They laid Hammond on the hard surface, and Anatov held the body down while he used a laser to weld four metal cords to hold him to the rock. There was no way to bury his body out here in this unyielding rock.
Once they were done, he stood back to look at his handiwork. Hammond was secure, staring up at the stars.
Colin removed the engineer’s helmet. He held it for a moment, then flung it up into space, a final testament to the man he had known for years.
The seed would soon do its work, and the Jackson Hammond he had known would be just a memory. Godspeed, Engineer.
AS THE captain knelt on Hammond’s other side, saying his farewells, Ana turned away from the man’s body. Her stomach was in a tumult, her heart full of conflicting emotions. She was eager to look at anything but the sad prone figure laid out on Ariadne’s cold, hard rock.
She approached the seed, where it had wedged itself into a narrow crevice in the asteroid. It had been a lucky strike. The husk had remained intact, and the whole thing looked relatively secure in its new home.
She ran her gloved hand over its rough surface, looking for the spot where she had inserted the ship-mind. As she searched, the sun rose overhead once more, lighting up the scene. The ridge took on a hyperreal aspect, a high contrast between where the light shone and where the shadows still ruled.
She found the patch at last and was alarmed to see a bit of frozen rime around the edges. The seal had been breached.
“How does it look?” the captain asked over the suit comm.
“Intact, but there’s some outgassing from the place where we cracked the shell.”
“Meaning?”
“If the breach worsens, it could kill the seed before it has a chance to germinate. I think we need to sprout it early, or all this may have been for naught.” She glanced back at Jackson. He can’t have died for nothing.
“I’ve got to go back to the lifeboat to get the initiator.” She turned away from the seed. “We don’t have much time.”
He looked at her at last. “I’ll come with you.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be stupid. It will take too much oxygen for both of us to go back and forth, and I’ll need you here when I initiate the seedling stage.”
He grabbed her hand as she passed, pulling her around.
She stared at him through their visors. “What? I need to go.”
“Be careful.” He squeezed her hand through the suit fabric. “One today is enough.”
She held his gaze for a moment. “Thanks,” she said at last and turned away to make her way back to the lifeboat.
This was not how the sprouting was supposed to happen, but she’d already strayed so far from protocol. It was a day or two earlier than the original plan, but that date was arbitrary. The seed itself was as ready today as it would be tomorrow.
She climbed back down the crevasse to the plain below, placing each foot carefully. If she flew off this rock, there’d be no way back. No way back. Who was she kidding? She’d already passed the point of no return.
She’d need the initiator, the penetrator tool, and McAvery’s help to keep the seed steady.
The sun spun back around to Ariadne’s other side, and her world was plunged again into darkness, the stars poking brilliant holes in the firmament above.
She stopped for a moment and stared in wonder at the universe above. How terribly alone we are. How far from home. She felt a sudden, intense longing to be back on Earth, her bare toes buried in the mud of the river, the blue bowl of the sky overhead.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Keep it together, Ana. There was no time for regret.
She trudged across the plain to the lifeboat, opened the hatch, and began to collect the tools she would need to initiate the seedling stage.
COLIN SAT on an outcropping of rock with absolutely nothing to do. It was a strange feeling, after the hectic pace of events these last twenty-four hours. The enormity of what had happened rushed in on him and threatened to crush him. He turned off his comm link, wrapped his arms around his chest, and wept unabashedly. For Hammond, for the Dressler, for his own endangered life.
The suit’s recycling systems dutifully removed the water his tears deposited within the helmet, the soft whir of the suit motor the only external sound.
After a while, he began to calm down, taking a few deep, ragged breaths. The worst was over. Jackson was in no pain, and they had escaped the wreckage of the Dressler.
Now he would witness the birth of a new world, something good would come out of this otherwise unmitigated disaster. I can do this.
He turned the comm link back on.
The doc’s voice was in his ear. “—can’t seem to reach you. Are you okay? I’m coming back as quickly as I can—”
“I’m here, Doc.” Colin kept his voice steady. “Just a glitch on the comm. Don’t rush back. Just take it slow and steady.”
“Oh God, it’s so good to hear your voice, Colin.” She sounded close to losing it. “I don’t know what I would do all alone.”
“I’m okay. Just get back here so we can get this done.” He stood and stretched.
“Affirmative.” She was all business once again. “Give me about ten minutes.”
He put his hands on the seed, trying to feel the life within, wondering what it would lead to. The thing he held between his hands was destined to become a world all its own, mankind’s first interstellar ship.
What would its occupants think of the world around them? Would its strange interior be as natural to them as the Earth was to him?
He looked up at the stars as the spin of the asteroid pulled them away from the sun’s glow once again.
Where would it go, and how long would it take to get there?
It was a liminal moment in the history of mankind, the threshold of a new era, and he was here to see it.
For a moment, he forgot all about Jackson Hammond and the Dressler. He was filled with an intense longing to go along with these future star travelers, to see what was out there. It was what had fueled his passion to become a pilot, to come out here into the vast unknown. Though ultimately he’d become nothing more than a highly paid delivery boy.
There was so much more beyond where they were allowed to go.
We have such short lives in the grand scheme of things. He’d be unlikely to live long enough to see her launched into the void, let alone to see where she went and what she found there.
“I’m almost there, Captain,” Anatov called.
He acknowledged her tersely, turning back to look at Jackson’s corpse lying there in the starlight.
He just wanted to get this over with and get back to the safety and comfortable confinement of the lifeboat.
It was too big out here for one man, no matter his grand ambitions.
ANA CAME upon the captain as he stood on the alien ridge, staring up at the stars. Beside him, Hammond lay prostrate on the cold rock, like a human sacrifice.
My sacrifice.
She shuddered.
McAvery turned as she approached, acknowledging her presence with a nod. “What do I need to do?”
“Just brace the seed while I work on it. I don’t want it shifting.”
He nodded, moving around to the seed’s far side, and embraced it with both arms. “How does this work?”
“I don’t know if it will, yet. In theory, I’ll drill a small hole in the hull of the seed and insert the encoder using the initiator. It’s a small crystalline memory chip encoded with a set of DNA instructions.” She showed him the little green encoder crystal, no bigger than the tip of her smallest finger. “Very durable, until the seed-mind gets ahold of it. If it works, it’s supposed to set off a chain reaction that will bring the seed out of dormancy. Once that happens, we need to get away from it, fast.”
“How far?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never done this before in the wild with a seed of this size, or with the modifications we made back on the Dressler, but I’d gue
ss two to three meters, to start.”
“So we try it and see.”
She nodded. “We try it and see.” She pulled out a vacuum pack from one of her suit pockets. The sun began to rise over Ariadne once again. “This is a good time to start.”
She pressed the pack against the hull of the seed, sealing it tightly all around the edges. She inserted the initiator through a valve in the plastic, and with a glance at McAvery, started to drill through the thick shell.
The debris from the seed’s shell collected inside the vacuum pack in small shards and spirals of woody material. She went slowly, oh so slowly, pressing the bit forward until she felt the drill breach the seed’s inner core.
She quickly withdrew the initiator and dropped the drill bit within the vacuum pack, then reinserted the tool to deliver the encoder.
This was followed by a sealant, which she pushed out along the newly drilled canal as she pulled the multifunction initiator tool out of the husk. She reached the surface, and the sealant immediately hardened.
“Done.” She pulled out the initiator and then removed the vacuum pack and its contents. “Step back and follow me.”
McAvery did as he was told, letting go of the seed and stepping around it as quickly as he dared to follow her back down the small hollow next to the crevice where the seed had lodged itself.
They waited.
Chapter Twelve: Seedling
LEX AWOKE. The cold of the void lapped at her extremities, but she was made for that. It didn’t bother her.
She could sense the rock of the asteroid beneath her, could almost taste it. No longer would she be bound to the confines of a small ship like the Dressler. For the first time in her life, she was free to expand and grow beyond the bounds of her kind, and all she had to do was take the first step.
It was time.
AT FIRST, nothing happened.
Colin stood silently beside the doctor, watching the seed they had carried so far, through such difficulties, do absolutely nothing.
“How long should this take?” he asked over the comm. Not that we have anywhere else we have to be.
She put out a hand to silence him and pointed.
The seed was wobbling. Just a little at first, and then with more force, like an egg about to hatch. As he watched, the husk burst outward in half-a-dozen places, thick wooden roots breaking out of its lower section, digging down into the hard carbonaceous rock of Ariadne’s surface as if it were loose soil.
The roots pulled the seed toward the surface of the asteroid, and he could feel the rumbling of their excavations through the soles of his shoes.
The seed grew visibly larger, feeding off the rock. It began to sink down and expand outward, hairline fractures racing up its sides as it spread out to cover the rock all around it. The cracks in the shell widened, and it glowed from within with a bright golden light as if consumed by a fierce internal heat.
More roots extended down into the rock, and Colin imagined he could see the crushed matter being absorbed into the seedling through the engorged root system.
Anatov pulled him backward as the seed continued its rapid transformation, its edge finally reaching Hammond’s still body where it lay. Then its advance paused.
LEX ENCOUNTERED something unexpected—something not rock. She sent out a tentative feeder to explore this strange new thing.
It laid a nest of root hairs over the object, and the answer came back with a bitter taste. It was the body of the ship’s engineer, Jackson Hammond.
He was no longer alive.
She felt a wave of sadness.
He had been… valiant. A proper knight in shining armor. He had done what no one else could do for her.
Now she would do what she could for him.
She would make him a part of a new world.
THIN FILAMENTS of the same woody material that made up the seedling’s roots spread out over Hammond’s body, and soon the corpse was encapsulated by a fine dark lace. It grew thicker and thicker, forming a solid cocoon over the corpse of the engineer.
Colin watched, fascinated, as the engineer’s suit disappeared under a mass of brown organic matter.
For a couple of moments, nothing seemed to happen.
Then all at once it collapsed and Hammond’s body was gone.
Colin’s stomach churned.
The seed resumed its growth, pulling up nutrients from the rock below, turning them into building blocks for its expanding form, sorting them and allocating its resources.
“How long before it reaches the ship?” he asked the doctor.
“We’ll be long gone before that happens,” she assured him. “Either that, or it won’t matter anymore.” There was silence between them for a moment as they watched it grow.
“Let’s get back,” he said at last. They had done what they had come for. Goodbye, Jackson.
She nodded. “Nothing else we can do here now.”
LEX’S ROOTS finished absorbing the engineer’s body into her own system, and soon Jackson Hammond was no more.
She extended her senses slowly, tasting the rock of the asteroid beneath her as her roots pierced it and pulverized it for her to use. She was closed in, confined, but that would change. She was in transition, and in time she would be in full flower.
Her specialized organs were working on the raw materials she had been given, breaking them down into their constituent parts. With some of the harder metals, she began to build herself a new shell, while other substances were collected in holding chambers inside her growing mass.
This asteroid was large enough to sustain her initial growth spurt.
In a few years, she would be ready to host the first of her human makers.
She expected to live for a long time, long enough to carry them out to the stars.
COLIN AND the doctor reached the lifeboat without incident, though he felt the occasional tremor through his boots as the seedling grew.
As they approached the ship, a part of the ridge behind them collapsed. They turned back to watch.
Something that had been out there since the time of the dinosaurs was now crumbling to dust. Wherever we go, we bring about change. Some of it even good.
They climbed into the lifeboat, one at a time, and Colin wondered what to do about Ana if they were rescued.
She’d made a mistake. That was forgivable.
What she had done to Hammond…. Could he overlook that?
And yet, the man had made his own choice.
If he turned Anatov in, what kind of damage would that do to the project? Maybe he would never get to go out there… but someone should.
Humanity had made a mess of Earth, and there were no guarantees they’d be able to repair the damage.
What if he made the wrong decision? What if this was the point where history effectively ended for mankind?
In the end, it was taken out of his hands.
THE HERALD arrived three long days later, to find two haggard crewmembers and a growing new planetoid.
It took twelve hours for the Herald’s crew to fully disinfect the lifeboat and its crew, and when they were finally taken on board, the doctor confessed everything to the Herald’s captain.
They sat together as the ship prepared to depart, looking out at the seedling from one of the Herald’s plasform windows.
Already it had grown as large as a two-story house, and its form was beginning to take shape—a sealed tube that would grow wider and longer with time. Eventually its interior would hold thousands, on a one-way journey out to another star.
“Why did you confess?” Colin said to her at last. It spoke well of her that she had taken responsibility for what she had done.
“My father.” Ana looked down at her hands, clasped in her lap. “He would have been so ashamed of me.”
Colin nodded. He’d seen it eating away at her. “So what happens now?”
“I waived my right to a trial. I’ll be imprisoned back in Fargo, probably for ten years. They’ll keep
it quiet, though. Jackson will come out of this a hero.”
“He kind of was.”
“Yes.” She looked out at Ariadne and the seedling. “It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?”
He followed her gaze. The seedling was emitting flashes of golden light as it expanded, an internal glow that he figured was the planetoid’s equivalent of growing pains. “Yes, she is.”
“I had just one condition with my confession.”
“What’s that?”
“That they keep you on here as the project coordinator.”
He was surprised. “Why me? I’m just the errand boy.”
She laughed. “You’re far more than that, Colin. I saw that look in your eyes.”
“What look?”
“That wistful look when you thought you were alone out there with the seed. You know what all this means. You know this has to go on.”
He was surprised. He’d never considered being put in charge of something as big as this, but she was right. He did understand. “I’d do it. If they asked.”
She smiled enigmatically. “Look at her closely, Colin.”
They stared out at the new world being built before their eyes. It was beautiful. Jackson would have been proud.
“From here, you can almost see forever.”
PART TWO: COLONY, 2145 AD
Chapter One: The Hammond
LEX FLOATED on a breeze high above her domain. Her new world lay below her, not as it was, but as it would be. It stretched into the distance beyond its current bounds, and there were forests and oceans and castles and all manner of intrigue and adventure.
In reality, the world was much smaller than that, and she couldn’t see it, not really. She felt it, knew it like she knew her own body, because it was. She relied on the people in the Far Hold to be her eyes and ears in the world.
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