144: COORDINATION

Celti seems to be doing calculations too, glancing between Max and Captain Klees and looking somewhat baffled. “If we asked for medical supplies?”

“Absolutely. Tell us what you need and we’ll get it sent down.”

“Weapons?”

“I don’t think the ship carries weapons, but there are plenty of instruments that can be easily weaponised. If you want those, sure. Do you think that’d be a positive addition to your community?”

“Food?” And there’s a tense hunger in Celti’s eyes that tells me that he doesn’t actually care about medicine or weapons.

“Absolutely. Whatever you like. It’s our job.”

Celti, for some reason, looks confused by this response. He’s not the only one. There’s a lot of shuffling and murmuring in the crowd. I glance at Max, who’s watching the exchange with no surprise or confusion. There’s some kind of expectation we’re violating here; something that the Hylaran who’s spent days living with us expected, and the rest of them don’t.

“How much food?”

Captain Klees shrugs. “We’re supplied to start a colony of five thousand and we have a lot less people than that. We can get you what you need while we expand food farms, bring down a wider variety of crops, build algal tanks – ”

“Not that stuff,” Celti snaps. “I’m not interested in farms under your control so you can dictate the livelihoods of my people and your colonists. I’m talking food, made and ready to eat, in our stockpiles, under our control. You won’t give us that.”

“Of course we will. We have plenty. We’ll send it right down for you.”

“For our stockpiles.”

“Sure. How you store your food is none of our business. And just to clarify, I’m not a farmer. I have no interest in micromanaging food production and it’s nobody’s intention to control all the farming. I’m offering to drop supplies to expand your farms.”

Celti narrows their eyes, doubting. Max steps forward.

“He’s telling the truth,” Max says quietly. “You can take him at his word.”

“We have no reason to trust a single one of these outsiders.”

“Yes you do,” Captain Klees says. “This is a long, long process. Even if we’re not trustworthy, we can’t afford to cheat you this early, can we? I promised to drop food for you, if you want it. It’ll be pretty easy to verify if I’m honest about that much with the next drop, won’t it? Do you want food?”

“Yes. Premade food. No seeds. We’re not going to let you pull that terraformation trick again.”

“We weren’t in on that, for the record. The ship sent seeds because it was something we figured you’d need.”

“And yourco-conspirators just happened to be placed to spread them?”

“We’re not doing any conspiracy. If Hive and their friends have plans, they didn’t involve us. Just out of curiosity, why is there so much disagreement over terraforming the planet?”

The following awkward silence is broken by Max clearing their throat. “Now that any questions of immunity are resolved, I plan to take our visitors to tour the underground facilities today, before checking in with their ship. Leadership permitting.”

“We can’t guarantee the children – ”

“We won’t go in the nursery.”

Another silence, very tense. Celti glares. Max glares.

“You know better than anyone what we’re gambling with, Max. If these outsiders aren’t all you want them to be – ”

“What are you buying time for, Celti? Hoping a third option will manifest out of nothing? They’re here. It’s done.”

“I suppose it is, after your co-conspirators – ”

“After your setmate – ”

“We are where we are,” one of the people behind Celti cuts in sharply. “The most important decisions have been made already. Let’s not have a public brawl.”

Max nods. “The tour, then?”

Celti’s group look at each other. A few people in the crowd exchange glances. Brief murmurs are exchanged. Then Celti throws up his hands. “Clearly another Leadership council on this issue would be a waste of time.”

“Thank you.” Max turns to leave. We turn to follow.

“Max,” Celti says.

“Mmm?”

“Contact the ship first. I’m given to understand they’re quite nervous up there, with Hive’s sudden replacement. They were promised a report as soon as the ground crew got out of quarantine, weren’t they?”

“It would be more efficient to tour fir – ”

“We should be polite to the newcomers above us and allay their fears as soon as possible, don’t you think? And I think it would be beneficial to everyone if our new friends here had time to analyse and think through what they learn in their explorations rather than be thrown immediately into contact with their ship right after such a tour. Give everyone a chance to think through their actions before taking them.”

Max and Celti trade another long look. I don’t have enough context to fully understand what’s going on, but the crowd seems to be more with Celti this time, accepting this compromise. After a moment, Max gives a slow nod. “We all Agree.”

“We all Agree?” Celti asks the people gathered, and when there’s no dissent, Max leads us briskly out of the tent.

As we make our way up the hill to the radio tower, I try to put together what just happened. There is something about their underground facilities that they don’t want us to see, but they’ve accepted that this landing is happening and indefinite delays are pointless. So they’ve reached a compromise where they’ll show us, but after we’ve made our report, so we won’t have to (can’t) tell the ship right away.

Ominous. If there’s something down there that they don’t want the ship to know about, learning about it could put us in danger. It sounded like Celti was hoping to have time to convince us to keep quiet about it, but if it’s important enough for all this, it’s probably important enough for the ship to know. What happens if we don’t agree?

The rest of our group don’t appear to have reached any happier conclusions than me. Tinera’s jaw is set, eyes flicking between Hylarans until we’re out of the main cluster of tents, then raking over the landscape, checking for physical threats, calculating escape routes that don’t exist on a barren planet. Tal stares at the sky above, up where the Courageoussits somewhere invisible above the clouds, deep in thought. Captain Klees’ eyes are glued to Max’s back, brow knitted, probably trying to figure out if we’re in any danger or not. Max has returned to their bright bubbly self, chattering about how relieved the ship will be to hear from us and how great it is that we can experience the planet properly, out of quarantine.

Elenna is a relatively young-looking Hylaran wearing a woven rope belt and actively weaving another in kes hands as ke looks over the various instruments in the radio tower. The job of aiming a radio dish at the ship above can’t involve that many factors, but Elenna’s gaze flits around like the precise placement of every single instrument in the room is critical and they’ll suddenly change if ke turns kes back on them. Ke does pause to stare at our outlandish hairless faces as we walk in, but doesn’t put down the rope, and kes eyes are back on the instrument panels within seconds.

“Which one of you wrote the books?” ke asks.

“Me,” I admit. “Has everyone read those?”

“Yes.” Ke flicks a couple of switches on a panel. “Pinging the ship now. Response. Opening the audio channel.”

Well. Okay then.

“This is the Courageous,” Xanthe’s voice says. Tired, worried, somewhat tinny through the speakers in the room rather than a space suit radio.

“This is Klees,” Captain Klees responds.

“Captain!” Relief floods their voice. “Are you all okay? What’s going on? What happened down there?”

“Nothing critically bad,” Captain Klees says, with absolutely no way of knowing if that’s true. “There’s been an internal political issue so we don’t have Hive any more. The crew down here have just come out of quarantine. All are fine. Three taps.” (‘Three taps’ is a one-use pre-established code phrase to indicate that we’re not speaking under duress. We didn’t come down here completely unprepared for trouble.)

“Is Hive okay?”

Captain Klees looks questioningly at Max, who nods. “They’re in Time Out to think about what they’ve done. They’ll be fine.”

“Aspen has a robot eye,” Tal chips in.

“Yes, Aspen has a bionic eye for now,” Captain Klees says.

“Great! How’s that working?”

“It’s not, yet,” I say. “There was an issue with the optic nerve that – well, either it’ll work eventually or it won’t and I just have to wait for a surgeon from the ship. Captain Klees is getting a new foot soon, thanks to the serums you sent down.”

“How are things on the ship?” Captain Klees asks.

“Not too bad. I’m feeling a lot better, personally; killing off the synnerve seems to have helped fix my adrenalin issue. A disheartening number of failed revivals, but that’s to be expected. We’ve filled out the crew a bit with a few more hands; not a full twenty one yet, and the newcomers are very rattled and need training, but they’ll be able to help us speed up operations and keep this ship in one piece for longer.”

“we’re moving as fast as we can on arranging things to get everybody down,” Captain Klees says. “we’ve hit some… political barriers, in terms of getting information on the colony’s capacities, but we should have more information in short order.”

“No rush,” Xanthe says. “Reviving the colonists is going to take a long time regardless. If you can get us what we need to prioritise cargo drops, that’s great. If not, we’ll just drop staple goods and seeds until – ”

“No seeds for now,” Captain Klees says. “It’s complicated. Just staples.”

“Um. Okay? Okay, Captain.”

“By the way, Xanthe. Do you remember back when the colony wasn’t responding, and we discussed the option of landing elsewhere on the planet?”

“… I do. Is that scenario looking likely?”

“I don’t think so. Hard to say. But when you’re preparing drops, prioritise goods to keep the option open. Just in case you do need to land somewhere else.”

There’s a long pause. Eventually, Xanthe says, “Captain, you do know that the pods are drop only. That there’s no way to get you back up on the ship.”

“Yes, we understand that.”

“So if we do drop somewhere else on the planet…”

“We’re alone here for the rest of our lives. Yes. We know.”

“There’s that launcher they used to melt the ice caps,” Tal says, grinning. “I know it has no hope of getting anything into orbit, but if the Courageouspeopleland at the pole, we could climb into a big crate and – ”

“There are much less scary ways to die here,” Tinera says drily.

“Melt the ice caps?” Xantha asks.

“We’ve been informed,” Captain Klees says, “that the presence of free oxygen here is human-engineered. There’s no evidence of alien life here. It’s the colony.”

“Creating an atmosphere for a whole planet?” Xanthe asks, not bothering to hide their incredulity. “In just over half a century? No.”

“We don’t have all the details yet,” Captain Klees says. “But that’s what they say.”

“Alien spider queen technology,” Tal whispers, too quiet for the radio to pick up, and waggles kes eyebrows at us. We ignore kem.

“We hope to have more information soon,” Captain Klees says. “Nothing’s critically wrong up there?”

“No more wrong than when you left. Lina’s chomping at the bit over ‘wasted potential’, since we’ve got that modified dream program but all the colonists subjected to it are gone, but it’s probably no more than a historical curiosity at this point, anyways.”

“We have a computer now,” Tal says, “if Teri still wanted me to have a look at it.”

“Oh, great! We’ll send it down.”

“The architecture of the computer is weird. I might need to reconstruct some stuff to read it properly. Or maybe not. We’ll see how we go when I have it.”

“Roger that. Let us know it there’s anything we can do to help. We’re opening up the old bits of the ship up here, so we have as much room as we’re used to, which is great. Getting the other Greenhouse Ring back up and running in case we’re still up here for years.”

“Safe?”

“Yeah. We’re in a pretty stable orbit, the ship doesn’t have to be much more than a pressurised can at this point. ‘Nish and a couple of helpers have finished cutting things open and welding things shut so that all the doors and seals and things are completely manual. It’s impossible to eject a ring now without going in and cutting a bunch of welds first. Things will slowly fall apart when the wrong critical systems fail too many times, when the heat emission systems finally expire and we run out of filters or lose too much oxygen since no oxygen cycling system is perfect, but we’ve got decades left in this thing if we need it.”

“Well, you definitely won’t need that long!”

“Yeah.” Xanthe sounds a little wistful. “End of an era, huh. Captain Kae Jin’s resting now, but she’ll be glad to hear that you’re all okay. We’ll coordinate drops and transferring that data with Elenna, keeping in mind what you’ve said. Best of luck with your data gathering.”

“Give the crew our best.”

“I will. Xanthe out.”

Elenna cuts the transmission. “Which was your favourite?” ke asks.

“Favourite?” Captain Klees asks.

But Elenna is looking at me. “Your favourite book to write.”

“Oh. Um.” It’s been a while since I’ve really thought about writing my books. “The Ice Horizon, I think. Probably.”

Ke nods sharply. “I liked the first one better.”

“R-right.”

“Okay!” Max claps their hands together, smiling. “Should we have a tour?”