The Exo Project

by Andrew DeYoung

  “Grass,” Matthew said aloud now, reduced to monosyllables.

  “Yes,” Dunne said. She ran her hand over the top of it, letting the tips of the blades scratch at her glove. “Prairie grass.”

  “Does that mean this place will support life?” Matthew asked. “If grass can grow here, we might be able to survive too, right?”

  Dunne squinted and looked again at her handheld sensor. “I don’t know. A lot of organisms can survive in environments where humans would die almost immediately. At the bottom of the ocean, for instance—it’s a vibrant ecosystem, but if you put a human down there, they’d die within thirty seconds because of extreme water pressure and cold.”

  “Cut to the chase, Doc,” Sam said. “You’re the science officer, right? Well, give us some science here. Are we going to die or what?”

  Dunne poked at the display of her handheld sensor array, looking at one reading after another. “There’s oxygen in the air. More than on Earth, actually. Nitrogen. A bit more CO2 than I’d like to see, but it’s survivable.”

  “Any poisonous gases?” Matthew asked.

  Dunne shook her head without looking up. “Not that I can see. Though it wouldn’t take much to kill us, if there’s something small the sensor isn’t picking up.” She tapped again at the display. “Temperature is mild. About 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Fifty percent humidity. Gravity very close to Earth’s—I’m reading about 94 percent.”

  “What about water?” Matthew asked. “If there’re plants, they must be getting water from somewhere, right?”

  “I’m reading significant groundwater below the surface,” Dunne said.

  “Is it fresh? Drinkable?”

  Dunne squinted at the screen. “I can’t tell. But it doesn’t matter. We could dig wells, purify it if it’s undrinkable. All that matters is it’s there.”

  Matthew’s mind raced.

  Breathable air. Temperate climate. Water.

  “You mean to tell me that this place is actually …” Matthew trailed off, as if saying the rest aloud—actually habitable?—would jinx it somehow.

  Dunne looked up from the sensor screen, her lips parted.

  “I think so,” she said. There was a laugh in her voice. “I think we might be able to survive here.”

  “So … is it safe to take off our helmets?”

  Dunne nodded. “If these readings are correct.”

  They stood looking at each other for a few moments, not moving. It was still so hard to believe that they were safe. Matthew had been prepared to find a harsh landscape that would kill them. He’d never expected the planet they landed on to be one that might support life.

  “Aw, hell,” Sam said, his voice gruff. “I’ll do it.”

  He reached up and snapped his helmet off. He lifted it up over his head, then lowered it to his waist, breathing heavy through his nose.

  “Well?” Matthew asked.

  Sam made a gagging sound, his face contorted, and he fell to the ground in a convulsion.

  Dunne and Matthew rushed toward him. Matthew’s heart was racing.

  Then Sam rolled over laughing, a smile on his face.

  “You should have seen your faces,” he said. “It’s fine, all right? The air’s fine. You can take off your helmets. You’re not going to die.”

  Matthew looked at Dunne, grinning in spite of himself. He reached up to remove his helmet. The air rushed cool to fill his nostrils.

  The three of them took off their outer suits, twisting and snapping them away bit by bit as if shedding an exoskeleton. They’d just set the last pieces of their suits on the floor when Dunne’s handheld began buzzing.

  “What’s that?” Sam asked.

  Dunne looked at the screen. Her face fell, went gray. She looked as though she was going to be sick.

  “Another reading,” she said. “The sensor just picked it up.”

  “Picked what up?” Matthew asked.

  “Radiation,” Dunne said. “Lots of it. More than there was on Earth when we left.”

  Matthew looked into the sky. “But it’s night. How can there be radiation?”

  “It’s not solar radiation that I’m picking up. The readings are coming from the ground. If I didn’t know better, I’d say …” She trailed off.

  “You’d say what?” Sam demanded.

  “I’d say that the planet itself is radioactive.”

  30

  “What do you mean?” Sam asked. “We’re just going to bake down here? Burn up and die, just like we would’ve on Earth?”

  Dunne didn’t say anything.

  “But what about the grass? How can it survive on a planet with such high radiation?” Matthew asked.

  “It must have evolved a way to survive in the environment,” Dunne said. “Like I said, organisms can thrive in all sorts of hostile ecosystems.”

  “Just not us.”

  “Right.” Dunne sounded defeated. “Not us.”

  “How long do you think we can survive?”

  Dunne shrugged. “Twenty-four hours, max. Maybe less.”

  “Christ, a whole day? Is it going to hurt?”

  Dunne shook her head. “We can use the suicide pills. As soon as we notice the effects of the radiation and confirm that we won’t survive, we can go back in the ship and take the pills.”

  Matthew felt sick to his stomach. They’d been so close. The planet seemed to have everything they needed to keep them alive. They were going to survive.

  But it was just another false hope. He was going to die after all.

  “How long is this going to take?” Sam asked.

  “About an hour before we feel the effects of the radiation,” Dunne said. “Maybe less.”

  The transceiver, clipped to Matthew’s waist, crackled.

  “Status, Corvus.”

  Matthew told Control what was happening.

  “Roger, Corvus. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah,” Matthew said, his voice hoarse as he spoke into the transceiver. “Us too.”

  “Look, Matthew,” Alison began, then paused. There seemed to be real regret, real sadness, in her voice. “This is going to sound callous, given what you’re going through over there, but I have to ask. Before you take the pills. You need to send confirmation of the radiation. We need to be sure that H-240 isn’t habitable. You understand, don’t you?”

  Matthew nodded, then clicked the button on the side of the transceiver again. “I do. We’ll let you know.”

  Matthew, Dunne, and Sam wandered through the prairie as they waited for the effects of the radiation to take hold. Their paths diverged and crossed at random as they circled around the ship, not walking together but careful not to let each other or the Corvus out of their sight and get lost in the unmarked expanse of grass.

  Matthew paused at the top of a small hill and looked up. Above him, two birdlike creatures flitted about in the air. Their bodies were black, but where the light caught them their fine feathers glistened white.

  It was night where they had landed, but the light of a sunrise was beginning to warm the horizon. Two moons were still visible in the weakening darkness, dancing together in the sky and then gradually parting. On the far horizon, a larger orb rose and moved so quickly across the sky that Matthew could have traced its path with his finger. As it came overhead, Matthew’s aimless steps brought him close to Dunne again, and as the moon peaked over their heads, Matthew watched Dunne’s gray-flecked hair lift up into the air and float like tentacles in water. He felt a lightness wash over his own body; his arms lifted up at his sides without his telling them to. Then the moon passed on and the weight returned to his limbs.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dunne said. “At first it was only the two moons I saw, but I guess that makes three. Looks like that one orbits so close that it affects the planet’s gravitational pull. They might even be in a binary orbit.”

  Matthew watched the moon until it set on the far horizon, then looked back to Dunne. “Shouldn’t we
be feeling something by now? Burns? Radiation sickness?”

  Dunne nodded. “Yes. We should be feeling the effects of the radiation.”

  “But I’m not. Are you?”

  “No.”

  They angled their steps back toward the ship, walking faster now, and in lockstep. Sam walked to meet them.

  “Maybe the radiation isn’t high enough. Maybe it’s too low for us to feel the effects,” Matthew said.

  “That would be bad too. If the radiation was low enough, we wouldn’t be able to feel it in the moment, but it would still kill us over the long haul. Cancer. Birth defects. Mutation.” Dunne shook her head. “But even so, that can’t be right. The handheld told me that the radiation was higher than it is on Earth. We should be feeling some pain right now, even if it’s only small, like a low-grade sunburn.”

  They got closer to the ship. “What’s going on?” Sam asked.

  Dunne ignored him and went straight for the open airlock, where she’d left her handheld.

  “Could it be malfunctioning?” Matthew asked. “Maybe your readings were wrong.”

  “What’s malfunctioning? What are you two talking about?”

  Dunne stabbed at the handheld with her index finger. “I suppose it’s possible. But it was right about everything else. The breathable air, the temperature.”

  Matthew touched the transceiver clipped to his collar. “Control, this is Corvus.”

  “Go ahead, Corvus. What’s your status?”

  “We’re wondering about the odds of a malfunction in the handheld sensor array.”

  A beat of silence as Alison checked with her superiors.

  “We haven’t seen any occurrences of that, Corvus, but anything’s possible. What’s going on over there?”

  “What is it?” Sam asked, his voice low as though to hide his words from the people back on Earth. “We might be safe after all?”

  Dunne sighed. “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe? You sound disappointed. We’re still alive, we’re not burning up like you said we would. Crack a smile or something, doc.”

  “I just don’t trust it.”

  “Corvus, we need your status. What’s going on over there?”

  “So what do we do now?” Matthew asked.

  “Maybe nothing,” Sam said. “Maybe this is the one. The planet we were sent here to find. I mean, there was always a chance, right? A chance that we’d actually be the ones?”

  “Corvus, talk to us. Is H-240 a positive planetary match? Is that what you’re telling us?”

  “We have to wait,” Dunne said. “The readings might be wrong. But they might be right. There might be radiation here. We don’t know.”

  “How can we be sure?” Matthew asked. “Do we wait for five, ten years until one of us gets cancer?

  “Ten years?” Sam gaped. “You’ve got to be kidding me. What the hell kind of plan is that?”

  “Corvus, don’t leave us hanging over here. Tell us something.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Sam grunted. “Would you shut her up? I can’t hear myself think.”

  Matthew snatched the transceiver from his collar and flung it toward the ship, where it whizzed through the open door and clattered down on the floor of the airlock. He turned to Dunne. “So what do we do? What’s the plan?”

  “Tests,” she said. “Soil samples. And grass. Blood and tissue from the two of you. I need to see whether or not the radiation is manifesting at a cellular level. Then we’ll know for sure. Then we’ll know if this is a planet where the human race can survive.”

  “How long will that take?” Matthew asked.

  Dunne squinted at the ground. “Not long,” she said finally. “Just a few hours for the tests.”

  Matthew breathed out sharply and nodded.

  “All right, let’s do it. When do we get started?”

  31

  kiva

  A pinkish orb embedded in a sea of black—their world, Gle’ah, seen from a far distance.

  The bird made of metal, stone, and fire, blazing through the atmosphere and coming down through the air to kneel on the grassland.

  A door opening in the bird’s side and three suited figures coming out, their faces obscured by gleaming shells that surrounded their heads.

  One of the figures removing his shell, his face coming into view.

  The boy. The boy from her dream. Matthew. His eyes cast about, this way and that, then fell on her.

  His eyes were blue. They darted off to the side, and when they came back to Kiva they were filled with panic.

  “Look out!” Matthew shouted, and Kiva looked away to see one of the other figures pointing a smooth gray stick with an opening at one end toward where she stood.

  The stick roared, and the vision ended in a blaze of strange white light.

  When Kiva opened her eyes, she saw Quint’s face hovering above hers, the girl’s features distorted by fear and her cheeks mottled with tears. Behind her stood the Sisters, silent at last as they craned to see if Kiva was all right.

  “Kiva!” Quint said. “Are you awake? Is that really you?”

  Kiva let out a final gasp as the last of the blinding pain left her body. The relief that flooded over her as the vision receded was a physical sensation, a coolness that spread like a gulp of water from her belly to her fingertips. She panted, filling her lungs with air, pulled herself up to an elbow, then answered Quint.

  “Of course it’s me. What kind of question is that?”

  She tried to smile, to turn the whole thing into a joke, but Quint’s frown deepened.

  “You spoke,” she said. “You opened your eyes and spoke to me. But you didn’t sound like yourself.”

  Kiva bent her head toward Quint and pitched her voice low.

  “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘They’re here.’”

  Kiva winced, hoping that no one else had heard—but when she looked over Quint’s shoulder to the faces of the Sisters, she knew at once that they had, that those who’d crowded closest to her and Quint during the vision had heard the entranced thing that she’d said and quickly spread it through the crowd to those who stood on tiptoes at the back. Voices buzzed low on the air as the Sisters whispered to each other.

  “Vagra, what should we do?” a voice called from somewhere in the middle of the crowd.

  Kiva closed her eyes and let out a long sigh. She’d managed to keep the Sisters’ doubts about her leadership at bay—by confronting Kyne, she’d convinced them that she had what it took to be Vagra, and with her vision she’d demonstrated that the Ancestors truly did communicate through her. But now that she’d convinced them, she’d have to lead them. Over and over again, she’d have to prove that she was worthy to lead the Vagri—every day, every hour, every minute, for the rest of her life.

  Kiva lifted herself to her feet by degrees, moving slowly to give herself time to think of her next move. Still uncertain of her body, she first tested the strength of one leg, then the other, as she drew herself to her full height. As she stood the Sisters backed away slowly. Only Quint stayed by her side.

  Kiva scanned the crowd, looking for someone.

  “Liana,” she said when she’d found her.

  Liana stepped forward and bowed her head. “Yes, Vagra.”

  Kiva gritted her teeth at the formal way Liana spoke to her—her own mother, forced to bow and genuflect, to pretend that they meant nothing more to each other than a Vagra did to one of her subjects.

  “You’re still loyal to me, is that right? You came here tonight to oppose this little rebellion?”

  Liana nodded. “I did, Vagra. I am.”

  “Then I want you to lead these women back to the village.”

  “What about the Strangers?” Liana asked.

  “Leave the Strangers to me,” Kiva said, speaking loudly so that everyone could hear her. She turned to the rest of the crowd. “Remember your responsibilities, Sisters, the roles to which the Ancestors have called each of you. The me
n and children look to you for wisdom, for guidance. What if they wake in the morning and wonder where you’ve gone? Enough of this fighting. You must return.”

  The Sisters were silent. Some hung their heads. Others flexed their jaws, gave each other sidelong glances. The meaning of their expressions wasn’t clear, but Kiva could sense that not all of the Sisters were taking kindly to her show of authority.

  She’d have to deal with them later, though. There were more pressing matters for her to see to.

  “Thruss? Rehal?” she called as the Sisters trudged out of the pit.

  The two girls turned and walked to Kiva.

  “Forgive us, Kiva,” Rehal said when she’d come close.

  Kiva gave her a sharp look. Rehal and Thruss had been her friends, once—but seeing their faces among the crowd of women supporting Kyne was a betrayal she wouldn’t soon forget.

  “Vagra, I mean,” Rehal said, chastened. “Please, Vagra, we were only afraid.”

  Thruss nodded. “We don’t support Kyne. We only wanted to hear what she would say.”

  Kiva lifted a hand. “Enough,” she said. “You want to make it up to me? Stand with me now. Come with me to meet the Strangers.”

  Both girls were silent. There was fear in their eyes. But they nodded.

  “What about me?” came a voice at Kiva’s waist.

  She looked down. Quint.

  “I thought you’d gone,” Kiva said, crouching to her sister’s level. “You should go with the women. I want you back in the village, safe in your bed.”

  But Quint shook her head. “I want to come with you.”

  “Maybe I can help, too,” came another voice.

  Kiva lifted her head. It was Po. He’d come forward from where he’d been standing by the bonfire, his weapon still propped on the ground.

  “You,” Kiva said, rising to her full height once more.

  She advanced toward Po with her finger outstretched and jabbed him in the chest. “You’re part of this, too. You left the village to join the Forsaken because you were mad at me, is that it? And now you’re siding with Kyne, trying to turn the Forsaken and the Sisters against me.”