by Tim Lebbon
If your pod malfunctioned, your journey would feel like forever.
Occasionally after a drop, a faulty pod might be discovered, its inhabitant dead and seeming to have aged decades in the space of just a couple of hours. There were accounts of damaged pods being opened to find wretched corpses floating in rancid gel, mouths open in endless screams, fingernails torn out, finger bones snapped, and the interior of the pod scored with nail marks.
Over the centuries of drophole travel stories had sprung up of people who had decided to remain awake, eager to experience what happened to their consciousness during a drop. Isa didn’t believe it, as none of the stories could be proved true. Regardless of their veracity, though, all of the accounts shared a single conclusion. If any of the travelers survived, they were in no state to communicate what they had seen.
The journey had driven them mad.
Isa hated suspension and cryo-pods. A drop felt unnatural, like cheating nature, and in her eyes, a cheat was always found out.
Her own injury was identified after the drop to rendezvous with Kalakta and his peace delegation. Investigating the pain the trip had caused her, the medics informed her that she was lucky to be alive. As a result, she’d been staying at the base on LV-1657 while her injuries healed, and Marshall would have to wait. McIlveen and Halley had remained there with her.
In that time, Isa Palant dwelled upon what might come next.
The life she knew was over. She had made a place for herself at Love Grove Base, and found peace. The planet had been brutal, swept by violent storms whipped up by ongoing terraforming, barren and devoid of life apart from the scientists and indies at the base. She had grown to love it. She’d worked under the banner of Weyland-Yutani, but she was far enough away from them to make the work her own. Her parents had never trusted the Company, and that mistrust had passed down to her. But Weyland-Yutani was so huge that her feelings had never become an issue. The Company did not require people’s faith in order to persist. What they did need was expertise.
So she lent them hers, while in her own mind she was working for herself. Science was her one true love. Passing at least some of her expanding knowledge on to the Company was a small price to pay for the unlimited resources they could provide.
Those resources were gone now, but others had come into play. Akoko Halley, cool and distant, was one of them, and Milt McIlveen was another. Her instinctive dislike of him as a proven Company man had already been dispelled over their short time together, and what they had been through had surely pulled them closer.
The future had become an uncertain place, and that was why she had welcomed this enforced sojourn on LV-1657. It allowed her the opportunity to take stock.
She didn’t belong here, but she knew she would have to grow accustomed to the place. It was a military base, through and through, established simply to police and control the drophole built in orbit around the planet’s moon, half a million miles away.
Not exactly warm and fuzzy, she mused.
Someone knocked at the door.
“Yeah?” she said.
“It’s me.” Milt McIlveen. Isa felt a rush of relief at hearing his voice, familiarity among so many unknowns.
“You and…?”
“I’ve got coffee.”
“Then why are you standing out there?”
The door whispered open and McIlveen entered, holding a steaming mug in each hand and a foil bag under his arm.
“I’ve got breakfast, too,” he said, “and some news.”
They usually ate together in the canteen, often joined by Halley and some of her crew. LV-1657 was manned by a large contingent of the 5th Terrestrials, nicknamed the BloodManiacs, and Halley and her crew didn’t mix well with what they called rock-bound grunts. As such they had been spending much of their time on their ship the Pixie, sometimes parked on one of the seven landing pads, often out patrolling the system. Their aloofness had forged an uneasy atmosphere at the base, but it didn’t worry Isa too much. She and McIlveen were civilians, after all.
“Hit me with it,” Isa said.
“The breakfast?”
“No, fool.” It felt good to be sparring with McIlveen. It reminded her of her relationship with Rogers, the brash indie who’d shown his gentle, thoughtful side when in her company.
“Oh, good. Although maybe that’s a better use of what they serve here.”
“Powdered eggs again?”
He handed her the foil bag. She opened it.
Powdered eggs.
“So, the news?” she asked as she took a coffee mug. It smelled divine and tasted better.
“The Yautja are still in-system.”
Isa raised her eyebrows. “You know this how?”
“Heard a couple of the BloodManiacs chatting about it in the canteen. Their ship’s been orbiting LV-1657, and its moon and the drophole, maybe a billion miles out. Not hiding, flying sub-warp and just sort of… cruising.”
“Good,” Isa said. She grinned at him. “It’s good, isn’t it?”
McIlveen nodded and smiled back. They shared the same fascination with the Yautja, and in the weeks they’d been waylaid here they had continued working together. Their translation program was constantly improving. At the peace conference on board the independent research vessel Tracey-Jane, she’d interacted directly with Kalakta of the Elder Clan, recording their exchange so that it could be analyzed later. Even by then she had known enough to be able to hold a reasonable conversation with him, and from that came a ceasefire between their species.
Since then, she and McIlveen had taken several significant steps in their understanding of the Yautja language. First, they’d realized that it wasn’t one language at all, but several variations of a similar form. It went beyond being simple dialects, differing as much as English deviated from French, with some similar root words and others that were completely different.
Second, Yautja was a constantly evolving language. In their meeting Kalakta had spoken of having interacted with humans before, and in some of his phraseology they’d encountered a hint of human speech—not so much in the words as in their order and usage. Just as it was believed that the Yautja gathered or captured technology from other races or civilizations across the galaxy, so it seemed as if they also adopted and incorporated languages and speech patterns.
“Damn, I wish we could meet them again,” she said. She sipped more coffee, contemplating the bland but nutritious breakfast in the bag. Weren’t Marines supposed to be well supplied and well fed? Didn’t they pride themselves on having great food and support, wherever it was they were based?
Then again, perhaps they considered this good food. If so, she’d hate to be present on a Marine ship or base cursed with bad cooking.
“Maybe we will,” McIlveen said. “They must be hanging around for a reason.”
“It’s difficult to try and second-guess the Yautja,” Isa said. Her dream returned to her. With it peace turned to war, triumph to bloodshed.
“Maybe that’s where Snow Dog and her crew go, too.”
“Don’t let Halley hear you calling her that.”
McIlveen shrugged.
“So you think they’re out there tracking the Yautja?” Isa asked.
“Like you say, can’t second-guess them. There might be a ceasefire, even peace, but the Marines won’t just be letting them fly around the system without keeping tabs on them.”
Isa nodded her agreement. “I wonder if Kalakta’s stayed with them,” she said, blinking slowly, seeing his mouth open and his tusks ready to impale her face and rip it from her skull. She shivered.
“He got to you, didn’t he,” McIlveen said quietly, but it was obvious that the elder had got to both of them.
“It’s his age,” Isa said. “I was so close I could smell his breath, see into his eyes. The only other humans who have ever been that close to him…”
“He’s probably got their skulls in a trophy cabinet.”
Isa stared into her coff
ee. “He might be a thousand years old. Might have traveled across the galaxy. We’re exploring, pushing further every year. Our tech’s advancing too, new ship drives coming online. One day a Titan ship will arrive somewhere to build a drophole, and there’ll already be a human colony there.”
“That’s progress,” McIlveen said.
“What we think of as progress,” she countered. “To the Yautja, we’re barely crawling. Sometimes I think we’re like deer and they’re the lions, coming into the Sphere from time to time just to play.” She blew onto her coffee, watching the small ripples and the drifting steam. “The things they’ve seen.”
“So how are you feeling?” McIlveen asked.
“Good. Ready to get off this rock.”
“Even if that means starting for home?”
“Home?” Isa asked. The idea surprised her. She’d never really thought of any place as home, because she was most comfortable wherever her studies were, and for more than a decade that had been Love Grove Base. Perhaps it was time for a rethink.
“You know Marshall’s not the bad guy here, right?” McIlveen asked.
“Says you.”
“I know him. He’s one of the Thirteen, sure, but that doesn’t make him a bad man.”
“The Thirteen, who possess the tech to send instant sub-space comms but don’t share it? Think what that could do for people, Milt.”
“I don’t know anything about that.” This was a loaded conversation, strained because it was rare the two of them talked about McIlveen’s origins and intentions. Isa believed that he was a good man, and honest. But when on occasion they discussed Gerard Marshall, McIlveen stank of the Company, with all its shady ethics.
“He wants me near because of what I know about the Yautja,” she said.
“He wants you safe,” McIlveen protested. “Who knows what’s coming? And you said yourself, we just can’t second-guess them. This temporary peace they’ve agreed to might just be part of a bigger plan.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No,” McIlveen said after a shrug. “Guess not. But you’ve forgotten more about them than I’ll ever know, and that makes you important.”
“I swore I’d never return to Earth.”
“Things have changed,” McIlveen said.
They left her room and walked together across the base, approaching the recreation block where they spent most of their time. There were comfortable chairs there, decent coffee, and table games they could play when they were turning over differing ideas in their research. Sometimes they walked outside, but LV-1657—though a calmer planet than the one they had left behind—still held its dangers. Terraforming had made the air in this sector breathable, and thousands of square miles of forestry was becoming home to many species of insects and small lizards. Though they were all known and imported, some were very quickly adapting to the environment. Mutations were commonplace, their frequency propelling this new evolution all the faster.
A few species had become hunters. There had already been several deaths from innocent-looking bites, delivered by previously harmless insects that had developed poison glands in their rise to the top of the food chain. It was feared that vermin from visiting supply ships had escaped into the wild, and there was no telling how they were adapting.
Sometimes Isa wondered just what humanity was doing. Exploring was one thing, but in forcing a place to be something it wasn’t, maybe they were stamping humankind’s poisonous influence across the galaxy.
Perhaps one day, someone or something would object.
* * *
Akoko Halley and her DevilDogs were in the recreation block. They were a welcome sight. There was still a distance between them, but she and they had shared experiences at Love Grove Base, and more than one of them had told her that she had saved many lives. Because she was not a Marine, friendship between them would be difficult, yet they held her in visible respect. Sometimes the politics of human nature confused her.
That was why she loved studying the Yautja so much.
Halley was a cool customer, and one of her crew, Private Bestwick, had told Isa that Halley’s nickname was Snow Dog. Bestwick was a small woman, wiry and strong, and she’d smiled as she spoke the name.
“Sometimes cold as they come, but I’d follow her into hell,” she’d said.
But Isa liked Halley. As a major in the 39th Spaceborne, this was a strange posting for her, commanding a small ship and an even smaller crew. She was used to having thousands of marines under her command, not five. Yet without Halley there, the broadcast Isa had sent out to all Yautja forces likely never would have been sent. A lieutenant might not have had the gumption to make the call. Halley had everything to lose, but she had made the right decision.
“They say I’ll be ready to use the drophole soon,” Isa told the marines. “Couple of days.”
“Thank fuck for that!” Nassise exclaimed. He and Gove were playing table tennis, and they’d both become pretty good at it. Nassise was a weird character, harsh and distant. He seemed to resent having the time to become good at anything other than being a Marine. “I hate this rock,” he added. “Can’t wait to get back out there.”
“We’ve been prepping for the trip,” Halley said, lounging back on a seat. She was reading an old-fashioned book, and Isa wondered where she’d found it. “I considered using a bigger ship, but the Pixie is the fastest vessel available to us right now. It’ll still be almost six months, with dozens of drops.” She tented the book on her chest. “You sure you’re up to this?”
“Up to traveling, or being hauled back to Gerard Marshall?”
Halley glanced away. Isa had seen the same reaction from the Major every time Marshall was mentioned. She disliked him as much as Isa did, and Isa found that comforting. Even unspoken, it seemed to put them on the same side.
“Orders,” Halley said. “I mean the journey.”
“Yeah, I’m up to it. We could have gone days ago if it had been my decision.”
Halley stood and stretched, approached Isa, touched her forehead. “Don’t want to damage this precious thing, do we?” Someone chuckled and Isa glanced around. Sprenkel was looking her up and down. She’d never liked the big man, had hardly heard him string more than a few words together. He always seemed animated, even when still—as if filled with something eager to be released. Some Marines were just born for a fight.
“Sprenkel,” Halley said, and the big man looked away.
“It’s going to be cramped on the Pixie,” Halley said. “You and your boyfriend can bunk up.”
“We’re not together,” McIlveen said. “It’s not like that…”
Halley did not reply. She crossed the room toward the refreshments area, and silence fell, the only sound coming from the regular, hollow impact of the table tennis ball.
Back and forth, back and forth.
“Come on,” Isa said, grabbing McIlveen’s arm. “Work to do.”
“Hey, Palant,” Bestwick said. She was sitting in a holo chair, headset on and absorbed in some unseen scenario. “Don’t let us get to you. We’ve been here too long, and we’re just twitchy.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Isa said. “No worries.” Gove gave her a smile while returning a curving shot from Nassise. Huyck, Halley’s sergeant major, lifted his cap and winked at her, then went back to sleep. Even Halley offered a smile, though it did little to lighten her expression.
Sprenkel examined his fingernails.
“Still, can’t wait to get the fuck away from here,” Nassise said, emphasizing his last word with a vicious shot that bounced way across the room. “Yes! You lose, Gove. Shithead.”
Isa and McIlveen left the room without the coffee they’d sought. Isa steered them toward the media room. They could continue their studies there.
“Marines,” McIlveen said, quietly.
“Yeah.”
* * *
The day passed slowly. It was uneventful. They established another variation in Yautja speech patterns,
and Isa caught a hint of something intriguing, a verb structure that resembled some forms of an old Celt tongue vanished for almost sixteen centuries, last spoken in one of the old Welsh kingdoms.
She and McIlveen tested the new idea, trying to be objective about it. Isa knew well that she was often too close to her studies, and too passionate about them. Sometimes she feared that she forced ideas to fit the shape she wanted, rather than allowing them to form their own dimensions.
Later that afternoon she went for her usual daily check-up. The medic skipped through the familiar tests, then finished with a holo scan of her brain.
“Looking good,” he said. “Give it two more days.”
Isa felt nervous. There was such a long journey ahead, with only the Marines and McIlveen for company, and she wasn’t sure how she would manage. She was used to her own company in comfortable surroundings. Though she knew the marines respected her and what she’d done, she already felt like an outsider in their midst. She hoped it was just in her head.
And McIlveen? She liked him, but…
That evening the two of them left the base to watch the sunset. The facility was built on a wide plateau above an ancient glaciated valley. Sheltered from harsh easterly winds by a range of snowcapped mountains, the plateau was green and lush, criss-crossed by a network of streams that tipped over the cliffs in a dozen places. A haze of mist often hung above the waterfalls that plummeted into the valley below, and this often produced stunning sunsets. Today was no exception.
The far horizon was smeared orange, streaks of high clouds painted pink by the sinking sun. Closer, rainbow shades shimmered and flowed above the cliff edge, waving and dancing like giant multicolored gossamer wings.
To the south Isa could just make out the pyramidal shapes of the atmosphere processors. They were still working, though where previously they had accounted for most of the oxygen output, they were now far down the list. The vast swathes of new forests had become the lungs of the planet.
The place hadn’t even been named, other than the traditional number, LV-1657. Isa found that sad, yet also somehow appropriate. It was as if the planet was still free. Once humans stamped it with a name it would become a destination, and then everything here would change even more than it already had.