137: RADIO

Max shows us the central meeting area, which is exactly what it sounds like – a huge dome that’s apparently for meeting up and conducting business. A town hall, I suppose. Some benches are lined up along one edge with plastic crates piled on them; a middle-aged person with no feet perches on the edge of a table and consults a computer screen over one eye while a few other Hylarans talk to them. As I watch, they direct a toddler to go and grab a small wrapped package from a crate, which is handed to one of the consulting people. Some kind of resource distribution centre, then; makes sense. A ration system? Or are goods paid for with money? A mix of both, perhaps?

Along the opposite edge of the dome, plastic tables are scattered, where Hylarans eat and talk. They look like the one in our living dome, so it probably was brought in for us specifically, although it’s possible that they just have one kind of table in storage and everyone has a table in their home also. Here and there about the dome, people play games with each other, children skipping and darting about. I suppose it’s not really practical for them to chase each other outside.

The oxygen pumps run constantly, with people moving in and out of the dome through multiple doors. A wasteful setup. I suppose that they have a system somewhere that pulls oxygen from the air, so it’s not like they’ll run out of air, but it’s surely a waste of power. Not to mention wear and tear on the pumps.Even if the canvas integrity can’t be trusted, surely some airlocks would be more practical than this?

Of course, as soon as we enter, everyone stops what they’re doing to stare at us. We wave awkwardly.

“How long will this go on, do you think?” Tinera asks on our private channel.

“Probably at least until they can see our faces,” Captain Klees says.

“Our faces? Have you seen their faces? I bet we look like freaks to them.”

I shake my head, although nobody can see it through my helmet. “The colonists who landed here would’ve looked like us. We don’t know yet exactly when they died off, but the older Hylarans at least would’ve been raised by them. We’ll look like their parents and grandparents to them.” I can’t wait to be able to take the helmet off in public. Conversations are happening around us, and I want to hear them!

It’s not eavesdropping. It’s sociological research.

Before I can get a good look around the dome, a door opens, and a tall Hylaran wearing a multicoloured wovenbelt walks in. Max’s eyes widen.

“Well, we should move on!” Max chirps over the radio. “Captain Klees, I believe you wanted to make a report?”

“But I wanted to see – ” Tal protests, but stops when the Friend and I grab kes elbows and steer kem after Max.

“Well, that was transparent,” Tinera grumbles over our private channel. “I wonder what they were so worried we’d see?”

“Or what they didn’t want that person to see about us,” I say.

“Patience,” Captain Klees cautions. “We’re making friends, remember? We can’t make headway if we’re difficult, and if we charge off on our own without knowing what’s going on we’ll delay everything with a diplomatic nightmare. Let the liaison liaise until we have good reason not to.”

I analyse the belts of the people we pass, looking for patterns. Maybe different colours or designs denote rank or job or family? But no obvious pattern stands out. I file that away as a future cultural question to ask.

On our private channel, Tinera asks, “Are you guys as curious about the underground areas as I am?”

“I’d love to see their farms,” I say. “They’re not up here, so they’re probably underground, which would be easier to keep airtight. A famine that killed off so many suggests some kind of crash that they’ve recovered from; I want to know what happened. If it’s some kind of pathogen then we’ll need to account for it in what plants and algae we send down first.”

“Yeah, that’s what interests me,” Tinera says. “‘Easier to keep airtight’. If they have farms and power generation down there, if they’ve been here for decades, they have space down there for beds. So why are they up there trusting their lives to old canvas and oxygen pumps?”

Hmm. Good question.

“There may be something toxic underground that doesn’t come to the surface,” the Friend suggests. “We don’t know what the ground is made of down there. Perhaps it oxidises into a toxic gas that is more of a risk than the too-thin oxygen up here.”

Hmm. Maybe. There are a lot of gases that can kill through inhaling too much but are perfectly safe to grow crops in. You’d want an airtight place to grow crops, too, because the easiest way to keep nitrogen in the soil for them is to have nitrogen in the air that can be fixed down there. Earth’s air is mostly nitrogen; Hylara’s is mostly neon. Their food situation is precarious enough for there to be no aboveground plants in sight, not even decorative ones in the common area, and they suffered a famine, so food growing might be a delicate operation.

We pass our living dome and keep moving uphill, towards the radio tower. It stands proud against the reddish sky. Its enormous dish, pointing up at the sky and probably at the Courageous, looks recently cleaned. As we move uphill through the sand in our stupid clunky space suits, I realise the tower is taller than I expected, taller than it needs to be (at least I assume so; I don’t know anything about radio towers). There are a fair number of smaller devices attached to it that I don’t recognise or understand.

At the base of the tower sits a little metal room. It looks about the size of a single large room, and probably is. Hive comes out of the door and waves at us. I wave back, but I’m not really paying attention to them. None of us are. We’re looking at something on the far side of the hill.

A long set of rails climb up the neighbouring slope in what looks to be a perfectly straight line. The bottom disappears into a small metal building at the base that might be partially buried, it’s hard to be sure. Along their length, they travel through several metal hoops on their way to the top of the slope and then just… stop.

“Is that a fucking rail gun?!” Tal asks, awed.

Max laughs. “What is this, the pre-Neocambrian age? No, that’s a Hypati launcher. A rail gun that short wouldn’t send anything very far.”

“What’s it for?” Captain Klees asks.

“Climate control, mostly. It’s complicated. Should we contact the ship?”

We head inside the room under the tower. It is, of course, the control station for the equipment, and various controls and displays are arrayed along one wall. Along the opposite wall sits two beds and a little walled-off area, probably a bathroom. In the middle of the floor there’s a large metal trapdoor. It’s very clearly locked; the locking bolts are on the top, and visible. It looks like it might be airtight, although it’s hard to be sure.

“Welcome to the command centre!” Hive says dramatically. “Well, The monitoring station. Mostly we monitor weather and the mat – well, weather, from here. There’s always the risk of flooding.”

“I imagine there would be,” Captain Klees says in a very neutral tone.

“The higher-ups insist that the settlement is positioned properly so we won’t be in danger of any floodwaters, but that’s always a matter of rainfall not overwhelming the water channels. So we try to keep an eye on the cloud movements and the rain which, of course, we get a lot of.”

“Of course,” Captain Klees agrees. “When can we meet these ‘higher-ups’?”

Hive and Max exchange a brief glance, brief enough that I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t watching specifically for it.

“Soon,” Max assures us. “But we need to be sure that everyone’s completed the viral treatments first, and that they work.”

“Yes, of course.”

Hive fiddles with some dials. “There you go! If you call through your radios on the ship’s frequency, we can send the message up.”

“Thank you. You wanted to know about bees, right?”

“No! No, there’s no need to bother them with that; it was just idle curiosity. I’ll ask when it becomes relevant.”

On our private channel, Tinera says, “Something really weird is happening, but I have no idea what it is. This feels like some kind of con. Are we being conned?”

“How?” I ask. “We don’t have anything. We know we have partial information, but they haven’t given us anything specific enough to be a useful lie, if they’re trying to deceive the ship.”

“Well, something’s not right here.”

“Plenty of time to figure it out later,” Captain Klees says. “For now, let’s let the ship know we’re not dead.” He switches channels. “Klees to Courageous.”

The ship must’ve been alerted to our call in advance, because the response is immediate.

“Receiving. Status?”

“Ground team are all alive and well, as I’m sure you’ve already heard. Is that Xanthe?”

“Yes. I’ll be your primary contact up here. Asteria will take over if I’m asleep. The cap – Captain Kae Jin wanted to do it, but her lungs might not be up to it.”

“And how is the captain?”

“No worse than she was this morning. The doctors are hopeful that there might be no more organ failures, but it’s too early to be sure. How are things down there?”

“Markedly different than what we expected. Two major points. First: the need for life support and pressure vessel materials aren’t nearly as critical as we’d assumed. The colony aren’t isolated from the Hylaran atmosphere. They drink the planet’s native water and breathe the planet’s air with supplemented oxygen and carbon dioxide.”

“What?! Why?”

“We have few details at this time. But they’re not all going to die immediately because we didn’t drop enough dome canvas fast enough. They seem relatively stable for now, although we haven’t examined food and power production yet. Which brings me to the second point; it might be a week or so before we can make much headway. It turns out that we might propose an immune problem to the residents. They have a treatment that should deal with it.”

There’s a bit of a pause before Xanthe asks, “An immune problem?”

“It seems that most of them have never been exposed to a virus before in their lives. There’s some concern over whether we might carry normally benign viruses that pose a threat to them. They have a treatment for this, apparently; it was an anticipated danger and prepared for when their ship initially launched.”

“And that’ll work?”

The Friend cuts in. “We can only trust their science on this. To this friend’s knowledge, the research into the effects of reaching adulthood with an immune system completely unpracticed against viruses is relatively unknown. Usually, test subjects raised in sterile environments have been killed by microbial infections before viruses can be an issue as they lack a microbiome to outcompete any pathogens they might encounter. Viruses shouldn’t have that particular problem, but this Friend is inclined to trust the Hylarans that any virus could pose a threat to them, and that their treatment will sufficiently train their immune systems to prevent this. One assumes that Antarctica did the research on this.”

“Do you need us to send anything down for that?” Xanthe asks. “Any vaccines and stuff?”

“Not currently. We already know that we aren’t carrying anything that we have vaccines for.”

I ask on the private channel, “Half of our crew were genetically engineered in chronostasis and their blood presumably still carries the ability to engineer body cells. Is blood contamination from them a risk to the Hylarans?”

“Not any more than any blood contamination is,” the Friend answers. “That’s not a viral thing. But we should be careful with blood and avoid accidentally genetically engineering any Hylarans nonetheless.”

“Okay,” Xanthe says, “so canvas isn’t critical, and neither are food or medical supplies?”

“Our doctors are requesting cell substrate,” Hive says, “if you have that.”

“Anything specialised?”

“No, whatever we can grow human muscle on.”

“Right, that shouldn’t be a problem. Basic grower substrate can do that, we have that already for our own moss biotanks to make oil so we won’t even need to go digging around for it. Anything else?”

“No.”

“Okay. Ground team, what’s the nonhuman growing situation down there? Plants, animals?”

‘Alien life?’ is the real question there, I’m sure of it, but I answer the question asked thoroughly anyway. “We haven’s seen anything nonhuman. We haven’t toured the underground facilities yet, but there’s nothing up here. Zero nonhuman animals, no plants of any kind on the surface, not even decorative ones in the living domes. I can get you a more thorough picture after we’ve seen everything.”

“Nothing else?”

“No life in sight, known or unknown. Of course, I haven’t been sampling for microbes. I assume there’s bacteria everywhere.” I make a mental note to check that as soon as I get access to a microscope. I’m sick of being blindsided by assuming things that should definitely be true and somehow aren’t.

“Huh. Hive, any particular reason for the lack of vegetation? Do you need plants?”

Hive and Max exchange a strange, tense glance before Hive answers, “The atmosphere is low pressure and very low in nitrogen. It wouldn’t support plant life very well.”

“We have engineered strains for that. We’ll send you down some basic pioneers that can survive your conditions. They won’t be particularly verdant with that level of nitrogen but they’ll survive. Once we get some proper terraforming experts awake, they might have a strategy for keeping nitrogen in that soil.”

“Our committee would need to talk about that,” Hive says. “We can’t just go randomly planting things.”

“Of course! We’ll send them down and you guys can figure out what you want to use and how. We’re not ready to wake terraformers yet anyway.”

“Are you waking people yet?” Captain Klees asks.

“We’re planning to wake our first round of colonists once we’ve started properly pipelining these resource drops, so probably in a week or so. Oh, Tal, you might be interested to hear that Teri’s been looking into the cerebral program for the colonists.”

“It’s working alright, isn’t it?” Tal asks, a hint of panic in kes voice. “They’re dreaming properly?”

“It’s working fine, so far as us non-experts can tell. But she found an altered version that we think might be Cory’s program for sending and receiving to the brains ke stole. None of us can make much sense of it, I suspect a lot of it is machine-developed and incomprehensible to human minds anyway, but – do you guys have reliable computer access down there?”

“We’ve seen a couple of computers down here,” Captain Klees says, “but not reliable access currently, no.”

“Okay well, if you get it, let us know. Teri wants to see if Tal can make sense of any of this.”

“Will do. Any problems up there?”

“No, everything’s going smoothly. Any problems down there?”

“Not as yet.”

“Great! We’ll arrange the next drop as soon as possible.”

“Good luck. Klees out.”

Max flashes us a bright grin. “Everything’s going great for everyone, then!” They don’t seem to notice Hive’s tense look. “Our haulers have finished retrieving and sterilising the contents of your drop pod. I imagine you’ll all want to rest for a bit.” They lead the way outside.

They’re not wrong. I certainly want a bit of time to go over everything. There are too many little things that mostly but don’t quite add up. There’s something here that the colony isn’t telling us.

What the fuck is going on?