Stellaris: People of the Stars

by Robert E. Hampson

  * * *

  There were a lot of volunteers to both fly the shuttle and go meet the aliens. Lucy was happy she made the party of greeters—the Welcome Wagon, as the colony had taken to calling them. Though, really, shouldn’t it be the other way around?—and that Angelo would be flying the shuttle.

  Ross 128 c was a little world, but perhaps somehow there would be room for an aquatic farm, for…herding fish or something. She didn’t want to think too hard about it. She’d grown up in a farm with goats, but the goats all had to be slaughtered when the vegetation died. Now…

  She’d almost gone insane the ten days of the trip. Now they were landing and she had to admit it didn’t look promising. Ross 128 c was a tiny world, green-blue due to algae trapped in the ice.

  They landed close enough to the structures to see they were in fact igloos. And then the natives came out.

  * * *

  “From Earth,” Martha told Mike. “But I’m not sure I’d call them human. They were headed further on but their recycling systems started malfunctioning. Insufficient air. Something to do with the electrical system and their reactor. They didn’t have the ability to repair anything and could only limp to the nearest promising world. They used their shuttles for landing, one last time. Their useless ship remains in orbit. Many of the embryos were lost. They could only bring down the essentials, and the essentials allowed the landing party to barely modify themselves for the environment, but genuinely genetically modify their descendants and the frozen embryos.

  “They are amphibian. Well, not quite. Mammals, but with the possibility of storing enough air that they can maintain undersea…cattle farms, I suppose we must call them. Their complex system of transparent igloos over other tunnels did indeed save their crops from the flare, though they suffered some losses. They offered us a trade. We can come and join them. They can modify us enough that we can survive and modify any newborns or embryos enough that…well…we can find shelter there. If we’re willing to become like them.”

  Her reluctance must have shown in her voice, and it showed even more when she played the films the Welcome Wagon had taken to Mike. Mike’s reluctance was also evident. His lip curled. He sighed. “Is it even possible to make us like that?”

  “No. Not really. Not fully. But it’s possible to take us halfway there, as their landing party was. Mostly bio-modified viruses that will alter our genome to survive on thinner air, to endure the cold, to be able to oxygenate our blood to the point we’ll only need a breath every hour or so. The natives can go six hours without breathing.” She put her head in her hands. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “They will welcome us, and our embryos, as many as we’re willing to trade, because they need the genetic diversity. Only fifty founding couples survived on their side, and the gen mod narrowed their gene base even more. In return we can do anything we want with their marooned ship. It’s possible we can fix it. Part of their tragedy is that their main technicians were killed in the original crisis, and they don’t even know what it was. Most of the survivors were people awakened from deep sleep by the emergency systems. We were a planned colony and however bad Caiden Lester’s administration was, we still have techs.”

  “Caiden wants to stay, by the way,” Mike said. “He opposes all attempts at leaving the colony. He thinks the vegetation will come back soon. He thinks we’re tyrants, trying to circumvent his choice.”

  “Can the vegetation come back soon?”

  “Not a chance, though we might be able to provide him, and anyone who wants to remain, with the hydroponics facilities, and the seeds. Maybe one hundred people can stay behind.”

  “It will have to be voluntary,” Martha said.

  “All of it will have to be voluntary. Do you want to have any of it on your conscience?”

  She laughed, but there was no joy in it. “Not even my own fate,” she said.

  * * *

  “There’s room for four hundred people in the two ships,” Lucy said. “And we’re surrendering half of the embryos to the people in Ross 128 c. They call it Diana.”

  “Are you staying?” Angelo asked, with some anxiety. “Only, I’ve requested to go on the mothership. Our original mothership, that is, the Eos. It’s going further on, you know. I don’t know if I’ll be chosen or exactly where we’re going yet. People have mentioned Kepler, I think, but I’m not one of the eggheads, so I can’t tell you. The techs are fairly sure they can get us to a world, maybe better than Gloriana and close enough that, using long sleep, you and I—I mean, I’d still be young enough to start a life and a family.”

  Lucy smiled. “Yes, you and I could do that, Angelo. If we’re keeping the domestic animal embryos…maybe we can still have a farm somewhere. I’ve requested the Eos, too. A lot of stick-in-the-muds want to go in the Diana colony ship and back to Earth. They called it the boomerang.”

  “Well, if they don’t accept me to the Eos then maybe Earth will be okay,” he said. “I hear they have enough room for farms there.”

  “For all of us?”

  “Probably, but Lucy, if we are going to stay on the same ship when they choose, perhaps we should get married? I hear they give preference to married couples.”

  “Uh…is that a proposal?”

  He leaned in close in the crowded refectory. People were talking very loudly all around, and in a corner Caiden Lester was holding forth on how a hundred of them could hold this world, and make a stand for another generation or three, and then they could recolonize. Ross 128 was a quiet star, as quiet as the sun. Another catastrophic flare was unlikely in the near future. They needed, of course, to pick those with the cleanest genetics among the colonists. One hundred people could form a viable colony, particularly if supplemented with a few frozen embryos, but they must have clean genetics. And breeding would have to be carefully controlled. Lucy spared a look at the man’s haggard face, as he expounded the exact opposite of what his administration had stood for, and then leaned in closer to Angelo, in time to hear him ask, “Lucy, will you marry me?”

  “Of course. Let’s register it.”

  And maybe there wouldn’t be enough time or resources for a farm in their future. Maybe like the landing-party generation in Gloriana they would have to sacrifice their lives in regimented, almost military discipline. Maybe she would have to spend most of her life pregnant.

  But somewhere they would go on, and she would have Angelo. And maybe their children or grandchildren would have their own farms and find a world more hospitable than Gloriana had proven to be.

  * * *

  Mike waited. He stood by his wife’s desk, looking at her with every air of expectancy.

  He’d brought her a cup of coffee. Martha sipped the coffee as much to wait out the need to speak as to savor its rich caramel flavor. She wasn’t sure there would be any equivalent where she was going. And she didn’t want to go. She really didn’t want to go. Given her choice she would go to Earth, or on the Eos. But she was too old to establish a new colony. Even with the minimal aging while in deep sleep, she might not be able to have more children. And Mike—

  Beyond all that, it behooved her to provide a good example to her subordinates. Even with two ships, there was only room for four hundred people, give or take. Even with Lester’s group subtracted, they’d need three hundred people to stay behind. Three hundred one if they counted the new Martin baby in the population, though he and all the young children would probably go in the Eos, in deep sleep.

  “Patrick and Peter and James have signed up to the request list for the Eos,” Mike said. “And I allowed Mary and Jane to make the choice as well.” Patrick, Peter and James were their sons over fifteen and Mary and Jane were their ten-year-old twins.

  Martha felt a wrench at her stomach. She was sending five of her children to places unknown. It was logical, even loving, to give them a chance at a new world. It was risky also.

  “I suggest we send Michael, Miles, and Janet with them, as well as the babies.”

  M
ichael was five, Miles three, Janet two, and the babies, her womb-children, were one year old. The wrenching increased. “I don’t want—” she started.

  “If we have them modified to stay in Diana,” Mike said, “they’ll never fully fit in. It will be difficult for them to procure mates or to start a new life. They’ll be like us, creatures caught in the middle, but for their entire lives. It will inform their ideas of themselves, everything they are. We can send them back to Earth, of course. They should be able to find a place there, but it is also denying the entire effort our ancestors made to establish a new beachhead for humanity. And we don’t know what the Earth is like after two hundred years. Or how they’ll be treated. They might become curious specimens to be studied and observed their entire lives.”

  “There is no good option,” Martha said.

  “No. We can have more children,” Mike said. He put his hand across to her.

  She looked up at him, and was both comforted and shattered to see tears in his eyes. “But you don’t understand,” she said. “There is only one place I can go. I have to go to Diana. Someone has to set the example, and by virtue of being the elected leader when this happened, it falls to me. The captain goes down with the ship and all that.”

  “I know.”

  “And you don’t mind?” she asked. They hadn’t married for love. Their married life had been harmonious rather than passionate. He’d been a reliable ally and a steady worker for her goals. But all of a sudden, inexplicably, in the middle of the destruction of the whole world, she needed to know for sure that he would be with her. They might have to cast their children adrift into the unknown but she didn’t know if she could survive without him. She looked at his green-blue eyes and realized he was looking at her just as intently.

  “Wither thou goest, I will go, even beneath the ice.”

  Martha wanted to laugh and cry at once. The facilities were more technologically developed than she expected under those igloos. They should have known, of course. After all, creatures who can perform gen mods aren’t exactly primitives, no matter how many fish skins they wear, nor how many ways they choose to decorate their skins with fish bones and tattoos.

  The accidental, ill-begotten colony was about where the carefully planned Gloriana had been. They were at the point that there could be individual farms and some autonomy.

  They retained, from the two ships, enough tech to keep a wary eye in the skies in case there should be a flare so massive it would affect them.

  But now the five hundred Gloriana embryos had been delivered and the shuttles returned to the mothership.

  They were here for good. Their boats had been burned. There was no going back. They could never leave this shore.

  She held Mike’s hand as she was put under, to start the modifications that would make her a native of Diana.

  * * *

  It all depends on what eyes you use to look at the world, Martha thought. She looked out the window of the igloo that was both greenhouse and home. All the plants gave the house a very high oxygen content. And the plants grew at levels that her two-year-old, Triton, couldn’t reach.

  She heard the splashing down from the lower level as Mike came in from tending to their fish.

  He brought back a crab. It wasn’t really a crab, not unless crabs were the size of dinner plates and pale violet. But it tasted much like Earth crabs. She straightened from where she had been singing Triton to sleep, and welcomed her husband with open arms.

  If their movements were weird now, or if they smelled like fish, she couldn’t detect it. He was still the most handsome man in the universe, and Triton was as beautiful and loved as her other children had been.

  They had scattered their children to the universe and she prayed, as she did every night, that they’d been granted safe landing.

  But looking around her home, filled with plants that glowed orange gold in the ice-filtered sunlight, she found nothing missing.

  They would go on, as colonists had had to since the first amphibian crawled from the deeps onto dry ground on Earth millions of years ago. They would go on as human colonists had managed to throughout the centuries.

  Sooner or later Earth would find faster ways of traveling—warps or gates or something—and they’d come and unite all their colonies into some sort of human commonwealth.

  Martha would wager that when that time came the inhabitants of Diana would be far from the strangest, accidental or planned.

  She took the crab from Mike’s hands and kissed him passionately, smoothing back his soaked hair.

  Perhaps Earth would come much sooner than expected. Perhaps they’d even understand her attempt at communicating they hadn’t all died, and that they might be found elsewhere in the system. Or perhaps she had just sought comfort from history and from the tale of the lost colony of Roanoke.

  And yet, if Lester’s remnants of their people didn’t make it, perhaps someone would correctly interpret the word Croatoan—the sole remains of the lost colony of Roanoke—which she’d ordered carved deep in the rock of what had been Gloriana as they left.

  A sign to those who came after.

  Bridging

  William Ledbetter

  William Ledbetter is a Nebula Award winning author with more than sixty speculative fiction stories and nonfiction articles published in markets such as Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Baen.com, the SFWA blog, and Ad Astra magazine. He’s been a space and technology geek since childhood and spent most of his non-writing career in the aerospace and defense industry. He administers the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award contest for Baen Books and the National Space Society, is a member of SFWA, the National Space Society of North Texas, a Launch Pad Astronomy workshop graduate, and is the Science Track coordinator for the FenCon convention. His science fiction thriller novel Level Five, published by Audible Originals, is available in audio format at audible.com. He lives near Dallas with his understanding wife, a needy dog, and two spoiled cats. Learn more at www.williamledbetter.com.

  Sigvaldi and its trailing moonlet, Astrid, were already high in the dark sky, but still too far away for me to see the long thread of the bridge. They were waning and didn’t provide much light, so I stepped from the shadows cast by the launch gantry and squinted into the growing dawn. My pulse quickened and the air crackled as a distant, growling roar announced the fødselsvind’s approach.

  Ghostly on the horizon, the pale, towering dust tsunami separated from the darkness. It raced toward me, occulting the horizon and even the stars above. I lowered my goggles, pulled the scarf up over my face and planted bare feet, shifting them until they felt firm, then crouched and leaned forward.

  The dust swept in, gently at first, then building in strength. I waited until stinging grit bit my bare skin before sucking in a breath and holding it. The wind intensified, threatening to push me backward, but I leaned further into it.

  I refused to yield.

  I would not move my feet.

  I would best the fødselsvind.

  An unexpected gust made me twist, arms reeling and I almost fell. Then it was over as the terminus wind swept past and a new day was born.

  I released my breath, sucked in another through my nose filters, then spread my arms wide and screamed defiance into the settling dust. More yells rang from the paling darkness as other geitbrors also proclaimed their victory and mastery over nature. Like the seven generations before me, I had proved worthy of another day on Støvhage.

  Hearty laughter rang out behind me and a strong hand clamped my shoulder, raising a small dust cloud. “By the gods, Judel, will you goat herders ever become civilized?”

  I turned to face Alvin Lund from the government’s intelligence office and shrugged off his hand. Not only had I bristled at his suggestion that my family heritage was barbaric, but something about the man made me squirm in my skin anyway and I didn’t want him touching me. Like most visitors from the coast who braved fødselsvind, Alvin wore full storm gear, including a
sealed coat long enough to brush his boots.

  “What do you want?” I said. “I know you didn’t come to celebrate the new morning. Blow the fish stink off, perhaps?”

  He smiled and shook his head, but didn’t rise to the insult.

  “This,” he said and gestured around him, “is a good place to talk.”

  I started walking toward the dormitory, letting him know my opinion of his wanting to talk. “You’re making a mistake. I’m not a spy.”

  His coat made a rustling, hissing sound as he scuttled up beside me. “We’re not asking for much. Just tell us what you see.”

  “I don’t spy on my friends,” I said, reaching for the dormitory door handle.

  He grabbed my arm, then slipped between me and the door.

  “That’s just the point, Judel. These people left us down here to die and ignored our struggle to survive for a full century. They are not our friends!”

  “Their ancestors did that to our ancestors,” I said. “What good does that grudge do anyone now?”

  “They’re using you, Judel. Do you think it’s coincidence that your contact is a beautiful woman? Do you think for a second that Sofie isn’t just flirting with you and stringing you along? These skogsrå are good at seduction. They know how to manipulate men.”

  “Skogsrå? So now they’re magic fairies? Look, if you think I’m so easily fooled by these people, then find a new chief project engineer and send him or her instead.”

  “We’ve considered that,” he said in barely more than a whisper. “You’re too deeply embedded in the project. They trust you.”

  “Which is exactly why I don’t want to betray them.”

  Lund’s gaze grew hard in the dim morning light. “Betray them? Is that how you feel, Judel?”

  A chill crept up my spine and for the first time since the government spooks started courting me, I felt a flicker of worry. “Believe what you like. Put me in jail if you doubt my patriotism.”