“Yes, sir.”
But everyone hesitated, stalled out, even those at the back who couldn’t see out the window. The transparent nanoceramic had taken a battering on the descent but still revealed a landscape truly alien—even to those who had seen actual alien landscapes. Colony planets were often chosen for their resemblance to Earth. The original survey records showed ordinary water, macro- and micro-fauna, a rainbow of plants evolved under an array of useful radiation. She’d reviewed the data just this morning. The planet wasn’t supposed to look like this.
“Move out,” she said, taking one last breath of the stale ship air, stinking of sour fear. “Cheo, point.”
Cold, dusty air blasted them, rocking everyone back on their boots. It abated quickly—just the pressure differential—and they shouldered weapons and began to walk, following the blinking directions on their helmet displays. Rossi kept half an eye on the squad’s readouts, not needing them to know that everyone was a trembling bag of nerves.
Nothing cheeped or sang in the low trees where branches were twisted and wrung-out like wet rags; no insects flew from the hip-height grass; the ground felt alternately stone-hard and spongy. And everywhere, swirls and clouds of the soft, pink-orange dust, some suspended, some scudding through the grass. Something blinked in her display: her uniform letting her know it was warming up and asking her if she wanted a seal to use her breathing apparatus. She shook her head.
Roscoe, behind her, said, “Man, I thought being a colonist was supposed to be a reward.” The others tittered nervously.
“Used to be,” Rossi said. “They didn’t give a lot of permits to get offworld back then.”
“When was this place settled, Frank?” someone said, and gulped. “Sorry, sir.”
“About two hundred years ago,” she said, forgiving him that—Ashford, probably. They’d been playing ade-yafe in the canteen when she’d gotten the mission call and had to forfeit, losing forty credits. “So records are a little scant.”
She let them do the math as they walked. An official colony convoy was usually about fifty thousand people. Their transport vehicles were booked for fewer than a hundred. A dead colony. Happened sometimes. But colonists were usually retrieved before a population crash; the Colonization Corps would never let it get this bad if they could help it.
Snatches of bluish-violet sky were becoming visible through the dust. Rossi adjusted her helmet, turning down the enhancement. Maybe there had been a recent tornado or something. Could get an awful lot of ejecta from a single storm under certain conditions. Her heart was pounding despite their careful pace. She gave up and let the helmet seal shut, feeling the extra oxygen immediately.
Low buildings began to rise over the grass, and she held a hand up for a halt. Standard colonist domes, white fabric gleaming under orange grit. Those were supposed to be temporary; colonists were expected to use them for a year or two while they built permanent residences. The domes were balanced precariously next to a tremendous rift—their dropship’s original landing site. The air above the crack shimmered with invisible thermals, like warm tendrils reaching for them.
“Spread out, armor on,” Rossi said, listening to the beeps in her headset. Warden’s suit didn’t beep, and she almost called her on it before realizing that Warden had had her armor on since they’d left the dropship. That was Warden, though; if Rossi had been composing her own squad, Warden would have been kindly left out. No good in ground combat, reprimanded repeatedly before they realized that her constant freezing in response to battle commands was nerves rather than insubordination. But the “help” they’d forced her to get hadn’t helped, so they’d created a new MOS for her—a sniper who didn’t do anything but snipe. And she was good, better than good, actually. She was the best Rossi had ever seen, winning award after award. But she might be a liability down here. Too late to do anything about it now.
They approached slowly from the crest of a small hill, giving the colonists plenty of time to see them and react. The briefing hadn’t suggested they would react with violence, but a colony this old and isolated, you never knew. Gratitude couldn’t be assumed.
No reaction. Rossi wondered whether the ship scanners were wrong, whether there was anyone left to rescue. Eventually, people emerged from the domes in ones and twos and finally in their shocking dozens. A single structure meant for a family of four was evidently sleeping more than twenty now. What had gone wrong?
She led the squad down the hill, leaving Cheo at the top on manwatch to send photos and environmental data back to the ship. As expected, one person broke from the crowd and came to meet her: a bent old man with a tangle of dirty beard, wrapped in a coarse, faded garment pinned with thorned twigs, their wickedly long spikes vanishing into the tangle of fibers.
“Hello,” she said, deactivating her helmet. The man stared at her bare face impassively.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Incident Commander Francesca Rossi. And you are . . . ?”
“Why have you come?” he said, folding his thin arms across his chest. Behind him, the others stared with wonder, suspicion, fear. No active hostility. Yet.
“To evacuate you,” she said. “Our ship was within response vicinity, and we determined that your colony is unsustainable and needs immediate and appropriate external resourcing.”
“No.”
No what? she almost said, but checked herself. She said, “Sir, I know it seems impossible to leave somewhere you’re used to. Where you’ve been born, spent your whole life. But think of your children. Your . . . elders.” That earned her an eyebrow raise, but she plunged on. “We’ve got food, clean water, medical care. Clothes. Warmth. And we’ll find somewhere for . . .”
“You,” he said, pointing at Ashford. Rossi ran down, partly in surprise.
“Sir?” Ashford murmured.
“Go on,” Rossi said. The others were unobtrusively reaching for weapons, not—thank goodness for training—projectiles but heavy-bladed truncheons, blades retracted. They did a lot of damage, but a fatality was unlikely.
Ashford approached the old man with polite if feigned reverence. “Sir.”
The old man motioned impatiently at Ashford till he rolled up his sleeve, then palpated Ashford’s muscle-plump forearm, running a dirty nail along the bright tracery of tattoos on the deep brown skin. “Are they all like you?”
“Sir?”
“Like you and her,” the man snapped.
Ashford looked at Rossi for guidance, but she had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps, it was just as simple as the colonists’ pitiful condition compared to her squad: fresh from quarterly training; superbly hydrated, clad, and fed; their teeth cleaned to squeaking with ultrasonic waves twice a day.
“Half a no,” the old man amended, pushing Ashford away. Behind him, several colonists nodded, their faces slack with relief. “Come. We will see the oracle, and he will say whether we go.”
“What?” Rossi said. “Sir, no. We’re under orders to—”
“This way.” He stomped off, parallel to the huge rift, his light leather sandals silent in the grass.
Rossi froze. Her first mission. First bloody mission! Finally, she said, “Oh, for God’s sake. Ashford, Warden, Roscoe, with me. Cheo, stay put and get long-range on us. Barrow, ping the Serp and tell them to drop the transport drones.”
“What should I tell them, sir?”
“Tell them we got half a no,” she muttered, and stalked off after the old man.
* * *
Rossi put Roscoe on point—at almost seven feet tall, no one could see over him when he took lead. They’d razz him about it when he got back; he’d enlisted at sixteen, right on his birthday, and the joke was that no one should have been able to keep growing on army rations. Rossi kept up with the old man, breathing hard in the thin, flinty air, reluctant to seal up again. It was important that he be able to look at her face if he wanted to.
“Our records indicate that you came here two hundred years ago
,” she said cautiously. “Do you know if that’s accurate, sir?”
“Maybe,” he grunted. “Must be close. Yes, maybe two hundred.”
“Did . . .” she began and trailed off. Fewer than a hundred people. Were they still able to have children? They must be severely inbred if they hadn’t instituted a rule against it. What were they eating? How were they getting water? The colony ships only had enough supplies for three or four months—you could ration it if you landed in, say, the middle of a drought, but it wasn’t meant to last long. Why hadn’t they built proper houses? What about all the birds, animals, and bugs? How had everyone died? A pathogen, a predator that the surveyors had missed? A civil war? Could thirty-six thousand people kill each other in two hundred years?
Her boot sank, not much, just enough to make her rear back in surprise; they’d come to wetter ground while she’d been woolgathering. She shook her head sharply, refocusing. Low oxygen, that was it. The old man hadn’t faltered and was moving surprisingly fast even as the minimal path through the grass became swamp. Thick, triangle-bladed blue grasses and spiraling shrubs rose over their heads, the meager amber sunlight not reaching the ground.
“Where are we going?” Rossi said. “Is it much farther?”
“Nope.”
“And this oracle . . .”
“Final say,” the old man said. “Wouldn’t expect you to understand. Fell from a star; don’t know what it’s like down here. Here on the land.”
“The surveyors named it Fortunato,” she said, and laughed grimly.
“We still call it that,” he said. He glanced back at her with the first smile she’d seen, revealing stumps of yellowed teeth. But he could not be drawn into further conversation, and they continued their slog. The smell of the air changed from the stony odor of the grassland to that of an alien swamp, strange microbes, everything decaying slowly under its dust in the cool and the wind.
The oracle’s domain announced itself with a terrible crunch; Rossi jerked her boot back, a muddy piece of bone falling from the deep treads. The ground was rippled and sculpted with them, white where they poked through the mud, some seized by vines and spiraled high into the canopy, some rotting instead of desiccating, black and purple with fungus. Rossi felt eyes on her, unseen.
“Sir!” whispered Warden, using the subvocals in her helmet.
Rossi replied, “Warden, you and Roscoe are on manwatch. Stay back. Ashford and I are proceeding.”
Roscoe put a hand on her shoulder for a moment before turning away. “Be careful, Frank.”
“Check.”
The old man slowed in a clearing hacked out of the swamp.
“Sir,” hissed Ashford, yanking on her elbow as she followed him. She looked down instinctively to see a skull, a big one—but hardly a trip hazard. As she opened her mouth to reply to Ashford, she found her gaze drawn down again.
Not just a big skull. An impossibly big one. Two skulls joined seamlessly at their centers, three eye sockets. Two noses. Two jaws. A single sturdy chunk of spine protruded from the bottom, propping it up slightly from the mud.
“How many people you think died here?” Ashford said softly.
Rossi shushed him. If this was what it took to complete the mission, they’d just talk to the oracle and discuss the bones later. Anyway, judging by the churned mud, the number didn’t bear thinking about.
“The oracle comes now,” the old man announced, stopping them with an outstretched hand. “If he will give you a yes, then I will take back my no.”
“Thank you,” Rossi said, and waited with her hands folded politely in front of her to show that she was unarmed. Ashford stayed behind her, breathing heavily. “Put your oxygen on,” she whispered. “That’s an order.”
“Sir.”
The leaves rustled, knocking loose clouds of dust, so that the oracle entered in pieces, visible first as only skinny white legs, a perfunctory loincloth, then long arms—too long, extra joints on the fingers. Rossi looked up slowly, dreading what she expected to see: two heads. No, not quite. But exactly like the skull that marked the entrance to the clearing. One head, two faces, each with its own eye and sharing an eye in the middle. It was this third eye that fixed itself upon her, meeting her gaze easily. It was blue, ordinary in shape, rimmed with light blonde lashes. Somewhere far away—the colony?—a chant began, low and faint, a language she didn’t know. Her helmet beeped a warning about her heart rate.
“You are . . . the oracle?” she began, weakly.
“Holy shit,” whispered Ashford.
“I am,” the oracle replied, through his left-hand mouth. “And you . . . you are a visitor from the far stars. Your people come from the same place as ours. The division was made many years ago. You decided you could survive the status quo. We hoped for better.”
“Yes.”
“And this was our reward.” The right-hand mouth laughed, a harsh bray. “Or our punishment. What do you seek, woman of the stars?”
“I . . .” The mission! For Chrissake, pull it together. “We came to offer help. Evacuation. Of . . . of your people.”
“All? All of us? All on this world?”
“Yes. Oracle, we are looking for a yes. Our intentions are honorable. We mean no harm.”
“But you intend to take them if I say no,” he said lazily, reaching up to scratch the remnants of his curling blonde hair.
“No! We require consent.” Except in cases of imminent threat to human life and health, in which case that requirement is waived for the duration of the threat, her training recited. Shut up, she told it. He can’t actually read minds.
“That consent cannot be given,” the oracle said. “You do not know what you seek. You do not know this world.”
“Our scanners and surveyor reports—”
“They cannot see all,” he said. “As you are aware.”
A painful silence stretched out. “Your elders, your children,” she said urgently. “Your sick. Let us take them, at least. We can help. We’re here to help!” she shouted.
The oracle drew himself up to his full height—still less than hers—and squelched closer in the mud. “Where was that help when my people first came?” he asked. “When we were met with the full horror of living here instead of the dream we had been promised?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Where was that help when we starved in the cold and the dark? When we sat around fires that burned with the bones of the dead, and read and re-read the charred scraps of books that we begged permission to take across the galaxy? The books that had taken the place of water and food in the cargo holds, all we had left to record culture, learning, language? When the little warlords arose and killed their own? Where was that help when our numbers faded every day like an echo?”
“That help is here,” Ashford announced, moving from behind Rossi to beside her. “It just came late. Now, are you going to say yes or not?”
That was technically insubordination, moving from his covering position against her orders, but she felt better having him there. “Please,” she said.
The oracle stroked his chin, considering. “Leave that one with me while I decide,” he said, pointing at Ashford.
“No,” Rossi said. “Not until you tell me how all these bones got here.”
The oracle grinned, and she felt a soft, light shock of realization. No more words were needed. The mission would have to fail. This was a price that could not be paid: it was bad enough it had been paid again and again in the past.
“We’re leaving.”
“You would leave us to die so easily? You, who comes offering help? Give him to me. What is he to you?”
The white, many-jointed fingers clamped around Ashford’s wrist with startling speed, pulling the big man close on the slick ground. And then the oracle’s central eye winked out in a spray of bright blood, the blue replaced with crimson so suddenly that for a moment none of them—the colonist, the soldier, the commander, the oracle—knew what had happened. The body s
lumped slowly to the ground as Rossi figured it out. Warden and her sniper rifle.
Blood flowed into the swamp, ceasing as the heart stopped. The faint chanting continued, shifting and swaying as if it were carried in the wind. The old man stared at the body, frozen. She had been expecting him to scream and rage and grieve, but he had simply shut down.
Ashford scrubbed at the arm of his uniform where the oracle had touched him. “Sir?”
“Come on,” she said. “We’re going. All of us.”
* * *
“That was some fine work down there, Rossi,” said McKay, eyes fixed on the screen. He’d turned off mirroring, so her side was blank, but she knew he was watching the mission’s surveillance footage. She was so surprised that for a moment she assumed she’d misheard him and began to line up excuses for what had happened.
After a moment, she said, “Thank you, sir?”
He shut off the screen. “Ha! You think the old man’s having you on, eh? Is that it?”
“No, sir.”
“Come on, Frank. I’ve been doin’ this job twice as long as you’ve been alive. Gimme a little credit. The look on your face.” He swiveled his chair and neatly produced two small whiskeys from a recess under his desk, pushing one over to her. “You’re thinking, ‘Oh, here it comes.’ No. Like I said. Been at this a while. What you don’t realize is how bad it could’ve gone. Me, I’ve seen it go bad. But you kept your head, remembered your training, and took command of your squad and the rescue.”
“What do you think could have happened, sir?” she said cautiously, sipping the warm whiskey. Hard liquor wasn’t allowed in academy, and it was understood that the limited amount on the ship was strictly for officers. No one her age had had so much as a whiff of whiskey for years.
“Massacre,” he said briefly, downing his in one gulp. “Them or you. Not as clear-cut as you think, either. Could’ve just ended up in the swamp, like that see-all who Warden accidentally shot. Or pinged the ship to say no one there to rescue. I’ve seen both.”
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