by Ginger Booth
Sanjay volunteered, “If you don’t normally eat meat, you might want to avoid that.”
“I’m so sorry!” Tikki exclaimed, rising to remove the offending bacon and ham to the side table. “I should have asked for medical advice.”
“Would the gut bacteria help with that, doctor?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know.”
Ben reflected this seemed fair enough. The research neurologist, fresh from the elite domes of Mahina Actual, had less experience with Denali gut medicine. “Never mind, I’m sure the other food won’t bother your stomachs. What do you normally eat?”
Mila sunk her teeth into a peach, picked fresh this morning, eyes wide in surprise. Rover’s mouth was full of soy protein donut. Groot replied, “Porridge.”
“And?” Ben asked in puzzlement.
The chairman gritted out, “We eat porridge. We would be grateful for…anything.”
Mila picked up a shred of lettuce, dressed with rice vinegar, and sniffed it suspiciously.
Ben frowned. “Surely you grow fresh greens?”
“We rely on recyclers.” Groot’s face betrayed his humiliation. “And grow oats. When I was a child the formatters still worked. I remember spaghetti.”
Ben traded a quick glance with Remi. “Perhaps we could take a look at it.”
“The air pressure,” the chairman blurted. “You’ve come at an inconvenient time.” Mila and Rover scowled beside him. “We planned to blow that section of the city. The computers don’t work. So we planned to cut cubic to keep the pressure up.”
“Blow?” Remi inquired.
“Explode. The roof will cave in and seal it off.”
Ben and Remi froze at this concept, the captain’s spork in mid-air. He laid it down. “Why not an airlock? Or don’t you have a spare airlock?”
The chairman’s face set in further mortification. He covered this with a sip of water. “The water is delicious.”
“Everything is delicious!” Rover enthused.
Groot shot him a glower. “We are not beggars, captain. If you came here all the way from – wherever – there must be something you want from us. Or to you, is this a casual workday?”
“Not at all. We are tracking down research, as we said. Important research that never reached its destination. We’ve planned this trip for years.” A slight exaggeration – the planning phase lasted months, but he and Sass had debated it for a couple years. Ben folded his arms on the table. “You have to understand. There are few of us. Approaching Earth is risky.”
“How few?”
Ben tilted his head. “I won’t get too specific. But you know that only two or three million left the home system in the Diaspora. Or were there more later?”
Groot glared at him. “It took all we had to launch those ships! No, there weren’t more! You left us without even the blueprints to make warp drives to follow you!”
Ben slowly nodded to acknowledge the agony in those words. “Not me. And not you. No one at this table was born yet.”
Groot waved an irritable hand to concede the point, and tried working his jaw again. His ears apparently still objected to the pressure. The Martians surreptitiously feasted on great gulps of air. The guests didn’t smell too appetizing.
The captain still gazed at him through narrowed eyes. How much anger and anguish lay behind his outburst? He opted to lay it on thicker. “Chairman, my great-grandparents were born on Earth. Remi and Sanjay, even more removed?”
“Sixth generation,” Remi agreed. Sanjay said, “Fifth.”
Ben nodded thanks. “My husband, my father, they’re both gravity-stretched like you. When I met my husband, he expected to die by age 30, typical for his walk of life. That was only a couple decades ago. Teke and Tikki’s people, we saved from an overheating planet just this past year. We weren’t living a life of luxury out among the stars while you suffered.”
He paused for the other to digest this. “But we are few. Too few to generate all the technological advances we need. Because life in space is precarious. As you well know.”
Groot seemed to thaw a little. “Indeed.”
Ben sat back. “We might be able to help with some of your challenges. An airlock is easy enough. In fact, a gift.” He pulled a Sagamore-style emergency air bubble kit out of his toolbelt and rolled it to Groot. Plastic-wrapped, it looked like a straw packaged with a pink gumball. He pulled out another and stepped away from the table. He blew it around himself, a great transparent pink bubble which adhered to the floor.
He poked at the side, then grabbed handfuls of the elastic pink and twisted it to and fro. It held strong. Then he took a knife from his belt and slit it open to step out. He peeled up and wadded the deflated remains to discard by the side of his plate. “An emergency air lock. I brought a gross of them for you as a hosting gift – a hundred and forty-four per carton. We carry them all the time. Surprisingly handy.”
“That’s – may I see that?” Mila collected the filmy spent bubble and passed it to her boss, who marveled at the substance. “How strong is this?”
“Easily cut,” Remi replied. “Temporary shelter only. But airtight.” He rose to collect the gift box and set it by Ben’s elbow, away from the guests.
Ben elected to pick on his other guests. “Mila. What is a CLO?”
“CIO,” she corrected nervously. “Chief Information Officer. I was in charge of the computers. Until they stopped. Now I send records to Luna –”
Groot cut her off. “Some things.”
Ben asked lightly, “Like the fact the Colony Corps is visiting?”
“No, you asked –”
“We intercepted your transmission. I was sad to see that. We are in a position to help you a great deal, Chairman. But trust is earned. Yes?” Ben let the man sweat for a moment, then proceeded. “But we’re only visiting for a short time. And Luna is in a position to help you. Do they? Help you?”
“Yes.” When Ben continued to hold his eye, Groot admitted, “They promise more than they deliver.”
“They haven’t delivered in a decade,” Rover muttered, on his far side.
“L-T,” Ben mused. “Is that an abbreviation for Lieutenant Rover?”
Rover straightened his posture. “Yes. I’m head of Martian security.”
“You seem young for such an important post.”
“I’m nineteen. Earth years.” Rover swallowed. “My father taught me all he knew. He passed two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.” Ben considered asking how many people the kid supervised, and abandoned the notion. “Let’s hold the presents until after the tour. Sanjay, about the air pressure?”
“We might have trouble,” the doctor allowed. “But I think a couple air canisters should suffice. Take a few breaths from them any time we experience distress.”
“Dessert first?” Tikki Cook suggested. He unveiled his pastry trade from the side sawhorse and set it on the table with a flourish. The Merchant group all leaned forward to admire the selection and artistry.
“We don’t normally eat like this,” Teke muttered. He disapproved of sweets, said they rotted the brain.
Remi decisively swept up a pudding tart, glazed with strawberries, and bit in. Mouth full, he waved to urge Mila and the others to follow suit.
She was the first to succumb. After a tiny bite, her eyes flew wide. “That is the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted!”
Remi nodded emphatically. “Try the brown ones too. Try all of them.”
Sanjay cleared his throat. “You’ll make yourself sick if you try all of them. But do try the chocolate.”
Ben contented himself with a cup of coffee, another new experience for his guests. Scarcely a crumb remained on his table by the time they rose to tour the colony. He didn’t offer a tour of the courier ship.
When the outer airlock door opened, he took one breath of the colony’s odious air and gagged, struggling not to lose his lunch.
8
When the Diaspora departed Earth in t
he 2120s, the mother world’s population was 1.5 billion and falling. A century earlier, it had been nearly 8 billion, on track to crest at 11 billion by 2100.
Sass skidded down a sandbank into a subsided hole among the ruins. Their first hour exploring the top of this Bermuda hill hadn’t borne much fruit. Sand drifted everywhere, hiding broken concrete walls and furniture eager to twist an ankle. Skeletons were all too common.
But this depression lay a story below the level crest of the hill. Perhaps a cave collapsed below. Fidget seemed to think something was down here. Loosed, she ran ahead to sniff at something. Dry now, the mink looked mangy indeed with half her fur missing.
Sass followed and found a child’s shoe. A few brushes of her suit gauntlet cleared the rest of the skeleton, and the skull. “Clay, VR goggles. On a cord.”
She tugged the cord gently and followed it around the wall of the depression. They’d seen no shortage of dead electronics here. But most led to piles of collapsed wall. Not that Sass was averse to excavating. The shuttle’s grav grapples could pull wreckage aside. But so far they hadn’t found any promising leads.
She found a switch box. Possibly a class of a dozen students had studied in virtual reality when disaster struck. More importantly, she found the data cable. But the computer that served the lesson was crushed. It never used a data cable, probably having connected to the dome network by radio.
“Dead end,” she reported yet again. “This was a classroom.”
She tried and failed to scale the sandbank back to the surface, a feat Fidget managed with ease. So she cranked up her personal gravity generator to counter Earth’s strong field, and bounded out with a few leaps.
Liam reported from the other scouting team. “We’ve got a probable date on the deceased. Forty years ago. A youth raised purely in the domes.”
“How do you tell that?” Sass asked.
“Lack of poisons incorporated in the bone. I tested another individual, much older. Radioactive traces in his bones. Iodine, cesium, other environmental toxins.”
Clay’s tone betrayed growing exasperation. “Thank you, Liam. But remember, teams. Our goal isn’t to figure out what happened to Bermuda. It’s to find data. Data which is decades out of date, apparently.”
Sass chided, “Clay, fifty years of history is better than none.” His brusqueness with her new crewman annoyed her. “Well done, Liam. Say, can you fix Fidget’s fur?”
“I treat people,” the doctor returned. “Machine repair is Darren’s department.”
“Thanks.” Sass grimaced and cut back to her team channel. She and Clay were android nearly as much as the mink. But they wouldn’t need repair today, knock on wood. “Clay, mind your temper, please. Let the kids enjoy solving a mystery.”
“My offer of relationship counseling stands,” Eli noted, the third wheel on their team. He’d been threatening the couple with intervention for the past hour. Not that Eli wanted to talk. “Clay, look at this. Could this be an intact chamber?”
Sass jogged over to join them. Standing back as far as she had, the raised area Eli studied did appear tall enough for rooms, if she subtracted the slope of debris from its base. “I’ll follow it around, look for a door.”
Fidget chose to scout ahead of her, while Clay and Eli strode the other way. She soon ran into another bank of collapsed wall, and bounded to the top, then down again. The far side offered fewer slabs of fallen concrete. But the suspected chamber walls changed over to unpainted cinder block. Sass turned to take in the hill slope crowding nearby, with more living tussocks pushing through the sand. “I think this is an outer wall.”
Clay agreed. “I’ve got an airlock.”
When attempts to open that with a blaster failed, Sass retrieved the shuttle. Using its guns, she cut a corner off the low slung rectangular bank. Eli and Clay had already slipped inside by the time she returned from parking the shuttle.
Yes, this group of rooms had survived the event that collapsed the dome. The glassed portion of the structure had begun at the second floor level, atop thick castle-like walls. The room Sass had chopped open contained shelving of canned goods, with expiration dates consistent with Liam’s dating, plus the rotted remains of potato barrels and great bags of staple grains. Eli collected samples of rice and oats.
Clay managed to open the single door onward. Sass followed him through, adding her helmet light to his. A Carolina flag tacked to the wall above a desk. A couple dead monitors, and yes, a personal-sized computer. Clay plucked that up and stowed it in his backpack for study on the ship. They hadn’t seen human remains in either room.
Sass and Eli advanced to the room’s other doors. Sass’s blaster unlocked the first, a private office. Sass claimed another personal computer there. The next proved a restroom. If this disaster befell during the school day, shouldn’t there be people here?
Clay finally forced his way through the next door, having gone straight for one with the most elaborate style of lock plate. “Eureka. Found a server room.”
Sass peeked in as her lover settled at a dust-covered desk to consider how to apply enough power to decant the digital secrets housed therein. She left him to it, to try the last door. This appeared little different from the server door, until she opened it.
“Hello. Staircase down.”
“Wait for me!” Clay demanded. He also tried and failed to tell Kaol’s team they were headed downstairs. Their comms didn’t reach through the heavy block walls.
She tried the switch on the wall, with no response from lights. Then she picked up Fidget for mink control, and started down, ignoring her lover. She kept her blaster in hand though.
“I told you to wait,” Clay growled over the suit radio.
Eli muttered, “Remember what I said about leadership? And petty arguments?” He followed close at Sass’s heels, curious as she what lay down here.
Three dogleg flights of stairs later, she reached another locked door at the bottom. She handed the mink to the botanist. The bouncing telltale of Clay’s helmet light above was catching up. She blasted the door lock before he could attempt to order her not to. She was the captain. He could at least pretend to obey her. She leaned down to peer to the other side through the gaping hole left by the blaster.
“More rotting organics,” Eli judged by his air meter. “Heavier than the store room.”
“So the people upstairs fled down here,” Sass suggested. She hauled on the door lever without effect, even when she braced a boot against it. This one was designed to open toward them, from steel frame. Kicking it wouldn’t work.
Clay bounded down the last few stairs, and pushed her out of his way. When his attempts to haul the door open also failed, he applied his blaster to the hinges. The door, never air-tight, settled enough to work in fingertips and utility knives. Finally it leaned toward them so they could set it aside.
And a gallery of the Crystal Caves lay before Sass in their glory. Or rather, three moving headlamp circles captured roving glimpses. Her imagination sketched in the whole from the picture Clay had shown her.
Eli murmured beside her, “Earth is lovelier than I imagined. So many novel pockets of beauty.”
“Actually, this reminds me of when I met Teke.” Sass met the physicist, then 17 years old, when she accidentally followed him into an underground river on Denali, which deposited them in a similar gaudy cavern. The crowded curtains of stalactites reminded her of Jonah and the whale, with her trapped on the wrong side of the whale’s baleen teeth. Granted, with Teke, she initially thought she was doomed. Fortunately, the crazy kid guided her to the exit.
She shook off the memory and strode into the cavern. A tourist trap, this cave supplied a concrete pathway with a chain railing on posts, now mostly rusted and broken. With her light on glistening walls of lavender and rose and sweet yellow, she almost stepped off the walkway at a turn. Clay caught her belt and hauled her back.
“This is where the people went,” he murmured, casting his light along the next leg o
f the path, an upward ramp. In a crevice to the left lay their trash, an institutional-size empty can of potatoes on top.
Sass gauged the modest volume of refuse. “Not for long. Keep going.” She strode ahead, careful this time to rake her light across the path frequently. The wheelchair-friendly walkway rose another twenty meters through switchbacks, some cut through the living stalagmites. She was beginning to think this was a waste of time, when a much larger cave opened before her. She stopped, and the three of them cast their lights around.
Sass had an excellent sense of direction to begin with, and space piloting honed it further. This chamber was the high point, its ceiling the floor to the ruins above. The organic forms of the stalactites ran more slender, more vividly colored.
“There!” Eli spotted it first, a viewing platform. The storage room refugees had brought cushions, and ate more cans of stores.
Though still not for long. She walked to the wide space, no larger than an ordinary living room, and held her arm out to prevent Eli from disturbing the scene while she took photos. Silly, really – she wasn’t a cop anymore, and the fate of these ark dwellers wasn’t her mission. But Earth brought back old habits. She lowered her arm, and stepped in herself.
The store room crew didn’t enjoy much of a life here. Copious batteries littered their trash crevice. Six cushion spots offered pillows, but they laid to sleep on damp concrete, to the sound of constant dripping. She naturally took a seat on a solo bolster, slightly separated from the rest. The leader sat facing this way to hearten his team. She scooted around. He faced this way to plot their next steps. They were here for days, possibly a week or two. Knowing that their ark was destroyed, that incessant tinkle of dripping drove him nuts, she was certain. Or her? She bet not. A woman leader would keep the cushions equal.
She cast her light around. Typically people carved or wrote hash marks to keep track of time, however pointlessly. But she didn’t see any.