IGMS Issue 49 (4 page)

Two days later, the tunnel walls above us collapse.

It's a quake beyond all our measurements; it feels like the whole planet is convulsing in a death spasm. The impact pierces through to the top stasis layers, crushing the pod down so that it bulges at its equator and tears apart at the seams.

We lose fifty people inside a heartbeat. There's no way to get to them safely. We seal off the top third of the pod and the outer layers near the equator, and hold a day-long memorial for the friends we've lost, and the ones we barely knew. I keep my Fibonacci mask on over the darkness, talking to each of the crew, weekly hour-long sessions about the loss and the dark and the fear, and the beauty above that will make it worthwhile.

Seris sits straight-backed throughout her sessions, no talk of sculptures or canyons. She never flinches, those gold-green eyes clear and firm. The woman has control like steel. You could bend girders around her will.

We should have made her the psych.

The wind unearths us in the final months of the terraform. We've lost all external cameras and sensors from the quakes, so while the rest of the crew slowly revive from cryo, we send drones and probes to sample the air and the soil from the ruined layers of the pod and ascertain if it's safe. Seris orders the doors welded shut to stop anyone leaving prematurely. I catch Justin trying to sneak out through a weakened bulkhead and have to handcuff him to his bed. Seris keeps us blind and waiting three whole days before she lets us out onto our paradise.

We walk out into a dead sea of rust.

The rock spires have been scoured down to sand by the storms. The brilliant blues and greens are gone, replaced with a glaring red-orange dust. It washes over the splintered shell of the pod, filling the cracks like water.

We're meant to be on recovery detail. I go AWOL. From the radio traffic, I'm not the only one - most of the terraform crew disappear. We're all looking for the same thing, I think. Some semblance of the world we loved. Our own secret, sacred places. I go looking for that canopy. I want to touch the minerals that shimmer on the rock surface, brush my fingers over the lichen.

I walk for two hours across the dead salt desert until the GPS says I've arrived. The spires are gone; nothing can hide on this planet anymore. I can see to the edge of the world; featureless and barren. The same emptiness howls inside. I sink onto my knees in the fine, ruddy dust, bury my hands and my face in what's left of that place and I sob.

I don't know how long I stay. Hunger comes and goes, and a weakness takes my limbs. But if I close my eyes and breathe the dust deeply enough, I can go back there under the spires. I can go back and wait to die.

Visions fill my head: the spires and the great storms that destroyed them. I imagine the planet writhing as we wrench her skin away and smother her in foreign air, and I spin back in the whirling darkness as the pod shudders and splits around me again. I brace for the force of the earth to crush us. I almost want it to.

When they find me, I'm too weak to walk. I wouldn't even if I could. They pull me from the dust and drag me back to the colony and lock me in an observation room.

Two others join me in that empty whiteness: Justin and Anna. They sit on the floor with the same expressions, the same vacant, shell-shocked faces. Red rivulets run down their cheeks where tears have plastered the dust to their skin. Dried blood clots on their fingers where the sand has shredded them. The whites of their eyes are orange with dust. I can feel the same grit in mine. We are the colour of our world; the only colour in the room.

We don't talk. I can see myself in them, my loss. I can see the spires and that sky we obliterated, Anna's deep pit of Hades and Justin's Buddha. I will them back again, try to crawl back into memory, force my belief they're still there until my chest aches, but the void in my gut sucks everything away until even the colours hurt.

Everything we loved of this world, we destroyed by trying to touch.

It takes them a week to decide Anna and I aren't a danger to ourselves or others. We eat, if tastelessly, and we answer questions. We're released to our assigned tasks on the condition that we check in each evening with the resident psych nurse. Justin is less fortunate. With each day, he withdraws further and further into himself; at first reducing his answers to monosyllabic mumbles, and then to nothing at all. Twice, his apathy snaps into a near-psychotic rage, and he launches himself at the nearest available surface, throwing himself against it until he's restrained.

I walk out again onto that lifeless dustball, trying to slip back into my engineering role. The glare of the sun in that garish blueness burrows into my brain and sinters my nerves. I want the soft, warm orange, the amber glow. Even the stars, my ridiculous constellations, would be better than that alien blue.

The wind razors my skin raw with sand. I force myself to remain standing and scoop a handful of the dust. It pours through my fingers, so fine it's almost liquid. A dull throb starts in the base of my brain, reaching around to my temples. I try to ignore it and walk further out into the heat.

The colony has soldiered on without us, starting the foundations of our new life. Skeletal scaffolds erupt from the sand like desiccated ribcages, the only interruption to that flat, dead horizon, but they splay and twist, slowly sagging instead of bearing true. I'd designed them to be sunk deep into a rocky ground, but now there's only sand and dust.

Seris will make us relocate, if there's anywhere with rock on this planet. The thought of leaving my canopy, even its remains, hollows me. I shuffle through the sand back toward the engineering labs - there has to be a stable scaffold we could build. The muscles in my thigh spasm, like they're crackling. I ease one hand down each leg as I walk, trying to look inconspicuous. Last thing I want is to end up back in isolation.

I step over attempts at mud bricks and glass on the way; clearly they've already been trying. In a neat little grid marked with specimen numbers lie two dozen crumbled bricks and slabs and patches of blackened dust. A few paces on, another half-dozen are being baked in a makeshift oven. Seris eyes the progress critically, her mouth in that steel line, gold-green eyes squinting against the dust. Anna's at her side, talking softly, her once-animated hands reduced to subdued flutters. She looks up as I approach but keeps talking, as if her body is on automatic.

"... doesn't matter what we add, it's not going to bind. It's slightly alkaline, but not too much; at best, it can act as a substrate like the hydroponics, but the nutrients sink straight through it; it's too fine. I've even found microscopic particles needling their way through cell walls."

Seris's gaze snaps up from the oven. "It's a contaminant?"

"No ill-effects that we've observed, but yes. We've already been exposed, Seris. And it's not something we can avoid. It's in the air, even inside. There's no point in a quarantine, and we don't have the oxygen reserves anyway."

Anna's voice is exhausted. If Seris is irritated at the too-familiar phrasing, she doesn't show it. When I look at Anna more closely, I can see the pinched expression around her eyes, the signs of tension in her jaw. She's as brittle as I am, and Seris knows it.

Seris answers a buzz on her comms, and waves a dismissal at us as she turns back to the colony pod. I try to muster an appropriately quizzical expression for Anna.

Anna shrugs. She isn't bothering to maintain the pretence with me. "I have to - " she waves vaguely at the makeshift hydroponics station. "We keep finding drowned bees in the irrigation units." She massages the palm of one hand with her thumb, slowly working her way down to her wrist.

"Cramps?"

"All the time. Like I'm being electrocuted."

"And a headache, like the back of your head's being broiled."

Anna looks at me, fear replacing the pinched expression for a moment. "Justin," she murmurs.

I know what she means. "I won't tell them if you won't. It's probably just stress."

She nods mutely, staring at her hand, and walks back to the hydroponics station.

The cramps spread until my whole body twitches. My muscles ripple and spasm under my skin like insects are crawling along my bones. I take a double-dose of muscle relaxants at night, but I stop sleeping at all two nights in. I'm exhausted, but it's better than the dreams. The blue-green spires, perfect and whole, tower above me, cradling me while I burn in the acid air. I can feel the lichen soft under my skin, burrowing into my nerves, blossoming with my heat as my body is etched away to bone, and up above the great maw in the stars sucks at my mind, gnawing it to pieces.

When I wake to my sterile, white quarters, I can't tell if I'm crying from relief or despair.

I spend my time out under the stars instead, huddling over a telescope where my canopy once was, hiding in numbers and calculations. I tell Seris I'm studying the gap in the stars. There's a flash of something in her face when she agrees. Pity, perhaps, for the poor sod barely keeping it together. Or maybe relief that I'm keeping my angst to myself, unlike Justin. I don't know what to say to either.

Anna joins me out in the dust the third night, unannounced. I'm calibrating the equipment for the thinner atmosphere, and she appears beside the scopes, watching dust clouds wash over the stars at the horizon. She says nothing for ten minutes, and then:

"I think we're dying."

I still my hands, thumb paused to close off the recalibration commands. Her voice is bald, like she's discussing the drowned bees. For a moment, I think that's all she's going to say, but she continues.

"My temperature's almost two degrees below normal, but my heart rate is elevated. All my enzymes are off-kilter and my potassium is low - which should lower my heart rate, not increase it. My neural activity is above normal, and there are growths in my brain where the tissue is denser than it should be."

I open my mouth to find a response, and settle for, "Did you tell anyone?" She ignores my lack of bedside manner.

"You have the same cramps. The headache. And you're not sleeping, are you?"

I adjust the tilt of the display by a fraction of a degree, trying to steady my hands.

"I keep seeing them," she whispers. "The spires. The planet. Like we killed a whole world and the ghost remains. And - " she checks herself, finally glancing over to me. I try my best 'this is between you and me' expression.

She exhales an almost-laugh. "Not so good at the human reaction thing right now, are we?"

"It's just grief," I say. "It's what people do, when..." I gesture helplessly to the empty planet.

"Justin committed suicide tonight."

I try to make an appropriate response. I can't even find one inside. Justin's my friend, I'm the one who defended him, who found him halfway up a vent shaft and talked him down, but it's like she's just told me we're out of oatmeal. In the silence, my equipment buzzes to announce it's started recording the starlight. I watch numbers flow over the screens as it scans.

"I'm hearing things." She turns to me fully, now, and I see a shadow of real feeling in her face. Fear. "I don't know what they are, it's like I can almost hear, but I don't understand."