Chapter 4

The dark clouds rolled away to reveal a sapphire sky, the light of Poseidon muted by Ava’s visor. Hilltops were covered in blue grass, each plateau was fixed with one to two hundred canopies, and the snags along the outer reaches curved together to create a large, elliptical gap through which the sun cast jackstraws of elongated shadow. The Federation hadn’t yet named this mountain, but Ava thought ‘The Eye of Poseidon’ would be fitting, as it seemed to watch over the copse below like a vigilant god from an Earthborn folktale.

V-Knox 852 had been travelling for the better part of an hour, the first thirty minutes in the station buggy, and the second thirty on foot. It was a quick journey to Parallel 40, just on the other side of Site 101, but the beautiful fauna and iridescently skinned creatures made it a plenty enjoyable experience.

Jack tapped his wrist overlay and shot water into his mouth from the helmet tube. “How much farther, Mindfield? I hate walkin’.”

Ava did, too, especially when carrying thirty pounds’ worth of tech in what normally would have been only a Life Support backpack. The team looked like small children on their first day of school, with bags almost three-quarters their size, and heavy, groundeating footsteps as they plodded up the final brow of the hill.

“About another hundred or so miles,” said Zef, and laughed. “Relax your panties. We’re here, on the outskirts anyway. What do you think, team? Long walk?”

“Alright, I suppose.” Tyrone’s surname appeared on the upper left corner of Ava’s helmet overlay, his voice muffled and out of breath. “Walked longer distances on the SS.”

“Longer, but not higher,” added Jade, who despite her freakish energy, sounded tuckered out as well. “I like a challenge, though.”

“You’ll find plenty here, Harper,” said Zef. “Plenty.” And he led the team the last couple paces over the hilltop, pulling on nearby branches for support.

At the top, there was an open glade with already-constructed chemtech at the centre: a framework of long, wire-wrapped bars, several tanks of liquid-oxygen, and drainpipes clogged only by the stopcocks on their exit holes. The liquid burbled, and even through the helmet Ava caught scents of burning gas and stone-melted oil. It reminded her a great deal of those old dropships, and it made sense, considering that much of the terraforming technology made use of the same materials and resources needed in order for a ship to fly. Ion circuitry being a fundamental component in each.

Without a doubt, this was the famous ‘Terraform-integrated Bio-engineering 17’ (T.I.B.17 for short). A first of its kind, with the potential to sequester the sulphur compounds in the atmosphere. In theory, this would give the atmosphere a chance at returning to a sustainable condition for humans, so long as the volcanic activity remained stagnant and didn't spike in the near future. Only a couple thousand of these and this quarter of the planet may have a ray-protective blanket, but they wouldn’t work, not without the proper resources.

Many of the colonisers on Zurn 852 were tasked with gathering resources as well as installing T.I.B.17s. Actually, as far as Ava was aware, all of the colonising teams were. They had been for the past three years and had made incredible progress since then.

They use advanced sensors to detect the presence and concentration of sulphur in the atmosphere, Ava remembered reading on a news article. They use powerful ionizing beams to break down these compounds into their constituent elements. Some machines use focused lasers to generate high-energy plasma, while others use magnetic fields to accelerate charged particles. Once these ionizing beams are generated, they are directed towards the atmosphere using advanced targeting systems.

“This been here long?” asked Nielsen, agog with curiosity. The cord attached to his LS System made a zippy whoosh sound as he thumbed it out. He let go and it snapped back into place.

“This is the terminal,” said Zef. “Here more than a month, just waiting for us to use it.”

“Who built it?”

“The Federation,” said Sibyl. “They have hundreds across Zurn 852, but they lack the resources necessary to run a full sweep of every parallel.”

“You’re tellin’ me the richest governmental power in the Western Arm don’t have enough resources?”

“At the moment, no. Petrolate takes a long time to gather,” said Sibyl. “To run a sweep of the entire planet, it would require at least half of the planet’s water level.”

“That sounds like a whole lotta rubbish.”

“It’s true.” Sibyl’s tone seemed to grow colder by the second. “And combine that with our own dependency on petrolate, for our ships, then you’ll understand why many systems aren’t so willing to give it up willy-nilly.”

“Sooner or later the Feds are gonna start seizing it at gunpoint,” said Kira. “See what other star systems have to say once a galactic war opens up.”

“Enough chat,” said Zef. “The petrolate’s not important now. The other resources are. You remember what those are?”

Ava did. Petrolate wasn’t the only thing these machines needed. There was also oil, which according to Dr. Quentin would be located under Zurn 852’s surface, near one of the lava spills bordering The Eye of Poseidon.

“Oil,” said Nielsen. “Lots of it.”

“And?”

“Any metal we can get our paws on,” said Jade. “More metals, more…. What’s the word I’m looking for…? More materials to build with.”

“What else?”

There’s more? Ava couldn’t remember him mentioning anything else before. What else could they possibly need from the underground?

“A smoke.” Jack made his way over towards the grated stairway built across the terminal. He unhooked his backpack and dropped it by the steps. He took a seat on the bottom step and massaged his hands together. “Well go on. Tell ’em, Mindfield. Also, crew, you don’t needa stand around like mindless apes. Drop the bags. Quick break, gentlemen.”

Ava wasted no time doing that. She released the belt around her waist, unlocked the straps, and gently squatted the gear onto the grass. So heavy.

“Alright there, Longwood?” said Jack. He pinched a secretive little smile that was barely visible through the glint in his helmet.

“Just about,” she said. How do people have the strength for this? Seriously?

The men in the group were equipped with mining tech: artificial-intelligence-based drilling mechanisms that could unearth some of the shafts beneath the mountain and, at the same time, notify the team of rising oil levels through the Echo Cloud. There were also the microbots (nicknamed Microbes), tiny things that could sift through layers upon layers of regolith with titanium cutters despite their small size.

The women were carrying signal receptors, otherwise known as masts, along with the control panels needed to operate the drilling mechanisms.

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All of them carried small water tanks in case they needed to refill their suits.

Whose idea was it to make this tech small enough to be carried by a team of engineers?

It took all of two seconds for Ava to come to an answer: Dr. Quentin, the man who came up with the ideas (or claimed to come up with the ideas) and ordered engineers to manufacture them. The domes, the radioactive propulsors, and just about everything the Federation had for gathering resources buried deep within the crust.

“In accordance with Federation regulatory whatsits,” said Zef, “we need to be on the lookout for inkasum nests. Our biologists are looking into these things in some more detail, and they want us to scope out their habitats. Previous colonisers haven’t noted any existing nests, because as far as they’re aware, they don’t exist aboveground, but instead”—he turned and pointed at the The Eye of Poseidon, aiming his finger slightly towards the bottom—“down there, away from the light.”

“Subterranean fauna?” Ava thought her voice would crack from disuse and was thankful when it didn’t.

“That’s probably what it’s called, Longwood.” Zef cleared his throat. He pulled his LX-56 phaser out from his holster, the hose stretching wildly like some elastic band, and he pointed at the handle. “You’ve all been given these, yes?”

“Yessir,” said the team.

“So if any of this subterranean fauna comes crawlin’ out, ready to attack—” He paused, put his right foot forward, and aimed the weapon towards Ava. For a terrifying moment, Ava thought the barrel would light up and a burst of concentrated energy would split her head in half. Darkness. What then? Her heart pumped and her eyes widened.

ZAP!

The gun went off and Ava squeaked, raising her arms in defence and doing her best not to cower. Still, her shakes were no doubt noticeable.

The crew oohed in shock.

Jack stood up. “Watch it!”

Zef chuckled. “I suppose it did look like I was gonna shoot ya, Longwood.”

She looked back and saw that the energy from the LX-56 phaser had burned a large, blue-flamed hole on the bark of a nearby bough. The bough snapped, fell, and rolled down the hill, leaving behind a foul odour of white vinegar.

“You damn nearly had me fooled, Mindfield,” said Jack. Ava thought he was joking, just like always, but after looking into his eyes she could tell that this time he wasn’t. “Don’t do that again,” he said sternly.

“Aw shut the fuck up, Terrygrew,” said Zef. “She’s alright.”

“Well I’m not.” Jack approached him. “You point that weapon at my crew and there’s gonna be problems. You understand me?”

Zef chuckled with disbelief. “This is gonna be a long journey with you onboard, Terrygrew. I think you should keep to flyin’ ships and not tell me how to run my operations. It was an accident. I wasn’t thinkin’. Happy, Terrygrew? Christ.”

Jack sighed, shook his head, and began tapping his wrist overlay, as if trying to adjust some settings, though more than likely documenting what happened. “Alright, team. Head over to the shafts and wait for us. I’m gonna speak privately with Mindfield. We’ll be over soon.”

The team hooked the belts of their bags around their waists, locked in the straps, and picked them up. Ava did her best to pull the weight up but struggled. It seemed the shock of the gunshot had sapped all strength from her muscles. A hand – no, two hands – touched her shoulders at first, then helped leverage the weight onto her back as she stood up.

Tyrone.

“Looked like you needed some help,” he said.

She grunted. The pain in her back and shoulders eased. “You think?”

“Come on,” he said, “before Mindfield goes haywire with that pistol again. Jesus. That was like a fever dream. I thought he actually shot you by mistake.”

“I’m fine,” she said, her heart calming now.

They followed the crew over towards the shafts, barely picking up on snatches from Jack and Zef’s conversation. She heard something about how Zef should take his own advice, and a prompt ‘Fuck you’ in response, but that was about it. Situations like this should be fed back to the Federation, or at the very least the Colonisation Officials. What was more likely was Jack letting it all slide, considering the two were great friends, hoping – knowing – Ava wouldn’t report it herself. After all, for someone as unimportant as her, it was much more difficult to report instances of misconduct from higher-ups, never mind convincing people that what she was saying was true. Plus, it was dangerous: if the Colonisation Officials didn’t believe her, she could get done for slander. It simply wasn’t worth the trouble.

Nor was this business with the inkasum nests. Disturbing mothers and their babies was awful. It wasn’t something anyone wanted to do. Yet these officials wanted them to do it.

Disgusting.

When Ava and Tyrone finally caught up with the team by the shafts – which weren’t really shafts as much as they were small openings at the side of the mountain, though she certainly had to admit the inside was dark and eerie and surprisingly cold – all eyes were on her, as if she was some celebrity walking fresh out of a movie premiere with her face on the front cover.

“All right?” Jade was leaning against the outside of the cave with her arms folded, a look of half-concern, half-resisting-the-urge-to-laugh on her face.

“Never better,” said Ava.

“That Mindfield is somethin’ else,” a voice said. It was Tucker, the small, closing-in-on-fifty man with a distant Irish tongue. The Irish accent was incredibly rare to find; there was something oddly humorous about it. “It nearly wouldn’t surprise me if he shot you. You know that?” He went back to opening the supply case of nanotech. First the zips, then the buckles, and finally the motherboard which had to be pulled out through the centre.

“You are alright, though, right Ava?” said Kira.

“She’s alive, isn’t she?” said Sibyl.

“Still.”

Crook, the dark-skinned man who had spent the last few moments fiddling with one of the Microbes, moaned. “Where do we place the drills? How deep do they want them to go?”

Nielsen pointed into the cave. “Into the darkness, my friend. How deep they go depends on how much metal and oil we find. They want us to take off where the last drills failed. Isn’t that funny?”

“Very,” said Sibyl. She began making her way down, but a hand reached out and grabbed her backpack, keeping her in place.

“Not until Terrygrew comes back.” Tucker shook his head, looking up at her while still on his knees.

“Why should we wait for him? What purpose does that serve?”

“It’ll save you from havin’ to carry all that weight up the cave again.” Tucker laughed.

“Funny,” said Sibyl, and she snapped away from him, breaking his hold on her backpack. She tapped her wrist and activated the torch at the side of her helmet. The cave lit up intensely, and Ava saw that the previous drills had paved large tunnels through the regolith, breaching into natural formations. The tunnels split into two directions, and directly above the entry holes stalactites dripped with the modesty of slow, steady progress.

“Fits the part of a cave.” Jade grabbed the strap of her backpack, hoisted it above her shoulder, and buckled it around her waist. “Zing.”

“I think this goes much farther down,” said Ava thoughtfully.

Tucker playfully mimicked surprise. “Well I’d hope so.” He went back to inspecting the Microbe. It was shaped like a mechanical spider, with thick titanium cutters for legs. Small, but deadly in the wrong hands. “How do these turn on—?”

The eye of the spider illuminated with a cyan fog; the legs gave a single kick before becoming stationary again.

“Like that, I suppose,” said Tyrone, laughing a little. “We need the control panels for us to give them tasks. The girls brought those, far as I’m aware.”

“We did,” said Kira. “Us ladies are always the ones in control.”

“Well that’s for fuckin’ sure,” chuckled Tucker. “The wife at home won’t let me use the television so long as her stupid operas are on. ’Magine that, stuck on your arse listening to old shows about people livin’ normal lives. The most interesting ones were shot on Earth. Have you seen those?”

“I know what you’re talking about,” said Ava. “What’s wrong with soap operas?” She had watched a fair deal of them with her mother. There were so many of them still showing glimpses of what life used to be like on Earth, even though they were centuries old.

“Soap opera me fuck. All it is is watchin’ some people walk around and chat about stuff everyone sees and everyone does. The movies are better.” Tucker tapped the side of the spider and the cyan foglight vanished.

Soon, footsteps appeared behind them. Zef and Jack.

“Sorry about that crew,” said Jack, now sounding calmer than before. He activated the light on his helmet and walked past Sibyl, pulling his phaser out from his holster. “Make sure you’re armed. ’Case there’s any of those inkasum lurking down here. We won’t be long. Just install the drills and the control panels, and we’ll talk from there. Understood?”

“How long will it take?” said Sibyl.

Jack didn’t stop. “Roughly six hours.”