Colonization

by Scott McElhaney

  “Zane and Renata, all the way,” she smiled.

  I nodded.

  Sarai

  Chapter Eight

  I could finally see the landforms of the world for the first time as we continued our descent. We had previously been unable to see through the dirty upper atmosphere and had to rely on old images sent from probes. Now it was nice to see that this moon was truly alive.

  By “alive” I meant that it wasn’t a wasteland of ice and snow as I’d been expecting, although a bit north or south of the equator and it may have been. There was still snow down there – dirty snow however, probably due to the dirt and dust that continually drifted down from the upper atmosphere – but the good news was that these weren’t glaciers. The good news was that I could see flowing rivers, some alien trees that somehow managed to stay green, and some bodies of water that weren’t iced over.

  I’d seen two smaller lakes that were completely covered in ice, but we’d just passed over a larger lake reminiscent of one of the Great Lakes back on Earth and its waves were alive and pulsing as though the moon still had a heartbeat.

  “Shuttle Four to any surviving shuttles,” the speaker in the console called out, “Do you read?”

  “We read you. This is Shuttle Two,” I replied, into the communicator.

  “Shuttle Three burned up in the atmosphere right in front of us. We lost Shuttle Three,” the reply came.

  “Oh no…” I choked, making sure not to press the communicator switch.

  I felt sick all of a sudden. I was near certain that I was going to throw up.

  “No… No…” John repeated next to me, “No, we can’t have this.”

  “We just lost half the colony! Half the people… half the supplies,” I fought the tears that threatened to escape.

  “Do you read, Shuttle Two?” the communicator erupted.

  “Tell them, Captain,” John said to me, “And it’s time to keep your composure as best as you can.”

  After a few short breaths, “This is Commander Sarai Stark. To whom am I speak in Shuttle Four?”

  “This is Nuclear Engineer Master Chief Leah Paulus – shuttle pilot,” she replied, “Ma’am, we lost the Chief Medical Officer over there in that shuttle. We also lost our only Atmospheric Engineer.”

  “Master Chief… Leah, listen to me,” I stated quickly before she had a chance to continue, “Follow our beacon that my pilot just switched on. We are heading to the prearranged landing site and I don’t know about you, but this shuttle is in very poor condition. We are experiencing a lot of drag and not sure why, but we have our ideas.”

  “I got your blip on my navigational panel,” she replied.

  “Now you’re going to need to focus first and foremost on the safe arrival at the landing site, because what I’m about to tell you is going to upset you,” I said.

  “Oh no… No, I don’t want to know,” she immediately responded, “No, tell me. What happened? The Captain’s shuttle? Shuttle One?”

  “Yes, Leah. Shuttle One disintegrated very shortly after beginning their descent,” I said, startled at how easily I seemed to state it.

  “I-I think I saw that, but I must have…”

  I wondered in that moment if I should have waited until we all met up on the ground. I knew how hard it was to maintain focus when you just witnessed many people dying.

  “I thought something was reflecting off the atmosphere,” she came back on, very obviously crying as she spoke, “They had died and I had brushed it off as a reflection! What the-”

  “Leah, you didn’t know and quite honestly, it wasn’t something any of us expected to be seeing as we watched each other start our descents,” I interrupted her.

  All I could hear over the communicator now was sobbing along with a few expletives that I’d never heard her say before. I remembered this woman very clearly because Master Chiefs were as rare as Admirals in the Navy. And female Master Chiefs were all the more rare. She was also probably the oldest person in our colony, even older than Captain Murphy who I knew was forty-six. I didn’t actually know Leah’s age, but I would have guessed her to be at least in her lower fifties. Her salt and pepper hair was more salt than pepper and like every Nuclear Engineer I’d ever met, she was a little too book-smart and a bit socially awkward.

  “I’m alright, Captain,” Leah offered, “Let’s get these on the ground and get set up.”

  I was very much aware that she had just called me Captain. It would most likely be happening a lot now, whether I was willing to accept the job or not.

  “I’m opening this thing up, ma’am, if you’re alright with that,” John turned to me, “The air outside is the right mix as we are now sailing below three-thousand feet.”

  “Yes, I could go for some cold air right now,” I immediately nodded.

  He typed in a couple commands and suddenly I felt cool air blowing on my feet and the warm air escaping above my head. Then all of a sudden it started to smell a little like rotten eggs. I covered my mouth with my hand.

  “What’s that?” I gasped.

  He also scowled and then covered his mouth. He typed in some commands and the shuttle stopped venting. The damage was done though and the whole shuttle had a hint of rotten eggs now. We did however drop the temperature by nearly ten degrees in that short span of time.

  “Sulfur,” John said, still typing in some commands, “I turned on the filters and I’ve got the air circulating full speed, but I don’t know if that will really do anything.”

  “So you’re telling me that’s the smell of our new home?” I asked, frightened all of a sudden.

  “Well, hopefully not forever,” he replied, “It’s probably like the dust that’s still floating in the atmosphere – just the leftover remnants of the impact. I’d imagine there was a lot of fire, brimstone, and sulfur across the whole planet shortly after impact.”

  “But that was thirty-two and a half years ago according to Lieutenant Grace,” I said, “I would have thought the smell would have returned to normal.”

  “What do you think the dirt is that we see on the snow down there? It’s got to be ash, some pulverized metals, and sulfur. The fires might be long gone, but the ash is still raining down. This is probably a lot better than what it was thirty years ago,” he replied, “Imagine that smell.”

  “True, but… wow, I don’t know how we are going to deal with something like that for the rest of our lives,” I replied, “A world that smells like intestinal distress.”

  “I’ll bet we get accustomed to it and don’t even notice before long. My sister lived in a house with twelve cats that didn’t always use the litter box. When you opened the door to go into her house, you were hit with a strong wave of ammonia and urine. It was so hard to breathe in there to the point that it almost burned your throat, yet she and her family didn’t even notice. They couldn’t smell what everyone else smelled,” he said.

  He pointed suddenly to a clearing in the plains alongside the winding river we had been following. I saw it and it matched the geographical images we’d reviewed on the bridge of the CP-4. And as we had already determined based on the weather, there was no snow here or in the immediate vicinity.

  “We planned to land the shuttles in the shape of a square with our side entrances all facing inward toward a central commons,” John said, “What do you suggest now that we are half a colony with two shuttles?”

  I stared at the flat area of dirt and patchy grass or weeds, “Side-by-side with our side entrances facing, but keep the central commons the same size as it would have been with four shuttles.”

  “I’ll send a text over to Shuttle Four to let her know,” he said, descending more rapidly now toward our Plymouth Rock.

  Zane

  Chapter Nine

  The horrible smell never dissipated by the time we landed. Sarai and Engineer Second Class Wolfe entered our section shortly after we felt the craft settle onto the ground. They both looked paler than usual, if that were even possible. I could
see it in Sarai’s eyes that something had gone horribly wrong and it wasn’t just about the smell of rotten eggs or the fact that our shuttle had heated up so rapidly during the descent. This was something much worse.

  “Thank you for getting us here safely,” I offered aloud as I unfastened the lower portion of my safety harness, “I could tell that it probably wasn’t an easy task.”

  “It definitely wasn’t easy and not everyone made it here safely,” Sarai confirmed, looking at all of our worried expressions, “Shuttle One and Sh… Shuttle Three didn’t...”

  She couldn’t finish her sentence and simply shook her head while biting her bottom lip. She was met with gasps and some expressions of denial. A moment later, it sunk in and many of us were upset and in tears.

  “We lost half our colony, half the supplies, and half of the people we loved. These weren’t just ‘members of a colony’ or just people who were educated and skilled in ways that could help us. These were people we shared dinner with, people we got to know personally during our six-month training, and people we came to love as brothers and sisters,” Sarai said, sounding every bit the leader that she always was, “And we will honor them and honor their memories by surviving and thriving on this home they helped to bring us to.”

  I got up from my seat and took Sarai’s hand. She started to cry as I drew her into my arms. I held her for several minutes before I heard a trunk being dropped onto the floor near us. I released her and watched as the pilot opened up the trunk and drew out a thick set of coveralls that resembled a snowsuit.

  “While we may have left the Earth planning to go to a somewhat tropical planet, we did plan for seasons as well. We have thirty of these in a variety of sizes right here. Pick out one and put it on. I’m also going to locate the trunk of gloves and watch caps if anyone wants those,” he said.

  “What’s the hurry?” Horticulturist First Class Keyandra Reese asked, “I’m a bit shaken up and I actually think I’m going to be sick.”

  “The hurry is that we don’t really know the state of both shuttles but that most likely, these will be used as our homes or sleeping quarters for the foreseeable future. And as you can see from looking around, we don’t have much space to live unless we offload everything we don’t need to store in here,” Sarai said, “And if you’ll remember the training, we need to get the greenhouses and the chicken farm up and running as close to immediately as possible. If we aren’t producing meat and crops by the time our food stores run out, we will all die – plain and simple.”

  I noticed that Sarai didn’t address the fact that Keyandra was feeling sick over the recent news. She was in full command mode now and would probably remain that way until things were operating at a more smooth and acceptable pace. Even I wasn’t immune to being fully subject to her command and was well aware of my place. There was a time to be a husband, a time to be a lover, and a time to be a ColSup who had an equal share in the future survival of the colony. We all had a lot of work to do and little time to get it done.

  “Works for me,” I added, kneeling next to the open trunk and checking for one of the fleece-lined coveralls in my size.

  Chapter Ten

  As we all expected now, when the back gate was lowered to offload the larger supplies including the land rover, we were met with a cool breeze that smelled a bit like rotten eggs mixed with a hint of minerals and compost. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t bitter cold out there in the dreary midday, but rather we noted that it was a fairly pleasant forty-three degrees and breezy.

  The next thing we discovered upon exiting the shuttles was that both shuttles should have never survived. Our shuttle was completely missing the outer hull on the right side, looking as if it had literally been sheared away. The inner hull was mostly intact, although we did find two cracks in the heat shielding just below where we had been sitting. Shuttle Four was also missing the outer hull everywhere except the roof and at the back. An emergency shield had also been dropped down over the windshield due to damage from a meteoroid, so the Master Chief had been flying blind the whole way and never thought to mention that to anyone. She still managed to land the craft in the proper spot just by following our beacon and using her ground radar. She explained that after she witnessed Shuttle Three’s demise, she was grateful not to be able to see anything else.

  While offloading the supplies and equipment, I took a quick and silent inventory of the surviving colonists. I wanted to secretly assess our potential for survival. This was brought on by the realization that we had not only lost all the medical staff, but all the medical supplies as well. We had not a single doctor, surgeon, or nurse among us. And outside of the two shuttles’ first aid kits and the small first aid kits found on the two land rovers, we had no medical supplies of any sort.

  So from the two shuttles, we had the following expertise within the colony:

  Captain Sarai Stark – trained in ship command and piloting

  Zane Stark – ColSup, but was a Welder First Class in the US Navy Space Division (USN-SD) and would continue serving in that regard.

  Commander Darius McEwen – Chief Colonization Officer trained in all forms of colonial establishment and survival.

  Kennedy McEwen – ColSup, but was a Lieutenant JG in the USN-SD as a pilot so she would probably assist in whatever ways she could outside of that realm of training.

  Ensign Marie Lopez – Horticultural Management

  Horticulturist First Class Keyandra Reese – the title spoke for itself.

  Christopher Reese – ColSup, but was a bouncer at a Navy club, so if he gained back any of that lost muscle mass from the trip, he could chase any aliens away. For now though, he would probably assist with any heavy duty labor.

  Master Chief Nuclear Engineer Leah Paulus – the title spoke for itself so she would run the reactor of which we only had one now instead of the two we had planned for.

  Animal Management and Processing Specialist (Civilian) Bob Thompson – basically he managed a chicken processing facility in Montana and he’d be doing that for our colony now beginning with over a thousand chicken embryos that we brought along with us.

  Geologist First Class Nancy Cartwright – the title spoke for itself.

  Biologist First Class Hannah Richards – the title spoke for itself.

  Renata Richards – ColSup who just graduated high school, so she would be a laborer of some sort.

  Biologist Third Class David Cox – the title spoke for itself.

  Angela Cox – ColSup, but was a hair stylist, so I was fairly certain her skills would be put to use at least in that regard.

  Engineer Second Class John Wolfe – the title spoke for itself.

  Electrician Second Class Lane Edwards – the title spoke for itself.

  Builder Second Class Faith Marhofer – the title was somewhat vague but basically the job was a new naval classification for a person trained in colonial carpentry from furniture all the way up to bridge-building. She was currently the only female in this field and she out-performed the four men who tried to join the CP-4 in this capacity.

  So ultimately we had a colony of seventeen people, five of which were colonial support and not considered to be educated in true colonial establishment. So take us out of the equation and we’re left with twelve people who needed to find a way to convert the people of these two shuttles into a village. Curiously enough, I wasn’t worried. Chris Reese and his wife were already putting together two of the larger tents so we would have a place to store supplies outside the shuttle.

  Engineer Wolfe, Renata, and I were gathering up the supplies for building the greenhouses and loading them into the back of one of the land rovers. Sarai and Commander McEwen were scouting out the best places to position the three greenhouses in order to maximize exposure to the hazy sun… or Tau Ceti as we would begin calling it.

  Chicken Man Bob, Biologist Cox, and his wife Angela were gathering up the supplies to build the heated chicken facility. His facility would be constructed of corrug
ated aluminum sheeting, formed into a large Quonset hut similar to those back in the ancient World War Two era. It was only made of aluminum because it was easier to transport with minimal space, but once it was put together with plenty of sturdy framing, it would be as large as a barn but shaped like a half-cylinder.

  Renata’s mother, Biologist Richards, was busy setting up the cots and personal supply trunks inside the much more spacious shuttles while Electrician Edwards swept the shuttles clean. Builder Marhofer also assisted by stacking up the food supply trunks in the shuttles to form some privacy walls around some of the makeshift “bedrooms”. It had been decided to keep the food supplies in the shuttles rather than in tents outside because we didn’t know what animals were native to this moon and if they’d be able to burrow into the trunks.

  Basically, the colonists had been stepping up and taking control even before the first sunset. I was beginning to have some faith that we could really do this. It was then that I realized I was breathing without complaining about the smell. None of us were complaining.

  Sarai

  Chapter Eleven

  We knew from an orbital unmanned probe that arrived here nearly a century ago that Kepler Moon Alpha had an unusual day-night cycle that wouldn’t be easy to get adjusted to. KMA was three-quarters the size of the Earth and orbited a ringed gas planet Kepler 963a that was almost as big as Saturn. KMA rotated on its axis once every twenty hours and six minutes and at the same time, it revolved around this Saturn-like planet once every thirty-nine days. Because of this, there was a five-day period in every 39-day ‘month’ that Kepler 963a would block Tau Ceti’s light and heat from reaching Kepler Moon Alpha.

  So for thirty-four days a month, KMA had normal days that consisted of approximately ten hours of sunlight followed by ten hours of darkness. Then for five days, KMA remained in the shadow of its enormous planet. Temperatures would plummet naturally if it weren’t for the geothermal heat brought on by the tidal forces Kepler 963a imposed. And during this five-day period every month, plants would be without any UV light from the central star. This would definitely pose a problem to the Earth plants we brought with us.