War World: Discovery

by Discovery v2 lit

  But anyway, we had trouble brewing below decks, and some of the bottom-feeders in my crew weren’t above a little black-market food peddling out of the galley. That made things a lot worse--particularly when my bilge-lovers started seeking sex as their preferred method of payment. Starving kids, desperate moms, pissed husbands: it was an ugly scene. In the two days before we made orbit at Haven, I had to issue weapons from the ship’s locker to break up three fights. I had two crewmen in sickbay for a week, and four of the contract workers never made it to their new promised land. Of course, in the end, that was probably lucky for them.

  So bottom line: I was in a rush to get the contract workers off my ship. And the corporate management team from Kennicott was urging me to waste no time, since we were already two weeks behind schedule. So they were only too happy to accept full responsibility for accelerated deployment.

  JM: Excuse me; ‘accelerated deployment?’ Could you define that term?

  DS: Sure: ‘accelerated deployment’ meant that we were going to drop them into a pre-prospected shimmer-stone lode without a comprehensive advance survey by the corporate team. Site survey and worker settlement were to take place concurrently.

  JM: And what was the problem with that?

  DS: What wasn’t? The advance prospecting data was restricted to confirming the presence of shimmer stones--and even that data was pretty thin. We had absolutely no info on the air pressure at the site, or on access to water sources, or anything else that might be handy for a self-sustaining labor colony. One of Kennicott’s managers commented that his only concern was to ‘first get ‘em dropped, and then get ‘em digging.’ That was pretty much the corporate motto, I think. And given the unrest down in my lower decks, I wasn’t in the mood to argue.

  JM: And when you landed, what did you find?

  DS: Mind you, I only went down once--on the third trip, just to get a break from the ship. Same old bulkheads get dull after a while, y’know? Any change of scenery is a relief. Or so I always thought.

  Well, let me tell you, I couldn’t get back upstairs to Stellar Bourse fast enough. These poor saps had been plopped down in the middle of an old volcanic plain. Nothing but rock as far as you could see. And their mine was also their home: a big sinkhole. You know what I’m talking about: there’s a special name for the geological feature, for those big shafts where the lava comes up--

  JM: (term) It’s a special kind of vertical volcanic tube, often confused with what’s called a ‘skylight.’ Yes, I’m familiar with them. Go on.

  DS: Yeah, it was one of those. Only it was big. I mean really big. Almost 90 meters across. The walls were almost a perfect ninety degree vertical, down to 3 kilometers. Then they started tapering inward down to a depth of five kilometers. Beyond that, it seemed to branch off into side chambers and galleries and crevices: a spelunker’s paradise from the sound of it. But a hell of a place to live: light coming down from way up high, all the ground water dripping down, and when it rained-- Christ. The opening to the tube sat down at the base of a shallow depression in the surrounding plain. Probably that basin was the result of water erosion, from eons of everything running down that big 90 meter-wide drain in the middle of a black expanse of igneous rock. So when it rained, it all drained down there--and suddenly, living on the galleries that spiraled down along the inner side of that thing was like living at arm’s length from the Victoria Falls.

  Actually, that feature--the wide ledges--were the one thing that was helpful for the settlers. See, the walls of the tube were terraced, sort of like a corkscrew in reverse: there was a shelf that came out from the wall, went all the way down to the bottom. It was anywhere between 4 to 10 meters wide, and looked like a road spiraling down, down, down into all that blackness. At the time, the company guys from Kennicott were all patting themselves on the back, saying what a lucky find that was, and what a freak geological formation. There was nothing in any planetary record which could account for that, they said--yet there it was, like a godsend to them, made to order for multi-level extraction. No need for elevators, no need for scaffolding: just follow the ledge round and round, down to the depth you want and then dig straight back into the wall. That ease of access saved them at least three months of start-up work, which made the suits simply ecstatic. I remember because they were boozing it up one day back on board the Bourse, and the Assistant Project Manager, Alvaro Gartian, drank himself silly while chanting the mantra, ‘Too good to be true, too good to be true.’

  We didn’t know--couldn’t even guess--how right he was.

  Hagman felt Dumaskaya’s green, ice-chip eyes attempting to impale his own. “And no one in your company thought to investigate these uncommon rock formations before sending the colonists down?”

  “Actually, Ms. Dumaskaya, they were investigated. They were carefully assessed for erosion, their long-term suitability for sustained load-bearing, possible drainage modification, and a slew of other relevant engineering and architectural and mining considerations.” Hagman thumped down another binder half as wide as the first. “That’s what we were supposed to do. That’s all we knew to do. There was absolutely no reason to conduct any other investigations. In fact, if we weren’t the beneficiaries of hindsight, I wonder if we’d be any more likely than they were to realize what kind of tests they actually did need to run.”

  “Easy to say, now.”

  “Ma’am, all I’m saying is that it was a mining project, so we sent miners. They conducted all the tests you are supposed to conduct to make sure that you’re going to be operating a safe--and yes, profitable--mine.”

  “Which did the colonists absolutely no good.”

  Hagman nodded. “I can’t argue with that; it did them not one whit of good.” He sighed. “Let’s move on.” He reactivated the playback unit.

  Deposition of Alvaro Gartian, formerly Assistant Project Manager of Compensatory Labor Colony Number 4a (chartered under the Colonial Development Act by Kennicott Metals Corporation, LLC). Taken by Chanille Jones, Court Clerk, Mugwumps World, Zeta Doradus system. Recorded January 19-21, 2057AD (sidereal), at the Brakeshoe Chemical and Toxin Rehabilitation Clinic. Relevant excerpts included for entry into the record; transcript of full deposition available in archives. (Some sections are unclear due to subject’s slurring and unclear enunciation.)

  AG: Is this thing running? Listen, before we start--if you can’t sneak me some more of that--Oh, this is part of the record? Okay, yeah; okay.

  So it was my job to conduct the logistical part of the site survey. You know, best place for the ships to land, best places to process the raw stones, best sites to store the transshipment containers. And all the less charming stuff, like: as we expand, where do we get water; where do we dump wastes; how do we reduce our costs by getting self-sufficiency in energy; how do use local biota to supplement off-world rations; you name it. Not a sexy job, but hey: it pays. Well, it paid.

  Anyhow, I took a look at the lay of the land and found out that the surrounding basalt barrens were not as barren as they looked from the air. There was a micro-ecology that was pretty sparse, but it was there. Small critters--like furry tree-frogs with big suckers on their feet--seemed to live off lichens and grasses that grew in some niches. They were the base of the food chain. Certainly there wasn’t the diversity of wildlife that they discovered over on the West Continent, in what came to be called the Shangri-La Valley. Out on the Eastern Continent, it was a pretty simple food chain--and stobors were at the top of it. Aggressive hunters but otherwise, pretty reclusive. But as I mentioned yesterday, there were a lot of deep, narrow ravines and crevasses in the basalt that you only noticed when you got up-close. It was like a sort of open-top rat warren, with pathways cutting this way and that. Whatever was going on in those cracks and crevices--including the life-habits of stobors--we didn’t need, and didn’t want, to know about. Quite frankly we were blind to it: we were all blind to everything except the shimmer stones. Even the most worn-out colonists started coming alive when they saw
that treasure-trove. It was like a shining promise sparkling at us out of all that dark. It meant that the company was going to get rich, and that we were going to get bonuses, and that the workers were going to earn back their freedom and a fair living.

  The only real oddity we detected was in some of the side vents down beneath the 2 kilometer mark. These were different, like they were lined with, or maybe cut from, some kind of soft stone that seemed more like tarry charcoal. Our mineralogists hadn’t seen it before, and would have sent it upstairs to the ship’s little lab, but Bourse had gone on to her next destination. So we had to ping a request off of the satellite, for which we had only a 28 minute window twice a day.

  As I understood the process at the time, that request for a sample analysis would ultimately be forwarded to the really big facility in the system at that time-- the fuel and refit base on the moon Ayesha. They’d eventually make sure that one of the bi-weekly landers going down to Shangri-La would make a quick ballistic hop over to us and pick up our sample before boosting back out. Then the half-staffed, overworked, and underpaid contract labs on Ayesha would take a look at the sample--when they got around to it. But quite frankly, that sample and those weird, half-sealed offside vents just weren’t on our priority list.

  We were finding shimmer stones like shells at the seashore. It was incredible; it was a dream come true. There was even talk about sending out some smaller parties to some of the other vertical vents we’d seen in the surrounding four hundred click radius.

  And then I got food poisoning: some spoiled company chow. Leave it to me to draw the bad MRE. So there I was, puking up everything I’d eaten for the past twenty years, and they divert a lander that was outbound from Shangri-La. I’m on a stretcher, waiting for them to load me on, three shades of green but really sick with the fear that I was going to get shipped out and lose my share, when I heard the first report come in.

  Yeah, I was there: I heard it. A team of advance prospectors had gone down deep into the Rabbit-Hole--’cause that’s what we called it, like in that fairy tale with the Queen and those mushrooms--and two of them had found one of these side vents that had even more of that tarry stuff than the ones back up higher where we were. The vent was almost choked closed with it, they said. So the site manager says, “go in and see what you can see.” So in they went, to see what they could see.

  I heard the screams over the radio. First they sounded distant; must have been coming from the guys that went into the vent itself, I guess. Then the third guy, the one with the transmitter, started getting jittery and teeth-chattery. Didn’t help that everyone in range of the radio on my end started telling him what to do--half of them saying he should get the hell out of there, the other half telling him he had to go back in after his buddies. I think he bugged out: I heard feet running. Then he started screaming--couldn’t make out what he said--and the radio died.

  I didn’t hear anything else. Didn’t really want to, either. They were drawing straws for the rescue party when they loaded me into the lander and we dusted off.

  That was the last I saw of Haven. Or anyone in the colony.

  “So then what of the actions of the Stellar Bourse, leaving orbit at such a time is not malfeasance?” Dumaskaya’s face was white with rage.

  “No, Ms. Dumaskaya, it is not. If every freighter or transport delayed leaving orbit every time any of its former passengers encountered difficulties, I seriously doubt we’d have any interstellar trade at all.”

  “So the death of three men--this is but a trifle, a ‘difficulty’? A minor mishap to be ignored?”

  “No, but it is the kind of problem that people on the ground can handle.”

  “Ah, yes--you mean the way the settlers of Colony 4a were so ready to ‘handle’ their crisis? Borgia moie, how can you say such things and not perish from the shame of it?”

  Hagman felt tired, tried not to feel bored as well. “Ms. Dumaskaya, that viewpoint is only tenable if you selectively decide to ignore the fact that it is also the product of hindsight’s 20/20 vision. When Capt. Seurault took the Bourse out of orbit to assume its overdue place in the re-fueling rota at Ayesha, only three men had been lost in the colony. I ask you to bear in mind that these casualties occurred in an unexplored mine. At an unsurveyed site. On a new and unfamiliar planet. Meanwhile, the rest of the colonists were in safe, fairly comfortable billets, had plenty of supplies, were relatively well-armed, and were confidently taking matters into their own hands. As they should have.” He spoke over Dumaskaya’s attempted outburst. “There were almost two thousand colonists, ma’am. And they did not ask for help.”

  “They did later on.”

  “Yes, when no one was there to hear them. When it finally became obvious that the situation was far more severe than anyone--including themselves--had guessed.”

  Hagman nodded to Funakoshi, who picked up several of the light sheets of paper--’flimsies’--which were the inevitable output of commo shacks, and began to read aloud...

  From radio traffic intercepts archive, Byers/Cat’s Eye archive. Haven incidental transmissions, September 16-17, 2054.

  09/16/2054 Z 1324 GMT (sidereal)

  “Hello, hello? Bourse! Bourse, come in... (15 second delay) Bourse, come in. Emergency. Uh...Code Black emergency. Bourse, this is the Rabbit Hole--uh, Colony 4a. Come in. Please...(20 second delay)...Bourse, please confirm receipt of this transmission by any means possible. Please send help--send all boats for evacuation, or at least shelter. We’ve got a disaster down here. Those tarry deposits were not geological. They are biological. It’s a...a breeding nest for stobors. At least that’s what we’re guessing. The little bastards are all over the place--and their numbers are growing. It started when we sent a three-man team down to explore the lower sections of the Hole. That seems to be where they’re coming from.

  Seems like an immature stage of stobor: they’re only 20 percent the size and mass of the adults, according to the colonial data you gave us. But there are so many of them. And they’re crazy hungry. Flame doesn’t scare them off. Guns kill ‘em just fine--but it doesn’t stop the hundreds of others coming along behind them. Except for the few dozen that stop long enough to eat the ones that we shoot.

  We’re trying to hold them off, but their numbers are growing, and you can hear the screech of them waking up, way down at the bottom of the vent. Like devils scrambling up out of the pit of hell.... Here, listen:., (noise as receiver is moved, then silence, then distant sounds of many high-pitched animal screams / cries)... And there are more of them all the time. I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be able to--shit! Cressy, get the (transmission ends)

  09/17/2054 Z 1945 GMT (sidereal)

  “Bourse, Bourse, come in, damn you. Peters, cover the door. Pedro, look. That one by the file cabinet; it’s still moving, (weapon report, probably shotgun, heard in background)

  Bourse, we have retaken the communication center. Can’t hold them off for long. Taking the radio and the backup batteries and rigging a remote relay to the main transmitter. All senior personnel are dead--we think. Identification of the dead--even counting them--is pretty uncertain. These rabid little bastards don’t leave much of a body behind.

  They are all over the place. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of them. They’re hungry, but it also seems like they’re trying to get to the surface. Like its some kind of upward migration. And they had to come straight through us, so we’re kind of like a snack as they make their way up to the top of the Rabbit Hole. Heh. More like a Rabid Hole.

  These little bastards are insane. They are non-stop ferocious and crazy. Everyone is terrified; there are pockets of survivors in different side tunnels. Some of the company shirts left us behind for dead and bugged out, went up and out the top. They got what they deserved: last radio report from up there indicated that the moment the hatchling stobors got into daylight, all their drive to move upward just became a double-strength desire to feed.

  We’re taking the radio d
own with us, down as deep as we can go. I know that sounds insane, but the stobors are all trying to go up. If we can take the shaft elevator down to the lowest platform, we should be able to bypass and get under the wavefront of the little monsters. There are still some ‘waking up’ down there, but those numbers seem to be tapering off.

  It was like a bell-curve: a few started showing up, then more, then a wave of them that simply rolled over and through us faster than we could hope to kill them or run. Now, it seems like there are fewer stobors coming out--like we’re on the downslope of the bell-curve of their hatching cycle.

  This will be our last communication from this site: we are pulling the plug and heading down as soon as--

  Damn it! The vent, Peters, the ve! (automatic weapons fire, screeching, shotgun reports, two human screams). Pedro, take the radio, NOW! Get out of here, get to the elevator, head deep and--shit! How did they--? (more automatic weapons fire, screeching: transmission ends abruptly, as if transmitter was destroyed or a power failure).

  “And the Stellar Bourse did nothing to help?” Dumaskaya’s voice had the fine-edged tremor of tightly suppressed rage.

  Hagman sighed. “Ms. Dumaskaya, after delaying in a parking orbit to pick up Alvaro Gartian, the Bourse had to boost at maximum thrust to be able to take her place in the refueling rota out at Ayesha. Ayesha was on the other side of Cat’s Eye, at that time. By the time the first radio transmission was being sent from the Rabid Hole, Captain Seurault had his ship well behind the shoulder of gas giant; radio signals could not get to her.”

  “Then how did he know to return to search for survivors?”