Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  He headed to the rock pile, then out of it. I texted “What are you doing?”

  “Going to figure out what’s going on. What are you two going to do? Just sit around and wait till someone finds you?”

  I looked at Laura. She shrugged. I also had nothing to say to that. I mean, he was right that we needed to know exactly what we were up against. Making any kind of plan before knowing that was stupid. On the other hand, I suppose making a plan at all was stupid. After all we were just three kids, and if these were really members of the Chinese Army, they were trained soldiers and were armed, and would have no trouble at all taking us down. They’d had no trouble taking our parents down.

  I had a brief wild hope that maybe dad had escaped somewhere and was hiding ready to rescue us all, but it was just a fantasy. This time of day my dad would have been in the lab taking the vital signs of lab rats or something. The only gun he had didn’t shoot. It was really a computer device, that “recorded” simulated shots.

  Even if we had a gun it wouldn’t make any difference. I had no experience of machine guns but what I’d seen on videos and heard from dad’s stories from his military service.

  Yeah, if you’re facing a guy with a machine gun it’s better to have a pistol than nothing. If you’re a really good shot—I was so so—you can take the guy out before he kills you.

  But if you’re facing more than one guy with a machine gun, you’re going to get killed in the next few seconds. At most you can take a couple out, before the third shoots you.

  I very much doubted the Chinese had sent a force of only one man. Or only three for that matter.

  Must have thought so long that Colton came walking back. He was walking funny. Not like he was hurt, but kind of like he wanted to run but was preventing himself from doing it.

  The floor of the habitat and the labs is basalt, cut in thin slabs and fused in place, everywhere but in the long cavern.

  So Colton wouldn’t make that much noise even if he pelted down the hallway, but he was walking like he wanted to go on tiptoe, and he kept looking over his shoulder.

  Before coming into the centrifuge space, he stood there a long time, looking down the hallway. Then he slipped past the rock fall, and stood there. He was very pale.

  “Are you all right?” I risked a whisper.

  He nodded. Then shook his head. “There are a lot of them. Twelve?” He spoke in the same sort of whisper. “They’re all over the lab and the communication room.” He paused. “They have your father in the com room. They’re trying to get him to read a message to Earth.”

  I felt like my throat was closing. “Dad?” I said, more lip movement than sound.

  I had a wild, Momentary suspicion that Colton was just saying that, because I hadn’t gone with him to scout out our situation. But I knew, even as I thought it, that it wasn’t true. Sure. Colton could be jealous of my going to Earth, and he could be a pain and sulk. But he wouldn’t say something like that just to wind me up.

  Besides, he looked really pale.

  “So?” I said.

  “Dr. McGown. Mr. McGown, I mean,” he said, having apparently remembered that there were after all two doctors McGown. “They must have shot him in his living quarters. He’s dead on the floor, and there’s blood all over.” Pause. “I’ve never seen anyone dead.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder, just a touch, trying to communicate comfort, not knowing what else I could do. The doctors McGown had sent their three children down to Earth to be raised by relatives, but he was always very nice to us, like, you know, he regretted not having his kids with him.

  “Oh, no,” Laura said, and folded Colton into her arms. Which is a funny thing to say, since she was shorter than him too. But she folded him in her arms like he was a little kid and she was the adult.

  I was thinking of my dad in the com room with all those soldiers. If there’s one thing my dad is, it’s stubborn. If they’d shot Mr. McGown they might shoot dad too. Part of me wanted to go right out to the com room and start punching or shooting people. But it really made no sense, did it? I mean, again, what was I going to do? Even if I could get one of their machine guns, I’d never shot one of them. And from the comments dad made when we watched movies, there was more to machine guns than what he called “spray and pray.”

  “We have to do something,” Laura said. And she and Colton both looked at me.

  Look, I guess it was fair. I was the oldest. I had absolutely no experience with resisting invasions, but then neither did they.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  All I could think of was the stuff they kept telling us about how we had to be careful of the air mixture.

  The entire habitat, labs and living quarters, and even the long cavern was all the same pressure. Well, no. Not quite. There were portions of the lab that were these big plastic tents, which were kept at a different oxygen concentration. And other parts where people could only enter after thorough decontamination and wearing dust proof suits. We kids never went into those parts of the habitat, of course. Nor did most of the adults. Only the ones responsible for the stuff there.

  Those tents had separate alarms. But the main habitat had one place and one regulator of air and pressure, and if we tampered with that and found some sort of fuel, we could . . .

  I must have been talking aloud, because Laura looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “And what?” she whispered furiously. “Blow the whole habitat up? Or set it on fire? How will that help?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said. And I was thinking. We could seal the lab. I knew where they kept the plastic that they made the “tents” with for isolated experiments. I could seal it, and increase the oxygen and blow it up. But then . . .

  But then, the com room being part of the lab, that would mean blowing dad up as well, and I really didn’t want to do that.

  “Where are the other people?” I asked Colton. “The other adults?”

  He shook his head. “From the sound, somewhere in the lab.”

  I was chewing my lip again. “If we could get our people out of the lab, we could blow the lab up.”

  Laura opened her mouth as though she were going to protest. She had got paid money this last summer for cleaning the rabbit cages, and she had named the rabbits and really liked them. But she just shook her head. “How can we get them out?” she said.

  “I don’t know, I’m just . . . thinking aloud.”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Or if we could get the bad guys out,” I said. “Or most of them. Somewhere we could seal and pump full of oxygen, then blow up.”

  “Seems . . . a long shot?” she was frowning, as if trying to think.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But we’re not exactly well armed here. If there’s a dozen of the invaders . . .”

  “There could be more,” Colton said. “I didn’t count. It was like twelve, maybe, but only the ones I could see looking around the door of the com room. There might be others guarding the rest of the people.”

  “We don’t have much time,” I said. Even right now my father could be getting killed for talking back or refusing to transmit the message they wanted, or—I strained for sounds, but couldn’t hear anything.

  Laura looked towards the centrifuge, where little Mary was still being spun and looked sound asleep within a centrifuge-adapting child seat. “Yeah, at some point she’ll awake, and you remember the racket she makes if she’s dirty or hungry.”

  Hungry. I hadn’t even thought of that. There was a refectory in the living quarters, since there was neither space nor any point to each family having a kitchen of their own. When you needed a pressure cooker to cook anything, it was easier to have it centralized. It was at the other end of the living quarters, near the labs. My guess was that our going near it would risk detection. But if we waited much longer we were going to need water. In fact, of course, the minute I thought of it, I wanted water. I said, through a dry throat, “that would be awful.”

  “I don’t know,”
Colton said. “We could put her somewhere where she’s crying, then pump that full of oxygen and blow it up, once all the invaders are in there.”

  “No,” Laura said almost too loudly. “You’re not going to blow Mary up.”

  “It might be the smallest sacrifice we can make!” Colton said.

  “It’s not your sacrifice to make,” she said. “Her life is not yours to dispose of.”

  “But—”

  But my mind had gone off on a track of its own. “A recording. Colton is right.”

  Two shocked faces turned towards me.

  “You can’t mean you want to sacrifice Mary, because—”

  I put my finger to my lips, signaling Laura to quiet down. I tiptoed to the entrance and looked out, but the area outside was clear and all the noise still came from far away. If dad—No. I couldn’t think of that, not right now. “No, listen,” I said, coming back to them and whispering, as I tried to assemble my thoughts. “if we take that storage area, where the two lava tunnels flow together, the one that dead-ends, where we have all the shelves with oxygen bottles and stuff on them, and get one of the tents from the lab, the ones they get to isolate experiments, and assemble it at the end of that tunnel. It self-seals, though you can unseal the door to go in. Then we fill it with a lot of oxygen from the tanks used for surface walking or emergency. Then we rig a recording to bring them running, and once they’re inside, we blow it up.”

  Laura looked confused. “I don’t think a recording of Laura crying will bring them running!” she said.

  “No,” I said. “But a recording of gunfire will.” And as she stared blankly at me, “Our shooting practice,” I said. “It records the shoot, so you can analyze your performance on your screen. I can rig it to fast repeat, so that it looks like a person firing again and again. I can loop it. And they’ll come running if they hear gunfire. They’ll have to. They’ll think there’s someone armed here, in the habitat.”

  There was silence for a few seconds and then both of them nodded.

  Laura whispered, “I’m going to add to Mary’s centrifuge time. She rarely wakes when she’s being centrifuged. That should give us a little time.”

  Then she and I and Colton divided tasks.

  The oxygen wasn’t a big deal. A lot of the tanks for surface walks, or in case of depressurization came from that same storage space, all we had to do was open them. And there were already a lot of shelves in the place we were going to use up. They were filled with odds and end the adults hadn’t got around to putting anywhere else: discarded equipment from old experiments, the oxygen tanks for surface walks, all sorts of things, some of which I didn’t know what they were. There were ten rows of shelves, ten feet tall, and each shelf was crowded with assorted junk. This was good because if we set the tent over the shelves we could put my screen at the back, and the invaders wouldn’t be able to see all of the inside of the tent right away. I thought the tent would just about be large enough and tall enough.

  The hard part was getting one of the tents.

  They were kept in the laboratory, see, because they were only used there, when someone’s experiment needed a different mix of oxygen, or a different temperature, or even just to keep biological or chemical contaminants away.

  I knew where they were because I had helped Mom put one up the last one she’d needed for her experiments. There was a supply area right by the entrance to the labs.

  “I can go get it,” Colton offered, but you could tell from his extremely pale face he didn’t want to do. On his last reconnaissance, not only had he gotten scared, but he’d come face to face with death for the first time.

  “No,” I said. “I’m the oldest, and I should go. Besides,” I added, as he looked like he would protest, “I need to go make sure dad is still alive.”

  This last wasn’t precisely true, mostly because I was afraid that dad wasn’t, and that I’d find he was dead. And I didn’t want to know. Certainly not any time soon.

  But we needed the tent. And if I knew about dad, then I’d at least know what I was dealing with.

  I made my way out of the centrifuge room. It seemed weird being outside and fully exposed, under the light. I wanted to unplug the light, as if being in the dark would protect me, instead of the lights going off probably alerting the invaders.

  I walked close to the plant-walls of the living quarters, ready to duck into a curtain-entry way at the slightest sound or movement ahead.

  But there were none. The sounds continued to come from where they’d been coming: from the lab. It was the sound of many voices, and the cadences were not English, even if the speakers were speaking English, which I couldn’t tell from this far off.

  The closer I got to the lab, the more carefully I moved, the more carefully I listened.

  Which is why I heard sounds ahead, and ducked into one of the living quarters, staying very still, almost not breathing, crouched in a corner, where the people who lived there had hung clothes.

  The curtain twitched. A face in a star-helmet peeked in. I swear I almost stopped breathing. But his gaze ran right over me, where I stood, half-enveloped in a lab coat. I heard him walk back towards the lab and held my breath and waited.

  The only explanation I could think of for his having come here is that he’d heard something. This both showed me it was possible to alarm them with sounds and perhaps that I’d been making way too much noise.

  I don’t know how long I waited to stop hearing the footsteps. It felt like forever. Even when I made it out, I was convinced the soldier would be waiting at the entrance to the lab to jump me, so my progress was excruciatingly slow, or felt that way.

  Eventually, though, I saw the entrance to the lab. The door was open. I shifted from one side to the other to look inside. I studied the shadows upon the doorway. I couldn’t find any reason to be suspicious. And I had to go in and get the tent, or all this was in vain.

  Thing is, this up close, I could hear dad’s voice, and he sounded so tired, and also like he was reading from something. I felt both relieved he was obviously alive, and scared. What had they done to make dad sound defeated?

  “The glorious People’s Republic of China—” dad was reciting. I couldn’t imagine his saying those words of his free will or even parroting them without major persuasion.

  The lab looked mostly undisturbed, when I went in, except for some tables pushed out of the way, a table overturned and a track that I was fairly sure was blood on the floor.

  “In demonstration of the failures of capitalism—” dad’s voice droned. The com room is normally soundproof. Mom and dad joked that it had become sound proof after the entire community heard the big argument Mom had with her Mom over not wanting to send me Earthside to be raised.

  But for it to be soundproof, you had to close the door. The door was open. Just as I noticed this, a face peered out, as though to look over the lab. But this time it couldn’t be because he had heard a sound. Not that I didn’t make sounds, but because the glance was perfunctory, like he was just reassuring himself everything was fine out here.

  I noted there were also half a dozen soldiers in a corner of the lab, blocking the opening between two tall sets of shelves, and assumed that’s where the rest of the people were. It wasn’t likely that they’d killed everyone else, and left only dad alive. And anyway, I could hear sobs and whispers form that corner.

  Also, I couldn’t be sure and wasn’t going to go much further in to make sure, but I thought the blood trail, meandering between shelves and tables, led to that corner.

  I waited to make sure that no one was looking out of the com room. Dad’s voice droned on saying the most unlikely things. I assumed they had a gun pointed at his head, and I wasn’t going to try to see him.

  Instead, ten steps inside the lab entrance, I slid left, staying close to shelves and things, and ducked to a set of shelves against the wall where the sealed packages of tents were.

  There were many sizes of these, I knew, but the smallest w
as the size of a family’s living quarters. That should be both small enough to fill with oxygen quickly, and large enough to contain a dozen or so soldiers. Then I thought again, and reached for the next biggest. We’d need to put it over a lot of the shelves, so we could hide the source of noise behind it. If they could see it, they wouldn’t go in. We’d want them to go in, and try to push shelves aside, to get at the people firing guns. It had to be plausible that there were people with guns behind there.

  On the way out, I grabbed one of the laboratory lighters, a kind I’d used before while helping Mom, and which I knew how to wedge on. We’d have to use leaf litter for fuel. There was a receptacle for them—before putting them in the compost pile—in the lab, but there was another in the hallway outside the living quarters. One of the jobs we kids did since we were little was remove fallen leaves from the plant shelves. We kept the oxygen at about 24% because any more than that and things became flammable. We were about to make things flammable.

  When I got back to the storage area, Colton and Laura had got the leaves and set them in a big pile in the center of the shelf upfront. They were trying to move things around to create a series of obstacles.

  We decided from the measurements of the tent that we could put it over six of the shelf systems. So we decided to make it the center ones. That way the two first shelves, up front, would obscure the tent some more, and the invaders would have to run down the space in between the shelves to enter the tent.

  Putting the tent over those things was easier said than done. The tents were clear plastic, with a sort of superfine “structure” also in plastic. The front plastic has two overlapping flaps that are “gummy” so that they seal together, but open under pressure of a hand pushing them, or even someone running at them. Once freed from the packaging and unfolded, the plastic supports snapped free, and the plastic “walls” fell into place.

  Normally you opened the tent in a clear space, and then filled it with whatever you needed.

  “We’re going to have to move all those shelves,” Laura said. “Move them away, set the tent up and then move all the shelves back.”