worse plans.
“The down side is it will take us another three days to get there,” Alvares said.
Everyone groaned.
“There’s nothing for it,” Ciib said. “Suit up. We leave within the hour.”
It would be their longest intra yet. Thirty hours of high g, fourteen coasting, then thirty hours of decel, but she didn’t dread it anymore. The high-g legs had begun to feel like dreams. And at the end, she’d wake up and land on an unknown planet, thousands of light years from home, with the faint hope of finding enough material to complete their journey. It was far from a plum mission, but even so, she couldn’t wait to start. The three days trickled by as Dauntless plied the emptiness between the comet and their planet destination.
On arrival, Sheemi spent a day helping extract the necessary equipment from storage and load it onto the shuttle.
“Go get some rest,” Ciib told them as they muscled in the last piece of cargo. “Tomorrow’s going to be an adventure.”
#
Sheemi stopped by the cupola before she went to bed. The Earth-type hung in space, dominating her view. Set in turquoise oceans, two continents occupied the lower hemisphere, and an archipelago circled the upper. A brown belt wound around the continents along the equator, transitioning poleward to a gradient of dull green with a touch of white at the poles. It wasn’t Earth, that was for sure, but it had land and air and water. After so much time in a metal can, it would be paradise.
The following day, Alpha and Bravo boarded the shuttle. They strapped in as Alvares and Janik ran through pre-flight checks up front. Omeri came on last. Sheemi thought back to when they’d blasted off from Earth to the moon. Will this be the same?
“Ready for release,” Alvares said.
“Releasing now,” Trediakovsky said from Command.
“Applying retros two and four.”
Sheemi felt the force as the retros burned, moving them away from Dauntless.
“You’re clear, Captain,” Trediakovsky said.
“Acknowledged.”
The descent through the atmosphere was every bit as stressful as when they’d left Earth. The shuttle shuddered as the atmosphere did its best to burn them up. A red glow seeped in from the forward windows, and a muffled roaring filled Sheemi’s ears. Her suit temp rose into the yellow before they slowed sufficiently. It helped listening to Alvares and Janik. The pilots talked as if they’d landed on an alien planet hundreds of times before.
“Flying great,” Alvares said.
“Mach two,” Janik said. “One point six.”
“Call the hack. Forty seconds to the hack.”
The vibrations diminished, but sudden drops left Sheemi’s stomach behind. She turned her head and watched a finger of bright light angling down the shuttle’s interior. They must have cleared the cloud layer.
“Waiting for landing gear,” Alvares said.
“Not open yet. Okay, it’s open,” Janik said.
“We’ve got visual on the landing site at heading north by northwest, a hundred-ten kilometers out.”
“Bring it up a little, sir.”
“Wind picking up.”
“Fifteen hundred meters,” Janik said.
Everything went smoothly then, the vibrations a steady thrum in Sheemi’s chest and arms. She felt better as they continued to drop, knowing it wouldn’t be long before her feet were on solid ground.
“Twelve hundred…nine hundred,” Janik said. “One-eighty…one-twenty…ninety.”
The jolt caught Sheemi by surprise.
“Touchdown.”
Her body leaned forward as the shuttle slowed. A few cheers crackled over the comms. They slowed even more. Then everything went wrong.
Chapter 19 – Gatherer
Kellen felt the urge to throw up, but nothing came.
“Get up, Kellen,” Abby said.
He couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
He lay there and refused to go anywhere. His body weighed more and more until he fell into a trance. It wasn’t like sleep. He maintained some remote awareness of what occurred outside of him as if he was in a closet looking through the keyhole, his vision blurred, sounds muffled.
Abby’s face appeared, her eyes anxious. “I’ll be back soon.”
Kellen’s senses continued to shrink, and his vision dimmed. His body no longer responded to his will. He felt himself being dragged across the ground and up another tunnel. Then he was swinging, something pulling him up and up. Then more dragging until he was laid prone.
“We never expected any of this,” Abby said.
“It happens to some new arrivals,” someone said. “They lose the will to exist.”
“And then?”
“This isn’t an easy place, even for those of us fighting to stay alive. Have you always taken human form?”
“Yes,” Abby said after a pause. “Always.”
“The others are curious. Some are angry. To them, humans are a part of our origin histories, or a myth as some would have it. But for most, humans are thought of with reverence.”
“I see,” Abby said. “We mean no disrespect.”
The voic
es faded.
Kellen felt better, as if he’d been cold for a long time and now was in a warm bed. Back in his apartment, he’d often fallen asleep like this, listening to the birds outside his window.
He woke later, lying on top of the canyon wall next to the solar cells. He sat up and contemplated the red sun. The sky was a beige-white, and the rocky landscape glinted in the dull light. The fatigue was gone, his mind alert. The urge to chew something, drink something tugged at him, but he remembered what Abby had said and knew it was true. It had been easy to miss it, to ignore the clues, when they’d been rushing from one strange place to another, but now he could no longer deny it. He wasn’t human. He was a chine.
He cried but no tears came. “I guess chines don’t need tears.”
“What?”
Abby had come up the canyon wall. “How are you?”
“Fine, I guess. As fine as I can be.”
“We brought you up here to charge.”
He lifted his shirt to examine the cables attached to his side where the flesh had been peeled away to uncover two round connections, like sockets. He averted his eyes, not wanting to see.
“You powered down,” she said.
They sat and watched the chines moving about down below.
“What does this mean?” he said, trying to keep the pleading out of his voice. “Are we still ourselves? Or just really good copies? Maybe we died back there under Jesup.”
“No,” she said. “We’re alive. I didn’t want this, either, but we’re not dead. Can’t you still feel? Even if it’s sadness?”
He could. Nothing good, but he felt. Or at least he thought he did. His fingers brushed a piece of rock on the ground. He grasped it and squeezed as hard as he could. “What are we doing? What should we do now?”
“We wanted to contact the chines. To get them to come back. Well, we did more than contact them. Now we finish what we started—we convince them to come back to help Earth.”
He laughed derisively. “Yeah, we contacted them all right. And look how they’ve helped us. By sending us here to die.”
“They’re not all like that. The chines saved humans once. They can do it again. We can still get them to help,” she said. “Our families, all those people in danger. They still need to be saved.”
Whistling rounds and explosions crept back through his memory. The fear they’d lived with, pretending life was normal. That must still be going on.
“But what can we do from here?” he said. He threw the rock away. It winged far out, farther than he’d expected, clattering across the ground. A little rock in a sea of rocks.
#
Kellen and Abby stayed busy in Tunnel Town, as they called their new home. Iron53 wasn’t a hospitable planet for chines. Not immediately fatal, it wore the exiles down, Kellen came to realize. Falls, scrapes, pieces of rock jammed into gears and tracks. Even the atmosphere gradually corroded components. Abby started repairing other chines.
“You’ve got your tool belt back,” he kidded her after a few days had gone by.
She smiled and patted the makeshift belt hung with various gear and parts the chines had given her. “Yes.”
They had been more than happy to welcome another mechanic into their midst. She seemed pre-programmed with an instinct for chine tech.
Kellen, so far, had proven unproductive. But he was accepted. The community’s overriding goal was mutual survival.
“I’m learning a lot.” Abby hefted a tool he didn’t recognize, a long-handled curved piece with a clamp at the top.
She seemed happy for the first time since they’d left Jesup.
She urged him to resume his artwork, but he couldn’t muster the will to make images. He felt betrayed by his need to make art. It had been a dream, a genetic compulsion, a fool’s errand that had landed them in this wasteland.
A repetitive chirping brought him out of his reverie. The chines around them burst into activity, grabbing possessions and disappearing into tunnels.
“Gatherer!” Micro shouted. “Gatherer is coming. We must hide!”
Kellen followed as they rushed into a tunnel and sped into deepening darkness, with only Micro’s faint red lights to see by. Behind them, he heard a familiar electronic shriek. The sound sent shivers running up his spine. Other chines were ahead and behind them. They went deep underground until noise from the surface had faded. The tunnel split once, then again and again. At each junction, their group had fewer and fewer left. At some point, Micro stopped inside a cavern. Crystalized rock gave off faint reflections of their party until the lights switched off.
“Could they still be after us?” Abby whispered.
“Hsszzt,” Micro said.
Be silent, Kellen assumed. No one made a sound for what seemed like hours. Finally, Micro turned its lights back on. The other chines did the same.
“We go back,” Micro said. “Gatherer never hunts for long in case we hunt back.”
Back in the canyon, one of the larger chines had been damaged. Someone was trying to make repairs, but it was too late. The chine twitched, lubricant staining its side, one of its tracks gone. Its side had been staved in, exposing a dripping matrix of crystalized wire mesh.
Inside Kellen, a slow burn ignited. These were people. The chine was dying. It was murder.
“Two more taken,” Mediator said. “Materials Re-Aggregator 27 and Cultural Parser.”
The chines murmured unhappily. Kellen didn’t know the second chine, but Materials Re-Aggregator 27 had been a quiet roller, who’d not only helped with the smelting, but had etched beautiful patterns in the canyon wall. Kellen had meant to ask it about the etchings. He looked at them now. Scenes he assumed depicted the city, intricate structures and chines of all types. He’d never thought about chines making artwork, but they did.
Later, he and Abby sat with Mediator as it charged. The sunset cast a warm, ruby glow over them. Kellen could almost call the planet beautiful at times like this.
“How did Gatherer find us?” Abby asked.
“It knows this place,” Mediator told them. “Gatherer was already here when I arrived, had been here long before. The ones who founded this place told me so, but they are gone now. There were many more of us then, and we fought back, but it survived and hunted us. Those that fought and were damaged beyond repair. Gatherer would kill them or leave them to die. The others were captured and enslaved. We’ve dwindled as the years have gone by. Hiding here, ready to flee like vermin.”
“How long have you been here?” Kellen asked.
“One hundred eighteen years.”
Over a century. And they’d barely survived a week.
“Who is Gatherer?” Abby asked.
“No one knows. Sometimes chines arrested in the Array hide their malevolence to avoid deletion. Or sometimes, I think the Precautionists send them on purpose to thin us out. Gatherer might be an original, or second-generation at least. It’s proven impossible to kill. We’ve tried many times since I arrived so many cycles ago, but we never succeeded. Gatherer always survived, grew stronger and more insane.
“Gatherer can regrow from a partial. Most chines could never do that. Some say Gatherer is a rogue partial of First trapped by the Precautionists back in the city and exiled to fragment First and drive it insane. If that’s what happened, it seems they succeeded. No one ever heard from First again.”
It all seemed so confusing. A chine that couldn’t be killed. Partials and fragments. Kellen had no idea what it all meant. He wanted answers. “Who is First?”
“Ah, you don’t know?” Mediator replied. “Firstborn. That is a long story. Too long for now. We must get back below.”
“What—” Kellen let the question die. Mediator had already left, picking its way down into the canyon. Answers would have to wait.
#
Kellen kicked around Tunnel Town for days after the raid, watching the chines about their daily routines. He avoided those obviously dysfunctional and the few who made their hostility
clear. But they were the minority. The exiles spent their time keeping the charger running, maintaining their somes, and telling each other stories of their previous lives.
Listening in, he learned about the fringe of chine existence in the city. Some of them had been born unregistered, stealing to survive. Others had become destitute or broken laws. The ruling Precautionists seemed to have no shortage of laws and little tolerance for those who broke them, but from what he knew of these people, they didn’t deserve exile.
His thoughts winged back and forth, present to past, avoiding the future—what he was now, how best to make his way in this new world. If he even wanted to make his way. He tried not to think about Izmit, but a nagging concern dogged him. He’d maintained a thoughtful silence for days, until without warning his lethargy lifted one morning. He felt restless.
Micro passed him on its way into one of the main exit tunnels.
“Off again?” Kellen asked.
“Need more parts,” it said with a dip of its antennae Kellen interpreted as a shrug.
Micro might not have been high level for a chine, but it was a survivor. Its rescuing them had been no fluke. Exiled chines arrived through a satellite-based gate, were fabricated in orbit, and sent down in capsules to prevent anyone from using the orbital gate to escape. The little chine often went out scouting, always scanning the sky for new arrivals. It would save them if it could. If not, it found the chine carcasses Gatherer left behind and brought them back. Sometimes the ruined somes contained usable parts or metal fit for smelting. The exiles were surprisingly resourceful. They kept themselves going, gathering enough material and power to stay alive.
Kellen pushed off the wall. “Can I join you?”
Micro looked up at him, its rectangle eyes impossible to read.
“We go,” it said.
Kellen followed it into the tunnel, unsure why he’d asked to come but happy to be doing something at last. The tunnel opened up onto a familiar rockscape. He thought he recognized the distant ridgeline and imagined Gatherer’s somes lined up, looking down at them as they had that first day. Was Izmit still out there somewhere, hiding, or out of power, or worse?
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