* * * * *
“My brother, it is done,” P’Dana reported. “We have returned from the Earther world with enough specimens to repopulate a considerable section of R’Ndus IV. If all goes well, these insects will be the salvation of our brethren. We will still need to supply food for a few solar cycles while they propagate; but with extreme rationing, the danger from the famine will soon be behind us.”
H’Juri patted the ground in excitement. “That is good information, indeed, my brother. It is true, then, that a robust species was found? One that could survive the L’Gana virus and reproduce in sufficient quantity?”
P’Dana replied with equal excitement—he was scarcely able to believe it, himself. “Most assuredly so, my brother! It is indeed amazing that the Earthers had something to offer, after all. The species is a most hearty survivor and is even moderately palatable!”
“It is good, my brother; our people are saved,” H’Juri sighed.
“It is indeed, my brother. It is indeed.” PDana closed the transmission and glanced at the insects scurrying around his hind paws and haunches. They had been the only kind that had survived the L’Gana virus while thriving in the alien habitat. He eyed a nice, juicy one, and his proboscis sprang forth. A few moments later, he licked his snout and said, “A moderately tasty species indeed, these K’Ock R’Oches.”
Exodus
Journal Entry I
Mom says I should keep a journal so there's a record for our family history. I guess it's important but I don't know what to put in it. She told me to write whatever I thought should be in it. OK. My name's Thespis and I am the second son of Haon. So, now what do I talk about?
It is a bright, sunny day—too bright and too sunny. Dad says the Ozone layer is depleted and UV rays are getting through. Dad says we'll be going, soon. I hope so; I'm tired of being stuck inside all the time.
Journal Entry II
I heard from Largo, yesterday. He says the underground complex is cool and depressing. There's no UV rays, though, so he's OK. He says he'd like to be going with us instead of being one of the "Chosen Ones.” I think I'd rather be one of the Chosen Ones instead of going to the neighbor planet. Sure, it's safe enough but, jeez, I'm scared. It's supposed to be cold, too. I'll find out soon; Dad says we'll be leaving next week. If we don't, the next window will be too late. Whatever that means.
Journal Entry III
The ship is ready and space is waiting. We'll be gone a long time. Dad says we aren't coming back. He says, if we do, we'll all die. There's twenty other ships going, each one with a different family. There will be fifty-six of us on Dad’s ship, and it will get crowded. And smelly. Dad says I have to be good and not get in anybody's way. What if they get in my way? Dad says I shouldn't get angry because the ship is small and we all have to live together for quite awhile.
I have to say goodbye to my friends, now, because I won't have a chance when we leave tomorrow. We'll be too busy.
Journal Entry IV
We're in space. Getting here was dull. Dad made me stay in the room I'm sharing with my brothers and we all got sick. Being sick in space gets messy. But then we started feeling better. Space is a whole lot of blackness and really bright stars. I stay in my room a lot, studying. I don't like all the emptiness. It reminds me of Largo and my other friends. Especially my other friends, the ones who didn't get chosen. Dad says they'll all be dead soon and there's nothing we can do about it.
Journal Entry V
They did it. Dad warned them not to. Dad's a scientist and knows these things. He explained it to them but they didn't listen. He just shook his head and said nothing for a very long time when he saw the pretty plumes at the poles. Atomics isn't safe to play with. We knew what would happen, though, a big explosion and clouds of radiation and debris. That's what they wanted: clouds. Especially the clouds the poles produced. Vaporized ice and stuff like that. Home is already starting to cloud over.
Maybe they're right and the clouds will keep the UV rays out. I hope so. Lots of people are going to get sick from the fall-out.
Journal Entry VI
Dad's been busy taking readings. He says the planet is already 60 percent cloud-covered and the temperature is rising rapidly. At the rate it's progressing, everybody that wasn't Chosen will be boiling, soon. I hope my friends don't survive that long. I don't want them to suffer. I've stopped going in to watch Dad while he's working, but every time I look at home, I can see it for myself. There isn’t any land anymore. All there is are clouds. Pretty soon, I won't be able to see that, either. We're getting farther away from home all the time and its shrinking.
Journal Entry VII
I can't see home anymore. I'm glad. It didn't look very good the last time I saw it. Dad just walks around frowning and shaking his head. Especially when he's taking readings. He told me yesterday the Chosen Ones are in danger, too. If the temperature doesn't level off soon, the tunnels they're living in will turn into an oven and cook them alive. I avoid Dad as much as I can, now.
Poor Largo.
Journal Entry VIII
We had a funeral today. Three of them. They killed themselves. One of them left a note that said they couldn't live any longer knowing that all the people they knew and loved were being burned alive. Dad made an announcement after that. He said we couldn’t let it stop us from keeping our race alive. He said it was up to us to bear the burden of the race so our children can grow up and create a new one. I guess that means me.
Journal Entry IX
I can see our new home now. No details, it's still too far away. Some of the younger ones are getting excited about it. Me? I keep thinking of Largo and the others who died. Especially the ones who killed themselves. I wish I could join them. But then I think about what Dad said and feel better. Not much, but it's enough. Maybe this new world will be OK, after all. I don't know, though, it's a whole lot colder than ours was. Dad says we'll have to make a few changes in our DNA to allow us to live there. He said a whole lot more about it, but I didn't understand him. I nodded a lot, though, because he kept on talking.
We went to the lab and the doctors injected us with stuff that burns as it goes in. I asked them what it was and they called it "bacteriophages with recombinant DNA sequences" or something like that. It's supposed to fix my genes so I can breathe on the new planet. Breathe and keep warm enough to survive.
Journal Entry X
I can see the planet now. It looks weird. There's a whole bunch of blue that shouldn't be there. It makes me nervous. I like the green and brown, though, because it reminds me of home. It tells me there's land down there. Dad says the blue is water, but I don't believe him. There can't be that much water on a planet. It doesn't make sense. There's a lot of white, too. Dad says it’s cloud-cover, and the reason for the odd color is because the clouds are filled with water, too! How does he know? I'm scared, all over again. We'll be making planet-fall soon.
Journal Entry XI
Mom read my Journal today. She almost didn't give it back. She said I was doing a fine job but not to let my father see it. I don't know why she said that, but I won't show it to him. He doesn't know I'm doing it, anyway. Mom says he'd approve, but if I showed it to him it would upset him. Then she comforted me—or herself, I couldn't figure out which. Maybe both.
We're going to be locked in our rooms again. Dad says it's time for us to begin our descent into the atmosphere and make a landing. It took us a long time to get here. Dad quit taking readings of our home a week ago because it didn't make any difference any more. When I asked him why, he shook his head and sent me away.
Journal Entry XII
We've landed but Dad won't let us out. He says he has to do some tests to make sure our DNA has been adapted to suit the climactic conditions. Or climatic? I don't know, he said it too fast. He asked for volunteers to be introduced to the atmosphere. I volunteered, but he wouldn't let me do it. He said, "Adults, only," and left it at that. I guess it was a good idea because two people died before
they found out what was wrong. A lot of people volunteered after that. The doctors have to shut off some more genes and turn one back on before we can be let outside. I don't know how they did it.
Looking out the window is very strange. The green I saw from space is plants, not sand-cliffs. It scared me, at first, until I realized they were just like big colonies of lichen. Then I could look at them without thinking they were going to eat me. The sun is a lot dimmer, too. It makes it very difficult to see. Dad's going to have to work on that. In the meantime, he's asked for suggestions about a name for our new world. It seems important to him. We have the privilege because we were the first ones to land. The other ships deferred because it was Dad who made the trip possible in the first place.
I saw an animal. At least, that's what I think it was. It looked kind of like us but with too much hair. Its head was too big in the front, too. I laughed when it threw a rock at the ship. Then it ran away. When it came back, it brought others with it, and they ran up to poke the side of the ship with sticks. It was all very funny. They made some noises with their mouths that sounded like, "Urt," and that's what I suggested for the name of the world. Dad said he liked it, and it stuck.
Journal Entry XIII
I get to take my first step on Urt, soon. It's a big, new world, and once we leave the ships, we aren't turning back. Dad says we'll have to move quickly to get far enough away from the ship before the self-destruct mechanism goes off. I don't really understand why we have to blow up the ship but Dad says it’s so we don't make the same mistakes again. He says, if we don't know how to make the technology, we'll forget about it and it will be lost forever. I hope so! I don't want to see my new friends dying from UV rays. Dad laughed when I said that. It was the first time I'd heard him laugh since before we left. He said it would be a long time before that happened because Urt has a lot more atmosphere than our old home had. He says it is rich in Ozone, the stuff that keeps the UV rays out. I'm glad.
Journal Entry XIV
I have to end this journal, now. We're going to leave the ship and it's going to blow up. The ship, not the journal. I'm taking it with me. Dad told us not to bring any technological gizmos, but Mom said I should bring my notepad, anyway. They had an argument about it and she won. She said we needed it. She said it was important for a people to have a history. I didn't know I was writing history. Dad said, all right, if it was history, then I could take it with me. Then he demanded to read it.
I didn't know what to do. Mom had told me not to show it to him, but a son does not disobey his father when he demands something. Especially on a new world and in a ship that's about to blow up. I handed it over and he read it.
It took him a long time and his face never changed once. He just stared at it, and when he was done reading it, he handed it back to me and said, very quietly, "Keep it.” Then he walked away. After she touched my cheek to tell me it was OK, Mom followed him. I guess that means I'm in charge of our history, now. I hope I don't lose it. History's important to a people, just like Mom says. And our new home needs some history, too.
Stranded
“Stranded” is a self-contained excerpt from my novel, The Snodgrass Incident.
Lilith Greenberg tugged gently on the tether attaching her to The Junket’s airlock, and the small shift in momentum propelled her gently toward the little survey ship. As she floated toward it, the braided carbon nanotube strands retracted into the shoulder pouch of her Evac suit. It hissed softly as it slithered around the spool, an unnerving sound that reminded her of an oxygen leak. She cringed and, as she had done a dozen times before on this mission, checked her oxygen level. The O2 pressure was normal, as it had been every other time she had checked it, so she returned her attention to the ship.
The Junket reminded her of a black widow spider clinging to its prey, its eight titanium spikes – four on each side, evenly spaced – clung to the surface of the asteroid as if it were ready to wrap it in a silky cocoon. Between them, the body of the ship bulged with fuel and engine compartments, and at the nub near the end, the steady red pulse of the buoy deployment chamber shimmered against the black backdrop of space. The bulbous bridge, barely large enough for the pilot, tilted slightly forward from the body, its open airlock a gaping maw waiting to swallow her up. It grew steadily larger, and she positioned herself with her thrusters until the laser sight indicated she was ready for the airlock’s cocoon-like embrace. She held her arms out in front of her, braced herself, and waited for the gentle clang of contact.
The airlock’s shape mirrored the Evac suit’s with barely a micron’s difference between them, and they needed to merge perfectly for the seal to be complete. The first few times she had attempted it, she’d recoiled from the impact and had to waste thruster fuel before she had grasped the handholds. From those initial failures she had learned to ignore the contact and focus only on the handholds. She made a routine of it after that: brace herself, watch her handholds, make sure her timing was right when she closed her grip, and let the magnets suck her boot toes into the stirrups. Now it was second nature, and the suit merged seamlessly with the airlock opening with little effort on her part.
“Seal the airlock,” she said, waiting for the spider’s fangs to close around behind her. A moment later, the fangs injected their corrosive venom into the Evac suit’s seal, dissolving the goo that held the two halves of the suit together. A few seconds later, the front half of the Evac suit moved forward six inches and pirouetted inward, allowing her to step out into the small, pressurized bridge.
She floated to the captain’s console and retrieved the data from the suit’s recorders, estimated the angle for the laser broadcast to Mars Base, and transmitted it. “Now to deploy the buoy,” she said as she pressed the command sequence for injecting the device into the asteroid’s nickel-iron core. The buoy was mostly a homing beacon, but it also contained a supply of moles – small machines that would tunnel through the asteroid preparing it for the larger machines that would follow later to harvest the metallic core.
“Well,” she said, “another one down.” She leaned back, and frowned. “Where’s the ping?” she asked, listening for the sharp, resounding ping that had accompanied all of the other buoys. But there was no hammer-on-anvil sound. Instead, there was a dull thump, like a pillow being fluffed. “Odd,” she muttered, “That’s never happened before.” She sat up and pressed the diagnostics icon, scrolled through the options until she found the buoy’s deployment mechanism, and initiated it. The computer rapidly ran through its sequence of sensors and reported the mechanism was functioning properly.
“Strange,” she muttered, frowning. “Maybe I should do a full diagnostic?” She returned to the main diagnostic screen, paused, and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Check the buoy deployment record, first.” She had only begun the sequence when the proximity alarm blared to life and the navigation screen automatically overrode the diagnostics screen. She gasped.
There were two shapes coming toward The Junket. One was small, barely five times the size of the ship, but it was crumbling into smaller pieces, and they were fanning outward like a shotgun blast. The other was the bulk of the asteroid, rotating on its axis, a bulbous outcropping slowly coming into The Junket’s path. A digital countdown poised ominously above the image: 12 seconds.
Her mind whirled. The Junket was surfing the splintering chunks like a wave. The asteroid was on a collision course. No time to turn the engines on. No time to get in the Evac suit. It wouldn’t matter, anyway; if the ship were damaged, she couldn’t repair it. Survey ships didn’t carry spare parts. It would just take longer to die in the Evac suit. “Thrusters!”
Her fingers flew over the controls, initiating one thruster after another, trying to nudge The Junket out of the asteroid’s path. But the ship was sluggish; the anchors were still engaged, and the thrusters were not designed for the added mass. She wasn’t going to make it.
The alarm grew louder and changed pitch – a di
straction she didn’t need – and she did the only thing she could think to do: she rotated the ship until the legs were facing the asteroid and braced for impact. It was a surprisingly soft bump, cushioned by the chunks of asteroid still clinging to the anchors, and she was almost ready to breathe again when debris began clattering against the hull. For a few seconds, it was like hailstones pinging against a flyer’s roof, but then the larger chunks started banging against the underbelly of the ship. She gasped as they jostled the ship around, and her fingers flew over her console as she listened for the soft hiss of an oxygen leak. She took a slow, shallow breath and clung to the computer console as the battering continued for nearly a minute before dwindling to an occasional light rattle. No oxygen leak.
“Damage control,” she said to herself, shutting off the klaxon and studying the warnings dotting the console. The engine seemed undamaged. There was a fuel leak. “Stop that,” she said, sealing off the leaking compartment from the rest of the fuel reservoir. Two anchors had broken off; two others dangled uselessly. A few of the thrusters were nonfunctional. No hull breach.
She switched back to the navigation display, studying the asteroid and the debris cloud clustering around it. The Junket had been batted by the asteroid and was drifting slowly away in a looping arc. She shifted to a larger view to study the debris cloud, used the functional thrusters to stabilize the ship, and repositioned The Junket to a safe distance from the debris but within landing distance of the asteroid.
“Have to go outside,” she said, shaking her head. “Well,” she sighed, “No sense putting it off.” She pushed herself toward the airlock and twisted in the air to back into it. She barely took enough time to make sure her hands and feet were properly placed before she sealed the lock. The sealant oozed into the grooves and the front of the Evac suit shifted into position and squeezed into place around her. After a few seconds, she checked the sensor readings to make sure the sealant had set and said, “Eject.”
The clamps released the back of the Evac suit and peeled away. A moment later, the airlock decompressed and she was ejected a few feet into space. The Evac suit’s thrusters fired automatically, stabilizing her in relation to the ship, and she tugged gently on the taut tether line until she could grasp the outer handholds. She belayed the tether from her shoulder pouch and scampered along the hull as if it were a cliff face, reaching here and there for small outcroppings, until she was under the belly of the ship. Once there, she pushed off and floated away from the ship, belaying the tether line to keep it slack.
“Damn,” she muttered as the extent of the damage became apparent. “Damn and damn again.”
Two of the anchors had been pulled from their sockets, leaving behind bits of wiring and shards of metal clinging to the tortured joints. Two others were dangling, boulders impaled upon them; something would have to be done with those before The Junket would be space worthy. The other four seemed intact. The underside of the hull was riddled with dents and scratches. One of the fuel compartments had a jagged gash, but the fuel had long-since leaked out and frozen into a cloud of fine mist.
“All right,” she said, firing the suit’s thrusters to nudge her closer to one of the damaged anchors. The anchor was as thick as she, four times her height, and had three joints. She pulled herself up to the socket joint connecting it to the ship. She activated a control panel beside it, keyed the sequence to trigger the time-delayed explosive charge, and confirmed the command four times before the two minute countdown finally began. She pushed against the ship’s hull and floated away, giving the anchor plenty of room, and waited. The explosion puffed, and the anchor floated free, its slight momentum moving the anchor slowly away from the ship. If it hovered too close to the hull, it would be a potential hazard, so Lilith cautiously returned to the joint, pressed her back against the hull, and pushed against the anchor’s mass to increase its momentum away from The Junket.
Then she turned to the next damaged anchor.…