141: ANSWERS

by Derin

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We all leap back, as if a bit more distance will protect Max from the viruses in the mostly enclosed tent.

“You said the viral treatment would take another week after our landing!” Captain Klees says, accusing. “You can’t be here like this!”

“It is a few days early,” Max allows, “but I’m sure I’ll be fine. It’s a long treatment, and it’s possible there was never any danger. Your pathologies all came back clean, so…”

The Friend steps back then forward, hesitating, arms half-raised like they’re trying to judge the relative risk of making physical contact to push Max out of the tent, or refraining from contact and letting them continue to breathe the air. “Max, this isn’t safe. You have to leave.”

“I can’t.” Max’s smile brightens, for some reason. “I’m contaminated now, and can’t interact with the rest of the colony until they finish their treatment.” They walk into the room, ignoring the way everyone pulls back (Tal just barely removing the computer visor before the cord yanks kem back comically), and sit at the plastic table. “We were about ready for a test exposure, and as the person working closest with you, I’m the obvious candidate.”

We all exchange glances. That’s stupid. Even I know that’s stupid. Why not do the test exposure after everyone’s finished their treatments? A pointless risk of life, to what, save a few days?

“Spy,” Tinera suggests in Texan. “Us talking in a language they can’t spy on makes them nervous. Max will have to stay with us now. It’s probably an attempt to keep us from talking to each other unrestricted.”

“Unlikely,” the Friend says. “It’s far too great a risk for no real gain. Besides, whatever’s going on here, Max is on the friendly side, right?”

“They’re on the side that don’t glare at us in the street,” I correct it. “We don’t know enough of what’s going on to know if that’s the actually friendly side or not. Or if no side is friendly. And Max is to control what we see and hear.”

“This isn’t just to have someone in the tent, though; too big a risk,” Tal says. “The Friend’s right. Too big a risk for no reason, and we can just keep talking like we are right now anyway. Something happened out there. Something that put someone on a time limit. They want us able to be out and about as quick as possible. Must be.”

I watch Max’s face. They must know we’re talking about them behind their back, it’s simply not possible that they don’t realise that. But they don’t even look awkward about it. They just politely wait for us to finish.

“Fuck it,” Captain Klees says. “You know what? Fuck it. We’ve tried to be polite and subtle and I’m sick of it.” He waves his hand. “They pulled this without consulting us, they tell us nothing. I’m out of patience. I’m not taking the lead on questions any more. Tiny is.”

Tinera grins like a child experiencing seven spring festivals at once. “Really? You want me to – ?”

“Don’t hurt anyone, don’t start fights, don’t treat Max as an enemy; they’re a friend until proven otherwise. Don’t start any big political fuck-ups that’ll cause problems for the Courageous. But yeah. Everyone ask their questions. My diplomacy’s getting us nowhere and this latest move of theirs is fucking ridiculous. Throwing Max to the viral wolves like this. What the fuck.”

Captain Klees walks over to the computer and pretends to start using it while the rest of us, as one, all come to sit at the table and look directly at Max. Who starts to look a bit unhappy for once, eyes fixed ahead, mouth suddenly tight. Maybe giving Tinera the lead on this was a bad call, I think; we don’t want to scare Max, we don’t want to burn any bridges here. Maybe the Friend should be leading, or –

“Are you willing to kill us?” Tinera asks conversationally.

Max’s worry is replaced by immediate, sudden bafflement, the tension almost immediately pouring away. “What?”

“You heard me. Us. The landing party. Obviously you’re keeping us alive right now, but are our deaths on the table at all? Is that an option here?”

“No! No, of course not! I’m sorry if we ever frightened you; we have no intention of – ”

“I know, know. You didn’t frighten us. ‘No’ is the answer I expected. I just wanted to make sure that you knew it, too.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Another smile. Friendly. Looks genuine.

“I’m just saying. Our ship is here. We are here. You won’t kill us, you can’t hurt the ship, and we’re light decades away from any outside influence. So what the fuck is the point of all this secrecy? Who did you steer us away from on the tour yesterday, what’s with Hive’s obsession with pollinators, and how and why do you have the pieces for a Hypati launcher? Tell us what’s going on, Max.”

“The Hypati launcher? It’s for climate control.”

“What does that mean?”

“When the ship got here, this place was a dry rock. There’s ice at the poles, pretty deep ice, but it’s a much less hospitable place to settle. We – our ancestors, I mean, I wasn’t born yet – launched hotslugs into the poles to melt the ice as part of building a climate. There was some complicated magnetic stuff done to help it hold an atmosphere better, they built strippers to pull the water apart and make an oxygen atmosphere, all that. It’s not survivable yet without carrying tanks as well, but it’ll get there eventually. We obviously don’t have the ability to travel to the poles, so the launcher was needed. It hasn’t been used for a couple of decades, so far as I know, but we’ll need it to melt more ice eventually.”

Hotslugs. Pellets of contained radioactive material that would emit heat until said material broke down. I try to calculate how hot they’d need to be (or how many, alternately) for this kind of operation, how sturdy the shells would have to be to not leak their radiation into the water supply, try to figure out whether it would matter if they did leak given the relatively low concentration in the water, and finally had to admit to myself that I don’t know anything about radioactive elements. I do know that it would be absurd for them to have carried those materials over on the ship, especially since Max implied they have more. The math isn’t adding up. And what’s that about oxygen stripping?

“You’re increasing the oxygen in the atmosphere?” I ask.

“Of course. We need to get it breathable, eventually.”

An entire planet’s worth of atmosphere, and Max talks about that like it’s a reasonable plan. That confidence… if I take Max at their word for a moment, extrapolate, bring in Occam’s Razor…

“Was there any oxygen in the atmosphere when you arrived?” I ask.

“There was barely an atmosphere at all. Certainly no oxygen.”

“Aww, are you saying there’s no aliens?” Tal pouts.

“Not that we know of!”

‘It’s complicated’, they’d said when we’d asked about aliens. Why say that if there’s no aliens? I try to remember the conversation.

No… they hadn’t been calling the aliens complicated. We’d been talking about the oxygen in the atmosphere. That’s what was complicated; complicated because it was Hylarans, not aliens, and there was something there, something political that Max and Hive hadn’t wanted to get into. Why be more forthcoming now?

There’s a little frown between Tinera’s brows, and I’ve lived with her long enough to know what she’s thinking, how she works. She would’ve noticed the difference too, and in her mind, when people step back like that and are suddenly accommodating with information, it’s because they can’t dodge any more and want you to accept the gift horse and not probe further. She might be right. She might not be. It could be that something had gone through the meetings of whatever passed for government here, and Max was allowed to tell us more, now. It could be that Max wasn’t allowed to tell us more, but wanted to, and could use being trapped with us as an excuse, same as Hive wanted to know about pollinators but couldn’t ask the ship directly. Could be related to Max’s sudden appearance here without protection, to whatever sudden change had taken place.

Which is what we really should be asking about, but I’m not going to let this atmosphere thing go. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s too much gas in the atmosphere, and too much water in the atmosphere. Luckily, everyone’s looking at me (probably because I was the one who’d insisted that this exact thing was impossible; I put off being embarrassed by that until later) and nobody stops me when I ask, “How?”

“How what?”

“How did you do that? Where did you get the hotslugs? If you built them here, that means high-level mining of radioactives; if your predecessors brought them on the ship, that means trucking a lot of dense radioactives. Either way that just doesn’t make sense for a light ship, not for the ridiculous amounts you’d need for something like this. Ice doesn’t melt like this in half a century. You can’t skim this much oxygen in half a century, this is an entire planet we’re talking about! And what about the neon? You said there wasn’t much of an atmosphere, was the neon here? What do you plant to add to up the pressure without poisoning us all with oxygen?”

“We could free some neon,” Max says.

“How? From where?”

“It’s trapped under the surface of the planet. We just need to find pockets and release it.”

And that’s the moment where I suddenly know, for certain, that Max has never directly lied to us in the past. I know, because this is what a direct lie from Max apparently looks like, and Max is an absolutely terrible liar.

“Neon is a noble gas,” I point out. “It’s not unusual to find it in small amounts, but it can’t be trapped or released as part of solid materials so it’s not going to hang around in high concentrations, especially on a planet with little atmosphere. You’re a few hundred people living in tents; there is simply no way that you have the capability to find pockets of neon in the ground and release them, not on this scale, not to fill a planet. And you couldn’t have brought it with you, so unless you’ve got some space fleet out there siphoning it from somewhere else that you didn’t tell us about, which is frankly impossible looking at this setup and the planetary view from the courageous, this neon was here when you got here, meaning you’re not adding inert gases as part of your atmosphere building program, which puts a hard limit on how thick you can make the atmosphere without poisoning everyone and I haven’t done the math but I think that limit is a fair step lower than Earth’s atmosphere.” But why lie about that? Reaching a survivable oxygen level is still a perfectly logical goal. Why lie? What’s going on?

Max shrugs. “It’s complicated.” Ah, we’ve hit the information wall again.

“You don’t have the materials to produce this much oxygen and water this quickly,” I say. “You just don’t.”

“I’m telling you.” Tal points at me and grins. “Secret alien technology.”

Max, to my surprise and slight horror, flinches slightly at that comment. Oh no, no way. If Tal is right, I really will find an ocean to walk into.

It’s my intention to keep pushing for information until Max stonewalls us completely, so it’s lucky that Tinera’s in charge of this and remembers that we have other priorities. “Who did you steer us away from in on the tour?”

“I didn’t steer – oh. You mean Celti.”

“Do I?”

“One of the leadership. A great guy, really; clever, practical, has steered us through crises before. He’s just… well, I didn’t think a confrontation in the central meeting area would be a great first memory for everyone to have of you.”

“Was a confrontation likely? If this guy’s so clever and practical?”

Max shrugs. “He does have a way of using little barbs, and…” They shrug again. Ah – it’s not Celti that Max was worried about getting aggressive. They were worried that Celti would say something to piss us off, and didn’t know us well enough to know if we’d make a scene about it.

Honestly? Fair.

“Why are you here?” Tinera asks. “In here, with us, without protection?”

“Somebody had to be. Honestly, I didn’t expect you all to start grilling me about it. Liaison is my job, it’s good to be able to relate directly.”

“It would’ve been safer to do it in a few days. Why this risk, why the rush? What happened?”

“It’s compli – ”

“Complicated, I’m sure. What happened.”

“Boring political stuff. Don’t worry about it. Hey, are you guys hungry? I can have people bring – ”

They stop talking, suddenly, when Tinera reaches out and grabs their wrist. “Friend, the other one, if you would?” The Friend, clearly reluctant to touch someone potentially still immunocompromised, gingerly reaches out to grab the other. “Captain,” Tinera says, “I think you should take Aspen and Tal and suit up for a little independent tour of the colony.”

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25 thoughts on “141: ANSWERS”

    2. However, an Earth Portal that can bring across enough resources to terraform a planet in less than a century can certainly bring across people, too. Why the lack of immunity? Why the strange levels of resources? Famines? Why are there only a few hundred people on the planet?

      It certainly explains some things (why the colony’s tech is so advanced compared to the stuff on the Courageous: they don’t have to worry about sourcing parts), but it doesn’t really explain enough for me.

      If it’s a Proxima style portal (travels you there at the speed of light, i.e. if it’s 40ly away you arrive 40 years after you left), it makes slightly more sense since any crises that are less than 80 years in duration essentially cannot be helped by the presence of the portal, but things that will require predictable and regular maintenance can be sent through, like replacement machines every few years, and like all the terraforming technology you could want. Maybe they even sent a bunch of people through the portal when they realised that there wouldn’t be enough food for everybody. It might also make sense to send older people, since the younger people would be best placed to continue the colony, or some cultural reason. I still think that some people would want to go through the portal to arrive on Hylara, even if they were a lot smaller in number.

      I also still think the terraforming is nonsense, because as Aspen points out, I don’t care how much technology you have, you need more than hundreds of people to terraform a planet. Moving things from A to B is enough of a job for that many people, especially if they’re acting under a thinner atmosphere and reliant on oxygen masks. They found this planet in a similar shape to how it is now, whether Max knows it or not.

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  4. I remember being puzzled earlier in the story about how an isolated, small(ish) nation like future-Antarctica would be able to become technological leaders in the field.

    The thought now occurs that if there was an crashed alien ship on Earth containing reverse-engineerable tech, one of the places it could go unnoticed for centuries is Antarctica. That would explain the ability of the Antarctic people to make both the Kleiner array tech public, and the possibility of quickly developing a much faster drive system for the Antarcticans to beat the Javelin colonists there.

    THat might explain why the Antarctic colonists were so ready to go to Hylara, since the hypthetical ancient alien ship may have had enough details to infer theere will be radioactives or similar for them to use. (similar to Aspen’s 20 photo game) Doesn’t explain the Hylarian’s weird set of scarcities & abundances, though.

    I’m wondering if the reason the Antarctic colony ship was could be so fast is if it didn’t have any living biological stuff on board. Just a super acceleration tolerant set of “printers” for both material and 1st generation colonist babies. And the reason the people are so heavily gengineered is they were designed specifically for Hylaria. Perhaps there’s a limit to the number of patterns that could be easily stored, and the Javelin brain-hijacking system was to try and make more useful patterns for the new colonists to use? They seem strangely interested in pollinating insects, which is suprisingly unless they had limited space or could not transport living things easily on their ship. But it’s not a great fit for the mystery…. either teleporters or printers don’t quite explain what we’ve seen so far.

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  5. Ok new theory: yes there is alien tech, but not on this planet specifically! Like maybe that’s the secret behind Antarctica’s secret advanced tech: they somehow got their hands on some alien tech and have been reverse-engineering it for centuries.
    However if that was true why not just tell our colonists now that they’re here… oh well I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

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    1. hmm that would be interesting, setting up a secret The Thing twist that aliens where frozen on earth the whole time? Honestly my only problem is that this is a very realistic sociological perspective and keeping that a secret would be a nightmare. Then again, maybe it’s the genetic engineering. An entire subspecies of humans to handle the alien stuff so you need relatively few people to keep them from communicating it to the outside world. Heavy gene modification not for any survival purpose but to make it real easy to pick them out in a crowd. Or well, going back to The Thing of it all, they might just not be great at mimicking humans. Gave up on getting all the details right a while back.

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      1. I hated not being able to read in a while, but now I enjoyed reading a big chunk without cliffhangers. I hope Aspens eye will be fine. I’m mildly worried because we don’t know how much tontrust the Doc. At least Max was able to tell them clearly that they won’t be killed. We got some answers but it threw up more questions then or realy answered. I will have to be patient now.

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    2. Maybe there are aliens who were in the middle of terraforming Hylara but not ready to settle on it. And then Antarctica or someone manages to contact them, and the aliens agree to let humans settle there in exchange for helping with terraforming. There could be another planet in the same solar system that does support life.

      But again, that’s not something you can expect to hide. The only reason to hide if is if you’re not sure how to deliver the news, and the Hylara has had a lot of time to think about that.

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  6. time to air a theory ive had for a while: theyve somehow been here a lot longer than half a century. Long enough to just get bored of living underground and blase about oxygen usage, long enough to radically change the atmosphere, long enough to develop quirks like bulk making soap by hand

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    1. yeah that seems very likely at this point, especially given that the title is Time to Orbit: Unknown. It’s not that they don’t know when *from their perspective* they’re going to be in orbit, it’s that they don’t know when they got into orbit from the perspective of everyone else. Timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff.

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    2. Thing is, the Courageous took about 130 years to get here. Even if the Hylara colony arrived instantly, 130 years isn’t enough for this level of terraforming. Of course, any kind of FTL travel also implies time travel since the speed of light is really the speed of causality. So why not take negative years to get there?

      If the secret colony ship arrived centuries in the past, then the Kleiner Array could’ve detected the future colony efforts on Hylara. That’s why the AI project could afford to be so blasé about the lives of the colonists. They can’t doom the colony because it was already successful. That’s also why Tarandra placed their own spies but didn’t expect sabotage during transit; the colony is already there but who’s to say what its leadership is like?

      If we’re disallowing time travel, then for the colony to have been there longer than expected the Courageous would have to be traveling faster than expected and would have taken a long detour to allow more time to pass. If both navigator/astroanalysts were conspirators, then it’s possible for no one to realize that the ship is off-course and taking a meandering route while the secret ship takes a direct route. This would also mean the ship’s engine specs would have to be wrong and for Denish and Sands to not notice the ship has the capability to go way faster than it is. The meandering must’ve stopped by the time Sam woke up because they would’ve noticed something was wrong.

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  7. As others have said, I think the colony is way older than the group thinks and that’s what they are hiding. Or that’s what Max knows. I think there’s even more

    I think it comes back to the Hivemind experiments. I’m placing my bet that the Courageous wasn’t sent to populate a colony, it was sent to do the Hivemind experiments. There is something on Hylar that would make use of such an AI. Probably alien tech that Hylarans are hoping to use to better their connection to Earth. Because I think they’ve got one. Not a great one but definitely one that’s not on a decades long delay. That’s why Max a “Port Manager” picked up the Courageous’s message. He was doing his duty waiting for Antarctica to send their normal messages.

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  11. “Boring political stuff. Don’t worry about it.”

    Considering that they have a fuckton of supplies to drop, 2000 people in comas to wake up, and need to coordinate all that with your leadership, I think that any political is very relevant for the crew to know.

    Tal’s theory that they tried to farm but there was some kind of contaminate that caused a famine could be closer to the truth. There might be some kind of poison in the soil that got soaked up by the plants that didn’t them but did kill the people who ate them. You would have a bunch of plants that could be used to harvest oil for soap but aren’t edible. This would explain why Hive seemed so tense about the idea of trying to plant things in the soil.

    Or, at least, that previous paragraph is what I was going to say before Max dropped the ball and now alien tech is on the table.

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  12. Not gonna lie, I do feel like they slept on the most important question… who else knows you’re in here? Has Max gone rogue?? I hope they’ve gone rogue. That little “oh I can’t possibly leave now, I’m contaminated, guess I’m stuck here” is just too pat and way too convenient, especially since they picked the team up in the first place; if they’d turned right around, they’d not be much more exposed than that first time, and they could still be quarantined in isolation in another dome. But for that to happen, Max has to leave the crew’s dome, and the Hylarans can’t just come in and get them for another few days if there’s a chance of a clean suit breaking in, say, a scuffle, and the Friend has been very clear about taking contamination seriously (as shown by the crew not yeeting him out).

    Max clearly thinks they’re in no danger (so either they’re just infinitely chiller than Sands and such, or does not know the criminal histories of the entire ground crew bar Aspen), so why have they strong-armed themself into quarantine? Were they told to? And if so… by who?

    To my mind this is the biggest clue that there’s a serious level of dissent on Hylara (or that the quarantine’s entirely faked), because there is literally no reason not to have informed the crew they’d be doing a test, and just walking in basically naked both forces the hand of whoever is keeping the crew isolated, and is something that is extremely easy for a single person to do, and pretty hard to stop them with the level of security Hylara’s showing.

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