Third Rock

by S E T Ferguson

  “This is a painful precaution. And what if the Civitians do find us? It seems to me that it isn’t going to do us any good to have our sole mode of transportation miles from where we are. For what it is worth, I’d like to be a short ride away from Rediviva and transport the hell out of this shithole of a solar system.”

  Iris didn’t reply, but Heming didn’t push the issue. Vlad knew Heming’s concerns were valid, and Iris did as well.

  Then again, Heming didn’t have to be there. Someone had needed to stay on Rediviva to attend to—and watch—Quince, who was still mending. Heming could have volunteered to do that with Mimi, but he had been quick to say that was the last thing he wanted to do. Fawn had been the one to volunteer for that task.

  As for Quince, it was clear that whatever was causing the Columbinians to heal quickly, the same thing did not heal the Civitian they now had as part of their little group.

  Someone really, really needed to talk to Iris about this.

  Mimi was still on Rediviva as well, more of an accessory to what they were doing than an actual participant. If they ever did reach Earth, Mimi’s knowledge, no matter how old it was, could prove invaluable. Vlad didn’t begrudge her presence with them, at least any more so than he did anyone else’s. She could also help Fawn with Quince, should something go wrong. Not that the two women would be able to do much against the much larger man if he decided to go after them.

  Bringing up the rear of their group, Beryl seemed unusually quiet. Vlad knew it was about her father—to see him again when they arrived at Libertas must have been both exhilarating and nerve-wracking, even with their few minutes of communication giving her a chance to see he was still alive. Beryl had pushed herself these last few years in part to please the father she never thought she would see again, and Vlad knew that at least some part of her worried that what she had done would not be enough to please Whit.

  Everything Vlad knew about Whit suggested he could never be disappointed in Beryl, but it was one thing to believe that, and another thing to get someone else to believe it. Particularly someone like Beryl, whose whole identity seemed to be inextricably entwined with her father’s approval of her work.

  The group had hiked about a mile from where they had left the Bird when the jungle started to thin around them, either as if it was nearing its end or someone had deliberately worked to keep the underbrush down.

  It actually reminded Vlad of the area around the town on Columbina, where the jungle thinned as you approached town. Or of the area around Whit’s compound.

  Iris led them, doing a better job of keeping the branches she was pushing out of her way from hitting Vlad than Vlad was doing at the same job with Heming. Pushing through a large bush, Vlad saw a rock formation covered in slinking vines appear in front of them, seeming to block the path they had been following.

  Vlad had seen old pictures of jungle ruins on Earth—ancient civilizations who built incredible pyramids and temples, only to have them reclaimed by the forest once those who built and maintained them died or were driven away. This looked like that, only beneath the vines were not purpose-built buildings, but an intricate rock formation. The rock rose above them, like something out of a dream. It was almost cliff-like, except instead of heading straight up like a cliff, it rose slowly like the side of a gradually rising pyramid.

  Then, something above his head and to his right caught Vlad’s eye. It was just a slight movement, but years of watching for the slight movements in the woods that might indicate an impending Vos attack had conditioned Vlad to see even the smallest of unexpected movements. It looked to be something near the top of the rock cliffs.

  “Did you see that?” Beryl asked. Apparently, Vlad had not been the only one who saw it.

  “I did,” Vlad replied. Iris nodded, too.

  “What do you think it was?”

  “Probably yet another something that could kill us,” Heming suggested. “We should definitely check it out.”

  “Good idea,” Beryl replied.

  “I was being facetious.”

  “No, Heming, it’s a good idea,” Iris said. “The mines should be close now. It might have been a drone or something, just patrolling.”

  “Because that’s always what you see when you’re in a jungle on a planet with a single human inhabitant. A drone. You know, instead of, say, a Vos. Or a Caterkiller. Or Civitians who want to kill you. Or whatever those giant fences back at the compound are meant to keep out,” Heming added, but Beryl was already clambering up the rocks and ignoring his legitimate worries.

  “Great,” Heming said. “Now I look bad if I don’t crawl up after her.”

  Vlad watched as Heming followed Beryl, although he was not anywhere near as fast as her. Years spent in the woods had honed Beryl’s ability to climb and scramble through the woods, Camp scrambling after her. At least in this instance, there wasn’t anything crashing through the woods behind them and forcing them to climb.

  Vlad easily walked and pulled himself up the cliff, using the vines to help pull himself up when faced with any particularly steep portion of the climb. Iris followed, now the last one heading up toward the movement.

  Behind him, Vlad heard Iris swear, apparently not enjoying the scramble up the rocks. Vlad smiled at her reluctance. It felt like nothing so much as all the time they had spent in the woods on Columbina. Iris was always suggesting she needed to improve her climbing ability and yet she never did.

  As he got to the top of the vine-covered rocks, Vlad climbed out on to what looked to be a plateau. The vines that had covered the sides of the rocks had stopped at the top of the rising rocks, as had the tops of the trees, making the plateau’s ground level the same height as the tops of the trees.

  The first thing Vlad noticed about the plateau was that the view from up there was incredible.

  A mountain range rose up in the distance, while in the opposite direction one of the planet’s giant lakes spread across the horizon. A few, similar plateaus were nearby, but the view was otherwise entirely forests broken only by an occasional stream or river where the woods thinned.

  Vlad was so enamored with the view that he didn’t immediately see that they had found what had caused the movement.

  They were not alone on the plateau.

  There was another person.

  And, another dog.

  The new person was tall and stood near the center of the plateau, looking as if he had been waiting for them. The dog stood by his side, watching the group of people and other dog who had just clambered up the rocks to find them.

  It had been years since Vlad had seen him in person, but the man standing with them did not appear to have changed at all.

  As in, he looked not a day older than he had when Vlad had last seen him, over a decade earlier.

  The dog didn’t look any older, either

  Beryl stood apart from the man, just staring at him and his dog in front of her and her own dog.

  Vlad saw she was crying.

  No one moved from where they stood.

  No one seemed to know what you did in this sort of situation.

  Finally, it was the dogs who broke the awkward staring contest.

  Camp’s wagging tail reached a frantic speed as he realized who was standing in front of him. Then, without warning, the dog charged ahead. Foregoing the typical dog greeting, Camp jumped all over the dog standing next to the man, greeting it in the way dogs who knew each other well would greet each other, no sniffing formalities required.

  To Vlad, the two dogs looked exactly like what they were—long-separated companions who had thought they would never see each other again.

  The happy dogs seemed to awake something in the man standing in front of them. He covered the few steps in between himself and Beryl faster than Vlad would have thought possible and then enveloped her in a hug.

  It took Beryl another moment to wrap her own arms around her father, but when she did, she looked as happy as Vlad had ever seen her.

&nb
sp; Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Whit led Beryl and the rest of them back to the bottom of the rock formation, on the opposite side up which they had climbed.

  They walked in silence, as if there wasn’t anything to say. Or maybe it was that there was so much to say, no one knew where to start.

  Beryl wiped several tears from her eyes as they reached the bottom of the rocks.

  She finally willed the tears to stop.

  Still silent, Whit led them a few feet around the base of the rock and then Beryl saw where they were headed—a large, metal door almost the same color as the rocks behind it had been built into the rocks, almost as if it had been put there naturally, millions of years earlier.

  The only two things that immediately gave the door away as something modern were the smallest of sensors above its frame and a small touch pad to its right side. If you didn’t see either of those, you would never know that the door was anything but ancient.

  Whit walked to within a few feet of the door, pausing as it automatically opened toward them. Then he stood back and let them all enter ahead of him.

  Beryl entered the hallway first, and she nearly stopped as soon as she passed through the doorway, mesmerized by what she saw around her.

  The walls of the hallway in which she found herself were some sort of stone, hewn and smoothed to look like marble. Through the dark rock ran strands of light blue, illuminated by bright white lights that made the blue and clear crystals glimmer and shine.

  The walls weren’t marble or stone, Beryl realized.

  They were made of gemstones.

  Aquamarine.

  Beryl touched one of the strands of light blue, then looked at her wrist, where the same stones curled around her wrist in the bracelet her father had given her.

  “How long did it take you to figure it out?” Whit said, coming through the door last. It shut with a dull thud behind them, but the lighting in the hallway tunnel heading slowly down to a set of stairs almost seemed brighter with the door shut.

  Beryl knew exactly what her father was asking about without any additional comment—the riddle.

  “Longer than it should have,” Beryl replied.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be easy,” Whit said, passing all of them and heading down the hallway toward the stairs. As none of the Columbinians, including Iris, seemed in a hurry to move, it was easy for him to sneak by in the wide hallway. Poydras scampered ahead of Whit, seeming to know where they were headed without being told. Camp looked around and then followed his mother, unimpressed by the hallway, unlike the rest of everyone who had come from Columbina. “If it had been easy, you would have been here before I got here yesterday. It’s a long walk. Even for me.”

  Beryl moved down the hallway, toward a set of stairs that looked to lead several stories underground. There were so many things to talk about, but still the group followed Whit silently. Before, there had been too much to talk about to start talking.

  Now, the hallway around them was so incredible, no one could do anything but stare.

  The stairs descended, their own risers made of the same gemstones, before flattening out into a large, domed room. The room was furnished as if it was a home, with couches situated as if someone was planning to have a group of family or friends over. To the side, a kitchen area took up part of the domed room. Several open arches off of the room led elsewhere.

  Beryl wondered if what was down the other hallways could be anywhere near as incredible as the cave itself.

  Like the hallway before it, the room was bright and almost airy despite being underground. It was like the blue-streaked walls were the sky, illuminating the ground below.

  “Do you live here?” Beryl heard herself ask.

  “Part of the time,” Whit said, leading them to the couches. It was as if, despite being the only person who lived on the planet, he had been expecting them or some other group of visitors at any moment. “Here and at the farming compound. My labs and computing capabilities are almost all here. Most everything that I can keep above-ground is there, though I do have rather extensive farming capabilities here. What I have here is typically reserved for plant experimentation, though. It’s a far more controlled environment underground. There are far too many variables above-ground for most of my plant experiments.”

  A group of four drones flew out of one of the open archways, heading straight for another opening. Whit didn’t even seem to notice what must have been a regular occurrence in the cave system.

  Beryl didn’t know what to do. This was it—everything they had wanted and been attempting to do. They had found her father, who she hadn’t seen in over a decade. They had defeated the Civitians. They had everything they wanted from Libertas.

  And that was when the alarm went off.

  Chapter Forty

  “Are you shitting me?” Oly said as soon as she saw it.

  The Columbinians’ Bird sat in a clearing. They had clearly not even tried to hide the thing. It was obvious the Columbinians thought they had outwitted the Civitians and were never going to see them again.

  “Those assholes.” Oly shook her head. “I can’t believe they thought we wouldn’t get here.”

  “Put the Bird down next to the other one.” The order came out of Wolf’s mouth and the pilot set the ship down near the Columbinian’s Bird.

  The group was uncharacteristically silent and had been since getting off of the island. Wolf had been losing control of the group—they all knew that. But since the island, he had become the Wolf of old.

  He was their leader again.

  No one questioned what they were doing. No one needed to chat with each other. No one even wanted to.

  Oly felt a certain confidence she had started to lose return as soon as Wolf had cut the ropes from her hand.

  Now, she had no doubt of what they were about to do: they were going to find Whit.

  And she was going to kill Beryl.

  *

  “Is there a back door out of here?” Beryl asked. There was no way they were going to go leave the same way they had come in. At least, not with the Civitians out there.

  “There is. Follow me,” Whit headed to the far side of the room, apparently accepting without question that the best idea was to get out of the complex as soon as possible.

  Beryl followed her father through one of the arched doorways, with everyone else following behind them. The hallway into which they now entered was lined not with the aquamarines, but with glass walls. On either side of them, two giant rooms—even larger than the one through which they had just walked—housed rows upon rows of plants, from small, vegetable-like vines to trees reaching nearly to the curved ceiling of the domed room. The room on the other side appeared to be the mirror image, except with different plants lining the floors and reaching toward the lights of the ceiling. Drones flew about both rooms, tending the plants.

  Beryl couldn’t help but slow down as they passed the garden rooms, unable to help herself from gazing at the incredible variety of plant-life. They had indoor growing rooms at the Caves back on Columbina, but these growing rooms were something else entirely. On Columbina, the rooms were devoted to food. Here, there were a huge variety of plants. The rooms seemed to be a sort of incubator of life. Just looking at each of the plants could occupy Beryl’s life for weeks, she was sure.

  “You’ve been busy,” Iris said.

  “I guess this is what happens when you don’t have any TV or movies to distract you from getting things done.” Whit joked.

  “This is incredible.” Even knowing they needed to move, Beryl wanted to stop.

  Then she saw the flowers.

  Rows upon rows of them, sitting at the far end of the room. Huge stalks of sunflower-like purple flowers. Vines snaking across the ground and covered in hot pink blossoms. Giant yellow tulip-looking plants. Miniature petunia-like blooms on thin stalks.

  It was like nothing Beryl had ever imagined, let alone seen.

  “The flowers.” Beryl said, a
nd she finally stopped to gaze on them. If the blue running through the walls was incredible, the flowers were even better. “Mom would have loved them.”

  Whit stopped then, turning back around. Everyone else stopped as well, though Beryl saw that they were, unlike her, still antsy to keep moving.

  “She really would have,” Whit moved to Beryl’s side, and put his hand on her shoulder. “I never got to give her any.”

  “I did.” Beryl thought back to the last flower she had found for her mother. It had been an orchid-like yellow flower she had picked that fateful day—the day the Earth AI appeared in the Columbinian solar system. “Columbina has flowers. Not like this, but they are beautiful. Like orchids.”

  Someday, Beryl would tell her father about the flowers she had brought to her mother, picked and dug up because she knew her exiled father had always wanted to live somewhere he could give flowers to her mother. When he couldn’t do that, she had done it for him.

  “I would love to see them.”

  “You can. We have some on Rediviva.” Beryl had made sure they brought some of the native flowers on the ship, where they grew in some of the park-like parts of the ship. One of those was that flower Beryl had plucked off of a tree for her mother on that day that was still only a few months in their past.

  “I hate to interrupt this father-daughter moment, but we need to get moving before the Civitians discover the back door to this place,” Iris said.

  Whit took his hand from Beryl’s shoulder and started moving again, rolling his eyes at his best friend. “Oh, give me a break, Iris. You don’t hate to interrupt.”

  Beryl turned to see Iris smiling. “You’re right. I don’t hate to interrupt.” Iris paused a moment before speaking again. “It’s good to have you back, Whit.”

  *

  If Vlad had guessed, he would have guessed they had walked at least half a mile underground before they reached a second door like the one through which they had originally entered. The complex was absolutely enormous, and he knew they had likely only seen a portion of it.