164: FAWN

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Captain Klees and Tal turn immediately to face the direction of the radio tower, way on the other side of the colony. I don’t waste time with questions. Sharing two breathing masks, the three of us make our way as quickly as possible towards the tower.

“Courageous to Hylara,” Xanthe’s voice says from Tal’s back, stressed. “What’s going on? Is everything alright?”

Tal pulls something out of kes pocket – a ring, one of the ones the Hylarans wear with short-range radio capability. Looking more closely under the oxygen tanks on kes back, I notice the cobbled-together nature of the radio hidden there. Carrying around a radio that’s both home made and hidden. Interesting story there.

“Elenna made it for us, just in case of emergencies,” Tal explains, seeing my look. “Nobody else in this place seems to realise how easy they are to make.” Ke holds the ring to kes lips. “Hey there, Xanthe! The cap and I have just met up with Aspen, we don’t know what’s happening with Elenna, we’re on the way to check it out. Whoever’s fucking around in that room had better think twice about doing anything they can’t reverse!”

Elenna again; voice breathless, haggard, hitched. “Courageous, go dark, go blind, turn off all radio receiving equipment; they have a kill code! They can use radio to destroy the ship, they – ” brief sounds of a struggle, then the signal cuts out again.

We stop in our tracks. What are we going to do, burst in and escalate the situation further? We’re near the central meeting dome; we head there instead.

“Well,” Captain Klees says as we change direction, “that makes a lot of things make sense.”

It does, and I hate the implications. I’d been wondering for a while, how it made sense for Hylara to fear Antarctican punishment for letting us land. We were going to drop supplies and land on the planet no matter what; Hylara couldn’t stop us. They’d been ordered to ignore us, for a time, but contact was still going to be made. It makes no sense to punish the Hylarans for disobeying orders in such a situation; killing off your subordinates for not achieving the impossible just leaves you with dead subordinates and no gain.

Unless they hadn’t been ordered to ignore us. Unless Antarctica, when it was informed of the approaching ship, had ordered them to kill us.

As we enter the dome and attract a handful of glances surprised and interested to see me out and about, a voice I haven’t heard in a while comes on the radio; breathless, I assume, for different reasons than Elenna, if the Courageous hasn’t gotten proper surgical facilities set up and woken proper surgeons yet.

“A kill code, huh?” Captain Kae Jin asks. “Well, that’s certainly interesting.”

Everyone in the dome immediately stops caring about me or why I’m there and pays their full attention to Tal’s illegal radio. Expressions are a mixture of dread, fear, excitement, anger.

Guilt.

We crew know that the kill code won’t work. We discovered and disabled it ages ago. Denish, Tal and Asteria have combed through both code and physical systems for any more nasty surprises and found nothing. But the Hylarans believe they have a way to destroy the ship looming above us in the sky. A way they’ve had since they reported our presence to Antarctica. A way that any Hylaran pushed too far could send out and make all their problems go away, and that explains the radio drama, doesn’t it? It was never about stopping us from contacting the ship (well, the first sabotage might have been, to delay us telling them about the Vault, but other than that). The slowness in setting up radios, the high security around the radio tower – it’s not about restricting our communication, it’s about preventing some panicked Hylaran, in this time of covert seed spreading and biting brawls, from taking it into their own head to take down the ship.

Max, all smiling and friendly, and Celti, with all his calm authority, had known about this. Hive and Elenna, on the radios. Dr Kim, with her purported interest in the future; all the Hylarans who’d smiled and played games with me and given gifts, all of them knew about this supposed ultimate weapon to destroy the ship of colonists and crewmates above us.

And not one of them had told us.

“Can I at least have the honour of speaking with my killer first?” Captain Kae Jin asks on the radio. She’s calm, of course. She knows there’s no threat. Although I have no doubt that crew are frantically running about up there triple-checking every possible risk just in case, in case maybe this is somehow a completely different kill code we don’t know about that’ll somehow still work despite Amy being almost fully replaced by new independent systems by now.

The voice that responds is unfamiliar. I think they might be younger than most of the Hylarans I deal with, but it’s hard to tell. A teenager? Older, but with a naturally high voice? “There’s no point in stalling! You’re going to – you’re going to give us everything we want, or else!”

“So this is a negotiation? Forgive me being slow on the uptake, but a moment ago it seemed like you were trying to do this secretly.” Captain Kae Jin pauses to catch her breath before continuing. “Are you trying to kill us, or extort us? Those are different goals. Especially since we’re already giving you everything you want, aren’t we?”

“Shut up!”

“I think somebody’s getting cold feet with their finger on the trigger. That’s a good thing. It shows you have integrity. A coward would’ve killed us by now.”

What’s she doing? Why talk this person out of pulling a completely harmless trigger? It is harmless, right? I’m not missing something?

“Don’t you come here and call us cowards for defending ourselves! Earth system people have done nothing but try to control us from the start! You brought us into existence to man your your port and now you’re dropping out of the sky to take everything we do have! Don’t act like I’m out of line here. We all know, you don’t need us any more. You can kill us off without losing the Vault now.”

“We’re not Antarctican. We don’t work with them we don’t know them. We only just learned that the Vault even exists.”

“You’re the same! You expect me to believe that you’re magically different from all the other Earth system people?”

“Interstellar racism, that’s a new experience. My name’s Sienna. What’s yours?”

“I’m going to do it, you know.”

“Then I should at least know the name of my killer, shouldn’t I?”

“Kit.”

“Pleased to meet you, Kit. I’m the captain of this ship, and that’s a role I chose of my own free will, back in Earth system. I decided I wanted to devote my life to finding spreading humanity to farthest places we could reach. But we didn’t know you were already here. We didn’t come here to hurt anyone. We don’t want a fight. We don’t want to kill you, and we don’t want to die.”

“Antarcticans lie all the time, and then they kill us. There’s no way they sent you out here without telling you to expect us when you got here. This is our one chance to be free, do you understand? We have biotanks and seeds now; Antarctica can’t control us or kill us. You think we’re going to let you do it instead?”

“I chose to come out here. I didn’t expect to find you at the other end, but I did choose to come. Not everyone up here is like that. Did you know that?” Fainter, like she’s facing away from the microphone, I hear her call out, “Lina! ‘Nish!”

“Hello, little warrior,” Denish’s rough voice comes through the speaker. “I am Denish. This is my friend Lina.”

“Hi.”

“You want to kill us, hmm?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want. I can’t let you come down here.”

“Well, this is very sad, because we have nowhere else to go. Three thousand sleeping people, almost. More than two thousand should wake up okay. You’re going to kill them? Two thousand is five times all the people you know in your whole life, yes? Five whole Hylaras, you want to blow out of the sky. Most of them didn’t want to be here, either.”

“This is a convict ship, Kit,” Lina adds gently. “Do you know what that is?”

Kit doesn’t answer.

“It means that when Earth wanted to fill up this ship, they took a whole lot of locked up workers – people much like you – and took them off the jobs they were making them do, and forced them to go to space. In the Earth system, when people break the rules of society, they’re sometimes locked away and made to do whatever work the society wants done, work that’s dangerous or too expensive to hire other people to do. This job, being on this ship, is dangerous. It’s something that not enough people volunteered for. So Earth made us go instead. About four fifths of us were sent to your planet against our will.”

The Hylaran faces surrounding us are utterly distraught. I don’t think they’ve encountered a disciplinary system more severe than Time Out with Mama before. It’s obvious that this is the first time they’re being made aware that most of the arriving colonists have been treated the same as the Hylarans are by the Earth system. (And to think, we were nervous about them finding out about the convict thing. We thought it would cause problems and make things harder. We should’ve told them from the start.) For the more expressive people, I can actually see the transformation on their faces, as they go from regarding the ship above as a looming threat of the first strangers they’ve ever met, to a group of refugees with more in common with them than they imagined.

Yeah, we should have lead with the convict thing. Huge failure on my part. I should have predicted this well in advance.

“I can’t help but notice,” Captian Kae Jin says, “that we’re all still alive, Kit.”

“I’m about to do it.”

“I don’t think you are.”

“You’re asking me to give up the freedom of my people for your sake. I can’t… you’re asking me to betray everyone.”

“No, I’m not. We have no interest in killing or oppressing or controlling anyone. We just want to get these colonists safely to the ground and share the planet with you. Has anything we’ve done indicated that we want to be anything other than friends?”

“The famine said that perfectly clearly! The Antarcticans were all nice and friendly too, until we stood up for ourselves!”

“Then we’ll have to arrange matters so that that sort of thing is impossible, won’t we? You already have food production facilities, now. Antarctica can never do that to you again. So let’s figure out a way to keep you safe from us, that doesn’t involve murdering more people than you can possibly imagine.”

There’s a long, long silence. Then, Elenna’s voice. “Hylara to Courageous, this is Elenna. Kit’s stepped back from the controls.”

Everyone in the dome around me instantly relaxes. People laugh in relief. Captian Kae Jin’s tone stays exactly as calm and measured as it has been for the whole conversation.

“Thank you, Kit. I knew you were a good person. And if things do get tricky and you find yourself wondering in the future if you made the right choice, I can tell you for certain: you did. The crew of this ship discovered the nature of that kill code and the systems it was connected to before ever contacting Hylara. It’s been disabled for a long time. The only thing that sending it would have done was tripped our alarms and told everyone on this ship that someone down there had tried to kill us, which I’m sure you can imagine, would have made diplomacy a lot more tense.

“You chose peace today, and you chose to give strangers a chance. We’re going to honour this choice by doing the same. Thank you for trusting us.”

Some of the Hylarans around us start actually cheering. Having just come from Dr Kim’s quarantine, it’s a very surreal moment. I can’t predict how this little incident will affect things going forward, but the Hylarans seem to be taking the sudden removal of that smoking gun as well as the ship’s reasonable reaction to it as a good thing. At least, the ones in this specific dome are.

“Well,” Captain Klees says. “I’m glad that’s handled. Aspen, what happened to you? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” I say. “I need to tell you everything that happened, though. Privately. It’s information we need to be careful with.”

“Dangerous?”

“No. Powerful. If we’re clever, we might have the leverage to get Tinera and the Friend.”

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