by John F. Carr
‘’They did later on.”
“Yes, when no one was there to hear them. When it finally became obvious that the situation was far more severe than anyone—including themselves—had guessed.”
Hagman nodded to Funakoshi, who picked up several of the light sheets of paper—’flimsies’—which were the inevitable output of commo shacks, and began to read aloud…
From radio traffic intercepts archive, Byers/Cat’s Eye archive. Haven incidental transmissions, September 16-17, 2054.
09/16/2054 Z 1324 GMT (sidereal)
“Hello, hello? Bourse? Bourse, come in…(15 second delay) Bourse, come in. Emergency. Uh…Code Black emergency. Bourse, this is the Rabbit Hole—uh, Colony 4a. Come in. Please…(20 second delay)…Bourse, please confirm receipt of this transmission by any means possible. Please send help—send all boats for evacuation, or at least shelter. We’ve got a disaster down here. Those tarry deposits were not geological. They are biological. It’s a…a breeding nest for stobors. At least that’s what we’re guessing. The little bastards are all over the place—and their numbers are growing. It started when we sent a three-man team down to explore the lower sections of the Hole. That seems to be where they’re coming from.
Seems like an immature stage of stobor: they’re only 20 percent the size and mass of the adults, according to the colonial data you gave us. But there are so many of them. And they’re crazy hungry. Flame doesn’t scare them off. Guns kill ’em just fine—but it doesn’t stop the hundreds of others coming along behind them. Except for the few dozen that stop long enough to eat the ones that we shoot.
We’re trying to hold them off, but their numbers are growing, and you can hear the screech of them waking up, way down at the bottom of the vent. Like devils scrambling up out of the pit of hell.… Here, listen:..(noise as receiver is moved, then silence, then distant sounds of many high-pitched animal screams/cries)… And there are more of them all the time. I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to—shit! Cressy, get the (transmission ends)
09/17/2054 Z 1945 GMT (sidereal)
“Bourse, Bourse, come in, damn you. Peters, cover the door. Pedro, look. That one by the file cabinet; it’s still moving. (weapon report, probably shotgun, heard in background)
Bourse, we have retaken the communication center. Can’t hold them off for long. Taking the radio and the backup batteries and rigging a remote relay to the main transmitter. All senior personnel are dead—we think. Identification of the dead—even counting them—is pretty uncertain. These rabid little bastards don’t leave much of a body behind.
They are all over the place. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of them. They’re hungry, but it also seems like they’re trying to get to the surface. Like its some kind of upward migration. And they had to come straight through us, so we’re kind of like a snack as they make their way up to the top of the Rabbit Hole. Heh. More like a Rabid Hole.
These little bastards are insane. They are non-stop ferocious and crazy. Everyone is terrified; there are pockets of survivors in different side tunnels. Some of the company shirts left us behind for dead and bugged out, went up and out the top. They got what they deserved: last radio report from up there indicated that the moment the hatchling stobors got into daylight, all their drive to move upward just became a double-strength desire to feed.
We’re taking the radio down with us, down as deep as we can go. I know that sounds insane, but the stobors are all trying to go up. If we can take the shaft elevator down to the lowest platform, we should be able to bypass and get under the wavefront of the little monsters. There are still some ‘waking up’ down there, but those numbers seem to be tapering off.
It was like a bell-curve: a few started showing up, then more, then a wave of them that simply rolled over and through us faster than we could hope to kill them or run. Now, it seems like there are fewer stobors coming out—like we’re on the downslope of the bell-curve of their hatching cycle.
This will be our last communication from this site: we are pulling the plug and heading down as soon as—
Damn it! The vent, Peters, the ve! (automatic weapons fire, screeching, shotgun reports, two human screams). Pedro, take the radio, NOW! Get out of here, get to the elevator, head deep and—shit! How did they—? (more automatic weapons fire, screeching: transmission ends abruptly, as if transmitter was destroyed or a power failure).
“And the Stellar Bourse did nothing to help?” Dumaskaya’s voice had the fine-edged tremor of tightly suppressed rage.
Hagman sighed. “Ms. Dumaskaya, after delaying in a parking orbit to pick up Alvaro Gartian, the Bourse had to boost at maximum thrust to be able to take her place in the refueling rota out at Ayesha. Ayesha was on the other side of Cat’s Eye, at that time. By the time the first radio transmission was being sent from the Rabid Hole, Captain Seurault had his ship well behind the shoulder of gas giant; radio signals could not get to her.”
“Then how did he know to return to search for survivors?”
“Because on his way to head out-system, the incidental radio traffic from Haven—”
“Incidental? You call the desperate cry of a murdered colony ‘incidental?’”
“Ms. Dumaskaya, any comm traffic other than those originating from the Registered Territorial Transmitting Stations is categorized as ‘incidental.’ It is non-official traffic.”
“Well, then the Kennicott Corporation’s malfeasance is obvious: for the sake of its own safety, Colony 4a should have been designated a Registered Territorial Transmitting Station.”
“Nothing would have made us at Kennicott happier—but that was not an option. Before the Extra-National Services and Protection Board will consider any independent community’s request for a designated RTTS, several criteria must be met. These criteria include minimum benchmarks regarding the population, duration, and vulnerability of the community in question. At the time of the disaster, Colony 4a only met the population criterion.”
“These so-called criteria are, collectively, an outrage, Mr. Hagman.”
“I agree with you, Ms. Dumaskaya—but I’m not a member of the CoDo Prenational Colonial Protection Subcommittee that established those benchmarks. I will however, be happy to sign any petition you care to write up which applies to that governmental body for suitable restitution to the heirs and assigns of the victims of Colony 4a. If, that is, you think you can win a legal action against a CoDominium agency.”
Dumaskaya looked away, said nothing.
Hagman hitched his now-grumbling belly closer to the table. “So as I was saying, Captain Seurault got the message about two days after the distress calls were sent. I add, for the record, that Captain Seurault was not legally obliged to divert from his flight plan to investigate the signals. By a strict interpretation of the emergency response protocols set out by the Extra-National Services and Protection Board, the responsibility for investigating the incident fell squarely upon the shoulders of the charter-holders of the planet—which is the Church of New Universal Harmony centered in Castell City. Or, if said organization was not available, then it would fall to any in-system employees of any Territorial Protection agency. But, as it turned out, the ETSB commo traffic router on Ayesha dropped the ball, and the news did not get back to the colonies in the Shangri-La Valley until long after the Stellar Bourse had returned to Haven orbit.
The rest is already a matter of record from the initial hearing: Captain Seurault called for a team of volunteers to go down and search the site for survivors. He had twice as many as he could shuttle down. What they found doesn’t permit couth description. They landed on a basalt flat littered with the remains of the colonists who were able to get to the surface before being overtaken—if you can call a few tattered rags and well-chewed bits of bone and gristle ‘remains.” There were some stobor remains as well, more when they went to the edge of the Rabid Hole. But the stobor hatchlings were still coming up in twos and threes: easily gunned down, but the sound of t
he fire—or maybe the smell of the fresh blood—attracted more of them from up out of the darkness. Seems in that immature stage, the pads of their paws allowed them to adhere briefly to vertical surfaces: because they were able to manage short spurts of vertical climbing, they got around every defense or blockade the colonists tried to erect in the main vent.”
“And then the so-called ‘rescue-party’ failed to explore the side shafts in the vent itself.”
“No, Ms. Dumaskaya, they did not fail to attempt that. But after they went 500 meters down, and had entered about half a dozen of the side vents, the stobor numbers started increasing again. Two of the volunteer rescue party died fighting them off. And they had not found any sign of human remains under the 200 meter mark.”
“But the last transmission you played back—that indicated that there might have been survivors further down, maybe beneath three kilometers.”
Hagman fixed Dumaskaya with a weary stare. “The rescue party from the Bourse were volunteers. They had already lost two men. They would have had to go another 2800 meters down to get to the point you’re talking about. And if the settlers’ last mission to retake the comm center had finally succeeded in retrieving the radio, then where were the subsequent radio messages the survivors would surely have sent?”
“Well, maybe the mission to retake the comm center did fail…but the survivors down deep might still have been alive.”
Hagman nodded slowly. “I can’t deny that. But I also can’t think of any set of circumstances which make it probable, or even possible. Those poor people were beset by a tidal wave of these ravenous little monsters. There was no sign of survivors. There were still hundreds, maybe thousands of stobors crawling up, in drips and drabs, from the depths—which is where you’re proposing these survivors might have been. There was no reasonable chance that there were any lives left to be saved.
“On the other hand, it was a proven fact that the deeper the rescuers went, the more casualties they’d take—and for what? To prove what they already knew: that nothing could survive that locust horde of cat-sized, four-legged piranhas?”
Hagman turned off the recorder. “Ms. Dumaskaya, I must advise you that your attempt to continue your litigation will surely be futile and a waste of your energy and good intents. The first court found no basis for charges of corporate or individual negligence. Your assertion that the colonists were abandoned is fallacious—because there was no one left to find.”
“The absence of a radio signal does not prove an absence of survivors in the dark depths of the Rabid Hole, Mr. Hagman.”
“Ms. Dumaskaya I admire your determination, but I wonder if it’s starting to become simple mulishness. The Kennicott Corporation wasn’t negligent in its safety surveys: it simply wasn’t god-like in its speculative foresight. Before this, no one had the faintest idea of how the stobors reproduced, or where they went during the height of the East continent winters. We had no idea how different the East Coast subspecies was from the variety that had been observed in the Shangri-La Valley. And there was no way–and no reason—for Captain Seurault’s rescue party to press on any further. As his first rescue reports indicated, the Rabid Hole was still crawling—and I mean crawling—with neophyte-stage stobors. And what those little demons lacked in size and experience, they made up for in numbers, speed and enthusiasm.’”
“But there still could have been survivors,” persisted Dumaskaya, her shining eyes wide and tragic.
Hagman shrugged. “Almost anything is possible, ma’am.” He sighed and shook his head. “But not that. Those people are dead.”
Epilogue
Rabid Hole City, 2671 AD
The tall man and the blonde girl stepped down into the gondola from the pre-flight loading platform. Since theirs was to be a tethered ascent, the preparations were minimal. Within a minute they were rising into the blue and mauve dawn sky, slipping between the dozing float sacs, which would soon make careful descents to sip at the condensation puddles dotting the darkling basalt plain below. Enriched by the water’s oxygen, given lift by its hydrogen, they would once again be fully aloft by early morning.
After the first fifty meters of altitude, the ground crew began playing out the line more slowly.
“Ready?” asked the man, squinting into the rising sun. The blonde girl nodded, wrapped her wool-weed cape more tightly about her coltishly spare frame. The man returned her nod, took a scroll tube out of his satchel bag, unfurled its contents, and began:
“This is called the Scroll of Passage. The reading of it marks your rite of passage by ensuring that you have heard, understood, and may relay to your children, the story of how your People first passed from dark to light, from doom to hope.
“Our beginning seemed hopeless: one hundred and twenty eight souls, expelled as debtors from Eld Erth, labor slaves of their creditors. And within their first week on Haven, they were also the only survivors of that most fey fancy of fate which decreed that they were to be unwittingly set down atop the greatest of all stobor hatching holes.
“And so, having rebounded from one dark travail to the next, they found themselves huddled in the dark, thinking each minute might be their last. It was then that Grigori the Engineer returned with explosives and saved them all by doing what most thought would simply bring a more swift and certain death: he touched off the explosives—and thus brought down the tunnel’s ceiling—just within its mouth.
“And so, sealed in the bottom-most vent of the Rabid Hole by the small explosive planted by Grigori the Engineer, they waited. Because it was a small vent, and the tunnel collapse required was quite minor, there were still two small apertures in the debris. However, only one stobor could pass through each of them at any one time. And so all the beasts that tried to reach the one hundred and twenty-eight survivors were all easily killed.
Those luckless stobors became the meat upon which the last of the settlers survived for those first few days. The one hundred and twenty-eight also found water—unusually fresh—in pools further back in their vent. And so it was that they learned why there was comparative safety at the very bottom of the Rabid Hole: occasional seasonal subsurface overflows made those lower levels inhospitable for the stobor egg clusters. This was what had bred the hatchlings’ fierce, even desperate, instinct to race to the top of their breeding vent: the spring melt waters—pouring in from the surface, and rising up from the bottom—might drown and make an end of each generation. Unless they migrated swiftly upward upon emerging from their cocoons.
As the survivors waited in their narrow safehold, they also explored further back into the vent. Which, they discovered, opened into a vast network of other lateral vents, many scored deep by the black waters of underground rivers that had coursed through them for millennia. And in many, many places, they found washed-down deposits of the stobor-cocoons. Having been compressed by the accumulations above them, and air-dried for millennia, the lower strata of these ossified composts burned well—more readily than peat, less hot than coal. But they were also easy to mine, even for a child. It became the survivors’ first source of heat and light, and so it was that the birth-spoor of the creatures which slaughtered our forebears also became the umbilicus which nourished their first struggle to survive on Haven.
Even as they waited for that first stobor hatching season to pass, the one hundred and twenty-eight learned that the rock beneath them was an endless maze of caves and vents and grottoes. In them our forbears found the blind eels that have become our daily meat, and also the float sacs which—in separating water into the oxygen they needed in place of that which we breathe—also collected the hydrogen remainder in the thin leathery tubules that serve as an inflatable shroud over their diminutive bodies.
We thought the float sacs were cave dwellers at first, creatures that drifted endlessly against the ceilings of the endless dark beneath us. But then came the First Spring, and our first understanding of not only how, but why, the float sacs collected the hydrogen: to facilitate their o
wn upward migration. Out of our Rabid Hole they floated, and out of a dozen smaller ones as well, concealed in the crevices and ravines of the great basaltic expanse that surrounded our new home. They dotted the sky, like tiny children of the clouds and the one hundred and twenty-eight looked up in wonder and declared them a good omen.
And so, the last people of the Rabid Hole Colony and thus the first people of our city, walked out into that Eastern Highland spring and discovered that the land thought dead by those who had set them down in it had been but a land hidden and sleeping. The one-hundred and twenty-eight discovered that although life in the plain’s filigree of interlaced arroyos was simple, it was surprisingly abundant, and that a perennial variety of fire-weed grew there, fast-blooming and potent, as are many plants that have short seasons. Obsidian—the true cornerstone of our early existence—came readily to hand.
In time, so too did the thin but adequate deposits of coal, iron, limestone, quartz, tungsten, sulfur. Because our earliest sires and dams knew the earth and the use of its buried fruits, they depended upon these mineral riches: at first, to survive, and later, to thrive. And when at last they dared to go further a field, they found other stobor breeding holes, and learned how, with proper timing, to make a meal of what had first made a meal of them.
In the course of those explorations, the other great vents were found, and so these wombs of new cities were soon fertile with the seed of our kind. And in time, emerging from those basalt loins, a new generation of wanderers later found their way to the western lowlands and the sea. Which you can see from here: it is that glimmering line on the far western horizon.”
The carefully timed reading at an end, Jothan Bailee refurled the Scroll Of Passage, put his hand on his daughter’s head, and pronounced softly, “And now, Jansy Bailee, you are a woman.”