“They’ll help. They have to. They have no other choice and they don’t want to go back to Earth, so they’ll help,” chimed in Spencer.
“All I know is, I’m not working extra for some lazy assholes,” Jane said.
THAT’S WHEN IT HAPPENED. The darkness. The sun seemed to slowly fade into dusk, but it was too early for that. The shadows from the trees around us grew until they consumed the ground. The air began to chill, even as the stars above shone brightly. Turning to gaze out toward the sun, I was surprised to be blinded by a small sliver of light until it was completely blocked out, rendering Circadia pitch black.
Once the light was blocked out, it was obvious that we were looking at the dark side of Earth. The lights of civilization shown brightly against the dark of the world. A thick haze blurred the cityscapes, which I assumed was the nuclear debris trapped in the atmosphere. Ominous, the sun stayed dark to us.
“What the hell just happened?” asked Smith.
“It was just like a lunar eclipse back on Earth, but the moon doesn’t orbit us,” Garrett answered. “We’re supposed to be on the same path as Earth, but it seems that someone lied. I can’t be sure of what just happened, but it appears the Earth just eclipsed the sun, which means that either we are one of Earth’s new moons, or Earth is ours.”
“No!” exclaimed Spencer. “You’re wrong. I was there when they told the solar team that Circadia and Earth were locked into the same orbit. They said that Circadia didn’t orbit the Earth, that it rotated just like Earth, but right next to it. They said Circadia orbits the sun!”
“Well I’m sorry, but I’m a lunar astronomer, and I’m telling you, Earth is blocking the sun right now. Which means that we are one of Earth’s new moons,” Garrett growled back. “I need to go talk to the space crew, see if they know anything.”
“Wait! What does this mean, then? If we’re orbiting Earth and the Earth is blocking the sun, or the other way around, what's going to happen?” I asked.
“Nothing good, I can tell you that. How bad? I have no idea. All I can tell you is someone fucking lied.” Garrett ran off under the light of the moon.
Our team sat in shock.
Who had lied? What reason would they have to lie? Then it set in. I knew exactly who had lied, and the reason they had. Leslie Marshal, director of Grow. That stupid reality TV show that had sent us here. Entertain Now Productions. Did they have enough money to pay the government to keep people quiet? My heart pounded in my chest. I was angry. So angry. I felt my face turn hot. “I think I know who would have a reason to lie,” I said. “A damn good reason. Someone who never cared what was going on here on Circadia, or—” Taking a moment to slow my breathing and clear my head, I continued, “Someone would need a lot of money to cover up something this big. It seems crazy we didn’t know this.”
“I know what you're thinking, and it pisses me off too, but he’s a million miles away now,” Jane said.
“Yes, he is. I hope he dies a slow, painful death suffocating on his lies,” I replied. The hatred that left my mouth was almost sickening...almost. I had never felt that way about someone in my entire life.
“You think Leslie did this?” asked Spencer. “He would’ve had to lay down a lot of money to cover this up. Plus, we're here with crowdfunding money—it’s not even his! You think he used the crowd-funded money to lie to everyone?”
“Who else?” said Jane.
“Would it be so bad if Leslie lied?” asked Smith. “Would you have come here if you had known all of the dangers? Or would you have turned them down like the other hundreds of experts they tried before us? Maybe he had good reason,” he offered.
“You think he lied for the good of science?” Jane asked. “Are you kidding?”
“It would have made for great TV if we had ‘discovered’ this while being on nearly live television. Would have attracted a lot of attention and made for some interesting stories up here. Not to mention, all the viewers he would have gotten and all the money. Oh my God—I am so mad right now.” The anger was enough to make me shake. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “I need to go for a walk.”
As I walked away, I looked out into the sky to see the dark Earth illuminated by lights. He was down there, somewhere, not giving a shit about what was happening up here, worrying only about himself. I tried to clear him from my mind, but the thoughts wouldn’t go away until I hit a realization. Leslie sent us here, saving us, but he’s still down there. The singular thought was enough comfort and karma for me to relax. He had screwed himself by trying to screw us, and it brought me some joy. We still had no sun at the moment, though, and were unsure of how long we were going to be going without. That was a problem.
I hoped Garrett would be able to figure things out. It explained why the production company had sent him with us. They hadn’t left us completely helpless. They knew that Circadia was another one of Earth’s moons, so they sent us with a lunar astronomer to at least give us a clue. If anyone could figure out what to expect next, it was going to be him. Seeing as how Earth had two moons now, or Circadia had two moons, we were navigating unfamiliar territory. That’s where Garrett came in. He was an expert, one of few, who studied other planets that had multiple moons. If anyone could let us know what changes to expect, or what would happen next, it would be him.
Jogging through the encampment of huts and through the new housing, I came upon Garrett talking with the space crew. They all stopped talking and looked at me as I slowed to a halt. “Got any ideas on what’s going on yet?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s not going to be great,” Garrett said.
“How bad?”
“We’re not going to see the sun for a week by my estimates,” he said, his eyes downcast. "Turns out Circadia is one of Earth’s moons now, for sure.”
“What?”
“Yeah, and we have five hundred more people that are going to be here in four days,” he said. “What do you think that will do for the panic around here? Luckily we are in the ‘habitable zone’ and our atmosphere will keep us warm enough to survive. It’s going to get cold, though.”
I looked to the space team. “How did you guys not know? You flew the ship, right? Wouldn’t that be a need to know kinda thing?”
“Normally, yes, but they had our course pre-charted. We basically didn’t even have to fly the ship. We were along for the ride, just like you, there in case anything happened during flight. We were just as oblivious as you, I promise,” one man said.
“It’s true,” said another.
“You don’t even understand just how bad this is going to be...” I trailed off. My mind was racing. “The plant life here on Circadia is very fragile. It is extremely fertile and grows at tremendous rates, but it also is very sensitive.”
“What the hell does that mean? I really don’t care about the plants right now, Aella.”
“No, you don’t get it. The plants, including our crops, will go dormant. We are going to be short on food and about to more than double our population.” I was frantic. “We have a good chance of starving. Even if the plants start to come back to life when the sun comes back, I don’t know if it will be soon enough.”
“What the fuck? What are we going to do?” he asked. “I thought we were supposed to be prepared for a possible shutdown?”
“We have been trying to prepare, but we haven’t had a lot of time, and we didn’t prepare for a shutdown with this many people!” I exclaimed.
“So, what are we going to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. We need to go talk to the nutrition team right now. We need to start rationing immediately.”
THE NUTRITION TEAM and crew quickly got to work on the math of rationing safely for nine hundred people. Garrett and I watched as they looked at charts and went over numbers with calculators. When they started looking at each other without saying a word, I knew something was wrong.
“Gonna be tight, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It’s going to be w
orse than tight,” the lead nutritionist replied. “It’s going to be painful. There’s going to be unsafe rations, but I can’t see any other way.”
I closed my eyes and wished for an idea or solution that never came. When I opened them, I realized everyone was staring at me. “What?” I asked, confused.
“What should we do?”
“Whatever needs to be done.” I turned to walk away, begrudgingly. This was not what I wanted this place to be, but we had to do what we had to do. I thought I had grown in a positive way, but now everyone was looking to me for answers that I didn’t have. Couldn’t have. It was a nightmare.
BY THE TIME THE NEXT mealtime came around, everyone had already speculated that there would be food shortages. I heard talk about it circulating, but when people were handed their plates, I watched as their eyes bulged from their sockets. The amount of food that was placed on the plates was laughable. A tablespoon of corn, a few leafy greens, and two ounces of a protein shake made from soy powder. It was a terrible feeling to be hungry and to only have that much food to eat. For the next three days, I felt like I was starving. The food was just enough to sustain life and nothing else. The taste was not great, and the way it made my empty stomach feel was no better. Everything was left raw so that the most nutrients could be extracted by our bodies, but it still wasn’t enough. There was no energy, drive, or relief.
I watched the dark field as my crops shriveled and turned brown. The trees wilted and dried. My hopes of making this new planet great faded, along with my body. It was amazing what such little food could do to a human body in a couple days’ time. We had already been skimping on rations before the blackout, so our bodies were already rundown when the second cut came. My muscles shrank, and any fat storage I had was being used. We had no mirrors, but I could feel my face sinking in.
Luckily, it stayed warm enough that nothing froze, so we still had fresh water to drink. Dehydration was the last thing we needed, but even though I was grateful that the temperatures never dropped below freezing, I loathed the cold.
Garrett made it a habit to come to my hut every night to keep me warm. The company was nice, but the warmth was even better. I felt his bones press against mine and shake. The longer we went without food, the more prominent they were. What should have been comforting was more depressing than anything else. He told me over and over, ‘we are stronger than this’ and ‘we are going to make it through this, just wait.’ The words were about as comforting as the cuddling. Just echoed what I didn’t want to hear. After a while, he stopped saying things like that.
I wondered if he’d lost hope, but never asked.
ON THE FOURTH DAY, when the spacecraft carrying five hundred more people to feed was supposed to arrive, we waited by the supply hull just like the last time we received new arrivals. We were unsure who these people were, just like last time, but worse.
When the crews came, we had no idea who they were but we knew and they knew that they were coming here to work. It was a pre-trip agreed-upon understanding. With the new civilian pioneers, we had no idea what to expect. I thought they probably had no idea what to expect, either.
We waited in the dark continuous night until we saw a burst of light from above. With each pod that dropped, a bright light exploded into the sky until it burned out like a falling star and crashed to the surface. No one seemed to be excited or nervous like last time, and that worried me. The light that burned from the pods entering the atmosphere lit the grotesque faces of the people I had come to know, and it scared me. They looked like zombies; no emotion showed on their sunken faces. This was hell, and we were supposed to be the saviors.
When we were sure that the pods were all accounted for, we headed out in teams of fifty or more to meet them. Footsteps landed with a thud from every step, slowly shuffling along through the open fields and into the trees.
Chapter Sixteen
Trudging through the night, my group came upon a pod. It was even larger than the second group’s pod. We were prepared with ladders as we had expected such. This time we waited much longer for the door handle to turn and the hatch to open, accompanied by the screeching sound of metal-on-metal. When it finally lifted and fell onto its hinges, we watched as the moon lit the hands grasping for the way out.
The first woman that appeared looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her. Her face was plump and her hair was well-groomed. Her eyes were wide and scared. Garrett hollered up to her, “Hey, welcome to Circadia! We have a ladder to help you get down over on the left of the pod.”
She looked around quietly and began to climb down. Twenty or more people climbed out of the pod after her, and then I saw him. Leslie Marshal. That son-of-a bitch! My blood boiled as I watched him emerge from the craft and make his way down the ladder. No one else around me said anything, so I wasn’t sure if they had noticed or recognized him, but I had. I walked around the pod slowly and quietly. This was going to hurt.
As soon as I watched both feet fall from the ladder, I caught him by the shoulders and slammed him up against the pod with one arm while my other fist slammed into his fat face. “You asshole! You knew, didn’t you? You fucking knew!” I screamed through my tears as I kept hitting him. My knuckles felt warm with blood. It wasn’t his, it was mine—my fragile skin burst upon first impact and got worse with every hit.
My tears obscured my vision, but through the blurriness I could see his eyes grow wide when my fist withdrew then came in for yet another shot. My knuckles burned and ached, but I didn’t care. I kept going. “You’re going to pay for what you’ve done! You mother—” My hand was caught.
I turned to see who’d stopped me. It was Smith. His eyes were wide and his mouth hung open. “Aella. Enough.”My anger quickly turned to sorrow. I held onto Smith for support as I bawled hysterically. Leslie fell to the ground behind me with a thud. I knew that I was angry before, but not that angry. More so, I didn’t realize I was so upset with losing what I felt like I had helped build here on Circadia.
Glancing up, I saw Garrett walking towards Leslie. I sniffled, caught my breath, and watched as he knelt beside the other man. His hand tilted Leslie’s battered face to meet with his. “How did you do it? How did you manage to get yourself a seat to Circadia?”
“I was just lucky, I gue—” Leslie barely got any words out before Garrett punched him in his stomach, hard.
“I’m going to ask you again. How did you do it? I want to know.”
“I paid for my seat, just like everyone else,” he muttered. “6.8 million, to be exact. Just like everyone else.”
The disgust I felt at that moment was insurmountable. We had worked for this world. We were not paid to come here. We kept the ideals of currency out of Circadia, and had flourished. Now we had seven hundred people who had paid millions of dollars to be here. The fate of who would survive from Earth had been decided by money. My heart ached for the people still down there.
“Not like everyone else! You think everyone from Earth had that much money laying around? You’re not like everyone else, and you don’t deserve to be here,” I said. “It wasn’t even your money, was it? You probably got here with money you asked for from people that are still down there, dying. Am I right?”
“Oh my God. So self-righteous, huh? You’re telling me you would have given your seat up? I don’t think so,” Leslie coughed. “You can pretend that you're a decent person here, but you weren’t down there, were you?”
I stared back at him.
“Look,” he said, “I’m here now. Let’s move on.”
I couldn’t take anymore. I left the group, and took off for the woods.
STRESS LEVELS SURGED through my body as I trekked through the dead fields in the dark, towards the even darker woods. My heart pounded in my chest, so hard that I thought it might break free. My eyes welled with tears that streamed down my face. The faster I went, the better I felt. I broke into a run, and then a sprint. Nothing could touch me.
I ran for what felt like foreve
r. I ran through the fields, into the woods, on past the woods into a new prairie, over a creek and onto the next patch of forest, until I encountered a large lake.
When I met with the water, I dropped to my knees and bawled. What little energy I had from nearly starving and freezing to death from the week before, was now gone. Every muscle in my body electrified with intense jolts of lactic acid. Burying my hands in the sands before me, I felt the ice-cold water that ebbed along the beach.
Glancing out at the moonlit water, I tried to clear the hatred from my mind. Letting my brain drift into nothingness was soothing for once, and the tears dried. I sat there for the rest of the night, freezing my ass off, not giving a damn. It was the best and worst thing that I could have possibly done.
WAKING UP, MY MIND instantly panicked. My eyes shot open to see only frozen water, and the steam of my breath rising into the air. Attempting to sit up was a struggle that ultimately failed. I was too weak and frail to make myself rise. Thudding to the ground, I cried silent tears. To be so helpless was dehumanizing. I lay in the dark, prepared to die, for the second time in my life.
Hours passed. I was sure that no one would find me, until I heard voices coming from the second wooded area. Another hour passed before someone stepped out on the edge of the forested plot, just barely within my range of sight. A very dark colored man of tall stature yelled my name. The comfort of knowing I was found was enough to put me back to sleep.
“Aella, hey. Can you hear me?” Idris asked.
I blinked rapidly, trying to comprehend what was happening around me. I looked down at my arm to see an IV leading to a bag with fluids hanging above me. Taking in the scenery of the inside of a large hut, I relaxed. When I glanced up, I saw Idris standing above me with Garrett directly behind him. “You found me,” I said.
The Circadia Chronicles: Omnibus: The Complete Colonization Sci-Fi Series Page 12
