Children of the Divide

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “Shit,” he said aloud inside his helmet. Jian took three small hops and got right up to the edge, then kicked his legs out from under him and floated down into the dust flat on his stomach.

  Madeja shouted through the plant.

  Jian stretched out his left arm as far as the range of motion in his suit’s shoulder joint would let him and scrambled for grip with his free hand.

 

  With barely a meter left to fall, Madeja reached out in a panic. But in freefall, the wild flailing of her arms caused her entire body to rotate around her center of mass, quickly spinning her outstretched hand out of his reach. With her back now facing him, Jian made one last, desperate lunge for the grab handle on the top of her suit’s life support backpack before she slipped into the inky black of the yawning chasm.

  Jian managed only to get two fingers on it, but in the weak gravity two was more than enough.

  Jian said.

  Madeja went obediently limp as Jian firmed up his grip on her backpack handle. With almost no effort, he flexed his arm and tossed her entire body up and out of the ravine.

  For just a moment, he felt like a superhero.

  He was not a strong man by any measure of the word, but with Madeja effectively weighing in at less than four kilos, it was easier than throwing a baby. Not that Jian would ever throw a baby. But his ego, not caring about the details, swelled up a notch anyway.

  Rakunas shouted into the com as the rest of the team bounced up to help both Jian and Madeja to their feet.

  Jian lied and turned to Madeja.

  Madeja took a moment to regain her composure before answering.

 

 

  Jian nodded.

 

 

  The rest of the jaunt to the stricken harvester was, mercifully, uneventful. The machine itself was enormous, nearly the length of the shuttle from which they’d arrived. Each one had taken a dozen shuttle flights to deliver the components to Varr’s surface for reassembly. With six wheels and an articulated body, it looked like a strange, gargantuan insect. Its “head” rested on two of its wheels and mounted a broad, shallow scoop to shovel up the first several centimeters of regolith for processing further back in the beast’s body. Only a thin layer of dust needed to be collected, because the lion’s share of the fusible Helium-3 that rained down from the system primary in the form of solar wind was trapped there.

  Once inside, a series of sifters and vaporizers separated the individual helium atoms for capture, along with a handful of other useful elements and compounds, and were routed into storage containers for later collection. The remaining dust was then spread out the back of the harvester and combed to cover any trace of the machine’s passing.

  That feature had been retrofitted to the harvesters out of respect to the Atlantians, who had insisted that any disturbances to Varr’s surface be mended before they would grant permission for the endeavor. It was the face of one of their Gods, after all. Such considerations had not been important when the harvesters had been built to stripmine Earth’s moon, which was just as doomed by Nibiru as mankind’s homeworld had been.

  The resurfacer wasn’t the only field modification the harvesters had gone through. Despite their size, their weight was a problem, or more accurately, their lack of it. They’d been designed to operate in one-sixth standard gravity, and while that didn’t seem like much, it was still nearly five times greater than Varr’s environment. Huge concrete slabs made of thermally fused regolith had been strapped to their backs to give their wheels enough purchase to push through the dust. Likewise, metal paddles had been fixed to the wheels themselves for extra grip on the silty surface.

  It was probably a combination of the extra weight and the sharp wheels that had caused the roof of the hidden cave to collapse as the harvester rolled over it. Jian came near the edge and prodded at the ground with his foot to make sure it wasn’t about to give way. It held. Still, to be safe, he hooked a line to the harvester’s hull with a carabiner and instructed the rest of his team to do the same.

  Their lidar scans from orbit had pegged the cavern’s depth at around thirty meters. Peering in through the hole, it looked more like sixty.

  Well, nothing for it, Jian thought as he let his line play out all the way to the bottom. The distance was safe to jump in only three percent gravity, but he clipped a repelling arrestor to the line anyway. No such thing as too careful. With a flourish befitting his new superhero status, Jian stepped off the ledge, rotated to face his teammates, and saluted as he plunged out of sight.

  Slowly.

  Very, slowly.

  He didn’t so much plunge as… sink. By the time he was halfway down the shaft, Jian was already bored. He hoped for some vivid hallucinations a la Alice’s visions as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, but none were forthcoming. He finally touched down many seconds after stepping off, his boots sending out little clouds of dust which flew off in perfect little parabolas before settling down again. His helmet’s floodlights bounced around the chamber, illuminating it with a dim glow and giving him a sense of its proportions. It wasn’t much bigger across than it was deep, but if it had a back wall his suit’s lights couldn’t find it. Debris from the roof collapse littered the floor like discarded building blocks.

  Then, he looked right, and his heartrate jumped twenty BPM.

  Kirkland’s voice broke through from the shuttle.

  Jian said. As he spoke, his eyes swept over the anomaly. Until that very moment, Jian had been holding out hope that it had been some strangely improbable arrangement of ice slabs, or a trick of light and shadow, like the face on Mars that had captivated so many fools back on Earth centuries before.

  But staring at it, he knew it was neither. Covered in rocks and ice, it was unmistakably manufactured. And unmistakably alien.

  Jian pulled a light beacon from one of the pockets of his pants, switched the little globe on, and let it tumble to the ground.

  * * *

  It took almost an hour to clear away most of the debris from the top and front of the anomaly, which was surprisingly light work in the low gravity. Still, even with their relative super-strength, some pieces were too large or too wedged in to move by hand.

  They were going to need some help.

  Rakunas said as he surveyed one of the largest slabs pressing against the side of the anomaly.

  Jian maneuvered over the block and crawled up its surface to take position beside Rakunas.

  Rakunas wiped away a handful of dust from one corner of a small ledge built into the anomaly’s face. Below it was a circular depression, maybe three meters across. Jian’s helmet banged off the wall, so he used one of his wrist lights to get a better look. Running diagonally across the circle was a line separating it in two.

  he said a moment later.

 

  Jian pointed at the slab.

 

  Jian announced to the rest of the team.

  at about electric winches?> Rakunas asked.

  Jian said.

  Madeja said. They both turned to face her.

  Jian said testily.

 

  Jian said.

 

 

  Madeja took a deep breath obvious even through her vac suit.

 

 

  Jian wrapped his gloved knuckles on the slab.

 

 

 

 

  Madeja considered the question.

  Jian nodded.

 

  Jian winced as his father’s words tumbled so easily out of his own mouth.

  Madeja nodded and signaled for LaSalle to come over with his pack. Together, they fished out the inflatables and argued over their optimum placement. After a gentle reminder of how much O2 their deliberations were burning up, consensus was quickly reached. Madeja popped the valves and backed away almost to the far wall. With no atmospheric pressure opposing them, the airbags expanded and quickly filled nearly all of the void-space between the floor, slab, and the front face of the anomaly, unfolding in total silence in the airless chamber.

  The expansion stopped abruptly as the airbags met real resistance. At first, nothing happened. Jian was preparing to call it a day as the sides of the bags bulged helplessly against the stubborn monolith. But then, he felt a rumble of something shift through the soles of his feet.

  Jian warned.

  As the team took cover, the slab cracked in half with a shudder. The airbags, already pressurized to their full capacity, launched the two pieces with tremendous force, one towards the opposite wall, and the other up towards the–

  Madeja said as they all stood by and helplessly watched the chunk of rocky ice pinwheel through the cavern, drawing slowly but inexorably closer to the harvester wheel dangling over the open ceiling, backlit by the stars.

  Jian shouted.

  With the sort of bad luck usually reserved for compulsive gamblers, the spinning block struck the wheel dead on before rebounding back towards the floor.

  Rakunas yelled as the chunk returned to the floor, bounced off one of the other blocks at an angle, then came to rest with a thunk everyone could feel through their boots.

  But no one was paying it any attention. Instead, all eyes remained fixed on the wheel of the harvester as it shifted and ground its way further over the hole. Little flakes and pebbles of debris floated down through the cavern like gray snow. Jian sucked air through his teeth. Sphincters clenched down on colostomy tubes as everyone watched in horror, expecting the rest of the roof to collapse and send the harvester tumbling down, dragging their anchored lines along with it.

  Another section of ceiling ice almost a meter across broke free where the wheel’s axle had sat and followed the dust down to the floor in a fresh pile. But then, movement stopped. The harvester settled into its new position and rested.

  The sighs of relief were audible even through the plant comlinks.

  Jian said.

  Madeja shouted.

  Rakunas said.

 

  Jian bounded over to the anchor lines hanging from the harvester far above. With more than a little trepidation, he gave one line a cursory tug. It held, and nothing came crashing down on his head. He gave the line a harder jerk. It felt solid enough, so he grabbed it with both hands and put his full weight on it. No change.

 

 

 

 

  Jian checked his suit’s air supply. The CO2 scrubbers were still at sixty-seven percent and they had another four hours of battery charge on this trip. Hour to secure the harvester, hour to walk back to the Atlantis, hour for safety margin, still gave them an hour to play with. It was worth it.

 

  Madeja nodded and started working her way up the line back to the surface with LaSalle close behind on another rope.

  Rakunas asked.

  Jian looked at the anomaly and its freshly revealed airlock.

 

  Five

  The “Welcome Home” dinner Benexx’s father had prepared for them was a textbook example of trying too hard.

  In what had surely been intended as a grand gesture, Bryan had spent the better part of three hours in their home’s kitchenette preparing an entire buffet line of Atlantian dishes to the very best of his somewhat limited ability.

  He’d apparently spent the morning before football wandering around the small, but growing bazar in the Native Quarter, spending lavishly on imported yulka beans, fenta root, smoked kujin fillets, even freshly slaughtered dux’ah meat, and a bag of exotic spices not even Benexx could properly identify. Of course, Shambhala’s fields and plains grew nearly all of them as well, save the kujin fish which were native to the reefs around Atlantis.

  But they were grown in strange soils, using strange methods, in a strange climate, by strange tools and inexperienced hands. They were grown packed together to increase yields, and in half the usual time to double the number of harvests each season. These tradeoffs did what was necessary to feed the city’s swelling masses, but they left locally grown food tasting strange and weak to the discriminating palate. Genuine Atlantian imports grown in the traditional way commanded quite a premium as a result.

  The smell of it all filled the house as he worked, thoroughly putting Benexx off zer appetite. Ze’d been eating authentic Atlantian food from all over the damned continent all summer. Fresh Atlantian food, not stuff that had been processed, frozen, and stuck on a drone cargo ship for the nine-day voyage across the Sukal Ocean. Food prepared by indigenous people who knew all the little tricks to cooking it, had the same sense of taste in their hands and mouths as ze, and knew from long personal experience what it was supposed to taste like.

  And ze was still sick to death of it.

&nb
sp; Ze’d been craving genuine Shambhala junk food for weeks. It was the taste of home, zer version of comfort food. Ze wanted falafel rolled inside a genuine wheat flour pancake. Ze wanted breaded, deep-friend chicken and mushroom kabobs dunked in creamy cucumber sauce. Ze wanted to eat an entire thirty-six count bag of Little Smokies. Ze wanted a perch and wild rice sushi roll as long as zer arm and to suck up the soy sauce through a straw until zer tongue shriveled up like a raisin.

  Raisins! Ze wanted raisins. There had to be some in the pantry.

  “What are you doing in here, Squish?” Zer father looked up from the induction range.

  “Don’t call me that. I’m just grabbing some raisins.”

  “Now? You’ll spoil your dinner. Have a cup of tea instead. There’s a fresh pot on the counter.”

  Benexx scoffed. “It’s a couple of raisins, dad. I’m not a larva anymore.”

  “Well, OK, but just a handful. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “Yes, dad.”

  Bryan grimaced, but ze ignored him and found the raisin container on the third shelf next to the ever-present bunch of bananas that were, as always, turning brown and destined for bread. No one in the house ever seemed to remember they were in there until they’d ripened almost to the point of spoilage. Ze poured a glass of the green tea sitting on the counter. It was a little tepid by human standards, but just right for the more temperature-sensitive skin of zer Atlantian mouth. Benexx was constantly waiting for things to cool off while zer human family, friends, and coworkers were busy pouring boiling hot liquid and food down their throats.

  Ze sat down on the couch next to zer mother and popped a few of the tiny brown bits into zer mouth. Raisins were a guilty pleasure for zer. One amino acid or another didn’t agree with the later stages of zer digestive system. They weren’t poisonous to Atlantians, just difficult. But they were so sweet and chewy. Ze could get away with a handful without too much discomfort later on.