Empire of Dust

by Jacey Bedford

  The buddysuit helped. It automatically monitored his vital signs and gave him whatever he needed. Right now, that was gentle warmth, soothing massage, and light analgesia. He stopped pacing and picked up a cup of chembal, tasting it cautiously. The warm, viscous liquid hit the back of his throat and made him want to hurl, but he needed the balanced intake it provided. Whether to sip slowly and prolong the experience or whether to down it in one was hotly debated. He downed it in one and kept on swallowing until he was sure it was going to stay down.

  He shuddered. Despite the drugs fizzing around in his bloodstream, he still didn’t feel warm. Psycho-induced, he thought. Nine months in a freezer was bound to play games with anyone’s brain. He checked the readings on his buddysuit again. His temperature was normal. He flicked the controller and felt the pulsing tingle of the skin massager start up again. That was better.

  “Commander Benjamin, the landing vehicle is ready now.” An ensign rapped on the open hatch and waited outside. “Launch in forty-three minutes, sir.”

  “Is Yan Gwenn out of cryo?”

  Ben gestured to invite the young officer into the small space, noting that the boy was showing every sign of recent revival himself. The ark didn’t need most of her crew to be awake for the whole journey. The long haul fell to two pilots. Even the captain slept the journey away unless there was an emergency.

  “Yes, sir, he’s already checking out the flight systems on the LV.”

  Yan would be in charge of all transport on Olyanda, but his first job was to pilot the primary landing vehicle down to the surface, with Ben as Navigator and copilot.

  “And the others?”

  “Your medical team is boarding now.”

  “Good.” Ben nodded. That would be Anna, Ronan, and four med-techs.

  He picked up his flight bag and followed the ensign to the docking bay.

  The landing vehicle crouched in the center of a hangar the size of two football fields, a huge saucer shape, domed on the upper and lower surfaces. A single-use vehicle, unmarked and inscrutable, it held the capability of becoming his technical team’s headquarters, but from the outside, none of its potential showed. Even its sensor arrays and propulsion units were masked by the seamless casing.

  Ben hit the comm-link on his handpad. “Yan?”

  *Here.* Yan, a short-range Telepath, was inside his head immediately, and the LV’s hatch dropped to give Ben access to the familiar interior. He walked through the hold, past the three hundred cryo pods; strange, semitransparent cocoons carrying his sleeping psi-tech team. Cara was in one of them, but in this state they all looked the same. His boot soles clattered on the grating beneath his feet and clunked on the rungs of the ladder to the flight deck. Yan was already sitting at the pilot’s console.

  “All systems checked, Boss. Launch in thirty-two minutes.”

  “I hope you didn’t wake the sleepers in the hold.” Ronan was already strapping into a passenger couch, his hair wet and slick, his face pale.

  “No, that’s your job.”

  “Hi, Ben.” Anna clunked up the ladder. “Let me check your vital signs.”

  Anna and a small medical team were the only ones besides himself and Yan to be revived on board the ark. The rest of the three-hundred-strong psi-tech team would be revived planetside. Body pods and cryo revival units were stored side by side in the LV’s hold, along with essential supplies for the first landing.

  Ben offered her his wrist, and she bent her head to read the display on the cuff of his buddysuit. Her silver-gray hair caught the light from the overhead.

  “Still a bit sluggish. Here—this is a bit more powerful than your suit will deliver.” She slapped a blast pack to the side of his neck. He felt a cold shock as the mild stimulant hit his bloodstream. Almost immediately his body began to respond.

  “Thanks. Is everyone all right?”

  “All cryo pods are functioning at one hundred percent. No problems so far.”

  It wasn’t unknown to lose even seasoned crew members in cryo. Every now and then someone had an unpredictable reaction to the stasis drugs and didn’t pull through. It was one of the chances they all took each time they made a long journey through space.

  Ben took his place on the couch at the navigation array and punched in the coordinates. This was what he was good at. This is why he ranked among the elite, despite his lack of active telepathy.

  The medical crew harnessed themselves into the passenger stations, and Yan checked with Maternal’s flight controller for clearance. Ben felt a familiar bump of adrenaline as Yan released the docking clamps. The forward monitor showed the bay doors open and the vastness of space beckoning them on. A relay from the ark’s monitors showed the LV sliding out of her parent vessel, sleek as a wet fish. He settled back to enjoy the journey. Once they landed on the planet, the medical crew would begin to revive the psi-techs and the real hard work would begin.

  “Ten minutes to touchdown,” Yan said.

  Ben made a quick nav check and nodded. “Right on target. Take her in easy and put her down on the south side of the river.”

  Yan Gwenn was completely at ease in the pilot’s chair. He brought them in, square on, and dropped the LV into the designated spot as if he was landing an airbus on Earth. It was the same location where the original planetary survey team had landed three hundred and six years earlier, but the landing pad was as green as though it had never suffered an alien invasion.

  The LV shuddered as its landing gear took the weight. “Down and safe,” Yan announced. “Securing anchors and clamps.”

  For now the LV would sit on short stilts, but once the Psi-Mechs were out of cryo, they would dig it in, so that everything below the ship’s copious equator would become, in effect, a basement. The redundant flight deck would be secured until the tech teams were ready to leave. There was just enough power in the LV’s drive to lift off, fly to the nearest ocean, and ditch. At the end of the planetary year the colonists would be left, at their own request, with a pre-industrial civilization.

  Ben thought their choice of level of technology was harsh. A clean, self-sustaining power plant could provide enough output to keep the settlers warm through the winters and give them light through the night. There was plenty of sustainable power available from the sun and the tides even if they didn’t want a fusion plant. Where was the harm in light and heat?

  “Harness release,” Yan warned the passengers, and the snug straps and fittings that had anchored them during the flight snapped open and slid back.

  Ben and Yan locked down the LV’s systems while Anna and the med-techs readied the cryo resuscitation chambers in the tiny area next to the main cargo bay. Once the construction teams were thawed out, they’d get a medical center built on the site and have more space to revive the ten thousand settlers still in storage up in the Maternal’s cavernous hold.

  • • •

  Coming out of cryo was like trying to crawl out of a tar pit. Cara didn’t want to leave the no-place where she’d been to struggle up through the sticky blackness. Her head was buzzing with an annoying dream that was fading fast.

  “Cara! Cara! Wake up! Cara! What’s your name? Come on; make an effort! What’s your name?”

  She half recognized the voice, but finding a name and face to fit it was too much of an effort.

  “Cara Carlinni, SP472.”

  “Carlinni? Close. Try again.” She heard a man’s voice as if through water.

  “Benjamin. Serena Cara Benjamin.” It was Ben’s voice, cutting in, “She’s still dreaming. Come on, Cara, give us your real name.”

  “Serena Cara Benjamin.” It sounded more like Seena Caa Bemjin. She felt drunk.

  “Good girl. Wake up now. Okay. Thanks, Ronan, I’ll see to her. She’s coming round. I don’t think she’ll need another shot.”

  Ronan. She tried hard to remember. Ronan—oh, yes—young doctor with gorgeous eyes. Anna’s second. But that wasn’t Ronan’s voice. The muttering voices moved on, and Cara felt her body
manhandled into a sitting position as though it didn’t belong to her. She was so cold. She began to shiver.

  “Ari?”

  “Ben. It’s Ben. Who’s Harry?”

  “My pet rat. He bit me so I ran away.” She thought again. Where had that come from? “Sorry. Talking rubbish. Mouth and brain disconnected.” She tried to focus, but her head felt like it was lined with lead.

  “Come on, Mrs. Bemjin.”

  She felt herself physically lifted from the gurney and manhandled upright into a fresher cubicle. Her fingers and toes felt swollen to twice their normal size. They were the sort of numb that usually precedes pins and needles. Sharp jets of steaming water stabbed her back and shoulders, made tender by nine months of inactivity. She gasped and then began to enjoy the sensation. The fresher washed the coldness out of her bones and the stasis gel from her skin. She became aware that Ben was holding her upright, and it brought back the time when he’d nursed her through the concussion. She mustn’t get to rely on him. She staggered slightly as she took her own weight.

  “Come on.” He backed off and threw a towel at her. “There’s a robe on the rack.” She caught the towel and held it away from the jets of water.

  “Your buddysuit’s wet all down the front,” she said. “Sorry. Good thing it’s waterproof. I tend not to come around too well after cryo. I should have warned you. Thanks for being there. It seems to be your specialty.”

  “Let’s get you some real clothes and a Chembal ration, then we can pick up your kit. It should be out of cargo by now. I need you to link for me. Set your handpad for a twenty-six-hour day. It should feel almost like Earth standard time after Chenon.”

  “I should have known you only needed me up and about so I could start work.”

  “Welcome to Olyanda.” His mouth twitched up at the corners, and his eyes crinkled in a genuine smile.

  Cara began to take notice of her surroundings. She could hear thumps and bangs in the cargo hold of the landing vehicle; someone else must be awake and working.

  While Ben waited outside the door, she dried herself and pulled on her own buddysuit, full of the complex circuitry that monitored her well-being as well as fed information in from numerous sources. Her suit was strong, with built-in body armor, but weighed next to nothing and moved with her like a second skin. She checked her vital signs on the cuff display and found them remarkably stable given that she’d just been frozen for nine months. The suit’s heater circuits kicked in. It gave her a mild shot of analgesic, and she began to relax.

  Cara and Ben emerged from the dark womb of the LV, reborn into frost-sparkled sunlight shining down from a single yellow-gold sun. The air, so cold it scorched Cara’s lungs with every breath, carried a peaty, lemony smell that she could taste at the back of her throat.

  It was almost too much to take in through one pair of eyes. Sky, slightly more lilac than azure. Two moons, both faintly visible in daylight; one tiny and distant, the other irregularly shaped like a lump of putty, badly molded. They’d settled in a wide valley. A fat, snake-like silver river meandered through, but there was nothing gentle about the startling rocky outcrops along the valley sides crowned by needle-like pinnacles, jagged teeth of rock jutting skyward. They might be called hoodoos if they’d been on Earth, but Olyanda was nothing like Earth.

  Why was it always a temptation to measure every new planet against the one she was born on? Was she such an Earth girl at heart? Perhaps. She wondered if Ben compared every new planet to Chenon. Was that just the way humans reacted to new environments? Compare and contrast with something familiar; assess the immediate area for dangers; catalog potential assets.

  All of that, yes. That was her job, but this was more than a job. It was a privilege. She blinked away tears and swallowed a lump in her throat. Olyanda was breathtakingly beautiful.

  She hesitated on the ramp of the saucer-shaped landing vehicle and stared out beyond the localized power-burn to an untouched world. “Oh, wow!”

  “Just ‘wow’?” Ben said. “That’s not very articulate for someone of your fine sensibilities, Mrs. Bemjin.”

  She made a face at his teasing, and cleared her throat. “Okay, not quote of the century, but just look at that.”

  Clumps of something closely akin to trees jostled on the edge of the river; their thick green trunks and dense purple-green, lollipop-shaped canopies made them look more like giant broccoli than any native Earth tree. Low down, the trunks split into tendrils that thrust into the earth and snaked into the water as if drinking. The valley widened to a rolling plain stretching out to infinity, covered with a sea of bleached-blond vegetation, hip-high. In the distance creatures moved slowly through the growth, but with nothing recognizable against which to measure scale, they could have been as small as antelope or as big as a mammoth.

  Cara ran down the ramp ahead of Ben, her boot soles crushing the flattened vegetation still further and leaving prints in the dark soil below. Footprints in the soil; that was something you never got on Mirrimar-14.

  Beyond the river, maybe thirty or forty klicks away, jagged peaks rose, sparkling snow-capped needles ascending in upthrust alien shapes.

  She knelt and examined the soil on the edge of the burn. A shower of semitransparent, insect-like creatures scuttled away, leaving little puffs of dust in their wake. Wisely, she didn’t reach out for them. Even the smallest of creatures could be deadly, intentionally or unintentionally.

  “This is the bit I always look forward to.” She breathed deeply. “That first moment on a new world, that first breath of planetside air.” She stood up. “Can we take a look around?”

  “Usual warnings apply,” Ben said.

  “How’s the solar flare activity?”

  “Quiet today. No need for sunblock.”

  It didn’t matter how many times Cara saw the preparatory holos; the scale of a new planet made her realize how small a human being was in the grand scheme of things. Maybe here she could put Ari into perspective.

  In the waving vegetation, something slithered away—no, not slithered, more, twisted or rolled. She looked closely, but it was gone. That was something for the exobiologists to investigate.

  “It doesn’t look as Earth-like as those promotional holos made it appear.” She smiled. “But I’ve seen worse.”

  “Smell that?” Ben asked. “Within a few hours that scent will be so firmly fixed in our nostrils that we’ll learn to ignore it.”

  Cara saw movement in her peripheral vision and whirled round. “Whoa! What’s that?”

  A small blue-green creature cleaved through the waving vegetation, whizzed toward them through the air at about knee height, stopped dead, hesitated for a moment or two, and then whizzed back the way it had come, without turning round. It was hard to tell which was the front and which was the back.

  “Trikalla?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  She accessed the memories left by the infodump. “Totally harmless. Live on traces of copper in the soil, hence the verdigris coloring. Weigh next to nothing, float on helium sacs, and propel themselves by farting.”

  Ben laughed. “Not quite farting, though near enough. Blowing jets of pressurized exhaust through their outlet vents.”

  “Can’t this planet come up with fluffy bunnies?”

  “It doesn’t look like a fluffy bunny sort of place to me, and even if it did have them, they’d only eat all the settlers’ crops.”

  “Cynic.” She looked at him sharply, but his eyes were focused on distant horizons.

  • • •

  Four hours later Cara made her way to the hastily rigged kitchen shelter where she joined the lineup for caff, changed her mind at the last minute, and had a peppermint tea. She shivered as she took a cup from Ada Levenson. Smart idea to make sure that someone from the catering staff was in the first batch of psi-techs to be revived.

  “You’re not one hundred percent yet, are you?” Ben came up behind her.

  She shrugged. “I’m always envious of
anyone who can hit the ground running after cryo. I inevitably get a hangover, but I’ll be all right. I can keep up. What are you doing next?”

  “Just checking the perimeter. How easy is that?”

  Easy, but not always safe on a new planet. Ben would be setting the perimeter beacons on full alert and with a weapon to hand. In this case, the weapons they could legitimately carry, according to the planetary charter, consisted of smart-dart guns containing a fast-acting anesthetic, but the settlers were still in cryo and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Ben had temporarily issued powerful jet pistols to crew members moving outside the perimeter.

  “Have you got a Dee’ell with you?” Cara asked.

  “Youen Biggs.”

  Youen was one of the best field exobiologists they had, a Dee’ell, short for Dolittle, named for some character in a book who had talked to animals. They were the oddballs of the psi-tech crew, but essential on a new planet.

  “You need someone to watch your back?”

  “Checking up on me?” Ben raised one eyebrow.

  “Just making sure.” She smiled. “We wouldn’t want to lose you too early. There’d be no one to blame when it all went wrong.”

  She wondered if she’d said the wrong thing, but he grinned.

  “Thanks for that vote of confidence.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You mean you want to come for a look around?”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Well, Youen’s a great Dee’ell, but he won’t be focused on anything other than livestock.” She held out her hands. “Look, the shakes have subsided. I’m good with a dart gun, better still with a DR-20, it’s got more heft to it. And, besides, you might need your telepath.”

  He nodded. “Get yourself a weapon. I’ve got a groundcar waiting.”

  She grinned. “Yes, Boss!”

  • • •

  Though Cara kept vigilant watch from her station atop the hood of their groundcar while Ben fixed perimeter beacons, the afternoon offered nothing more dangerous than a flotilla of trikallas emerging from the hoodoo-like rock formations and taking an unusual interest in their activity. Youen Biggs was enraptured and insisted on extra time to observe them, eventually deciding that what was attracting them was the metallic content of the beacons themselves.