Half Way Home (22 page)

Everyone quickly assumed the beast’s discovery had been the impetus for Colony’s abort procedure. While they argued the details, other thoughts rattled around in my head. I began to consider the far more vexing question of why Colony had
stopped
the abort process once it had been started. I tried slotting the facts together, arranging the clues in some readable order, but raw fear and leftover adrenaline made it hard to think. And other,
older
problems kept invading: Oliver was dead. Colony had sent for us. And something else . . .

I traced the thread of concern to back before the creature’s appearance. Something bad had taken place prior to the tractor coming for us—something that seemed to tug at my subconscious for attention.

Then I remembered.

That single gunshot.

I could see the huddled forms of Mica and Peter on the small rise before we reached the fire pits. They were right where we had left them: close by one of the shaft walls. One body was bent over the other and a mournful moan—barely audible—emanated from one of them.

We forgot our exhaustion from the long jog up the mine and broke out in a run, the light from my flashlight bouncing with my gait but increasingly unneeded as we approached the wan reach of daylight.

As I got closer, I could see that it was Peter draped across Mica’s body, his shoulders shivering in time with the sobs. Leila and Tarsi reached him right before Kelvin and I got there. Their hands went to his back, trying to comfort him for his loss.

Both of them pulled their arms away as if burned by the touch. Leila yelped, and Tarsi covered her mouth. I came to a stop as Mica’s arms moved across Peter’s back.

She was alive.

The shivering and sobs were coming from
her
.

Jorge began cursing as I tried to help the girls tend to Mica. As weak as she’d been an hour before, we had a difficult time prying her arms off Peter. She probably would’ve chosen to stay there until the weight of him on her ribs finished her off.

We finally got Peter’s body free, and two of the boys laid it by the black stain of an old fire. Mica’s moans turned to wails. She sat up, the front of her soaked in Peter’s blood. It looked like her bruises and injuries had leaked right through her clothes, but I had a glimpse of the damage on Peter’s chest—it looked like something had erupted through him and out his back.

Tarsi and Leila tried to calm Mica down, and I moved in to help, but Vincent stepped in front of me, blocking me off. He knelt beside Mica, leaned forward, and wrapped her up in his arms. He began sobbing along with her. Mica’s hands went from fighting the girls to clutching Vincent’s back; her fingers squeezed the folds of his shirt into frantic clumps.

The two of them shook from the hard cry, and I could hear Vincent whispering something to Mica between the sobs.

I stood there, completely ineffectual. Someone thought to cover Peter’s body with a scrap of tarp, but I continued to remain rooted in place, my arms at my side as I watched two of my friends grieve together.

I wanted to join them. I wanted to beat my fists against the mountain. I wanted to pound the image of Oliver’s death out of my memory. Part of me wanted to unleash pain on myself for failing my friend. For failing my profession. All the words and advice, all the grief tactics I’d tried to use with Vincent over the past few days as I attempted to chip away at his sullen silence—the very same things I had been about to employ with Mica—they all crumbled away like loose rock.

Replacing them was the knowledge that even though such things were useful, the first thing Vincent had needed—and what I needed right then—was someone to feel his pain. An honest outlet for his heart-rending torture. He needed something the rest of us had worked as a group to protect him from, maybe because we were scared of it ourselves. He needed to
feel
it. To be allowed.

There were times when I wanted to grieve with him, to share just such an outpouring of sadness, but I had walled it off. I had hid it away with that secret
me
I had become ashamed of. Maybe I was wrong to have done so. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried so hard. Maybe it was the death of my former friend on top of so many other gruesome ordeals that finally had me realizing that maybe—

Maybe I wasn’t broken after all. Maybe the things I was scared of could be part of some solution, rather than a problem.

Tarsi and Kelvin sought me out, the numb confusion I felt reflected in their faces. And that’s when I saw that I wasn’t alone, that I didn’t have to suffer by myself. I reached for them.

And I cried.

We sat in a cluster by the mine’s entrance as the day outside began to fade, the sun slinking back behind the mountains. Vincent and Mica had fallen asleep—passed out, really—in each other’s arms, and none of us could stomach to move them. Some of the others had taken Peter’s body deeper into the mine. The thought of him back there—dead and covered in a tarp—made me feel sick. It made me think of Oliver and the other enforcer. I took a deep, shuddering breath, but my face was already chapped with a week’s supply of tears.

“It’s getting cold,” Leila said. I looked over and saw she was addressing Jorge. He still had his shirt off and bundled around the gun, which rested in his lap.

She helped him with it. They unwrapped the weapon, and it clattered to the stone floor. Nobody moved to retrieve it as she flapped the shirt in the air, trying to work the kinks out.

Those who had drifted off into their thoughts hours ago took notice of the sudden activity—several of them frowned in Leila’s direction. She held the shirt up in front of her and I could see her face through the large holes that had been eaten away from it. Our eyes met, and we both looked to the gold gun in front of her.

She reached out. “Don’t touch it,” I said. I crawled forward to inspect it. A light sheen remained on the weapon; it still looked as if it were covered in a layer of wax. “Let me have the shirt,” I said. I became numbly aware of the audience stirring around me as I took the ruined article of clothing from Leila.

I rubbed the side of the gun with the shirt and the shiny stuff came away.

“What is it?” Kelvin asked, leaning forward to inspect it.

“It’s wet,” I said.

Jorge leaned forward and showed us one of his hands. Several of his fingers were bright red and raw-looking. “Shit burned me,” he said.

“An acid?” Tarsi asked.

I shook my head, but not to answer her question. I could feel bits and pieces of a larger picture coming together in my mind, like drops of condensation flowing downward with the pull of logic—meeting and growing and becoming an awful realization:

The reason.

“Am I going to be okay?” Jorge asked me. “What do you think it is?”

“The reason,” I repeated to myself, thinking aloud.

“Yeah, it burned me. I thought it was just hot from firing. Am I gonna die?” Jorge looked around at us. “Aren’t one of you a chemist or something?”

“Quiet,” Kelvin said. I turned to see him staring at me, his hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” he asked me. “The reason for what?”

“For aborting the colony,” I whispered. “For changing its mind. For everything.”

Before anyone could respond, I added, as it had just occurred to me: “It’s the reason for the rocket.”

I sat back, leaving the gun where it was, and tossed Jorge what remained of his shirt. I pressed my palms flat against the cool rock and closed my eyes, my entire being weary with all the new awareness coursing through my veins. Just as with the setting sun, I could feel some source of light dying within me, leaving me dark and cold.

“So fucking tell us,” Jorge said.

“I’m trying to figure out where to start.” I opened my eyes and glanced around at the others. “It’s still rattling around in my head.”

“I’ll say,” said Jorge. He rubbed his hand against his pants before inspecting his palm again.

“It’s because of the creature back there, right?” Mindy asked.

“What’s the rocket for?” another said.

I waved them off and reached for the flashlight, finding comfort in just holding it as the completed puzzle danced in my vision. “Mica was right,” I said. I looked up from the flashlight. “She was right about why this planet was on-edge. Why the AI couldn’t make up its mind. There’s a deficiency of metals in the crust. The planet is ideal, but only for life. Not so much for making more colonies and sending them out to the stars.”

“We already know this,” someone said.

“But I think I know why,” I countered. “That . . .
thing
back there—”

“The monster,” Karl said. “Porter, we’ve already been talking about this—”

I waved him off. “That thing came for the tractor, not us. It had already eaten another one some time earlier.” I looked at Tarsi. “What was left of that other tractor blocked the mine shaft up where you and Mindy were.”

She nodded. “I saw it. What was left of it, anyway. There were pieces of tread.”

“So there’s no metal because something eats it all?” someone asked.

“Exactly,” I said. “Did you see that thing? Its teeth, the sides of its body, they looked like metal. I don’t think it was a giant robot, I think it uses ore the way we use calcium. To build bones. Skin. Whatever.”

“Holy shit,” Kelvin whispered.

“You still haven’t explained why our colony was almost aborted,” someone said.

“That’s why the farming was stopped,” Kelvin suggested, pointing out a connection I hadn’t seen yet. “Colony was worried about drawing attention to itself. The farms were shut down right after the tremors that day. Tremors drawn from the tractors.”

“
If
the thing actually meant to eat the dozer,” Jorge said. “So far it sounds like a bunch of bullshit and nothing.”

“Are you kidding?” Samson asked. “It went through two of them.”

“They left it idling,” Tarsi whispered.

“Think about it,” I said. “Just follow me for a second. For years, the colony is vacillating on viability or abort. You’ve got a decent planet here, not toxic, some tricky flora, but otherwise pretty habitable. You start setting up and deploying the primary automations, but right off the soil samples come up ugly—”

“Mica’s theory,” someone interjected.

“Right. But everything else is perfect, so you get trapped in this logic loop. The AI is in some kind of if-then-else-goto programming hell. It finds a normal amount of gold in the soil, so it substitutes and makes an alloy impure enough to be strong. And here’s where the big event happens. A month ago, the first tunnel back there is formed by whatever that was.”

“How do you know a month ago?” Jorge asked.

Kelvin waved his fist at Jorge. “Because it’s a theory of our fucking birth, genius. Shut up and listen.”

I nodded and kept going. “A month ago,” I shot Jorge a glance, “one of the mining tractors gets eaten, and maybe that was enough to push the AI over the edge and toward abort. A predator that size must’ve finally tipped the scales. Let’s say another dozer came in and investigated. It would’ve seen the damage and the size of the shaft—hell, maybe it figured out what all the seismic activity was from and got scared—”

“AIs don’t get scared,” someone said.

“Or changed its mind, just bear with me—”

“But then why save us? Why change its mind again?”

“Because it found the gold in the tunnel.” I pointed to the gun. “Maybe it spotted it from the mine shaft, or maybe it did more exploring. It could’ve spent days puzzling through all this.”

“It shits gold,” Leila said. “Those big clumps of gold were some kinda bowel movement by the super vinnie.” She looked at the gun. “That thing must’ve passed through its gut.”

I turned to Leila. “Or fell out of its mouth. You remember what you told me about gold? Back in camp? You said gold was worth a lot of money because it was nonreactive. Something about valuable electrons.”

“Valence electrons,” she said, smiling.

“Right. Well, what if that thing can’t digest gold? What if it can’t process it for the same reason that other things don’t react with the stuff? What if it can chew through solid rock and uptake all the metals it comes in contact with, but it leaves the gold behind with maybe a few other things mixed in?”

“Holy shit,” Kelvin said

“What?” Jorge asked. “It’s still Mica’s theory. Why save us?”

“To build the rocket,” Tarsi said.

“Yeah, but why build the rocket?”

“Because this is a secret worth warring over,” I told him. “It’s probably the greatest find in the history of galactic exploration.”

In the glow of sunset, I could see an expression of impatience and fury come across Jorge’s face, one best not tested lest he and Kelvin come to blows.

“I was on the payload team,” I reminded Jorge. “The main body was being built to carry six cylinders. Several of us knew this. I’ve even told some of you about it, trying to postulate what might go in them. Memory cells, lessons on what went wrong here, DNA samples . . . it might be some of the latter, but I think that rocket is being built to deliver whatever enzymes or acids these creatures use. Imagine if you could synthesize it—”

“Or engineer bigger versions of the beasts,” Samson said.

“You could turn them loose on entire planets,” Tarsi whispered. “Why
colonize
a planet when you can transmute it into gold?”

“Forget the gold,” Leila said. “It’d be as abundant and valuable as our crap. Think of the
useful
metals like titanium, cerium, neodymium, all the rare earths. Everything worth anything could be extracted. Maybe you could even reprogram their DNA to build specific things, just like they build their skin and teeth and what-not. If so, you could do what nano-tech never could.”

“Like what?”

“Like build colonies from scratch. Or subdue entire worlds in a single generation.”

“Holy shit,” Kelvin said again.

“World eaters,” Mindy whispered.

“That’s why Colony can’t just beam the information back with the satellite,” I said. “Sure, it’ll get there quicker, but if they’re paranoid enough to abort and nuke unviable colonies, I bet every transmission is in jeopardy of being intercepted and decoded. Radio waves propagate in every direction but a physical package the size we’re sending? It would be practically invisible.”