133: COLONY

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Before we can respond, Max dashes forward and shakes our hands one by one, their thin digits dwarfed by our bulky space suit gloves. They speak into their own right hand to talk to us – those rings must have microphones and radio transceivers in them.

“I’m so pleased to meet you all! I gotta say, I was pretty disappointed that Cattail here won radio rights; I cannot believe this is happening. The Courageous, appearing in our skies! And now you’re here! Come on, come on – let’s go home!” They grin excitedly, and I find myself grinning as well.

“You should keep the helmets on,” Hive advises as we start walking, as if there was any chance that any of us would just decide to start breathing alien air when nobody else breathing is seems to have lived past age sixty. “There’ll be an infection risk until we’ve gotten our immune systems set up. Quarantine – I can’t believe we need to worry about quarantine. Or vaccinations.”

“We could’ve brought down some common vaccinations with us, if we knew you’d need them,” Captain Klees says, the thread of accusation in his tone almost completely undetectable, but Hive just shrugs.

“That’s not the problem. This is a virus-free colony. People usually get their first viruses very young it helps train their immune system, but we don’t. Something completely benign for you could be deadly for us. The older people underwent a general vaccination booster program as they grew up, in expectation of your ship arriving, but after you were given up for dead it was considered a waste of resources. Over half of the colony had never been exposed to any virus or viral treatment at all before receiving your radio broadcast. Everyone’s undergoing treatment now, but it’ll take another week before we can be sure that we’re safe.”

“Max,” the Friend says in alarm, “have you had this treatment?”

“It’s ongoing, like with everyo – ”

“You need to sterilise your hands straight away. Don’t touch your face. Don’t even touch your oxygen mask. Don’t touch anything. Do you have disinfectant on you?”

“No, we didn’t bri – ”

“Stop talking in the radio, it brings your hand too close to your face. Captain – ”

“Tal, you’re the fastest,” Captain Klees says. “Disinfectant. Go.”

“The blue bottle in the first aid kid under this Friend’s seat should be sufficiently antiviral.”

“You’re all inside your space suits,” Hive says, sounding puzzled. “There’s no chance of contamination.”

“Our space suits have been inside our drop pod which is full of air from our spaceship that we’ve been breathing,” I explain. “It’s very, very unlikely, but it’s technically possible that you guys can pick up something just by touching the suits, if it’s virulent enough and if it can gain access through your mouth or eyes.”

Tal comes back with the whole medkit, and the Friend quickly retrieves a bottle from it. Its hands are clumsy in the space suit and it ends out having to lever the lid off with the medkit scissors rather than unscrew it. Carefully, avoiding touching Max or letting the bottle touch them, the Friend pours the solution over their hands.

“Nobody should touch anything from our pod unless it’s been disinfected, or unless they’ve already undergone the viral treatment,” the Friend says. “If someone who has undergone the treatment touches anything, they shouldn’t interact with people who haven’t until they’ve disinfected themselves. In fact, given the slim possibility that they could catch a virus and give it to someone untreated, everything should probably be considered contaminated by everyone until you’re fully treated.”

“We could have waited another week before coming down,” Captain Klees says, clearly trying and failing to not sound reproachful. “It would’ve been safer to wait until everyone had finished this treatment.”

Hive shrugs again. “We’d need the doctor to run full pathology screens on you before direct contact could be considered safe anyway. That’ll take time. Shall we keep going?”

It’s weird, walking around in a space suit. I’ve never really done it before, apart from very small trips across the Lunar surface, and that’s largely hard and flat and with a lot less gravity than Hylara. Usually, if I’m in a space suit, I’m either sitting down, or in the vacuum of space. Trudging through mud and sand I can neither feel nor hear from inside several kilograms of stiff suit is a novel experience. A terrible novel experience.

And I already know it’s going to take longer than half an hour to get back. Because it took Hive and Max half an hour to get here, and they can move a lot faster than us, long toes moving them over the sand like they were made for it, even as they weave around the watery patches. They have a rapid conversation that I can’t hear, since it’s not over the radio, until Hive lifts their ring to ask us, “How many species of bees did your ship bring, do you know?”

General puzzlement greets this question. Finally, Tinera asks, “Bees?”

“Yes. Well, if you have a number for pollinators in general, that’s also good information. What would your estimate be?”

After checking with the rest of us, Captain Klees says, “We don’t know. They’re all stored in the freezers. Next time we contact the Courageous, we can ask – ”

“No, no,” Hive says hurriedly, “it’s not that important. I was just curious.”

I glance over the barren landscape around us. Pollinators?

Theory: they lost their insect species when they landed, or during transport, or perhaps to some disease afterward, it doesn’t matter. That would greatly limit plant ecology. You can feed four hundred people without pollinators, no problem; a population can be kept alive on algae, and there are many crops that either don’t require pollination or can be pollinated by hand and wind machines – but it does put serious limitations on what you can grow, especially if they want to populate the planet itself with plants outside the living domes. But if that’s the case, why not tell us over the radio before we came down? We could’ve brought some with us. Same as the vaccinations.

I kick mud off my boot, and glance at the pair ahead of us, walking an alien world with no concession to the conditions besides an oxygen tank. Two liaisons for the suddenly appearing foreigners; one for the radio to the ship, one for the ground crew. After a sudden long radio silence on contact and a strange reticence afterward to tell the people coming to supply them what they actually need and where to deliver it.

A cold sense of suspicion starts to pool in my stomach. Oh, no. We misread this so badly. We didn’t even consider this possibility.

“So you guys have oxygen here, huh?” Tal asks, as if that’s a normal conversation starter. “Aspen says that means there’s aliens.”

“I said that was the most logical explanation,” I add, in case I’m wrong and Tal has just made me look like an idiot in front of our new hosts. “Photosynthetic life is the only natural force that could be expected to generate this much oxygen.”

The pair exchange a glance.

“It’s complicated,” Hive says.

“But pretty amazing,” Max adds. “I’ll show you guys around after Doctor Kim’s had a look at you. You’ll love it. You guys have been cramped up on a spaceship for years, right? This must be a great change of pace!”

“It’s certainly new,” I say.

Tal flings both arms wide. “Aaaaalieeen plaaaneeeet!”

“Your home planet, now,” Tinera says, shoving kem lightly. “Quit being an idiot.”

We climb the edge of a crater, and I see two things that make my heart jump in joy. The first is a cluster of domes in the distance, built partway up a gentle slope on the opposite side of a fairly flat-looking broad expanse of bare stone. The colony. The second thing, which is more exciting to me personally in the current moment, is a transport vehicle.

Said vehicle is very simple – a flat carbon tray with wheels and a seat with some driving controls up front. The batteries and engine must be built into the base somehow. Hive jumps into the driver’s seat and the rest of us clamber onto the tray back with Max, keeping as much distance from them as we can. I keep my eyes fixed on the colony as the vehicle starts up, trying to see what I can learn from a distance. Trying to see if my suspicions are correct.

The drive is smooth, the stone beneath us bare and water-worn. It seems to be at a slight slope, so the water after a rainstorm would be washed away fairly quickly, leaving the ground dry. The colony barely shakes in my vision as we drive closer and the others all discuss… something, I don’t know, I’m not really listening.

The space taken up by the colony is smaller than I would expect. Large enough to house the stated population very comfortably, but no obvious industry or vast tented farms. Many of the domes aren’t connected to each other, and as we get closer, I can see people moving between them, unprotected like Hive and Max. The domes themselves are whiter than the sand around, but not by much; they’re probably coated in mud or dust. More visible than the canvas of the domes is the gleam of metal some distance away – a metal door, it looks like, leading underground and wide enough to drive three trucks through. That’s probably where their power station is, if they lack the materials to build it safely aboveground. Nice and protected from any asteroids that do happen to land in the area.

A network of power cables leads between the living domes and up the gentle slope where, some distance away, there sits a smaller, metal dome under a radio dish setup. Some parts of the setup look noticeably shinier and less weathered than other parts. Over some of the living domes, flatter roofs have been constructed to create slopes that lead into rainwater tanks. Some of the domes have repair patches on them or even, to my surprise, embroidery. Embroidery, in atmosphere-containing dome canvas! There’s not an airlock in sight. As I watch, a small child comes out of a dome with a jug, fills it up from a water tank, and goes back inside.

I switch my radio to a private channel for just talking to Captain Klees. “Captain, we’ve seriously misread this situation.”

“Misread how? Are we in danger?”

“No. No, I don’t think anyone here would dare let any harm come to us. But I’ve figured out why they were so reluctant to tell us what they need, or accept our help.”

“Why?”

“Because they don’t need it. We expected to find a colony on the edge of their resources, struggling to survive long enough for help to arrive. We assumed they’d be low on dome canvas and their life support equipment would be wearing out. But look – they live in the air here. They drink the planet’s water. I don’t know how safe that is, exactly, but they clearly think it is; if anything, the most dangerous thing they’re facing right at this minute is the diseases that we might be carrying with us. I’m sure they want what we’ve brought; who wouldn’t? They don’t exactly appear to be swimming in spare resources down here, looking at the small size of their community. But they seem to be surviving just fine.”

“That’s good. If they’re not all dying from lack of oxygen and water, we have more time to get everything down to the planet. We can expand faster, revive colonists faster, get everyone – ”

“No, you’re not listening to me. Look at it from their perspective. These are not the people who left Earth. They were born here. And they thought their resupply lost; they never thought to have contact from Earth again. Think historically, Adin. What usually happens when there’s some small, isolated community, and a bunch of resource-rich foreigners show up out of nowhere to settle on their land?”

“… Oh. Are you saying…?”

“Exactly. We came in as rescuers, but we’re not. From their perspective, we’re invaders. Foreign invaders who showed up on their shores with the openly declared intent to plant a population almost six times the size of theirs right in their home. We showed up with superior firepower, superior resources, and nowhere else to go but here.”

“We don’t have firepower!”

“Yes we do. They live in open-air tents and our entire task is to drop stuff from space. And now we’re a handful of representatives sent specifically to look at their colony and find out how to best fill it with our own. Is it any wonder that they went dark until they had to respond, and gave us a single liaison to talk to on the radio? Is it any wonder that they told but practically nothing that they didn’t have to? Is it any wonder that the people who live here do not want to talk to us?”

We’ve reached the colony by this point. People who look and dress like our liaisons come out of their domes to stare at us. They all look curious. Very few of them look happy. Hive drives the vehicle right into an open-air tent containing several other vehicles and dismounts to plug a charging cable into it. Max grins widely at us and claps their hands together.

“Alright! Let’s get you to Doctor Kim. Who’s first?”

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