Патрик Томлинсон: Children of the Divide

The mottled, pockmarked surface of Varr loomed large in the cockpit windows, each crater and valley jumping out in stark relief under the bright glare of Tau Ceti’s sun. Without an atmosphere, there was no air to blur the details, which were sharper than any holo. It looked almost too real, and it kept growing. It was small for a moon. But even a small moon was a gargantuan object on the scale of human beings.

Jian swallowed. “Looks a lot bigger from here.”

“Nervous, Ace?” Kirkland teased.

“Yeah, a little. I’ve never flown this close to a planetary body before.”

“You’ve been up and down the beanstalk dozens of times.”

“That’s different. The tether means nothing can go wrong. Well, almost nothing.”

Kirkland nodded. “It’s fine. We’ve been through this a hundred times in simulation. Even a few with a mangy engine.”

“Yeah…” Jian keyed up the comlink back to the Ark. “Flight, Atlantis . We’re about to begin terminal maneuvers for our approach to Varr. Priming main engines for burn.” There was a slight pause as the message covered the distance between them.

“ Atlantis , Flight. Acknowledge terminal approach. Good luck.”

Jian lit the mains on minimum power just to get them warmed up. He left the number four motor in standby. Satisfied that the other five would burn when he opened the taps, Jian triggered maneuvering thrusters on the nose to flip the shuttle and get the mains pointed opposite their direction of travel. They had a lot of velocity to bleed off before they could insert into orbit around the low-mass moon.

Jian made a final adjustment to their trim, then put hands on the throttles. “Here we go, kids. Hold on tight.”

A few bruising minutes later, they’d slowed to just over a kilometer per second at an altitude of fifteen kilometers above Varr.

“We’re in. Everybody relax, but stay buckled up.”

Kirkland pointed to a discolored patch near the horizon. “There’s the Helium-3 field.”

Jian nodded and enlarged the image using the feed from the shuttle’s forward camera. Parallel rows of turned regolith hugged the uneven terrain, marking where the autonomous harvesters had already done their work. Two of the machines were still busy churning through the silt. The third, not so much. Jian reoriented the camera and zoomed in on the stricken machine, which was sitting at an odd angle, as though it had fallen halfway into a sinkhole.

Kirkland whistled and looked over her shoulder at the techs. “Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you, fellas.” A chorus of groans revealed their feelings of the prospect.

“Think we have time to land this boat?” Kirkland asked.

Jian shook his head. “Nah. Let’s do a flyby and survey the scene for the best LZ. We’ll catch it on the next orbit. That’ll give us a chance to check out the telescope site on the far side as well.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Their orbit carried the Atlantis closer to the field until it was directly underneath. Looking straight down on the immobilized harvester, Jian could see the hole it had fallen into. It was irregularly shaped, and about half the size of the harvester. Its front two drive wheels dangled over open space. Lidar put the hole’s depth at more than twenty meters.

“What do you think?” Kirkland asked. “Roof collapse? We know there are some lava tubes leftover here and there.”

“Well it’s definitely not a crater.” Just then, something in the lidar return caught his eye. It was sharp-edged and hexagonal, sitting on the floor of the cave, or whatever. And it wasn’t alone. Something reflective with an edge that was a perfect ninety-degree angle jutted out from the dark next to the hexagon. Jian swiped the image from the small lidar monitor to the main screen.

“Are you seeing this?” he asked.

Kirkland traced the shapes with her fingertip. “What the hell are those?”

“Hey, Madeja,” Jian called to the back of the cabin. “Unbuckle and come up here a minute.”

The nervous tech floated into view to his left. “Yes, commander?”

Jian pointed at the mystery objects. “Any ideas? Could they be parts of the harvester that broke off in the accident?”

“Not anything that I can think of.”

“Well then what is it?”

“I’m sorry, commander, but I have no idea.”

“Survey equipment, maybe? Probe? A crashed satellite?” Jian asked even as he opened a data query to search probe landing sites or equipment lost on the surface, but there were no landing or crash sites within a hundred and fifty kilometers. “Nope. Nothing.”

“Well if we didn’t put it there,” Kirkland said. The implication of the question floated in the air between them.

Despite the zero gee, Jian’s stomach sank.

“That’s not supposed to be there.”

Two

Varr rose above the horizon as night crept over the village of G’tel. Alone in the long-abandoned signal tower, Benexx watched the small moon slowly gain altitude against the dark ocean of stars. Few came up here anymore. Not since the road network had been supplied with human-built radios. Once their proudest technological achievement, the signal tower was now little more than a tree fort for village kids.

In truth, calling G’tel a “village” was a misnomer. In the fifteen years since the humans’ appearance on the continent, the population had exploded. For the first time, houses were being built well outside of the village’s ring of protective halo trees. Where once crops had grown in the sun, rings of streets had been laid down. New three-, four-, and now even five-level buildings were being erected as fast as the mudstone could set.

As the village grew, human advisors helped plan for new issues that cropped up, such as infrastructure, aqueducts, and sanitation. All this development was necessary to keep up with the growth fueled by the twin booms in both fertility and immigration. G’tel was now the place on the road network for trade, sitting as it did next to the largest landing strip, and only sea port, on the entire continent. And with the explosive increases in crop yields owed to the humans’ desalinization plant and irrigation channels, there was finally enough food to feed all those hungry mouths. The days of culling new clutches were fading into memory.

Which was just fine with Benexx. Ze’d narrowly escaped being decapitated only moments after zer birth, along with every other member of zer clutch, save four. It was a barbaric practice, one ze’d only been spared from by the intervention of zer father, Bryan Benson. Benexx had never bothered to search out zer biological parents. Ze didn’t feel the need.

“Ah, there you are, Benexx,” a familiar voice called from below. It was Uncle Kexx, G’tel’s long-serving truth-digger. Ze was shadowed as always by zer human apprentice, Sakiko, who was in turn shadowed by Gamera, an orphaned ulik she’d adopted as a pup.

“We wondered where you’d run off to before the evening cleansing,” Kexx said.

“Just wanted to watch one more sunset over the plains,” Benexx called down.

“Well, don’t be too late. The evening cleansing is starting soon and you have an early flight tomorrow.”

“Yes, uncle.”

“Goodnight.” Kexx said something to Sakiko in Atlantian, a little too quiet and fast for Benexx to pick up, then headed back down the trail to the old village inside the ring of trees. Zer house was there, near the outskirts, as it had been since before Benexx was born. Sakiko remained behind and started up the ladder to join zer at the top, while Gamera whined softly at the base of the tower before stomping down a bed in the underbrush and lying down to wait for her return.