Blue Planet

by S E T Ferguson

  The whole time they had been on Columbina, Beryl had thought the worst of their problems were with the Vos and the other creatures on Columbina seeking to kill them, whether they be on land or in the planet’s waters. When she used her imagination, she could think of something like a meteorite or an earthquake. She had never really thought aliens would be their problem.

  And definitely not Earthlings.

  Beryl stood up, ready to follow the group already headed toward the caves.

  As she did, she heard Iris’s voice behind her.

  “Oh shit,” Iris said, and the large screens in the bar—which had still been showing the inside of the docking port and avoiding any view of those who had been killed—came alive with the face of Benny, the Earthling spokesman and now, as far as Beryl was concerned, murderer.

  Whatever had caused Iris to swear was about to be seen by everyone in the bar.

  Like the previous messages, as soon as Benny started talking, Beryl could tell that it was pre-recorded. This time, it was less about the way the video looked than it was knowing that the man could not have gotten somewhere and recorded a message in the short period of time that had elapsed between this moment and the one Beryl didn’t want to think about.

  Around her, those who had been leaving stopped.

  With the first words out of Benny’s mouth, Beryl could tell that something was different with this video. The man’s voice was now loud and clear, his strange accent still there but less obvious now that he was speaking with more confidence than he had in any of the previous videos.

  “As you can see from what has happened to your pathetic group sent to our ship, we are prepared to destroy you and your planet. Unless you acquiesce to our immediate, complete, and total demands for you to surrender your planet peacefully, including giving up any and all weapons and weapon technology, we will be forced to annihilate you. Should you agree to our demands within the next 48 hours, we will consider sparing your lives. If you do not agree, we will be forced to wipe out you and everything on your planet through the use of extreme force. Please communicate your intentions to us within 48 hours from the end of this video.”

  The video ended with a gleeful looking Benny smiling at the screen, before all the screens in the bar went black.

  For a second, Beryl wondered if the video would start a wave of panic around them, but Iris jumped in before anyone could move. “This video doesn’t change anything I said before. I recommend everyone make for the caves, where we can decide what we need to do next.”

  Instead of panicking, almost everyone started leaving the bar, calmly headed either toward the caves or to find their families.

  All Beryl wanted to do, the tears now a memory, was fight back. Not only for her mother but because these Earthlings had come here, seeking to destroy their way of life as they had tried to do the same to her ancestors before they left Earth.

  Vlad hoisted his drink, very little left in it.

  “Don’t they know,” he said, still glib despite having seen his father killed—or, perhaps, because that fact still hadn’t settled on his mind or he was trying to fight the thought with humor—“you never kill the dog? Those Earthlings are about to get the fight of their lives.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Beryl walked through the thick doors of the entrance to the caves and, as always, was surprised to remember that despite their name and their being situated hundreds of feet below ground, they bore absolutely no resemblance to an actual cave.

  Instead, they looked more like the cavernous convention centers from Earth that Beryl only knew from photographs. She hadn’t spent much time in the caves, but she knew their general layout – three levels, with areas for Iris’s computing hardware, people, crops, and manufacturing. There were not enough people currently on Columbina to fill up the areas set aside for them, as these areas had been constructed in anticipation of future residents or need. Someone had moved their livestock into the caves since the announcements about the Earthlings, so now what little livestock they had—cattle, chickens, pigs, rabbits, bees, and the like—were in the caves as well. They weren’t a necessary food source, as meat was now created, like so much of everything else, in their manufacturing facilities and printer farms without the necessity of killing animals. However, they were still a valuable commodity in a world where people would pay high premiums for real, non-lab-created meat.

  Around her, Beryl looked at a sea of scared people trying to make the best of a bad situation. Lots of people looked scared, but most seemed to be dealing with the situation alright. A lot of kids were running around, clearly viewing this whole thing as a great adventure.

  “Is that Fawn?” Beryl asked no one, even though Iris, Vlad, and Camp had walked into the caves with her. Near the entrance to the room, a young woman sat on a cot with her face in her hands. Two young children—a boy and a girl—sat on the cot as well, themselves crying, but the woman seemed unconcerned with what they were doing.

  Beryl found herself walking over to the woman. The preparations could wait for a few minutes. If they couldn’t help each other, there was no point in trying to fight off the threat.

  Beryl walked toward the woman and placed her hand on the crying woman’s shoulder. She looked up, her big brown eyes rimmed with red and overflowing with tears. Beryl had no doubt now that it was Fawn, even though her old friend now looked even older than the last time Beryl had seen her.

  “Are you OK, Fawn?” Beryl asked, knowing full well she was not.

  Fawn sniffled, and Beryl expected her to state that she was OK. Instead, the woman shook her head no, that she wasn’t OK. Her daughter—May Lee—smacked her younger brother, Bo, in the ear. The young boy started bawling even harder than he had been before.

  Fawn didn’t seem to notice. Or, if she did, she didn’t seem to care.

  “Where’s Reed?” Beryl gave the older kid her best adult, in-charge look and she stopped herself from hitting her younger brother again. Their father, Reed, was nowhere to be seen.

  “I, I don’t know.” Fawn wiped at her nose. This time, though, Beryl knew Fawn was lying, trying to protect her husband. The husband who should have been with her now. The one who had never done anything good for her friend.

  “I’ll be back,” Beryl stood up and squeezed Fawn’s shoulder. If Reed was in the caves—a likely situation, as Reed was foolhardy but also lacked actual courage—she was sure he would be easy to find. The man had his vices. Beryl doubted he would give them up, no matter the circumstances.

  Beryl marched past Vlad and Iris. Both of them had seen her look like this before.

  “Beryl, we need to discuss the bigger situation we have here.” Vlad’s voice pled with her, but he already realized he wasn’t going to get his way. Not yet, at least.

  “No, we need to make sure everyone down here is OK first. If we can’t take care of ourselves, there’s no reason to fight off the Earthlings,” Beryl walked toward the back of the room, not entirely sure what she was looking for but figuring she would know it when she saw it.

  “You do realize we’re about to be attacked by the Earthlings, right?” Vlad asked, still protesting Beryl’s actions, no matter how half-heartedly.

  “Exactly. And if people don’t stand up for what’s right, it doesn’t matter if we’re able to fight them off,” Beryl motioned to her right, where she saw several of Vlad’s siblings gathered around a group of cots. “Why don’t you check on your family and then help out making sure people have everything they need. Iris, you will let us know if there is any imminent danger, right?”

  “Of course.”

  Vlad shook his head at Beryl and headed toward his family. Beryl didn’t have to ask Iris to help; she walked toward the nearest person who looked in need of some reassurance, leaving Beryl to her own devices.

  Beryl continued heading toward the back of the room, and then she saw what she hadn’t known she had been looking for—a makeshift bar someone had already set up. Beryl headed straight tow
ard it, focused on the back of a scarred head.

  As she approached, the man seemed to sense that she was headed his way and he turned around. The look on his face suggested he was not happy to see Beryl.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Beryl asked as the man in front of her took a swig from a bottle of beer.

  “Having a drink.”

  “I can see that,” Beryl could smell the alcohol on Reed’s breath and knew it wasn’t the man’s first drink. “Do you realize you have a wife and two kids who need you?”

  The man groaned, as if the mere reminder of his family was a thought he couldn’t bear.

  Beryl didn’t even realize she was doing it, but she took a large step toward the man and slapped him across the face.

  Reed dropped the beer and the glass shattered. The noise was loud enough that almost everyone within immediate earshot turned to watch the scene.

  “Look here, Reed,” Beryl said, grabbing the man’s shirt. He was a full head taller than her and could easily have beaten her in a fight, but he seemed too shocked to do anything but comply with what Beryl wanted him to do. “On a normal day, I don’t give two flying fox shits if you want to drink your life away. But today isn’t a normal day. And today, I actually do give a shit. You need to get back to your wife and children and make sure they’re OK. And then you need to get ready to help defend this planet.”

  Reed sneered and pulled his shirt away from Beryl’s grip. “Or what?”

  Even faster than she had slapped him seconds earlier, Beryl had her gun at the man’s head.

  “Or you’re going to regret having wasted the last beer of your life.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “Try me. And when I’m done with you, if there’s anything left, I’ll feed it back to the fish and let them finish off the job they started before.” Beryl didn’t know what had brought this on, but it felt good.

  Beryl let herself glance at the other men gathered around the bar, all of whom were now riveted on the scene in front of them. They all carried weapons, but it was almost unheard of for someone to pull one out. They now stared at her, clearly wondering how this was going to play out. Around them, the room had fallen silent. Beryl didn’t have to turn around to know that all of the citizens of Columbina were looking at her.

  Beryl felt a hand on her shoulder, then heard the familiar voice of Iris say her name, trying to calm her down and prevent the situation from getting out of control. She didn’t move the gun, though.

  Beryl stared at Reed until he averted his eyes, no longer able to stand staring at her.

  “That’s what I thought.” Beryl put the gun away and watched Reed slink back toward his wife and children, the eyes of nearly everyone in the room on him now instead of her. When she felt sure he was not going to come back, Beryl turned her attention to the rest of the people gathered around the bar, many of whom were her fellow regulars at Gamma’s bar.

  She didn’t have to say anything. Those who were left and had families dispersed, headed toward wives and children and husbands.

  Iris squeezed Beryl’s shoulder, and Beryl put the gun away.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s something I should have done a long time ago,” Beryl said. “And I think I’m ready to deal with those assholes from Earth now.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I have to show you something,” Iris said.

  Beryl sat backward in a chair, using its back as a place to rest her arms and head. Beryl looked at the phone on her wrist, and the image was instantly recognizable to her as the docking bay from the Earthlings’ ship.

  Beryl’s stomach twisted and knotted itself when she thought of the last scenes she had seen from that docking bay. Could it have only been a few hours ago that all of that had happened?

  Already, it felt like something that had happened to someone else in some other life. Beryl knew there would come a point where she would have to think about her mother’s death and everything that meant.

  Unless, of course, the Earthlings killed them all first.

  It was a good reason not to dwell on those things now. If they didn’t take care of the threat from the Earthlings, there might not be a reason to ever think about the awful consequences of Rona’s death.

  Beryl refocused on the video, pushing the unpleasant thoughts away to deal with the imminent threat that might make all of those other thoughts obsolete. Beryl guessed it had to have been taken by one of the drones Iris had sent up with their ship. Mercifully, Iris had chosen a shot for her that didn’t involve the bodies Beryl guessed were there somewhere.

  “Is this live?” Beryl asked as the drone video showed two of the Earth AI on either side of the human who had been in all their videos and had been the one to greet the Columbinians, if you could call what had happened a greeting.

  “No, the drones took it after…” Iris trailed off, leaving the statement that came after it unspoken.

  Beryl watched the video. The AI each took one arm of the man and marched him, without words, out of the docking bay. To Beryl, the way he was propped up between them made it seem as if he wasn’t moving entirely of his own volition. It was more like he was compliant with what the AI wanted, rather than cooperative with them.

  “What does that look like to you?” Iris asked as Beryl watched the AI walk the man through the doorway to the docking bay and down a hallway. Like the docking bay had been when she first saw it, the hallways seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to Beryl.

  “It looks like he’s a prisoner.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  Beryl continued watching the video. If the Earth AI knew the drone was there, they weren’t doing anything to destroy it or even acknowledge its presence. She guessed they had no idea it was there.

  The two AI and the Earthling continued walking down the hallways, turning corners, going downstairs, and getting deeper into the bowels of the large ship. “Do you see what’s missing?”

  Beryl looked around the screen in front of her, at all the details of the darkened hallway, as if that would help her see what wasn’t there. And then it hit her.

  “There aren’t any other humans.” Iris nodded at Beryl’s realization.

  The revelation refocused Beryl, who silently watched the human and the two AI onscreen, searching for any sign of humans. The most obvious sign was the one she had already realized—that there just weren’t any people. But there were other, subtler signs. She didn’t see any misplaced items waiting to be reunited with a forgetful owner. No garbage waiting to be picked up by a cleaning drone. No signs warning of a hot pipe that shouldn’t be touched. No pictures or paintings or personalization that humans created everywhere they went as they tried to make a place feel like home.

  “It worries me,” Iris said. She was not normally one to be nonplussed by something. This had unnerved her, and Beryl could tell that, even without Iris’s statement. “I have the other drones looking for any sign of humans elsewhere on the ship. Nothing so far.”

  Beryl went back to looking at her phone’s screen, looking for any sign of humans. A morsel of food. A smudge on a smooth surface. Even an errant hair on the floor, catching a glint of the low light. But there was nothing.

  Instead, the two AI led the Earthling around a corner on the sterile ship, with the next hallway ending abruptly at a large door. The two AI pushed the man forward, holding him at arm’s length in front of themselves. The routine seemed familiar to everyone onscreen, though no one seemed comfortable with it.

  The door slowly swung open, apparently having received a command from someone to do so without any pushing of buttons or other effort. On the other side of the door, a hallway stood almost entirely unlit. If the hallways they had seen already had been dim, this new one was dark and lit mostly from the light on the dim side of the door. Iris paused the video.

  “Why did you pause the video?” Beryl asked.

  “I figured y
ou would have some questions. And I don’t want you to see the end before I have a chance to answer them,” Iris replied.

  “Please tell me you got a drone in there.”

  “I didn’t. At the time, I didn’t realize it might be my only chance to do so.”

  “Why is it so dark?” Beryl asked.

  “I don’t know. It could be something simple. I mean, you guys don’t realize how hard it is to keep everything in working order on a complicated ship like Hodios or V. It isn’t only the obvious sources of trouble, like the computer systems or the greenhouses and animals. It’s the little things, like having the ability to make enough extra lights when they burn out while keeping the necessary functions of the ship going. If you aren’t keeping up with those little things constantly, eventually they are gone, or you’re so far behind in replacing items that it’s difficult to get caught back up,” Iris replied. “That’s the simplest explanation. The other explanation is that it is something more sinister.”

  “Which do you think it is?”

  “I’m going to start it, and I think you’ll know after you see the rest of the video which explanation I think it is.”

  The video began again. Onscreen, the two AI shoved the man through the doorway as soon as it had opened enough for his thin frame to fit through. As they did, Beryl thought she saw something she hadn’t seen elsewhere on the ship: humans.

  She only got the briefest glimpse of them before the door shut again. There had been a group of them, their skinny, dirty figures only slightly illuminated from the light on the AI’s side of the door. What struck Beryl was that none of them looked like they were trying to pass through the door.

  Beryl didn’t have to ask Iris what she thought about the situation. There was something sinister going on. These humans seemed cowed and feeble, and yet even in the dim light, Beryl saw something in their eyes.

  The humans on the ship were afraid.

  And they needed the help of the Columbinians.