“I’ve already started this one. I have to build at least one more aquarium,” she complained.
“Then build it against the far wall,” Gino said.
“What do I do with the rest of the equipment?” Olivia asked.
“Pack them back in their crates,” he said.
“We can’t fit everything into its crate once we’ve taken everything out,” she said.
I wanted to slap her smug face. If I’d had less self-control, I would have.
“Maybe not everything into one crate,” Mathieu said. “But you could use two crates per aquarium.”
God bless him.
“And we’ll help,” Jorg said, flashing that smile of his.
God bless the both of them.
Olivia growled. It was against her nature to be outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Begrudgingly, she relented.
Once her last aquarium was completed and the others were repacked, the next project was placing all those crates against the wall in the form of cabinets.
They chose the long wall next to the dorms.
But a cabinet made of different sized boxes was a major ordeal. They started the cabinet, took it apart, and rebuilt it three times before they decided it was acceptable.
It was like a jigsaw puzzle trying to get odd pieces to fit in an orderly fashion. But worse, these people were scientists. They had to have everything just so. Large crates had to be on the bottom. Certain crates couldn’t be too high or someone short like Lu who couldn’t reach them. Some smaller crates were pushed farther back. Some larger crates were pulled out so those could be used as tables while getting into a different crate.
I would not have been so precise, but I’m not a scientist.
Sometimes, they made my head spin.
“No don’t put it there!”
“Why not?”
“Because …”
“What if …”
“It should be this way.”
“No, this would be better if …”
“If you do that, then we should …”
Everyone had an opinion. And when they couldn’t agree, they looked to Gino to make the final decision. To my surprise, they listened to him.
Nothing was exactly where everyone wanted it, but no one complained, except for Olivia. She demanded the wall be rebuilt to suit her needs. It wasn’t. Olivia had not yet been forgiven for her aquaria.
Each scientific group arranged their work area right up to the aquaria. If she had built them along the wall, she could have had all six and she could have easily walked around them. Now she could only walk between the two of them. The third one was erected against the far back wall. She couldn’t even walk around that one.
Olivia complained late into the night that her aquaria were not where she wanted them. I guess she thought if she was persistent, someone would hear, or maybe she thought to wear the others down. Her whining was ignored.
CAPTAIN’S LOG
Akiane Colony
Captain Faris Assetti
Year 2144
Eight months
Our Oceanographer Adryel says the cold ocean waters will delay the warming of the planet a few years. He has also warned us that with the open waters, and with temperatures above freezing, comes snow.
A simple snowstorm is nothing. We continue to work on the habitat.
Blizzards are a different matter. We are confined inside when one hits sometimes for days with winds that make it impossible to stand up straight.
Nerves get on edge. Fights break out, which leads to more deaths.
There have been two murders so far. One murderer killed himself. The other is in the brig. We are unsure as to what to do with her. Seven have died of despair. They went to sleep and didn’t wake up. Four more committed suicide.
Akiane far more harsh than we planned. She’s killing us. 31 have died from a strange disease. 92 others are sick. Beasley says it’s a virus that is rewriting trying our DNA, but it is missing a key element to finish the job. It’s the lack of information that’s killing us.
He’s having trouble pinpointing where the virus originated. More details in his medical logs.
I do not like this place. I want to go home. I think all of us are tired of working on the dome. It is all we do, but we have no choice. For the moment, we are stuck here and have no way to leave. Dome must be finished before winter returns are we will all die.
Chapter 16
Larry Gino
Morning of Day Four
A COUPLE of centuries ago, people would have retired long before reaching their eighties. But not now, modern technology and medicine has extended human life to at least 150 years.
Gino was a little stiff at times but at eighty-two he felt as spry as a fifty-year-old and mentally sharp as a twenty-year-old.
He chuckled to himself. Hopefully with a little more maturity.
Gino was standing outside the same habitat entrance he and the others had entered when they’d arrived three days ago. He looked to the west at the hot springs and snow-covered mountains. Now that they’d finally settled in their new living quarters, it was time to begin their research.
Jorg stood at his side. “Just imagine,” he said, “we’re standing on an alien planet.”
It didn’t look alien. It looked like the rugged, snow-covered Canadian Rockies.
Even though this was not his first alien planet—he’d been on Earth’s moon, Mars, and Europa—Gino was as excited as if it were his first time.
“Virgin territory,” he said. “We will do the research the colony didn’t have the time to do when they first arrived. These are exciting times, my boy.”
“Indeed they are, old one.”
Gino laughed.
Jorg patted him on the shoulder. “I’m headed out to the vast algae patch to see how similar it is and how it differs from Earth’s algae, and see what kind of ecology it hosts.”
“Spiders and worms?” Gino asked.
“Spiders and worms,” Jorg confirmed. With his work pack slung over his shoulder, he headed out.
Gino turned to see Olivia and her team rolling toward the edge of the caldera in their small aquatic hovercraft. She was ready to fill her three aquaria with seawater. Eventually, she and her crew would take the aquatic-craft underwater to investigate the bottom of the alien ocean.
She’d release robotic cameras to film marine life, which would produce sharp-realistic digital images. At some point she’d go scuba diving, collect alien coral life, and try to recreate it in her aquaria so she could more closely study them. She was also working toward the possibility of bringing an aquarium of marine life back to WSC as a museum piece for the Galactic Museum.
The astrophysicists and astronomers had already set up their ground telescopes. They’d begun mapping the night sky from Akiane’s point of view. They were also building a Very Large Telescope (VLT) or an astronomical interferometer. The next ship would set the VLT in orbit. The telescope will have superior resolution capable of picking up very small objects and would continue to look for extrasolar planets, or exoplanet planets, outside Kahair’s star system.
All information from every project on Akiane would be sent back to WSC. Hopes were high that they would make significant scientific discoveries. And Gino was in the thick of it.
“What are you doing standing here?” Spago came trudging out of the habitat. “We have a mountain to study. Get a move on!”
“I’d already be there, with a week’s worth of work done, if I didn’t have to wait on punk kids like you,” Gino bellowed.
“Excuses, excuses.” As Spago hurried past Gino, he glanced over his shoulder and said, “You coming or are you planning on standing there all day?” He continued on as if to leave Gino behind.
It would be a few more decades before Gino was too old to keep up.
gh
Geologist Larry Gino stood on the side of Akiane’s mountain surrounded by a chaos of rocks. He turned a garnet rock over and over in his hands. It loo
ked beaten and battered. Pieces had broken off.
“Whatever happened to you, my diminutive fellow, must have been traumatic,” he said.
So far, his findings made little sense. The base of the mountain looked like a construction pile of rubble. Geological formations eluded him. Every kind of rock classification seemed not to relate to the rocks surrounding them. Gino and his team marked the areas they planned to excavate.
Gino had never seen anything like this on Earth, the moon, Mars, or Europa. Nothing made sense.
Rocks normally congregated according to their geological timetable. There might be a slight mixing because of erosion, earthquakes, or human intervention, but there was still a clear line as to which time period one was studying. But here, everything was all mixed up.
Good, Gino thought, wouldn’t want an easy project. Need something that’s difficult and mysterious. It will produce better results and make for more interesting research.
The team took digital images of interested areas, labeled the most significant rocks, marked their positions, and were in the process of analyzing what they’d found.
Realism imaging was remarkable, almost as good as the real thing.
Up until the middle of the twenty-second century, the only way to study rocks was to carry them back to a lab and carefully saw them open. Then cut wafer thin cross-sections, which were then cut into smaller pieces. Those pieces were examined for mineral content and carbon dating.
But with realism imaging, Gino took holographic pictures that could recreate the rock in an exact 3D image. Deeper 4D imaging allowed him to feel the roughness of the rock, taste, and even smell it. Digitals in 5D showed him the interior of the rock and its mineral content all the way down to its molecular structure.
Spago’s seismic readings would do the same on the interior of the mountain.
Volcanoes are notoriously noisy, which increased as they prepared to erupt. A volcano would have repeating mini-earthquakes that could not be felt or heard above ground, but underground there would be as many as one every second to every half second. As the threat of eruption neared, the quakes happened so fast they sounded like one long scream. Newly developed 6D realism imaging recorded those quakes so they could be seen and heard.
Geologists used to dig core samples out of the ground, which could be hundreds of feet long. They would be cut and saved in manageable lengths, packed in crates, and carefully shipped to a storage facility where someone could check them out and study the interior rock formation.
It would take hundreds of core samples to fully understand one area of land. Each core was individually examined to obtain the needed information to assimilate a hand drawn-contour-map. As technology advanced, the images were computer drawn with more exact specifications.
Hundreds of thousands of core samples had been drilled over the centuries, and no matter how carefully the cores were stored, they degraded over time.
Spago was setting up his seismic equipment now, placing the instruments along the base of the mountain 15 meters apart. The seismometer would bounce sound waves off underground rock, which then created an interior rock image.
He could project the image and see Akiane’s rock structure with 3D, 4D, 5D and 6D quality. He could project the image to actual size or shrink a part of it down to page size. One could walk though a life-size image and extract information at any precise point, then print images of the most interesting sites at any scale desired.
Data on Akiane would be sent back to WSC Moon Base where researchers could take a virtual walk through the images and make valid discoveries without ever setting foot on Akiane.
Gino picked up another rock. He turned it over in his hand, ran his thumb over it, then the tips of his fingers. The surface was rough. He picked at it with a fingernail. Little slivers fell away. He smelled it, and tasted it with the tip of his tongue, salty.
Realism imaging might be amazing, but it was nothing like smelling the air, feeling a breeze on his face, or feeling the warmth of an alien star on his back, or the beating of his heart as he actually walked an alien planet in real time.
“Looks like junkyard geology,” Spago said as he joined Gino.
“Just what I was thinking. It looks like a giant has been piling rocks with no particular order to them.” Gino stood and stretched his back.
“It seems to be the same everywhere,” Spago said. “Of course we are in a caldera. A massive volcanic explosion could easily do this.”
“When do you guess it happened last?” Gino stood.
Spago shrugged. “At this point, without more information, everything is just a guess. A hundred years? A thousand?”
“Yeah, my best guess too. An explosion like that could have caused a junkyard effect, but I get the feeling there’s something more,” Gino said. “It’s too early to settle on a conclusion.”
“Well, we should have some good readings by the time we get back,” Spago said. “But I can tell you this mountain is not completely dormant. There are a lot of rumblings down there.”
Gino lifted one questioning eyebrow.
“Nothing dangerous.”
“Just enough to make things interesting,” Gino said.
“Exactly.”
“There’s a puzzle here, Spago.”
“Looks like a messy puzzle.”
“The greater the mess …” Gino smiled.
“… the greater the excitement untangling it,” Spago finished.
Chapter 17
Adumie
Guardian Angel
ONE COULD not see Kahair’s actual rising from the bottom of a caldera. Adumie came to the top of Endurance to watch the morning’s effects. The darkness faded into pinks and oranges then to light blue.
It was times like this when Adumie could forget death and invaders. Instead he rejoiced at the beauty of the land and the vastness of God’s glory. It was a good time to reflect on God Himself.
Adumie turned to the west to the ever-changing mountain range. At the moment, it was bathed in Kahair’s morning light, a mixture of soft reds, yellows, and blues that blended into unnamed hues only God could imagine. The mountains were peaceful. Soon The Storm would return and the volcano within would awaken to fume poisonous gases and bleed lava.
But this morning, all was quiet except for the angry eruption in Adumie’s heart.
Intruders were gathering outside. Why did they not stay in their own living quarters?
They were like fungi exiting from Endurance, spores drifting on the wind spreading over Akiane, laying hands on all that was valuable, infecting everything they touched.
The tall one with yellow hair walked to the algae fields, contaminating them. No one would pick algae from those fields ever again. New fields would have to be secretly planted where the tall one would not find them.
The short red-haired one, and several others, took the path to the coast. They traveled in an enclosed sled that moved without the help of the wind or chovis.
Intruders in their strange orange suits rode their sledto the mountains where they crawled over them like flying insects oblivious to the mountains’ grandeur and might.
They will take what we leave behind. All that we have will be handed over to those we cannot tolerat., Adumie fumed.
One day, intruders would be the masters over everything the community had built and had once loved.
Adumie was helpless to stop them. Helpless. His prayers went unanswered. His voice went unheard among the community. He could not protect his people from invasion or heal them from this illness.
With all his heart, Adumie wished he were a guardian angel. In the name of God, he would cut down the unholy intruders and cut out this slow killing disease, thereby saving his people.
This was all his fault. If he’d been a better person, a better leader, he might have known how to stop those of Earth from coming. If he had been a better priest, sinless, if he was more of what God wanted then God might have answered his prayers and there would be no dea
ths.
CAPTAIN’S LOG
Akiane Colony
Captain Faris Assetti
Second year, Day 2
We have ended the year in tragedy and seem to have begun the New Year no better. Forty-eight more people have died of the virus. All told, 172 have died since we landed. They have not all died from the virus, but from despair, murder and suicide.
Now at the start of our second year, the fish have vanished. They were becoming sparse for the past several months, but now they are all gone. If we had arrived at this time, we would have thought there was no marine life on this planet. But we know there is.
We think they left because the ocean waters have opened up.
We are mounting an expedition to learn where the fish have gone and why they left. We leave in the morning.
Fish is one of our sources of protein, besides beans, soy, and nuts. We plan to find a school of fish, net as many as we can and bring them back to the colony where we will gut, clean, and preserve them for future meals. When we run out, we’ll execute more fishing expeditions as needed.
We are twelve and will take a shuttle for a quick trip. We should be gone no more than a few days.
Father Striken
There was a gentle knock on Faris’ office door. “Yes?”
The priest entered.
Faris stood. “Father Striken, may I help you?”
“Please, call me Joseph, or Joe.”
“Father Joseph then,” Faris said.
“You offer me far too much respect. I am a member of this community like any other,” Father Joseph said.
“Sorry, but my grandfather taught me to respect the priests of all religions,” Faris said.
“Not all religions have priests,” he said.
Faris nodded. “You know what I mean. May I help you with something?”
“You look tired,” Father Joseph said.
“I feel tired.” Faris felt not just tired, but old, but she was unwilling to admit it to any one, especially this priest. She didn’t need his counsel; she was the leader and must stand strong. “You came here for a reason, Father.”
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