Colonization (8 page)

Chapter Nine

Poison

I watched from the triangular sight panel in the dining room as Landrovers tore down the part of the jungle Mom had ordered the bio team to clear. After an initial wave of destruction, a foot-crew yanked up the turf, disentangling the roots of a massive network of vines, revealing black crystal underneath. They stripped the land until it looked bare and naked, like a giant had chomped down and bit off a colossal chunk. Once the bio team cleared the designated area, construction crews put up the smoky glass of the colony’s new greenhouses, in rows.

Mom twiddled her fingers by the sight panel, impatient to expand her crops. She’d already introduced the black crystals to the soil in the biodome and had enormously successful results. Although we’d learned Earth plants withered underneath the naked purple rays of this planet’s sun, the smoky glass of the greenhouses would filter the blazing ultraviolet light.

“Go on, Annie. Try it.”

A ripened tomato, twice as big as my palm and plump as a baby’s bottom, lay on the countertop. My mouth watered just looking at the shiny red sheen. Yet, because it was grown with the new crystals, I was hesitant to sink my teeth in.

“If it took millions of years for the crystals of Paradise 21 to form, don’t you feel bad grinding hundreds of them into dust to enrich Old Earth’s soil?”

“Oh, Annie.” Mom squeezed my arm as we looked out to the newly forming greenhouses. “It would take thousands of years to use them all up.” She gave me her practical look—half smile and half frown. “We must consider our immediate needs first. There’s an entire colony going hungry.”

“What will our descendants do when the crystals run out? Find another planet and strip it bare? Or worse, poison it like they did Old Earth?”

“That’s something for the later generations to consider hundreds of years from now. Right now we have to worry about ourselves. You of all people should know our soil has turned barren after eight hundred years of excessive use, and now I can use the crystals to infuse nutrients into our crops. You’ve seen how high the nitrogen is in just one ounce.”

I had. It was amazing. The black crystals provided excellent fertilization, but it was the purple crystals that, when ground up and sprinkled over the soil, achieved accelerated growth. I’d been charting the crops’ progress now for a week, and the results had surpassed every hope we’d ever had. I should have been elated, but a sharp pang of remorse held me in check.

Before I could debate any further, a message beeped on the main wallscreen in the living room. Mom jumped up. “My goodness, it’s your great-grandfather.”

She sprinted over to the panel and pressed the video button. His face flashed on, large as the living room wall, and for a second I imagined him as the giant biting off a piece of Paradise 21.

“Delta, we need you in the emergency bay. It’s urgent.”

Mom leaned in until her body covered his entire nose. “Is everything okay?”

“A member of the bio team has fallen ill. I need you to analyze the composition of the toxin and deduce whether it came from any infectious agents on Paradise 21.”

“Okay. I’ll go immediately.”

“Good. He’s in patient cell 43-F. We need this species identified at every stage of its life so we can eradicate any further contamination. If it’s lethal, you must work with the other scientists on a cure.”

“Yes, Commander.” Although he was Mom’s grandfather-in-law, she always called him by his formal name. Mom moved to shut off the screen, but my grandpapa’s voice held her still.

“And Delta—”

“Yes?”

His voice grew tender. “Be careful. Take care of Andromeda.”

I guess he hadn’t noticed me sitting in the background. His concern for me outweighed any grievance I had with his diplomatic policies. I was touched. I still hadn’t told him I accepted his apology, and it reminded me I needed to take time and visit him on the obsolete main control deck.

“I will.” She shut the screen off. “Come on, Annie, let’s go.”

“I’m going, too?”

“You’re part of my team now, and I’ll need someone to double-check my readings.”

I didn’t know whether to feel proud or scared. Yes, she trusted me with this extremely precarious situation, but could I really do anything to help? My low test scores haunted me, furthering my self-doubt, and I had to push them away.

“All right.” I picked up my backpack, although I couldn’t think of anything inside that would help me. “I’m ready to go.”

We hurried down the corridor and pressed the elevator panel to take us up to the medical emergency bay. I thought of the poor contaminated man and wondered if he was conscious or if he was in pain. Corvus was right. They hadn’t prepared for everything. The satellites had never picked up a potentially poisonous contaminant. If they were wrong about that, then they could be wrong about a lot of things.

The alien’s pale face surfaced in my mind, and I shook my head to remove the image, as if the thought would summon the creature beside me.

The portal dematerialized, and we rushed down to cell 43-F. Guards stood by the entrance, holding off a swarming crowd of colonists asking questions and demanding answers. They handed us each a face mask before allowing us to go in. I snapped mine around my head, the elastic pulling at my hair, and followed Mom into a room full of nurses and scientists. She forced her way to the bedside and pulled me with her.

Ray Simmons from the class one year ahead of mine lay in the bed. A jolt of panic shot through my veins. It could have been me lying there. Sweat covered his face, and his eyes flickered around blindly as if he was having a seizure.

Mom whipped out her hand-held digital pad to take notes. “Did he mention any unusual plants?”

An older man who looked vaguely familiar to me, perhaps a supervisor, walked over to her. “He hasn’t spoken since we found him face-down in the jungle turf.”

“Did you collect a sample?”

His eyes were hard coals. “No. I evacuated the area immediately. I’d like you to slip on a full-body suit and head a bio team with me to retrieve what we can.”

I’d never seen Mom’s eyes stretch that wide. “I’m a microbiologist, not an explorer.”

He gave her a no-nonsense grimace. “Exactly why you’re the one we need. You’ll know what to look for.”

Mom shook her head violently. “I have no idea what to look for. The satellites didn’t report any poisonous plants. There’s no evidence of anything on this planet that can harm us besides the Trillium Bisonate.”

“We need your expertise.”

Mom’s voice grew low. “My job is to take care of the crops.”

Disobedience was not in this man’s vocabulary. “You have a new job now. Assemble your bio team. We’ll be heading out at dawn tomorrow.”

As the adults argued behind me, I pressed my way forward to Ray’s bedside. I grabbed his hand, wrapping my fingers around his cool, damp palm. As I squeezed his hand, his gaze focused on mine and became lucid. I stared into the eyes of a drowning man, fearing what I might see. I wanted to save him, but I had no way to research a cure until I knew what he suffered from.

“What did it look like, Ray?”

He stared at me blankly.

“Ray, what did this to you? What did you see?”

When he spoke it was barely a whisper. “They tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.”

His words made me shiver.

“Who?” I leaned in closer and wisps of my hair fell onto his chest.

He shook his head as if I wouldn’t understand, and the machine connected to him started to beep faster. I had a feeling we didn’t have much time to get through to him.

“What did you see?”

“Goes….” He was so weak he could barely breathe, never mind speak, but I had to try.

“What? Goes?”

He took a sharp intake of breath. “Ghos…” His voice died before he could finish the first word. The pulse of his heart increased and his body went rigid as a board.

“Ray, stay with me.” I held onto his gaze, pleading with him to keep his eyes focused.

He squeezed my hand so hard I feared my fingers would pop out of their joints. Behind us, the heart monitor went berserk.

I slammed my elbow against the code button on his bedside and an alarm beeped, silencing the argument behind me. “Something’s wrong.”

Nurses rushed to his side, covering his mouth with a mask attached to a ventilator, and Mom pulled me to her as if I was too young to take it, as if she could shield me from the horrors of this new world.

I pulled free. I didn’t want to sit snug in my cocoon any longer. Whether I liked it or not, we were stuck here on this strange jungle planet. I had to play the cards I was dealt. I wanted to find out who the alien people were and what did this to poor Ray.

“I’m coming with you.” I yanked my hand away from hers as Ray struggled to breathe. Behind us, the nurses stabilized his condition by injecting him with a sedative.

“You can’t, Annie. You’ve got no experience on this new world.”

I jutted my jaw out and challenged her. “Neither do you.”

Chapter Ten

Reconnaissance

“Stay behind me and don’t take off your bio-suit.” Mom shoved plastic vials for samples into her backpack. Her anger with me and my big mouth had simmered to a slow boil, and after a few hours of pestering she put my name on the bio team list. “Keep your eyes open. We don’t want another incident.”

I looked away, ashamed. An image of torn petals raining on the turf seared my memory. “I said I was sorry.”

“But you didn’t say you’d be more careful.”

“I will.” I tightened the straps around my waist, but the bio-suit still flounced around me like a marshmallow, as if my shirt and pants were stuffed with clouds. Good thing no one but the other members of the bio team would see me in such a pouffy state.

Mom’s bio-suit fit her just right. She pulled the plastic hood over her head and sealed the sides around her neck in the practiced way of a true explorer. “Promise me you’ll pay more attention to your surroundings.”

“I promise.” I wasn’t five years old, following her through the bio dome on a routine inspection. She never used to let me handle the plants, slapping my roving fingers until I kept them by my sides.

“Don’t touch anything with your bare hands. Put as many samples as you can in the vials.”

“I
know
.” I seethed with exasperation.

She gave me a warning glance and I bit my tongue to hide my sour attitude. She’d use anything to get me to stay home. I swallowed my pride. “Thank you for taking me along.”

“Well, you were right to ask to go. As a new member of the bio team, you should do anything in your power to discover more about your environment. You need to learn about this planet just as much as I do, or more if you want to progress up the ranks.” She softened her tone. “As my daughter, I’d rather you stay where it’s safe.”

It was the closest I’d get to Mom getting sappy on me, and I kind of liked it. I smiled, but she stuffed extra sample vials in her backpack, unaware. “Come on, the Corsair leaves in an hour and I want to be on time.”

No one was there to bid us goodbye. Dad had left several hours ago. Since they didn’t need him to monitor the ship’s engines, Grandpapa reassigned him to a research team. Now he researched the best way to power our new colony off the ship. He rose every day at dawn and didn’t come home until hours after the purple sun set each night.

As I looked behind me at the empty family room, wistfulness clouded my thoughts. I missed our lives before the landing. Both parents came home and made dinner, and we ate together around the table. There were no dangerous missions, no dire contaminants.

I sniffed up my self-pity. My life was different now, and the sooner I coped with that the better I’d do. Picking up my backpack, I followed Mom out the portal.

The loading dock bustled with commotion. A team of Landrovers filed out on a ramp, destined to flatten another stretch of land for housing units, and exploration Corsairs took off every fifteen minutes into the deep violet sky. Mom directed me around the hustling colonists to a smaller torpedo-shaped ship toward the rear.

I recognized the man in charge of the mission from the emergency room. He came forward and shook Mom’s hand. “I’m glad to see you’re ready.”

“As ready as I can be, Lieutenant Crophaven.”

Lieutenant! My eyebrows rose. There were only three lieutenant positions on board the ship, so he outranked Mom and Dad by several levels. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed who the lieutenants were before and scolded myself for being so self-absorbed.

If you wanted anything done, the lieutenants were the people to ask. Grandpapa had risen to the revered position through many years of hard work, and from there the previous commander appointed him as his replacement. No wonder Mom lost the argument in the emergency bay.

“Let’s go over the routine procedures.” Lieutenant Crophaven pulled out an old clipboard with real paper on it, and I leaned forward to get a good look.

Mom turned to me. “Go on, Annie. Belt yourself in.”

“Okay.” I knew when I wasn’t invited. Letting her discuss the particulars with the lieutenant, I approached the Corsair, wondering if the motion of flying would make me sick. I’d flown my entire life on the
New Dawn
, but this ship was much smaller and navigated air currents, not deep space. As I stepped up the narrow metal staircase to board, a familiar face was at the control panels, and my heart squeezed so hard blood trickled in my chest. I wanted to shrink back down before he saw me in all my pouffy glory, but it was too late.

“Andromeda.”

“Hey, Sirius.”

“I didn’t think
you’d
be coming on this mission.”

Ouch.
The muscles in my chin quivered. Just because I tested low didn’t mean I wasn’t involved in important things.

“I didn’t know
you’d
be flying us into it.”

“I won’t.” He looked away. “I’m the first officer. Lieutenant Crophaven will be flying today. I’m training for the next set of missions.”