by Mark Zubro
Mike had never spoken to a survivor of the horror. Bex had told him about it with great glee. The evil shit’s words had been, “Mess with me and more of your own will die just as horribly.”
Mike had said to Bex, “My understanding is we’re just going to die on the new planet.”
“Not as soon as I’d like. The soft factions in the Senate are trying to assure your safety. As if they really cared.” Bex had laughed. “We were going to ban all protests. Now we’re encouraging them. You know how many showed up at the last one? Nobody. People can be taught.”
But Bex was wrong. Smaller protests had broken out. And a few had died like the ones Joe reported to him on the ship here. No battle cruisers had fired down on protestors after Tarnall III. Bex and the Religionists didn’t have absolute power. Yet.
“Why do you go on?” Krim asked.
Mike sighed. “Because I love Joe. Because I have a mom and dad who love me. Because I have a nephew and friends, a drag queen I want to see before I die. Because I have a sense of myself as a good person, and despite all the odds, I believe I can triumph.” If Krim had been from Earth, Mike would have repeated Anne Frank’s words, “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” Mike still believed that. He said to Krim, “You’re right. Our chances here are not good, but I want to build a world where no gay person has to fear again. I’ll accept the slightest of chances. I’m going to take it and fight as long and as hard as I can. Lots of times, I don’t think we can win, but that doesn’t bother me anymore. We’ll endure what we can.” Mike stood up. “It’s late, Krim. We better get back. We both need our sleep.”
The boy got to his feet. He said, “I feel better now.”
“I’m glad.” He looked down at the boy, at least a head shorter than he. Mike saw the boy’s hesitation. He reached out and gave the boy’s shoulder a reassuring touch. Krim moved forward leaning into Mike’s chest. Mike gathered the boy in is arms. He felt the thin body, no longer trembling. He caressed the youthful hair.
Krim murmured into Mike’s shoulder, “I wish we were lovers.”
Mike was a little bewildered. He held the embrace a few moments longer, released the boy, took a step back. “That’s a kind and beautiful thing to say. You’ll find someone of your own someday.” Mike didn’t want to lead the boy on. “Let’s go back.” As they turned toward the colony, the boy stayed in character by tripping over a half inch high dune of sand.
Mike kept him from tripping over his feet any further with a firm grip. Underground in the corridor he said goodnight to the boy. Mike climbed into bed next to Joe. He fell deeply asleep in moments.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The first thing the next morning, Mike met with Snek in the storage room.
“How was your night?” Mike asked.
“I wasn’t on a billion-ton prison ship. It’s a step in the right direction.”
Mike got to the point. “Any luck yesterday finding junk or derelict stuff for weapons?”
“Just getting started, like everything else.”
“Sorry to push,” Mike said. “I guess I’m hoping for a miracle.”
“We could do with a few of those,” Snek said, “I know, we’ve got our safety and the lives of millions of gay people to consider, but like I said before, we’ll be lucky to find anything usable.”
Mike asked, “Why wouldn’t previous expeditions just take all their junk with them?”
“It would be outmoded and transport would be cost-prohibitive. Starting up a colony is not easy, but abandoning one is a real pain in the ass. It’s easier just to leave the stuff. And if they’re giving up on a colony, it usually means they’ve gone broke and can’t afford salvage. Probably could barely afford to get themselves home.” Snek swept his hand around to encompass the mounds of materials around them. “This storage room isn’t the only place with equipment. This has all the new or recently delivered stuff. Previous colonies dug into these mountains pretty extensively. A lot of what they built has decayed, but one of the things my group is doing is retrieval. Like a scrap metal drive on a planetary scale. You know if we put some kind of weapons together, we’re more likely to use them on ourselves.”
“It’s a delicate balance.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Next he met with Sry, the mining maven. Sry had his contingent of men moving the mining equipment to where they were digging.
Sry said, “It’ll take us most of this morning to get it all set up, and then we’re good to go.”
“That quickly?”
“The people of Hrrrm have been mining for thousands and thousands of years. It’s not that hard to follow blueprints, schematics, and diagrams.”
He brought Mike to the face of the wall they were going to begin digging into. Sry tapped the granite then echoed Brux’s sentiment. “If granite was as in demand as liquid zukoh, we would be the richest people in the galaxy.”
“How does this work that the tunnels don’t collapse?” Mike knew little about the complexities of digging into a mountain beyond the horror stories he remembered from Earth of cave-ins and deaths of miners in coal country.
Sry smiled. “Any ordinary planet colonization does this. Way cheaper than building above ground.” Sry tapped the front of his communicator. He showed Mike the complex geometric pattern that emerged. Sry explained. “In essence all the strongest seams are mapped for you. You just point your digger and follow. In our case here on good old, lovely 6743-0A, it’s easier than many planets as the whole damn thing is just solid granite and is for most of the way within a thousand miles of us. This is where other colonies started. Each successive one built on what others built. That often happens. If gray-granite rooms were considered a luxury, this could be a tourist destination.”
“How does this reverse gravity thing actually work?”
Mike had listened to explanations in the training sessions of how the reverse gravity flow eliminated all the waste. Now as then, after another fifteen minutes of listening to Sry, the most he could figure out was, a guy threw an on switch here, crushed granite went in one end of a tube, and came out the other end on the plain. He didn’t care that he didn’t know the dynamics of it, just that someone could make it work.
Sry could.
Sry also showed Mike his own digger and the section he would be assigned to. It was down one of the offshoots from the storage room.
Sry pointed to the nearest digging machine. “See,” Sry said, “state of the art.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Sry explained, “What we are doing is digging a city. Essentially we hope to hollow out the whole range.”
“Why not just keep digging down?” Mike asked.
Sry said, “It’s much less efficient. The laser diggers and vacuum shovels use more energy pulling materials up from the ground than down from above or sideways.”
On a digger, a worker would sit on a back ledge of what looked to Mike to be a man sized fan. The fan blades faced toward what was to be tunneled. The driver sat and directed the machine which had already been programmed by a computer based on the geologist’s reports on precisely where to dig.
Sry showed him where to sit. Mike had trained on a simulator in the training camp before going on the ship. He thought he could handle it. Sry gave him a couple of run-throughs. The computer did the hard part of figuring out where to go. Any driver had to sit there and turn it on or press the computer key, and make sure the gravity flow tube kept working so the residue got back to the surface.
After they were done, Sry showed him some of the smaller laser diggers. They were designed to do touch-up work, or get in spaces the larger diggers couldn’t. Mike looked at the front. It looked like a large flashlight with vicious teeth.
Before Mike left, Sry motioned to a couple of the other diggers. “This is Grith and Eph,” Sry said. “They have requests.”
Grith was a man in his forties. He was an artist from a Religionist part of the galaxy. He wa
s a random choice. He’d learned his digging skills in the training camp and on the ship on the way here.
Grith said, “I saw one of the old tunnels leading off from the storage room. It’s one of the larger ones. I’d like to create a mural there.”
Mike couldn’t think of a reason to say no, so he said, “Sure, as long as it doesn’t take time from your digging.”
Grith smiled. “I’ll only work after hours. Thanks.”
Mike turned to Eph. He was the oldest man in the colony. Another random pick from a Religionist world. He was bald on top of his head with thick gray hair on the back and sides. He was as thin as most of them.
Eph said, “I was a sculptor on my world. I’d like to make a Story Wall.”
“What’s that?” Mike asked.
“Starting at the entrance to the colony, I’d like to put the name of each person who is here and their biography.”
“Wouldn’t that take forever?”
Eph gave a grim smile. “I’m not going anywhere, and I don’t think any of us ever will. I’ll talk to each man, interview them, and get what they want put up there. Maybe some won’t even want their names, but I think leaving a history of who was here and the story of who we are is important. Yes, I know we can cram it onto electronics, but I think we need something visual to remember ourselves. It will be etched into the cave walls forever, a Story Wall. I’ve got a tool kit for sculpting.” He explained it to Mike. When he finished Mike understood what Eph could do was sort of like the original Guttenberg printing press. That is the language of Hrrrm using letters that could be moved around. Except this was far more high tech using a computer to set the words and then burning them into the concrete.
“Burning them?” Mike wasn’t sure he understood the Hrrrm idiom correctly.
Eph said, “Like a series of pin-point chisels attached to a computer.”
Mike said, “I can’t wait to see it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Out in the blazing sun, with Joe and the agriculturalist that afternoon, Joe showed him the building flow of granite Sry and his men were sending to the surface.
“See,” Joe said, “the crushed granite gets up here. We let it flow into these forms, premade and preplanned, mix the stuff from down below with a little of this and a little of that, and you’ve got sort of ready-made dams and dikes. You know your Hoover Dam on Earth?”
“Yeah.”
“Took five years to build.”
“Okay.”
“We can do as much concrete, placed more efficiently, probably just as high, in less than five weeks. Some molds and some chemicals, and poof we’re done.”
“Well, and technology thousands of years ahead of Earth.”
Joe smiled. “That too.”
Mike gazed at the forms currently being filled. They looked like those on Earth he’d seen where someone put up wooden two-by-fours or other supports and then poured concrete between them like for a sidewalk slab. He pointed at the one being filled. “Don’t those supports take long to make?”
“Nah. We program this here.” Joe pointed at a computer. “And this lovely machine.” Joe patted what to Mike looked like a squat, rectangular, extra-long outdoor air-conditioning unit. “It spurts out forms that weigh what balsa wood does but has the strength of concrete. Takes a few minutes to place them. Then we pour in the cement and move on to the next.”
“It sets that quickly?”
“It’s not like cement on Earth. We’ve had thousands and thousands of years to make refinements. We’ve got plenty of the right chemicals. The computer adds them in the right amounts and presto, instant Hoover Dam.”
“Really?”
“Well, sort of. One of the problems the early colonies here didn’t solve was the huge floods during the rainy season. I’d like to try a series of dams, dikes, diversions further north from the colony.”
“Will you have time? Before the first rains?”
“I don’t know. We’ll certainly have time in terms of we’re going to be here for a while.”
“Kinda forever if the Religionists’ plans work out.”
“And I want an irrigation system that’s also flood control. It’ll take some doing. I’ve got my guys working on expanding the plans we were given before we got here.”
The initial agricultural section covered approximately five square miles, and was divided into twenty separate areas. Each section had a different crop or a similar crop but using different experimental fertilizers. A complex irrigation system provided the plants with water. The final result with water from the rainy season and the pumps in the dry season was a rice paddy effect. Mike had seen pictures of the proposed plants. They were sort of like seaweed and other plants that grow on the bottom of the ocean. Mike had tasted some once. He’d realized where his daily gruel must be made from.
Joe said, “We’ve been given seeds from plants from other planets that are like or similar to what was indigenous here. The problem with all the water in the rainy season, one of many, is the silting up. The irrigation system has to be designed so the water fills up the holding basins but doesn’t clog them up.”
“Why aren’t there rivers with the melt from the mountains?”
“By the time it reaches this level, until just before it actually rains here, it evaporates or sinks into the ground. What I’d like to do is also build retention ponds not just for the crops, but deep reservoirs to trap the rain and use it to turn turbines for electricity. Same with wind turbines. The storms are supposed to be awful. But in the mountains, we’d have strong electricity for all those months of rain.”
“We got turbines in the supplies?”
“Well, no, but perhaps in the not distant future, we can try and make do with makeshift ones.”
“I hope it works.”
“We’ll try. We’re going to introduce new plants as well. The galaxy would like us to cost them no money. Short of conveniently dying for them, they want us to be able to feed ourselves.”
“Is that realistic?”
“This planet has been abandoned a number of times. If someone thought it could work, or if it was able to be made to work, they would have.”
“I know how stuck we are, I just sometimes try to convince myself that people can’t be this heartlessly cruel. Then I remember the history of Earth, and reality sets back in.” Mike sighed.
Joe said, “The difference is they wanted to exploit the place to make cash. We want to use it to survive.”
Mike gazed through the heat at the oceans of sand surrounding them. He said, “Could we bundle some of this up and use it for cushions and pillows?”
“Huh?”
“For chairs and beds. Could we find material that would hold sand inside? It would be better than hard slabs we’ve got now.”
“We could try it, I suppose. Would it work?”
“I have no idea. I’ll suggest it to some of the others, see if anyone has any ideas.”
The colony’s alarm bells went off again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Joe said, “That better not be Brux fucking around again.” They ran through the heat to the communications shed.
When they got inside they saw Brux shouting into the microphone. “Help is on the way.”
They rushed to Brux.
“Where’s the problem?” Joe asked.
“The coordinates are in your communicators.” He pointed to the monitor in front of him. “It’s on one of the first digging levels. The ventilation system is working at full capacity so you should be okay.”
Mike and Joe dashed in the direction indicated. Down ramps and through a few tunnels they arrived at the scene. A cloud of dust and debris hung a few feet above their heads and was dissipating rapidly. They could hear screams of agony mixed with wild coughing and choking.
They found Sry and three diggers clustered around a fourth man, Ake, on the ground. He was in his late teens. Thin like almost all of them. He had big zits and long shaggy hair. Ake had seemed
friendly enough the few times Mike spoke to him. He writhed and screamed and choked. Mike and Joe knelt next to Sry on the ground.
“How is he?”
“He needs medical attention.”
“Where’s Gek?” Gek was the only person with medical training in the colony. Compared to a doctor on Earth, he’d had the first day of training of an EMT.
Sry shrugged. Mike tapped his communicator and seconds later got Brux. “Find Gek and get him down here.”
“He’s in the storage room looking for medical supplies.”
“Send men to help him look.”
“Already done,” Brux said.
Ake stopped screaming. Mike put a finger on his carotid artery. The blood still pumped. He saw the chest rise and fall. He had passed out.
Mike and the others knelt next to him. Five minutes later Gek ran up. He had with him what looked like an EMT person’s kit on Earth. He unhitched a wand-like, flashlight thick device.
Complex medical devices such as on Joe’s ship had not been given to them. They would have to make do with portable mechanisms that hikers used on primitive planets. These were like flashlights that gave off a beam that fixed things medically. Mike would have found this hard to believe if he hadn’t witnessed Joe being cured on his ship. That had been a spectacular display. Joe had assured him that the flashlight deals, although primitive according to the standards on Hrrrm, would give better care than the most advanced surgical department on Earth. Mike trusted his husband.
“What took so long?” Sry asked.
“It was hidden under ten tons of other stuff. We were lucky to find them this fast.” He worked while he talked. “Let’s see if this can do anything.”
A blue beam extended from the front. Gek began running it over Ake.
