Half Way Home (2 page)

But nothing about the situation was calm. And there was no clear exit.

Were it not for my wobbly legs, I would’ve thought it an emergency drill. In all my training modules, however, my body had known how to balance itself. That was no longer the case. Even with legs artificially stimulated to remain strong, I struggled to control them.

I grasped the edge of my vat’s opening, stepped over the jamb, and joined the narrow stream of other slimy, naked, and confused colonists beyond. We packed ourselves into the narrow passageway between the empty chambers like animals chuted for slaughter. Slick bodies came into contact with mine, more of my senses overwhelmed with bizarre newness.

In the distance, someone yelled “Fire!” and the already tight space became a horrific crush of human frenzy, of elbows and knees and shoving. Strangers shrieked at the top of their lungs. We became one quivering mass of fear and confusion. Bodies became like cells, forming a new blastocyst with awful potential.

I tried to keep the girl close. We clung to one another like imprinted chicks to Konrad Lorenz, scrambling after the first thing we’d seen upon hatching. Around us, the column of flesh trapped between the vats flowed slowly in one direction. I felt we should be going the
opposite
way, toward the bright light that flickered beyond the scurrying crowd.

Half of us seemed to be working against the rest, everyone canceling out each other in a macabre display of Brownian motion. It wasn’t until the thick smoke billowed closer that those of us pushing toward the light recognized it as the danger we were meant to avoid.

Panic vibrated through the crowded mess, sparking from skin to skin as the shrieks of those burning alive reached us ahead of the horrid smell. I lost hold of the girl as someone pushed between us. I watched her face disappear—and then her outstretched hand. The crowd jostled me toward some unseen exit.

My entire trip down the narrow passageway was made in reverse; I looked back for the girl and watched the glow of flames brighten, reflecting off the wet walls of glass to either side. As the mob carried me to safety, some part of my thoughts flitted to the therapy the survivors would need: the grief counseling, the group sessions, the extreme likelihood of severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

I fell backwards through the exit—back into trampled mud and rainy night. I clawed my way, shivering, across a tangle of the filthy and fleeing. And through the panic, I found myself dwelling on my years of training, on what was expected of me, on what I needed to do to fix the situation.

My job is to help people recover from tragedies
, I thought.

But where were the people whose job it was to
prevent
them?

The night and rain assaulted us with frigid air, and the flames rising up all around us seemed magical in its ability to defy both. Chemical fires, licking mightily through both the chill and wet, seemed all the more powerful for it. More fierce and terrifying.

The last of the survivors stumbled out into the mud—coughing, steaming, tripping over those still scurrying out of the way. They splashed us as they staggered past, arms wide for balance and eyes wide with shock. Beyond them, the screams of those who would never join us reverberated through the vat module. They cried out for help, but we were too busy coming to grips with our own new lives to chance saving theirs.

So few of us seemed to have made it out. Fifty or less—and mere kids. Naked, covered in mud, we coughed and experimented with breathing. Most struggled to get away from the module, but I crawled back toward it, squeezing through the flow of colonists that fled in the other direction. I searched through them as they went past, looking for the face from my neighboring vat, needing to find something in this new existence that made sense.

I found her huddled by the exit, shivering and covered in filth. Our eyes met. Hers were wide and white, little orbs of bewilderment. The film of protective tears on them sparkled as they captured and released the light from the flames.

We collapsed together without speaking and held one another, our chins resting on each other’s shoulders, our bodies quivering from the cold and fear.

“The command module!” someone yelled.

I heard feet slap against the mud as fellow colonists ran off to save the dying thing that had birthed us. The girl pulled away from me and watched them go, then turned and followed my gaze down the aisle of vats and to the growing inferno beyond. The screams within the flames had morphed into moans of agony. Hundreds were dying or were already dead.

“We can’t save them,” she croaked, her voice raspy from coughing and disuse. I turned to her, watched her delicate neck constrict as she swallowed forcefully. A lump under the splatter of mud rose up her neck as if for some purpose, then fell back down. “We have to save Colony,” she whispered.

I nodded, but my attention was pulled back to the flames. A dark form moved across the fire, arms waving, the silhouette of dripping flesh visible like a thing sloughing its shadow. One of the glass walls exploded from the heat and smoke quickly swallowed the form. Only the moans remained as a newborn near adulthood made the mere handful of sounds it would ever be allowed to.

The girl rose. I turned to her and away from the dying. Large drops of rain spotted the mud on her chest with dollops of pink exposed flesh. She pulled me up and tugged me, staggering, away from the vats. We held each other clumsily, four legs proving more stable than two, as we joined the others in running.

Running and surviving.

We were too late to help the command module. By the time we splashed through the rain to assist the small structure, we found it had already helped itself. Large construction tractors stood poised over it, their buckets dripping the muddy remnants of its salvation. Through a small single door, plumes of fire extinguishing agent billowed out into the wet night. Both efforts to fight the fire created the illusion that the module was one of us: slathered in mud, its labored breath visible, all the same marks of desperate self-preservation.

A fellow male colonist came to a stop beside me. He bent over and rested his hands on his knees and shook his head.

“What about us?” he asked.

The boy had the look of a worker; his body bulged with large muscles, especially for our age. I rested a hand on his back and bent down beside him. He wasn’t breathing hard, just leaning on his knees as if weighed down by the gravity of our situation.

I watched a few colonists run past us to gather by the command module and wait for the smoke to clear. The girl—my birth neighbor—fell to her knees beside me and stared at her own palms.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. My voice sounded raspy and foreign to my own ears as I used it for the first time outside my dreams.

The girl shook her head. Her hair, groomed by the vat for many years, was now matted in muddy clumps and dripping with rain.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Lightning,” the boy beside me whispered. He turned his head sideways and glanced up through the rain, almost as if waiting to be struck down for the accusation. I watched a rivulet of water course down his neck, plowing a track through the mud. He turned to me and slapped his own chest. “I’m Kelvin,” he said. “A farmer.”

I took it as a flash of credentials for his weather theory, rather than an introduction.

“Tarsi,” the girl beside me whispered. She continued to stare into her cupped palms as she said it. The brown water gathered there splashed with the trickles from her face. “Teacher,” she added, after a pause.

“What about you?” Kelvin asked.

Several more colonists ran by, looking for something to do or somewhere to go. The screams and shouts had turned to panting punctuated with occasional coughs.

“My name’s Porter,” I told him. I stood, shaking the mud off my hands before helping the girl stand.

“This wasn’t lightning,” she said.

She turned to us, her face growing dim as the flames from the command module were brought under control. “This was an abort sequence.” She waved an arm at the destruction on all sides, at the dozen metal buildings on fire and illuminating the darkness beyond. “Too many modules are on fire for this to be anything else.” Tarsi faced us. “The Colony AI did this,” she said.

“And then changed its mind?” Kelvin shook his head. “Why wake us up?”

“We need to find out,” Tarsi said.

She set off toward the command module. I watched her bare feet throw up twin sprays of mud, her naked form blending in with all the people running through puddles, hacking and breathing hard.

Kelvin and I glanced at each other; the streaks of grime on his face did little to conceal the worry in his furrowed brow. He coughed once into a fist, slapped me on the shoulder, then ran through the rain after Tarsi.

I followed him. I was too confused to do otherwise, and too terrified to be alone.

When Kelvin and I reached the command module, we found Tarsi conferring with a couple by the door. Boy and girl, they were huddled together under the slight overhang of the entrance, their backs to the dark, mud-splashed steel.

“What’s going on?” I heard Tarsi ask them.

The boy shook his head and jabbed a thumb at the door. Artificial light spilled out of the module, giving me a good look at the couple. I noticed Tarsi and the other girl covering themselves with their arms, and was reminded of my own nakedness. My professional curiosity became piqued. Had a training program taught us to be ashamed? I couldn’t remember.

Flushed with guilt for even concerning myself with such matters, I shook my head and tried to focus on the crisis around us. Tarsi patted the girl on the arm and stepped into the light; Kelvin followed. Both seemed to be holding it together better than me, making me long to have been born a teacher or a farmer.

Entering the module, the patter of rain on mud was drowned out by the roar of it against the metal roof. Over that, I could hear the AI speaking, his voice filling the enclosed space:

“—the primary goal. Once the launch pad has been restored, a mission-critical package will be prepared. All efforts must be prioritized for this task.”

The voice felt like a warm fluid rising up, wrapping around and filling every crevice of my being. For so many years, its constant and soothing sound had been my company as it emanated from dozens of instructional avatars. For fifteen years, it had readied me for life—teaching and preparing me.

But not for this.

Nearly a dozen colonists had packed themselves into the command module; most sat on the floor with their arms wrapped around their knees. White fire retardant covered every surface like a thin layer of frost. Overhead, a swirling black mist of smoke hovered near the ceiling. There seemed to be minimal fire damage. If the AI was responsible, it would’ve initiated its own destruction last in order to oversee the process. What I was seeing lent considerable weight to Tarsi’s theory.

I followed her and Kelvin as the two of them squeezed down a tight corridor lined with electrical cabinets, and headed toward the front of the module. Wracking my memory, I tried to recall where the power for this module came from but couldn’t. Another pang of fear roiled up through me as I wondered how many important things I was supposed to know—but hadn’t yet learned. We’d been given no orientation for our planet. Nothing at all. We should’ve had another fifteen years in the vats to learn and grow.

The module widened toward the end, opening on a handful of naked, muddy colonists crowded around a bank of monitors. Three colonists sat in chairs bolted down in front of the screens. All the blinking lights and complex machines made us look even more like lost savages—out of any element we could possibly have been designed for. Kelvin and Tarsi slid down against one of the walls and I joined them. Across from us, a few other colonists hugged their knees for warmth or modesty—perhaps both. The three of us followed suit, wrapping our arms around our shins. I could hear several sets of teeth chattering, creating a frantic backbeat for the peppering rainfall and the oddly calm conversation taking place around us.

“Understood, Colony, but as I said, there are some more . . .
primary
needs to tend to. Where are our clothes? Our food? We are—I have a lot of colonists in shock right now. Modules are still burning, and what you’re asking will take time.”

I watched the young man in the center chair, the one talking, and admired his poise. He seemed distraught yet in control. He rested his elbows on the counter in front of him, his fingers interlocked above his head as he bent over in worry or deep thought. But it was his voice—the tenor and pace of it matching the AI for calmness—that soothed me. It was as if they were on solid footing. Like together, they could make everything okay.

“I have already recalled two more tractors from mining station two,”
Colony said.
“It will be two days before they arrive with more supplies. Until then, there are tarps for cover and clothing. The server module, the power modules, and this one will provide adequate shelter. The planet has some caloric resources, enough to last you the duration of the task. I am setting a two-week timetable for the launch of the mission package.”

The girl seated next to the boy stiffened. “Two weeks?” she asked, turning to the center boy. He held up his hand and nodded to her, then looked around at the rest of us. His eyes widened, as if surprised at how quickly his audience had grown. I leaned away from the wall and looked back down the aisle. Another dozen or so colonists had squeezed into the module to get out of the rain, or perhaps to take stock of themselves, their fellow survivors, and the situation.

“Two weeks seems a bit quick to get something into orbit,” the boy said, looking at us rather than face the monitor. He seemed to be sizing up the group. Taking our measure. “It’ll take a few days just to clean up, organize supplies, and—”

“All of that will have to wait. The mission package comes first. The viability of this colony is still in question.”