Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  Jessica sits up. “What if we seal off the cavern?”

  “How?” Grace demands. “Explosives? We’re supposed to save those for starting mining operations and blasting ice cores.”

  “Not the mining explosives.” Jessica shakes her head. “We—the UEF team—we were sent with an ordnance allowance. It’s still in storage”—she looks questioningly at Straley, who grimly nods—”and it’s not much, but we have grenades and sticky bombs, maybe some C4. It was all packed as rescue material, you can free people from rock falls and crawler accidents if you’re really careful, but there’s no reason it wouldn’t work the other way.” She gives Grace a faint, twisted smile. “Sorry for the secrecy, Captain. You weren’t told because you didn’t need to know.”

  Of course. “Still. Collapse the cavern,” Grace muses. “But we only know one entry point. What if there are others? This damned planet could be cobwebbed with these things.”

  “It’s probably not.” Signy straightens up. “Remember the drone I used to fetch my sample? I kept the camera on, and there were bones at the bottom of the pool. Human bones, clean ones. That’s the rest of Aurora’s crew right there. Has to be.” She brushes hair from her face. “I’m not speculating on how the howlers started. Maybe some quadruped that’s extinct now tried to drink from the pool and fell in, like a tar pit. But I think they’re an anomaly here. They can’t have large numbers, the mutagen makes adult reproduction impossible. I think they attacked the remnants of Aurora’s crew because they were hunting a breeding juvenile”—Don Ebisawa winces audibly—”and maybe they’ve been dormant until now.” She stops, pinking faintly. “Enough with the speculating. Jessica’s right. Destroy the queen, destroy the eggs, collapse the entrance. We can hold any stragglers at bay until we have greater numbers.”

  “That’s good,” Straley interjects, “it’s solid. But we’ll need boots on the ground to plant all that.”

  Jessica’s smile fades. Her bruise-purple eyes leak sluggish red. “Two pairs right here. That’s enough.”

  She means herself and…Ebisawa? Grace hauls herself upright. “Jessica…”

  “I don’t take orders from you, Captain Morgan, you can’t stop me.” Jessica tucks one arm around Ebisawa’s trembling shoulders, and the man sits up straighter. “I know what I have in mind. I know it means no coming back. But neither of us has anything to lose. I’ve already lost Harry, and Don…” She trails off a second, voice unsteady. “Don will get to be with his daughter again.”

  Grace bites her tongue. Signy and Straley are both quiet, watching her, while she wants to rail at the injustice and can’t find the words. Jessica’s right. Sacrifices have to be made now to keep everyone else safe later.

  She finds her voice. “When do you want to go?”

  Jessica studies the feeds on the viewscreens. The sun’s just come over the horizon, and once again, the wind’s fallen calm. “Right now. Let’s do it right now.”

  *

  The last thing Jessica does, after putting on her smart suit and shouldering her plasma rifle, is pull her hood and hair back from her face with one hand, and start peeling off her bandages with the other. “It doesn’t matter,” she says to Signy’s grimace of protest. The skin beneath the stained gauze is red and raw, the cut-down layers clearly visible through the remaining transparent dressings. Along her cheekbones and her forehead, so is the bone. She pulls her hood up. “It doesn’t matter at all.”

  Jessica hugs Straley—”Keep everybody in line, boss”—but shakes hands with Grace. “Captain Morgan, I’m wired for audio, to a point, so keep a channel open. But no cameras. Not inside. We’ll set up something external for you, maybe it’ll work.”

  She looks Ebisawa over, claps him approvingly on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  *

  Jessica keeps almost perfect radio silence for six kilometers, breaking it only with fragments over the hum of the crawler: “Turn here.” “No, left.” “Watch that rock.” Then the crawler’s engine spools down in a low descending tone, and she speaks up. “Captain? We’re here.”

  Grace blinks hard at the sound of her voice. “Reading you.”

  “Turning off to set up now.”

  Silence again, ticks of it. Grace stands in front of the viewscreen, too fidgety to sit. It’s too easy to imagine Jessica and Don creeping into that entryway, trying to maneuver in that dark narrow space to plant bombs and wires and a timed detonation device. “…I hope Jessica’s doing the work.”

  She hadn’t meant to speak, but there it is. Straley eyes her sidelong, shifts position beside her so their shoulders touch. “So do I. Deep breath, Grace.”

  Is she breathing? She’s breathing. “I can’t believe they’re doing this. I can’t believe I said yes to it.”

  “You didn’t say yes. You just didn’t say no,” he points out, drawing a deep breath of his own. “So. Is the old bitch still taking a cryo nap after this?”

  It’s a joke, Grace knows, but it stings. God, how selfish she’d almost been. “And be able to look all of you in the face afterward? I can’t. I feel like I’ll never sleep again.”

  There’s fuzz on the open channel. “Set up,” Jessica says, and she’s breathless. “I—no, Don, I’m fine, it’s just blood in my eye. Captain? Okay. We’re going in. Don, watch your step.”

  Their movements crunch and scrape. Pebbles slide. Ebisawa swears almost inaudibly. “Bad time to be claustrophobic.”

  Jessica winces. “Keep moving or I’ll shove you.”

  “Going. Going—oh God. God, there’s light.”

  Ebisawa sounds awestricken. Grace can hear a change in the crunching noises; they must be in the cavern, pulling themselves upright. She manages a whisper: “Jessica?”

  “We’re here.” Jessica’s equally quiet. “My God, they’re everywhere, these things are everywhere—”

  “Kiana!” Ebisawa’s voice flutes, breaks. “Daddy’s here, baby, Daddy’s h—”

  “Don, no,” Grace whispers, and something hisses. A second, a third. Four. Five. Six. Growling. Claws on stone. Yip. Yip. Yip.

  Howl.

  “Captain.” Jessica’s voice is overshadowed by the thrum of her plasma rifle powering up. “I’m cutting the audio now. External video goes live in five seconds. Detonation in sixty. Take care of the boss for me. Don, let’s move.”

  “Jessica,” Grace begins, but the link is already severed.

  *

  A new window pops up on the viewscreen almost at once, displacing the view of the camp itself, showing the opening of the cave at a little distance. “Fifty-five seconds,” Straley says.

  “Don’t.” Grace curls her hands into fists. “I hope they’re going for the eggs first. The eggs and the girl. I hope Don doesn’t try to kill her himself.”

  “Forty.”

  I hope it’s quick. Quick and painless.

  “Thirty.” The countdown’s in the corner of the frame. Straley’s begun to shake a little. “Twenty-five.”

  Grace wraps her hands around the edge of her seat and shoves her nails in. She pummels the fabric. “Nick, stop. Please. Stop.”

  “Five seconds,” Straley whispers. “Three seconds. One—”

  The ground heaves as rock and snow launch silently into the air. The rumble hits almost immediately, pitching and rolling the floor underneath them, making Grace grab for the back of her seat, making Straley grab for her. Workstation screens topple and shatter; LED housings drop from the ceiling and crack. The view from Aurora goes dark. Outside the cave, the view convulses wildly, grayed by a cloud of dust and vapor; when it finally clears, the image is half black, canted at an acute angle.

  “Turn it off, Nick.” The rubble clogging the cave mouth judders and shifts as it begins to settle, dust and smoke wisping out of gaps between the fallen stones. The screen goes dark and Grace blinks, puts a hand to her face, realizes it’s wet. When had she started crying? Why can’t she stop? “What have I done? What have we done?”

  “Grace. Grace, don
’t.” Straley’s voice is thin and cracking. “We all did what we had to, all right?” He wipes her eyes with his thumbs, with his fingers. He has gun calluses. Of course he does. “We’re safe. We’re safe.”

  Outside, Grace can hear shouts and screams. Someone beats at her outer door. She pulls away from Straley, but then reaches out for his hand, catches his wrist instead. A memorial, she thinks, we’ll put a memorial out there. For everyone. “For now.”

  “We’re safe,” he still insists. “We have twenty-five thousand people coming, remember? Five hundred will be armed UEF staff.” Straley shifts out of her grip, closes her hand in his own. “If anything crawls out of that cave, we’ll be ready for it. We’ll have to be.”

  Grace lets him squeeze her hand. His fingertips are still wet with her tears.

  Scarlett R. Algee Biography

  Scarlett R. Algee’s work has appeared in (among others) Sanitarium Magazine, The Sirens Call, Body Parts Magazine, and the recent anthologies Zen of the Dead and Lupine Lunes; she was also the copy editor of Explorations: First Contact. She lives in the wilds of Tennessee with a beagle and an uncertain number of cats.

  Website | Twitter

  A Time and a Space

  By Nathan Hystad

  Clark Thompson stared out the window in his stuffy office, seeing the looming yellow dwarf hanging in the sky like a reminder of what used to be. He rubbed his temples, hoping it might give him a moment of reprieve from the constant pounding these meetings caused.

  “Ambassador Thompson, these are serious issues. If we don’t do something about it, the crops might be ruined for the foreseeable future,” the man prattled on once again. This was his fourth visit this week, complaining that the team in charge of pesticide distribution was holding out on him, because he didn’t grease their wheels. Bribery and non-compliance were against the colony protocol, but Clark could hardly bring himself to care at that moment.

  His gaze flicked back to the sky, the bright yellow star in the cloudless sky of a new planet called New Skarsgaard. He’d served with the First Contact Federation (FCF) Admiral when Sol was invaded some twenty years ago, and the least he could do, was honor the dead man by naming a planet after him. His sacrifice had allowed them to explore in relative peace.

  “Are you going to do anything about it?” the farmer asked, voice rising to an almost inaudible pitch.

  Clark shifted his focus from the past to his present. He was in charge of this world, this colony, and the people needed a leader. He just wished it wasn’t him.

  “Yes. I’ll be sure to discuss this with Henry this afternoon. I’m sorry it hasn’t been resolved sooner. My apologies.” He stood and extended his hand, letting the man know the meeting was over.

  “Thank you, sir.” He shook and left in a hurry, as if lingering might leave time for Clark to change his mind.

  He opened his desk tablet and took a sip of coffee from the newest crop, admiring the people’s tenacity. Sixteen years on a strange world, and they already had coffee, beer, and chocolate: everything needed to survive the perils of being on a colony planet.

  His screen flashed through messages from all the department heads: one looking to discuss the school curriculum, then something about a clogged sewer drain pipe, and a fence that one of the local herbivores had chewed through, letting the goats out.

  With a flick of his wrist, he slid to an old screen he forgot he’d left open. Images of his wife appeared before him, her red hair glistening in the sun. A sun that was now dying. Earth’s sun. Before he would let himself get sucked into that mindset again, he closed the tab, and a video he’d brought up the night before sat unplayed.

  “Play,” he said aloud, and his old professor’s voice chimed in over some graphics on the class’s smart board.

  “I know it’s all confusing at this point, but by the end of the course, you will have a much better understanding of the wormhole. Research teams have recently started exploring the constructs of a wormhole, and we expect to have working models in a couple of decades. They’re really just energy folding space and time,” his old professor’s voice said through the desk tablet.

  “Can we hypothesize, then, that with enough understanding of the wormhole, we could potentially isolate one from the other?” an eerily familiar voice asked from behind the camera. He’d been so young and ambitious back then, so full of questions.

  “Mr. Thompson, are you asking if time travel can be real?”

  “I suppose. If you can fold space, then perhaps it’s possible to only fold time,” his own voice answered.

  “Yes. I do believe we will find it can be done. But I imagine it will be centuries before we understand it enough to create a viable working practice. Don’t forget, your first…” The professor’s voice trailed off as Clark muted the screen.

  He brought the picture album up again, and stared into his wife’s eyes.

  “Jeanie, hold all my meetings. I’ll be back in the morning,” he said into his tablet.

  Checking the colony maps, he confirmed where the wormhole generator was sitting gathering dust. He was going to solve the problem he’d posed in that class thirty years ago. He was going to isolate time from space.

  Two years later

  New Skarsgaard stretched out below him: a beautiful small planet, teeming with growth and life. He knew he’d be able to see the colony if he zoomed in enough on his viewscreen, but for the time being, he wanted to enjoy it as it had been before they’d come to the world. Resplendent in its untouched surface. No pollution, no wars scorching its surface, just nature at its finest.

  A light alarm broke him from his daydreaming, letting him know the generator was charged and ready for another test. The device was smaller than he’d thought possible years ago, about a quarter the size of his small transport vessel. It sat attached to the space station they left above the planet. Usually a team of two rotated in and out of it, but Clark had sent them all packing while he worked on his experiments, though it had been a battle with FCF Officer O’Sullivan. He’d eventually won out, and had given O’Sullivan his ambassador title while he was indisposed, pissing off all the department heads, but he didn’t care. He was so close to his answer. It would be any day now, he could feel it.

  He keyed in the next parameters, a 0.001 variance to the last test, and in a gut instinct, he went against his constant stabilizer percentage, lowering that by the same amount. He couldn’t explain it, but he knew something was different before he tapped the blue Confirm square on the tablet. The generator whirred and the blue-white glow of the tiny wormhole swirled in space five thousand meters away. It was so beautiful. Every single time he felt in awe of the destructive and unstable folds in space. He often reminded himself that even though it was astonishing, it was also deadly under almost every circumstance.

  Another press on the tablet, and a tiny probe flew toward the dancing maw of the wormhole. He couldn’t see the small sensor out there, but it blipped softly as it neared its destination. Soon the blip ceased to exist as it travelled through the opening and into somewhere else…somewhen else, if he finally had it right. The wormhole stayed stable, and Clark took a deep breath to contain his excitement. After playing with the controls, the blip came back, slowly moving toward him.

  His now trembling hands moved quickly, accelerating the probe and sending the readings the short distance so he could analyze them.

  Images of New Skarsgaard appeared on his screen. He zoomed to where their colony was situated. Nothing but trees and lakes covered the area. Clark stood up and quickly sat back down as his head swam. He’d done it! He’d damn well done it! His fingers ached to set course for the swirling light, but it wasn’t big enough for his ship, or safe to do so. It could become unstable at any moment, but he’d done it. All of the work to climb the ladder, becoming a UEF leader, and then ambassador of a colony, all paled in comparison to what he’d just accomplished.

  They’d all want to understand it, and to duplicate it for their own wants,
but he couldn’t tell them. It wasn’t for them, or for humanity; it was for him. For his wife.

  Her picture smiled at him from his secondary screen, her image forever static over the past two years as he worked tirelessly.

  More data streamed from the probe into his database and he inputted the information into his program, comparing variances with time differences. He’d have to make the wormhole a little bigger for his ship to fit through, and he needed it to fold time just enough. Twenty-two years, specifically.

  *

  “What do you mean, you’re leaving?” O‘Sullivan barked at him from behind Clark’s own desk. Clark looked around the messy office, and for a moment felt a pain at seeing the disarray his replacement had left it in. It was fine. It was no longer his, so he let it go.

  “Just let me get my things out of the desk, and I’ll be long gone. You can have full control of this colony just like all you FCF-types wanted.” Clark normally considered himself a quiet, subdued type, not one to get riled up by confrontation, but this arrogant man brought out the worst in him.

  “You listen here. You were given the charge of leading us, and you were doing a fine job. What is this obsession you have? You spend the last two years up in space tinkering with a damned wormhole, that’s never going to bring you anywhere but dead.” O’Sullivan was almost yelling at that point.

  “Anywhen…” Clark mumbled.

  “Anywhen? What the hell does that mean? You’re a strange man. You think you can just take one of our ships and leave? Along with the WHGEN?” He was referring to the wormhole generator, the one that had been sitting unused for over a decade before Clark chose to find it.

  “You wouldn’t understand, and I don’t expect you to. Just give me my stuff, and I’ll be leaving. I don’t need your consent. Technically I’m still in charge here.” Clark heard his own voice get gruff, and his fingernails were digging into his palms so hard he thought he could feel a drop of blood fall off his left hand.