Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  31 March

  Message sent. Howling’s closer. Nothing to do now. Signing off.

  Grace stares at the words for long seconds before they sink in.

  “Message received,” she whispers hoarsely. “The message was received. Somehow it got through. And here we are a hundred years later, about to colonize a planet we know by the name Bill Baker gave it, facing the very things that probably killed him, and nobody told us. Nobody told us at all.”

  She drops the book. “Son of a bitch.”

  *

  It’s been three days.

  Jessica’s up and about now, though she’s tight-lipped and heavily bandaged. She can see after all, though her eyes have turned a deep wine color, sclerae and irises together; when they leak, which is often, her tears are transparent and red.

  Don Ebisawa is hiding in his quarters; his work on the water processing system has been taken over by his subordinates. Signy’s rearranged her partitions to form a sturdily-walled quarantine area for Kiana, who’s still sluggish and unresponsive at the best of times and snappily aggressive at the worst. Signy’s keeping her sedated out of an abundance of caution, though her very presence in the camp has got half the crew sleeping in the cryo module instead of the hab.

  Grace walks through both tonight, understanding the appeal of a bed with a lid, even though it can’t possibly be comfortable. She certainly doesn’t understand how some people manage to share one. Her own desire to go into dreamless cryosleep seems like a lifetime ago now. In fact, only Signy, with her new drone-acquired mutagen sample and her stash of snakes and feeder mice she’s somehow kept in cold storage all this time, appears to have any joy in doing anything.

  When she’s spent enough time in her tiny room in the hab mod to bathe and change, Grace pulls her smart suit back on and trudges back to her command post. Straley’s not there, which faintly worries her—there have been howler sightings nightly since they’ve brought Kiana back, but he insists on the nightly patrol—but Don Ebisawa is, which somehow worries her more. He’s thinner than he’d been four days ago, and practically colorless.

  “Don.” Grace puts a pleasantness she doesn’t feel into her voice, and goes for the coffeemaker. “I’m glad to see you up, I’ve been worried about you. Please. Sit.”

  “I can’t stay.” His voice is colorless too, papery. “Captain, I don’t think I can do this.”

  Grace takes her seat. “What do you mean?”

  “Kiana.” He sways, runs a hand over his face, and drops onto the crash couch with a thud. “It’s…it’s just so much, everyone here’s afraid of her, afraid of me, it’s hurting the production quotas we need for the colony, and…” His shoulders quiver. “I go to see her every day and she doesn’t respond, she doesn’t recognize me. She has full fangs now, did Dr. Sigurson tell you? She tried to bite me tonight.”

  No. No, Signy hadn’t told her that. Grace frowns, because she feels as though crying is the only alternative. She has to make all of this work, somehow. “Don, what do you want to do?”

  “Take her back. Let her go.” He doesn’t hesitate at all. “Captain, I still love Kiana. She’s still my baby, even if she doesn’t know it. But I can’t be a father to her like this, and I can’t risk endangering anyone else. I couldn’t forgive myself if she hurt someone.” His eyes are glittery. “Please. Let’s take her back.”

  Back to that cavern? Back to those beasts, to keep being changed, to be made one of them? He’s serious; he’s actually serious. “Don, please,” Grace offers soothingly. “You’re overwrought. You need to get some rest.” She won’t let him get a word in to protest. “Go sleep. I insist. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  It’s a long time after he’s left before Grace has calmed down enough to attempt sleep herself, and the next thing she knows is Straley shaking her awake. “Grace. Get up. The kid’s gone again.”

  Her eyes snap open wide. “Kiana? Nick, what happened? How did she get out?”

  Straley laughs grimly. “Her old man. Her old man did it. Broke into the clinic while Signy was at the hab dome site, dragged her out, put her on a fucking leash and fucking gave her to Harry to ‘take back’.” He reaches down and yanks her upright. “We need Signy’s tracker. We have to find them.”

  *

  They don’t need Signy’s tracker, because they don’t have to go that far.

  Something, some kind of hunch about animal instinct, makes Grace drive the crawler back toward the cave, back toward Aurora, and in the ship’s now fragmented shadow they find Pierce.

  He’d come this way on foot, apparently, in the warmer early-morning lull in the wind and snow. Grace bends over his body—torn, skin and suit, from throat to belly, still faintly steaming in a swath of bloody, refreezing slush—and wonders why. Had he meant to take Kiana out just so far and turn her loose, trusting her to find her own way?

  Pierce’s eyes are wide open, his face a rictus of shocked agony, tiny crystals of ice beginning to form on his lashes. Straley looks once and turns away, coughing, retching. Jessica sinks to her knees in the crimson mess and takes his face between her hands, whining, dotting his forehead with her own sticky red tears.

  There’s no sign of the girl, no sign of any leash.

  Fine, Grace thinks. Fine. Let her go. Let this be the end of it. “Jessica? Honey? Let’s take him home.”

  *

  “I shouldn’t show you this. I shouldn’t even have them. But there’s cryostorage for lab animals, so.” Signy’s reconfigured her space yet again. Her clinic’s two beds are occupied—one by Harry Pierce, thick dark sheets drawn over his body; the other by Jessica, still restless even under heavy sedation, who’d screamed until her throat bled. She leads Grace past them, to the back of the module, without a second look.

  She’s set up two tables and a series of glass tanks. It’s close and dim, musty-smelling, and in the containers on one table, small things rustle. But Signy is occupied with the second table, and turns on a lamp with a weak blue light. “I’ve been testing the mutagen on some of my rats, by injection.” She reaches into one tank with a gloved hand and draws out a little pale form that’s curled and stiff in her palm. “You see most of the effects. You don’t get the odd eye color, but there’s the claw growth, the fur loss, the pigment change.” Signy lays the rat down and indicates two others, similarly changed. “The results repeat.”

  Grace swallows bile. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Getting to that.” Signy turns to face her, leaning on the table. “I’ve found out a few things. These are just the ones I haven’t dissected yet. Outward changes are consistent. Inward changes, organs and so on, are minimal—a heart’s a heart and a stomach’s a stomach. But there are two big exceptions. One,” the doctor ticks off the points on her fingers, “there’s a wholescale and almost immediate destruction of frontal cerebral mass.”

  “So you’re saying it destroys higher brain function.”

  “Insofar as rats have that,” Signy agrees. “Of course, we still don’t really know if Kiana was directly submerged in the mutagen or if she ingested it, but some of her behavior—the sluggishness, the aggression, the lack of speech—points to some degree of cerebral damage.”

  Maybe putting the girl down when they’d seen her changed state would have been better for everyone. Grace would at least still have a UEF officer alive. “What’s the other thing?”

  Signy looks back at her container of euthanized rats. “The mutagen destroys adult reproductive capability. Gonads, gamete production, the works. It’s still intact in the juvenile, but changed.”

  Grace can feel her stomach knotting. “Signy, I don’t like where this is going.”

  “Neither do I, Captain. Especially not now.” Signy motions to a second tank that’s covered by a green surgical drape. “I have to be practical, you know. I breed the rats for the snakes. Feeders. Two days ago I injected a four-week-old female rat with the mutagen, waited out the changes—it took a few hours—and put her in the tank with o
ne of my corn snakes.”

  “Wanting to see what would happen when the snake ate it?” Grace guesses.

  “Eh, maybe partially. Mostly I wanted to see how the new aggressive tendencies in the rat manifested in the presence of another species. I got…surprised.” Signy removes the towel. “Look.”

  “What am I—oh my God, Signy.” Grace bends for a closer look. The corn snake is dead, lying on its back in a convulsive curl, its underbelly ripped straight open and its abdomen empty. But the rat is nestled high in an opposite corner of the container, hanging from the glass in a cocoon-like sac that seems to have extruded from her own flesh; underneath her, at the tank’s bottom, a small pyramid of tiny soft-pink spheres has gathered.

  Grace fights back a gag, turning away. “Those are—those are eggs.”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Signy drops the towel back in place. “I don’t know, and that scares the hell out of me. Acquisition of genetic material by ingestion shouldn’t be possible. It sure as hell shouldn’t be possible with an unrelated species. That rat wasn’t even mature enough to breed.” She pulls her gloves off with a snap and grabs for a fresh pair. “I’m disposing of all this as soon as I’ve tended to Harry. Straight into the incinerator. Dammit, he was too good for what happened to him. They were engaged, you know? Harry and Jessica. They didn’t deserve this.”

  She reaches out bare-handed and takes Grace by the shoulders. “Find Kiana, Captain Morgan. I don’t think you’ll have to look far, but find that girl. Find her and end this. Before we have an even bigger problem.”

  *

  “Are you kidding? Are you fucking kidding? Of course I want to go after that little bitch,” Straley growls. “But not directly, not like before. I want eyes on the scene before I even think of sending people back into that hellhole.”

  Straley’s taken over Grace’s command chair, hunched over her console, programming a drone to detect the transmissions from Kiana’s microchip. She puts a hand on his shoulder. “Nick. She’s still a nine-year-old girl and it’s not her fault.”

  “Yeah, well, according to Signy’s crackpot theory, your nine-year-old ate Harry to get his DNA.” Straley shakes her off, pecking in commands, getting a green light when the drone comes online. “She’s not a little girl now, Grace. She’s—call me monster or asshole or whatever—she’s a threat. If Harry’d shot her on sight in that cavern and we’d picked off the stragglers instead of trying to drag her back here, we’d all be a whole lot safer right now.”

  He slumps in the seat with a heavy exhalation; the fight’s temporarily burned out of him. “Harry was my friend, Grace.”

  “I know, Nick.”

  “He didn’t deserve that.”

  “I know that too.” Grace’s throat is tight, but her eyes stay resolutely dry. She touches Straley’s shoulder again and this time, he allows it. “Better give us the camera view.”

  “Right, right.” Straley inputs a command; he types with two fingers. “Launch in three.”

  Grace counts off three seconds. On the viewscreen, camera link established, the drone whirs to life, rotors spinning up as it begins to lift and head southeast. The camera shows the snowy ground rapidly falling away as the drone ascends. “Good job, Nick.”

  “It’s what I’m for.” He fine-tunes the drone’s movements, so that Aurora’s visible—increasingly bare, now that lights have been set up for round-the-clock disassembly—but carefully skirting the place where Harry Pierce had died, keeping that bloodstained patch of earth and snow out of view. “Shouldn’t we be messaging someone about this?”

  Grace is silent a moment. She’d considered that, and done the calculations. “Aurora tried it. Got a message through. It was ignored.” She watches the ground race past beneath the drone, its flight path changing a little as Straley corrects for the wind. “What would we say, Nick? That we’re failing and can’t handle it? We can’t even turn back the colonists now, they won’t have the resources to go elsewhere on such short notice.”

  “Hold it, hold it.” Straley’s talking more to himself, but Grace falls silent. “Coming up on the cave. Look, you can see the tracks the crawler left.”

  Grace looks, and frowns. So close. She remembers the day she’d landed Lansing, and how the depth of the snow had taken her by surprise, but no one had anticipated how near disaster could lie. “Take her down carefully.”

  At the cave’s mouth, the drone skims the ground. Its camera picks up a clump of wet snow. Straley sucks in his breath. “Good thing we’re using a mini. This’ll be tricky.”

  “You’ve got it.” Grace rubs the back of his neck. “Wait. Where’s the signal from her transmitter?”

  “Where’s the—fuck.” Straley stops the drone in place, just centimeters inside the tunnel. He puts the little device through a few turns to dislodge the snow, then pecks in another command that sends a quick chirping noise through the speakers. “Audio was off. Good catch.”

  Grace keeps her eyes on the screen. The tunnel’s getting lighter and the light has that familiar sick cerulean hue; they’re close. “You’re welcome.”

  The drone keeps descending, with a few careful maneuvers from Straley. The signal from Kiana’s transmitter chip has gotten stronger on audio, its chirp nearly constant. Suddenly free of the entry tunnel, the drone glides into the cavern with the glowing pool, its camera suddenly swamped with the quivering blue light, and Grace grabs Straley’s arm. “There she is, Nick, stop the drone.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Straley types a command hurriedly. “Let’s hold that.”

  The drone hovers, unnoticed. Above the pool, Kiana Ebisawa hangs suspended from the cavern ceiling, enclosed in a cocoon of glistening, weirdly fleshy material. Only her head and shoulders are free, her arms lying limp along the curves of her prison, her eyes closed, her altered face utterly expressionless.

  A commotion at the bottom of the cocoon, a ripple of the wet leathery bindings, draws the attention of one of the adults. Exactly what’s going on is blocked from view as the creature moves between the girl and the drone’s camera; but then it crawls quickly away, bearing something small and ovoid in its mouth, trailing strings of mucus. The object is carried toward the wall of the cavern, out of easy sight.

  “Zoom out and turn,” Grace orders.

  Straley inputs another command, and the view widens. The light provided by the mutagen pool falls off sharply past its glowing edges, but there’s enough ambience to track the pale howler’s trek up one wall, where it deposits its sticky burden with a care that looks like reverence. The camera pans along the sides of the cavern: still dark, but pebbled-looking now instead of smooth, studded with myriad squashed spheres that gleam damply. “Grace, tell me what the hell I’m looking at?”

  Grace doesn’t answer right away. She’s thinking of Signy’s rat, the eviscerated snake, the tiny globules clustered in the corner of a glass tank.

  “Eggs, Nick,” she says quietly. “She’s laying eggs.”

  “Jesus fuck. Signy wasn’t kidding. She really wasn’t.” Straley’s staring at the screen with his mouth open. He realizes it and shakes his head quickly, and moves the view back to Kiana. His bandages are off, and the scarring claw marks on his cheek are livid in the blue light spilling from the pool and transmitted by the camera. “What do we do? There’s got to be…hell, I don’t know, hundreds of those…eggs already. Thousands, maybe. We don’t know how fast these things will grow, Grace. We can’t handle thousands.”

  There’s a thread of panic in his voice, of incomprehension. Grace glances away. In her mind’s eye she can still see Harry Pierce’s opened body: the pain and terror frozen in his eyes, the ice forming on his lashes, Jessica’s crimson tears freezing down the ruin of her face.

  “Get our people. Signy. Jessica…and Kiana’s father.” Grace takes a deep breath. “She has to die. Everything in that cave has to die.”

  *

  Grace swivels a little in her seat and watches her little gathering:
Signy on her feet, Straley sitting flat on the floor, Jessica and Ebisawa sullenly quiet, in different ways, on the crash couch. “I know what we have to do.”

  “Of course you do.” Ebisawa glares at her, then glances away. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “You have to kill my daughter. Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” He looks back at her just as she’s about to protest, and waves her silent. His expression has softened, or he’s steeling himself into neutrality. “Captain. I’m not angry about it. Not at you. I’ve seen the footage now, I’ve heard Dr. Sigurson’s explanation of what’s happening, and…Kiana’s suffering. She has to be. This is no way for my little girl to exist. ..and she’s still my little girl. Please, let’s do what we can. Even if that means the worst. I can—” His face contorts for a second, Jessica gripping his arm. “I can live with the consequences.”

  That’s a reaction Grace didn’t expect, and the anguish on his face is heartbreaking. “I don’t want any more loss of life, Don,” she sighs. “No more death, no more injury. We’ve had enough. So I’m not looking at a direct manned attack. I want to weaponize the drones.”

  “I don’t like that idea.” Signy lounges against one of the unused workstations, elbows resting on its surface, chin on her crossed wrists. “It’s admirable, Captain, but I don’t think it’s tenable.”

  “Yeah, no.” Straley stretches a little but doesn’t move. He’s gray with tiredness, and his pallor makes his scars stand out. “Think, Grace. They’re microdrones. Even our biggest ones are minis. Topography, reconnaissance, some weather observations, that’s all good. But we saw drones on Earth get taken out by birds all the time. What if these ‘howlers’ notice a drone and think it’s food? Besides, they get battered to hell when the wind’s not dead calm, what makes you think they’ll handle a payload even if we can spread our resources that thin? I’m with Signy. We need maximum effect with minimum effort.”