Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also By Woodbridge Press

  Newsletter

  Melt (Felix R. Savage)

  Knowledge at Any Cost (Jasper T. Scott)

  The Unsung Heroes of Sublevel 12 (Amy DuBoff)

  The Failsafe (Ian Whates)

  Fleeing the Fire (Ralph Kern)

  The Colony of Imago (Scott Bartlett)

  Spiderfall (Scott Moon)

  Colony: Earth (Robert M. Campbell)

  Howl (Scarlett R. Algee)

  A Time and a Space (Nathan Hystad)

  The Light of Distant Earth (Tim C. Taylor)

  A Change of Plans (Dennis E. Taylor)

  Explorations Series

  Explorations: Colony

  A Nathan Hystad Anthology

  No Part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or means without the written prior permission of the copyright holders below, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

  The stories in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead is coincidental.

  “Explorations: Colony” Copyright © 2017 by Nathan Hystad

  “Melt” Copyright © 2017 by Felix R Savage. Used by permission of the author.

  “Knowledge at any Cost” Copyright © 2017 by Jasper T Scott. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Unsung Heroes of Sublevel 12” Copyright © 2017 by Amy DuBoff. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Failsafe” Copyright © 2017 by Ian Whates. Used by permission of the author.

  “Fleeing the Fire” Copyright © 2017 by Ralph Kern. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Colony of Imago” Copyright © 2017 by Scott Bartlett. Used by permission of the author.

  “Spiderfall” Copyright © 2017 by Scott Moon. Used by permission of the author.

  “Colony: Earth” Copyright © 2017 by Robert M. Campbell. Used by permission of the author.

  “Howl” Copyright © 2017 by Scarlett R. Algee. Used by permission of the author.

  “A Time and a Space” Copyright © 2017 by Nathan Hystad. Used by permission of the author.

  “The Light of Distant Earth” Copyright © 2017 by Tim C. Taylor. Used by permission of the author.

  “A Change of Plans” Copyright © 2017 by Dennis E. Taylor. Used by permission of the author.

  All other Explorations universe is Copyright © Woodbridge Press and Nathan Hystad

  Cover Illustration © Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Series Editor: Nathan Hystad

  Copy Edited by Scarlett R. Algee

  Also By Woodbridge Press

  Explorations: Through the Wormhole

  Explorations: First Contact

  Explorations: War

  Journeys

  Heart Blade

  The Haunting of Lake Manor Hotel

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  Melt

  By Felix R. Savage

  The colonists never knew where they had come to. They’d been selected by lottery, packed into transport vessels, and put to sleep. Their destination was kept a secret. When they staggered off the transports, many of them assumed they must have arrived at some planet many light years from Earth, where the remnants of the human race could start to build new lives.

  “No,” Gavin Steed said. “This is Enceladus.”

  “Enseh … what?”

  Selected by lottery. Never left Earth before. All they knew about outer space was that a war had raged out here, hopefully ending with the destruction of Empyrean … and the impending destruction of Earth.

  “Enceladus,” Gavin repeated patiently. “It’s the sixth-largest moon of Saturn.”

  He stood on the ice, watching the new arrivals file from the transports to the crawler. The crawler was a conveyor belt on treads that extended from the landing zone to the transit camp. The colonists climbed onto it and stood huddled like so many widgets on an assembly line. 13,402 souls in this group. Refueling vehicles and maintenance robots swarmed around the mighty transports, prepping them for a fast turnaround, so they could head back to Earth and pluck more people out of hell. You thought war was a logistical nightmare? Saving humanity was worse.

  Gavin should know. He was the manager of Transit Camp 13. He’d worked in electrical systems design for the FCF during the war, so he had some relevant experience, but he’d come by his position the same way as everyone else here: lottery winner. He’d be leaving on the very last colony ship to depart the solar system. Until then, he had the delightful responsibility of managing a 100,000-person refugee camp on the ice of -200° C Enceladus.

  Another new arrival strayed over to ask him a question. “What’s that up there?” That’s what Gavin was here for: a human presence amidst the impersonal machinery of cattle-class space travel. This was one of the most commonly asked questions. The only unusual thing was that this questioner was about four feet tall. The visor of his or her mass-produced EVA suit reflected the swarm of lights overhead.

  “That’s the shipyard,” Gavin said. “It’s all done in orbit. They’re building the ship that will take you to your new home.”

  “I thought this was our new home.”

  The child looked around. Gavin saw it through his eyes. Ice, ice, everywhere, chewed up by crawler treads, melted by exhaust blooms and refrozen in dirty slicks. Saturn peeked over the horizon to the east. The shielded domes of Transit Camp 13 blistered the western skyline. The tower-like transports panted fiery wisps of gas over the ice. Gavin’s suit radio crackled with a low-volume stream of banter among the surface personnel. A less homey place could scarcely be imagined.

  “How old are you?” Gavin said to the child in front of him. Unaccompanied kids were the toughest to deal with. This one carried a large metal suitcase that would have been impossible for him to drag on Earth, but weighed next to nothing here.

  “I’m ten. My name’s Quinn. I’m from San Francisco. What’s that?”

  Now the child was pointing at the most terrible detail of the scene: the red dot floating in the black sky above the roofs of the camp.

  “That’s the sun,” Gavin said. Sol was still the brightest source of light in the sky, but so much dimmer than it should have been. “It’s expanding into a red giant. In another few years, its outer rim will scorch Earth. But by then we’ll all be far away.”

  “We’re already far away,” Quinn said.

  “You’d better get on the crawler, buddy. There’s a caregiver who will meet you at the camp. She’ll show you where you can sleep. We’ve got virtual reality games, a gym, classes, lots of things for you to do.”

  “Games,” Quinn said, with the world-weary intonation of a war veteran. “OK.” He trailed away to the crawler, leaving Gavin feeling bad for trying to make the end of the world sound like fun.

  *

  There was nothing for the colonists to do except wait for their number to come up. They vegetated in their dormitories, immersed in games and simulations intended to prepare them for their new lives in some distant star system.

  Meanwhile, Gavin and his staff were rushed off their feet 24 hours a day. If it wasn�
��t the plumbing, it was a fight breaking out in the mess hall. Or excess humidity building up in the air. Or a power outage in one of the domes.

  Power—Gavin’s specialty, and the key to humanity’s survival on Enceladus. The dying sun could not provide them with solar power. Solar panels would have been ineffective this far out, even in the old days. With the orbital shipyard consuming every erg of power from the captive singularities, the transit camps on the surface relied on hydrothermal energy sucked up from the ocean deep below Enceladus’ south pole.

  Once thought to be a mere iceball, this little moon concealed a treasure under its frozen surface: a briny sea six miles deep. Of course, to get to the water, you had to drill down through 20 miles of ice. They had done that, and now a transit tube ran alongside the pipes and cables that carried water and electricity up to the miserable millions on the surface.

  Gavin rode down in the transit tube as often as one of the thermoelectric converters broke, which was a couple of times a week. He usually took some of the colonists with him. It was good technical training for them, combined with a little adventure. Something to take their minds off everything they’d left behind.

  The colonists gathered at the portholes of the capsule as it plunged down from ice into liquid water. If they expected to see anything apart from water out there, they would be disappointed. Despite the presence of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, life had never gotten a start on Enceladus. The sea was as dead as a newly sterilized aquarium. What Gavin wanted them to see was something both more, and less, exciting than imaginary extraterrestrial life-forms.

  “Wherever we go, we can make a home for ourselves,” he said. “I know some of you have been wondering where you’ll end up. Not all the colony planets are guaranteed to be as hospitable as Earth used to be. But look at this.”

  They were nearing the ocean floor. The capsule’s swift plunge down the cable slowed. Now there was something to see out of the portholes. Fingers of light fanned through the water.

  “There are people living on the bottom of the ocean on Enceladus.” He paused before delivering his punchline. “Folks, wherever you wind up, I guarantee it’s not gonna be this bad.”

  Some of them laughed. All of them, he hoped, got the point: if human beings could survive down here, they could survive anywhere. So don’t worry. Be happy. At least you’ll soon be leaving this frozen hell.

  They straggled out of the capsule, through the dock, and into the power station. It wasn’t actually hellish at all. The power station squatted like a huge yellow crab over a thermal vent, sucking up the boiling water that seeped through cracks from the moon’s active interior, and using the heat differential to drive turbines for power generation. The throbbing of the turbines pervaded the station like a heartbeat. There was a large common room on the top level, ringed with thick windows, where you could see bubbles of hydrogen gas rising through the water.

  The colonists wandered around the common room, checking out the displays and exhibits that the team had built to explain their work. Gavin went down to the engineering level.

  “Here are your spares,” he said, handing over a satchel of parts to Jimmy Khan, the chief engineer. “Brought you some visitors today, too. Want to go up and say a few words?”

  “I better fix that converter first.”

  They clambered into the labyrinth of condensers, evaporators, and heat exchange pipes.

  “Heard you got your number,” Jimmy said, lying on his back, prying out a fried motherboard.

  “Yeah.” It had been a surprise. Gavin had assumed he would be staying on until the last colonist had departed from Transit Camp 13. But there was a high turnover among the staff as well as the clientele. Maybe the Transit Authority thought that after five years on the job, Gavin was burning out. “I’ll be going to 15 Monocerotis in the Cone Nebula.”

  “Hey. Congratulations. Want to trade places?”

  “Nah,” Gavin said. “I’ll just think of you while I’m lying on the beach, drinking margaritas.”

  “Don’t make me throw you outta the lock. You can practice your swimming right now, how’s about it?”

  “Did I mention 15 Monocerotis is supposed to have ski slopes, too? Yeah, baby, we’ll be living in paradise.”

  Despite what he said, Gavin couldn’t make himself feel much enthusiasm for starting a new life on 15 Monocerotis. Sure, it sounded like a plum destination. It was just that beaches and ski slopes wouldn’t mean much to him if he couldn’t share them with Margaret.

  Back in Jimmy’s office, they looked at the monitoring screens. “Oh Gawd,” Jimmy said. “Kids. Why do you do this to me?”

  In the common room, the adults had settled down to eat the snacks they’d brought with them. The children were hurtling around, playing tag.

  Gavin had actually brought the group of children as an excuse to bring Quinn, whom he had been keeping an eye on. The boy had performed very well on the aptitude tests dressed up to look like games, and Gavin had thought he’d benefit from the trip.

  “This one kid,” he said. He couldn’t see Quinn on the monitoring screens right now. It figured he wouldn’t be playing a childish game like tag. “They ought to be sending him to 15 Monocerotis, instead of me. Sharp as a tack.”

  Jimmy glanced at him. “You didn’t have kids, did you?”

  Gavin shook his head. He and Margaret had tried without luck to start a family, and then the war had wrenched them apart. She’d served in the Fifteenth Battle Group. Died on the Saratoga. Just as well they had never succeeded in having children.

  “I had two,” Jimmy said.

  The things you didn’t know about people: the things people didn’t talk about. Everyone was traumatized, trying to forget the past.

  Looked like Jimmy didn’t want to talk about the past now, either. He swiveled his chair to face the other bank of screens, the ones that monitored the intake pipes that led from the thermal vent to the power station. “Hey,” he said abruptly.

  Gavin looked over his shoulder. In the weak yellow light from the underside of the station, a swimmer was finning around. Jimmy had a couple of swimmers on his staff. They carried out external maintenance on the power station.

  “Problem with the pipes?” Gavin said.

  “No. There is no problem with the pipes. The problem is that’s not one of my people.”

  *

  Gavin had never worn a deep-sea diving suit, or used a scuba tank, but he didn’t let Jimmy dissuade him from donning the awkward gear and diving into the lock. One of Jimmy’s professional swimmers went ahead of him. They emerged underneath the power station and chased after Quinn, who was wearing an identical diving suit. It was too big for him, of course. The legs flapped comically as he tried to grab something he had lost in the water.

  “You come here right now!” The other swimmer seized Quinn by one leg and hauled him back into the station. Gavin returned through the lock after them, somewhat giddy from the experience of swimming in an alien sea. He found the swimmer peeling Quinn out of his borrowed diving suit and scolding him. “You could have died!”

  “I never went near the vent,” Quinn protested. “I know that water’s hot.”

  “This suit’s too big for you. That’s dangerous.”

  “Not very dangerous. The water pressure here is only about one-fifth of what it was on Earth at the bottom of the Pacific.”

  “Don’t give me that smart-ass crap,” the swimmer fumed.

  Gavin finished stripping off his own diving suit, with a twinge of reluctance—he’d enjoyed the swim, would have liked to have longer out there. He said sternly, “Quinn, apologize. You frightened everyone. The nice lady isn’t mad at you. She’s just upset that you could have gotten hurt.”

  Quinn scowled. “Soooorrry,” he said, dragging it out in a singsong.

  Later, on their way back to the surface, Gavin took Quinn into the driver’s cabin of the capsule. Gavin himself was the driver, insofar as the automated capsule needed one. He sh
ut the door. Quinn stared mutinously at him, clearly expecting another scolding. Gavin opened his hand. “What’s this?”

  A plastic vial, clear as glass but tougher. This was what Quinn had lost hold of in the sea. Gavin had recovered it before returning to the power station.

  Quinn’s shoulders sagged. “Mine,” he said.

  “I know it’s yours. What was in it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s nothing in it now. What was in it when you went out of the lock?”

  Silence.

  “Quinn, I saw you on the screen. You were pretty near the thermal vent.”

  Quinn stared furiously out of the porthole at the black water. “Fine,” he said. “It was Methanopyrus kandleri. I also had vials of Pyrolobus fumarii and Pyrodictium abyssi.”

  “Microbes.”

  “Yeah. My mom gave them to me before I got on the transport.”

  “Why?”

  “She was a marine biologist. She was researching chemosynthesis. That’s what these microbes do, they produce organic compounds from hydrogen gas. Some people think that’s how life on Earth got started, you know. It all began with bacteria living around deep-sea vents.”

  “So you released these microbes around a thermal vent on Enceladus, because …”

  “Because my mom thought we should try to save other creatures as well as ourselves! I mean, it’s nice that we’re saving humanity, but what about everything else? What about animals and fish?”

  “The colony ships will all be taking pigs, chicken, cows, rabbits. Well, frozen embryos.”

  “Rabbits,” Quinn said disdainfully.

  Gavin took a deep breath. “Quinn, I know you must miss your mom.”

  Something broke in the hard little face. “I didn’t want to go. Yeah, I won the lottery. But what about Mom and Dad and my sister? It’s not fair!”

  “No, it isn’t fair.” Gavin used to feel pangs of the same survivor’s guilt. He had become immune to it over the years, but Quinn’s distress ripped off the scab. “But what if they let everyone bring their families? That wouldn’t be fair, either. For every person that goes, other people have to be left behind. The lottery was the only way to do it.”