Horizon Alpha, page 11
None of that is happening. We lost a third of our solar arrays in the original disaster, and those that remain will not be enough to keep us in orbit for long. Our life support is powered, but our calculations indicate that within a year, we’ll lose enough altitude to enter Ceti’s atmosphere and crash. Some of the ship will burn up upon entry, but it’s huge. Even if we can manage to get the cylinders to separate as programmed on the way down, we will have no control over where we finally crash. Of course there is no expectation that any of us could survive. We have escape pods designed to survive re-entry, with parachutes and their own thrusters to allow them to land, but after all this time and damage, they are unlikely to work. None of us are panicked about our impending deaths. But we are panicked for those on the planet below us.
We can’t control where the ship will crash. And an impact of this size on the same continent as our people could create an extinction level event that will make the meteor strike that ended Earth’s dinosaurs’ time look like a dust storm. It’s also a nuclear ship, so if the impact crater doesn’t kill them all, the radiation might.
I’m trying to find a solution. Later this week I’ll be doing a spacewalk to see if I can repair enough of the solar array to allow us to initiate the crash sequence and ensure that we crash on the opposite side of the planet from Eden Base.
It might be a moot point. They’re almost out of power themselves. Caleb is going out tomorrow on a mission to get a power core from one of the wrecks they know about. Carthage is leading it, so I’m sure they’ll be safe. But if they don’t find it, Horizon Alpha can crash wherever she wants because no one but the dinosaurs will still be alive down there.
Year 3, Day 214
They’ve found a place to live. We were full of joy as we heard their chatter, loading up their shuttles to evacuate to the valley Caleb and Josh found. I can’t express my relief knowing that Randa and my daughter will finally have a safe place to live. And with a new baby on the way, that valley will be a fresh start for my family. My old friend Carthage fathered that baby, and I’m forever grateful to him for keeping Malia and Randa alive. He’s gone now, but when Randa has the baby, a bit of him will live again. And my sons are finally safe as well, so in a way, a bit of me will live, too.
Year 3, Day 276
We’ve been putting off the decision, but in another few months, we’ll be out of options. We’ll have to initiate the crash sequence to be sure that our loved ones on the planet below are safe. But they’ve found Transport Seventeen. My niece and nephew are on that transport, along with Bethany’s father, Don, and Caleb is flying out to get them. For Bethany’s sake, we can’t go down before she knows that her father has made it back to Carthage Valley.
Year 3, Day 299
They made it back. Most of them. I’m so incredibly proud of my son Caleb.
Year 3, Day 301
They heard us. They know we’re alive.
Chapter 24
Caleb
Shiro’s team was gone for three more days.
Without the sat trans contact, we had no idea what was going on with the away team. We got a few minutes of signal here and there, enough to see that their sat trans were active, and moving around the base, so we knew they were alive, but the small amount of communication was spotty and usually cut off mid-sentence. They said something about a Rex, and something about an engine, but we couldn’t make any sense of it.
Sara had, as expected, freaked out. She and Mayor Borin argued about showing the Flood ‘saurs to everyone. Mayor Borin didn’t want to confirm the rumor and risk panic. But Sara insisted we needed every able-bodied person out in the pine trees, digging up all the mounds we could find.
Sara was right.
We found another nine mounds over the next three days, and destroyed them. Nobody was certain we had gotten them all, but we continued stomping over every meter of ground in our valley, looking for the telltale signs.
Late in the afternoon, Erik rushed into the Painted Hall shouting, “They’re back!” We had a guard stationed in the re-opened front door around the clock now, though we were so low on ammunition that if something really wanted to get in, there probably wasn’t much a guard was going to do, other than let us know we were all about to get eaten.
Now I bolted down the narrow passageway, emerging into the bright sun. The tank was rumbling up far below me, emerging from the thick tree line. A wide trailer bounced along behind it, full of metal bits all lashed together into a jumble. They pulled in right next to the derelict shuttle and turned off the engine. The hatch popped and Shiro’s head peeked through.
He disappeared, and Nirah climbed out, followed by Don, Fernando, and Adam. I expected them all to head for the crumbling path up toward the entrance to our cave system, but instead they immediately began tugging on the straps, releasing metal parts that clattered to the ground.
I peered around at the jungle edge, far too close to where they were working. Anything could be hiding in there, waiting for a chance to leap out and have a human-size snack. I waved down to the group, and Shiro squinted up at me. He dropped the thick black hose he was carrying and scrambled up the path.
“Caleb! Hey, you look awful!”
I gave him a hand up the final climb and he threw his arms around me, clapping me on the back and making me cough. “Easy, man. I was almost dead for a week.”
Shiro stood back and peered at me up and down in the filtered light of the tunnel. “I didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to leave you like that.” He glanced down at the little group unloading the trailer. “But we couldn’t wait. And we didn’t even know . . .” He trailed off.
“Didn’t know if I was going to make it.” I chuckled. “Yeah, Josh said the same thing. But I’m hard to kill.”
He nodded, and smiled suddenly as something popped into his head. “You should have been there. Baby Rexes. Man, you should have seen it.”
Nirah’s team was still pulling things off the trailer. “You need to get them in here. Whatever she wants to do, we need to do it at night. Not safe out there in the daytime.”
Shiro rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we sure know that. But getting Nirah to stop when she’s on a roll . . .”
“She’ll stop real fast if a Wolf pack hears all that racket.” I grabbed one of the pitons embedded as a handhold in the rock, preparing to head down and try to make them come up for the afternoon, but Shiro headed me off.
“I’ll get them in. You stay here.”
He swung over the edge and down the narrow path. From below I could make out snippets of argument. Fernando kept looking out into the trees, and Don was hanging close to the tank as Nirah bustled around.
A distant roar cut through the air and the forest went silent.
The clatter of metal on dirt followed as the team scrambled for the path up to safety.
Chapter 25
Caleb
I sat on the plateau overlooking the valley, balancing my dinner plate on my lap. We had found three more Flood ‘saur nests in the pine grove and Sara got more agitated with every egg we brought her. She was trying to come up with some kind of repellant, some chemical that might make them avoid our valley, but didn’t seem to be making much progress.
Malia plopped down next to me and grabbed a handful of berries off my plate. “Mom said you need to rest,” she said. “You need to come inside.” She snuggled into my armpit, playing with the little doll Mom had made her. It was a birdman made out of twigs and wool, with crocheted feathers and a carved wooden beak.
“It’s such a nice night, though.” We shared my dinner under the bright, round moon.
Sara appeared next to us, holding her own plate. “Room for one more?”
Malia jumped up and hugged Sara’s legs.
“Here, let me take that.” I reached up to take Sara’s plate so she could sit next to us on the smooth rocks, our feet dangling over the edge. “How’s the work coming?” I didn’t want to push her, but if Nirah’s calculation was correct, the Flood would be here in a month or so. We still had no plan to survive them.
She picked at the food on her plate. “Nothing yet. We just don’t have the facility to manufacture anything in the kind of quantity we’d need to go around the whole valley.”
The full moon made everything in the valley look gray. If Sara came up with something that repelled the ‘saurs, we’d need an awful lot of it.
“Careful, Mali.” I grabbed the back of her shirt as she stood too close to the edge of the plateau, playing with her doll. She swooped it all around in her hands, flying it around as the real Birdmen almost certainly never did.
“What did they do?” Sara’s voice was distant, contemplative.
“What did who do?”
“The Birdmen,” she said. “The Flood isn’t new. A migration like that doesn’t just change course since they were here.” She tapped her fingernail against the metal plate, looking up at the bright moon.
Her eyes snapped wide. “I need to see . . .” She cut off and turned to me. “Go get Ryenne. And a bunch of lanterns.” She dropped the plate and jumped to her feet. “They did come here. And the Birdmen survived.”
***
Sara, Ryenne, and I stood in one of the lowest reaches of our caverns. It was another painted room full of Birdmen drawings and their scratchy writing. Sara held the lantern up, muttering to herself as she circled the room. We had uncovered it in our continued exploration of some of the less accessible areas. The walls were smooth and regular, a clear sign of Birdman excavation.
“Here.” She stopped and pointed at a peculiar series of drawings. “I knew I’d seen them. I just didn’t know what they meant.”
The pictures showed the form of a Birdman standing on a hill. There was a circle over his head and his mouth was open. Little lines were coming out of the beak. All around him the mountain was covered in little dots.
“I thought he was singing to the full moon,” Sara said, and Ryenne nodded.
“It looks like he’s singing.”
Sara whirled to face her. “You said your little ‘saurs run and hide when you practice your flute?”
Ryenne nodded. “They hate it. I keep telling them I’ll get better with practice.”
The lantern shone on the writing and Sara murmured as her eyes ran across the lines. “I didn’t know so many of these words. I still don’t.” She turned to me, gesturing with the lantern. “But don’t you think this looks like a million little ‘saurs?”
The dots all over the mountains. Tiny, hungry ‘saurs.
“Nirah said it’s the first full moon after the equinox.” I looked at the drawing. “That sure looks like a full moon.”
“I was right about the words I knew, though,” Sara said. “They are singing. Look here.” The next picture showed a bunch of jagged lines. “See? It’s a map of our valley. And all these circles and lines around the perimeter? I think that’s where the Bird People stood. Where they stood and sang.”
The next picture showed three suns and three moons. And the next showed the mountain without the dots.
“The ‘saurs hate the noise.” Ryenne’s eyes lit up. “They were protecting their people.”
Sara nodded, pointing to the suns. “I think you’re right. The Bird People stood on the edges of the mountains that ring the valley and they sang for three days and three nights. To keep the Flood from coming into the valley.”
I stared at Sara. “Three days straight?”
She shrugged. “I’m sure they took turns. But that has to be what this means.”
There was no way we could close up the cave entrance to keep them out. These caves had a million tiny openings, and the main mouth into the valley was tall and wide. Even if we piled stone into it, they’d squeeze through. After they ate our sheep and probably all our crops.
“So we have to sing, too,” Ryenne said. “How many flutes do we have? My ‘saurs hate it.” She pointed at the picture. “The Flood ‘saurs must hate it, too. So we have to get enough people making enough noise to keep them out.”
Sara shook her head. “There’s no way. There aren’t enough of us to make enough racket even if we had a flute for every person. We need something loud. All around the valley.”
“Something like the speaker system on Horizon Alpha,” I said.
They stared at me.
“Well, it would work, wouldn’t it?” I looked at the picture of the Birdman shrieking for his life, keeping the Flood out of the valley. “If we pulled the whole system out of Horizon with all the wire and ran it all the way around? Blasted the warning siren?”
I remembered the siren well from the evacuation. Horizon had been on fire and the siren had screamed from every corner of the ship.
“It might.” Sara picked up her lantern. “We would need . . . maybe fifty of the wall speakers. Enough wire to hook them all up, all the way around the valley. We can run the noise from a trans, so we don’t need the Horizon computer. Just the speakers and the wires.”
“What about my ‘saurs?” Ryenne asked.
I looked around the cavern. “We can bring them way down here. Use a bunch of cloth to pad up the walls, soundproof it as best we can. They may not like it, but they’ll survive.”
My mind was spinning as we trooped back up the smooth stone staircase. We had lost Kintan retrieving Nirah. She was our only hope to get us flying again. But she could do it. If anyone could figure out a way to get a shuttle up to Horizon, Nirah could.
We had thought it was another rescue mission. My dad and the others were counting on us to save them from a half-dead, burned-out hulk in orbit. It was so much more than that now. If we didn’t get that sound system from Horizon, we’d have to abandon the caves and try to get back to the old Eden base transports while the Flood passed through. Mayor Borin in his wheelchair would never make it. The babies and the toddlers had no chance. We could lose half our people over a week in the jungle. If a Wolf pack found us, or a Rex . . . My mind turned away from the horror. We could lose everyone.
“Nirah has to get that shuttle flying, and fast.” I followed Sara up the stairs. “We’ve got four weeks to get ready for the Flood.”
Chapter 26
Captain’s Personal Journal. Year 3, Day 322
Nirah Saffar thinks she can get a shuttle to us. Her idea is completely insane, but that’s classic Nirah. I’m torn in half by their plan. The shuttle crew is just as likely to be killed in the attempt to get up here as they are to make it to Horizon. If it were only about us, I would forbid them from attempting it. But it’s not just about us. They need the speakers from Horizon, the wired system throughout the ship that carried our emergency alerts and ship wide announcements. The alert system is destroyed, but we’ll be able to salvage a lot of the speakers. And if Sara Arnson is right, the noise they make might spare the valley from the millions of tiny dinosaur predators that almost wiped out Nirah’s entire group. So this insane mission is not just about rescuing us.
But it is also about rescuing us.
I had given up hope so long ago. And after all the mistakes I’ve made, the idea that I could live out the rest of my days on an actual planet fills me with a hope that shames me. So many others deserved to live before me.
We begin today dismantling the speakers and collecting the equipment. If the shuttle makes it to us, it will dock at the fore side of the central axis, so that’s where we’ll put it all, attaching it to the wall nets so it doesn’t float away. If they make it, we’ll have an easy time loading it all up in zero gravity.
If they make it.
Chapter 27
Caleb
Every night things got more tense as the clock ticked down to the Flood’s arrival. We watched the stars twinkling over our dark valley, waiting for the appearance of Tau Ceti e which rose just before the equinox and would herald our doom. Nirah and her team worked frantically on the shuttle through the nights, while Don took apart one of the transport’s reactors, hiding his body behind an old metal door to protect him against the radiation. There was nothing he could do about his hands and arms, but if he couldn’t turn the reactor into an explosive, it wouldn’t matter how much radiation he was exposed to because we’d all be dead when the Flood arrived.
The plan was insane. Nirah had explained it to the council as soon as her party returned from the old Eden Base. Step one was to get the shuttle flying again, using the parts they had scavenged from the transports we left behind. But there was no way to boost the shuttle’s thrusters enough to get it into the stratosphere. Every way she worked the numbers, the power came up short. Bolting on one of the huge transport’s thrusters would make it too heavy to take off at all.
So we were going to set off a nuclear bomb.
Just a small one.
We had pored over the maps of the planet, looking for the perfect place to blow up Don’s repurposed reactor. It needed to be far enough from Carthage not to endanger our people, but close enough that we could get there within a week or two in the tank. We were looking for something like a volcano, where the explosion would be directed mostly up, not out. If we could time it just as the shuttle was beginning its climb overhead, Nirah thought the detonation could lift the shuttle high enough for its thrusters to make it the rest of the way out of Ceti’s pull.
