Foxfire in the Snow

by J. S. Fields

  This time, Ember did frown. Watching for mella and daydreaming about shooting one so you could avenge your wife who didn’t actually need avenging because she was about to die from cancer and had chosen to walk into a sand dune was one thing. Chasing mella, even if just to spy on them, so they could shoot you was something entirely different. She didn’t have a death wish, just a need to see her wife’s body and maybe punch someone.

  Solitude had come as a bonus. You didn’t get a lot of solitude living in a pimple of a dome on an all-woman planet, especially if your wife had just died. At the very least, out here she didn’t have to unwind spools of hair from the shower drain and had half a moment to remember her wife the way she wanted to, not the way everyone else demanded.

  “It’s a two-day ride and a four-day walk,” Ember said. “They’ll get there before I do. They have beetles. I don’t even have a flyer. The director turned down my requisition request.”

  “That’s because, first, it’s the presidium that approves those, not the director, and, second, because you suck at flying. You are terrified of flying. You are terrified of ships, even those that don’t leave the atmosphere, which I get—yours almost didn’t make it to Queen but still. This is a big group of mella. They’re not moving fast, and they’re still at Outpost Two. You’ll make it. Move like a beetle. You kind of look like one in that suit when you have the antennae out.”

  Nadia leaned into her video feed until her eyes consumed the whole screen. Ember could see through her sister’s goggles to the rich brown eyes that laughed behind them. Nadia always had a smile, even when you thought the dunes might as well sweep you to the cold side of the planet, where your bones would crack and your marrow freeze. Or to the hot side, where your skin would turn to leather in a day without the envirosuit, two days with it. Her sister smiled because she didn’t remember Earth, not in color anyway. Not in sound, or smell, the way spring daisies gave way to buttercups in fields that wafted a perfume of silage. She’d never seen redwoods try to touch clouds, had never slipped on moss-covered stones in streams alive with nutria and frogs and ducks and migrating geese.

  She’d been ten years Ember’s junior at the Collapse, but they’d been put on different ships. She’d been too young to go into stasis, at eighteen, but she’d made it here, eventually. They’d been in transit nineteen years, Earth time. Their time here on Queen, only five years, felt like an eternity.

  Now, the signs of aging showed in the silver of her hair and crinkles around her eyes, and in the way she kept rotating her wrist to ease some unspoken pressure. They had the same complexion though, a pale tan that flushed too easily. Nadia still smiled and joked as though Queen wasn’t a desolate, isolated colony planet. As though Earth’s memory didn’t oppress them hundreds of light years away. She joked because she didn’t want to leave. Queen was her home, even if they had no other family here and precious few friends.

  For Ember, it was a way station. A bad aftertaste. A future gone horribly wrong.

  “Botanists are not good with sand.”

  “Well, you know what they say about sand, Sis.” Nadia smirked. “Dune’t forget your—”

  Ember shook her head but couldn’t help smiling. “You’ve used up all the puns. Please don’t invent more.”

  Nadia’s eyes relaxed. The crinkles smoothed. A somberness took over, and it looked wholly alien on this sister she’d never gotten to see grow up. “We’re just trying to give you what you want.”

  “If I wanted to look for Taraniel, I wouldn’t have waited two months to do so.”

  The name burned Ember’s mouth, and she sucked in her lips as an explosion of pain shattered her insides. Only sisters could make you hurt like this. Only sisters could dig up your most painful memories and talk about them as you would the weather at Sunday brunch.

  “Doesn’t matter. You have to go.” There was no laughter in Nadia’s voice now, no light in her eyes. “Maybe after, you’ll finally want to come home. You’re no good to yourself like this. You’re a botanist. Finish your task so you can get back here and into the lab where you belong. Enough with your funk. The mella are done. There are two troupes left, and then it’s just the outliers in their outpost, wherever that is. We’ve got a satellite reading that looks promising. We think it’s the same group that raided the hospital last month. Find this group and send the coordinates to Dr. Narkhirunkanok. She’ll send them to the presidium, and they will send out the flyers. One of these times, one of the mella will have a GPS on them, and our satellites will function correctly, and we can finally track them back to their main base.”

  “The plan sounds about as well cooked as most of the presidium’s brains.”

  “Oh, for fuck sake’s, Ember. Just take the job. We’ll get the coordinates to their home; the presidium will take it out.”

  Ember, squatted, crossed her arms, and kicked the side of a dune. A smile flitted across her face. Poking the presidium would only get one of her minor research grants revoked, but poking Nadia got her some much-needed human interaction. “Yes, but then I’d be out of a job.”

  “Lab.” Nadia pointed back toward the dome. “Baby trees and whatever else you have growing in your greenhouse that won’t survive two days once you plant it outside the dome. Science pays way better than this, and you’ve got tenure coming in, what, a year? Get a raise. You need a hell of a lot more money than you’ve got if you want to leave Queen. Leave us. I know what you and Taraniel talked about at night. Your voices carried through the walls.”

  Nadia’s voice turned sour. “Aside from that, think about your future, Ember. Not this shit. Come home. Taraniel may be gone, but visit Dr. Sinha, at least. Call Taraniel’s mother on Europa. Talk to her about her daughter.”

  “Stop talking about her, Nadia. Please.”

  “Why? Someone has to.”

  Ember wouldn’t let the tears fall. She’d never be able to wipe them away. Instead, she kicked her boot into the dried red blood of the barren planet and watched the spray dissolve into oblivion.

  “I’m going to record that as your verbal consent.” Nadia sounded so smug. “You leave immediately. No one really cares about soil samples from a barren dune. Soil science is boring. Still, should just be you and the grit the whole way. Enjoy.”

  Nadia’s image clicked off. Ember’s viewscreen reverted to the red landscape, where a wall of sand rose with the wind. The world turned russet for several moments, and Ember’s respirator whirred into high gear, filtering the air it brought in. It smelled of crisp nothing. It smelled of heat. It smelled of loss.

  Ember stood at the base of the dune and waited for the small storm to subside. Nadia’s words stripped her mind of every other thought, and she gasped mouthfuls of hot, processed air.

  Taraniel. It had been two months now, give or take a few days, and Ember still expected to see her around every dune. Hoped for a mistake. Hoped the doctors had been wrong.

  Cancer.

  Earth’s legacy, the one enduring gift that had come with the immigrants. Taraniel had preferred to meet death on her own terms. She’d taken no respirator, only clothes and things entwined with her memories, and left Ember with no body. No closure. No peace.

  The wind died to a low rush. Ember turned and started the slow, plodding walk toward Outpost Seven, where she could recharge her envirosuit before going out again. Sand slicked under her feet. TOPA told her giant beetles scuttled along the parallel dunes, just out of sight, knowing better than to attack while she still moved. A sand funnel swirled. Her face shield registered the distance in the logging unit of chains, but the landscape remained fundamentally unchanged aside from the occasional dotting of twisted trees—Ember’s work as part of the terraforming project. These trees were the farthest ones out from the dome. After here, nothing grew in the sand, not even small plants, no matter how many genes Ember edited and how much irrigation Nadia installed. They were two scientists with futile research, although their PhDs had gotten them quick acceptance onto Earth’s newes
t outpost. Well, PhDs had helped, and their anatomy had sealed the deal. Vulvas got you onto Queen. Nothing could get you off. A pun worthy of Nadia.

  Ember looked out at the patchwork desert forest she’d grown from Petri plates. She saw red and silver maples, mostly, but a few white aspens had taken the genetic modifications well too. Because of the winds, they couldn’t grow upright, so they branched out more like bushes, staying low to the ground with fanning crowns to make the most of the perpetual morning. Mostly, they caught sand and died when their leaves became too covered for photosynthesis. But, well, that was job security if nothing else.

  TOPA chirped. Another tooth click brought up a readout.

  Wind dropped to 14 knots.

  Funnel increasing in diameter by 0.35 meters per five seconds. Shape unstable and likely due to animal interaction.

  Probability of human origin = 95%

  “Well, yes, that would be the obvious conclusion noting the data, wouldn’t it?” Ember muttered to herself. The adrenaline hit like a punch anyway, snapping her body to attention. She stopped walking and watched the funnel continue to bloat across the horizon like some wave on a long-dead ocean. The wind wasn’t strong enough to kick up that much sand, but giant beetles definitely were.

  “TOPA, can you get a heat signature?”

  The face shield blanked momentarily before a heat diagram splayed across it. Human signatures weren’t discernable in the sand, but the five-legged beetles native to Queen ran colder than their surroundings due to some quirk of planetary genetics Ember didn’t understand, likely because she’d managed to completely avoid entomology in her undergrad.

  Beetles – two.

  Her face shield blinked the words, and Ember pivoted. The beetles usually swarmed in the wild; they were seldom solitary or in pairs. Her suit’s artificial intelligence quickly confirmed her suspicion.

  No ID sent. Not of the colony. Strong possibility of mella attack. Retreat or find cover.

  Two riders on beetleback exploded from the sand.

  Shit.

  Ember ran.

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