by Samuel Best
“What about the boy?” said Tulliver loudly.
Several colonists turned to look at him, then back at the wardens, awaiting a response.
Cohen’s gaze briefly flicked down to Gavin.
“The Farming Initiative states that a contract can only be inherited by someone twelve years of age or older.”
“The Alder boy did better than the rest of his class,” bellowed Tulliver. “Not bad for an eight-year-old. Surely his skill is worth more to the colony than that of one who simply meets the arbitrary age requirement.”
Murmurs of assent rippled through the crowd.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” said a man near the platform.
Cohen hesitated, then said, “We will review his contract.”
Tulliver caught Gavin peeking out from behind the weasel-faced man. He smiled at the boy.
“What about food?” a woman shouted from the back of the crowd. “Shelter?”
“If you work, you eat,” said Cohen. “It’s that simple. There are no shortage of jobs, and we’ve only been here one day. These tents were never meant to be our permanent shelters. The irradiated wreckage of the Halcyon is scattered for miles. Salvage teams wearing hazmat suits will be sent out to collect material for shelter. Certain comforts you were expecting may never arrive. Be prepared to go without. Those of you who paid for housing kits may not get them.”
“Now that ain’t right,” said the weasel-faced man standing behind Gavin.
Cohen fixed him with an icy glare.
“Nor is your situation. You can adapt, or you can give up. It’s up to each of you to make the choice.” He addressed the crowd once again. “Salvage team schedules and land parcel assignments will be posted later today. That’s all for now.”
He and Diego hopped down from the platform and disappeared into a small, circular shelter behind it — their makeshift administration headquarters. The weasel-faced man quickly guided Gavin away from the crowd. The rest of the colonists remained by the platform, talking quietly amongst themselves.
Tulliver chewed on his bottom lip, wondering where the wardens had parked their shuttle.
As he made his way toward the admin shelter, shouldering his way through the milling crowd, a short man with a hooked nose and unkempt black beard fell into step beside him. Tulliver recognized him as someone on the Halcyon for which he’d done a lot of favors.
“Mr. Tulliver, you have to help me,” the man pleaded, his voice shaking. “I can’t go back out there.” He glanced behind him, into the forest. “Can you keep me out of the salvage group? I-I-I can owe you.” He chuckled nervously. “You know, put it on my tab?”
“You already owe too much, Nigel” said Tulliver. “Don’t get in over your head.”
“But there must be something you can—”
Tulliver put his palm flat against the man’s chest and shoved, sending him stumbling backward. He tripped and fell, his back smacking the wet ground.
Tulliver pushed aside the canvas door-flap of the admin shelter and stepped inside as if he had every right to be there.
Cohen and Diego sat at a small folding table, several tablets and stacks of binders laid out before them.
Diego glanced up as Tulliver entered, then at Cohen, then back to his tablet screen. A scent of alcohol permeated the small space, emanating from a plastic cup filled with dark brown liquid resting near Cohen’s elbow.
“I’m going to miss that smell after the last drop is gone,” Tulliver said pleasantly.
“Ah, good. You’re here,” Cohen replied without looking up. He scribbled a note on his tablet screen with a stylus. “Saves me the trouble of hunting you down.”
Tulliver grinned. The man chose his words with care. Cohen set down his stylus and laced his fingers over his stomach as he leaned back in his chair, regarding Tulliver with the same detachment with which one might view a puzzle that didn’t need to be solved.
“My reputation precedes me,” said Tulliver.
“I know who you are,” Cohen continued. “I know how you operated on the ship.”
“Then you know how useful I can be.”
“Not to this colony,” said Cohen. He stood slowly, and Tulliver found himself looking up at someone for the first time since he was a teenager. “You sowed distrust among the crew. You turned several of them against each other. This colony will not suffer your meddling. It will not be divided.”
Tulliver spread his hands palm-up in a placating gesture.
“I acquire things for people who need them. I bring people together.”
“No,” Cohen said simply.
“The captain had a different opinion.”
“I am not the captain.”
Tulliver held his icy glare for a long time, then looked away.
“I can see that,” he said with a defeated smile. “Message received, good warden. I won’t darken your door again.”
He left the shelter quickly, his smile evaporating the moment sunlight hit his face.
A status quo was being established in the colony — a status quo which didn’t seem to account for the unique talents possessed by a man like Tulliver.
He had to get ahead of the problem before it was set in stone — before the colonists understood there was no need to honor the debts they had incurred on their journey from Earth.
He found Nigel in the heart of the crowd, speaking with a tall woman with stark white hair.
Tulliver said, “Excuse me,” to the woman and grabbed Nigel by the throat.
He hoisted the short man into the air as the crowd stepped back.
“Everyone pays!” Tulliver growled. “No debts are forgiven.”
He turned slowly in place, showing Nigel’s bulging eyes to the other colonists. The man’s legs kicked feebly against Tulliver’s side as he choked for air.
He threw Nigel into the tall woman, sending them both falling to the ground. The crowd parted before him as he stomped away.
That felt good, didn’t it? said the voice of Roland Day in his head. Tulliver’s erstwhile partner-in-crime on Earth had been among the most vocal of his disembodied commentators.
“Shut up,” Tulliver hissed as he left the settlement behind and stormed into the forest.
As always, Roland was right.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LEERA
The first colony sprawled behind Leera as she sat on a patch of moist, springy ground on a hillside, looking down at a field of unbroken gray rock. Not two hours past, the field before her was mostly brown, streaked with vibrant swaths of green. The far side of the field led into the forest, its floor also blanketed by gray rock.
The edge of the sheet of rock was a few meters from Leera’s bare feet. It extended to her left and right, following the gentle rise and fall of hills.
A million segmented legs churned beneath the gray blanket, carrying it ever-so-slowly east, toward the rising sun. Phobis blazed low in the sky, bathing the field and hillside in a warm, orange glow. To the west, she could discern no end to the migrating gray sheet of rock.
A dead animal lay on the wet ground beside her, its pale carapace translucent in the morning sunlight.
Leera picked it up and inspected its flat, hexagonal crab shell, running her hands over three small, pyramidal protrusions. She looked from the dead creature to the moving field of gray rock crawling slowly past the hill. Sunlight glinted off small, dew-covered pyramids that rose from the otherwise smooth field, each one spaced about a hand’s width apart.
The shells were locked together so perfectly that their tops created the unbroken field of gray which extended into the distance.
Leera flipped the dead creature over in her lap, resting its hard shell on her thighs. Fourteen segmented, ghost-white legs were folded neatly up against its underbelly, their sharp tips angled toward what Leera assumed was a mouth. The mouth was in the exact center of the creature’s underbelly. It was a small, barely-open slit with swollen, fibrous edges, like the mouth of a starfish.
She tried to unfold a leg, but the brittle appendage snapped off in her hand. The sharp tip had a small hole at the end, and a cluster of stiff, brush-like hair protruded from the hole. Leera touched the hair gently, and it crumbled to dust.
Walter had found this particular specimen shortly after her group stumbled across the first colony. It was inside one of the torn canvas tents at the heart of the settlement.
Uda and Colonel Turner had set out before sunrise to map the colony. From what Leera had seen before she passed out last night from exhaustion, there were more structures beyond the ones they’d first discovered. Some had collapsed onto themselves in a heap of rotting canvas, others were damaged yet still standing, and still others were fully intact. Greenish-brown mildew covered them all.
She rubbed her right shin, feeling the small bump on her tibia where the bone had snapped. All she felt was a dull pain, and she had to press down hard to feel it. The shrapnel wound on her back had completely healed, as well, all thanks to the strange moss that crept over her leg and back after she fainted.
Leera had told Walter to keep a special eye out for any scientific equipment in the first colony. She desperately wanted to get a closer look at that moss.
As if summoned by her thoughts, he emerged from a tent behind her, brushing dirt off a tablet with a shattered screen. He had clipped a black nylon belt around the waist of his skin-tight body suit. A large pocket bulged on one side of the belt, stuffed with odds and ends he’d picked up throughout the settlement.
“I like the new look,” said Leera as he plopped onto the wet ground beside her.
Walter looked offended and shook his belt pouch. “Hey, they’re making a comeback.”
He flipped the tablet over in his hands and studied the back.
“Don’t tell me it still has a charge,” Leera said.
“It doesn’t,” Walter admitted. Then he held up a finger. “But.”
He rummaged in his pouch and pulled out two cables, along with a small square sheet of black plastic. He connected the cables to the square sheet and to the matching holes on the bottom edge of the tablet.
“Solar,” he said as he set everything down on the ground. “Maybe it can tell us something about what happened. Speaking of which, I’m fairly certain Uda knew this colony existed.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I came across her standing in a tent last night. She didn’t see me, but I watched her for a moment. She picked something up from a shelf inside. It looked like a broken picture frame. I could swear she was crying.”
Leera stared down thoughtfully at the migrating hexagon-shelled creatures.
“She trained farmers on our trip from Earth, getting them ready to grow crops on Galena.”
Walter nodded. “Maybe she did it before.”
“Kellan lied to us,” said Leera. “He said no one has been allowed down to the surface until this trip.”
“Of course he lied,” said Walter. “Do you think he’d be able to convince anyone to come back if they found out an entire colony had vanished?”
Leera set the dead creature on the ground beside her.
“You said you found more of these scattered throughout the camp.”
“Dead ones. All over the place.”
“They all look like this?” she asked, tapping the shell of the dead one by her leg.
“Exactly the same.”
“They passed this way before,” said Leera. “Without knowing the details of their decomposition cycle, I’d still guess it’s been a few years, at least.”
“You think they killed the colonists?”
Leera sighed. “I don’t see how. It wouldn’t be hard to outrun them.”
“It could have happened at night, while they slept. Maybe they woke up under a blanket of those…things. Tried to fight their way out.”
“Or there’s something else on this planet,” said Leera. “A virus.”
“There are no bodies.”
“Dr. James!” called Turner from somewhere behind her.
“Here!”
Turner and Uda appeared at the top of the hill, walking briskly away from the colony. She carried three chromed metal rods in one hand. Each was two meters long, with one spiked end.
“Those crabs are in the camp,” said Turner. “Crawling all over it.”
“Like someone’s pulling a sheet of stone over the entire colony,” said Uda.
Leera stood up and walked to the top of the hill.
The foremost edge of another field of the crab-like creatures approached, crawling slowly past the tents at the far end of the clearing.
“What do we do?” asked Turner.
He wiped sweat from his brow and trained his rifle on the approaching sea of creatures.
“Save your bullets,” said Walter. “Unless you have a million more.”
“What are those?” asked Leera, pointing at the three metal rods in Uda’s hand.
She looked down at them as if she’d forgotten what she was carrying.
“I found them on one of the farms,” she replied. “I think they’re radio spikes.”
“They are,” said Turner.
“You can’t send radio signals through the Rip,” said Walter.
“The military uses them to communicate between outposts,” Turner told him. “The colonists were probably sending reports to the nav beacon near Aegea. But something’s different about these. May I see one?”
“We should really think about leaving,” said Walter, eyeing the slowly-approaching crabs.
Uda handed Turner a rod. He inspected the spiked end, then flipped it around and fiddled with a delicate electronics interface at the top.
“This one’s been altered,” he said. “It can’t receive any signals. Someone reprogrammed it to emit a specific frequency.”
“Why?” asked Walter.
Turner shrugged.
“They’re avoiding the hillside,” said Uda, pointing.
The others stood next to her. The approaching wave of crabs were on a direct course to climb the hill, yet they turned aside, sweeping around it like a curving river to pass through the settlement instead.
Leera walked back to the dead creature she had been inspecting on the hillside and knelt beside it. She stuck her fingers into the soft top-layer of the ground, wiggling them deeper, up to her large knuckles.
“No shock,” she told the others.
“What are you talking about?” asked Walter.
“I felt a shock before, in the soil. It’s gone.”
She hurried back up the hill, into the camp.
“Leera!” Walter shouted from behind.
She stood a few meters from the approaching crabs and dug her fingers into the soil. A low-grade shock licked her fingertips and she jerked her hand back.
“Let me see one!” she said to Turner, holding out her hand.
He gave her a metal rod and stepped back, gripping his rifle tightly.
Leera raised the spike over her head and drove its spiked end into the soft ground. She brushed wild strands from her eyes and looked at the crabs.
They were still approaching.
Turner appeared at her side, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. He slid up a small protective cover at the top of the rod and pressed a red button. A sequence of yellow numbers glowed on a tiny screen, and Turner pressed the button again.
The front line of crabs parted instantly, moving to both sides to avoid the path that took them straight into the rod.
“Proof of concept,” said Leera with a grin.
She yanked the rod out of the ground and the crabs came back together, sealing the crack in their ranks that had opened to avoid the rod.
“The shock is caused by an electrical current under the top-layer,” said Leera, unable to conceal her excitement. “The rods emit a signal that negates the current and cancel it out. That’s why the crabs aren’t crossing the hill directly. There’s no current.”
“That’s
fantastic,” said Uda flatly. “How do we get out of here?”
“Back to the hillside,” Leera replied, running ahead of the group.
The others joined her on the hill, in the warm morning sunlight. They were stranded on a tiny island in an ocean of alien crabs.
“What’s creating the electrical current?” asked Walter.
Leera shielded her eyes as she looked at the tops of the trees looming over the crawling crabs.
“I don’t…” she said, breathing hard. “I don’t know. Something about the trees. They don’t travel beyond the trees.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Something beeped nearby.
“Ah-ha!” said Walter triumphantly.
He picked up his tablet and pulled out the charging cables. Its cracked screen glinted in the sunlight.
“It’s working!”
While he swiped and tapped on the screen, Uda took a few steps down the hill and squinted at the horizon.
“They are turning east,” she said, nodding toward the sea of crabs. Then she turned to face the others. “What’s your best guess for the location of the new colony?”
Leera’s mouth went dry. She swallowed thickly, then said, “East.”
“Does the new colony have any radio spikes?” asked Turner.
“Even if they did, they wouldn’t know how to change the frequency,” said Leera. “We have to warn them.”
“Maybe there are more spikes in the shuttle,” said Walter.
The others slowly turned to look at him. He held up the cracked tablet and showed them the screen.
“One of the last log entries says they parked it nearby. And it still has fuel.”
He turned in place, holding up the tablet as he scanned the horizon. A mile to the north, a mountain of mineral lead sulfide rose above the forest.
“There,” said Walter. “At the base of that rock.”
