Dark Humanity

by Gwynn White

  She pressed the trigger button.

  Flash.

  The POCK stopped squealing. It flopped onto its back, paws jerking in the air.

  “Yay!” Colden yelled. “Yay, Goto! First kill!”

  Nausea surged in Elfrida’s throat. No way am I going to let Kristiansen see me throw up. She swaggered over to her kill and kicked it.

  The POCK was so light in Ganymede’s gravity that it felt like kicking an animal-shaped pillow. Elfrida smelt singed hair. She saw the blackened spot on the POCK’s chest fur. She had hit it dead center, as it stood on its hind paws, gesticulating at them.

  “Did Shyaka say anything about what we’re meant to do with the bodies?” she asked, swallowing.

  “Take them back for the trucks to pick up,” Colden said. “I guess we should just leave this one here and get it when we come back.”

  She high-fived Elfrida. Looking in her eyes, Elfrida understood that Colden was as squicked out as she was. She felt grateful for Colden’s show of bravado, even if it was for Kristiansen’s benefit.

  “I’m going to get the next one,” Colden vowed.

  ★

  An hour or so later, their kill tally stood at Elfrida—five; Colden—four; Kristiansen—zero. They had reached the end of the canyon. The ice walls converged into the darkness. The tracks ended in a snowbank.

  “I’m ready for a snack,” Colden said.

  “If we had a fire, we could roast a POCK,” Elfrida giggled. She’d grown blasé about killing the overgrown hamsters. You just had to think of it as a game, and not think about the way they waved their little pink hands at you. Think about winning. The Venus Project. Ten assignments for forty-three people.

  They sat down on the ice, insulated by their thermal layers. Their belt pouches contained emergency rations: cubes of ‘chocolate’ and ‘liverwurst’ made from nutriblocks, the ubiquitous food of humanity in space. They chewed in silence. Walking in micro-gravity was tiring. You had to use different muscle groups.

  Kristiansen gazed into the darkness beyond the reach of their headlamps. “Something’s been bothering me,” he said.

  “Has it?” Colden said, “Has it really, Kristiansen? Why don’t you tell us about it?”

  Colden’s voice held a dangerous edge. Elfrida realized that Colden was genuinely pissed off with Kristiansen. Elfrida felt blindsided. She was used to sharing their emotional states via text, but without a network connection, they’d gotten out of sync.

  Kristiansen blinked, reacting to Colden’s tone. “I was just thinking about the air circulation in this place.”

  “Screw the air circulation. Why haven’t you even tried to shoot any POCKs? Me and Goto have been doing all the hard work. I’ve got blood on my hands. And if you think we’re going to split our kills three ways, think again.”

  “I wouldn’t expect that.”

  “So what’s your problem? I thought you wanted one of those Venus assignments. You’re going to be completely screwed.”

  “Well,” Kristiansen said, “if you must know, I think you’re misinterpreting the test.”

  “As in?”

  “They don’t want us to kill the POCKs. They want us to not kill them.”

  Elfrida felt a pang of worry. Kristiansen was often right about this kind of thing. Colden looked at her, made the universal finger-twiddling gesture for crazy. But Elfrida said, “How do you figure? Not killing them, that wouldn’t be much of a test.”

  “That’s what we have to figure out. It’s a puzzle. The test is solving it.”

  “Oh, that’s just nuts,” Colden said.

  “No, Kristiansen, go on. Why do you think we have to not kill them?”

  He spread his hands. “Just a hunch.”

  “OK, you go on your hunch,” Colden said. “Me and Goto will go by the rules. Which were very clearly explained to us. I don’t see much room for misinterpretation there.” Still visibly pissed off, she unwrapped another cube of ‘chocolate’ and popped it in her mouth. “This stuff isn’t bad,” she said with her mouth full. “Better than your average nutriblock-based confection.”

  “Only the highest quality for the intrepid POCK hunters,” Elfrida murmured.

  The idea of Kristiansen’s hunch troubled her. She wanted to push him to explain, but not if it was going to make Colden blow her tokamak. Colden did have a temper.

  But she could not refrain from asking, “Kristiansen, what were you saying about the air circulation?”

  “Just that there has to be some active circulation mechanism. The crops stabilize the atmosphere in Farm Dome 1, but if there’s no ventilation system, the air in here should be really stale. But it isn’t.”

  This was true. The crisp cold air reminded Elfrida of hiking in the Alps. Without the views.

  “And if you sit perfectly still, you can feel a draught.”

  They all did. Colden froze in mid-chew, her cheeks bulging. After a second, Kristiansen licked his index finger and held it up.

  “It’s definitely coming from that direction.”

  They stared into the darkness that concealed the head of the canyon.

  “I kind of want to go that way,” Kristiansen said. “Just to check it out.”

  Elfrida groaned. “Then we’ll just have to come back. And we’ve already got so many POCKs, it’s going to be a huge pain to haul them out of here, no matter how light they are.”

  “Yeah, and what if Malone and those guys come and steal our kills while we’re out of earshot?” Colden said. “That’s what’s worrying me.”

  “I’ll help you carry them,” Kristiansen said. “If we can go that way first. We don’t have to go far …” His pale eyebrows quirked in the familiar expression that Elfrida had always taken for amused condescension. She now realized in a flash that Kristiansen was trying to convey self-deprecating humor. He was tacitly admitting that his idea was crazy. Colden, however, took it for condescension, same as always.

  “Oh, whatever,” she said, standing up. “We don’t need your help. Right, Goto? We’re going to go and haul our POCKs back to the entrance. We might even bag some more on the way. If you want to go exploring, you can go by yourself.”

  Elfrida stood up. Her ass was numb from sitting on the ice, thermals or no thermals.

  Kristiansen sat there for a moment. Then he, too, stood up. “OK. I guess I’ll see you back at the entrance.”

  Elfrida opened her mouth. Closed it again. Shyaka hadn’t said anything about not going off on their own. And her own duty, as a friend, was obviously to stick with Colden.

  The two girls started back the way they’d come at a leisurely hopping pace.

  “Last one,” Colden said, unwrapping a chocolate nutriblock. “Want half?”

  “Sure. These really are yums.”

  “Ganymede’s a food exporter. They’re the main source of calories for all those wacky squatters in the Belt. I wish the Space Corps would procure our rations from here, instead of whatever supplier on Earth can pony up the biggest kickbacks.”

  “No kidding.”

  The darkness seemed bigger, somehow, now that there were just two of them. Colder. Menacing.

  “He’ll be fine,” Colden asserted suddenly. “It was dumb of him to go off on his own. But he’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, he totally will. There’s nothing dangerous in here, after all.”

  “No, and if he gets lost, he can just use his radio.”

  “Right. In fact, let’s try him now. We ought to keep an open line of communication.”

  “Sure.” Colden unclipped her radio from her belt and spoke into it. “Kristiansen, hey Kristiansen, you big Swiss cheese, do you copy?”

  “You’re supposed to say ‘over,’” Elfrida said.

  “Over.”

  They waited. The radio’s power light glowed red. It was fully charged. But Kristiansen did not reply.

  “Maybe you didn’t push the talk button.”

  “I did.”

  “Should we try someone else? Ju
st to make sure it’s working?”

  “I’m sure it’s working. No, Kristiansen’s just being a dick.” Colden launched herself into a soaring hop. If Elfrida didn’t know better, she would have thought Colden was in a hurry to get back to the others.

  Following her, Elfrida spotted a hole in the snowbank on their right. That had to be where they had scared up a POCK. If so, the POCK’s body should be right here.

  “Colden! Wait!”

  “What?”

  “I think we’ve come too far. Look, there’s one of their holes. But where’s the body?”

  “We must’ve passed it. Oh, freaking great. We’ll have to go back.”

  “We couldn’t have passed it. It should be right here. There’s the den, and we left them exactly where we shot them. We didn’t move them.”

  “Maybe it’s in the other track.”

  The tracks were twin ruts, printed with frozen caterpillar-tread patterns, separated by a flattened bank of snow. The girls jumped from one track to the other, shining their headlamps around.

  “It isn’t here,” Elfrida said.

  “Grrr. Those botheads must’ve come and stolen it; just like I predicted. There is no solidarity in this cadre. Let’s go see if the other ones we shot are still there.”

  “Wait!”

  “What now?”

  “Look at this.”

  Elfrida had just noticed something bizarre. The snowbank had been broken down, on the opposite side of the tracks from the POCK’s den. A POCK-width trail led away into the darkness. The dry, light snow had avalanched in and partially filled it up, but it sure looked like …

  “Someone dragged our POCK away,” Elfrida said.

  Colden gripped her elbows. “Or, something.”

  “Oh my God, Colden. Don’t scare me.”

  “The aliens are here,” Colden intoned. “For countless aeons they’ve lurked in a network of ice tunnels, which no one knows about, beneath the surface of Ganymede. Now, they’re emerging to revenge themselves on the humans who dared to invade their world.”

  ★

  There were no aliens. Science had proven it, insofar as you could prove a negative. Absolutely no empirical evidence suggested that life had evolved anywhere in the universe except Earth.

  But in the sub-freezing darkness, with that inexplicable spoor at their feet, the scientific consensus did not have the power to silence Elfrida’s imagination.

  ★

  “It was probably another POCK,” she said, grasping at straws. “It might have come to retrieve its friend.”

  “Its friend? They’re animals, Goto. They don’t have feelings.”

  “Animals do too have feelings. They mourn.”

  “Cetaceans do, of course. And elephants. But these are hamsters.”

  “Well, what else could it have been?”

  “I don’t know,” Colden admitted.

  Elfrida wondered what kind of aliens might live in the ice of Ganymede. Her imagination suggested lots of legs, but that was silly. They would need to excavate tunnels to dwell in, and for that they’d need heavy claws. Or jaws. Very, very strong jaws.

  “Oh, frag it,” she said. “Let’s go find the others.”

  “No,” Colden said. “Kristiansen. He’s out there by himself. We should make sure he’s all right.”

  Elfrida was surprised, and then she wasn’t surprised. Colden had a temper, but she also had a conscience. In the past, Elfrida had often relied on Colden to make the right choice for her. This was clearly one of those times. “Of course, we need to find him first,” she nodded.

  They returned to the head of the canyon, staying close together.

  A fresh trail led into the snowbank at the head of the tracks.

  Elfrida went first, still ashamed that she had thought of leaving Kristiansen behind. “Kristiansen!” she yelled. “Where are you?”

  You … you …

  “Stop, I heard something,” Colden gasped.

  “It was just the echoes.”

  “No, it sounded like a voice.”

  After a tense second, Colden shouted, “Kristiansen! Stop being a dick! I’m sorry, OK?”

  This time, not so much as an echo came out of the darkness.

  Elfrida waded through the snow. The sides of Kristiansen’s trail—if that was what this was—rose higher and higher. The infill reached her collarbone. Kristiansen must have tunneled through here. But of course, no tunnel roof would hold in this powder, so it had fallen in, leaving a shallow valley.

  You have to do this, she told herself. You wanted to go into space. You applied to the Space Corps. Made the cut. Suffered through training. You can’t wimp out now.

  She was breast-stroking through the loose snow. It drifted into her face, stinging the unprotected skin around her eyes. Tears slid down to the top of her balaclava.

  This is a test. A test. A test.

  Her feet slipped all over the place. Snow had built up on the soles of her boots, hampering their gecko grips. Worse, every swing of her arms collapsed the trail’s sides, making it harder for Colden, behind her, to get through.

  This is crazy. We should go back.

  Ice loomed in her headlamp. She lunged forward and hugged the slagged, refrozen cliff.

  “Thank God,” Colden said. “I was about to call it quits.” Buried up to her chin, she swept an arm up and wiped snow off her face. Her woolly hat was caked white.

  “The next p-p-part should be easier.” Elfrida’s teeth were chattering. She knew from hiking on Earth that once you got this cold, your core body temperature could drop dangerously fast. She didn’t say anything to Colden, but she knew they needed to get out of the snow as soon as possible. “We can just jump up there. That’s what he must have done.”

  Her headlamp revealed a precipice just three meters overhead. An easy jump when you weighed less than 10 kilos. Especially when you had a friend who would let you stand on her shoulders.

  Elfrida pushed off from Colden’s shoulders and landed in another snowbank. “Oof! Sorry, did I knock a lot of snow down on you?”

  “Yeah, but that’s OK. I’m covered in it, anyway.”

  Elfrida lay flat—gritting her teeth as snow floated into her face—and reached down to grab Colden’s mitten. Colden jumped, Elfrida jerked, and Colden came flying up like a ballerina.

  “Oh God, I’m cold.”

  The snow reached their waists. The ledge was about as wide as the excavator tracks below. The cliff in back topped out in another ledge.

  They climbed a total of three more ledges. The topmost one was almost entirely choked by snow.

  “I think we’re under the roof,” Elfrida said.

  They stood on the edge of the precipice, holding onto each other, their backs to a wall of snow. Their footing was precarious. Their headlamps did not reach the bottom of the canyon. Elfrida knew that they were only 10 or 12 vertical meters from the place where they’d sat to eat their snacks, but it felt like she was looking into a bottomless abyss, where anything at all might be waiting.

  “I’m freezing,” Colden moaned. “Why couldn’t we have had EVA suits?”

  “They didn’t expect us to go exploring.”

  “This was a stupid idea. Goto, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it was the right thing to do. You’re a better person than I am, Colden. I was just going to leave him.”

  “It was stupid,” Colden insisted. “They hit us over the head with that in training, didn’t they? You can’t be a hero in space. There’s no margin of error in artificial environments. If you have the chance to rescue someone, that’s great, if you know all the risk factors and you’ve run your simulations. But if the choice is to walk into a pile of unknowns, you have to just leave that person, or you’ll end up dying.”

  “That’s if you’re playing by the rules.”

  “Well, the rules are there to keep us alive.” This sounded odd, coming from Colden, who ignored Space Corps rules on a daily basis. But maybe she regretted that now. �
��I guess because there’s air in here, I forgot that we’re 630 million kilometers from home.”

  The bald figure galvanized Elfrida. “Let’s try the radio again.”

  They both unclipped their radios and tried every preset channel.

  Nothing came through except static.

  “I guess signals don’t travel that well through ice, after all,” Colden said. “Those metalfuckers. This is the test. They’re culling us.”

  “Ha, ha. Not even the Space Corps is that sadistic.”

  “No, you’re right. They would be too scared of lawsuits. It’s that animal Shyaka. He’s a Hutu.”

  “A what?”

  “A Hutu. It’s a tribe, where I come from. I’m a Tutsi.”

  “Um, you don’t have to tell me your personal information,” Elfrida said. She was both touched, and frightened, by the confidence. As close as they were, she and Colden had never talked about their respective ethnic heritages. It just wasn’t something you did. She had guessed that Colden came from Africa, because of her dark skin and flat nose (her striking silver tresses were obviously a more recent modification). But beyond that, Elfrida had never cared to pry. Colden was her friend. That was all that mattered. And now, Colden was telling her this personal stuff. It made it seem like Colden expected them both to die here.

  But we aren’t going to die. We’re only a couple of kilometers from the exit.

  A bit of snow can’t kill you.

  (Elfrida was trying very hard not to think about whoever, or whatever, had hauled their POCKs away.)

  “Looks like there might be less snow over there,” she said. “Let’s check it out. Maybe there’s another way down; an easier one.”

  She shuffled along the ledge. Colden followed, clinging to her arm. “I guess you have to be from Africa to understand tribal stuff. It’s intense. I went to college in italy to get away from it, actually.”

  “Hey, I’m from Italy. Well, not from from, but …” Elfrida was half Austrian and half Japanese, not that she was in the habit of sharing that information with people.

  “Are you? I never knew.” Colden hesitated, but only for a second. “I would be really honored if you told me more about that sometime. But the point is, I never expected to meet a Hutu on freaking Ganymede.”