Colonization (12 page)

The alien didn’t point to the crystal. His fingers waved over the lab table and his palm hovered over the red flower. As the brittle fingers came to rest, its other hand spread out before me in three branch-like appendages. The alien held the position in the air, and then the fingers closed in like a curled-up spider.

I lowered my arm and squinted against the bright light. “I don’t understand.”

The life-form locator beeped, making me jump. The alien backed away and I reached out. “Wait.” There were so many questions I had to ask.

The portal to the greenhouse slid open and I faced a waft of jungle air. Mom panted in the threshold, tearing off her mask. “What is it, Andromeda? Are you okay?”

“Mom, look!” I pointed in the direction of the alien, but when I turned my head around, the row between the tomato plants lay empty. The crystal didn’t even flicker anymore.

Mom’s concern for me morphed into annoyance. “Look at what? I left a very important meeting to answer your distress call.”

Where could it have gone so quickly? I could chase after it, but I didn’t want to be taken back to the emergency bay. I decided not to mention the alien. “Nova brought in a sample from the jungle, a flower Amber Woods carried when she fell ill.”

Mom’s eyes widened. “Have you taken a look at it?”

I nodded, sniffing back tears. The alien sighting made me want to crawl into my sleep pod and curl up forever.

“What did you find?”

My legs wobbled so much I couldn’t bring myself up from the floor, so I pointed to the microscope. “Take a look for yourself.”

As Mom rushed to the lab table, I scanned the room for any trace of the alien. There were no tracks in the soil where it had approached me, and the crystal lay silent, reflecting the purplish rays of morning sun like an innocent bystander.

“Turn off that damn life-form scan.” Mom brought up a stool and positioned the microscope in both hands. I hadn’t noticed it was still beeping. I pressed the button on my arm and the screen went blank.

“Wow, I’ve never seen this before.” Mom glued her eye to the lens. “Do you have any live samples?”

“Scrape the inside of the flower pod.”

As I picked up the small device in my hands, I turned off the insistent beep and checked the history. I realized only two beings besides me had registered on the scanner that morning: Nova and Mom.

Mom’s hand jutted out and she wiggled her fingers. “Annie, get me the scalpel.”

I could only stand, numb and confused.

No one else could find the aliens because they didn’t register on the life-form locator. That meant they had no heat signature, no mass, and cast no seismic vibrations. Was it a hologram? A projection cast by the crystal glow? If so, where was their homeland? Why were they contacting me?

“Annie?”

I shook my head and reached over for the scalpel, handing the slim metal instrument to Mom with shaky fingers. “What if another race colonized Paradise 21?”

“That’s improbable, almost impossible.” Mom took the scalpel and grazed the inside of the pod. “None of Old Earth’s thousands of scout ships ever found another intelligent species. The odds of another race able to navigate space like us are slim, and the odds of them finding the exact same planet we found are even less. What we have to worry about is these little creatures squirming under the microscope. If one of them gets into our system, it may create havoc. It may be the culprit we’re looking for.”

Her voice held so much hope I couldn’t undermine the discovery with crazy stories of alien holograms. Instead, I righted the metal stool and sank onto it, deep in thought. If no one would help me find the aliens, I’d have to go looking for them by myself.

Chapter Thirteen

Forgotten City

“Goodnight, Mom. I’m going back to the ship.” I stood up and rubbed my bleary eyes.

Mom didn’t even look up from the microscope. “Tell your dad I’m staying here for the night. There’s still too much we don’t know.”

“I will.” Although I doubted he’d still be awake. Every night he collapsed in his sleep pod seconds after wolfing down dinner. Paradise 21 plagued all of us in its own way, making us eager fools, lifeless zombies, and paranoid delusionalists. The planet tore my family apart, and I resented it.

I pressed the button with an agitated sigh and the greenhouse portal closed behind me. As I took my first step out into the night, something reached out from the darkness and grabbed my arm. I struggled, my voice catching. I always thought I’d be able to scream in an emergency, yet fear stuffed its way down my throat, making me mute. A large hand closed on my arm. I realized it was no alien or plant tentacle. I yanked backward until the shadow stepped into the diaphanous light of Paradise 21’s twin moons.

“Corvus! What are you doing?”

He put a finger to his lips and shushed me. His voice was barely a whisper. “Come on. I have something you have to see.”

Before I could reply, he gestured behind him to the back of the greenhouse where neither moon’s rays could reach. My feet stuck to the ground in a moment of indecision. Adventures always got me in trouble.

He hissed into the night. “We have to go before someone sees us.”

My heart thumped against my bio-suit. Could I trust him? How well did I know him, really? Everything about the jungle night screamed danger: the glare of two alien moons, the thick, murky darkness, and the putrid stink of the turf in the twilight’s leftover dew. Corvus was a beacon of solidarity, a symbol of everything wholesome in my world. Sometimes I hated him for it, but other times his strength drew me in like a planet to the sun.

“Okay.” I followed him behind the greenhouse, ducking underneath the rain gutters to avoid being seen in the moonlight.

Corvus spoke over his shoulder as he led me forward. “I’ve been waiting for hours. I thought you’d never come out.”

“You could have buzzed me with your locator.”

He stopped and turned around to meet my eyes. “Yours must be broken. You don’t answer my messages.”

I looked away guiltily. “I haven’t had time. We’re working overtime on finding a cure for Ray and Amber.”

“Oh.” Corvus nodded and continued on, rounding a bend. He slipped down an incline to the most recent construction site. The equipment poked up through the hole in the turf like the discarded toys of a giant toddler. In the dark, the area seemed abandoned and forbidden. Corvus jumped down the ledge, but I couldn’t follow.

“Wait.” The toes of my boots teetered on the edge. “If I’m going to follow you down that hole and risk being caught, then I should know where you’re taking me.” I never had the guts to demand it of Sirius, but with Corvus I wasn’t afraid of being myself. So what if he didn’t like the real me?

Corvus turned around with an eager look in his eyes, as though he couldn’t wait another minute. He nodded, agreeing that what I’d said was fair, and walked back toward me. His eyes shone wide in the moonlight.

“They found something.”

I leaned over the ledge to get a better look at his features in the finicky light. “What do you mean?”

Corvus sighed. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone outside the construction team, but I wanted to show you because you saw something in the jungle that very first day, and it might be connected.”

Now he had my full attention. I plunged down the ledge. “What did they find?”

Corvus caught me as I slid down. “Ruins.”

My mind whirled. “Like the pyramids on Old Earth? Or the Coliseum of Ancient Rome before terrorists blew it up?”

“Not quite. These buildings are…stranger.” Corvus grabbed my hand and I squeezed back, borrowing his strength as he pulled me deeper into the excavation site.

Beyond the cranes and piles of rotting turf, turret-shaped shadows jutted up from the black crystal sand. Corvus reached into the front seat of a Landrover and pulled out a light. “I think we’re far enough in. No one should see the beacon.”

After smacking it against his hand a few times, the light flickered on, illuminating a field of spiraling ivory-white turret tops. The carrot-shaped structures were too impossibly slender for human buildings, with pinprick tops reaching toward the sky.

“Wow.” Words failed me. There must have been twenty of them, spread out in a cylindrical shape. Only the crowns were visible above the black crystal, and I wanted to run to the base of the first one and dig with my bare hands to see what lay beneath the sand.

I jogged over and smoothed my hands over the ivory, exploring the perfectly shaped curves. The surface felt cold and slick to my touch, like the metal walls in the
New Dawn
, but it gleamed shiny as polished opal in the moonlight, much prettier than chrome.

Corvus pulled me ahead. “There’s more.”

Dumpsters filled with black crystal littered the dig site. We walked through them to the last tower in the back. The crystals had been removed around its base, and we slid down the incline to an arched window. Corvus shined his light inside the building. Hulky shapes cast ominous shadows.

“I should go first.” Corvus suddenly looked at me as if I’d snap my ankle again. “Just in case.”

The thought should have annoyed me, but I was too scared to go in by myself. “I’m right behind you.”

We stepped around chunks of crystal bigger than my head. I imagined Mom rubbing her hands together in glee. Oh, how the tomatoes would grow!

The archway was still halfway buried, so we had to duck and crawl underneath the threshold. Once my head cleared the entrance, I stood up and brushed my bio-suit off. Corvus’s light flickered over high tables melting up from the floor like skinny mushrooms above our heads. I followed him deeper into the structure until he stopped abruptly. I fell against him, my hands clutching his muscled shoulder blades.

“What’s wrong?” I pulled away, embarrassed to be touching him in the dark.

“I’m not sure you should see this anymore.” Guilt tinged his voice. His shoulders sagged.

Anger rumbled up inside me. “What? You drag me all the way down here into these alien ruins and then decide I can’t see what comes next?”

He turned around. “I don’t want to scare you.”

“I’m fine. I can handle it.” I tried to speak with an even voice, but his hesitation frightened me more than I wanted to admit.

He pulled his bio mask off his face and ran a hand over his short blond hair. “When I heard about this, you were the first person that came to mind, and I counted the hours until my shift ended and I could sneak by the greenhouses. Now I wonder if this was more what I wanted for myself.” His eyes sparkled like two blue sapphires. “For us to be down here together, alone, on an adventure. I didn’t think about if it would make you happy.”

“Nonsense, Corvus.” I tried to comfort him and touched his arm, wrapping my fingers around his bicep and giving it a squeeze. Sirius used to drag me all over the place with him, but he never gave a thought about if I wanted to go. Here was “the oaf”, as I used to call him, thinking about my feelings. It almost melted my heart. “This is exactly where I want to be right now.”

His eyes flashed back at me, making me blush. Feeling as though I misled him, I cleared my throat. “I need answers, and this place may have what I’m looking for.”

Corvus frowned but quickly covered it up. “All right. I sure hope it has what you need.”

I wanted to say something more reassuring, but he’d already turned around. He hoisted the beacon light and shone it down on the floor in front of him. Lumps cluttered the smooth surface, as if the ivory had crusted over with fallen debris.

Disappointment crashed through me. I thought I’d get some answers. “I don’t see anything.”

Corvus stepped beside me, our shoulders touching. “Look closer.”

I leaned down. Three long fingers stretched out toward my foot: a hand.

“Fossils,” I whispered, crouching over the remains.

The hand extended back to a long skinny arm, the bones slim as a bird’s legs, in the shape of a fallen angel with broken wings. I reached down to touch the crusty skeleton, and shivers scurried down my spine.

“Is this what you saw in the jungle that day?”

I put my five fingers over the three-fingered hand and traced up along the arm bone to the wings. Large eye sockets filled with crystal dust stared back at me with the same expression I saw in the jungle. “Yes, I’m sure of it.”

“Annie, you’re not crazy at all, and this proves it.”

My head swam in deep waters, questions surfacing like ugly sea creatures with spiky teeth. “But this civilization must have died centuries ago. The alien in the jungle was alive.”

“Maybe they have another base somewhere else on this planet?” Corvus shone the light around the room but we didn’t see any signs of recent life.

“Don’t you think the ship’s scavenge droids would have found it? They scoured every inch of the planet before we landed.”

“They also didn’t find anything that would make us sick, and now look at poor Ray.”

I shook my head. Something about this puzzle didn’t add up. “A microbe can be easily overlooked, but an entire civilization?”

Corvus shrugged. “Maybe they left, and now they’re back.”

Chapter Fourteen

Answers

When I woke the next morning I buzzed Mom with my locator.
Don’t feel well. Taking the day off.

She’d be frustrated at the timing of it, with the microbe samples dangling right before her eyes and no assistant to jot down the readings, but I had to alert someone of our findings and it had to be a person I could trust, someone who wouldn’t get Corvus and me in deeper trouble.

I buzzed my grandpapa on the intercom, but he didn’t answer. Making sure Dad had already gone to work, I snuck out of our family unit and took the elevator to the main control deck. I hadn’t heard from my grandpapa in a long time.

Was he still alive?

I reminded myself if the
New Dawn
still ran, then he was up there somewhere, watching over us, keeping us safe. When I closed my eyes, he surrounded me in a guiding force through the buzzing hum of the lights and the smooth lift of the platform below my feet. I hadn’t seen him since our last argument about my lifemate, and I was ready to tell him I was sorry.