Nightborn, page 4
She bit her lip and nodded.
“Med’s got tranks,” he reminded her. “Maybe in the morning you should ask for a few.”
“We’re supposed to save our medicine for real emergencies.”
“Yeah. I guess.” He sighed. “It’s going to take a while to get used to the idea that our supplies can’t be replenished. No easy trip to the pharmacy here.”
“Why are you up?” she asked. Hoping to turn the conversation away from herself.
“Nightmare. Dreamed I was assigned to make a hundred and eighty-four concentrated nutrient bars look and taste like breakfast. Way too real.” He rubbed his eyes. “I should try to go back to sleep. So should you. Tomorrow’s going to be tiring.”
She smiled faintly. “Every day here is going to be tiring.”
He chuckled. “Amen to that.”
Lise was asleep when Tia returned, and the geologist made her way to her cot with care, trying not to wake the other five in the tent. Then she eased herself down onto it with a sigh, lay back and closed her eyes, and tried to relax.
Again the mysterious sound came. This time it was clearer. Something in the distance—someone in the distance—was definitely crying. Trembling, she put her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t shut out the sound. So human. So very human. It isn’t real, she told herself. It can’t be real. The cry was morphing into words now: slow syllables, hesitant, like a baby’s first attempt at speech.
Maaamaaa! it cried. Maaamaaa!
She shivered.
Commander’s Personal Log
Year One
Day Two
Slept poorly last night. So did many others. Too much excitement, too much light, stiff collapsible cots. Can’t be helped. The deconstruction team will break down the pressure chairs in the pods later today, to turn the padding into comfortable pillows. Hopefully tomorrow night we’ll all rest more easily.
We arranged the drop pods in a circle and stretched synth fencing between them to discourage casual visits from local wildlife. That will define our settlement for now. There’s a large open area at the southern end, big enough for the entire colony to gather in, and a gate in the fencing that opens onto grasslands. In the middle of the camp there is now a city of tents, each one large enough for six people, to serve as temporary housing while we build more permanent accommodations. Since the tents were designed to be cannibalized for fabric later on, they’re a motley assortment of colors; God alone knows what kind of clothing Colony Control expected us to make out of them.
To the north is a quieter area, closer to the forest, where small groups can congregate. We marked off a small area in one corner and buried the ashes of those who died in stasis, so that in their final rest they could be with us here, on this new world, not orbiting in an abandoned ship.
I have decided pod 4 will serve as my office. It’s the smallest one. That’s an important gesture to the rest of the colony: the person who has the most power in this place mustn’t take advantage of it for personal gain. We’ll assign the others as they are needed.
I will be working with the construction team when not needed for leadership matters. The show of physical labor will confirm to the colonists that I see myself as their equal, not someone above them, and the physical activity will help me work off some of my own anxious energy. That’s my hope, at least.
TO DO:
Timekeeping: Ernan day is 25.12 Earth hours. Close enough that we can break it up into 24 segments, and within a few weeks no one will feel the difference. Anna is adjusting all necessary electronic components to accept the new measure of minutes, hours, days. Just like home, only we’ll be a bit more tired at night.
Vehicles: The tractors need to be unloaded and assembled. We also need to create a strip of flat ground between the module and the camp that we can use to haul things back and forth. Most of the route is smooth enough, but there are a few sharp drops that will have to be filled in. One day’s work at most.
Medical: Lise wants to set up a clinic in one of the pods—which I have approved—but the equipment she needs is in the module, so that has to wait on having vehicles to transport it. Pod 8 will be the clinic, while 9 will be outfitted for convalescence, and 11, at the north end of the camp, will be reserved for quarantine. Hopefully the last one won’t be needed.
“Hey, boss. Got a minute?”
Leo looked up to see Ian Casca standing in the doorway. “I was just finishing my log. Is it urgent?”
“You said you wanted to know if we found an anomaly.”
“Indeed I did.” Leo closed the log program, then shut down the computer. The solar power they had harvested was too precious to waste on idling devices. “I’m listening.”
Ian offered him a slender wooden rod, as thick as his thumb and maybe a foot long. He smiled broadly as he did so, clearly pleased to be the first person to discover something significant. But if he had expected Leo to recognize the value of what he’d given him, he was due for disappointment. Leo turned the rod over in his hand and looked it over, but from every angle it just looked like a stick. “And this is . . . ?”
“Core sample from a tree.” When that got no response Ian urged, “Look at the rings.”
The wood was rough and it was hard to make out precise details, but the dark stripes circling the rod looked evenly spaced. “They seem normal to me. Each one is a year, right? What am I missing?”
“A tree develops wider rings during the years when conditions are optimal. Hardship reduces growth and narrows the bands. So you can learn the tree’s growth history by studying its rings.” He drew in a deep breath. “Now what do you see?”
Leo looked at the rod again, trying to distinguish some difference between the rings. “I’m sorry, these all look the same to me—”
“Yes! Yes! That’s it!” Ian smacked his hand on the desk. “They’re all the same. But they shouldn’t be. They can’t be. It would mean that year after year after year, weather conditions were identical. No droughts. No floods. No seasons that were too hot or too cold for optimum growth. Just the same rhythm of growth, every single year.” He paused. “You wanted to know about anomalies, Leo. Well, this is one.”
Leo studied the rod again. “Do other samples confirm this pattern?”
Ian nodded vigorously. “We’ve cored six trees so far. All show the same pattern.” He ran a hand through his ginger hair. “That counts, right?”
Leo felt the rough surface of the rod. “What could cause that kind of regularity?”
“Damned if I know. Especially on a world with so many active volcanos. You’d figure with all that ash being spewed into the atmosphere, sooner or later there would be some variation in sunlight, or rainfall, or some other element that would affect a tree’s growth. But either none of those things ever happened, or they were compensated for.”
Leo’s eyebrow rose slightly. “Compensated for, how?”
“Not sure yet. On Earth there are trees that connect underground so they can share resources. But that kind of thing wouldn’t help during a widespread weather event, as all nearby trees would also be affected. Whole different scale. I’d need more data to analyze, to know if that was the case here.”
Leo was silent for a moment, digesting the new data. “If the climate here was unusually stable—unnaturally stable, as you seem to be implying—and the seedship detected that . . . might it have wanted to collect more data, to work out the reason for that stability?”
“Thus explaining the ninety years of surveillance.” Ian’s tone was nothing short of triumphant. Leo knew from their months together in Orientation that the botanist dreamed of playing a pivotal role in Erna’s founding, of being the one person who could deliver solutions when others failed. Now he might actually get to play that role, by providing their first real clue to the seedship mystery.
Leo asked, “Was anything like this mentioned in the other colonies’ reports?”
Ian shook his head. “I read through all four of them. If they found something like this, no one saw fit to mention it.”
And the seedship might not do so either, Leo thought. Because what is there to report? Trees here are unusually healthy?
He was about to respond when Lise appeared in the doorway, knocking to get his attention. She looked distraught.
“Tia’s missing,” she told them. “We can’t find her anywhere.”
Leo’s eyes widened. “Since when?”
She shook her head. “Don’t know. She wasn’t in the tent when I woke up, so I figured she probably headed out early to her work assignment. But given the state of mind she was in last night, I thought it best to check. Her crew chief said that no, she hadn’t come to work today. So I searched the whole camp. Tents, pods, even the waste pit. I looked everywhere. She’s not here, Leo.”
He remembered how lost Tia had looked the night before. Remembered the terrible sadness in her eyes, the sense of a vast emptiness behind them. I should have stayed with her, he thought. Whether or not she thought she needed me. I shouldn’t have left her alone. He handed the core sample back to Ian. “We’ll talk more about this later, Ian.”
“Of course,” the botanist said. “I understand.” He tucked the core sample into his pocket. “I’ll help search.”
There were several dozen people standing around in the southern field, and the somber atmosphere suggested that news of Tia’s disappearance had reached them. Lise looked around, then waved for someone to come join them. Steve Sheridan. As he came over to them she told Leo, “Steve was the last one to see Tia.”
“Where was that?” Leo asked him.
“Out by the fence, late last night. She was just standing there, staring into the night. There had been an odd noise earlier, like an animal crying. She asked—” Steve hesitated. “She asked me if it sounded like a human baby. She seemed obsessed with that. Asked me several times about it. I got the feeling she was pressuring me to confirm it.”
Leo had seen Tia’s psyche profile, so he knew that she and Michael had left their former life behind and crossed half a galaxy to start a family. Could the strain of losing that dream have unsettled her enough that she was hearing things? “Did it sound human to you?”
Steve hesitated. “If you wanted to hear it that way I suppose you could. I hadn’t paid it much attention myself. But I had the feeling that if I left her alone there she might leave the camp to seek it out, and that seemed like a bad idea. So I talked her into coming back with me. I even stayed outside her tent for a while, to make sure she stayed there. That animal—whatever it was—howled a few more times, but Tia didn’t come out of the tent again. Eventually I left.”
“No one has seen her since then,” Lise said.
Leo looked at the wire mesh gate at the entrance to the camp. It wasn’t a very substantial barrier, and if someone had opened it during the night they’d have no way to know. “Lise says she’s not in the camp. Which means she must be out there, somewhere.” He looked out at the grasslands just beyond the fence. “So much land to search . . . . ” He looked at Steve. “Did you get a sense of where the animal cry was coming from?”
“Out that way.” He pointed southwest. Half a mile from the camp the grasslands ended and the forest began. “Past the tree line.”
“All right.” Leo looked at the people who had gathered in the field, then clapped his hands to get their attention. “I assume you’ve all heard by now that Tia is gone. We need to form a search party. Is Morgan here?”
A lanky young man with long hair and a black T-shirt stepped forward. “Whatcha need, boss?”
“Drones. Set up a search pattern over the grasslands. Starting there.” He pointed to the southwest. “Look for any sign of human passage. If she left through this gate, there’s a good chance that’s the way she went.”
Morgan nodded. “On it.” He looked around for the rest of the survey team. “Marty, Gina, Ahmed . . . c’mon, we’ve got work to do.”
“The rest of us will search on foot,” Leo announced. “Stay in groups. Tight search pattern. Look for any sign of a trail. If we can’t find that out in the open, we’ll go into the forest.”
They would find her, Leo thought. They had to. No one was going to accept losing a colonist in their first twenty-four hours on this planet. Least of all the colony commander whose job it was to keep them all safe.
Tia lay on her side in the shadow of the trees, her face half-buried in leaves. Leo knelt down next to her and put two fingers to her neck. No pulse. Cold skin. She’d been dead a while. He took her gently by the shoulder and turned her over, so that her face would be visible. Her body was stiff, and it rolled onto its back like an abandoned doll. Her torso was soaked with blood. There was a deep wound in the center of her chest, he saw, but there was too much blood-soaked fabric for him to make out details.
“Where’s Lise?” he said, without looking up. A moment later she was kneeling by his side. “Can you tell what killed her?”
She pulled some of the bloodstained fabric aside carefully, revealing mangled flesh, then crouched by the side of the body, studying it. Then she took out her utility knife and cut the clothing from Tia’s torso, laying bare a gaping wound in the middle of her chest. With the knife she prodded at the edge of what seemed to be a sizable gash, exploring it. She checked elsewhere, too, but except for the blood-soaked clothing, there was no other sign of damage. Finally she sat back on her heels, wiped her knife on Tia’s jacket, and sheathed it.
“Whatever killed her, it likely happened fast. There’s no sign of any struggle. Damage is messy, crushing and tearing, but it’s all limited to a small area in the center front torso. Probably whatever killed her only had to strike once to kill.” She was silent for a moment. “I can’t tell if anything is missing without cleaning the wound, but the flesh surrounding it looks untouched. If that’s the case . . .”
“Then she wasn’t killed for food,” Leo said softly.
Lise stood up and studied the surrounding area, walking around the body to view it from all sides. But except for the crushed vegetation under the corpse—and of course the blood—nothing looked disturbed. Given how large a beast would be needed to tear into a body like that, it just wasn’t adding up. “There’s no sign she was dragged here,” she muttered, “which suggests she came here under her own power. Others can inspect the site more closely once we move the body, and confirm that.” She looked at Leo. “I’ll need to get her back to the lab for a proper exam.”
The other members of his search team were all staring at Tia’s corpse. Several looked like they were going to be sick. “So we need to carry her to the module. All right. Who’ll help?”
There was a moment’s hesitation, then Lee Singh took off his oversized windbreaker and placed it on the ground beside Tia. The stiffened body was rolled onto it, and four of the searchers grasped the garment by its sleeves and corners, using it as a makeshift sling to lift her from the bloody ground.
“Make sure you check for alien life forms inside her,” someone said.
Startled, Leo turned back to see who had spoken. When he realized it was Wayne Reinhart, he scowled. “This isn’t one of your science fiction movies,” he snapped. Wayne’s obsession with old Terran vids was no secret. It was even rumored he’d been watching one on his tablet while other people on the seedship were still recovering from stasis. Now he dared to treat this solemn moment like a scene from one of his vids?
But before he could respond, Lise said, “He’s right.” She looked at Wayne. “I’ll do that first thing.”
Leo’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing more about it, just waved for those who were holding Tia to move off. He and Lise followed them, while the others in his search team stayed behind to search the site for clues.
Wayne did the intelligent thing and stayed with the latter group.
The office of the Director of Orientation is open on two sides, allowing warm air to flow through the space. Lush plants are everywhere, cascading from pots, shelves, and a low wall separating the space from the rest of the Amazon Preserve. Leo breathes in deeply as he enters, drinking in the humid perfume of the tropics. On Earth that’s a rare indulgence, but soon he will be on a planet where fresh air is the norm, where skies are never choked with smog, where the sunlight is always bright and clean.
And hopefully where grief and guilt will loosen their stranglehold on his soul.
“Come in, Leon.” The director smiles at him. She’s a small woman, dark-eyed and brown-skinned, pleasantly efficient. But it’s easy to be pleasant in an environment like this. “Have a seat. Would you like something to drink? Fresh juice, perhaps?”
It’s hard to say no to that. She goes to a sideboard and opens a decanter full of cherry-colored fluid and fills glasses for them both. Real juice, not the synthetic stuff they served back in the city. A true luxury. He shuts his eyes as he savors it. Soon, soon, his world will be full of fresh fruit. The children born there will never know anything else.
She waits until he lowers the glass, then says, “As you know, Orientation is nearly over.”
He nods. “One more week.”
“Your group has been taught all the skills they’ll need to establish a colony, at least in a theoretical sense. Meanwhile we’ve been observing personal interactions and assessing everyone’s long-term potential. This week is when we decide who’ll be doing what when the colony arrives, so that everything goes smoothly from day one. That includes deciding who’s best suited to run the colony in its first year.” She pauses. “We want you to serve as colony commander, Leon.”
He hadn’t expected that. For a moment he is speechless. “I don’t know that I’m qualified,” he finally protests.
“You have strong management experience, good social skills, and a level head.” There’s a flicker of a smile. “And charisma. People tend to listen when you speak. They’re open to ideas when you present them. And you’ve dealt with psych profiles in your previous job, so you’ll know how to apply the data we’ll be giving you. Who else should we choose?”
