Improbable Botany

by Wayward

  She stepped inside, tabbing it locked behind her. That alone might cause suspicion, but all the crew were in the comms shack, full attention on the screens, speculating on what they saw. It’d be a few minutes before anyone noticed she’d even gone, and a few more before someone called her to find out where she was.

  The safe was in the bottom of her locker. She moved two pairs of shoes to get to it: boots, hard and useful, and running shoes, more an extravagance, given they’d never have native sand adhered to their soles, black volcanic grit worn smooth by the vast, ever-churning ocean.

  She dragged the safe across the floor and heaved it up onto her low bunk. She wiped her index finger against her thumb, testing for dirt and moisture, anything that might interfere with the lock verifying her identity.

  When it had read the whorls and lines and compared them with the map in its memory the door clicked open.

  She reached past the automatic pistol and the two clips of bullets for the envelope. There were all kinds of dire warnings printed on it, who it was intended for and no other, what circumstances were needed, the penalties for unauthorised access. She wondered what force those prohibitions really had, this far from home.

  The envelope needed to be ripped open. She pulled the strip, listening to the tear of the plasticised paper, then pulled the single sheet out. She pressed it flat, trying to control her breathing as she read the bald black print FIRST CONTACT PROTOCOL at the top of the page.

  She read the instructions once, then read them again; not for the actual words, but for the implicit consequences of them. Up to that point, she hadn’t understood the need for the pistol, nor the training she’d received to be able to use one. She got the gun, checked the safety, slid in a clip and chambered the first round.

  Playtime was over. Important play, unleashing the curiosity of three women and five men on a exoplanetary biota evolved enough to be interesting, immature enough to leave the landmasses nothing but bare rock. But play nevertheless.

  She put the paper back in the envelope and the envelope back in the safe and the safe back in her locker. She retrieved the pistol from her bed and for the want of anywhere else to put it, tucked it in the waistband of her trousers. She thought for a moment about covering the butt with her top, but no. She had to do this right, first time, without hesitation.

  Her room was the same as everyone else’s, off the same corridor: it was just closer to the important parts of the ship. So when she slipped back out, she had only a few steps to take before she could hang off the door frame and watch what the others were doing.

  Not only had they not noticed her go, they didn’t notice her return. She looked at their curved backs, all leaning over the consoles, while their hands either gestured expressively or dipped down to dab commands to sensors and instruments.

  “Object’s delta V has increased ten percent, now at point two three of c.”

  “Trajectory puts it above the plane of the ecliptic at well over escape velocity. Whatever it is, it’s not staying.”

  “The bolometer gives a reading of three and a half thousand Kelvin for the drive. They have fusion, whoever they are.”

  “I’ve a preliminary identification on the system it left, assuming a steady point three c.”

  “Do we know where it’s going next?”

  “More importantly, do we know why it came here?”

  “Refuelling? It went very close to the photosphere.”

  “Unless it was desperate for the slingshot instead.”

  She listened to smart people make smart conjectures for a little longer, but the protocol was definite. She had to do this hard thing straight away, and without discussion.

  She cleared her throat, and when they either ignored her, or just assumed she was clearing her throat, she did it again, with more obvious affectation.

  Her voice, when it came, sounded small.

  “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m going to have to clear the room.”

  They turned, one by one, and it was at that moment she knew it was her, and them, whereas before it had always been us.

  “I’ve opened the First Contact protocols. You have to leave here until I’ve done what I need to do.”

  She wasn’t sure who first noticed the gun in her waistband, but its presence was communicated with a rapid series of looks and nudges. The lights in the comms didn’t do anything for anyone’s complexion, but even those with dark skin went pale.

  “Now,” she said, and it was the first, the only time she’d ever pulled rank. She kept her hands exactly where they were, on the door frame, but her knuckles were turning white.

  “Can’t we talk – ”

  “No.”

  “Can you at least – ”

  “No.” She stood aside and made it quite clear that she wanted them to comply, and that was the end of it.

  They filed out. Some stared resolutely at the floor as they stepped over the threshold. Others caught her gaze and held it as they passed. They felt hurt, but perhaps if they’d guessed what her orders were, they might have staged more of a protest. Or perhaps they had guessed, and had come to a swifter acceptance of them than she had.

  When the last one had dragged their heels out, she closed the door, and started the sequence that would maroon, and possibly kill, them all.

  ~

  It took them a week to spot that the fly-by had had another purpose above a simple course-correction. By which point, their orbiting carrier and their only way of returning to or communicating with Earth had been a week gone.

  No one spoke to her. One of the crew just posted the information on the ship’s board and copied her the link, so she could make her own conclusions untrammelled with told-you-sos and should’ve-waiteds.

  She looked at the spinning shapes again, their motion extrapolated from sightings through the space-based telescope they had in orbit. She could speculate as well as the next man or woman: she had degrees in astrophysics and geophysics. There were five objects, seemingly identical, the size of skyscrapers, towing billowing kilometres-wide sails behind them. Probes, certainly. With passengers, possibly, as they were certainly bigger than the ship-and-carrier combination that had brought her there. They were slowing down as they moved out of the blinding glare of starlight and into successively wider orbits with each revolution, making it all too clear that they were here to stay.

  It had been estimated that the previous star they’d visited had been fifty years earlier, ship-time. Its next port of call would be another binary system thirty-four years hence. Either the pilots of their brief visitor didn’t get bored, or had some sort of deep-sleep, or lived on a generation ship, or – there were no pilots and everything was automatic.

  All of this was information that Earth needed. She wanted to explain that the decision had been out of her hands. She’d agreed to follow the First Contact protocol, sight unseen, after she’d been offered the captaincy and before they’d confirmed her in her post. Perhaps she’d felt safe, knowing that in nearly sixty years of stellar exploration they’d never found anything more evolved than a fish-thing. But there she was: it had happened on her watch, forty-five light years from home. It wasn’t part of her to claim she’d been crossing her fingers when she’d made her solemn promise.

  In six weeks’ time, the carrier would finish tunnelling through h-space to emerge again somewhere outside the orbit of Neptune. She had no idea what the response would be: it might be anything from another exploration crew like hers, to a barely sub-light relativistic kill vehicle that would crash the delicate balance between stellar gravity and nuclear fusion and cause a nova that would incinerate the whole planetary system of six major bodies and twenty-seven moons.

  ~

  Having singularly failed to communicate with any and all of them, the First Contact protocol had gone from hubris to folly. So when it became clear that all the visitor’s ships were coming to them, she wanted to meet them outside.

  She had never felt more isolated, suiting up by
herself. Everyone had a different way of coping, but at least they didn’t have to cope alone. She carried on her own research, she played games on the ship’s computer, she read books and listened to music, she left long, rambling entries on the ship’s log. What she couldn’t do was have a conversation. Give orders, yes. Talk, laugh, cry with another human being?

  She lowered the helmet over her head, twisted it so that it locked, and checked all the life support systems. The suit over-pressured briefly, turning her limbs into plump sausages as it checked for leaks. Her ears popped, then popped again as the air was sucked back in.

  The airlock bathed her in ultraviolet light, hard enough to cause the visor to go dark, hard enough to kill anything living on the flexible white surface of the suit’s skin. Then it emptied all the oxygen-rich atmosphere they were used to breathing back into the ship, and replacing it with the oxygen-poor one outside. She could breathe it, even do work in it with frequent rests, but the space suit was for the planet’s protection, not hers.

  The door opened, and she stepped outside.

  The ship had been landed a little way from the beach, on what would have been a grass-covered dune, if there had been grass, but was just a wind-blown mound of coarse volcanic sand, as black as coal. They’d had the luxury of choosing their landing place – and they could still move their ship to anywhere they wanted – but it had seemed ideal for their studies.

  The sea offshore was shallow, teamed with life, and the coastline appeared stable, with a reef a couple of hundred metres out. She lifted her gaze from the line of white breakers to the sky.

  If the land was dark, and the sea milky, the view above the horizon glowed. Permanent high cloud, rich in ice, fogged the hard yellow-white light from the primary, suffusing the whole sky with a luminous shine. Lower, greyer clouds scudded between her and the fuzzy image of a sun painted high up on the dome of light.

  She wanted to feel the wind tugging at her hair, the prickling of salt spray drying on her face. She want to feel the sand between her toes and her fingers. She wanted to be part of its bleak, sparse beauty.

  She walked down to the beach, to the strand-line where they parked the hovercraft. It was a little thing, carried three people if they didn’t mind sitting on boxes of sampling equipment and, being open to the elements, was as noisy as hell. She liked it, and often – up until recently – drove the biologist and zoologist and oceanographer around when she wasn’t busy with her telescopes.

  She climbed awkwardly up its side and sat in the pilot’s seat. Though it should be a helmsman’s, being a boat. She looked up, and waited. Of course she wasn’t going to see anything: she’d actually see less than staying inside, watching on the telescope feed, but if the calculations were correct – she’d done them, and checked them – then the five towers the visitor had left behind would enter orbit right there, up in the eastern sky.

  The craft had jettisoned their sails along with their fearsome interstellar velocity. They were coasting, no minute adjustments or corrections along the way. A civilisation that could thread a line of stars with a single sublight ship presumably had no difficulty in making in-system travel look both easy and elegant.

  She stared up at the shine of the sky, aware of the clock turning its seconds over in the corner of her eye but unseeing of the actual minutes. When she knew it was past time for the craft to have manoeuvred themselves around the planet, she sighed and started to get up.

  She saw the flash before she heard the boom. Like descending stars, first one, then another, and again until all five lights burned their way into the atmosphere. The air about her growled and rumbled, muffled by the suit but amplified by an external microphone.

  Not one fragment broke the haze layer. Five smudged lines of smoke and the last rolls of thunder were all that marked their passing.

  Her initial shock – surely, to come all that way, just to crash and burn in some alien sky – was replaced with a deeper, quieter horror.

  They hadn’t made a mistake. Nothing had malfunctioned. Of course it was meant.

  She watched the smoke slowly dissipate, high up beyond the shine, then she started back to the landing ship.

  She wondered if anyone would talk to her now.

  ~

  They had enough supplies for six months. Half a year. It sounded like plenty, but now that they couldn’t go home, it had transformed into a literal deadline beyond which they were simply going to die.

  They were a month into those supplies. The water was abundant. They could distil it to their hearts’ content. Ship air was scrubbed and recycled, and even then, they could take the outside air and preferentially take up the oxygen over the other components. Power, they had. The lights would stay on.

  It was food. Biochemistry had failed them. They could eat their fill of the crab-things and the tube-things and the purple seaweed, and their stomachs would dissolve it all in the time-honoured fashion, but they couldn’t use any of it to repair their cells or replenish their blood or give them energy. It wouldn’t kill them, but neither would it sustain them.

  They hadn’t brought viable seeds. The risk of accidental release made their presence unthinkable. All they had were packets in lockers, and when they were gone, that was it. They might even turn on each other. She would be the first to go, she had no illusions about that. She didn’t even bother to bring up the question of rationing.

  Either Earth would send help in the next five months, or they wouldn’t.

  She carried on working. It was no longer the great adventure, the chance to look up at the stars and see them differently. But she kept on measuring and recording, because one day, someone would find her notes and think well of her.

  There was a fight. She didn’t intervene. She wasn’t a medical doctor so she took no part in patching up either party, and she didn’t try and find out the reason why two grown men would try and beat each other’s brains out in the kitchen area deck. She did take to sleeping with the door locked and the automatic pistol by her side. Then, inevitably, she took to carrying it with her wherever she went, even outside.

  No one tried to kill themselves. Yet. It would be relatively straight forward, because no matter how padded the corners of the tables, there were always sharp objects and straps to be found. They also had a large array of pharmaceuticals. She had run a clean crew. Not any more.

  She’d also run a clean ship. Now things were dirty. Grimy. There were odd smells and patches of grease. The walls were sticky in places, and there was litter on the floors.

  The beach was her escape. She went down every day, no matter the time it took to suit up and take it off again when she came in. She stood on the black sand and watched the waves run over her enclosed feet, longing to feel the ice-cold rush of water circle her ankles. She looked up at the sky and squinted at the shine and the ragged disc of brightness that was the sun. She left footprints on the wet shoreline that filled and slumped after her passing, mere indentations soon to be erased.

  Then she walked back to the grey-green landing ship, up the dune and down the other side. It took her a little while to notice, but eventually, she couldn’t deny the evidence of her own eyes anymore.

  The sky was darker, and the sun brighter. The shine was fading. The suspicion that she’d harboured for the weeks since the skyscraper-sized ships had burned up was more or less confirmed by that one observation. She’d check it, because she was methodical. She’d turn her telescopes from the stars to the ground, take all the readings she could, and make certain that they were preserved for posterity.

  The planet was being terraformed – or xenoformed – around her. Humans had come to the planet to record the native life and leave it pristine. The visitors had come to inoculate it with their own cocktail of germs, and clearly had different priorities to a UN-sponsored mission.

  She didn’t know how to react. She’d think about it and see what she felt later. For now, she cycled the airlock door and stepped inside, knocking off as much sand as she could
against the threshold.

  ~

  The shine had all but gone. All that was left was a rainbow halo of ice around the sun. Her suit, despite its reflective whiteness, struggled to keep her cool under the barrage of light. Down by the beach, the water that had teemed with life was now clear and sterile. Those creatures that could, moved deeper. Those that couldn’t, died. On the reef, complex and ornate branching coral-things shrivelled under the onslaught and gave up their bleached bones to be broken by the surging waves.

  Whatever was happening was killing the native life, forcing it into retreat. Mass extinction was an ugly concept, yet that was exactly the phrase to use. The visitors had engineered it. She was partly angry, but overwhelmingly sad. They were making the seas into as much of a desert as the land already was.

  The “how” still intrigued her, and she eventually found the answer in the filters. They’d been taking air in for the secondary cooling system ever since they’d landed. The filters were designed to catch dust, and once a week, or month, or whenever the ship reported that the throughput of air wasn’t enough, someone would have to go out and undog the intake housing and bang the fibrous filter pads on the side of the hull.

  It had been her job since marooning them there. As had all the other regular maintenance work, some of which she did, and some she didn’t. Cleaning the filters was essential.

  She knocked some of the dust into a test tube, screwed the lid on tight, and bagged it.

  It had been a very long time since she’d had cause to look down a microscope; everything, like her own telescopes, had become automated. She could tell the computer where to look and at what magnification, and it would do it, displaying the image – front lit, back lit, polarised light, fluorescing – on the screen.

  The dust she’d collected was grey, much like dust everywhere. There were particles of rock – scythes of sharp pumice and clay plates and pyramids of wind-blown quartz – and in amongst them were even finer grains, appearing as barely resolved dots. A thimbleful of them would number millions.