Dove Levy: Way Station

Three of the team members died by them. I was reading one of the botanists’ journals. Some of the still-dangerous specimens have been marked on a map, but nobody wanted to risk going close enough to any of the others to fill out warnings of the surrounding area. We’ll just avoid as many of them as we can.

Farther north, now. We’re close to the mesas. I have little to no confidence in the trail I picked for us to follow, but none of the other ones we saw gave us any more certainty. Likely, we’ll be spending our time picking trails at random and following them to their ends until the ferry’s battery is fully charged and we can leave. It’s better than sitting and waiting. We’ve had more than enough of that on the ride here.

There’s a grove right behind us full of plants that look like a mix between a rose, a venus flytrap, and the top of a palm tree. With how many of the flora on this planet have carnivoristic adaptations, I’m beginning to wonder if it was really the animals at the top of the food chain, or if that’s just my innate Earth-born assumption. It’s entirely possible that no mass extinction event was needed to wipe out the sentient life. Maybe the plants just ate them all.

Path number twelve. Still nothing. Still five hours till the ferry.

I can’t wait to get off of this island.

We found blood. Fourteenth time’s the charm, right?

It’s intermittent, starting about twenty feet past the southwestern edge of the border, and the space between the blood spatters is ten to twenty feet, uneven, like the bodies were carried on something that held in the blood and slipped every now and then. The boot prints look more recent than the other trails we’ve been down, but that might just be my imagination. Rural though I grew up, I’ve never been that great with tracking anything but the rampant destructive path my brother always made in the woods.

By now, the ferry battery should be fully charged and ready. It won’t hurt to leave it like that for a bit. Our schedule is completely made up by us, trying to comply with our bosses’ expectations as best we can. POGE is unpredictable of late, and even they know they can’t constrain us to a time limit.

They also know that we know there will be consequences for delaying too long. But a few hours can’t hurt, right?

The trail is hard to follow. The members who made it take random turns at random places, sometimes going off the clear land and right into spiny brush. Dr. Federman and I keep having to backtrack and walk in large circles to see where it picks up again, making lucky guesses whenever the blood blends into the rocks or plants around us. Some of this blood is from the bodies, but a lot of it seems to be from those carrying them, especially farther down their trail where they went through bushes with thorns sharper than my scalpel. Scraps of clothing are snagged on the thorns. Their walking suits had been ruptured, which should have killed them in a few minutes. Yet they kept going.

Nothing more we can do. An enormous field of those spiny plants stretches before us, disappearing into a mountain pass far above. Even our strongest lanterns can’t illuminate any farther than the rocky face twenty feet up. If they’re not dead now, they will be soon. Trying to cross this patch will kill Dr. Federman and me faster than I can record it. They should have given us armored suits so we could traverse such terrain. An oversight.

The worst thing is, we know that we’re not far away. More smears of blood and scraps of clothing make an easy-to-see trail through the thorny brush, a trail partially trampled and partially pushed aside but still too narrow for either of us to make it safely more than a few feet. We know where the bodies are, or, at least, where some of them are. And we can’t find out what happened to them.

Maybe, if we succeed, we can convince our bosses to upgrade our walking suits, or make vehicles equipped for harsher land, and we can come back. It’s not like the bodies will be rotting anytime soon.

Time to go.

I swear I saw something in the clouds just now. Something bright, flashing, but only for a split second. Something far eastward, miles and miles and miles across the water.

Maybe I just imagined it.

Dr. Eve Strauss, Research Facility G on Minor Island, assisted by Dr. Isaac Federman. Walls are intact, but the life support system is no longer functioning. Food storage is perished and air supply has leaked. About half of the research team was found in the control room and the lounge area, with a few bodies in bedrooms and the food storage. The other half was found outside the northern wall of the facility. All areas within the facility show signs of flooding, but the water has since been drained. The land around the facility shows signs of a severe earthquake.

Examination review of Mike Noel, ID number 318, details in file. Full autopsy report in temporary file, pending transfer when communication channels open again. They were found clothed in the control room, beneath the main desk. Burns cover their hands and forearms, with a few burns on their face where they had fallen against the broken main control center.

The burns were not fatal. Fine froth is found in the mouth, and the lungs are filled with water, with more water in the stomach and intestines. The burns were likely from them trying to control the facility’s functions to contain or drain the water, but the water had heavily damaged the control station and cause part of it to burst.

Cause of death is drowning in a flood that filled the facility. All members of Facility G are deceased. Those inside have a consistent cause of death as Noel, and those outside were killed by debris from the earthquake.

I have never, in all my years, been so grateful for human error.

Bad phrasing — I’m not happy they died. I’m not happy the facility is broken. Those are human lives, and that’s millions of dollars in building costs, and millions more in reparations, if the bosses decide they want to keep trying with this planet. But if they had to die, I am so, so thankful that it was to natural, normal, human error.

It would be ridiculous to think that the short decade that scientists have been studying POGE would lead to an expert-level understanding of anything on it. What I remember learning about the tectonic activity of POGE is that it’s one of the least-understood topics on the planet so far because of how few stations exist that study them in the first place — how few stations there even are on POGE, which certainly aren’t enough to adequately study the amount of surface needed to attain a good understanding, even if they all devoted their focus to the plates. And there aren’t any weather monitors out at sea yet near Facility G due to some difficulties in transmissions over the sea separating the northern and southern landmasses. It’s why Facility G is here in the first place — similar to Facility A on the southern continent, it’s a relay between the stations in POGE’s northern hemisphere, collecting basic data to send back to Earth until the channels can open again.

In this lack of understanding and lack of monitors in the ocean surrounding it, the earthquake wasn’t picked up until it was already upon the team, killing the half that had been outside and were, seemingly, running back to the station at their time of death. A few minutes following the earthquake, the tsunami struck, and from the wreckage of the surrounding land, it was a big one. As to how the water flooded the facility, there were a few bodies near the doors, and I can make an educated guess that facility workers inside had opened the doors and were trying to help their comrades who survived the earthquake make it in before the water hit. They didn’t time it right, and that’s why they’re all dead.