Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  Keeler’s party was traversing a part of the roadway that ran along a line of soft, rounded cliff faces beside a gently flowing river. The fields had gradually become less and less upkept, finally giving way to fallow lands and forest before rising into the hills through which they now traveled.

  As light as they were from the flimsy gravitational pull of Eden, most of the journey had felt like a glide, as though their feet barely touched the ground. Still, hours and hours of hiking had weighed on them eventually. The sun was going into eclipse. The effect was to fill the landscape with a cool, diffuse orange light. Shadows grew deeper. It was time to rest. Keeler was at the head of the party, consulting with Marine Lieutenant Honeywell as they surveyed a clearing. “What do you think?”

  Honeywell surveyed it studiously. “Defensible… the trees are far enough apart to shelter us without providing cover for…”

  “Little malnourished boys with razor-tipped sling-shots.” Keeler muttered.

  “What’s that, Captain?”

  “Nothing. You were saying.”

  “It’s a good, defensive position… and we’ll have access to the river.”

  “What about other... facilities?”

  “Captain?”

  “I think we should establish an area where the crew can tend to their bodily functions. I think it would be best if we all evacuated our bowels in the same locality, that way, people won’t have to watch where they step so much.”

  “I have one of the technicians digging a large hole between the camp and the stream.”

  “A large hole,” Keeler repeated slowly.

  “It’s not the Wall of God Hotel in Corvallis, Captain.”

  “Apparently not. Alkema!”

  Alkema had been standing behind him through the entire exchange. “Right here, Captain.”

  “Set-up a hammock for me. Good lad.” He crossed over to check with Medical Technician Skinner.

  “How is Specialist Dallas?”

  “Unconscious, but stable,” answered the doctor. “The bleeding has been staunched, her blood pressure is low, but deep inside her breast, her heart is keeping a beat as steady as a Cantonian metronome.” He rose. “I will need to construct a healing tent.”

  Keeler blinked at him. “Okeedokee,” he said finally. “Take two technicians and call me after the eclipse.”

  He excused himself from the company of the doctor and the Marines and strolled through the small clearing. Two of his crew were gathering wood to build a fire. Others cleared brush and checked through the small store of supplies. He pulled a nutrition bar from his pack and munched it, watching his people work.

  Nearly half the sun had disappeared into shadow. The land was dimmed, as though in a prolonged twilight. His eyes were poorly adjusted, but he could see the two Marine Specialists standing guard and saw the rest of the party arrayed nearby, lying on their packs for the most part, no one moving. Keeler had never been camping in the wilderness, although it was a popular recreational activity on his planet. He hoped he would be comfortable. He closed his eyes and thought, as well and goodly tired as I am, I am certain I shall be able to sleep regardless of the quality of the accommodations.

  He felt a shadow falling over him and half opened one eye to see Alkema returning. “Your hammock is ready, Captain.”

  Keeler nodded. “Well done. Get some rest yourself.”

  He found his hammock, laid down in it, and closed his eyes. Soon, he fell into his usual meditation ritual of feeling his weight settle into the bedding. However, the feeble gravity of Eden lent him only the weight of a child, and this was not settling in the manner to which he was accustomed. He tried to focus instead upon the slight sway of his hammock in the breeze. After a few minutes of this, and finding himself no closer to unconsciousness than when he started, he gave up, sighed heavily, and rose to a seated position. The rest of his team were still assembling camp. They went about their tasks in a way that looked leisurely, but Keeler suspected this was more out of thoroughness than laziness. He lay back in his hammock and stared up once again into the branches of the trees between which it was slung. He found himself staring at small white spots in the branches and leaves above him. He squinted at them and leaned up to get a better look. They appeared to be a fruit of some kind. Light colored, perhaps white, smaller than apples or apricots. Keeler reached up to grasp one of them. It proved surprisingly tough to remove from the branch and he guessed they were a long way from ripe. Still, he had never seen anything quite like them before. It felt soft and warm in has hand. Finally, it broke loose from the tree and he held it up to examine it.

  When he opened his hand, he was shocked to see a single eyeball staring back at him.

  “Yow!” he called out.

  In the space of a second, Marine Specialist Everything and young David Alkema were at his side. “Are you all right Captain?”

  “Marine, give me your light.” The Marine passed him an illuminator. Keeler shined it into the branches.

  From the branches hung scores, perhaps hundreds, of eyeballs. They looked like they were glaring at him.

  “What is it?”

  “A tree with eyeballs, what do you think it is?” the Captain answered. He moved the light toward one of the eye-fruits. Its pupil contracted. He moved the light away and the pupil dilated. He moved the light toward one of the eye-fruits. Its pupil contracted. He moved the light away and the pupil dilated.

  “This is fragging weird,” said Alkema, completely out of character.

  “Agreed.” Keeler turned the eye-fruit over in his hand. “Someone get me a specimen bag.”

  “Are the rest of the trees like this?” Alkema asked.

  Everything shined his light around the clearing. There were a few small other trees mixed among the woods with small white spots in the branches, not many, but a few. Keeler put his hands on his hips and gave a weak smile. “Why didn’t I ever think of this for all those Halloween parties at the compound? Too late now, I guess.”

  “Do you still want to lie in your hammock, Captain?”

  “Purgatory, neg. Set up a tent for me… away from the trees.”

  “You got it, Captain,” Alkema said, a little wearily.

  Keeler clapped his young aide on the shoulder. “You are too good to me. I think I’ll go and stretch out above the riverbank until the tent is ready.”

  Honeywell intervened. “Captain, I would recommend you not leave camp without an escort. Buttercup!”

  Buttercup? Keeler thought.

  One of the Marine Guards came up to them. Keeler and Alkema’s jaws dropped. Marine Buttercup was a giant, over two and a half meters in height, and his left shoulder was separated from his right by a stretch of hard muscle long enough to hold a road race on.

  “By the Unknowable,” Keeler gasped.

  “Buttercup was a starting linebacker for the Armpit Avengers before being selected for the Odyssey Project,” Honeywell explained.

  Keeler exclaimed. “He looks like he should have smaller Marines orbiting around him!”

  Buttercup said nothing, but scratched his cheek with a hand the size of a dinner plate.

  “Buttercup, escort the Captain…”

  “Neg, I will be all right,” Keeler insisted. “Stay close and guard the camp.”

  “Captain?” Everything and Alkema called out, but he was already walking away from them, head down.

  What kind of world was this? Since we’ve landed, we’ve been captured by bird-men, lion-men, bull-men, dragon-men, four-armed musclemen. We have been marched down a golden road, attacked by a starving puppy of a boy with a slingshot and as I lay me down to sleep, the trees have eyes.

  This was not natural. It could not possible have been. Someone had to have built this planet, designed its inhabitants and from this flawed design had sprung all its insanity. God did not make faulty worlds, or creatures. That took people.

  He found a smooth warm spot overlooking the stream. The water was black, with foamy white rivulets wher
e it ran against and around the large chunky rocks that lined its shores. It was almost a kilometer wide, and surely must have been the river they had seen from orbit. From here, in the failing light, it almost looked like one of the grayscale holo-fictions-noir that were periodically fashionable on his homeworld.

  He was lost in such thoughts when he felt the knife-blade against the back of his neck. “I was wondering when you’d show up,” he said.

  Eden – Citadel Altama

  “On Your knees,” ordered the Low Guardsman, pressing Blade Toto to the ground. As soon as the Misuke (the primary planet around which Eden revolved) had obscured all of the sun, the four pilots had been busted from their cells and taken out of the palace under the cover of darkness. Low guardsmen had loaded them into a large carriage with black-curtained windows, drawn by a team of matched centaurs. Any thoughts of resistance were banished at the first sight of the cross-bows and spears leveled at their chests. The four of them, bound at the wrists, sat in twos facing each other as the carriage bounced down the road of dirt and stone that led out of the citadel. They had been blindfolded, but had a sense that they were returning to the field where their ships had landed.

  “What are they going to do to us?” the pilot of the Yorick asked, his voice shaking, although mostly from the horrible roads.

  “This isn’t good,” answered the back-up pilot from Yorick.

  “They never should have left us alone,” said the back-up pilot from Zilla.

  “What are they going to do to us?” the pilot of the Yorick repeated. Blade Toto said nothing, figuring there was nothing to be said, and they would find out soon enough anyway.

  The carriage made a sharp turn onto an even worse surface that exacerbated the bouncing and lurching until it nearly threw them to the floor. The carriage stopped abruptly, sending the back-up pilot from Yorick face-first into Blade Toto’s lap, but they were too scared to be embarassed by this.

  They heard shouting outside, guessing there was a party of guardsmen, not very many. They heard the doors openeed and flet themselves jerked into the open by scaly, claw-tipped hands.

  Their blindfolds were never removed. The four of them were shoved to the ground and forced to kneel in a cross formation, head-to-head, while low guardsmen positioned cross-bows at the backs of their heads.

  “Damb,” Blade Toto thought as the cold metal blade pressed into the nape of his neck and he heard the sound of the bolt drawing back. “I really didn’t think I was gonna die this way.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Pegasus - Quicksilver Angels Mission Briefing Room

  The mission briefing rooms for each of Pegasus’s four flight groups looked out through large windows over the primary flight deck. Eliza Jane Change found it both amusing and annoying that these pilots had such attachments to their vehicles that they needed to look over them at every opportunity. Flt. Lt. Matthew Driver kept glancing at Prudence from the corner of his eye.

  Flt. Captain Stephen Hicksville welcomed them, a blandly handsome Republicker with sandy brown hair and thick blond skin at odds with his trim build. He greeted them, took a seat, and touched the pad in front of his place at the polished wood table.

  “We have been reviewing the telemetry from the scout mission the two of you completed on your last duty-cycle. We placed a probe in orbit upon your return and have since mapped the entire moon. Enlarge sector 047.” The viewer focused in on the icy surface of the outer moon. A rough-edged metallic object was wedged into the ice, like a bullet shot into a frozen lake.

  Hicksville went on. “The object is 2700 meters long, approximately 400 meters wide, and 1400 meters in height all at its longest points. Its mass is estimated at 11.2 million metric tons.”

  “It looks like wreckage,” Matthew countered. “Is it a ship?”

  “Neg, since the first probe, we’ve sent a total of three probe missions into the area. They have doing some neutrino profiling, quantum resonance scans, all that stuff. It’s solid all the way through. No conduits, no propulsion systems, no habitable spaces.”

  Eliza Jane’s assessment was more experienced. “The decks could have compressed on impact. I have seen it happen before. If the ship came in fast enough, it would fuse into a solid chunk of matter.”

  “We really don’t know yet, but it looks like the composition is fairly consistent as deeply as our sensors can penetrate it. Review, if you will, the composition of the object … molybdenum, carborundum, cobalt, gold...”

  Eliza Jane did not wait for the punchline. She intepreted the data herself. “The same as the crust of the colony.”

  “Exactly. Geological survey believes the colony was extensively terra-formed. They think it might be a piece of the crust that somehow ended up impacted on an outer moon. It could be an artifact from the colonial era. If so, it might provide insight into the terra-forming technology used by the ancients.” Hicksville did not seem enthused by the prospect, merely providing a detached mission briefing.

  “A team of engineers and space recovery experts is being assembled to take off and study the artifact. If it’s structurally sound, we plan to extract it, and have it towed back to the ship for analysis.” Behind him was a live data-feed from the surface of the moon, where an Aves had set down with an exploratory team. Some engineers and scientists in heavy space ear were walking across the surface of the object.

  Eliza Jane Change remained skeptical. “It’s almost as big as this ship. You should leave it in place and study it there?”

  “Both options were evaluated, and the study teams agreed, if it can be extracted, they can study it more thoroughly by bringing it into space.” He gestured toward the data-feed. “Aves Una is on the surface right now, with a team to evaluate its stability for extraction and transport. Another team is evaluating the best means of extracting it. They favor slicing it out of the ice with lasers and then pulling it free with tractor beams.”

  “That sounds pretty straightforward,” Matthew agreed.

  “Once the object is in orbit, a single Aves should be able to tow it into a high orbit with the Eden moon. The orbital calculations have already been made.”

  Eliza Jane gave both of them the eye of the skunk-beast. Amateurs! If they were lucky, it would only break apart into several thousand small fragments without destroying any ships in the process. .

  “Lt. Change, you were in the Mining Guild prior to your selection to the Odyssey Project,”

  Hicksville went on.

  “Before I was assigned to the Odyssey Project,” she corrected him. Hicksville shared a glance with Matthew, who returned a look that said, Sore spot. Do not touch. “You’re experienced in navigating in deep space, around asteroids and so forth?”

  “It was my job for about twenty years.”

  “We’ve been developing a plan for extracting and retrieving the object. I’d like you to lead the mission, with Matthew as shipmaster. There is some complexity involved. You should run through a few simulations before the mission… both of you.”

  Matthew sent a specific portion of the flight profile for display on a holo-board behind Hicks. “Pulling the object out of the gravity well seems to be the major challenge. We will focus on that.”

  Hicks drew his attention to a large spattering of rocks and ice orbiting far above the planet’s surface. “There is a debris field in the planet’s outer orbital margin. It isn’t very dense, but it could be problematic.”

  Eliza Jane squinted at it. That was an unusual formation, like a debris field caused by the collision of two asteroids, or an asteroid and a comet. Could its presence so closed to the object be a coincidence? She wondered if anyone was studying it.

  Pegasus – The UnderDecks

  A hooded figure made his way along Deck Zero . The deck was a demarcation line, of sorts. Above it were the ship’s superstructure, the command tower, the living quarters, the botany bays, the vivaria, and the other “mission areas” of the ship. Designed for human occupation, those decks were warm, spacious
, and comfortable. Below Deck Zero were the ship’s gravity engines, stores, fusion reactors, cargo holds, artifactories, waste processing facilities, and other

  “functional areas,” largely automated, intended for no more than occasional inspections by the ship’s active-duty-crew.

  Deck zero itself contained little. It was primary a utility deck, a place where the conduits connecting the above and below of the ship passed through, readily available for inspection and maintenance. It was also made of the thickest and sturdiest alloy to be found anywhere on the ship, representing, as it did, the primary load-bearing structure. The figure came to a transport pod station, and waited for a car to come. He stood still, hands clasped behind his back, occasionally surveying his surroundings purposefully. He knew the car would come, and precisely on the hour, it did.

  The hatch of the gray-white transport pod, shaped rather like an egg with a flattened bottom, slid open, and a large figure extracted himself out of it. He wore a uniform of black and silver armor, with no distinguishing insignia of any kind on it. On his head was a large, dark, helmet. An only slightly less imposing figure, similarly attired, extracted himself from the opposite hatch.

  The man who had been waiting paid the second figure no further attention. He waited until the first man had closed the hatch before stepping out of the shadows. “Centurion Bellisarius, will you do me the honor of sharing a word with me?”

  Bellisarius turned, he was a heavy man, much-invested in the kind of identity-altering, age-defying medical procedures for which the Centurion Order was notorious. His heavy jaw dropped slowly, and a leaden word fell out, “You!”

  “Friend Bellisarius, I have helped you on more than one occasion, and I have asked for nothing in return...”

  “And you never fail to remind me of this whenever I can not avoid the crossing of our paths.”

  “The legendary Centurion wit,” the hooded man deadpanned. Slowly, he withdrew the hood from his head. He still wore the face-mask he had worn in the presence of Trajan Lear. “I have brought you something.” He tossed something at the Centurion, who reflexively deployed his personal shield. The object bounced off of it harmlessly and landed at his feet. Slowly, keeping an eye on the stranger at all times, he lifted it up. It was a back-pack, the type schoolboys carried their datapads and sealed lunches in. He extended his two hands before him, making an L with both hands and thumbs, and scanned the pack. It was empty.