The Sublime Seven

by Nicki Huntsman Smith

  “Vibes? Seriously?” Jaeda said, injecting a mocking tone.

  The blue eyes narrowed. A hint of distaste flashed across the youthful face.

  Jaeda not only liked this strong-willed young woman, she respected her. And she desired nothing more at the moment than to have that respect returned. She bit her lip and waited.

  “Yes, vibes,” Shroom continued. “And they’re telling me some wicked shite is about to go down. But it’s not just the vibes and the weird body language. You’ve been putting in long hours even though there are no special projects under way.”

  “The SB drill is coming up,” she said, breaking eye contact and studying the antiquated solar system pictures on the walls.

  “Right. I think that’s part of it.”

  Jaeda’s gaze shifted away from the pictures and back to the young woman, taking the smooth, strong hand in her own. “Even if something terrible were about to go down, you know I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “So that’s an affirmative on the wicked shite? One blink for no, two for yes.”

  A small, hysterical chuckle worked its way up from her diaphragm. She blinked twice in rapid succession.

  “Feck,” the young woman said, wide-eyed now. The expression made her look like a twelve-year-old.

  Jaeda’s stomach roiled and knotted.

  “You’re not going to say anything else?”

  “I can’t,” she mouthed.

  “On the wicked-shite scale of one to ten, how does it rate?”

  Jaeda held up all eight fingers and both thumbs.

  ***

  Sleep eluded her that night. Her brain struggled with the logistics of servicing the three hundred people in the Subterranean Biosphere, but her thoughts strayed to the more than seven hundred souls who would remain topside. There had to be a way to ensure their safety, too, when the aliens arrived. She had toyed with several ideas but dismissed them all for their impracticality.

  This wasn’t Earth. To say their options were limited would be an understatement. Mars provided plenty of hidey-holes, none of which were habitable. To live or travel anywhere required a bio-pod, a bio-ATV, a bio-suit, or a combination thereof. Without one or more of these, humans could handle the low gravity, but they couldn’t tolerate the cold, nor breathing ninety-six percent carbon dioxide.

  The location for the Subterranean Biosphere had been well thought-out. The engineers selected a natural cavern two clicks from home base, inflated the specialized pod built on Earth specifically for the space, then outfitted it with ductwork connected to a smaller version of the MOXI unit used at home base. The large MOXI unit – Mars OXygen In situ, a machine which converted carbon dioxide into heated oxygen – generated breathable, warm air for a thousand people within the topside bio-sphere. The smaller unit in the SB would barely be adequate for the three hundred people housed there when the aliens arrived. Even if the additional seven hundred people could fit into the small space below ground, there wouldn’t be enough air.

  Everyone would suffocate in half an hour.

  Of course it made sense to save as many people as possible. Jaeda didn’t resent anyone for making that call. But it wasn’t in her nature to let people go without basic necessities, let alone die a horrible death, if there was any chance she could do something about it.

  She tossed and turned on the narrow cot, her mind scanning on-hand inventory lists as well as the manifest of a supply rocket due to arrive in three days. It would be the last one before ET’s ETA. She had almost committed everything to memory at this point, having dissected it dozens of times since her meeting with Khandar. Its cargo was fairly standard – food, medicine, etc. – as well as a few unusual items Omega pod had requested, which she had grumbled about but allowed.

  It was those items her subconscious invoked while she tried to focus on other issues. As she lay awake in bed, the Meggie requisition list appeared again on the back of her eyelids.

  - Carrot seeds (at least a gross for hydroponics facility)

  - Expanding foam (insulation for rec center...it’s COLD in there!)

  - 10 meters synthetic silk (children’s craft projects)

  Finally, after days of scrutinizing but not really seeing the line item on both the HIVE database as well as in her thoughts, its significance bobbed up to the surface. The expanding foam. It offered a solution, or at least part of one. The rest would be up to the engineers and the officers.

  She leaped out of bed, fumbled with her headset, and sent an urgent missive to the Colonel. Seconds ticked by. Was he asleep? Was he ignoring her? Either option was profoundly aggravating. How could anyone sleep at a time like this? How could he ignore her when she had been the loyal soldier for the past week, doing his bidding despite the heavy cost to her conscience?

  “What the hell is it, Johnson? Do you know what time it is?” The face that appeared ghost-like on the monitor befitted the Kraken nickname; she could imagine those blazing eyes unleashing a firestorm.

  “I’ve thought of a solution. For the others.”

  “We’ve been over this, Captain. You are dangerously close to a write-up.”

  A write-up? Really? Who the feck cared at a time like this?

  “Please, just hear me out,” she managed, swallowing the expletives that formed on her lips.

  “Not on the HIVE, JD. You know better than that.”

  The Colonel’s quarters were suddenly illuminated in the background behind the pillow-spiked hair. “Get your ass over here fast.”

  The screen went black.

  It didn’t get more by-the-books than Khandar. He had staked his entire military career on wise but safe choices and proper chain-of-command. His orders as to how they would address the alien contact came from his superiors on Earth, just as Jaeda’s orders came from him. Getting the man to go off-script would be the most monumental challenge she had ever faced.

  She needed more than just a persuasive argument.

  She conjured the v-board, typed some code and text into the HIVE’s message center, and threw on some clothes before heading to see the Colonel.

  “Sit,” Khandar said a few minutes later, then, “Here,” thrusting a cup of black coffee at her. He wore pajama pants and a thermal shirt, donned for her benefit, thankfully – she had noticed his bare chest on the HIVE screen earlier. She didn’t think she could have this, nor any, conversation if he was half-naked.

  “Now, what is this all about?” He took a sip from his cup. A stranger might assume the Colonel liked his coffee strong and black, but he preferred it spiked with milk and sugar and a sprinkling of cinnamon on top. Nobody had the balls to tell him it was a sissy way to drink coffee.

  The cinnamon smelled wonderful. She took a deep breath and dove into the fight of her life.

  “Do you remember Oxblood Cavern a half-click to the south?” It had been so named for the interior color of its rock formations.

  “Yes, of course. It was unsuitable for the SB location, so it was abandoned ten years ago.”

  “Right. Too small for a bulky biosphere habitat and all the outlying support systems. But there’s enough room for the seven hundred people that the SB can’t accommodate. It would be tight, but they would fit...for a little while.”

  He sighed. The burden of suffering Jaeda’s idiocy seemed too much for him to bear. “Yes, we could wedge them all in there, and they would be dead in four hours when their suits ran out of air.”

  “What if they only needed to wear their suits to get there?”

  “You’re making no sense, JD. Are you sleep deprived?”

  “Yes, but I’m thinking clearly. Hear me out.”

  He waved a tired hand in a circular motion, then took another sip of coffee.

  “What if we sealed up the cave? We have fifty liters of expanding foam coming on the next supply ship and a surplus of beryllium panels from that requisition...uh...misunderstanding three years ago.” The misunderstanding had been a screw-up on the part of a superior officer who had inserted an
extra zero in front of a decimal. She had caught it, questioned it, then been accused of insubordination. She had never gone to the Colonel about it, but nothing escaped his notice. Along with the foam, those panels, sitting unused in a remote supply pod close to Oxblood, might well be their salvation.

  “And then what, JD? Sealing it off might save people from the worst of the cold, but they’re still going to run out of air.”

  “Not if we rig up some ductwork and reroute home base’s MOXI unit to the cavern.”

  A salt-and-pepper eyebrow arched. She could see he was intrigued by her unorthodox plan. But just as she was beginning to get her hopes up, the eyebrow’s mood changed, falling back to its normal position, then meeting with the second eyebrow in a skeptical frown.

  “That’s a ridiculous idea. It will never work for three reasons.”

  “What reasons?”

  “First, we don’t have enough poly-tubing to run ductwork from the home base MOXI unit to the cavern. Second, even if we did, the aliens would see it, identify its purpose, and follow it from the suspiciously people-free base to the cavern, probably stepping on it with their giant alien feet in the process and cutting off the oxygen. And third, even if we had enough tubing and were able to hide it somehow, everyone would know what we were doing. Everyone – the three hundred people we can protect and the seven hundred people we can’t – would know what was going on. If that sensitive information got out there, it would spark mass chaos and a breakdown in the polite society we’ve taken such pains to achieve here.”

  The Colonel’s expression softened. He squeezed her shoulder with a rare display of affection. “JD, it was a good try. I’m proud of you for thinking of it.”

  Her stomach constricted in the now-familiar knots of anxiety. She had anticipated his reaction and was ready for it.

  She shrugged his hand from her shoulder, took a deep breath, and said, “There’s poly-tubing in the supply pods – I’ve checked. If we scavenged a bit more from around here, we could just get it done. Some areas of home base would have to be sealed off and those residents moved to other pods temporarily. It would be cramped for a few weeks while the project was underway, but we could do it. Second, we use the ATV excavator to dig a trench, lay the tubing, cover it up, and scatter the excess soil somewhere inconspicuous.”

  Khandar snickered, started to respond, but she cut him off.

  “Third, everyone will already know what’s going on because I plan on telling them.”

  The eyebrows shifted from skeptical to thunderous.

  “What did you just say, Captain? I think I must have misheard you, because it sounded like you said you intend to disobey a direct order. You have exactly five seconds to rephrase that final statement or be thrown in the brig.”

  “You can do that, but it won’t keep me quiet. I programmed a communique to be sent to all one thousand and seventeen colonists and military personnel, timed to be delivered...” she glanced down at her antique watch, “Now.” She lifted her gaze back up to the Colonel’s face as his HIVE unit blared with incoming alerts.

  “What does the message say?” Khandar said through clenched teeth.

  Jaeda gave his shoulder an ironic version of the squeeze he had given hers moments earlier. “I kept it short. I instructed people to stand by for an announcement from Colonel Khandar regarding imminent alien contact. I said that he will provide instructions for how we’re going to get everyone safely through it. I also programmed a future communique to be sent in the event I had been...detained...and wasn’t able to delete its directive.”

  “And what does that one say, Captain?” He leaned back in his chair, wearing a carefully neutral expression now.

  Jaeda wanted to think she saw a hint of grudging respect in those fierce eyes, but she might have been mistaken. It might have been hatred.

  She gave him a shaky smile. “It explains that the officers intend to turn their backs on seven hundred people while they and their handpicked favorites hide out in the SB to await the aliens’ arrival. Again, short, but to the point. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to piss off that many people who have just been told they’re about to die.”

  Thirty heartbeats passed during which she didn’t know if he was going to punch her in the face or summon the MPs.

  “There’s something you haven’t factored in, JD,” he said, his voice oddly resigned.

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “These aliens may possess the ability to detect human life through rock. If they’re capable of interstellar space travel, that wouldn’t be much of a stretch.”

  “Actually, I did think of that. All that means is the playing field will be level. The SB folks won’t have an advantage over the Oxblood people.”

  “That’s what this is about? Fairness? No one dies or everyone dies?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s all this has ever been about. I’m responsible for every person in this colony, not just three hundred of them. And so are you. Now, what are you going to say in your speech?”

  ***

  One of Khandar’s most useful talents had been on full display during the improvised speech that came moments later. His hastily composed words managed, miraculously, to explain the aliens’ impending arrival without inciting hysteria. Nobody lost their shite. Nobody panicked about aliens coming to Mars and quite possibly, in some dreadful alien manner, putting an end to their puny lives. The Colonel had a way of acknowledging problems so as to diminish their negative impact, but not their truth.

  Whether it was a gift or a learned skill, she would never know.

  Now, weeks later, everyone worked long days. Even the children in Omega pod helped out by transporting the red Martian soil from the excavated trench where the tubing would lay to a nearby low area. People were cranky and exhausted, but they weren’t terrified or despondent. Fourteen days out from the Arrival, and there was still much work to be done.

  “JD, wait up.” Corporal “Shroom” Eckland’s voice called from the end of the corridor.

  Jaeda had just finished a long shift at Oxblood. Workers had been going over every inch of the interior rock surface to make sure all the holes had been plugged with the beryllium panels and expanding foam. All she wanted to do now was shower and pass out on her bunk. Instead, she turned to face the stocky bull of a woman charging toward her.

  “Inside,” Shroom said, abandoning all pretense of proper military protocol and stepping into her superior officer’s quarters without an invitation.

  Jaeda followed, pressing the button to close the door. It seemed this was to be a private conversation.

  “Have you heard the voices?” she demanded.

  Shroom’s ancestry was Nordic. Jaeda had done a thorough investigation of her personnel file after their talk weeks ago. The blood that ran through the young woman’s veins was that of the Viking hordes that had invaded Britain in the first century. Jaeda could picture this twenty-five-year-old wearing a horned helmet and sporting a battle axe. The Zulu spear of her own warrior ancestors would have given that axe a run for its money.

  “What voices? The thought-noise?”

  “No, but it’s coming through the HIVE communication center just like the thought-noise.”

  Something tugged at the inside of Jaeda’s brain. She had been so busy and so tired lately that she had relegated the weird incident to the something-to-deal-with-later category. Now she brought it fully into the realm of conscious analysis. “The whispers.”

  The blond head nodded. “So you hear them, too.”

  “It’s probably just a new twist on the thought-noise. Why are you so worked up about it?”

  “Because it’s different.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “We’ll get to that. I figured you had heard it too.”

  “We’ve been over this, Shroom. I’m not telepathic.”

  “You sure as hell are, and yours comes naturally. It wasn’t programmed into your DNA. Let’s establish this as fac
t so we can move forward.”

  Perhaps the young woman was right. Since the techies said it was impossible to hear what she heard, maybe she truly did sense it on some psychic level. “Fine.”

  “I’ve been taking notes, JD.”

  “Of the whispers?”

  “Yes. At first it sounded like gibberish, but the more I tuned into it, the more it sounded like an actual language.”

  “Then it’s just us, Shroom. More thought-noise coming from all these people in the biosphere, like I said.”

  “Really? Do you know anyone here on Mars who thinks in Sanskrit?”

  “How do you know anything about Sanskrit? Isn’t that an old Earth language?”

  “Correct. The oldest. I know about it because I take excellent notes. I entered the gibberish into the HIVE’s linguistics app. Guess what? It came back as Sanskrit. Not an exact match, of course. Language is fluid. But enough markers showed up that I was able to conclude an origin in Sanskrit. Kind of like Latin is the origin of English. Fecking Sanskrit. You have to ask yourself, who would know a dead Earth language these days?”

  “Linguists? Historians? Ghosts?”

  “Ghosts, exactly. But not the type you’re thinking of. I already ruled out linguists and historians. Nobody on Mars has either of those backgrounds.”

  “There are different types of ghosts?”

  “Yes. Traditional ghosts are the souls of the deceased who return from death to scare people and cause trouble. That’s all nonsense, of course.”

  “We agree on that.”

  “I think these whispers are coming from living ghosts. Ghosts from our past. Our collective past, as in humanity.”

  “You lost me.” Jaeda struggled to keep her eyelids from closing. She glanced at her comfy bed with the wrinkled sheets and the soft blanket.

  “JD, pay attention. This is where it gets interesting.”

  “I’m listening. Just make it fast. I’m coming off a twelve-hour shift.”

  “There are two relevant questions. Number one: how are these whispers spoken in an ancient language not heard in more than two thousand years?”