141: ANSWERS

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. Mustbe.”

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 youknew 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.”