Third colony galena chro.., p.1
Third Colony (Galena Chronicles Book 2), page 1
THIRD COLONY
Samuel Best
DEDICATION
For Rowan
GALENA
Twelve Years Ago
Farah set down the last of the crates and wiped sweat from her brow. She tilted her head up toward the bright disc of Phobis, at its zenith in the crystal blue summer sky, soaking in the warmth with closed eyes and a broad, easy grin.
Her six-month journey from Earth had been spent moving from one coldness to another: cold metal ship, cold metal floors, even colder hypergel tank for the long sleep.
We could all do with a little more sweat, she thought. No one ever atrophied in the gel, but you climbed out feeling stiff and unused.
A blast of wind and heat swayed her on her feet. She opened her eyes as the drop shuttle accelerated skyward, having just delivered its last load of supplies to the colonists. The smaller craft would dock with the Starliner Myriad in orbit before the mile-long ship returned to Earth. The Myriad was an older vessel, but it was one of the few capable of surviving the extreme conditions of Rip travel. After it shed the soaked-up radiation from its initial passage to Galena, it would pass back through the wormhole into Earth’s solar system, where it would linger in orbit around Mars while the most recent bombardment of radiation dissipated from its many layered hulls.
Farah’s gaze slowly dropped to the meager camp she and the other colonists had constructed.
Four squat, prefabricated structures sat in a wide circle on a low hill. They were bone white and seemed like light sources unto themselves in the harsh midday sun. Next to each sat a pile of long black crates containing supplies for the coming year — long enough for the twenty colonists to survive until the next batch of arrivals.
Kellan said it would be two hundred, at least, Farah thought. My crew is just the advance team laying the foundation.
She didn’t mind at all. How else would she ever get the chance to be among the first on a new planet?
Hal stepped out of the nearest prefab with a sealed medical crate in his hands. Sweat shined on his bald head, streaming down his red cheeks and into his bushy, silver-streaked brown beard.
“Just gonna stand there with your mouth open?” he asked with a grin as he walked to the dedicated medical prefab. He ducked through the low doorway and popped back out a moment later, wiping his hands on his dark blue coverall, still smiling.
“I was just thinking all this exercise will do us good,” Farah replied casually. “Especially you.”
He let out a loud, “Haw!” and slapped his stomach, which pushed modestly against the fabric of his snug coverall.
“Careful you don’t get sunburned,” he warned half-jokingly as he walked away, down the hill. “This isn’t—”
“—Mars,” she finished at the same time, rolling her eyes. She’d heard it from him and half a dozen others twice as many times since they passed through the Rip.
Hal laughed again as he trudged away, making another trip to the drop site for more crates.
Farah stepped into the relative coolness of the medical prefab to begin organizing equipment. She pulled damp auburn hair back in a ponytail and went through the inventory lists, checking off a year’s worth of supplies for twenty people.
Moses delivered more crates while she worked, then came Daria, Jakob, Arshan, and Hal once more, all sweating as they lugged the heavy containers. He spared her the jests on his second trip, instead telling her they were cooking lunch at the drop site and it would be ready soon.
Farah sighed, in no hurry to endure overdone soy steak. She was not alone in her desperate hope that Galena would yield some savory local fruit or vegetable that would replace the bland and chalky soyflower derivatives most of Earth had been stuck with for decades.
Even a medical professional like her — with two doctorates — couldn’t sustainably afford more than a few heads of lettuce from a Mars hydroponics facility each month. The rest of the time she ate processed soyflower that was supposed to look like meatballs or pasta or — and this was a true abomination — ice cream.
Farah set down her workpad and went back outside, unable to keep herself from the fresh air of a new planet.
The heart of their future colony at the top of the hill offered a panoramic view of the surrounding forest. Ashen trunks without bark stood ramrod straight, like sentinels spaced at near-precise seven-meter intervals. They reached toward the sky with three thick branches, naked as their trunks. Between the trees, dark silver-gray boulders dotted the landscape, stuck into the soft, moist ground at odd angles. Far to the east, two large mountains loomed high, their peaks seeming to fade into the atmosphere.
Galena wasn’t just unlike Earth, Farah realized. It was diametrically opposed to it: blue instead of gray; light instead of dark; filled with hope instead of despair. Water still ran freely here. There was life. That was part of the reason she had left Earth for Mars nearly a decade before. It had meant living in artificial environments while she finished her second doctorate, but Farah preferred recycled canned air to thick blankets of daily smog. Mars boasted living arboretums with plants now extinct on Earth, as well as pedestrian promenades where she could visit a bookstore or buy groceries without worrying about getting mugged on the walk home.
She was just beginning to feel the first pangs of restlessness on the red planet when her application to take part in the first Galena mission was accepted. Kellan McEwan, one of the key project managers, had made the trip to Mars personally to offer her the job as lead medical officer. What else could she say but yes?
Two years later, her dream had become reality.
Despite her reluctance to chew on yet another soy patty, Farah followed her nose (at the behest of her growling stomach) to the small field where the shuttle had dropped off an impressive pyramid of supply crates. Next to the pyramid, most of the other colonists sat or stood in a wide circle talking to those they had most connected with before arriving on this new world.
Smoke rose from a solar grill as Devan slapped at the charred soy steaks with his spatula and worked what magic he could to make them palatable. He wore a dirty white apron and a limp chef’s hat, and loudly sang an off-key song in French while flames danced around his spatula.
“I’m starting to have second thoughts about our choice of chef,” said Martine as she walked over to Farah.
“To his credit, he does try very hard,” Farah replied.
Martine’s short, raven-black hair was slicked back with sweat. She was a member of the security detail, and her crew had been trudging through the woods since the first shuttle landed, scouting their surroundings.
“Find anything out there?” asked Farah.
“Trees and rocks,” Martine answered. “Freshwater springs, though I don’t know how it’s not tainted with all this lead sulfide.” She gestured to a nearby silver-gray boulder. “We tested it.”
“I’d forgotten what fresh water tasted like. No beasties?”
“Seems like Kellan told the truth, so long as we stay out of the oceans.”
“Jeff says we can’t trust him.”
Martine squeezed Farah’s shoulder. “I’m glad you have such a good friend to look out for you, but I hope he’s wrong.” She walked over to talk to Hassan, another member of the security team.
Devan belted out a verse and flipped a soy steak in the air. It bounced off the side of his spatula and spun to the ground. Without missing a beat, he scooped it up and bit into it, letting it hang from his mouth while he continued humming and cooking.
Hal and his tall, thin wife Elaine climbed to the top of the pyramid, using the stacked boxes like wide steps, and hoisted the top-most crate between them. The other colonists gathered round as husband and wife descended and dropped the crate on the soft ground. Hal opened it to a chorus of appreciation. Three bottles of whiskey appeared, along with cups, which were quickly filled and distributed.
Farah was handed a cup half-full. She joined the others in a toast to their new home, and sat on the warm ground to sip the whiskey and await her soy steak.
The sky had been dark for hours by the time she finally crawled into her canvas tent. Proper housing structures would arrive on the next shipment in a year’s time. Until then, the colonists were roughing it.
Farah closed her eyes, and sleep enveloped her quickly.
She awoke in the middle of the night. Someone snored softly from a neighboring tent. Farah emerged from her own slowly, stretching her back and looking up at the stars.
The air had cooled only slightly after Phobis dropped below the horizon. Standing next to her tent in shorts and thin t-shirt, she wasn’t the least bit cold.
Twin nebulae painted the western night sky, stretching long purplish fingers across the glittering firmament. The moon wasn’t up, but the landscape glowed in the starlight all the same. Nearby, she heard the trickling of a stream — but no insects. There had been none on Mars, either, but she would often fall asleep to a recording of Earth’s extinct rainforests and all of their noisy inhabitants.
Permanent electricity would eventually come to the colony, she knew, yet it wasn’t something that was promised in the beginning. Once more colonists arrived, hydroelectric dams would be installed.
Farah’s tent was huddled near the others on the side of the low hill. She climbed the short distance to the top and stood beside the medical prefab. On an impulse, she scrambled up the side of the squat building to stand on its roof as a warm, gentle bree
A stone clacked softly nearby. Beyond a flat patch of mossy ground at the base of the hill, she spotted Jarod near a tree, kicking at the dirt. His dark blue coverall blended into the night, but his pale white hands and bald head glowed in the starlight. He was on sentry duty that night, and he was always turning over stones in a seemingly futile hunt for insects. None had been seen since their arrival.
Jarod kicked another stone and continued on, following a wide circuit around the hill. A few moments later, he thought better of it, sat with his back against a tree, crossed his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes.
Farah sighed. She would wake him with the tip of her boot just as soon as she was done enjoying the peace and quiet.
She spied the stream she had heard near her tent, babbling calmly over mossy rocks as it wove a thin path into the forest. The stream seemed to end at a low cliff rising no more than a meter off the ground. Extending into the foreseeable distance beyond the short cliff wall, the ground had changed while Farah slept. It was supposed to be soft and moist — organic, like what surrounded the prefabricated building on which she stood.
Now it was an endless plateau of hard geometric facets that reflected the starlight in small, flat hexagons depending on how they were angled.
Farah’s brow knit in confusion when the shin-high cliff wall moved, as if the plateau of land behind it were sliding like a rigid sheet across Galena’s surface. The cliff wall crept closer to the hill, swallowing up a few more inches of the stream.
An animal the size of her lunch plate separated itself from the mass and skittered sideways like a crab across the stream on a blur of segmented legs. The six edges of its shell formed a perfect hexagon. It rejoined the moving cliff wall a few meters down, locking into place, linking its geometric top shell with the others that formed the unbroken landmass steadily crawling toward the camp.
“Martine,” Farah whispered, her voice catching in her throat. “Hal. Jarod.”
She strained to cry out, but her windpipe seemed no wider than a pin.
A crack split the approaching cliff wall, extending back like a fissure. The landmass parted as thousands upon thousands of hexagon-shelled organisms flowed around the low hill as if they were water moving past a river boulder…
…except this was happening in slow motion. Farah could see their chitinous legs churning under their great linked shell as they surrounded the meager colony.
“MARTINE!” Farah shrieked, finding her voice at last.
A scream pierced the night air in response. She turned in time to catch a glimpse of Jarod’s pale white hand before he was pulled beneath the dark edge of the moving landmass.
Hal fell out of his tent blindly onto the wet ground, canvas flapping behind him. He stumbled up the hill at the sound of her voice, rubbing sleep from his eyes. Others were not so quick, but they emerged from their tents one by one to squint into the night.
Martine and Devan emerged half-dressed from another prefab.
“What?” she asked breathlessly. “What is it?”
Farah could only point down the hill. Martine climbed atop the medical prefab with her while Devan and Hal spoke quietly below.
“I don’t see—” Martine said before stopping short. She spun in place to look behind her. “It’s surrounding the hill.”
Farah turned slowly. The mass of oversized crabs had come back together on the opposite side of the hill, isolating the colonists on an island surrounded by an ocean of alien organisms.
“What is it?!” Hal shouted. Elaine ran to him and they held each other tightly.
The mass of crabs slowly crawled up the hill, shrinking the area of uncovered land inch by inch.
“Get everyone out of the tents!” Martine yelled as she jumped down and ran into a prefab.
“They’re out!” someone called back.
The remaining colonists scrambled up the hill and clustered together between the prefabs. Farah looked down at them helplessly, unable to think of what to say.
Martine reappeared with a weapon in her hands — a blend of metal rifle and grappling hook. An electric hum filled the air as she marched down the hill, toward the approaching line of hexagonal crabs.
She braced the weapon against her waist. An arc of electricity exploded from the grappling hook and scoured the conjoined shells like a lightning whip. The arc split into several electric snakes that crawled and leapt across the shells, frying the organisms beneath and sending up swirls of black smoke.
The ones with blackened shells sank lower and were trampled over by their neighbors as the mass moved to fill in the gaps.
Martine let loose another arc to a similar result. On her third squeeze of the trigger, the weapon fizzled. She hurled it onto the continent of hard shells with a curse and retreated to join the others.
“On top!” Hal yelled as he charged the approaching line.
Elaine screamed at him to come back as he leaped into the air. Hal cleared the edge of the shells and landed firmly on two feet, running like he was on solid ground. There was a brief moment when he turned back to look at Elaine, and he opened his mouth to speak — and then the shells separated beneath him. His legs kicked briefly in midair as he fell into the pit. Elaine’s screams cut off abruptly as the shells came back together, swallowing the cries of her husband.
Farah was alone atop the medical prefab. Between her own quick breaths, the churning movement of the crab legs was a constant whisper. She hugged herself as the open circle of ground crowning the hill shrank, and shrank.
The cliff wall rose around them, up and up and up it went, as if someone was lifting a blanket to smother the hill — only the underside of this blanket was covered with a billion scrabbling, clawing segmented limbs, each as long as a human forearm.
“Everyone get inside!” Martine shouted, but Farah barely heard. She was frozen in place like most of the other colonists, staring at the rising curtain of long crustacean legs that surrounded them.
The crabs came together overhead, their shells interlocking seamlessly to blot out the stars. As the solid blanket of whispering legs lowered slowly onto Farah and the others, someone screamed — but not her.
I won’t scream, she promised herself as she stood paralyzed, quaking in the darkness. I won’t I won’t I—
The sharp tip of a leg scratched her shoulder, and she broke her promise.
KELLAN
The six shipyards orbiting Earth were built by Diamond Aerospace under contract with the United States Government in anticipation of a Great Human Expansion throughout the cosmos. Starliners and other massive ships of the void could not be launched from the surface of our little blue-green planet — and one couldn’t ferry more than a dozen souls on the smaller freighters — so orbital infrastructure took top priority for “the future”. As the top emerging private space company of its age, Diamond Aerospace was granted the contract.
The shipyards were massive, hollow egg-shaped containers, slightly squeezed in the middle.
It was inside these shipyards that the crafts were built which would take humans through the Rip — a hole in the fabric of space that plunked them down a short journey away from a habitable planet: Galena.
Kellan McEwan’s eyes swept over the long lines of the Renata. The elongated vessel dominated the center of the shipyard. Smaller than a gargantuan starliner, but faster to build, its two bell-shaped engines would provide enough thrust to make the trip to Galena in just under seven months. As long as the ship could handle the stresses of Rip travel and could get him and his cargo to the other world, Kellan didn’t care if it was no bigger than a school bus.
He floated weightlessly, keeping a firm grip on the moving handrail as it pulled him along a track toward the boarding station. The long viewing hallway ringed the interior circumference of the shipyard, connecting the many offices, dormitories, and cafeterias inside the thick walls of the shell.
Kellan had been waiting eight years for the completion of the next Rip-capable starship. Ever since the Halcyon was lost on Galena, nothing but drones had traveled through the wormhole. Without the anemic yet vital tourist income from rich elites sightseeing through the Rip, there was no hope of building another ship. Kellan had failed to convince his government superiors that Galena was a project worth funneling hundreds of billions of much-needed dollars into — even with rock-solid proof from probe satellite imagery showing that some of the colonists had survived.
