Alien--Echo, page 17
Even if there aren’t, I want to say goodbye. We’re about to head off on a fool’s errand, one that hopefully ends with us getting my sister back, but could just as easily end with both of us dead. I want to see my home one last time before that happens. I want to remember that we were happy there.
If this is where my childhood ends, I want to be the one who closes the door.
“You know the way,” says Kora, and she’s right. I do. I turn the ATV around, careful not to hit the beacons that maintain the supply trail, and I drive away from the colony, back into the wilds where I belong.
14
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN
Nothing jumps out of the tall grass to attack us on the drive back to the residence. I see a few snuffle-squirrels vanishing into the undergrowth, and one of the larger flying pseudo-reptiles flashes by overhead, but that’s all: nothing larger, no meat-deer or hippos or lion-worms. Zagreus seems to be holding its breath, waiting to see what horrors are going to befall it next.
It seems strange to feel bad for an entire planet, but I do. These things, whatever they are, are only here because the human settlers got greedy and decided to risk planetary biosecurity for the sake of short-term profits. The Zagreus colonists might talk a good game about being conscientious and taking good care of their new home, but in the end, they were just as venial and shortsighted as the rest of our species. They risked everything on one good score, and they lost. We all lost.
Kora keeps her eyes on the scenery around us, volt gun raised and ready to fire. It’s comforting, having her there. It lets me focus on everything else, on keeping the ATV moving smoothly, avoiding the holes in the road, and most importantly, on maintaining an even speed. The engine barely hums once it settles into a comfortable groove. As long as I don’t accelerate, we might even pass for part of the ordinary background noise of the world.
How intelligent are the creatures that have been hunting us? Can they actually recognize the sound of a machine, or have they been following the more unique, louder sounds of mammals fleeing for their lives? I sort of miss having multiple bodies at my back, although I can’t even muster enough regret to be sorry that Michel was taken. He shoved Viola. He assaulted me. If it weren’t for him, Kora, Viola, and I could all be safely inside the colony right now, preparing to take my family’s transport and get the hell off this doomed planet.
The residence is silent when we pull up in front of it. The front door is still open where Mom charged out to distract the creature. There are gouges in the solar panels covering the roof, some of them so deep that it looks like the creature was on the verge of breaking through. My unease about the wall surges back. If those things want to get into the colony, they will.
And that needs to be a problem for later. We have plenty of problems already for right now.
I stop the engine and slide out, gesturing for Kora to follow me. She nods, seeming to understand the need for silence. Shoulder to shoulder, we make our way across the yard to the door. I unholster Mom’s gun before I step inside.
The living room is trashed. The couch has been overturned, the shelves have been emptied, and something has been chewing on the rug. I catch motion out of the corner of my eye and whirl, barely stopping myself before I pull the trigger and waste a bullet on the snuffle-squirrel that’s sitting on one of the end tables, industriously sucking the last of the snacks into its bulging cheeks.
It stares at me for a moment. Then, with a fluting squeak, it flops to the floor and scuttles out the door, taking its prizes along. I follow it, shutting the door and activating the seals that will cut off all sound escaping to the outside. They’re standard issue for xenobiology residences, since we never know when we land on a new planet whether we’re going to be dealing with creatures that attack at the faintest hint of an unfamiliar life-form. Sometimes we have to cover all the bases.
“We shouldn’t stay here long, but this will buy us a little time,” I say. “There’s food in the kitchen. Water, too. Grab whatever you want. It’s not like we’re going to be using it.”
Viola ate. Mom and Dad always kept the cupboards stocked for four people, not three, even when money was tight; she was an android and she didn’t need to eat, but she ate, because they’d been that committed to the fiction that she was still alive. They’d sacrificed everything to give me the shadow of a normal childhood, and I’d never even noticed.
It hurts to realize that. It helps, too, in a strange way, because all their sacrifices had been intended to keep me from noticing that something was wrong, to keep me from realizing that my sister wasn’t like me, wasn’t like anyone else. She was Viola, and that was what mattered. That was what always, always should have mattered. By shaping our environment to lie so that they wouldn’t have to, my parents gave me the greatest gift they were in a position to give. They gave me a life I didn’t feel like I needed to question.
My chest feels like it’s getting heavier and my throat feels like it’s getting tighter. My vision blurs, swimming behind a veil of tears. I close my eyes, forcing myself to breathe in and out, slowly, carefully, forcing the impending wall of grief away. It’s going to hit me soon enough, and when it does, it’s not going to be pretty, or useful, or productive. I’m going to fall apart. I’d rather do it while safely on my family’s transport, Viola by my side and—hopefully—Kora strapped into one of the passenger seats, getting the hell away from this doomed world. We can’t stay here. If I fall apart now, we’re not going to have a choice.
“Olivia?” Kora sounds concerned. That’s probably the right reaction. “Are you all right?”
“No.” I open my eyes. The tears have receded, at least a little; at least enough that I can see. “You root the kitchen, see what you can find. Take anything, take everything, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m going to check the office.”
I spin on my heel and walk quickly away. It’s not that I specifically mind Kora seeing me cry. It’s that if she says one word—one word—that’s meant to comfort me or calm me down, I’m going to lose it, and we’re not going to get out of here. We’re going to wind up huddled on the couch while I cry, and those creatures will come back, and we’ll both die. Even with the door sealed, I have all faith that they’ll be able to find us if we’re not quick about this. So we have to be quick. I refuse to die out here.
The door to my parents’ office is closed. I hesitate outside it, resting my fingertips against the knob. They’re dead, they’re both dead, I know that, and yet opening this door is what’s going to make it real forever, not only in my nightmares. Opening this door when they’re not inside is the end.
I open the door.
Their office is the largest single room in the residence, easily twice the size of the room I share with Viola. When we’ve objected, saying two teenage girls deserve room to keep their things, they’ve always countered with the fact that they know we pile into Viola’s bed at night, sleeping in a tangle of legs and hair and silence. We don’t need more room. They do.
The walls are lined with storage units, black and smooth and labeled with tiny white designation codes. Some of the drawers contain biological samples. Others contain paper files, a waste of storage space that both of them will defend as necessary when working on planets that don’t always guarantee a global communications network. Old school doesn’t need electricity, or wireless signaling, or any of the other luxuries on which the modern world is built.
Somewhere in those files, they have every sketchbook I’ve ever filled, from my early attempts to accurately draw the jarred samples Mom and Dad brought home to field studies of my own. We all thought I was going to be some great xenobiologist, documenting the natural beauties of a hundred thousand worlds humanity hasn’t even discovered yet. I don’t want that anymore. I can’t just go out into the field with a pencil and a sketchbook and trust that someone else is going to take care of me if I get into trouble.
I have to be able to take care of myself.
Mom’s terminal is flashing. I walk over and press my thumb to the print reader on the side of the screen. If whatever message waiting is something that I’m approved to see, it’ll unlock, and maybe then I can get into the rest of Mom’s files.
I wish Viola were here. She’s the one who can make any system do what she needs and wants it to do. She’d be able to crack this whole thing wide open with a reproachful look and a few lines of code, and then we’d be prime.
The terminal beeps, flickering once before it clicks to strident, colorful life, and my mother’s face fills the screen. I freeze, thumb still pressed to the print reader, putting my other hand over my mouth and staring at her image.
She’s smiling. Not a big, happy smile, but the small, wry smile she’s always worn when Viola was sick or I was fussy or Dad left his dirty laundry on the hallway floor. It’s a smile that says she understands things have costs, and sometimes she feels the need to pay them, whether they were originally hers or not. It’s a smile that isn’t giving up, exactly, but is ready to find another way to fight.
“Hello, my girls,” she says, and my heart sinks further. “If you’re seeing this, something has happened to me, and I was able to transmit the unlock code before it was too late. I am so, so sorry, sweethearts. Please believe me when I say that there’s nothing I would like more than to know that this message will never need to play, for either one of you.”
“Mom,” I moan, and touch the screen with the tips of my fingers. “Mommy.”
“Now, there’s a good chance that there isn’t much time. This message shouldn’t play if your father is there, so we have to assume you girls are alone now. Please listen carefully.” She leans closer to the camera, smile fading, expression turning grim. “My brother, your Uncle Sebastian, is on Earth. He works for Weyland-Yutani, in their research and development branch, and in the event that something has happened to your father and I, he is now your legal guardian. I know you girls are almost eighteen, I know you probably feel like you don’t need a legal guardian anymore, but believe me when I say that family always matters. Family always makes things easier to bear. He’ll take care of you. He’ll make sure you have a place to sleep, and someone to support you in whatever it is you decide to do with your life. Lives.”
She stops, and laughs bitterly. “Olivia, my sweet girl, my first baby, there are things—as I’m recording this, there are things you still don’t know, and if no one’s told you what they are, I don’t want this to be the way you find out. Viola knows. Viola has always known, even if we both pretend that she doesn’t. Listen to your sister, honey. She doesn’t want to hurt you any more than I do, and if we did this right, she’s going to be staying with you for a long, long time. I … talk to your sister. Believe her.”
My mother takes a deep breath. “Viola, darling, you were my second born, and as soon as I saw you, I knew I was done having children. I had everything. How many people are lucky enough to get everything they want before they even know they want it? You have always been perfect in my eyes. No matter how much things have changed between us, no matter how much you may feel like you’re less than you were meant to be, you are perfect. Your sister loves you. Stay with Olivia. Trust and believe and hold on to Olivia. She’ll take care of you.”
She reaches up and wipes her eyes with the side of one hand. I want to go to her. I want to put my arms around her, hold her, comfort her, tell her that everything is going to be all right. I can’t. I don’t know when she recorded this, but the world that existed when she did isn’t there anymore. Viola and I are alone, orphans, and in the eyes of the law, I’m the last surviving member of our little family. Everything has changed.
I miss my mother.
“All the accounts will have transferred into Olivia’s name upon transmission of this message. The transport is yours. Go to Earth. Go to your uncle. He’ll make sure you have the time to make any necessary decisions about where you’re going to go next, and what you’re going to do once you get there. Stay together. As long as you stay together, I’ll be there with you, and as long as I’m with you, I’ll know that you’re all right.” A tear runs down her cheek.
It’s impossible not to wonder whether she knew something, or suspected something, about that transport ship. The universe is full of dangerous things, but I can’t imagine that she’s been recording variations on this same message for years. She had a feeling. She knew something was wrong. And she did what she could to get us ready for the future, where we’d be going on alone, without her.
“I love you, Mom,” I say.
“If you’re seeing this message, something terrible has happened to both your father and I. It doesn’t matter where you are. It doesn’t matter how safe you think your current position could potentially be. You’re standing in a graveyard. Whether or not the people who claim to be in charge are aware of it, they’re already dead. I don’t want my little girls to join them. Take our transport and get off the planet as quickly as you can. Run, my darlings. Run, and don’t look back. I love you both, more than you will ever know.”
The message ends, blinking out to reveal the main screen of her terminal. All her files are available to me. Prime. I sit down, quickly pulling up the geographic surveys of the local mountains.
Xenobiologists study the life indigenous to the worlds humanity chooses to settle on, trying to understand the shape of it before we inevitably change everything through our very presence. Observation changes things. Colonization, messy and exploitative and invasive as it always is, even when it’s something as intentionally narrow in focus as the settlements on Zagreus, displaces the wildlife that was there before we came. Humans like “Earth-like” planets, choosing new homes that are already capable of supporting life whenever we possibly can, and way too few people like to think about the fact that a place that can support life probably already does support life, or that any reasonable ecosystem will have already done its best to fill all available niches.
Before any fieldwork can begin, the planets where my parents work need to be mapped and charted, sometimes down to the millimeter, because any chamber they don’t think to peer inside could be the chamber where the next great threat to humanity is lurking. The average colony doesn’t contact a xenobiologist until something tries to eat a colonist. In the case of Zagreus, that was a lion-worm, and it succeeded in eating the colonist in question. Subterranean tunnel maps were supplied before we even touched down on the planetary surface.
The maps come up with dizzying speed, showing the network of caves and passageways that riddle the nearby mountains. The original assumption had been that the lion-worms denned there, before my father followed a gravid female back to a hole and realized that they dug themselves vast subterranean nests, choosing to burrow so far below the surface that most conventional eradication methods were just barely shy of useless. Zagreus will always have lion-worms.
Unless these new apex predators decide to devour them all, which seems suddenly very possible. Maybe these were a sort of genetically engineered pest control gone terribly wrong. People sure do love creating life. They forget that life, once created, carries no innate obligation toward whoever made it. Life does what it wants, and screw anyone who gets in its way.
The cave system nearest where we saw the shuttle go down has a large enough opening to allow me and Kora to walk inside without blasting equipment or drills. Once there, we’ll have a limited amount of territory we can reasonably cover—but these things are big. Even if they like to slither through narrow passageways and hide in crevices, that armor that protects them from things like bullets means that they’ll be limited in how much they can manage to compress themselves. The tunnel networks on the map show a distinct lack of deeper chambers. Unless these things burrow, they should still be relatively near the surface.
I run off a flimsy, grabbing it from the printer before I eye Dad’s rack of biological samples and snag several jars of the scent-dampening pollen. There’s no way of knowing whether these creatures track by scent or through some other, less comprehensible mechanism, but they’re not the only dangerous creatures on Zagreus. It would be seriously subprime to have our rescue op shut down when a lion-worm decides to eat my girlfriend. Again.
Kora is waiting in the living room when I emerge. She has one of Dad’s field bags slung over her shoulder, pockets bulging with provisions snatched from the kitchen. We have the ATV: she won’t have to carry anything for long. I look at her wearily.
“You ready?”
She nods.
I nod back.
This is where we leave the last safe place: this is where we step out into the world, and hope that what we find there is kinder than we expect it to be. I’d linger here forever if I could, trapped in the middle of the crisis, but with four walls around me and a roof over my head and the illusion of safety still pooling in my hands. I can’t do that. We both know it’s not possible. So I offer Kora my hand, and she takes it, and together we walk away from all the broken things, toward the future; toward the claws that broke them.
We have one shot at doing this. And I’ll be damned if we’re not going to do this the right way.
15
THE NARROW PLACES
The ATV’s batteries still register as nearly full. I switch us over to battery power completely, reducing the sound of the engine. We run a little faster when we’re burning fuel rather than electricity, and that’s another good reason to conserve what we have left until we’re heading back to the colony with Viola. If those things come after us, we’re going to want to be in a position to make the fastest escape possible.
Kora sits rigidly in the passenger seat, the volt gun in her hands and her eyes scanning the horizon. She looks like she’s running out of resources, like she’s nearing the point where she snaps and starts shooting at anything that moves. I’m so sorry I dragged her into all this. If I hadn’t been so interested in impressing her …
