Colonization (The Seamus Chronicles Book 3) (10 page)

Tears stream down my face and the pain is excruciating, but I can’t stop running. The rucksack full of water slows my already pathetic speed, but I know it contains life for those in the jungle, so I don’t drop it.

At the jungles edge Cassandra waits for me under a broad leaf. It provides some shelter for her but not one hundred percent. It’s almost cute the way she dances from side to side as a drop of acid sneaks it’s way into her flesh. Only the expression of terror she wears keeps me from joking.

We wait there in moderate safety, but I can’t stop long. If I don’t keep moving I will not make it.

I’m a little surprised that Cassandra and I are going in different directions. Intellectual strength and emotional strength are clearly different, turns out that Dad was right.

In one sense Cassandra is the only one behaving rationally. We allowed the Earth to be destroyed by our own technology and have arrived on a planet in a completely different solar system. We are trying to establish a colony and sustain the human race but have no idea how to accomplish that.

The acid rain stopped falling just as the group came into sight. The burns on my arms, face and neck are worse than any of the blisters I got from the sun. None of the others were as exposed as I was so the damage to their skin is minimal.

Francisco has recovered enough to be useful and he helped pass out the few bottles of water and is taking care of refilling them from the rucksack. Liam ingested less of the contaminated water than the others and he is getting back to his old self.

“So rain bad. Sun bad. Leaf water bad. Is there anything good yet?” Liam asks.

“Air, water, and gravity. Oh, and the little fact that we’re alive.” I used to be a big complainer but now I see how useless it is.

Francisco passes in front of me with full bottles of water and I remember how thirsty I am. I stand to follow him and get myself a drink. only to realize that my body is stiff and sore.

“Francisco, could I have a sip?” I call out instead of following.

He passes out three of the four water bottles and returns to me with the last one.

“You look like hell. If your skin keeps taking this kind of abuse you won’t make it a week.” He doesn’t look concerned but it comes across in his tone.

“We had the solar sail configured to block the bad radiation and allow the good radiation. Our garden will need some of the sun’s energy for the plants to grow.” I’m explaining how we use the containment field, but those listening don’t seem to care.

Looking to where Cassandra sits with her mother I can tell that she is not listening. The two are cuddled together and Jane is stroking her daughter’s hair. She was the catalyst for completing my reactor and for turning it into a space warp device; will she help drive me to the next invention?

“It was damaged though, so we are trying to figure out how to restart it.” I bring him partially up to speed.

There is movement from further up the group. I can see most of them get to their feet and a few are swinging their arms like they were limbering up for a jog. My brother is next to me watching them and shifts from hugging himself to bouncing and swinging his arms, always the copycat.

“Seamus, aren’t you cold?” Liam finally asks me when he sees me watching him.

The sun has been down for a while now and the temperature is falling. I am cold, but the burns on my skin give me an odd sensation of being overheated.

“I think we need to keep moving to stay warm. We’re going to move out.” Gwen has taken a leadership role for the group.

Without waiting for me to respond she turns and walks away. I risked my life for them and they don’t even want to see if I’m well enough to travel.

Fortunately no one moves fast. After about fifteen minutes Jane touches my shoulder as she and Cassandra shuffle past. Liam is still waiting with me but Francisco joined the others a little while ago.

I struggle to my feet and Liam and I begin walking. One foot in front of the other is all I can think about. Each step is a labor and I don’t even have enough strength to bemoan the fact that none of them seem to care about me.

I lose track of time. At one point I noticed that we seemed to be catching up to Cassandra and Jane. I wanted to tell Liam to give them space but didn’t want to shift my focus from walking.

“Hey Seamus, how are you going to restart the solar sail reactor at camp?” Liam asks me before he almost trips on Jane’s foot.

“If Dad and Henry are back from our plane with a generator we’ll crank it to make some electricity and then I jolt the unit.” I answer him, annoyed that he’s trying to talk to me about things he doesn’t understand.

We continue our shuffle along the trail and I see my brother practically knock Jane to the ground again.

“Liam, a little space please.” She lashes out at him and I don’t blame her.

“Sorry, I was wondering if you thought I could make the changes to the solar sail configuration. Seamus set it up to block certain wavelengths of light so it would be more like Earth. If I can get another one do you think I could set it up the same way?” Liam throws out one of the craziest statements of his life

“Well in theory Seamus documented the command set, all you would need is to know what wavelengths of light or radiation particles to filter out. Do you know those details Liam?” Jane sounds like she has dealt with my brother as long as I have.

“No. But I can just do trial and error until I find the right settings.” Liam’s ho hum attitude is almost startling.

“Liam you have to be kidding me!” Cassandra cries out.

Suddenly I see what my brother is doing. He knows that Jane and Cassandra can contribute. The struggle is to know how to get them out of their funk. There is no way Cassandra will let him mess around with the settings on a solar sail unit, but I’m not sure why he doesn’t think I can do it.

“Totally not kidding. It seems like a good idea but Seamus is too much of a perfectionist to use trial and error. He’d rather melt than make a wrong guess.” My brother drags me into his mud slinging.

“Is the reactor unit even functioning?” Cassandra asks.

“I dunno.” Liam answers.

“No.” I speak before he is finished.

“Then this is a stupid conversation. Can you just shut up and walk?” Cassandra is dismissive.

Liam starts to whistle while he walks. It is annoying and I’m not sure it’s warranted. He tried to plant a seed with Cassandra and Jane to get them contributing, but they appear to have rejected his efforts.

My body is about to give out. I’ve gone for unknown miles on sheer will and I don’t think I have more than another one hundred feet left. Even if Liam just stays with me, I want to sleep, and I can do it right here on the jungle floor.

“We need two reactors.” Jane says and stops walking.

I’m not sure why she stopped, I can’t or I will not get going again. Pushing past her I try and speak but only manage a single syllable – “Yup.”

From nowhere mom is on me. I have no idea why she is out here in the jungle but I am so happy to see her. The touch of her hands sends a shooting pain through my skin. Everywhere she touches is on fire.

A bottle of water comes to my lips and I drink thirstily. My eyes close and I drift off to sleep.

“I thought you said the reactor was ready!” Jane is yelling at Dad.

“Seamus told me it was fixed.” Is his only response.

Looking down I see that I’m not wearing a shirt and the burns on my arm are weeping puss.

“Fixed and ready are different. I verified and repaired all the connections, meaning it’s fixed. I did not go through an initiation sequence, meaning it’s not ready.” I say to them both.

“Oh good, the boy genius is awake. What’s next Seamus, should we build an ice crystal ring around the planet to balance out the temperature fluctuation? Or maybe you forgot something on Earth and you have a new calculation that proves you could survive going back for a day?” Jane snaps at me.

“Shut up Jane. You messed up,
again.
From now on you can just carry stuff around, that seems to be all you’re good for.” Dad waves his hand and pivots to face me.

“How long was I out?” I ask him.

“A long time. At first mom was waking you every two hours to drink water but eventually she fell asleep too. Feel better?” He comes closer to me and I can see worry all over his face.

“And where are you at with the reactor?” I don’t want to start the arguing over again but I need to know.

“Well I think we need you again. Jane tried to start it but something isn’t working.” Dad winces, like he knows it was a mistake to let her try.

“I’ll take a look at it.” I slowly get to my feet.

My muscles are still sore and the burns don’t feel great, but I am able to move, that’s a plus. I walk gingerly across the opening and to where the reactor sits. Dad has placed it on a leaf; it looks strange and out of place here in the middle of the jungle.

The reactor is connected to a crazy array of batteries. I don’t bother running through the calculations to verify that it would have been enough juice to start the reaction. Cassandra would have made sure of it.

There are two pieces of the reactor that I remember failing during an initiation sequence. One is a circuit connector; the other is a piece of plastic that works as a spacer. Cassandra and I upgraded the connector to a highly conductive alloy back at Ames; if it failed it will be tough to manufacture a new one.

As I comb through the unit I swell with pride. The design and construction are remarkable. Things look a little messy after the creature damaged it, but messy and broken are different. My repairs were sound and the failure should be easy to isolate.

“There. Looks like our luck just ran out.” I find that it was the connector that failed and not the plastic spacer.

“Someone else seems to have gotten it!” Dad takes off through the underbrush and towards the lake.

Jane stands shaking her head and then walks off in the opposite direction.

I follow my dad’s path slowly and find him knee deep in the water with Francisco and Henry. All three stand around a yellow life raft that appears to be full of rags and trash.

Henry is leaning over the raft with his right hand outstretched. It looks like he’s holding on to something and now I can see that there are two people in the raft. My initial reaction is that he is shaking hands with the person but I quickly realize that isn’t the case.

His fingers are pressing against the neck of one of the bodies in the boat and Henry shakes his head. There is no pulse; at least one of the people in the raft had their luck run out too.

“David and Mary Beth.” Henry says to no one. “I guess that means Rick didn’t survive the landing.”

Dad and Francisco carefully lift David out. That means that Mary Beth is dead. Henry stays with the raft and keeps it steady. The two men and their load slowly shuffle to the edge of the jungle. They are not working hard but the sweat from exposure is pouring off them.

“David is in rough shape, but I think he could make it. He really needs that containment field buddy.” Dad nods at me.

Henry grabs a rope from the raft and hands it to me. He reaches in and pulls a few things into his arms. There is a single large box still in the raft and I want to know what is inside.

I wait anxiously for Dad and Francisco to climb out of the water and into the trees. I’m worried that they are going to leave me to address the body still in the raft.

“This is a weird assortment of things; the 3-D printer, some tarps, and a bunch of notebooks. I wonder why they didn’t have more food and water?” Henry says, looking down into the raft.

“Maybe they were the things on top of the pile and they had to unload them to get at the food?” Francisco offers a possibility over his shoulder.

“Dad were you able to get a generator from the plane?” I ask, filled with a new hope.

“No. We don’t have the tools to get it out. I was able to get a couple of fasteners undone, but there was too much damage around the one we found, I couldn’t pull it out.” Dad shakes his head in frustration.

“The 3-D printer is important to making a new connector. The alloy is not something we can carve. But we need power to run the printer and start the reactor.” I detail the obvious.

“When we couldn’t get the generator out of the plane we salvaged the batteries you saw. Jane drained them trying to initiate the reaction. Maybe we could salvage another set of batteries from the other C-5?” Dad explains why he was so mad at Jane.

The three older men pause and look at one another. We came to this planet on three craft that rely heavily on computers and electronics. If we can’t figure out how to generate a little bit of juice we are definitely doing something wrong.

“We could salvage copper and magnets and build a generator.” Dad breaks the silence and hypothesizes.

Henry is deep in thought. He aimlessly leafs through one of the notebooks and puts it down. With his thumb he starts to flip the pages of another one but stops quickly. Flipping back to the beginning I can see his eyes scan the page.

“Hey guys. There was another life raft with the space plane. They tethered it to the ship so we could locate it. Their guess is that it’s under twenty feet of water.” He shares the information written in the notebook.

“We packed a pedal generator on the space plane. I can remember when they went off to search San Francisco for it. Kind of a last minute addition, but you guys were busy. Not knowing you too well, we thought your reactor might be kind of fake.” Francisco does not seem happy about what is basically good news.

“That’s perfect! We can run the printer, manufacture the pieces needed to make it solid, and then use the generator to start it.” My excitement counters Francisco’s pessimism.

“Not really perfect. It’s too far underwater for us to get at. It’s also probably part of the reason the space plane crashed and didn’t land. We ‘snuck on’ some extra weight and never cleared it with Rick.” Francisco looks guilty.

“We have to try something. Otherwise it was packed for nothing and they crashed for nothing.” Dad speaks softly.

“I’ll go get Grace.” I turn to leave.

“Hold on Seamus.” Dad calls to me.

My sister is the strongest swimmer I have ever met. If anyone can swim down to the space plane and get the generator, it’s her. And seriously, for Sofie, I don’t even have to ask.

“We keep hearing about this analytical guy named Seamus, but you always seem to be charging off with half a plan.” Francisco is not impressed.

“It’s still about midday. We have to wait until it’s just before dusk. We’ll paddle out in the dark and swim just before the sun comes up. That way we won’t freeze and we won’t melt.” Dad is looking up to the sky to confirm his time estimates.

He’s right, and that really gets to me. Sitting around idly while Sofie suffers makes it feel like I am actually hurting her. Without a word I turn from the men and leave.

I’m like a little boy running to find his mommy. But I’m not looking for mommy so I can bury my face in her apron; I want to shift my focus. She has been working so hard on the village layout and the garden I feel like there will be a lot for me to learn.

Walking past the monolith I am surprised at how comfortable we all are around it. Even if it is natural, it’s bizarre, and should warrant curiosity. The potential that it’s not natural is also quite stunning and is worth some brain cycles.

With so few planets in the many solar systems capable of sustaining life, it makes sense to me that the ones that can do. Obviously there is life here, the plants and trees, but intelligent life would be a reasonable assumption too. Finding it and connecting with it represent an unprecedented challenge.

Up ahead mom is standing with her hands on her hips and shaking her head at the ground. I can’t see what she’s looking at, but I’m glad it’s not me receiving her wrath.

“Hey mom.” I call out so that my presence doesn’t startle her.

“Oh Seamus. I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Mom drops to a knee and inspects a tiny spec.

We haven’t talked yet about the narcotic pollen. The good thing about the discovery is that the pollen isn’t toxic. That means there is a good chance that the plant would not be toxic to us either. If we can handle the buzz we can probably extract some nutrients from the leaf.

I look more closely at the spec and realize that it is one of the tiny little seedlings we brought with us. Dad must have salvaged it from the cargo hold and brought it back for her. But now it appears to be dead, wilted, and listless.

“It’s the radiation, right? I mean it has to be. If it’s strong enough to make Sofie sick it certainly must be strong enough to fry a seedling.” I don’t know if this is what she’s worried about, but it has to be.

“I think it’s a combination of the radiation and the cold. We could probably deal with one extreme or the other, but when the overnight cold weakens the new growth there isn’t enough moderate warmth and sun to let them recover.” Mom’s always been great with the big picture.

I have to get the reactor working. Obviously we need the reactor to keep Sofie and potentially others safe. Now I also see that our food sources may be at stake.

There is a noise in the jungle beyond where our village is going to be. Mom slowly turns to face it but does not show signs of concern. When it stops she goes back to the vegetables.

“We need to talk about that, by the way.” I say while I keep my focus off into the jungle.

“Liam mentioned that you all got spooked by some noises in the trees. Dad and I told him that it was probably the breeze or a branch falling.” I don’t know if my mother believes her story, but I do not.

“No one has felt a breeze here, and you and I scoured the ground for fallen leaves and branches. Nada.” I call her out.

“So what? You think it was an alien?” She’s not interested in worrying about anything else.

“We are the aliens here. I do think that it is a native species in the jungle.” I don’t believe the detail is insignificant.

Before my mother says anything else there is another loud rustling. To the right and just below where I was looking I see something move. I could swear it was an eye or an ear or something.

Without mentioning what I saw I take off at a run. Confronting whatever it is may not be smart or safe, but I feel like it has to happen. My feet get caught in some string my mom had used to lay out a pathway. I stumble but catch my balance quickly. The adrenaline gives me speed and stamina but my battered body quickly tires.

By the time I reach the bushes where the suspicious object was my adrenaline has dropped some and I start to worry. The pain from my blisters and acid burns returns in full force. How will I handle the initial encounter? If humans are on this planet for generations, the first contact with natives will be a part of our history and should be handled with the appropriate gravity.

It turns out that there is nothing to fear. The area under these bushes is no different than that of the other bushes we have inspected. A few hurried steps in several directions around the bush provide no clues or interesting tidbits.

“Seamus?” Dad calls to me from a few feet away, panting.

“Over here.” I reply, knowing he can triangulate on my voice.

“Mom said you were chasing something? Any idea what it was?” He asks.

“Nah. I could swear I saw an eye or an ear or something checking us out.” I don’t stop searching.

My father drops to a knee and inspects the soil. It still cracks me up to see him acting like a mountain man, he’s supposed to be a middle aged house husband. He looks around the area and gently touches a few spots on the ground.

“See anything?” I ask him.

“Well it looks like a six foot oaf was stomping around in here making a mess.” He looks up at me before standing and brushing his hands on his pants.

“Funny.” I’m not amused.

“If there are aliens here we aren’t going to find them by charging off through the jungle. We need to be methodical and slow. Remember when you tried to catch that wild rabbit? Running didn’t work out too well did it?” I can always count on dad for a lecture.

“Whether we find them or they find us this might come in handy.” I pull the gun from my waistband and hand it to my father.

He takers the weapon from me and inspects it closely. The clip is ejected and the slide is pulled back. Dad acts like an old pro but I’m not convinced he knows what he’s looking for. The clip goes into a pocket and the gun goes into his belt.