The cabin lights went red. Klaxons sounded, warning of an imminent breach of the outer hull.
“Personal protective equipment NOW!” Zimmerman shouted over the alarms, just as Foley’s voice came over the radio.
“Shuttle! Scuttle mission and bring yourselves down immediately!”
“As if we had a choice.” Wu grumbled before toggling his mic open to the planetary frequency. “Werder, give me a beacon to lock onto, outside the colony. Screw looking for a soft landing; we’re gonna be lucky to land at all.”
All three pulled on protective suits and then continued working their consoles: Zimmerman trying to pilot away from the larger pieces of debris heading their way, Wu laying in coordinates for a landing that would keep them well away from the colony itself if they came down explosively, and Milne collecting and relaying the diminishing data from the satellite.
Zimmerman cut off the alarms and the chamber, still washed in red light, was eerily quiet.
“We know we’re in trouble. We need to hear each other better,” he said to no-one in particular.
With the alarms off, the number of direct hits and partial glances the shuttle was taking from the debris became more noticeable. Milne had hoped they were heading away from the storm, but it seemed like they were now in the middle of it. Every reverberation through the shuttle shook them in their seats and made them tense up expecting the breach alarm and their suits to seal.
The breach alarm never came, but the shuttle took its most violent hit yet, and a different alarm sounded.
“Engine rupture!” Zimmerman shouted.
Milne could feel the shuttle swinging around as forward momentum ceased. Another piece of debris hit the rear end of the craft. “Thrusters?”
“Firing,” Wu answered. “Werder, forget that beacon. We can’t control our descent beyond what the thrusters are capable of.” He paused, swore. “And we’re leaking what little fuel we have left. There’s a good chance once we hit the atmosphere, we’ll be leaving a flaming trail for you to find us by.”
“Get yourself to the ground,” Foley responded instead of the kid. “We’ll be waiting.”
Hands worked consoles feverishly. Wu tracked the fuel. Zimmerman fired the thrusters, pushing them down into the atmosphere. Milne gave up tracking the satellite data and tracked the debris storm, which they passed out of as they moved closer to the planet.
They could feel increased resistance on the shuttle as they entered the atmosphere. The shuttle became harder for Zimmerman to control even before the fuel reserves ran out.
Milne switched his sensors over to positioning data, to figure where the shuttle would come down. “We’ll come down outside the colony by several miles.”
“But not on anything soft,” Wu added.
“Not in that location, no.” Zimmerman concurred.
“Foley is on her way out to your projected landing site,” Werder’s voice came over the line. “We’ve mustered every crewmember we can.”
“Hey, kid,” Zimmerman interrupted.
“Yeah?”
“Sorry I was so hard on you. And so easy, too. Shoulda spent more time teaching, less time blaming.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to make that up, Zimm.” The fact that Werder addressed him by his nickname wasn’t lost on Milne. “And the rest of you, too.”
“Still, just in case.” Milne chose his next words carefully. “Tell our families we love them, and you do everything you can to keep comms running in case Earth ever does get in touch. Got that, Werder?”
“Yeah.” Werder sounded resigned. “Yeah, I do.”
“Good. Now stop talking to us, and let us try to set this thing down without a big explosion, okay?”
“Yes, sirs.”
And then there wasn’t time to think, just react, as the ground drew closer.
Zimmerman pulled the nose up and they landed on the shuttle’s belly. But the shuttle had been built for controlled vertical landings with landing gear deployed, not for landing like an old Earth aircraft.
Milne passed out as the shuttle began an uncontrolled skid across the flat plateau in front of them.
*
He came to in a hospital bed, wrapped in bandages. His blurry right eye opening after several blinks; the left forced closed with something heavy and unmoving. Something immobilized his neck, but he tried to look to his right anyway. A headache spiked behind his eye in response to the movement, and he gasped.
“Welcome back. It’s been a rough few days.” Werder moved into his line of sight.
“F . . .” Milne tried to speak, but his mouth was too dry.
“Your family’s right outside. Doc had a feeling you’d be waking up soon. You and Wu have been recovering at about the same rate and he came to an hour ago.”
“Z . . .” Milne tried to speak again.
“I’m sorry. We got you and Wu out before the fire got to you, but Zimm . . . he was crushed by his console. I . . . I’d rather let Foley give you all the details. I’m gonna get your family.”
Milne grabbed Werder’s arm as he turned away. The kid spun to look at him.
“S . . .” Milne tried again.
“Satellite’s gone, man. But we got a ton of extra data from it thanks to the boost you gave the signal before it slipped out of range. It was still broadcasting. Maybe someone’ll hear it and chase it down. Meantime, our days of chasing satellites are over. Can’t afford to risk any more lives up there. We’re here, this is home now. Let me get Aleksander and Renee. Family first, right?”
Milne nodded, and let Werder leave. Family first, he thought. Orpheus Colony would survive, thrive, or fail on its own. This had always been true. But now it would be a known reality. At least the planet was hospitable, the colony strong and secure. With the comm satellite gone, they could put their energy and resources into exploring the world they were trapped on.
Milne’s daughter pushed through the door and rushed the bed before Aleksander, trailing behind her, could rein her in. Milne grunted with the impact, and his good eye blurred with tears. It hurt, but it was a good hurt.
Alerted by a biologist, the Director of Native Relations between humans and the slythii discovers details that affect their burial ceremony and must find a way to interfere to save lives. Nancy Fulda is a Hugo and Nebula Nominee and has been honored by Baen Books and the National Space Society for her writing. Her story here asks some interesting questions while taking some unique twists and turns.
SOARING PILLAR OF BRIGHTNESS
NANCY FULDA
The knock at Adrian’s office door was brief, tentative, and mildly desperate. Reluctantly, he set aside his research and called, “Come in!”
The handle swung downward, and a young biologist from the colonial research institute poked her head around the door. “I’m sorry to bother you. I know you must be very busy . . .”
“Not at all,” Adrian lied. He read the name on her ID badge. “Come in, Brenda, and tell me what the slythii have done this time.”
Not, Adrian reflected sourly, that the inevitable conflicts between the human colonists and their alien hosts were ever truly the aliens’ fault. The slythii were an herbivorous race, quadrupedal, and almost annoyingly complacent. About the only crime they’d ever committed was the accidental blockage of traffic by milling around on public roadways.
The roadways in question, it turned out, had been built along a series of culturally significant hunks of rock bordering the canyon wall. Adrian, incensed on the aliens’ behalf, had shouted down several overzealous traffic cops and complained to the colony leadership. He’d expected to ruffle a few feathers, get the roadways removed, and return to his quiet field studies of slythii culture.
Instead, he’d ended up with a desk job and the lofty title of “Director of Native Relations,” which hadn’t been his intent at all.
Adrian sighed, set his coffee mug among the scattered documents on his desk, and wondered how sunrise had come so quickly. The planet’s rings,
arching overhead like gold-dusted ribbon, had already caught the glowing edge of dawn. Another hour, and his day would vanish in a morass of trade negotiations, political inquiries, and activist outcries over native mineral usage.
Brenda emerged from behind the door’s expansive bulk, tucking her hair behind her ear. “It’s, um . . . not exactly about the slythii.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“It’s about their death rituals.”
Adrian froze, all aspirations of returning to his research draining away. “What about the death rituals, exactly?”
Brenda held up a small, flexible data strip. “I—we . . . sort of recorded one of them?”
Adrian gaped, swallowed, and managed to avoid breaking into a cough. “Are you sure?”
“That it was a slythii Ascension? Oh, absolutely. You can hear them keening on the recording.” She added hastily: “We weren’t trying to eavesdrop. Professor Fazzolari asked me to set up a three-day surveillance for tchuno spores. But when I looked at the video . . .” She broke off, wilting. “It was an accident, I swear! We didn’t know there was a Deceased in the area. You don’t think this will start an interspecies incident do you?”
Her expression of abject terror was distressingly genuine.
“Brenda, the slythii are neither aggressive nor politically inclined. Learning that an Ascension was observed by outsiders would—” be a grave violation of the trust they placed in me “—merely displease them. Let me see the data strip.”
She handed it over. Adrian activated the built-in holoprojection, skipping to the time stamp she indicated.
A wooded hillside glowed above his desk. The planet’s rings, majestically multipartite, illuminated the gathering dusk. A raw-throated wail rose from the speakers.
For several seconds nothing happened. Then, beyond the far line of treetops: a soaring rush of light. The column blazed like a conduit to heaven, bright enough to make Adrian wince. A hiss of wind against the treetops, a distant sonic echo, and the glow faded.
A slythii Ascension. The recording matched native descriptions perfectly. As near as Adrian understood, through his admittedly imperfect mastery of the slythii tongue, the giant, tranquil aliens believed that deceased souls resided for several weeks within the hardened carcasses of the dead. Taloned avians called ghondui attended the body during this time, driving away scavengers and preparing to escort the dead slyth’s spirit into the greater life.
Adrian had always presumed the rushing light that supposedly accompanied the soul’s ascension to be a metaphorical exaggeration. Apparently, it was not.
“Play the recording again,” Brenda said. “Frame by frame, at high magnification.”
Adrian did so. Frowned. Scrolled back and froze the playback during the brightest frame. Light surged in the motionless image, rising behind the trees, spreading with an almost chemical quality. Amidst the ripples atop the column, grainy with magnification, floated six hazy figures. Creatures. He was inclined to call them gargoyles.
Wrinkled heads, tightly sealed eyes; taut, stout bodies beginning to unfurl from a fetal compression. Corrugated wings, vengeful beaks. Slime-encrusted feathers dripping with liquid light.
“Blazing stars,” Adrian whispered. “What are those?”
Not the rising spirit of a dead slyth, certainly.
“They’re immature ghondui,” Brenda said quietly. “I ran the image through our biological correlation programs. Bone structure, relative limb length, feather distribution... there’s no room for doubt.”
“Ghondui,” Adrian murmured, appalled. “Guardians. That’s what the word means in slythii. Supposedly, adult ghondui guard the bodies of the dead until their spirits are ready to ascend.”
“Then why,” Brenda said—and the gravity in her tone implied that this was why she’d come to him— “are the supposed guardians of the dead brooding their young in the carcasses of the Deceased?”
“I don’t know,” Adrian whispered.
He stepped the playback forward, frame by frame. The ghondui spread their primordial wings, fanning from the glowing apex of the geyser. They were almost impossible to spot, even in the slow-motion recording. To slyth standing on the ground, eyes dazzled by the brilliant eruption of light, they would melt invisibly against the faded slate of the heavens. Unseen.
“There are wasps back on Terra,” Adrian said, “who lay eggs in the bodies of dead spiders. The hatchlings feed off the corpse until they’re mature enough to take flight.”
Could enterprising birds have taken a similar evolutionary leap, learning to lay their eggs in slythii corpses?
“You mean,” —Brenda’s eyes were aghast— “The entire slythii religion is based on a parasitic relationship? Those big, stupid birds lay their eggs in the dead, then guard the corpse until . . . until some sort of chemical reaction shoots the hatchlings beyond the reach of ground predators?”
“It appears so,” Adrian said reluctantly.
‘Big, stupid birds’ was perhaps an ungenerous description of the ghondui. According to the initial survey team, the ghondui were rather intelligent—possibly even sentient, although they’d shown no interest in communication. Sentient or not, they were knobby-skinned, bad-tempered, and approximately three times the size of the raptors found on Terra.
“Are you going to tell the slythii?” Brenda asked.
“Tell them what? That the blazing light their corpses emit has nothing to do with spiritual ascension? That carnivorous birds are using their dead as incubation chambers? That their entire religion is based on a hideous fallacy?” Adrian leaned back in his chair, surveying the display with an expression Brenda would surely interpret as a glower.
Silence stretched between them.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said. He shut down the data strip, fervently wishing that he, like the junior biologist standing in front of him, had a superior whose desk he could dump the problem on. “Death rituals are the heart of the slythii culture. Attacking the convictions they’re based on could result in unpredictable, species-wide effects.” He spread his hands in indecision. “I’d like to keep this data strip. I’m afraid you’ll have to make a new recording for Dr. Fazzolari.”
“Of course.” Brenda nodded. She retreated toward the hallway, but paused halfway through the door. Turning, she said: “I’d want to know, sir.”
Adrian glanced up, puzzled.
Brenda continued. “If my species had spent two millennia believing a lie. If someone had evidence of the truth... I’d want to know.”
She blinked as if astonished at her own statement, muttered a timid farewell, and fled.
*
Adrian tossed the data strip onto his desk.
Should he tell the slythii? Could he tell the slythii? Most cultures did not take kindly to attacks on their religious precepts. On the other hand, as an ethical man, how could he not?
“Ah’drahn?” Adrian’s head jerked up at the slythii pronunciation of his name. Rukha’s mottled head poked through the open doorway. The Native Relations complex had been built to slythii proportions—double-wide by human standards—but Rukha’s torso blocked all view of the hallway. His snout bobbed with excitement. “It is time.”
Adrian rose, strangely reluctant. He did not wish to view a slythii interment; not today. Not with the data strip glaring like a baleful eye from his desktop. But he was the first human to be accorded such honor. More, the Deceasing was blood-kin to Rukha. He would insult his friend if he refused to come.
So he tucked the data strip into his pocket and slid his chair back into position. He pulled his government-issue taser from the bottom drawer of his desk and strapped it into his thigh holster. Slythii were not aggressive, but that did not make them non-dangerous. They tended to treat humans as one of their own, jostling to assert physical dominance. Since the average slyth massed as much as a small elephant, this could prove hazardous for the humans. Adrian had learned that, in moments of extreme cultural disconnect, it was useful to ha
ve a way of evening the odds.
Rukha was halfway down the hallway, his head ducking to avoid the light fixtures, by the time Adrian stepped out of his office.
The slythii were a leathery-skinned species, with blunt, ridged snouts that made Adrian think of box turtles. Rukha’s shoulders spanned most of the hallway. A less enlightened slyth might have brushed into passers-by, crushing them against the wall and inadvertently breaking bones. But Rukha had been interacting with humans almost as long as Adrian had been interacting with slythii. He was the closest thing they had to an ambassador.
On the front steps of the building, Rukha paused. He bent his neck until one wide eye hung near Adrian’s face, and spoke in the rasping tongue of the slyth.
“Djudin,” he said. Great friend. “My lungs are heavy.”
“I am not surprised,” Adrian answered in the same language. “Gazhii is the first of your brothers to depart.”
“It is not that. Death is no cause for sorrow. But Ghazii has not always honored the old ways. I am afraid no guardian will come to ease his passage.”
Adrian’s tongue snagged in his throat, caught in the gap between two impossibilities—uttering the comforting words that were a lie, or uttering the truth that would dishonor the dead.
Adrian temporized. “I am sure that what is right and proper will happen.”
Rukha heaved a slyth-sized sigh. “You are a good friend, Ah’drahn. You do not lie to me. Yes. What is right and proper will happen.” He stepped onto the gravel access road, headed toward the tree-line.
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