Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
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First Edition: May 2020
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LCCN: 2020932858
ISBNs: 978-0-316-42597-1 (paper over board), 978-0-316-42598-8 (ebook)
E3-20200409-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Two Days Before Lowest Tide
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
One Day Before Lowest Tide
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Lowest Tide
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Special thanks to Synthesis Entertainment
Prologue
Mission Log 87
Robinson, Maureen—Commander
24th Mission of the Resolute
Good morning. I know I’ve been recording fewer logs lately but, well, after six months, there isn’t much new to report. We’re learning more and more every day about this water planet that we’re stranded on… but we still don’t know how to get off it.
There’s been no contact with the Resolute, as usual. They could be to Alpha Centauri and back by now, assuming they were able to find their way back on course from our last planet. For us, this sector that we’ve found ourselves in is even more unfamiliar than the one we left. It’s cloudy most nights here, but when I do get a view of the stars, I can’t make any sense of them. It’s safe to say we’re more lost than ever.
But chin up, right, Maureen? There have been some positive developments in the last couple of weeks. John’s crops have started to yield food—he’s so proud—and I have to admit, eating real corn and tomatoes is a welcome break from rehydrated meal packs. The greenhouse’s hydroponics systems are working well. The only real problem is the wind damage to the plastic walls. The poisonous atmosphere here is just as lethal for the plants as it is for us. So far, we’ve been able to keep on top of patching any holes, but we have to stay vigilant.
Same with the solar panels. As long as we can keep the sand from building up on them, they are providing enough power for the oxygen-generating system as well as for our suits. However, that’s barely enough energy even on the brightest day, and there’s never any leftover to store in the Jupiter’s batteries. And of course, we still have yet to find a way to use the methane in this atmosphere for rocket fuel, which we’ll need a lot of if we’re going to take off.
Another week, another month… I’m still studying that strange occurrence of lightning storms out on the horizon. They happen like clockwork every twenty-three days. I can’t help but think that those storms could be the key to us leaving here if I could just figure out how to harness their power.
In the meantime, everyone’s doing all right. Penny and Judy are fine. John’s a happy farmer—to be honest, I think he wishes we’d stay here. Don is Don, and Smith is… well, I shouldn’t say what I think she is.…
But I’m still worried about Will. Most of the time he seems fine; he says he’s fine, but these days that’s about all he ever says. I know he still misses the Robot. I keep thinking enough time will pass and he’ll get over it, but I fear he’s getting worse: more solitary, more withdrawn. I see everybody trying to bond with him, but he just won’t come out of his shell. Granted, there isn’t much for him to do here, which makes it worse. He spends so many hours off alone, exploring our little island world. Maybe if he had someone his own age around, a friend… I should go exploring with him sometime. But there’s so much more I need to study.
Ugh.
I guess that’s it for now. I should focus on the positive: We’re as healthy and safe as a family stranded on an uncharted planet can be. Back to work on those lightning storms. I’ll update again in a few days.…
TWO DAYS BEFORE LOWEST TIDE
CHAPTER
My name is Will Robinson, and I’m in danger.
Danger of complete boredom.
I mean, okay, sure, there’s still real danger; we’re stranded on a little sand island on a poison water planet. We’re always one bad windstorm from losing our solar cells and our garden, which would also mean losing our air and our food. We have no fuel to take off and no idea where the Resolute or anyone else in the 24th colonist group is. We don’t even know where we are.
But all that being said, while I do have a list of daily jobs, like testing the hydroponics chemistry in our garden and checking the underside of the Jupiter for corrosion, there’s not very much to do here.
Especially when you don’t have any friends.
I know, I have Judy and Penny, Mom and Dad, and Don. Dr. Smith is here, too, but she’s under house arrest in an air lock, and I try to avoid even walking by her door. The rest of us have fun now and then, but it’s not the same.
I miss him. My Robot. Whenever I think back to exploring our old planet with him, tromping through the forest, clapping for the flowers, avoiding mothasaurs, even discovering the occasional time-portal-in-a-cave… I can’t stand the feeling it gives me: the stinging in my eyes, the tightness in my chest. Have you ever felt like someone saw the world the exact same way you did? Like you had the same brain? And have you ever had to say goodbye to that person as they tumbled out of an air lock while fighting an enemy robot?
Okay, probably not that last part, but what about the rest of it? I’d never felt like that about a friend before, and I haven’t since—
Except for Clare.
But I shouldn’t talk about her. I mean, she wasn’t even…
Was she my friend? I guess that depends. Sort of like with the Robot: Sometimes I wondered if he was just following a program because I saved his life, or if he actually liked, you know, me. Could he even make a friend? Did he have a concept of what that was? I’m not sure, but I guess no matter how much you think about something, at some point you have to decide if you’re going to believe it or not. I believed in the Robot, and I believed in Clare; I think I still do, even if what happened nearly got me and my entire family killed.
As you can probably guess, they don’t know about that.
If the Robot had been around, he never would have let it happen. But he wasn’t there, and so the day I met Clare started like every other day here, with the sound of Dad’s voice speaking quietly:
“Hey, rise and shine, Farmer
Will.”
My eyes blinked open, and I saw Dad’s silhouette in the doorway of my compartment. I checked the time: almost six. Time to do the plant chemistry before the sun came up, just like every other day.
“Be right there,” I croaked.
Dad tapped the side of the door and headed down to the cargo bay.
For a second, I shivered and pulled up my blanket. The hull of the ship creaked, and I heard the steady howling of the wind. Every day here is windy; it’s just a question of how strong the wind will be. That morning sounded about medium, which meant you had to lean into it when you walked around, but at least it wasn’t going to try to nick your suit or tear your greenhouse apart.
But then I bolted up because I remembered that it was an important day: one of the three lowest tides of the entire time we’d been here. Mom and I had been keeping track of the tides, because how much the water level changes, especially how much it rises, has a pretty big impact on whether we’ll still have a place to live. We’d learned that this planet has diurnal tides just like on Earth, including the more drastic spring tides, but here they aren’t nearly as regular. Every four or five months, there are these super-extreme tides, where the higher ones are much higher and the lower ones are much lower. It has something to do with this place having two moons instead of one. There had been a set of these extreme tides not long after we’d arrived, and if our calculations were right, there was going to be another set over the next few days. That meant our island was going to shrink down pretty far during the high tides—we’d even dug trenches around the greenhouse just to be safe—and the low tides would be prime time for exploring.
As I swung my legs over the side of my bed, a familiar shape caught the corner of my eye: the silhouette of the Robot—not really him, just a little model I’d made on our old planet. Yet every time I saw it I felt this little tug inside, a squeeze of energy like, Is it him? Then I immediately felt stupid because of course it wasn’t.
“Where are you?” I said quietly. Sometimes I thought if I concentrated really hard, I might be able to picture where the Robot was, might even be able to see what he was seeing—we’d had a connection like that, once upon a time—but it never quite worked. Maybe he was still tumbling through space, locked in battle with that other robot, the one we called SAR. Maybe their joints had frozen up by now and they would just drift that way, forever.
“You’d like exploring these low tides today,” I said to the model, and then, swallowing hard, I turned away and grabbed my space suit from the floor.
I stood and tugged it on, wiggling my feet in my boots, trying to make as much room as I could. Just because you were lost in space didn’t mean you stopped growing, but it did mean that you couldn’t get the next size bigger suit, and mine had gotten pretty constricting over the last six months.
As I struggled to zip the suit up to my collar, I felt what had become a familiar sensation on the back of my neck: a burning feeling that made me immediately start scratching there, even though Judy had told me not to. The spot had started to itch two days earlier. The skin was red, and even though it didn’t itch all the time, the flare-ups had gotten more frequent and more intense. At first, Judy had thought it was some sort of rash, maybe from my suit chafing—it was stretched pretty tight—but we’d tried putting a bandage there and it hadn’t helped. Her next theory was that it was some kind of allergic reaction, except so far, she hadn’t been able to figure out what I might be allergic to. She’d run the standard set of tests on me, and while I had tested mildly positive for an allergy to silicates, which we’d detected in the sand and rock formations on this planet, it shouldn’t have been enough to cause this kind of reaction.
We’re in an exotic atmosphere and habitat, Judy had said. We have control of our climate and food, but we can’t be one-hundred-percent sure what particles in this world we might be exposed to. For the moment, the treatment she’d prescribed was to wear an antihistamine patch on my wrist and just try not to scratch. Wearing my suit was actually helpful since it kept my fingers off my neck.
Once I was suited up, I walked as quietly as I could down the curving hall of the Jupiter, past the doors to the other sleeping compartments. The ship was dark except for the dim outside light that was coming through the cockpit windows and the skylights in the hub. Both rooms were empty, but the hall smelled like coffee, so I knew Mom was up already—she always was—which also meant I knew where she was.
Dad was waiting for me down in the cargo bay. He had his helmet under one arm. In the other hand he held a hurricane lamp, its flame burning blue. I took my breathing pack from its charging station on the wall, slung it over my shoulders, and pulled my helmet from its hook.
“Ready?” Dad was smiling at me as if it wasn’t a drag to be up this early.
“Yup.” I put my helmet under my arm and got the probe from its charger.
We walked down the open ramp of the cargo bay, our boots clomping, then through a short, round tunnel made of plastic and into the domed greenhouse. The air was warmer here, with a sweet, damp smell. Water droplets beaded on the plastic surface, which was stretched over a skeleton of thin metal poles. Dad said it reminded him of camping when he was a kid.
All around us were our crops: corn, cherry tomatoes, soybeans, carrots; some of the nymph oranges were finally starting to bear tiny fruits. Everything grew out of vessels of water, the stems and leaves climbing around supports that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Dad had said that none of these plants looked exactly like they would have back on Earth; everything had been genetically designed to grow quicker and smaller and without soil. We’d never been able to have a garden at our house because of the bad air and the water shortages, which was maybe why I’d never really been interested in gardening, but it was kinda cool to have all this food around you that you actually grew. Maybe this was a tiny bit like having a pet? One that just sort of stood there all the time, but still.… Also, I had to admit, it did make us pretty rugged explorers to be able to grow our own food on an uncharted planet.
Dad breathed in deeply. “Another day living off the land.” He waved a meter in front of him. “Oxygen mix is right,” he reported. “Methane leakage is holding steady below three parts per million.”
I stepped into the narrow gap between the corn plants. Here, closer to the greenhouse wall, you could hear the wind whipping outside and the hiss of sand grains and pebbles striking the plastic, which was dotted with patches. I knelt down and pushed the sleek metal end of the probe into one of the water vessels, which was almost completely filled by a ball of roots. The results appeared on my wrist communicator.
As I knelt, a wave of burning itchiness radiated from my neck. I moved my gloved fingers there, but with my suit on it was no use. I took a deep breath and tried to relax.
“You okay over there?” Dad called.
“Yeah, fine, just my allergy thing,” I said.
“Is it worse?”
“About the same.”
“Well, make sure you check in with Judy again today.”
“Yeah, okay.” I stood. The flare-up was passing. “The pH is looking good,” I reported, and moved along to check the beans. “Nitrogen and phosphorus are holding steady… just the potassium is low again.”
“Like clockwork,” said Dad. He was rubbing a cotton swab between the flowers of the nymph orange plants. “Looks like we might not have oranges in time to put them in our stockings after all.”
“Huh?”
He shook his head. “Nothing; weird old Christmas tradition. Like, from my great-grandparents. But”—he surveyed the rest of the crops—“it does seem like we really can have a decent Thanksgiving next week, especially if Don lets us at that chicken of his.” My head whipped around to Dad, but he was grinning. “I’m just kidding. How are the rest of the readings?”
“Fine,” I said, moving on to the tomatoes. “Just the potassium. I’ll update the irrigation settings.”
“Perfect.” Dad held
up a wand-like scanner and began waving it around the sides of the greenhouse; it used sonic waves to check for weak points in the plastic so we could stay ahead of any tears. When the scanner started to beep, Dad made an X on the plastic with a marker.
I moved to the control station by the entrance to adjust the irrigation settings, then met up with Dad by the air lock on the far side of the greenhouse.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We clamped our helmets into place and stepped through to the outside.
The wind shoved us like a schoolyard bully as our feet mushed into the gray sand. There was a hiss as sand sprayed against our visors. All around us was a watery gray world: layers of waves and clouds, the flash of whitecaps, and here and there the black teeth of rocks that stuck out of the sand, some only a meter or two, but others that towered above us. Our Jupiter was parked on an oval-shaped sand island. When the tides were high, it looked like a lonely little dot surrounded by ocean, but when they were low, other islands appeared, as if our spot was part of a chain of islands, or at least a brief sandbar.
During the lowest tides, you could follow the island chain quite a ways, like playing an ocean version of hopscotch. The shapes of the islands were always changing as the waves eroded and deposited sand. Sometimes, the bridge between two islands would disappear for a week or two, or a new rock would get uncovered, or a whole new little landform would show up, only to erode away a couple of days later.
Not too far from the Jupiter was a formation of rocks that made a little jagged bluff. Beside that was Mom’s small work hut, a light glowing inside. She’d probably already been in there for an hour or two.
Dad and I were rounding the side of the greenhouse when a line of light appeared on the horizon. For just a moment, the planet’s fused twin suns—technically contact binary stars—appeared, reflecting brightly on our helmet visors and making us squint. Everything lit up in orange and gold, and you could feel the warmth through your suit. I stopped and watched, getting green dots in my eyes, before the suns disappeared into the upper cloud layers and the light got flat and gray again. That was often the only time we’d see them all day.
Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge Page 1
