Table of Contents

A NineStar Press Publication

Kepler-186f

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Epilogue

About Rachel Ford

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A NineStar Press Publication

www.ninestarpress.com

Kepler-186f

ISBN: 978-1-64890-589-6

© 2022 Rachel Ford

Cover Art © 2022 Jaycee DeLorenzo

Published in December 2022 by NineStar Press, New Mexico, USA.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact NineStar Press at Contact@ninestarpress.com.

Also available in Print, ISBN: 978-1-64890-590-2

CONTENT WARNING:

This book contains depictions of depiction of cannibalism, graphic violence, gore, and combat with guns and hand weapons.

Kepler-186f

Rachel Ford

Chapter One

I WAS FIRST aware of sound. Not an individual sound, but the faint hum of nothing in particular. And then light registered, dim and somewhere behind closed lids.

Slowly, very slowly, the sounds became distinct and morphed into something recognizable.

Droplets fell slowly. Drip. Drip. Drip.

The rustle of the wind, like pages moving far away.

A quiet, consistent mechanical clicking. Tick. Tick. Tick.

My mind felt foggy, as if waking from a deep sleep. I registered the sounds but couldn’t place them. They puzzled me, but vaguely. I couldn’t focus enough for anything more than vague confusion.

Feeling flowed back. My extremities were chilled through. My head throbbed, and fire seemed to course through my veins. I felt a slab of some sort underneath my prone form. A cold slab. Was it stone? Maybe. I couldn’t be sure.

And before I knew it, the world went dark again.

I started back to semiconsciousness as an icy droplet splattered against my face. Sucking in a great gasp of air didn’t quench the burning in my lungs. My eyes opened to an unfamiliar scene, and I drew in breath after shaking breath as I tried to remember what was going on. But my brain was sluggish and my memory slower yet.

So I concentrated on what I could see. I was outside, it seemed, staring into a starless burgundy sky. Rain was falling, the dripping sound heavier than I remembered. But, aside from the occasional splash, I wasn’t wet.

I wasn’t outside after all. Where am I? I squinted at the sky, trying to clear my vision. It was dark, not so much that I couldn’t see, but dark all the same. Still, I could make out the explosion of raindrops above me as the forces of gravity propelled each watery projectile into an invisible barrier.

Splat. Splat. Splat.

Glass. There’s glass overhead. I was in a building. That was something, at least. How I had gotten here was another story. My memories weren’t clear. I seemed to have an inkling of what had happened last, but it was elusive, slipping out of reach every time I came near to seizing it.

I had to get my bearings. I knew that much. I tried to sit up. For a moment, it seemed as if my body wouldn’t cooperate. It wasn’t weakness, exactly, but the same sort of haze that clouded my brain…then, with a sweeping sense of vertigo, the muscles in my arms and torso gave in, and I was upright.

Only after the nausea had abated did I notice the medical apparatus. Various tubes ran to and from me. A flash of panic swept me. What is this? What happened to me?

But instinct took over and buried the fear. I was an Army Ranger. I didn’t panic.

Captain Nikkole Johnson. The name returned, as if it had never been gone. I am Captain Nikkole Johnson.

That realization still didn’t explain the equipment or the room. It seemed to be some sort of hospital, though it was difficult to see much through the dimness of a late dusk. But I could make out a little by the glow of a dial here and a screen there. And the sounds of beeping and whirring supplemented my visual perceptions.

The angle puzzled me—it seemed as if all the room were leaning on its side, and I, alone, and the cold metal bed upon which I sat, remained level with the earth.

My presence here confused me further. Had I taken an injury? How? Where?

Or—worse yet—had I been captured by the enemy?

No. That couldn’t be. The war was over. I had survived, been decorated, and reassigned.

Reassigned. That was it, wasn’t it? The mission, this is all part of the mission. I frowned, trying to remember what mission. But my head wouldn’t cooperate.

It was as though I had cobwebs on my brain. I could almost feel them. And the air felt so thin, so very thin. I seemed starved for oxygen.

No wonder I’m having such a hard time remembering. I needed to get up, get out of this room, get away from…whatever this was.

I pulled at the tubing, wincing as each piece of the apparatus broke loose, then dangled my legs over the side of the bed and promptly tumbled into a heap.

Some while later, I woke up for a third time, shivering violently. All had gone dark, save the green and blue displays of machinery around me. I was soaked to the bone. The occasional splattering I’d observed earlier I now recognized to be rain coming through a broken window. And I’d collapsed directly beneath the breach in a wet pile of stone and glass.

In this last bout of unconsciousness, the numbing effects of my long sleep had worn off. I remembered the mission, the room, and why I was here. And so, I knew where here was.

Not a hospital. Not a ward or a clinic. I’d woken in a cryochamber onboard the USS-Genesis II. I’d gone to sleep in this chamber on June 2nd, 2093. The fact that I was awake now, with icy sheets of rain pouring down my back, meant the mission had been a success. I was home.

My new home. Kepler-186f.

Chapter Two

I WOKE UP knowing more than just my location. I knew that the atmosphere of Kepler-186f was Earth-like. That had been the hypothesis on Earth, backed up with no small amount of data, but still unsure. The fact that I could breathe, however laboriously, indicated the presence of sustaining levels of oxygen. The fact that I hadn’t already died indicated there was nothing immediately and lethally toxic in it. There were the ship sensors, too, designed to detect deadly chemicals and alert against them. Their silence was another good sign.

There were plenty of less promising signs though. For starters, I found myself alone. I’d been on a ship with six hundred people, yet here I sat.

Then there was the manner of my awakening. The plan had been that the acting captain would wake the crew after we’d landed safely. Judging by the shattered window overhead and the precarious tilt of the ship, we’d somehow been denied a safe landing. So, where had the captain gone, and who had started the wakening process? My empty, debris-ridden chamber offered up no response.

But I couldn’t sit asking questions of the darkness. The rain was intolerably cold, and the air carried a deep chill. While the cold and wet were the immediate obstacles, I didn’t count them among the more worrying features of my predicament.

Kepler-186f orbited an M dwarf star in the constellation Cygnus, on the outer end of the star’s habitable zone. So we knew in advance that our new planet would absorb less energy from its star than Earth got from the sun. Two-thirds less, according to our measurements: it would be cold. We knew that before we left. What we didn’t know was whether we’d find liquid water. Kepler-186f, being in the habitable zone, was in the right range for its possible existence. But that didn’t mean it actually did exist. That had been part of the gamble we’d taken on leaving Earth.

So the icy downpour, in its own way, was good news. Our gamble had paid off. Though the particular method of discovery left something to be desired, at least we’d found liquid water on Kepler-186f.

I pushed to my feet. For a moment, my legs seemed foreign to me. I reached out to the cryochamber to steady myself. That feeling of cobwebs that I had noted when I’d first come to rushed back. I stood there for a minute, breathing heavily until the sensation dissipated.

Then I let go of the table and looked around. My eyes had adjusted as well as they could to the darkness. I could see the glass overhead and the rain pouring in through the breach. The door stood a few feet to my left, at a downward angle of about forty-five degrees. Water and debris pooled in front of it.

I stumbled for the door and flipped the light switch beside it. Nothing happened.

On its own, that didn’t concern me. I could make out enough by the artificial light of the machinery around me. The cause of the malfunction worried me. The ship had been designed to prioritize life systems and, in a time of crisis, divert all energy to maintaining the cryonics and resuscitation infrastructure. They were ticking away just fine, but everything else seemed dead. Which only furthered my growing sense of unease and the feeling that we had met some kind of crisis.

Or maybe it’s just a busted bulb, my mind argued. It was possible. In combination with everything I already knew about my situation, I didn’t think it particularly likely. But it was possible.

I needed to get to the rest of the ship and the rest of the crew. Standing in water up to my shins, I sifted through the pile of twisted metal, medical tubing, and rocks. I was struck by how quickly and violently out of breath I found myself.

If anything, this added urgency to my movements. I’d never been in an environment where I felt so weak, so utterly spent—and I had been in my fair share of tight spots and close encounters. I clawed at the rock until my fingers bled and I was shaking for want of oxygen.

As soon as my heaving lungs quieted a little, I was back at it. Eventually, the pile had shifted, although the water remained in place. I pushed the lever.

The door remained fast shut. Maybe I have it the wrong way. I pulled. Nothing happened. I threw my weight against it, pulled and pushed and cursed until I was quivering for want of air again. But it didn’t budge.

It was time for a different approach. I could feel my body tensing with each futile gasp. It was like drowning on solid ground. Panic was edging in. I had to fight it.

I waded out of the puddle, onto higher ground and out of the rain, and breathed—one steady, moderate breath after another, rather than quick, stertorous bursts. The burning in my lungs lessened and then returned to a manageable level. The panic receded; the tightness in my chest loosened.

It had been a painful lesson, but a lesson learned. My activity had to be measured, deliberate, and careful, so as to exert no more energy or expend no more oxygen than necessary.

I returned to the door and, this time, calmly examined it. The seal remained intact, and the frame seemed undamaged. And yet, it did not yield.

Heading back to shelter, I considered my options. Without power and without natural light, it didn’t seem likely I’d be able to pry the door open. It was stuck, somehow, but I hadn’t found anything to indicate how. Another option was to climb out through the broken window and try to gain admittance to the main part of the ship from the exterior, but the storm raging outside my window was formidable. The rain that had accumulated in the interior spoke to that. Further, I had no idea where we were and, without light or tools, few means to figure it out. I had no idea what I would be climbing out into, other than a violent storm.

It seemed the most prudent course to wait until morning before venturing outside the ship. But not in my current state. Kepler-186f’s atmosphere contained oxygen. There was liquid water on the surface of the planet. The elements for life as we knew it on Earth appeared to be present. That didn’t guarantee life on the planet, but it certainly seemed to up the odds. There was no chance in hell I was going to sit out the night, struggling to maintain proper oxygenation and unaware of my surroundings as I was, without some means of self-defense.

Our chambers, ostensibly, were medical units, meant to contain nothing beyond ourselves, our clothes, and the medical equipment to sustain our lives. That hadn’t sat well with me back on Earth, and I’d taken measures to rectify the situation.

I frowned. It seemed only yesterday, literally, that I’d stashed a pistol and my combat knife in the paneling of my room. It had happened the evening before I entered the cryochamber. But Kepler-186f was five hundred light-years from home. NASA’s best estimates put our arrival at two and a half centuries after takeoff—and that was provided the USS-Genesis II performed as well as the tests and models had predicted. It was revolutionary technology, in its first application outside of test conditions. But in a best-case scenario, the memory was a quarter of a millennium old.

And yet, in a sense, it was only yesterday—for me, at least. My life had been put on pause when I entered that cryochamber. Someone had activated the Play button. I wasn’t sure who, and I wasn’t sure when. But, until I could find them and the rest of the crew, I would prepare for any eventuality.

Feeling my way around the room, I found the spot—two panels down, three across from the cryonics equipment mount.

With a little pressure, it popped out. And there, right where I’d left them, were my holster and pistol, a sheathed blade, and a box of ammo, all packed in a vacuum-sealed box. It wasn’t much. I didn’t even know if the ammunition would still work. The armory was well stocked, and we were supposed to rely on it for weaponry. Still, it had seemed poor planning to wake up defenseless on an alien landscape, with my only tools for defense half a ship away. This wouldn’t hold off much for long, but something was better than nothing.

I broke the seal and retrieved my gear. In the dim artificial light of the life systems, I could see the silver glint of steel. The blade had weathered its journey well.

I worked the slide of my pistol. It was smooth. I dropped the magazine and filled it. It was too dark to see what I was doing, but I didn’t need to. I could load that gun in seconds, blindfolded. Load it, disassemble it, reassemble it, and hit a moving target based on sound alone. That pistol was almost an extension of my arm, and it had saved my life more than once.

Sitting there, cold, wet, and unsure of my surroundings, I felt indescribably glad I had smuggled it on board. I wasn’t alone anymore. I had Death at my side.

*

THE NIGHT PASSED slowly, and despite my efforts to stay awake, I drifted in and out of sleep. Eventually, the rain stopped, but the temperature continued to drop. I found the cupboard with my clothes, and a cupboard with blankets, and made myself as comfortable as possible under the cryochamber. The cryonics apparatus had been fastened to the wall but was designed to swivel as needed to maintain an upright position—which was why, when I awoke to find the room askew, the chamber still faced upward. Now, it served as a sort of shelter, first protecting against the rain, and now providing cover. Cover against what, I didn’t know. But I didn’t want to be visible to anything that might be exploring outside the ship.

Finally, dawn broke. Traces of a purplish color started to blend with the black. I couldn’t see Kepler-186f’s sun yet, but an old-burgundy hue started to lighten the landscape. The interior of my room grew more visible and, at the same time, revealed that there was a simple solution to one of the mysteries of my awakening. The life support controls had been half buried under a pile of rocks. The resuscitation process must have been kicked off inadvertently, a byproduct of dumb luck and gravity in action, when those rocks crashed through my window.

The sunrise is already shedding light on the situation. I laughed out loud as the thought crossed my mind. It wasn’t that funny. Hell, it probably wasn’t funny at all. But, to my addled, oxygen-deprived brain, it seemed hilarious.

I got to my feet feeling fairly optimistic and hoisted myself onto the cryochamber. Standing on it, I could reach the shattered window. Very little of one pane remained—only a shard here and there. The glass was thick and strong. It had been designed for deep space flight after all. I wondered at the force necessary to shatter it. How close had I come to being crushed in my sleep?

I wouldn’t be able to clear the jagged pieces that remained, so I maneuvered around them, pulling myself over the ledge until my head poked out just far enough to allow a glimpse of my surroundings.

My heart sank. I was on a mountainside as gray and desolate as the bits of stone that filled my chamber. There was not a blade of grass or a bit of foliage to be seen. In front of me sat more featureless mountains, and above me lay a cloudless burgundy sky.

Chapter Three

I PULLED MYSELF onto the side of the USS-Genesis II with caution. Last night’s rain had become this morning’s frost, and the ship rested at an approximate forty-five-degree angle. One faulty step, and I would be sliding face-first toward the nearest rock. Balancing carefully, I took a second look around. From this vantage, I could see more than before; and it was less reassuring than the first glimpse.

The ship lay against a gray-green outcropping of stone on the side of a similarly composed mountain. But to call it a ship was too generous. What remained of the USS-Genesis II was no more than a fragment. The hull had been shredded. My chamber, upon which I stood, was one of probably twenty or thirty left intact, stretching in either direction away from me. How the other occupants had fared, I couldn’t say, as the windows to their chambers were frosted over. In most cases, I could see no visible damage.

The Genesis II had been designed to house dozens of occupants in close quarters. My own room, though fairly compact, was one of the more generous accommodations afforded to high-ranking scientists, military specialists—and those who could purchase a room to themselves. As a special forces veteran and volunteer for the mission, I’d earned housing here.

They’d put a few of us in the area. The chamber over from mine had been assigned to Caspersen. She’d been a MARSOC Marine Raider, brought back from retirement for the assignment. Down from her were Russell and Cohen, both Rangers. Granges and Connor had been assigned the other side of the hall. They were Marine Force RECON.

And that was where the southernmost end of the ship vanished. Twisted metal, torn cables, and shattered glass were all that remained of what had been Captain Weidner’s chamber. Where he’d gone, I didn’t know. If anything remained of the rest of the ship, I couldn’t see it from my position. But Weidner’s room had been shredded. Which meant our best-case scenario already included casualties.

I slid down to the rockface, and for the first time since regaining consciousness, I stood unimpeded. It should have been a good feeling, but in the wake of discovering some inkling of the disaster that had befallen us, I hardly noticed. I scrambled as quickly as I dared in that thin air toward the southernmost end of the Genesis II.

Sidestepping loose rocks and ice pools from the rainstorm, I reached Weidner’s room. The cryonics capsule had vanished. Indeed, three quarters of the wall to which it had been bolted was gone, and the opposite side fared little better. Bare, blackened metal was all that remained of the walls, and most of the medical apparatus and cupboards had melted or gone missing.

Had Weidner’s room caught fire somehow? Was that what had caused the structural collapse? Maybe. But it still didn’t explain where the rest of the ship had gone or why the captain hadn’t initiated the cryonics reanimation sequence before the ship splintered.

Maybe he didn’t realize the fire had caused structural damage.

I skirted shredded metal and unrecognizable rubble to get to the other side of the room. The door frame had torn in two—one half remained, and another presumably had gone with the rest of the ship. But I had enough space to squeeze between the metal of the ship and the stone of the mountain behind it.

Gingerly, I poked my head into the near darkness of the passage beyond. The Genesis II had been constructed with rows of self-contained rooms on either side of a narrow hall. The idea was to maximize space while creating pods that would be entirely sufficient and contained. Each room was an airtight, fire-resistant, and structurally independent box, stacked into a row of identical units. Each had its own connections to the central power system, as well as built-in solar paneling sufficient to maintain the core life systems at 150 percent—one and a half times the power needed to maintain the cryonics equipment in each unit. The excess energy was diverted toward other boxes, through a so-called Smart Grid designed to detect shorts, failures, and interruptions, and bypass accordingly. The idea was that if one box’s power failed, the others would feed it, and also that no one unit could disrupt the entire system.

It had been created to be accident proof, to maximize human survival in disaster scenarios. At the time, people thought the engineers behind it had been overly cautious or downright paranoid.

They hadn’t been. The fact that I survived to marvel at their handiwork proved that. And the faint glint of greenish-blue light from the units on either side of the hall ahead of me only further justified their paranoia.

Just like the fact that Weidner’s room lay a charred and mangled mess and most of the ship had gone missing affirmed that even the best-laid plans could go awry.

I crawled into a narrow hall. From what I could tell by the glow emanating from each room, the way forward lay unimpeded. The entire structure sat at the same forty-five-degree angle I’d observed in my pod, so I made my way up hunched over, with one foot on the floor and the other on the left wall.

The unit opposite Weidner’s had been severed in similar fashion. The door remained, but everything past it was gone. I went up the hall toward Granges’s and Connor’s quarters.

A thought hit me. The doors in the Genesis had been fitted with toxicity sensors that locked them in place in the presence of toxic substances. Those sensors were considered a part of the life systems and would be powered at all times.

It hadn’t occurred to me last night when I assumed my own had been the only breached unit. But now I considered the possibility that perhaps my door didn’t budge because the system detected traces of toxicity. I wondered what kind of gases or other substances might be circulating in the air. Had something tripped my tox sensor?

There should have been an alarm if the sensor had gone off. But maybe the alarm was the piece that wasn’t working and not the door mechanism.

I decided not to linger too long on the thought. Our journey across the lightyears had already hit some significant snags. I didn’t want to think the rest of the crew and I had made this hellish trip just to be poisoned by the air.

I reached Granges’s door, took hold of the latch, and pressed it.

It slid open. A wave of relief and stale air assailed me. The air might have been stale, but it carried a flood of oxygen too. I stepped past the door, breathed deeply, and then realized I should reseal it as quickly as possible. There might not be toxic substances in Kepler-186f’s air, but there weren’t Earth-levels of oxygen either. This unit might be one of the few spots left, and it made no sense to needlessly disperse something that precious.

I slipped into the chamber, and pulled the door closed after me. The room was dark—very dark, as its windows faced the mountainside. The little, internally facing pane on the door remained unobstructed, and it admitted only the faintest light from the already darkened hall. Still, I crept toward the cryonics mechanisms, using my hands as much as my eyes to guide me to the spot.

The controls were, by design, extremely simple: a button to kick off the process and a button to reverse it. I saw diagnostic tools as well. But I was a soldier, not a doctor, so they were completely foreign to me. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use them because I doubted I’d be able to do so.

A screen near the cryonics capsule lit up after I pushed the button, displaying a data read. Columns for heart rate, body temperature, breathing rate, and other vitals indicators sprang up. The one entry that really meant anything to me, and so caught my eye, was an estimated time—four hours.

In that case, I had plenty of time to rouse the rest of the crew. Or what remained of us.

I threw a final glimpse at Granges—his capsule was sealed, and he looked much as I’d seen him yesterday.

Not yesterday, I reminded myself. He looked much as he had before we entered the deep freeze. Through some accident of providence, Granges had been born with the ideal features for someone in military intelligence: pleasant enough to go unremarked but average enough to look at once like everyone else and no one in particular. Now, those features sat in a suspended state, in the familiar, unconcerned expression he wore no matter the circumstance—whether he was getting his lights knocked out in training or being locked into a timeless cooler. Other than the little flecks of ice on the stubs of blond hair cropped close to his skull, he looked exactly as I remembered.

Repressing a shiver, I headed for Sergeant Connor’s unit. This time, I closed the door as quickly as possible behind me. Connor’s room was better illuminated than Granges’s had been as her windows, like mine, faced the sun. Well, Kepler’s sun. Ice still covered the hull, but reddish light filtered through and cast the sterile interior of the pod in an eerie, sort of blood-red glow.

The usual pugnacity had eased out of Connor’s expression. Her fierce eyes had shut on the world, and her jaw relaxed. The only reminder of her personality was the scar that stretched the length of her cheek, from her left eye down past her mouth. Connor, like the rest of us, was a vet, but the scar hadn’t been from her war days. Somehow, she’d made it out of that hell without a scratch. The scar was a token from a drunken bar fight after she’d gotten home, in which her face had become intimately acquainted with a whiskey bottle. She’d walked away with a scar that would last her a lifetime. By all accounts, it was months before the other guy was walking at all.

So whatever wounds Connor had taken during the war, it seemed that they weren’t the kind you could see. Rumor had it that she’d almost been passed over for the mission because of her psych eval. But she’d worked hard to get her act together, and when it came to the work, no one surpassed her. So, in the end, she’d made the cut.

In this light, her face appeared gentle and peaceful, and the scar out of place—all the more pronounced. Bathed in that red light, it looked almost like a fresh wound, seeping blood. I shivered at the sight.

I didn’t scare easily. But something about waking up in a crimson hellscape surrounded by human popsicles, each tucked neatly in a cryochamber, put a shiver up my back. It was like waking up in a high-tech serial killer’s lair, where even the lighting was designed to be evocative of death.

Except—my mind kicked in impatiently—there’d been no killing involved. And the popsicle business had been voluntary and self-imposed, with the idea that we’d all be woken up at a future time and place. So, not at all like a serial killer.

Still, irrational or not, the sight gave me the heebie-jeebies, and I moved as quickly as possible. The sooner my human companions were out of the deep freeze, the better I’d feel. Scrambling up the incline, I activated Connor’s resuscitation routine. The stats display flickered to life, and the countdown began.

I moved on. The next stop on my way was Caspersen. Back in training, we’d been partners, prepping for the mission together. Which had been interesting for both of us. Caspersen was one of the most decorated officers in the Marine Corps special forces and was equal parts hard-ass and bad-ass. She was probably the best I’d ever met—at pretty much everything. Still, I was a Ranger. So, when pressed, I’d say she wasn’t bad…for a Marine.

Not that I’d ever let on, but the day I’d overheard her remark similarly that I was pretty good for a soldier, had been one of my proudest moments. I didn’t really know anyone else on the launch, but in Caspersen, I felt I had a friend.

And there she was, blue and still in that frozen limbo. I pressed the button and waited for her stats to display. I squinted at it, reading off the numbers. There were a lot of zeroes, but everything displayed as green. We were okay, I guessed.

I frowned. This was wrong. All wrong. I had no idea what I was doing. Suppose something happened? Suppose one of these cryo-units malfunctioned? There were procedures to bypass the main power unit. I didn’t know any of them. I wasn’t trained in any of them. Hell, I didn’t know if they were still applicable now that the ship was torn in half.

Where the hell is the captain? What the hell happened to us? This was his job, or hers—whoever had inherited the rotation when we reached Kepler-186f’s atmosphere.

There’d been fifteen flight captains on board. Of the entire crew, they were the only ones set to wait out the duration of the trip awake. It was essentially a suicide mission: pilot the ship for fifty years, or until ill health intervened. The captains in deep freeze had been set to wake on a series of fifty-year timers. We’d taken off under the stewardship of Captain Lee. Captain Baker had been set to wake up in fifty years’ time, and Captain Miller after her; and so on and so forth. Captain Lee had daily automated health check-ins. If the system detected health issues, or if he failed to check in, it would wake Baker. Lee would go into a cryonics chamber; Baker would authorize a time shift, set to wake Miller in fifty years from that date; and the ship would continue.

We in the crew had even heard rumors of a kill switch implanted in the pilots. Fifty years of solitude would take a heavy toll on anyone. The Genesis II pilots had been chosen for their mental fortitude as well as their skill sets; they knew the cost of their journey, and they knew the perils. But mission command wasn’t taking chances; rogue behavior—failure to check-in, unauthorized crew resuscitation, etc.—would trigger the release of a deadly and fast-acting toxin; in twenty-four hours, the old captain would be dead and replaced.

Or so the rumor went among the passengers anyway.

Everything seemed to have been accounted for, from illness to aberrant behavior. And yet, here I was, doing the job that the captains had trained for, waking my fellow settlers. And the Genesis II captains? They had vanished, along with the rest of the ship and the bulk of her passengers.

Chapter Four

I WAITED UNTIL the numbers started to tick upward on Caspersen’s charts and then left her quarters. There were about a dozen more units on either side of the hall, presumably all still containing frozen crew members. I had to wake them all. And it probably wouldn’t hurt to do a little reconnaissance while waiting for the process to finish.

The contrast in Kepler-186f’s oxygen levels with earth levels hit me again as I stepped from the sealed unit into the open passage. Damn. This is going to be hard to get used to. I was huffing and puffing just making my way up the hall toward the next chambers—Russell and Cohen.

Russell looked the part of a grizzled, square-jawed former soldier; he was built like a bull and looked meaner than hell even in the deep freeze. Cohen, by contrast, looked like a kid barely out of training. His baby face and dark hair were the sort of thing that made some girls swoon. No one would have guessed, looking at him, that he was a trained killer. While I hadn’t had the opportunity of working with either beyond training, I knew them by reputation. And both were exceptional.

Russell had been in and out of so many scrapes with death that they called him Ghoul; no man of flesh and blood, they said, could have his luck. And Cohen had been one of the youngest to make Ranger in history, and he’d already received more commendations in his short career than most people achieved in a lifetime.

Their resuscitation processes kicked off without issue, and I moved on. They were the last of the special forces in the area. Everyone else from here on was either a scientist or a researcher. Everyone except Matt Law, that was.

The Genesis II passengers had been chosen for what they could bring to the mission: military expertise, scientific acumen, and in some cases, a pioneer’s personality and ability. But sometimes, it had just been about money. Law was young and reasonably fit, and that might have played some role in his selection. But mostly, it was the last-minute infusion of cash that his billionaire father had pumped into the project. He’d put most of his fortune toward it, if the rumors were true.

Then again, it was just money. The government needed it to get the Genesis II off the ground, so it bought his son a chance. A chance in hell, maybe, but a chance.

And that was more than the rest of his family had had when all that money had been safely tucked in this account or that investment. Matthew Law, Sr. probably never saw it coming. Few had then, and those who did thought their money would insulate them.

It turned out, though, that nature didn’t give a damn about the size of your yacht or the number of your offshore accounts. Rising sea levels swallowed up the coastal mansions as readily as the little towns that no one cared about. The billionaires disappeared along with the common men as earthquakes ripped cities asunder. Melting ice exposed long-buried volcanoes, rising temperatures brought new and more terrible storms, and disease and famine followed each new catastrophe.

We had spent the decade before at war. Maybe we’d been too busy killing one another to really think about what happened when we killed our planet too. Or maybe we believed on some level that we were above facing the consequences of our actions. Maybe we’d relied too long on the idea that some Invisible Hand would swoop down to save us from danger.

It never came. Instead, we got death on a scale previously unknown. The war was but a preview of what Earth had in store for us. And by time we realized we’d made our home inhabitable, that the doomsaying scientists had been right all along, we had frittered away so many of the resources we’d destroyed ourselves to attain, that we were hardly able to get off the ground at all.

The Genesis mission was humanity’s second chance, our Hail Mary play. Six hundred human beings, with the fortitude and skill to face the challenges that we imagined would be waiting, jettisoned into the void, toward the planet that promised to be the most hospitable. Six hundred, less the Matt Laws—they were the passengers who let their wallets or, in Matt’s case, their parents’ wallets, do the talking. Not their ability, not what they’d bring to the future of humanity. Just cash.

It struck me as particularly galling as I stared at Law’s features, frozen in peaceful repose. I was surrounded by the wreckage of humanity’s efforts, perhaps surrounded by the last vestiges of humanity within hundreds of light-years—or maybe at all. And instead of a worthy pioneer, someone up to the challenge of settling a new planet, there lay a smug kid who had never earned a thing in his life, much less admission to this elite crew.

Some things never change. I slapped the controls and waited until I saw his vitals monitor flicker on. Then I crossed the hall, toward Dr. Ellis’s room. Kayleigh Ellis was a researcher with an alphabet’s worth of letters following her name, each denoting a degree or certification she’d acquired. She was a top scientist and a respected voice in more branches of science than I could name, and she couldn’t have been more than thirty or thirty-five. I didn’t know much more about her than that.

The machinery hummed to life at my touch, and I waited for the countdown to begin. The numbers popped up on a screen, and I moved toward the door.

And then a shadow passed over us. I froze. The reddish glow that had illuminated the room had gone dark.

In a moment, the shadow left, and the red hue returned. But I had no doubt about what I’d seen. Something, something large, had cast a pall over the ship. What it was, I didn’t know. But it had been big enough to obscure all the windows in Ellis’s room.

A plane? Another ship? One of the shuttles?

Genesis II had left the space dock with a number of shuttles onboard. Had the hanger survived whatever had demolished our part of the ship?

The wild hope that Earth had sent a second mission after us crossed my mind, although I knew it was a long shot. But maybe…maybe they had been able to muster a second launch?

Or… Other options started to crowd my mind—darker options. What if it’s a Kepler craft? We had assumed the planet was uninhabited since we’d been unable to detect traces of life. But our scientists were five hundred light-years away. There was a lot that could be missed over that distance. What if the Genesis II had been spotted entering the atmosphere, and this was some manner of craft come to search for us? Would they be friendly, or hostile? And what manner of creature could be out there? In my mind, I envisioned a humanoid…but my knowledge of the planet’s atmosphere was limited, and my understanding of Kepler’s ecosystems—if they existed—even more so. It seemed plausible that the evolution of life might follow a similar path to what we witnessed on Earth, in the right set of circumstances…but I’d emerged from the Genesis II to find a seemingly barren planet. I couldn’t begin to guess what lay beyond this mountain or what circumstances had guided the process of life on Kepler-186f.

The same ice that coated the rest of the craft covered the windows of Dr. Ellis’s quarters, and I could see nothing of the sky outside. So, in that moment of curiosity, I made what was quite possibly the worst call of my life. I decided to investigate.

I left Dr. Ellis to her cryochamber and hurried to the end of the hall. My breathing was choppy when I reached the opening. I peeked outside, cautiously, and looked around. Nothing.

I crawled out, keeping low by the wreck. But for the dim red of Kepler’s sun, the sky looked exactly as it had when I’d reentered the ship: clear and cloudless. I saw no hint of a plane, shuttle, or anything that might blot out the sun.

I crept up the side of the mountain, staying as near the Genesis II as I could for cover. Something had passed by the ship; something had cast that shadow. I needed to gain a vantage point, some way to see beyond the mountainside, to figure out what that something was. Desperate eagerness and a vague hope fueled me.

Still, I hadn’t succumbed entirely to the madness of the moment. Some better sense warned to proceed with caution, so when I ran the length of the ship, I still stuck to cover. Skulking from rocky outcropping to shadowy crag, I made my way farther up the mountain.

The going was not easy. Ice slicked the rock in places; climbing took time. Time and energy. The more I exerted myself, the harder I fought to breathe. I had trained in mountain terrain on Earth and defended high-altitude positions. But the constant, burning need for oxygen dwarfed my worst experiences back home. Five minutes in, I was already exhausted and trembling. My breaths came in ragged gasps, and my heart hammered against my sternum as if to shatter it.

I stopped to recover, leaning heavily against an oddly green rock, wondering what the hell I’d been thinking to ever take this gig. This low oxygen is going to get old fast. For a few minutes, I forced myself to take controlled, steady breaths. Then, I looked around. The ship perched below me, the burgundy sky loomed above, with nothing but stone in every other direction.

I was about to set off a second time when the shadow passed overhead again. I darted for the nearest cover, catching only a glimpse of the Thing as it glided past. And that was sufficient to strike a sort of terror, hitherto unparalleled, in my heart.

The Thing was unlike any beast or machine I had seen. It had great wings of quasi-transparent material, through which a little light seeped, and a squat, solid center, from which the wings sprouted and through which no light passed. If this contraption was mechanical in origin, it struck me it must be controlled remotely or operated by tiny creatures. The center—presumably, the cockpit, if it was an aircraft—was twice as tall and at least twice as broad as a human.

But I had the sense that it was a biological entity. I couldn’t have explained why. I had no clear reason, just an impression. It might have been that its motions seemed lifelike, or that I caught some other clue to its organic origins.

Regardless, in the moment, I was sufficiently convinced of how foolish I’d been in abandoning the safety of my ship and interrupting the work of resuscitating my fellow passengers to chase airborne monsters.

I had the idea I should return to the ship and complete my duty there forthwith. The skies were once again empty. The creature, whatever it was, had gone somewhere beyond my field of view. I waited a few uneventful minutes before deciding to take my chances. I would make a break for the Genesis II.

Scrambling down the rockface, I stayed as near the mountainside as possible. I had no desire to draw additional attention to myself.

A good plan, but with my eyes glued to the sky rather than my path, the execution left something to be desired. I barely made it two minutes before I hit an icy patch of mountainside. And half a moment later, I pitched down a steep incline.

My elbows and back in particular seemed drawn to every outcropping of rock along the way, although the rest of my body took a handy beating in the process too. In what was nothing short of a miracle, my head avoided all but minor brushes with the rocks lining my way down.

Still, when I finally came to rest some twenty-five feet below the miserable spot of ice that had started my rapid descent, pain blinded me. Literally. For a moment, I saw nothing but white light and felt nothing but pain. Then, I noted the hot trickle of blood on my face and brushed it away as it seeped into my right eye.

I winced as my fingers found a nasty gash above the eye. Still, I needed to get to cover. If we had any medical staff left, they could take care of my ample cuts. But getting to safety had to be my top priority.

I pushed to my feet with an effort. Another wash of pain flooded my senses, and when it let up, I threw a glance around. I saw nothing overhead. I might be a dumbass, but it seemed I was a lucky one. The creature, if it had been a creature, apparently missed my painful crash course on Kepler-186f’s gravitational forces.

And, on the plus side, I am that much closer to the Genesis.

I hobbled toward the ship, tilting my head to keep the blood out of my eyes. I’m going to need bandages. I wasn’t far now. In a few minutes—

My mind froze as the shadow returned. It was bigger now—much bigger—and it came with the sound of wind. Which meant only one thing: the creature was nearer. My conscious thoughts might have been arrested, but the soldier’s instinct kicked in. I spun around, at the same time pulling Death from its holster.

And there I was, face to face with a thing straight out of nightmares. It had a wingspan of some twenty feet, and an audible gust of wind accompanied each beat of its leathery wings. Thick ropes of sinew stretched along the wings, flexing with every movement. The body was a squat, shapeless mass covered in coarse fur. Though indiscernible in proportion and shape from the rest of the mass, the anterior end seemed to serve as a head. It bore three enormous blackish discs and a mouthlike orifice from which protruded a set of chelicerae that terminated in elongated, dark fangs. The fangs were positioned horizontally on either side of the mouth and curled toward it. But as the beast came in, they drew back as if readying for the strike.

The creature was certainly strange to me, but the pose was not. When one spent a lifetime doling out death on command, recognizing the intent to kill became second nature. Even with an alien monstrosity like this, as I stared into that gaping maw, the situation was obvious. One or the other of us wasn’t likely to outlast the encounter.

I whipped my pistol upward, planting one shot mid-torso and the other in the head area. I saw a jolt run through it and then another, but it continued on its course.

The winged terror had almost reached me. I dove to the side, firing a third shot. The move took me out of reach of the Thing’s fangs but not its wings. A crashing force of prickly hair and slick leather bowled me over.

The hairs on my neck stood up, and terror crept into my soul as the creature unfurled a set of stubby legs that ended in massive talons. I hadn’t seen them before; they must have been tucked up against the shapeless blob of its body. But it wasn’t the talons that worried me as much as the fact that it stood at all. I had planted three .45s in this grotesque son of a bitch, and it hadn’t even fazed it. Hell, I hadn’t even seen it register pain. Instead, it stood there silently, fangs parting for another go at me.

I loosed a scream of preternatural fear, emptying my magazine into the Thing. In that moment, I was no more rational or sane than my prehistoric ancestors who’d trembled behind their painted cave walls at the sound and sight of thunder and lightning—a sky raging with violence that would have seemed unfathomable to them at the time. That fear of unknown terrors, so long buried by our species in the light of knowledge and rationality, was as real to me in that moment as it had ever been.

I didn’t see the movement of a wing rushing toward me. I’d been too wrapped up in shooting and screaming. But I felt. God, I felt it. A whiplike sinew slashed my face and shoulder with so much force it threw me to the ground. I blinked upward at the red sky, almost insensible for a long moment.

Then I saw it approach, and I went to swap out my empty magazine, but somehow, I’d lost the gun. I tried to get up, to search for it, but my head throbbed, and movement sent a wave of nausea over me. I collapsed back to the rock beneath me, calling feebly, “Help. Somebody.”

It was ridiculous, of course. I was alone. I knew that. My companions were in their cryochambers, half of them still in deep freeze and the rest hours away from consciousness. I was my only hope against this monster. And I had failed—myself and them.

A stink of decay—the only odor I had detected so far on Kepler-186f—hit me. The creature hovered above me now, its monstrous fangs drawing back to reveal a tubular mouth.

I tried to pull away, crawling backward. But a piercing agony split my sides and put an end to my squirming. The Thing had its fangs in me, and suddenly, a burning sensation reached my ribs like liquid fire pouring straight from its chelicerae and into me.

In a moment, the pain ended. My breathing slowed, and the world went dark. My last memory was of vague terror and the rhythmic beating of wings.

Chapter Five

I AWOKE WITH the same sense of dread. The burning in my sides hadn’t lessened, and my head swam. I felt something else too—a sort of prickly, crawling feeling.

My mind tried to place it, but it wasn’t until a dank, leathery surface pressed against my arm that I associated it with the monster. The vague terror became very real, and in a moment, I was on my feet, eyes open. It took half a second to steady myself against the wave of nausea that followed movement.

I saw that I’d woken in a dimly lit rock cave that opened to a great, sloping entrance a good forty feet above me. The air felt close and heavy with the stink I had observed earlier. But I wasn’t alone. The monster was here too, or, some miniature version of it.

Even on its legs, this Thing stood about my height in total. Its wingspan reached less than half that of the one I had already encountered. Offspring. The Thing’s offspring. My mind could not bring itself to call this hideous apparition a baby.

But I understood, now, why the adult hadn’t already killed me. The Thing could have devoured me on that rocky plateau had it chosen to do so. But that had never been the plan. I was still on the menu, of course, but the kid’s menu.

I reached instinctively for Death and then remembered I’d lost it.

The little Thing parted its fangs, revealing a smaller and no less repulsive mouth.

A thought flashed through my mind. My knife. I might have lost my 1911, but my combat knife remained strapped to my leg. Something like hope returned as I pulled it out. I had no clue where the parent had gone, but I would deal with it when and if I got to that point. In the meantime, this seemed a fairer fight. While I had neither the reach nor the built-in weaponry that this creature possessed, size-wise, we were more evenly matched. And with seven inches of cold steel in hand, I was feeling more optimistic about my chances.

Like its parent, the young monster made no sound. It shifted its repugnant body noiselessly, with a kind of grace—or as much grace as a hairy blob could have anyway. I retreated from it, and it followed. Stubby though its legs were, they were capable of remarkable speed. It kept up a rapid pursuit of me.

Round and round we circled. I heard crunching and felt the breaking of something underfoot; something that sounded suspiciously bone-like. But I didn’t look, in part because I dared not—the Thing was quick and seemed very responsive to my movements. Whether it could detect a moment’s inattentiveness, I didn’t know, but I sure as hell didn’t want to find out the hard way.

And there was the fact that this family already made my skin crawl. I didn’t need to add to the feeling. At the moment, that seemed to be the likeliest outcome of figuring out what was crunching under my boots. I could deal with that reality if I made it out. And if I didn’t, well, it wouldn’t really matter.

My uncooperative behavior seemed not to sit well with my host though. After about the second time around the room, it tried a new tactic: whipping me with its wings. This drew blood and hurt like hell. But not enough to disorient me or knock me onto my backside.

“Not as strong as your momma, are you, you little bastard?” Why was I talking to it? Maybe it was the effects of whatever poison the parent had used to tranquilize me or the need to hear something other than the mystery crunching. But realizing that I had something like a chance had given me a euphoric rush. I felt positively gleeful as I taunted it, and I waved the blade like a challenge. “Come and get me, fucker.”

It struck again, whipping at me with the corded sinews of its upper wing. It occurred to me that the wing was incredibly flexible, and I wondered how it could so easily morph from pliable enough for striking to rigid enough for flight. It was marvelous, a wonder unlike anything I had ever seen before.

A flash of pain, so intense I could practically visualize it, cut down my forehead and cheek, and I realized I must have blanked out for half a moment too long. I had the distinct impression that I could feel the suffering of every individual nerve and trace the pain from my face to my brain. I could almost see a map of my nerves, all of them alight with electrical signals, all of them rushing to let my brain know I was in distress.

I staggered. The sedative, it seemed, wasn’t entirely gone from my system. I didn’t know if I was hallucinating, about to pass out again, or just lightheaded. I gritted my teeth to concentrate. I couldn’t afford to give in, either to the euphoria or the numbness.

The monster advanced, and I retreated, waiting for its next strike. In a flicker of coarse sinew and damp leather, it came. This time, I was ready. I moved aside in time to avoid the blow, and with my left hand grabbed for its wing. It slid through my fingers—an oozing, repulsive bundle of tissue—but I managed to slow its retreat.

And with my knife hand, I struck. The blade hesitated for a fraction of an instant as it pierced the creature’s leathery skin and then glided through as easily as if I’d been separating butter. Never underestimate a dependable blade.

It was the Thingling’s turn to retreat now—still noiselessly. In all of our encounter so far, the only sounds I observed from either the junior or senior representative of this unsavory species had been incidental. They crushed things underfoot and impacted with barriers like anything else, but they didn’t roar or growl or even cry in pain. Could it even register pain? Its sudden retreat told me that it did understand damage, at least. I had sliced through most of the wing, leaving the end attached by little more than skin. A good third of it dragged behind the creature, limp and unresponsive.

The sense of euphoria returned. With my meager turn of luck came the lure of promised victory, the sensation that the tide had changed. I’d felt it more than a few times in the past, back on Earth. But I’d been neither oxygen-starved nor suffering the effects of lingering poison in those days.

Today, though, I was both. And my judgment reflected the fact. I raced headlong for the creature, intent on destroying it once and for all.

But whatever damage I’d dealt, the Thingling was far from finished. It knocked me upside the head with the full wrath of its whole wing and charged to meet me. Blood oozed from a fresh stripe across my crown. The beast collided with me, and we went down. Horrible, reeking blackish-green liquid leaked from its injury onto me. My stomach roiled. But it was only when I felt the prickly coarse hairs of its body, the cold dampness of its skin that I truly understood what a mistake this had been.

The time for second guesses had long passed though. The creature’s mouth was open wide, its chelae flailing eagerly. I had about a second left before I wound up tranquilized all over again—and there’d be no coming out of this sleep.

“Not this time,” I growled, kicking to be free of the tangled heap we’d become.

You’re talking to it again, my mind kicked in. Then, I realized I was talking to myself, too, and in the third person. What the hell did that bastard jab me with?

Whatever it was, I couldn’t let its offspring repeat the trick. Staring into the row upon row of little razors that lay behind those fangs, I knew well enough what would happen the instant I went under. Or probably before.

I swung the blade, not with a measured strike, but wide enough to buy myself a little time—time to jump backward, to get out of reach of the Thingling’s fangs. You need a plan. I mean, I need a plan.

I gritted my teeth. This was bad. I was facing death, and I was halfway out of my senses. I needed some means of killing the monster. Hurting it might buy me time, but I couldn’t count on time being on my side here. I needed something permanent and something quick.

But what?

I thought of human anatomy, considering where I’d strike if this had been a man. As near as I could tell, its wings were roughly the equivalent of our arms. The legs, like the mouth and fangs, were obvious. Then there were the three black discs on the anterior end of its body. Two smaller discs sat on either side of a large, central one. At first glance, I thought they might be smooth, convex surfaces. But I saw now that these were more akin to a cut gem, with a thousand different angles and surfaces.

A particularly repulsive gem.

Eyes. They were the Thing’s eyes. Which meant, if its internal anatomy followed the same pattern as its external, its brain probably sat directly behind those monstrous discs.

And here in my hand is seven inches of razor-sharp steel.

The plan practically formed itself. Fighting a giddy sense of excitement, I returned to the offensive. I moved back for the creature, grabbing with my left hand for the uninjured wing. This didn’t seem to be something it had anticipated. In truth, I didn’t know if its brain was developed enough to consciously anticipate action, or if it merely acted on an instinctual basis. But whether by instinct or thought, it pulled back to free itself from my grip.

I dug my fingers as deeply as I could into the ropes of oozing sinew, clawing bitterly to maintain my hold of that slick flesh. It worked.

The Thingling pulled away from me, and I leaped forward at the same time. The wing drew back, up above its head in the familiar whipping motion. And I rose with it, propelled by my legs and the creature’s own formidable strength. A second later, I was above the gaping mouth, above the chelicerae, and above the fangs. Then, I let go.

Gravity did most of the work after that. All I had to do was guide the blade. And I did, straight into the great, central eye. The sickening sound of flesh parting followed. The creature shivered as I drove the blade in and down until the guard struck tissue. In a flash, I retracted it, ignoring the urge to retch at the sight and smell of the blackish-green ooze that leaked out. I plunged it in a second time, and a third.

From my peripheral vision, I saw the creature’s wing coming toward me and raised my free hand to ward it off. Stinging pain shot through me as it impacted, but I hardly blinked. My own instincts seemed to have kicked in enough to cut through the Thing’s chemically induced haze. Compared to that dullness of the brain, pain was a nonissue. The most difficult aspect of my current position was maintaining my distance from the creature’s fangs as I straddled its head. And after three blows, its efforts to dislodge me degraded to the point that they were all but ineffectual.

A few more strikes of my blade, and they had ceased altogether. The Thingling flailed helplessly between the final blows and staggered forward. Then its legs buckled underneath it, and it slumped to the ground in a shapeless heap of fur and goo.

No sooner had I hit the ground than I rolled off it, leaping to my feet. In the fury of the moment, I was ready for anything.

But the Thingling didn’t move. Shaking with exertion, I drew ragged breath after ragged breath and waited for some sign of life. None came.

It was dead.

With that realization came a wave of relief and, directly on its heels, nausea. Greenish-black blood covered me. I reeked of it. I smelled like week old meat left in the sun. And with nothing more pressing to focus on, my stomach seemed to have seized onto that one particular aspect of my situation.

I backed away numbly, putting as much distance between myself and the corpse as I could. I had the vague idea that that might diminish the smell.

And then something crunched underfoot. My earlier suspicions returned, but this time, there was no reason not to look; so, I did.

Bones littered the cave floor—dozens upon dozens of bones. But not just any bones. Mixed in among the strange shapes and unfamiliar structures of alien species lay an all too familiar sight. Human bones. The source of the crunching sound had been my heel shattering a jawbone.

A human jawbone.

This was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and it pushed my stomach from roiling to heaving. In a minute, I was crawling away from the remains, expelling centuries-old stomach bile as I went.

Chapter Six

AFTER A SOMETIMES-perilous climb, I emerged from the cave. I was a disgusting mess of stomach bile and strange blood, of sweat and dust and every manner of stink. But, for all that, my bout of nausea seemed to have cleared my mind. I didn’t feel woozy, I’d stopped talking to myself, and I wasn’t losing track of time.

So when I stepped into the light of Kepler’s red sun, I’d steeled myself for battle. Because I knew that was what waited: the Thingling was dead, but its parent remained. She’d already demonstrated how much more formidable she—it?—was than her offspring. But I’d be damned if I’d be taken by surprise twice in the same day.

I had a little more perspective on our situation on the planet too. Our part of the ship hadn’t been the only one to survive. Whether the bones in the cave were the remains of people who had been pried from their cryo-units, or whether they’d been fully reanimated when the Thing grabbed them, I couldn’t say. But they obviously hadn’t been burned to ash on entering the atmosphere. That meant that some other part of the ship had survived in well enough condition to protect the bodies—and maybe lives—inside. With any luck, the handful of surviving passengers in my section of the ship weren’t alone.

Perspective, though, could wait. For now, I had to get back to my ship, alive. Judging by the dimness of the light, I guessed the day was mostly over. I had to figure out where I was, where I’d come from, and how to get back there as quickly as possible. And all while avoiding the Thing, preferably, or killing it, if necessary.

Keeping low, I surveyed my surroundings. The cave entrance was nestled into the side of a rock face and sat below an outcropping of stone that probably shielded it from aerial view. While that particular arrangement might have been well suited to the Thing’s needs, it rather put a damper on the as-quickly-as-possible portion of my plan. To have any idea of where I was or where I needed to be, I needed to first reach a better vantage. And hope the momma’s not out there watching.

I crept to the nearest rock and listened for anything like the flapping of wings. When I heard nothing, I peered over the top—and froze stiff. My heart skipped a beat, or ten. There, not fifteen feet away, was the Thing.

I ducked back down and drew my knife. Had it heard me? Had it seen the shadow I’d cast when I peeked out from behind the rock? I strained my ears for a sound, any sound, that might confirm my fears.

But I heard nothing but the thundering rush of blood as it raced through my temples and the low, ragged breaths I tried to suppress. The phrase “scared shitless” had been invented for situations precisely like this one, and it pretty well encompassed how I felt at the moment. Had I been spotted? Was the Thing was even now creeping toward my location to finish what it had started? Or had I gone undetected and was just wasting precious time behind this rock? Not knowing was a hell of a lot more terrifying than either possibility.

When after a good ten minutes, nothing had happened, I figured I could safely advance again. Slowly, very slowly, I crept forward. Since I’d heard no hint of movement, I guessed I would find the creature where I’d last seen it. If so, I might be able to take it by surprise and kill it in the same way I had killed its offspring.

I inched my head up. But for the occasional howl of the wind, the day remained eerily still—no chirp of birds, no buzz of insects, no chatter of rodents; just silence.

As I left cover, my heartrate accelerated. A standard stress reaction, of course. But in this oxygen-poor atmosphere, it felt anything but standard. The winded sensation I’d already experienced heightened until I gasped with each breath. Try as I did, I couldn’t get it under control, and I wondered how the Thing hadn’t heard me yet.

It had its back to my position, and it seemed not to have moved at all since my last glimpse. Its body slumped forward, away from me, and I thought it might be angling its head to peer down into the valley below. Or is it sleeping? I’d had my share of luck on missions before, but this seemed almost too good to be true.

Still, if fate had my back in this, I figured I shouldn’t squander any more time than necessary. Clutching the handle of my blade, I crawled up the rock one step at a time, pausing after each movement to see if it had stirred. Now and then, the wind swept up the mountainside, ruffling the monster’s coarse fur and carrying its wretched stink toward me. But it didn’t budge.

I slid down the rock slowly, quietly, until I was on the plateau once more. The enormity of this senior member of the species struck me yet again. Even slumped over, it stood well above my head. Still, I had an idea of using the current incline of its back as a sort of ramp and racing up toward its head and vulnerable eyes before it had a chance to react.

Whether I succeeded or not, I couldn’t confront it face-to-face, nor could I take the chance of trying to slip away undetected. If I had a hope of walking away alive, it would be over the Thing’s dead body.

I got into position, drew in a lungful of air, and stepped forward—directly into a puddle of some sort.

Splash.

It hadn’t been loud, but it was enough to be heard. My heart missed a beat. I fully expected to be staring into the Thing’s jaws in half a moment. But, again, it didn’t move. It just sat there, absolutely still.

I glanced down at the puddle and began to understand why. I stood in the same greenish-black ooze that covered my clothes. Blood. Or more specifically, blood from a Thing. And not a little blood either. I hadn’t been able to see it from the other side of the rock, but now I could. The plateau was covered in blood. It ran around the creature’s body, all the way to my feet, forming multiple pools along the way. Pools like the one I stood in.

Death. Of course. Death had put a solid magazine’s worth of holes in the Thing before it had taken me. No wonder it was leaking like a sieve. It must look like Swiss cheese.

The slumped posture, the absolute stillness, the seeming deafness—it all made sense now. The Thing didn’t respond because it couldn’t. It was dead.

I felt fairly sure of the fact, but I still maintained a ready hold on my knife as I crept around it. A sensible precaution but needless in this case. Swiss cheese had been a pretty fitting description. The Thing’s fur was matted in blood, its anterior end hanging limply forward as its mouth gaped. One wing twisted under its squat body, and the other rested motionlessly to the side. The creature had, it seemed, carried me home to feed its young and then crawled off to die.

I couldn’t help but feel some grudging respect for it. The instinct so familiar on Earth, to nurture and even sacrifice for the species’ young, seemed no less present among the monsters that called Kepler-186f home.

Respect and relief were not, however, mutually exclusive, nor equally matched. On the contrary, the relief I felt at that moment, seeing the Thing dead, was one of the most intense emotions I’d ever experienced. I dropped to a crouching position on the rocks and let myself breathe for a long time. I steadfastly refused to think about how close I’d come to being dinner. Still, it took a few minutes before I could get back on my feet.

But get back up I did, and headed up the mountain, leaving the two dead creatures behind me. The Thing’s plateau had provided a glimpse of a rocky valley below, but the mountain’s many rises and outcroppings largely obstructed the view. I could detect nothing useful. I might have been standing directly above my ship without being any the wiser.

Realizing that I needed a better vantage, I headed farther upward. This quickly proved more difficult than I had supposed. In addition to the constant feeling of oxygen deprivation, I now had to contend with new, twin difficulties: hunger and thirst.

Before we’d blasted off, we had been required to abstain from both food and drink for forty-eight hours prior to entering the cryochambers. In reality, that had been many years ago. But time had paused for me. I’d gone to sleep on an empty stomach, and now I’d woken on an empty stomach. It hadn’t been so bad earlier. I’d been too discombobulated and generally uncomfortable to notice. But now?

I couldn’t shake the sensation. The thirst was worse though. I could mostly ignore the nagging gnaw of hunger pains. But I couldn’t shake the constant pull of dehydration. Once or twice, I stumbled upon a little pool of collected rainwater, nestled in a nook in the stone, and drank what I could. But I got little more than a few sips each from these puddles, and they carried an odd sort of tangy metallic taste that sat poorly with my stomach. I had the impression I might not have been able to drink more even if I’d found it.

In time, as I climbed, I found I’d misjudged the hour when I’d emerged from the Thingling’s cave. I had supposed the wan light of day signified the approach of sunset. Not so, as it turned out. More than half the day remained. The dimness I’d mistaken for a late hour was a feature of Kepler-186f, the planet’s star, and its proximity to the planet itself.

Kepler-186 produced less energy than Earth’s sun and was farther from the planet than our sun was from Earth. These two factors in combination meant a rather dim day by Earth standards. As the hours rolled on, and the day hadn’t ended, my thinking started to adjust. It felt something like an overcast or stormy Earth day, and I found myself constantly glancing up at the sky.

I needn’t have, though, for there were almost no clouds overhead and certainly no storm brewing—which was fortunate since it took some time to reach a decent lookout. But what a view it was when I did find it.

From there, I got a better picture of the mountain range upon which I stood and upon which the Genesis II—my portion of it, at least—had come to rest. It looked like a great, jagged wall of rising and falling gray-green stone stretching to the eastern horizon. I was observing from one of the higher peaks. A good mile and half or so down from me, on the side of an adjacent mountain, sat the Genesis. From this distance, it seemed little more than a toy, small and frail and far away.

To the west there was something of even more interest, not only for myself but to the rest of the crew as well. Something I had, in my time here so far, not yet seen. Vegetation. A great mass of tall, dark spires stretched out before me, with huge, billowing tops rising off them. They resembled some kind of tree, though no variety I’d ever seen before. These were more like a childhood drawing than anything Earth had to offer—tall, gangly trunks sporting oversized puffs of foliage, or a stick figure sporting a cartoonishly oversized hat.

They stretched out from the foot of the mountains until the horizon vanished to the curvature of Kepler-186f’s surface. I stood there, trembling at the sight of them, beautiful in all their strange glory. They were the first thing I’d seen so far that remotely resembled home. And what did they signify?

Well, that was more beautiful yet. It meant this world had more to offer than rocks and predators. And maybe, just maybe, we’d have a decent shot at building a colony after all.

Chapter Seven

I MADE A note of the position of the sun and began my descent with an eye toward my destination. It was a long way down, over inhospitable, sometimes almost sheer, rock face. Still, it proved less arduous than the trip up had been. I hoped my sense of direction hadn’t failed me because as soon as I started to move, I lost my view.

I managed to reach the second mountain by sundown without getting too turned around. As near as I could tell from my glimpse of the area’s topography, this range consisted of a series of cojoined peaks. These two mountains came together a good two miles above the valley.

I discovered more water shortly after reaching the second mountain, and for that I was very grateful. It had the same tangy taste noted earlier, but I’d started feeling lightheaded from dehydration. Nor did I have any concerns about this water source baking in the sun all day. This wasn’t rainwater that had pooled in some natural basin or crevice but, instead, a spring that flowed from a break in the rock. It trickled down between the mountains into a narrow chasm in the stone, no doubt carved by long years of running.

As with the trees I’d spotted earlier in the day, I found myself a little overcome at the sight of this mountain brook. And not because it resolved my immediate need, though that certainly didn’t hurt. Running water meant accessible water. It meant we’d be able to replenish our supplies without drilling wells, which would allow us time to prioritize other settlement needs.

I drank greedily, and then, having sated my thirst, turned to the formidable task of removing the filth of my adventures from both my skin and clothes. I scrubbed first at my face and hands and then at my uniform.

Had I been wiser, I might have paused to consider my situation. I was still a good distance from home base, and the day had very nearly expired. I couldn’t venture into perilous and unfamiliar terrain in the dark, but neither could I remain in the open. I’d already encountered one manner of predator and had no way of knowing how many others might live here or if more resided in the area. That wasn’t the extent of my folly though. I’d focused so much energy on ablutions that I missed a key point. Nights on Kepler-186f got damned cold damned quick.

Of course, by time I started to think about any of that, it was already too late. I’d wasted more time than I should have and soaked my uniform in the process.

It was too late to undo my mistakes, so I set myself the task of finding shelter. After twenty or so minutes of searching, I located a little nook in the stone some ten or fifteen feet up the side of the mountain. I’d be sleeping on cold stone, but I spotted no signs of prior inhabitation, so I doubted I had to worry about critters returning home in the middle of the night. Not only that, a kind of ledge hung out over the aperture, which would shield me from unfriendly eyes and precipitation.

This turned out to be a stroke of good luck. Night began as clear as the afternoon had been. The air took on an increasingly crisp chill. It didn’t sit well with my soaked clothing. I couldn’t really complain, though, except about my own stupidity. The temperature was no colder than an autumn evening back home and, while not ideal for an impromptu camping trip, remained manageable.

Despite my best efforts, sleep didn’t come. Every rustle of the wind, every faraway noise, thundered in my ears until I knew for a fact I would not sleep. So I passed the time by studying the strange new stars and foreign constellations that gleamed overhead. Perhaps most curious of all were the two visible moons, shimmering in reddish-silver light. They were as beautiful as our Earth’s moon, with their network of dark and light spots. To my naked eye, one looked nearly double the size of the other. Whether this was a product of the relative distance between the two or an accurate reflection of their sizes, I could only guess. But it was mesmerizing to watch them, and I did so for a long time.

Which in turn helped take my mind off my empty and pained stomach. My injudicious imbibing had come back to haunt me, and my guts rumbled and churned and protested all through the night. So I kept on studying the moons and stars, trying to ignore the discomforts of my situation.

And then the clouds rolled in. First, little wisps floated by, dimming the starlight as they passed. Soon, they grew thicker until they obscured even the moons, and all was utterly black.

The rain began, and the wind started to shriek and howl. Thunder boomed in a steady chorus of discontented rumbling, punctuated now and again by a tremendous clashing. Streams of electricity ripped through the skies in the most impressive lightening show I had ever witnessed. The wonder was somewhat diminished by the fact that it seemed all around me and way too close for comfort.

This continued for most of the night until the storm broke shortly before dawn. I hadn’t slept a wink, but I’d made it through no wetter than I began as my cave kept out all but the occasional splatter. I waited until daybreak, and then, wearily, hungrily, and with a stomach still protesting last night’s misguided bounty, headed off.

Some four hours, a few wrong turns, and a lot of luck later, I spotted the wreckage of the Genesis II. Twenty minutes later, I was near enough to make out the crew, busily milling around the ship. They looked not much bigger than ants, as far away from one another as we were, but I could see them, and that was better than I’d done in a day and a half.

The last hour, as I scaled rises and descended drops, was the most difficult psychologically. Being so near and yet so far away felt maddening. Every cramp and bruise and ache that I’d so far suppressed screamed anew at the promise of relief. Nothing was quite as interminable as the end of a long wait.

But terminate it did, and probably far sooner in reality than it seemed to me. Caspersen was the first to notice my approach. She carried a crate of something, and she set it down quickly.

“Son of a bitch. She’s alive. Cohen.” At her signal, he came running into sight and then over to me.

I brushed off his assistance. The muscles of my legs might have felt as if they were running with liquid fire, but I had pride. I’d made it this far; I could make it the last few feet.

There were about ten of them outside, and they all stared at me with something resembling morbid curiosity.

“Captain Johnson?” This was Dr. Ellis.

“Johnson,” I replied. Technically, it was my last name, but I’d spent enough time being referred to by nothing else and had grown used to it.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m starving. But otherwise, yeah.”

“You sure? You look like shit,” Caspersen informed me.

“Smell like it too,” piped up Matt Law.

I frowned. In a ship full of hundreds of presumably lost souls, that this frat boy had somehow managed to survive seemed decidedly unfair. And all the more so as he recoiled, wrinkling his nose.

“I’m good. It’s a long story; I’ll explain later. But I’m starving.”

Caspersen nodded. “All right, go. Law, you go with her.”

I frowned harder. “What?”

“In case you need help.”

“I told you—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “But I’m not taking chances. Anyway, he can show you where everything is.”

I didn’t like it, but I was too hungry to argue further. I headed back to the ship and ducked inside. More than once, I’d all but given up on ever seeing the Genesis and her crew again. But at the time, I registered nothing more than weariness and now irritation at being assigned a babysitter. Much less this particular babysitter. As it was, the long-awaited moment of return came and went without much fanfare.

“So, Kayleigh has been working on the ship,” Law was saying. For some reason, he seemed to be under the misapprehension that I wanted to chat. “She’s been doing something to the vents.” He paused. “Or filters. Anyway, you can breathe in some of the rooms now. You know, breathe regularly.”

Despite myself, this captured my interest. After a day and a half in this low-oxygen atmosphere, that sounded even better than food. “You mean, Dr. Ellis has figured out how to increase the oxygen levels in our rooms?”

“Yeah.” He nodded appreciatively. “She’s really kind of a genius, I think.”

“Of course. Why do you think she’s on board?”

That seemed to shut him up, but only for a minute. “All right, Cap, in here.” We’d reached the far end of the ship, and he gestured to the door.

“What?”

“It’s where we’ve got everything.”

“I know what a supply room is. But what did you call me?”

He stared blankly. “Call you? Nothing.” Then, realization dawned. “Oh…you mean ‘Cap’?”

I clenched my jaw and held his gaze, saying nothing. It did the trick.

“You don’t go by Cap? Okay, what should I call you?”

“Johnson. Better yet, Captain Johnson.”

He struggled visibly to repress a grimace. And failed. “All right, Captain Johnson. Food’s in there. Shall we?” He held the door open and stood aside to let me pass.

If it had been meant to placate me, it had the opposite effect. “Thanks, I can take it from here.”

He waited for me to go through. “Sorry, Cap. I mean, Captain. Tracie told me to make sure you’re okay, so I’m going to stay.”

“Tracie?” I repeated. I had no idea who he was talking about.

“Yeah. You know, the hot Marine?”

It was my turn for belated understanding. He was talking about Caspersen. “Captain Caspersen is a highly decorated war hero,” I replied in the even, menacing tone any good drill sergeant has down to an art.

He shrugged. “Yeah, I buy that. She looks like she could kick some serious ass. She’s pretty hot too.” He’d retrieved a packet by this time and turned to me before I could respond. “Anyway, this is the crap we’ve been eating.”

The packet was preserved food, a type of MRE—Meal, Ready to Eat—that had been designed for our mission.

“Meal” was generous and “ready to eat” deceptive in that it seemed to imply you might actually want to eat it in normal circumstances. In the field, MREs were assigned to deployed military personnel as they preserved well and carried a significant number of calories. And while no one with options would choose them, they were preferable to starvation. By what degree was a matter of intense debate.

The particular MREs we’d brought on the Genesis were a prototype designed to withstand deep space flight and extended periods of time. “Indefinite shelf life” was the description the development team had used.

And did they ever taste it. My entrée, labeled beef stroganoff was an odorless sludge of indeterminate origin, which somehow tasted worse than it looked. If the R & D team had managed to package cat vomit to last an eternity, I don’t think it could have been worse.

Still, my choices were to eat or stand there conversing on an empty stomach with Law. I choked the stroganoff down. Then I tore open the dessert packet. Ostensibly, it contained a brownie bar of some sort, though it looked like a small, solid brown brick. It was the perfect complement to my stroganoff, in the way that hairballs often accompany vomit.

And, even though I hated every bite, I felt half-starved by the time I finished. “Another,” I told Law.

He’d been watching absently as I ate but started when I spoke. “What?”

“I want another packet. But not stroganoff.”

“Another one? You mean, you actually want to eat it after you’ve tasted it?”

“Yes. Exactly.” It really didn’t seem like it should be necessary to spell out what “another” signified in the circumstances. And yet here we are.

“Well…Tracie said we should only have one a day. You know, to conserve rations. They’ve got enough calories…” He trailed off.

I stared at him from under furrowed brows. The overtired, underfed part of me wasn’t in the mood for tact. The more measured part of me cautioned that Law, buffoon that he was, was going to be one of only a few neighbors from here on out. So, no matter how much I resented it, tact would probably still be best.

“Law—that is, Matt.” Civilians, in my experience, tended not to respond well to being addressed by their last name, and I didn’t want to sabotage my effort at being tactful. “Do you know how long I’ve been out there? Do you know what I’ve had to eat?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Since yesterday morning. Mountain climbing, fighting…whatever the hell that thing was. And not a damned thing to eat until just now—not a bite since the fasting period kicked in on Earth. Literally, centuries ago. So, while I agree that in normal circumstances, we should stick to one MRE a day, I think the circumstances call for a little flexibility. Don’t you?” This was proving more difficult than I’d imagined. I’d gone for tactful and wound up patronizing.

Even still, he hesitated.

“Forget it. I’ll get my own.”

“No, no, I’ll get it. You rest.” He was at the meal box before I’d made it onto my weary feet. “Just…you explain it to Tracie, okay?”

“I’m sure Captain Caspersen will not object.”

Chapter Eight

SOMETIME DURING THE last half of my chicken fajita meal, Law slipped out. I wasn’t sorry for it. Aside from the fact that there was little to recommend his company in any situation, my second MRE was going down very slowly. Whether the fajita was particularly foul, or I’d been so hungry that the stroganoff had seemed more palatable, I didn’t know.

By time I’d gotten through the first half of this meal, I was choking down each subsequent bite. Every mouthful seemed worse than the one before. But I’d been adamant that I wanted a second MRE, and our rations were limited, at least until we figured out what the hell had happened to the rest of the ship. So, I stuck with it. But Law’s absence left me freer to suffer at my own leisure.

I decided I’d save dessert for later since it came packaged separately. There was only so much punishment I could endure in one sitting, after all.

I’d managed to get through most of the fajita when the door opened. I nodded at Caspersen, mouth full of food-sludge, and said nothing.

“Hey, Johnson,” she said, leaning back against one of the cupboards across from me. “So, how you doing?”

I swallowed the sludge. “What?”

Her manner was relaxed, but she was studying me. “How are you feeling?”

“Feeling? Fine. Better since that dumbass left. Tired, but good.”

“Good. When you’re done, Ellis is going to give you an exam.”

“An exam? Why?”

“You’ve been out there for—what? Eighteen hours? Twenty?”

I nodded again. That sounded about right.

“In this atmosphere, the oxygen content is,” she continued. “It’d be sufficient for sedentary human life, but that’s about it. We’ve been taking it in shifts, spending most of our time in the filtered rooms, and it’s still taking a toll on us. And…” She gestured at me. “I’m guessing your time away wasn’t a vacation.”

That was true enough. “But now that I can breathe again, I’m much better.”

“I don’t doubt it. Still, I don’t want to take chances.”

“Fine.”

“Oh.” She retrieved a pistol from a leg holster. “This is yours.”

It was a 1911. My 1911. And judging by the pristine condition, it looked as though it had been cleaned recently. “Where’d you get it?”

“Out there, on the rocks. We found the shell casings, some blood, and this.” She cocked a crooked smile. “There wasn’t a trail to follow, but I figured we hadn’t seen the last of you. And I knew you’d want it back when you got here.”

“How’d you know it was mine?”

She scoffed now. “Who else etches ‘Death’ onto their sidearm?”

“Fair point. Thanks.”

“’Course.” Then she stood. “Well, I better get back out there.”

“What’s going on?”

“Research, mostly. Figuring out the composition of the rocks, trying to get readings on the rest of the ship—”

“Any luck?”

“None so far. But if there’s anyone else out there, we’ll find them.”

I shivered, the memory of a shattered cranium returning unbidden to my mind. “They’re out there.”

“How do you know?”

I sighed. “It’s a long story. The Thing—”

“The what?”

“The monster. The one that took me.” For some reason, I’d been thinking of it as a “thing” for so long the name had taken hold in my mind. What else was I going to call it anyway? “It had bones in its cave. Human bones. Lots of them.”

She sat down now, across from me on the slanting floor. “What is this ‘thing’? Tell me about it.”

I described it as best as I could, from its enormity to its foul stench to its loathsome appetite. She listened as I recounted my story. Now and again her brow would crease, but otherwise, she remained silent and unmoving.

When I'd finished, she nodded. “Well, good to know what we’re up against. And that we can kill the son of a bitch. All right, I’m going to get Dr. Ellis.”

I pushed to my feet. “It’s really not necessary, Caspersen. I’m good. Food—” I gestured to the remainder of my MRE. “Or something near enough, and oxygen. That’s all I needed.”

“Probably. But we’re not taking chances, remember?”

I acquiesced grudgingly. “Fine, fine. I don’t suppose our resident genius has rigged up anything like a shower, has she?”

Caspersen paused at the door and laughed. “Not yet. Although now that you’re back, it’s probably going to be a higher priority.”

She was gone before I could threaten to kick her ass. I sighed, leaning back against the wall. I was tired as hell. Right now, all I could think of was getting sleep and taking a shower. One wasn’t an option, and the other wasn’t an option at the moment. Damnit.

A few minutes later, Dr. Ellis arrived. “Johnson,” she said, extending her hand. “Tracie says you went through hell out there?”

“Tracie? Oh.” I still wasn’t used to hearing people address Caspersen by her first name. “Well, she exaggerates. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh.” If she’d called me a liar, she couldn’t have expressed her disbelief any more clearly. “Well, we’re going to just do a quick exam. I’m going to check those puncture wounds on your sides—”

“They’re fine,” I insisted.

She raised an eyebrow but continued. “And I’m going to do a blood draw. That’ll tell me a lot.”

I frowned. “I didn’t think you were a medical doctor.”

Dr. Ellis shook her head. “I’m not. Medical division was in east wing, remember?” She didn’t need to elucidate; our doctors were, at best, missing and quite possibly dead. “I do know what I’m doing, though, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“Uh-huh.”

The corners of her lips twitched, but she said, “I completed a field medic course before launch, and I can analyze blood in my sleep, Captain Johnson. You’re perfectly safe.”

“All right. No operating though.” She might not have had professional training, but based on our interaction so far, I guessed she’d have done all right with difficult patients.

“I’ll save the mad scientist routine for later. Okay, you’re going to need to take the shirt off.”

I did as I was bid, and she scrutinized the red welts on my sides.

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“That’s a lot of irritation. Are the puncture wounds sensitive?”

I shrugged. They hurt, but they were nothing I couldn’t get past. “Eh, no big deal.”

Her left eyebrow crept up again, but she nodded. “What about breathing? Any trouble with that lately?”

“Not really. We’re not on Earth, so it’s not exactly the same, but…”

“Okay. Any…soreness, aching, overall pains?”

I shrugged again. “Not really.”

“Okay. I’m going to just take a look at the sides. Can you move your arm?”

Grumbling about how none of this was necessary, I did as she asked.

I held back a wince as she brushed the wound on my right side. “We don’t have any gloves, so I’m going to have to—”

“Fuck!” I interjected. Without a change in tone or a bit of warning, she’d gone from ginger examination to squeezing the area of soreness. “What are you doing?” It seemed I’d grossly overestimated her medical ability.

She straightened up and faced me. “You’ve got matching eighth-inch incisions that reach a minimum of half an inch each into your sides. You’re wincing as I even get near the site, and yet you’re telling me it’s ‘no big deal.’ You’re breathing fine, nothing hurts, you’re A-OK.”

I started to explain, but she interrupted.

“Captain Johnson, you’ve come into contact with an extremely powerful paralyzing and possibly hallucinogenic agent. There’s obvious tissue damage at the site, and I need to know how bad. I need to figure out what we’re dealing with here. So, you need to be honest with me. No more of this hero crap, you understand?”

I scowled at her. “You’d be a shit doctor.”

“Probably. But the incisions—how do they feel?”

“Feel? They hurt like hell. Especially after your ‘care.’”

She ignored the emphatic dubiousness I added to the word care, and prompted, “Be specific. Is there soreness only at the site of the wound? Or does it extend through this whole patch of redness?” She gestured at the site of the wound. “Or beyond?”

I shrugged. “All around, I guess. The general area.”

“Okay. And when you got bit, describe the feeling.”

In this way, we stepped through my injuries, my experience with the Things, and even the stomachache in my mountain cave. By time we’d finished, she knew more than Caspersen—Caspersen hadn’t inquired into, and I hadn’t offered up, details about my particular pains and aches. She cycled through a handful of tools that, she explained, were collecting samples of my blood, measuring my vitals, etc.

“There,” she said when we’d finished, “we’re done. See, not so bad?” She wisely didn’t wait for a response before continuing. “All right, I’m going to take a look at this data. You stay here. Oh, and I brought you some clean clothes. Your other ones are in pretty rough shape, but once Kim gets the water filter up, we should be able to wash them.”

I nodded dubiously. Dr. Isaac Kimutai was a Kenyan immigrant whose work in bringing clean water to the regions of the world worst and first hit by climate change had saved countless lives. His specialty was developing natural filtration systems using nothing but the area’s resources, but his research on waterborne parasites had earned him the nickname “Dr. Water” because it seemed there wasn’t a water-related problem he couldn’t fix if he put his mind to it. I’d met him a few times, and he’d introduced himself as “Kim.”

It wasn’t Kim’s ability to fix the water situation that I doubted. If anyone could figure it out, it’d be him. My skepticism was directed at Ellis’s assertion that there was anything we could do with my clothes. I had the feeling nothing short of a miracle could save them. Still, I slipped the stained and torn relics off and relished the experience of putting on something that didn’t smell. Even if my wearing them was about to change that.

Ellis returned a good fifteen minutes after she’d left me, with Caspersen in tow. I’d taken up a vigil over the remains of my MRE, trying to force the last few bites down. “All right, Captain Johnson,” Ellis said, “the good news is, the toxins in your blood shouldn’t have any lasting effects.”

I couldn’t resist an “I told you.”

I caught a flash of irritation in her hazel eyes as she continued. “The bad news is I’m detecting some infection in your puncture wounds.”

“Infection?”

She nodded. “As far as I can tell, it’s not too serious, but I’m going to give you an antibiotic all the same.” I started to protest that we should save the supplies, but she frowned. “We’re not on Earth anymore, Johnson. The immunities we developed there might not mean much here.”

“What are you saying? Am I in some kind of danger?”

“She’s saying,” Caspersen cut in, “that the antibiotic should do the trick, but we don’t know for sure. There’s a chance it can’t account for whatever’s here. And we need to be very careful.”

“So, what? I’m going to die from…a scratch?”

“Probably not,” Dr. Ellis returned. “But infection is the bigger risk here.”

I sighed. “Damn it.”

“And there’s something else.”

“More good news?”

She shook her head. “No. Your blood oxygenation levels are low. Dangerously low. Look, you’re not going to like this…but…I’m putting you on bedrest. Just for a couple of days. But I need you to stay in bed, keep your activity levels to an absolute minimum, try not to get too excited—”

“Bedrest?” I nearly spit the words out. “What the hell do you mean, ‘bedrest’? I can’t be on bedrest. We just touched down. We’ve got crew members out there we’ve got to find—people dying. Our people.”

Caspersen and Kayleigh exchanged glances. “About that… Listen, Johnson, there’s something we’ve got to tell you. But…it’s going to come as a shock.”

I scoffed. “More shocking than this fake doctor telling me to play sick?”

Caspersen sat down across from me. “Yeah. By a lot.”

I knew enough about her to realize the concern in those blue eyes portended something big. I wasn’t willing to give in on the bedrest, but it could wait. “What?”

“We didn’t just land.”

I blinked, repeating, “What?”

“And those people you found in the cave? They’re not our people. Not directly.”

I glanced between Caspersen and Kayleigh. The doctor nodded gravely, her pretty features morphed into the same sober, clinical expression she’d worn when talking about infection risks.

“Johnson, we’ve been here for about thirty-one hundred years.”

Chapter Nine

“WHAT THE HELL are you talking about?” I demanded. “I woke up two and a half days ago.”

Caspersen rested a hand on my shoulder. “Johnson, I need you to stay calm.” She said it in a friendly tone, but it wasn’t a request.

And somehow, it seemed to kick off my soldier’s instincts. I clenched my jaw and nodded. This was crazy talk, completely nuts. But they seemed to understand. I could too. “Okay. But what do you mean?”

Dr. Ellis sat down beside Caspersen. “When you started our reanimation sequence, you stopped at mine. We had to wake everyone else afterward. Remember?”

“Yeah. I saw the Thing outside.”

“Right. Well, did you check out the remaining chambers?”

“No.” I shook my head.

“You know Blakely’s unit? Two doors down from us? And Anders’s?”

I nodded. They were the two rooms nearest the storage unit, on the mountain-facing side.

“They were crushed,” Kayleigh returned. “Well, Dr. Blakely’s was. His unit was smashed through. Dr. Anders’s was mostly intact, but his cryochamber was smashed.”

“Smashed? So, he’s…dead?”

“Yeah. But it didn’t happen on the way down.”

“What do you mean?”

“The end of the ship that ripped apart in the air? It’s charred. The hall, the rooms—they all show signs of burning consistent with separation in the lower atmosphere. Anders and Blakely’s rooms were intact until we hit the ground.”

“It was the impact, then?” I couldn’t help but think how much it would have sucked to have survived the spacecraft’s midair disintegration, only to be smashed to death on the rocks below. At least they were in cryofreeze, so they wouldn’t have seen it coming.

Caspersen confirmed this with a grim nod, and Kayleigh continued, “But not here.”

“Not here?” I frowned.

“No. The ship didn’t land here. It landed up-mountain.”

“There’s a trail,” Caspersen put in. “From about two hundred feet up. It’s all fresh, just a few days old. Scraping on the rocks, paint, that sort of thing.”

“There was a rockslide,” Kayleigh explained. “A big chunk of the mountain broke away—part of what the ship was resting on. We came careening down here and landed on this ledge. We found a trail of rubble from the landslide quite a ways down.”

Caspersen played absently with an end of flaxen hair that had somehow slipped out of her tight coif. “It’s probably what broke your window and initiated your reanimation sequence.” She didn’t need to mention how close I’d come to sharing Anders’s and Blakely’s fate, although I guessed it was on her mind; I had something of a sense of it already.

“We found the spot where the ship had been too.” This was Kayleigh again. “Before the collapse, I mean. But the thing is…we’ve been here for just better than three thousand years. When I tested Anders’s remains—there aren’t any of Blakely’s left—they’re more than two thousand years old, and less than four thousand. The vegetation around the ship’s landing site…it resembles a species of Earth lichen…it’s several thousand years old too.”

“You mean…we’ve been sitting in deep freeze for thousands of years? Just sitting there?” Stunned didn’t begin to encompass what I was feeling right now. I’d known something had gone wrong. That was obvious. But this kind of wrong? The kind of wrong where the ship split apart, and no one came looking for us? Where they left us in the deepfreeze for thousands of years?

“Exactly.” Caspersen nodded. “We’d still be there if not for the rockslide.”

“Fuck.” The odds against us were absolutely staggering.

“Yeah.” Ellis looked grim as she spoke.

“So those bones I found in the Thing’s cave?”

They perked up at that. “Well, in a way, they’re good news,” Caspersen said. “Not that they’re dead in the cave, obviously, but they signify there are other people here, on Kepler. Some of the rest of the crew must have survived, must have populated and settled the planet according to the mission.”

“That is good news,” I conceded. “Albeit delivered in a shitty manner.” She smiled at that, and a little tension eased out of my brow. “But…if they made it out alive, why didn’t they come looking for us? Why leave us here?”

Caspersen shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t realize anyone else survived. We’re in the mountains, probably not visible from the valleys below. They might have assumed this piece of the ship splintered. I’m sure there were plenty of us who died like that.”

“So, you see,” Kayleigh persisted, “you can take the bedrest. If they waited three thousand years for us, a few more days isn’t going to hurt.”

I frowned, but this time I didn’t argue. I didn’t have the stamina for it. Not after that news. No, all of a sudden, a few days of sleep didn’t sound half bad. I still had one more question though.

“If there are people out there…why don’t we try to find them instead of worrying about filtering water here? Surely, they would have had to do that already?”

“Probably.” Caspersen nodded. “But three thousand years is a long time. We don’t know what kind of civilization they have here; if they even have any memory of the original mission; if they’d be friendly or hostile.”

“Hell,” Kayleigh put in, “if there’ve been subsequent missions. In that time span, Earth might have sent new ships, new crews.”

I nodded slowly. The realization was slowly dawning that pretty much anything might have happened during our Rip Van Winkle interval. Our people on Earth might or might not have found a way to solve the climate crisis; our home governments might or might not have survived; our countries might or might not have survived.

Somehow, that was the most jarring possibility to me. I might have signed on to a long-shot life on another planet. But even as a settler on Kepler-186f, I was still—always, first and foremost—a United States Army Ranger. Now, I’d woken up in an era where there might not even be a United States of America. And I might never know, one way or another.

“I think I need that bedrest after all, Doctor.”

*

I TUCKED INTO a makeshift bed in one of the chambers where Dr. Ellis had modified the air filtration systems. I didn’t know, as I lay down, if I’d be able to get any rest after the day’s revelations.

I opened my eyes some twelve hours later and realized through a yawn that my concerns had been misplaced. Sleep had come almost without warning and had been deep and dreamless. Night had settled, probably hours ago. Outside my window, the sky had darkened and the wind whipped by. It wasn’t raining, at least, nor was there much cloud cover. Now and again, the silvery-pink glow of moonlight illuminated the world, and then it would dim and vanish.

I drifted to sleep again and woke in the morning to the sounds of someone walking about in the room. “Captain Johnson?”

I blinked. “What?”

“It’s Lieutenant Cohen, sir. Captain Caspersen sent me to check on you. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

I nodded, sitting up. “It’s okay. I…what time is it?”

“A few hours after sunrise.”

“What are we doing as far as…calls of nature, Lieutenant?”

He nodded. “We’ve got a sort of latrine rigged up. Behind the ship. If you’re up for walking, I can take you there.”

“Of course. This bedrest is the doctor’s idea, not mine.”

Lt. Cohen led me to the pit—which was more or less all our toilet facilities were at the moment. It was a short hike, but it left me completely winded. By the time I returned to the ship, I was ready to sleep again. I wouldn’t let on to her, but I was beginning to concede that maybe Kayleigh hadn’t been entirely wrong. I couldn’t remember being this tired or generally feeling so spent.

I slept until evening and woke only because it was time for my checkup. I felt better, and it showed. Other than a lingering slight fever—my body fighting the infection, she said—I was doing well.

“You’ll be on your feet in a day or two, provided nothing changes,” Dr. Ellis told me.

“Any chance of getting something to eat in the meantime?”

“Sure. Anything in particular? I hear you were really fond of the fajitas.” This was said with a grin.

I shivered at the recollection. “Anything but the fajitas.”

She laughed. “Matt said you were a big fan. All right, I’ll be back in a minute—with anything but fajitas.”

She was as good as her word, and in a few minutes had returned with a packet of beef stew. “It’s cold,” she cautioned.

I shrugged. “It’s going to suck either way, so…”

Kayleigh nodded. “Good call. You know, when we first got out of the cryofreeze, Connor and some of the others were talking about locking the MREs up. So no one would run off with them or eat more than their allotted share. And then we tasted them.”

I laughed, even over the remarkably sobering odor of my stew. “No wonder they didn’t have us eating them prior to blast off. Half the crew would have gone AWOL.”

“Yeah.” She paused and seemed to hesitate for a long moment. When she spoke again, she’d lowered her tone. “Hey, you know, Caspersen’s going to give you a briefing later, but I figured you’d want to know… We’ve picked up a signal from the Genesis’s locator.”

“A signal? You mean, we’ve found the rest of the ship?”

“Looks that way. The professor can explain, but he figured out some way to…bounce a signal off it, I think.”

The professor was Dr. Carter, an electronics and computer systems guru. His singular demeanor and fierce devotion to his work had earned him worse names, but professor seemed to be the one that stuck. Probably because it never failed that talking to him felt more like a lecture than a conversation.

“It’s still working? After three thousand years?” I was more than a little incredulous.

“Well, not really. It’s supposed to send a signal, but it isn’t emitting anything. The battery probably died a few decades after we landed. But the professor managed to rig something up to bounce a signal off of it.”

I frowned, trying to work through the mechanics of that. “How?”

“Don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess the signal relay mechanism is still working, there’s just nothing powering the signals it’s supposed to send. At least, that’s what I got from the professor’s class on deep space locators this morning.” She was grinning again, and I nodded. We hadn’t had much chance to get acquainted with our fellow passengers during training, but some personalities stood out too much to be overlooked—sometimes for all the right reasons, but usually for all the wrong ones. The professor fell into the latter category.

He was one of those brilliant asshole types, who thought a lot of degrees and a good brain made up for a dearth of personality or decency. It didn’t. Still, the professor was smart—damned smart—and hypercritical. Even during our very short acquaintance in training, his keen ability to detect flaws had made itself known. He seemed particularly incensed over shortcomings in technical know-how and had no reservations about correcting the offender, whoever and wherever they might be. Perversely, it didn’t help the professor’s standing in public opinion that he was generally right. Instead, coupled with his bellicosity, being right felt like proverbial salt in the wound to whoever found themselves on the receiving end of one of his dressings down. I’d had that misfortune myself once, and that had been all it took to teach me to avoid him when at all possible.

So I nodded, taking her meaning in full. “I’m sure that was enlightening.”

“Very.”

“But he thinks he found the rest of the Genesis?”

She nodded. “Yup. Caspersen will talk to you about it later, but we’re thinking—once you’re on your feet—that’ll be the first place we head.”

Chapter Ten

CASPERSEN STOPPED BY shortly after Kayleigh left. “So, I hear you’re surviving bedrest?”

“I’ll make it.”

“Good. Because we’re going to need you once we find the rest of the ship.” And with that, she launched into her briefing. In regards to the professor, it was essentially the same account Kayleigh had already given me. When we got to military considerations, though, we started to delve into new territory.

“He can’t pinpoint a location because it is just a signal return,” she explained. “There’s nothing to triangulate it off of. It’s like an echo—you can tell which direction it’s coming from but not the exact source. Still, direction is something. And he’s got a rough range. He figures a minimum of fifty miles, so we’re looking at a hike.”

I nodded. “And we’ve got to get out of the mountains anyway. The MREs are only going to last so long. We’re going to need to find a source of food and a more hospitable base.” I’d done nothing but sleep and think since I’d gotten back, so I had a few ideas. “We’ll probably want to move the pods with us as we travel since they’ve got the filtration systems built in…” Each of our little rooms was a self-contained, removable pod that could serve on its own as a shelter, separate from the ship. I was already figuring out how we’d get them down the mountainside when she brought me back to reality.

“Yeah. But…there’s a part you’re not going to like so well,” she said, and this served to dampen my enthusiasm enough to let her finish. “I’m sending Granges and Connor to scout it out, in advance of the rest of us.”

She was right. I didn’t like it one bit. “What? You’re splitting us up? Caspersen, we have no idea what’s out there, who they’re going to run into…that’s crazy. What if they meet more Things? Or hostile forces? There’s strength in numbers.”

I could have gone on with any number of similar arguments, and they’d have all been solid. But there was another reason I didn’t voice. This whole business bothered me. We had exceptional special forces representatives from both the Army and Marines in our band. That was the whole point of this cooperative, joint venture. But here we were, with the first glimpse of a mission, and who had Caspersen picked? Only the jarheads. That definitely rankled. But I valued my teeth too much to mention it out loud. So I finished with, “You split us up like that, you leave us all vulnerable.”

She nodded. “But numbers mean a higher risk of detection.”

I scoffed and was about to launch into a second volley of argument, but she cut me off.

“I don’t disagree with any of your points, Johnson. We don’t know who—or what—is out there. Which is exactly why we need to be invisible until we figure out what we’re dealing with on this planet.”

“But you’re sending—”

“Granges and Connor are the best at what they do.” She paused, surveyed my face, and conceded, “But if you want, I’ll send Ghoul instead of one of them. He’s good too.” She shrugged. “But reconnaissance is their forte.”

I hesitated. Ghoul—Sergeant Russell—could get the job done whatever it was, but he was more an unstoppable force of destruction than a ghost. If this were strictly a reconnaissance mission, he’d be good, but not as good as Granges or Connor. And if things go south? They may need a lucky son of a bitch. “I don’t know. Depending on how things go down, he may be the better choice,” I said finally. “Or not.”

She nodded. “All right. I’ll send Connor and Ghoul. They’ll get Carter to the ship and—”

“Wait, what? The professor’s going too?”

“Yeah.” She grimaced. “He’s quite adamant. Won’t let anyone else even touch his equipment.” She must have seen the disbelief on my features because she shrugged, “I’m not thrilled about it either, but short of confining him to quarters under armed guard, I don’t think I could stop him.”

I groaned. “So we’re splitting up and sending our techie into the wilderness?”

“Well, if they find the ship or find any electronics along the way, they’re going to need him. If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears.”

I frowned. I could poke a hundred holes in her plan, but the truth was, I couldn’t think of a better one. Whatever we did would be a gamble. A small party was at risk of being outnumbered but stood a much better chance of going undetected. A big party would be better equipped to fight its way out of danger but much more likely to be spotted. It was like flipping a coin and calling heads or tails: we couldn’t control the external factors, but we still had to make a play.

Unfortunately, this play left me sitting out the action.

“I didn’t think so,” she said after a minute. “All right, in that case, we’ll plan on them heading out tomorrow A.M.”

*

LATER THAT NIGHT, I got a summons to the storage room, which was the largest room on the ship and served as our communal dining and planning location. The professor had called the meeting in preparation for the reconnaissance team’s departure the next morning.

The professor was a tallish man of slight build, with a receding hairline and fierce, attentive eyes that seemed fine-tuned to pick up on every stifled yawn or wandering gaze. We sat cross-legged in the open areas of the sloping floor while he faced us from across the room.

I arrived late, as Kayleigh hadn’t wanted to disturb my bedrest. The professor had insisted, apparently. “Nice of you to join us, Captain Johnson,” the professor greeted with only the faintest hint of sarcasm in his tone. “Now that we’ve got everyone here, I can begin.

“All right. As you know, tomorrow at sunrise myself and Sergeants Connor and Russell will be leaving to locate the Genesis. Or whatever’s left of her.” He waited for confirmatory nods. “Right. Well, there are a few things we need to establish prior to that.

“The first is my relay signal. Most of you know where I’ve set up base. For the rest—Captain Johnson, I believe that’s you—it’s about two hundred feet up, where the ship used to be. I get a good, clear signal, straight down into the valley following the ship’s entry trajectory from there.”

There was a collective sigh of relief—or maybe I imagined it—when he continued.

“Without getting into the technical details, suffice it to say the device is one of my own designs. It’s very simple and requires an infinitesimally small amount of electricity. With only one of the ship’s micro-solar panels.” He paused to glance at me. “From your room unit, actually, Johnson. It’s one of the ones I stripped off since they weren’t doing anyone any good just open to the elements.

“At any rate, just one panel generates enough power to emit a signal every five seconds. Now, with this—” He held up a small box. “I can pick up my signal. And I can pick up the Genesis’s signal. Which means I can plot a course to the ship and then back here.

“Now—and here’s where we get to the part that concerns all of you—it is imperative—” He shook his head. “More than imperative. I cannot stress strongly enough just how imperative it is that you do not, under any circumstances, Touch. That. Signal. Emitter.” He emphasized these last words with a stony gaze cast over each of us, one by one. And then, for good measure, went on.

“Come hell or high water, alien invasion, or the ten plagues of Egypt, I don’t want a single person here to so much as breathe near my equipment. Are we clear?”

More than a few glances were exchanged before the expected “yeses” filled the air.

“As fascinating as they are, your electronics are safe, Prof,” Law spoke up. “Especially if we’re dealing with alien invasions, I think we’ll have more important things to worry about.”

“Thank you, Mr. Law, but I wasn’t anticipating interest from you regardless of circumstance. For those of you with an IQ upwards of a rock, however…” He paused to let Law feel the full impact of the putdown, and I couldn’t repress a laugh. “For the rest of you, you’re probably curious as to why.”

I was pretty sure we weren’t but equally sure we’d find out anyway.

“The Genesis is returning the signal my device is sending,” the professor continued. “If you disturb my signal, you don’t just disturb our way home, you ruin our chances of finding the Genesis as well.”

“Excuse me, Dr. Carter.” This was Kim. Dr. Kimutai was a tall man, thin but not gangly. He spoke excellent English, with a hint of an accent. “But in that case, should we not have a plan in case something should happen to disturb the device? How will we restore it?”

The professor stared at Kim, then at everyone else in the room. Finally, he returned exasperated, almost astonished eyes to the Kenyan. “In what sense would that be keeping your hands off it, Dr. Kimutai?”

“I only mean, what if the device becomes, I don’t know, dislodged? Or there is another rockslide? Should we not know what to do in that case?”

“You do know what to do, Dr. Kimutai. You know precisely what to do.”

Law, who had been stone-faced and silent since the professor’s jab offered, “Let me guess—don’t touch it.”

“See? Even he knows. Don’t even breathe near it. I believe those were my exact words.”

“So…even if something happens to your setup—something outside of any of us—you want us to just leave it alone?” Caspersen summarized skeptically.

“Yes. Exactly.” His tone was measured but hints of annoyance seeped through all the same. He seemed to regard us as irritating him with pointless queries.

But from where I was sitting, there were some significant problems with his plan. “And how will you find your way home?” I felt compelled to ask. “If your signal is the only way to get home or to the Genesis, shouldn’t we make sure it stays running?”

“And how would you do that, Captain Johnson?”

“What?”

“Ensure that it remains functional. Let’s say this rockslide of Dr. Kimutai’s happens, and you take it upon yourself to restore the signal to guide us back home. How do you do it?”

“Well, I don’t know. That’s what we’re asking.” We might as well have been speaking different languages at this point. “You need to tell us how to fix it, so we’ll know.”

“Captain Johnson,” the professor sighed, “I have taken every precaution to ensure that nothing does occur to interfere with my signal. I cannot account for nature, nor entirely eliminate user interference. However, I would rather risk my life on my design’s durability than entrust it to the well-intentioned but nonetheless ignorant meddling of people who, frankly, don’t know what they are doing, and could not be sufficiently educated in a year, never mind before sunrise.”

“Well, that’s all well and good,” Caspersen put in. “But it’s not just your life we’re talking about. Connor and Russell are going with you. And while your confidence is commendable, I’m not willing to stake their lives on a ‘do nothing’ contingency plan.”

The professor began to protest, and loudly, but Caspersen cut him off.

“I’m sorry, Professor. But we’re going to need something better than that. Granges, I want you to work with Professor Carter to understand how the signal works and how we keep it working.” Carter’s protests began anew, but she was quick to add, “If and only if something should happen to it. Don’t worry, Granges is a comm specialist. I’m sure he’ll be able to figure it out.”

Nods and murmurs of agreement echoed round the room, and Law seemed particularly amused. The only real dissenters were the professor and Granges. And, of the two, it was difficult to tell who was less enthused about the new assignment.

Chapter Eleven

IT HAD BEEN an ugly affair, but in the end, Caspersen accomplished what none of us had thought possible. She convinced the professor to share some of his precious knowledge with the lieutenant. And somehow, Granges made it through the hours of condescension without strangling the professor. It was a display of extraordinary willpower, on all sides.

I stayed up for the festivities because, well, who wouldn’t? But shortly after that wrapped up, I turned in. Sleep didn’t come right away. Despite the long hours of rest lately, my body felt like it would welcome another long sleep. My mind, by contrast, buzzed with energy. I was torn between hope and fear, filled with wonder at the sheer uncertainty of our current position, and worried about what would happen on our new world, and what had happened on our old. I wracked my brain with scenario after scenario of our entry into the atmosphere and what had befallen the ship and her crew. I imagined what might be out there in the world beyond. I envisioned vibrant civilizations we might wake up to find, and imagined a hundred types of chaos we might find instead. I thought of Earth, my home, and wondered how the rest of humanity had fared. Had they figured out how to stabilize our home world before it killed them all? Did they rebuild, smarter and better than before? Did they survive at all? Every time I tried to quiet my thoughts, every time I managed to put one possibility to rest, another popped up.

I didn’t slip into sleep until nearly dawn, and it wasn’t a clean, deep sleep either. My mind kept churning away, now full of muddled scenarios and confused musings. Questions kept playing out in my mind, but the answers made less sense than before.

And then, very abruptly, it came to an end as a cracking sound split the air—a sound all too familiar to a soldier. Gunfire.

I was on my feet, Death in hand, after the first shot. A split second later, a second and then a third followed. They sounded near the ship but definitely outside it. I raced for the exterior.

Caspersen and Cohen got there first, and Russell and I made it out at about the same time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, it registered that he had a sidearm—and not only Russell, but all the rest of the military personnel as well. This wouldn’t have been noteworthy except that the armory was with the rest of the Genesis—missing—and regulations had prohibited individual possession of weapons on board the ship. Apparently, I hadn’t been the only one to take issue with that particular rule.

And in the moment, unsure of what awaited in the night beyond, I was exceedingly glad of it—although I was admittedly less so when the professor broke onto the scene a moment later, a .45 like my own clasped tightly in his trembling hands.

As it happened, we were on edge unnecessarily. A clear voice cut through the night, calling, “Stand down.”

“Connor?” Caspersen answered.

“Yes, ma’am.” Her voice carried from the direction of the latrine.

“What the hell’s going on? You okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I think we all breathed a sigh of relief as her lanky form, bathed in silvery moonlight, stepped into sight.

She was grinning sheepishly. “Just a little…pest control.”

“Pest control?”

“Some sort of creature. Small, like a dog. But hairless, and slimy. Shaped like a rat…but much bigger.”

“It wasn’t a Thing?” I wondered.

“A what? You mean, the winged thing that took you? No.”

“Did it attack you?” This was Caspersen again.

Connor shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“It damn near bowled me over, but…I don’t think it was attacking me. I think it might have been bolting.”

“Did you shoot it?” Dr. Ellis, who had emerged sometime after I had, wondered.

Connor’s red hair bobbed up and down, indicating a pretty definite yes. “After what happened to Johnson? You better believe I wasn’t taking any chances.”

“Did you kill it?”

She snorted. “If I shoot something, it’s dead.”

Kayleigh seemed almost excited as she said, “Can I see it?”

It didn’t seem to be the reaction Connor was expecting, and it certainly wasn’t the one I was anticipating.

Connor shrugged. “Sure. It’s down this way.”

Kayleigh moved to follow her, but Caspersen stepped forward. “Let us check it out first,” she cautioned. “Just in case.”

“Of course.”

“Johnson, Cohen, with me. Russell and Granges, stay with the civvies, just in case. Connor, show us the way.” Caspersen glanced behind her at the professor, who was shivering visibly, whether from cold or fear I couldn’t say. “And Carter? Put that damned gun down before you kill someone.”

With that, we headed down the path and the familiar trek toward the latrines.

Connor explained, “I was going back to the ship when something jumped out—from over there.” She pointed to a dark patch of gravel and rock. “Collided with me. I thought it was coming at me, but after the first shot…” She frowned. “I think it was trying to get away from me. But I had already wounded it, and…I didn’t want to take any chances. There.”

She pointed to a dark form, slumped out in the moonlight. Her description, peculiar as it had been, turned out to be fairly accurate. The creature looked like a hairless rat, if rats grew to be about the size of an average Labrador retriever. And judging by the reflection of its skin in the moonlight, I gathered it probably was slimy as she’d observed. I was content to take her word on it, rather than investigating for myself.

Caspersen seemed to have other ideas. Gun at the ready, she walked up to the slick form and prodded it with her foot. The folds of shimmering flesh absorbed the pressure, but other than the ensuing jiggle in the area, it didn’t move. Once she’d contented herself that the creature was dead, she surveyed the area. “Were there any others?”

“Not that I could see.”

Caspersen nodded. “All right. Dr. Ellis can come down. And anyone else who is interested. Johnson, will you get them?”

I nodded and headed back. Kayleigh waited for me at the edge of the group. I could see the gleam in her eyes as soon as I rounded the bend in the path.

“Is it safe?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s right down there.”

She practically sprinted past me, clearing the rocks along the way and flying over the gravel underfoot with an eager athleticism that matched her demeanor.

“Umm…anyone else wanna see it?” I asked over the crunching of her footfalls on the path.

More than a dozen hands reached into the air. Along with the Marines and Rangers, and the professor and Dr. Kim, the rest of the crew had assembled and was waiting. Dr. Verner, our resident astrophysicist; Wu, a biologist with an emphasis in evolutionary biology; Patel, Evans, and Robinson, the geologists; and Lee, Rodgers, and Madison, our engineers. Even Law’s hand was raised. It was the second time I’d seen them all together—and, unlike when we’d assembled for the professor’s meeting, they were actually excited this time. Everyone wanted to see Connor’s kill.

I wondered at that, at how someone, much less all of them, could be eager to view that great hairless slug. But this is the first life-form they’ve seen on Kepler. I had already encountered the Thing, and while it had quite cured my own enthusiasm, they’d yet to discover the beasts that inhabited this place.

So I led them to the spot, where Dr. Ellis leaned over the corpse, remarking on its curious form. The scientists hurried forward as of one impulse, with all the hushed eagerness of children waiting for Christmas morning. Even the professor was oddly quiet.

It unnerved me a little. My own reaction had been something like what I supposed prompted Connor to pull the trigger: mortification. But they were thrilled, exclaiming in the same curious way as Kayleigh.

Different strokes, different folks, my mind kicked in. I might have been thinking in cliches but at least I wasn’t still talking to myself in the third person.

Not that improvement did me much good in the short term. All it meant was that Kayleigh cleared me to work, and Caspersen assigned me protection detail for the scientists. Which sounded boring and turned out worse. Protection detail was never much to write home about, but when the mission entailed trailing a bunch of science geeks as they ogled every oddity, monstrosity, or other feature of a new world? Hell on Earth. Or, Kepler-186f, I guessed.

That day’s suffering didn’t last too long though. After about half an hour, Caspersen stepped in to relieve me. “You might as well head back to the ship, Johnson. Not much going on out here.”

I didn’t argue. It wasn’t that I was looking to shirk my responsibilities, exactly, but sleep did sound significantly better than wasting the last hours of night standing guard over a slimy corpse and morbidly fascinated scientists. So, I returned to the ship and wound up sleeping soundly until sunup.

I woke to find that things had changed somewhat during my rest. The professor, Connor, and Ghoul had already set out. Kayleigh and Dr. Wu, meanwhile, had turned my old room into a sort of lab. They’d cleared away the rubble, blocked off the broken window, and managed to get the door open. At the moment, they were inside, hovering over what looked like a dissection table.

I made the mistake, as I walked down the hall, of pausing to do a double take. My eyes confirmed my initial suspicion. The room had indeed become a lab, and both Wu and Kayleigh were busily exploring the entrails of Connor’s kill.

I moved on, a quicker step to my pace. I’d spent the better part of these last fifteen years flirting with death—either delivering it or avoiding it as my country demanded. And yet I wouldn’t be caught rummaging through something’s guts if my life depended on it. But these civilians, who had probably never shed a drop of blood in their lives, seemed not to blink at the thought of dissection. Different strokes, my mind offered up again.

Thus musing, I ducked out of the ship and almost collided with Dr. Kimutai, who had been about to duck inside.

“Captain Johnson, pardon me.”

“My fault,” I acknowledged. “Sorry.” I stepped out of his way, but he held up his hands.

“Actually, Captain, it’s you I was coming to see.”

“Me?”

He nodded. “Is now a good time to talk? Or are you otherwise occupied?” He glanced significantly down the trail in the direction of our makeshift latrines.

It was a good point as it had been half a day since nature last called. “If you don’t mind…?”

“No, please.” He gestured. “I will wait.”

I made my way down the familiar trail, my boots sinking here and there into the gray-green crushed rock underfoot, but mostly, the going was smooth. In a minute, I reached the spot of the night’s gruesome excitement. I could see exactly where the creature had fallen thanks to a residual blackish stain.

But as I neared the spot, I saw that it wasn’t truly black, but more of a green. Not any sort of green seen naturally on earth—not a deep forest green or an airy spring green. This was another color altogether, so deep, so dark as to be almost black. Almost, but not quite.

Despite myself, I knelt to examine it. I found my thoughts wandering back to the Thing and the great puddle of blood I’d stepped in on its ledge. It’d been very nearly the same color, hadn’t it? Lighter. But not by much.

I frowned at the stain, feeling suddenly, on that green rock, under that red sky, very alone and out of place. I wasn’t alone. I could hear the voices of my companions just down the path and up the rise, just out of sight.

And somehow, that was worse. It meant they, mad fools that they were, were stuck here too. I, mad fool that I was, was trapped here, and they were my companions in our self-imposed exile.

In that instant, the enormity of this vast new world, of the unknowns all around us, hit me as it had never done. Before we’d ever left Earth, I’d thought I had come to terms with it all—with the risk, with the change, with the permanence of it.

Crouching in the gravel, trembling from head to toe, I realized I wasn’t so comfortable with matters as I had thought. Somehow, through all of our planning and training and preparation, I seemed to have harbored some notion that Kepler-186f was just another planet Earth. We’d been warned about that, warned about all the unknowns, the questions that our instruments couldn’t answer over the span of five hundred light-years of space.

And yet, here I was. On some level, I knew we’d actually been pretty lucky. We’d arrived on a planet with an atmosphere that could sustain human life; a planet that had liquid water, animal and plant life, and all the building blocks of life; a planet that seemed, from all we could tell, relatively stable. We were incredibly lucky to have made it at all across the void of space and through a death-defying crash.

But this was no Earth. There were no blues here, no earthy browns and greens, no rainbow of colors. There were no songbirds, no butterflies, no man’s best friend. For all I knew, there weren’t many men left at all, never mind dogs.

I felt a weight like lead pressing down on my chest, compressing my lungs until I could barely breathe.

I sank back into the gravel. It seemed to me in that instant I had nothing to hope for and everything to fear. I’d left everything I’d ever known, and all that remained was this place, where even breathing came with an effort, where nothing was familiar. What the fuck have I done?

I sat there for some minutes just breathing. And then the feeling of despair passed, and anger bubbled up inside me to replace it.

Anger at myself for having agreed to this in the first place; anger at mission control for having sent us on this suicide mission; anger at my fellow passengers for the infectious madness that had prompted them to agree; anger at the monsters that inhabited this place for being unfamiliar and loathsome; anger at Kepler’s star for burning red and painting the entire planet in the same damned color.

I stumbled to my feet. I was not a baby, to sit and cry. I was a United States Army Ranger. And if I’m going to die on this damned planet, I’m going to do it on my feet.

I pushed on. Dr. Kimutai was waiting for me. They’ll be sending out a search party soon. Literally. I better—

I stopped short, my eyes resting on the rocks opposite me. There, nestled among the stones at the side of the path, was something that most definitely hadn’t been here yesterday—a strange bundle of greenish material. And not just any kind of green—Kepler green.

Chapter Twelve

THE SCIENTISTS WERE thrilled by my find, but no one matched Kayleigh’s excitement. The pod had been constructed of organic materials, but definitely constructed, she told me.

“It’s an egg sac, from the creature Connor shot last night.”

“Wow. Cool.” Matt whistled.

Kayleigh flashed a grin that seemed wildly out of place considering the topic of discussion. “Yeah. We haven’t confirmed it yet, but I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s an egg sac!”

“A safe bet,” I remarked, “as we have neither dollars nor doughnuts here.”

“Ohh, doughnuts.” Law groaned wistfully. He’d accompanied the rest of the crew to the location, although I wasn’t sure why. “I wish we had doughnuts.”

Kayleigh paused to look back at us. “Jelly-filled, with a nice cup of coffee…”

“Or smultringer,” Caspersen sighed.

“Smultringer?” I repeated. It sounded like something cleaned out of old chimneys. Not something you ate.

“They’re a Norwegian doughnut,” she explained. “My mom used to make them at Christmas.”

“You’re Norwegian, then, Tracie?” This was Law.

I couldn’t resist answering, “No kidding? I thought ‘Caspersen’ was French.”

The comment got a few snickers from the rest of the group at Law’s expense, but Caspersen seemed to have missed it. Instead, she answered, “Fifth generation. With some Swedish and Danish in there too.”

“Cool,” Law returned. “Fifth generation? That’s pretty cool.”

I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t sure if his vocabulary really was as limited as he let on, or if the issue lay with his conversational skills. Either way, I had no interest in figuring it out.

Caspersen’s crooked smile appeared. “Which apparently wasn’t how my Norwegian great-grandpa saw it, but I wouldn’t be here otherwise, so I’m pretty happy about it.”

“He didn’t like Swedes, then, or…?”

She shrugged. “You know. Everybody has their grudges. Scandinavia’s no different.”

Law was nodding dubiously, and I was pretty sure he didn’t know. “Oh…sure.”

“And from all accounts, the Norwegian side of my family took them pretty personally. Until the Caspersens met the Ingerssons, that is. And the rest is, as they say, history.”

I frowned as I listened. This—the family histories and Tracie—was a side of Caspersen I’d never seen before. Hell, I’d never guessed at it. From what I knew of her, the mission—the job—was everything. Obviously, she’d had a family. She hadn’t spawned in a military laboratory. But I realized, listening to her, that I’d simply assumed she never talked about hers for the same reason I didn’t talk about mine—they were absent. I had no idea she’d come from the kind of tight-knit group she was describing or had an interesting background and family life.

“That’s cool,” Law repeated.

I grimaced. “All right, ‘coolness’ aside…what about this egg sac?”

“We don’t know if it contains eggs,” Dr. Wu cautioned as she examined the green-black exterior of the pod, her features screwed up in a frown of concentration.

“Michelle’s right,” Kayleigh said. “We don’t know it. Yet. But I’ll bet you—”

“I know. Dollars to doughnuts.” I grinned.

“Dollars to smultringer,” Law said.

A growling sound emanated from Caspersen’s stomach, loud enough for all of us to hear. The group turned, as of one mind, toward her, laughing.

She laughed too. “All right, new rule. No more talking about doughnuts. Especially smultringer.”

*

WU AND KAYLEIGH decided against dismantling the pod. They were quite sure it was an egg sac, and further, that it had been created by the rat creature in the lab. “This is the same plant material we found in its stomach,” Michelle had explained, gesturing to the fibrous textile matter that made up the sac.

“It’s probably food, for its offspring,” Kayleigh added. “So when it hatches, it has something to eat.”

“They’re herbivores, then?” Dr. Kim wondered.

“Yes, definitely,” Kayleigh said. “We found nothing but plant matter in its stomach and intestines, and its teeth are essentially hypsodont molars—very similar to what you’d find in a cow.”

“Well, that’s good,” Law put in. His relief mirrored the rest of the party’s. “Are they edible? I mean, they’re made of meat, right?”

I snorted at the characterization, but Kayleigh only shrugged. “Basically, yes. But I’m not sure they are edible. I’m finding a high presence of trimethylamine oxide.” My eyes glazed over almost as much as Law’s, and she explained, “Basically, it’s full of neurotoxins. It’s poisonous. Possibly as a defense against predators.”

“Damn. Looks like we’re stuck with MREs, then.”

“Not necessarily,” Kayleigh shook her head.

“I thought you said it was poisonous?”

“It is—as is. But there are certain Earth animals that contain the same toxin. Somniosus microcephalus—the Greenland shark—among others.”

“And they’re consumed by the indigenous peoples of the area,” Michelle finished. “With the right preparations, the meat can be usable.”

“It’s even a delicacy in some cultures,” Kayleigh put in.

“Hákarl?” This was Caspersen. “Are you talking about hákarl?”

We turned to her. Her expression indicated some skepticism, but Kayleigh had lost none of her enthusiasm.

“Yeah,” she said. “In Iceland, they…”

“I know. My cousins used to bring it with them to the States.”

“Oh.” Michelle smiled. “That was nice.”

Caspersen’s eyebrow crept upward. “Have you ever tasted hákarl?”

“Me? Well, no. I’ve heard it’s an acquired taste.”

“Which is a euphemism for ‘tastes like chewing on the devil’s asshole.’”

“Really?” Law asked. “I heard shark was pretty good.”

“Putrefied shark?” Caspersen prodded.

“Wait, putrefied?”

She nodded. “Cut the head off, cut the shark open, empty the stomach cavity, bury it in gravel for months until it’s reached the right degree of, well, basically rot… Then, scrape the outer layers off and eat up.”

We were all cringing at the description, except Kayleigh and Wu.

“Well,” Kayleigh said with a shrug, “obviously, it’s not a first choice. But where these methods of preparation originated, their choices were pretty limited. Like ours.”

“You can also boil it,” Michelle noted. “Depending on the levels of toxins, cycles of boiling in clean water can achieve the same result.”

Law grimaced. “On second thought, MREs aren’t so bad.”

“Yes, they are,” Kayleigh contradicted. “And worse, they’re limited. We’re going to need to find a source of food. I’m not saying we have to eat Kepler rat now, but we should figure out if we can, in case we have to.”

“Kepler rat?” I repeated. “Is that what you’re calling it?”

“What? No, we haven’t classified it yet. It just…looks like a rat.”

“Speaking of!” Kayleigh interjected. “You’re the first one to discover an animal on Kepler.”

“You mean, the Thing?”

“Yes. So you get to pick the name.”

“I do?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a rule?” I wondered. I’d never heard anything of the sort.

“Well, no, not a rule. Just…” She shrugged. “You know, since you were the first one to find life, you should name it. Like an explorer or something, naming a new island.”

“This island tried to eat me,” I reminded her.

She grinned. “Well, you should have discovered an herbivore. But, seriously, what do you want to call it? Part of our mission is to classify the life-forms we find…so, start us out, Johnson.”

I hemmed and hawed for a long second. “Well…I don’t know.” The Thing wasn’t simply a remorseless predator; it was a bug-ugly amorphous blob that reeked to high heaven. It wasn’t the sort of thing you tribute-named after your favorite uncle or pet dog. It wasn’t the sort of thing that inspired awe and respect. It was just a loathsome terror. And what do you name a loathsome terror?

“Maybe play on a characteristic that really stood out to you?” Michelle suggested.

“Or where you first saw it,” Kayleigh put in.

I hesitated. “Sky Blob?”

They laughed—until they realized I was serious.

“Sky Blob?” Kayleigh repeated quizzically. “Well…”

Their expressions had been critique enough, so I waved the suggestion aside with, “I’m joking. But really, there’s not much to say about it…it was just a sort of shapeless, winged monster.”

“Monster might do,” Law offered.

“It’s kind of pejorative,” Michelle said.

“And juvenile.” I sniffed. The Thing was my monster, and if anyone was going to give it a ridiculous name, it was going to be me. Not Frat Boy.

“Yeah, unlike ‘Space Blob’…’cause that’s mature.”

I frowned at Law, correcting, “Sky.”

“At any rate,” Caspersen said, “you need to pick a name, Johnson, so you and Kim can get to work.”

This work, I supposed, must have been the reason Dr. Kimutai had wanted to speak with me earlier, although I’d not yet heard the details. “Oh. Well, hell, I can’t think of anything.”

“Just describe it,” Kayleigh suggested. “I mean, what would you call it, if someone asked you?”

This naming business was supposed to be an honor, but at the moment, it was feeling somewhat like a chore. “I don’t know,” I repeated. “I mean, it’s just a…a Thing.”

Law rolled his eyes, but Kayleigh and Michelle exchanged glances, and then shrugged.

“What the hell,” Kayleigh said. “’Thing’ it is.”

“Thing?” I murmured. It was the name I’d picked since the beginning, but I hardly expected it to stick.

“Yeah, it’s what we’ve all been calling it since you came back anyway,” Dr. Wu shrugged.

“Cool.” This isn’t so hard after all. “Maybe we could, you know, Latin-ize it?” If high school biology had taught me anything, it was that everything had a Latin name. “Thingus? Thingus Mortem?” My Latin was pretty much nonexistent, but I seemed to recall mortem was death. I had the idea that Thing of Death would be a pretty good name.

Kayleigh cringed, and Dr. Wu, though slightly more diplomatic, suggested simply, “Let’s go with Thing.”

“Okay.” Then, another thought occurred to me. “Hey, you know what? I saw the first vegetation too—back on the Thing’s mountain—the trees down in the valley? Maybe I can name them too?”

A collective groan sounded from the assemblage, and Kayleigh hastened to dissuade me.

“Actually, I don’t think you did. The lichens we found on the mountain? George discovered those right after we woke up.” George was George Robinson, one of the geologists.

“Oh,” I said with a touch more disappointment in my tone than I’d intended. “When did he find them?”

“Early,” Dr. Wu assured me. “Before you would have been able to see the trees.”

I fell silent, trying to wrap my head around the timeline.

“Anyway,” Caspersen said, “to business. Kim, have you had a chance to tell Johnson your plan yet?”

Chapter Thirteen

DR. KIMUTAI’S IDEA—the one he’d wanted to tell me before I found the rat pod—was that I should lead him back to the mountain stream. He wanted to analyze the water and determine if it either was or could be made suitable for human consumption. Caspersen’s idea was that I would be Dr. Kim’s bodyguard for as long as it took him to sort out the water issue.

That I could live with, but I hesitated when she added, “And Matt, if you’re up to it, I’d like you to go with them.”

Frat Boy practically jumped at the suggestion. “Absolutely. Count me in.”

“Good. Kim’s got a lot of equipment, and he’s probably going to need some help with it.”

He flashed a smile, and I had the distinct impression Law’s enthusiasm was growing in equal measure to my own dampening. “Yeah, definitely.”

She nodded. “We’ll get some MREs together. Kim, you’ve got your stuff packed?”

“Yes. Since last night.”

“Good. All right, I think you can head out as soon as Johnson’s ready, then. If you’re good with this, that is?”

They watched me with expectant eyes, and I forced a smile. “Hell yeah. Getting tired of bedrest anyway.”

My faux enthusiasm aside, though, I dreaded the assignment—and took the first opportunity, as Law and Kim headed back to the ship, to pull Caspersen aside to hammer out the details. “Hey, you know what I was thinking?”

“What?”

“Maybe we should take Robinson instead of Law.”

“Why?” She frowned at me, which I didn’t fully understand.

But I forged on anyway. “Well…he’s a geologist.”

“He’s already busy. He and Drs. Patel and Evans are working on—”

“Yeah, I know,” I interrupted. They were evaluating the composition of the different mountain layers around us with an enthusiasm that old rock didn’t merit in my mind. “But Evans and Patel can do that by themselves, can’t they? I mean, what if Kim needs Robinson?”

Caspersen crossed her arms and studied me. “What’s this really about, Johnson?”

I frowned back at her. She was too damned perceptive. “About? Nothing. I just thought, you know, maybe he’ll need a geologist.”

“He doesn’t seem to think so.” She shrugged and turned, ostensibly toward the pod that Kayleigh, Wu, and a few others were still studying. But I was not going to be put off by this dismissive gesture.

“Still, don’t you think…wouldn’t Law be better here? With everyone else?”

“Ah.” She turned back and regarded me with annoyance she made no apparent effort to conceal.

“What? All right, yeah, so I don’t want to babysit Frat Boy. Come on, you know what a pain in the ass he is.”

Her frown deepened. “You need someone to help carry things.”

“I can do it.”

“You’ve got to keep your eyes open. We can’t afford to lose Kimutai. Or you, for that matter. I want you concentrating on keeping everyone alive. Not lugging equipment. Matt is suited to the job.”

I snorted. “I doubt he even knows what a job is. Come on, Caspersen, the kid’s a complete jackass.”

“Well then, he’ll be in good company,” she returned dryly. I was about to offer a retort when she continued, “Seriously, Johnson, you do need to back off Law. I know you don’t like him. Fair enough; your feelings are yours. But you’ve got to stop making it so damned obvious to everyone else on the crew.”

My mouth sagged with sheer disbelief. “Back off Law? What are you talking about?” In my own mind, considering the circumstance, I’d gone easy on him.

She raised an eyebrow. “You need to stop making fun of him, and making faces when he talks, and generally making this a hostile situation.”

I blinked. “I don’t,” I protested. Sure, there were the occasional jabs, but could I help it if he walked into those?

Her eyebrow climbed a little higher. “Johnson, come on. You can’t stand him. Everyone knows it, and it’s starting to rub off. You heard Carter last night. And it’s not just him. Evans and Patel, even Granges…they’ve all started copping an attitude. Ever since you woke up, you’ve been on his case; and it’s spreading.”

“Are you kidding me?” I was genuinely astonished. Sure, I didn’t like him. But that was because he shouldn’t have been here. Someone else should have gotten his seat—someone who’d earned the spot, someone who might bring value to the team. Not a spoiled dumbass who could barely string three words together. “You have no idea the stupid shit he says that I let slide.” Then, a new thought struck me. “What, has he been whining? Saying shit about me?”

She shook her head. “Actually, he hasn’t said a word. It’s what I’ve seen, what everyone else is saying.” I scoffed, but she continued, “You don’t think he should be here.”

This was too much. “Well, of course not. Of course he shouldn’t be here. We’re talking about Frat Boy, remember?” Spreading my hands to signify how self-evident this was, I added, “He’s got zero qualifications for the mission, no skills. And he’s not doing much better in the brains department. There’s no way in hell he’d be here if he had to follow the process the rest of us did. There’s no fucking way he should be here, Caspersen.”

“I don’t disagree. But he is.”

“Yeah, exactly. That’s the problem.”

“No. That was the problem before we took off. But that was three thousand years ago. Now? Now, we’re here, and so is he. And, damn it, we’re stuck here. With him. Whether we want to be—or he wants to be.” She shrugged as if she’d made her point.

I wasn’t seeing it. “It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No, it doesn’t. I told you; you can feel whatever you need to feel about it. But it does mean you have to suck it up anyway.” If her tone had been less straightforward, less earnest, I might have taken the exhortation differently. Right now, though, the inevitable truth of it lingered between us for a long moment before she went on. “There’s not many of us left. It doesn’t matter if we like each other. What matters is the mission. And that’s our survival. All of our survival. His too.”

Despite my inclination to argue further, I had nothing to say. She was right. Dammit.

She clapped me on the shoulder. “So…no more ‘Frat Boy’?”

“Fine.” Adding to myself, At least, not aloud.

“Good. We’re here for the long haul, Nikkole, and we’re going to have plenty of new shit to deal with. Might as well leave the Earth shit in the past.”

*

DR. KIMUTAI, LAW, and I headed out shortly thereafter. The going was slow. Kayleigh had given us specific guidelines about how much exertion we were allowed before rest was required. Still, the going proved rough on all of us. Kim forbore with quiet dignity, and I soldiered on. Even Law, I noted begrudgingly, made a good show of it. He’d been loaded down with most of the equipment. He was covered in perspiration and breathing in gasps by the time we reached the stream. But he didn’t utter a complaint.

Whatever the trip had cost him, Kim seemed to come to life when we reached the water. And for all of its unpleasant associations, I felt my own measure of relief. I’d been fairly certain I could find my way back, but now I knew.

Dr Kimutai’s reaction was so much more than relief though. He was the first to hear it, rippling away in the distance, and his eyes practically danced when we did see it. “Good, good. This is very good. Where there is running water, there is life.”

It seemed cruel to point out the obvious—that for all its running water, the area remained utterly barren—so I didn’t. But I couldn’t share his enthusiasm either.

While Law and the doctor set up his makeshift lab, I scoped out the area. I couldn’t forget how close the Thing’s cave was, and I didn’t dare lower my guard. I’d killed one family of monsters, but who could say what else lurked in the mountains unseen? I had no intention of being taken by surprise a second time.

As it happened, the day was a lot less eventful than I feared. So uneventful, in fact, that I spent most of the afternoon stifling yawns. For hours, Dr Kim took samples, made tests, and hmmm’ed and hummmm’ed over whatever he was finding. Law made himself as useful as possible.

For hours, I kept an eye on nothing in particular and tried not to think while I did it.

Finally, as the sun started to set, we made our camp. My cave, which had been cramped enough during my single occupancy, now served as our joint shelter. Further adding to the experience was the lingering odor of the Thingling, left during my previous occupation of the space.

My companions didn’t comment, but their grimaces mirrored my own. It’s going to be a long night.

And so it proved. Sleep was long in coming and troubled when it finally arrived. Again, I found myself awake until nearly dawn and not particularly well-rested when I woke.

I might have slept longer, except that Dr. Kim, eager for another day of analyzing water samples, decided to crawl out of the cave for an early start. Crawling out of such cramped quarters meant crawling over the rest of us. And a few knees, elbows, and “I’m sorry and pardon me’s” later, both Law and I were wide awake. So began day two.

We rose to an overcast sky, and the cloud cover only deepened from there. Before midday, we’d moved Dr. Kimutai’s equipment into our shelter. And none too soon, either, as the deluge began almost as soon as we’d packed up.

Our space was now reduced to sitting room only, and we waited for the storm to pass. We didn’t talk much. Kim gloomily lamented the lost daylight hours. Law remained quiet and, it seemed to me, sulky. For my own part, exhaustion competed with aggravation, each feeding off the other. It struck me that this planet seemed to have no concept of rain showers. It knew only periods of dryness or raging storms, with no in-between.

Thunder and shrieking winds kept us awake most of the night, but the storm quieted a few hours before dawn. Despite the lack of sleep, Dr. Kim rose as the sun came up and shifted his equipment back to his outdoor lab. Law dragged himself out to help, and I felt compelled to do the same.

The stream ran high now, and Dr. Kim’s good humor came rushing back like the water. He told us in rapturous tones that he’d collected rainwater during the storm and planned to compare the two.

I was happy for him, but I felt the last three nights of poor sleep catching up to me. Nor did it help that Law had taken it upon himself to play the role of conversationalist that morning.

“Been awhile since I’ve been camping,” he said. “I don’t remember it sucking this much.”

He seemed to be joking, but I only grunted in return. I didn’t really care about his camping experiences, here or on Earth.

“Got to be a bit rough, I guess,” he added after a minute of silence. “Coming back here after the run-in with the Thing and everything.”

“That was up-mountain.”

“Oh. Still, I mean, it’s close, right?”

I grunted again, and he left it alone for a bit. But then he tried again.

“So, is it what you thought?”

“Is what?” Some exasperation seeped into my tone, despite my efforts. I was truly trying to remember Caspersen’s exhortation to be civil, but Law wasn’t making this easy. I’d made it clear I didn’t want to talk, hadn’t I? I didn’t want to be an asshole about it. So why couldn’t he make the same effort, and just—well, fuck off and leave me alone?

“You know. Kepler-186f. Our home sweet home.”

The sarcasm in his tone resonated too well with my own feelings. I don’t think anyone figured on a world where everything, from the water to the air, the wildlife to the sky overhead, worked in concert to attack our physical or psychological well-being. But I didn’t want to dwell on that, and I didn’t want him dwelling on it either.

I said, “It’s got enough oxygen to sustain human life. Water. Decent temperatures. Can’t complain.”

Law nodded. “Yeah.” He sounded about as convinced as I felt. “The odds weren’t really great, so we’re lucky in a way.”

“Yup.”

“Still, I wish the air was better.”

“Yeah.”

Law glanced around. “And the sky didn’t always look so…red.”

I stopped to stare at him. “Well, what the hell did you expect? That this was going to be like moving to a new house? Jetting off on a vacation? Or going on a camping trip? We’re on a new planet, for fuck’s sake. Of course some of it is going to suck.”

He blinked under the reproof. “Yeah, bruh. I know. I’m just saying.”

“Well don’t. We don’t need that kind of thinking. We’re on this planet, and we’re stuck here, for better or worse. And you wanted to be here so badly? Well, you’re here. At least try to keep your shit together and pretend you deserve your spot.” I caught myself before I said more, but I figured I’d said enough already—too much. Caspersen wouldn’t like it. But maybe it needs to be said anyway.

“Wow.” He shook his head. “You don’t have to be a dick all the time, you know.”

“I’m looking out for the morale of our crew,” I told him. “Pissing and moaning isn’t going to change a damned thing.”

“But sulking and acting like your life’s fucking over will? Come off it. You think that’s good for morale? You think seeing you mope around, pretending everything’s okay, is good for morale?”

“What the hell do you know about what’s good for morale?” Whatever twinge of penitence I might have felt at letting into Law in the first place, anger now replaced it. So I added, “Or anything else, for that matter?”

He shook his head again. “Jesus. You are an asshole.” Then, he brushed past me and headed toward the stream. I’d started to turn my back on him when he paused. “And you know what? I didn’t ask to be here. I didn’t want to be here, and I don’t want to be here.

“But I am here. And maybe I don’t know shit. But you know what I do know? I know enough not to bullshit about how perfect everything is when it’s not. There’s some things about this planet that suck and bullshitting myself isn’t going to make them better. We’re alive, and that’s something.”

Chapter Fourteen

AFTER MY DUSTUP with Law, I spent most of the day in somber reflection. Or, as Frat Boy would no doubt have put it, sulking. Somehow the conversation hadn’t worked out as I’d thought it would. He’d gotten the better of it by saying almost nothing. I looked like an asshole—that much was clear from Dr. Kimutai’s expression. He’d been watching, and he’d shaken his head gravely after Law walked away.

And the worst part of it was, Frat Boy hadn’t been wrong, exactly. We were stuck here. And it sucks. But being alive? Well, that was something.

And maybe, just maybe, I had been an asshole.

For some reason, my mind seemed stuck on all the things I couldn’t stand, all the things I had told Law to shut up about: the low oxygen, always being short of breath. The red, the bleak burgundy of the sky overhead. The barren desolation of the mountains.

I tried not to think at all, since thinking only depressed the hell out of me. I tried not to reconsider for the umpteenth time if I’d been a fool or lunatic to join the expedition in the first place. I tried not to think about anything but making my rounds of the perimeter as numbly as possible.

I was mostly successful. The hours dragged on, but I concentrated on the green stone underfoot, on my next foothold, on each breath, one by one; and, somehow, the day wore on.

It was midafternoon when I heard distant footfalls, ringing out on stone here and crunching on gravel there. “Hello?” I had Death at the ready, should it be needed.

But a crisp, clear “Johnson?” rang through the air and put my mind at ease.

“Caspersen.” I was absurdly happy to hear a familiar, trusted voice after being stuck with Law and stationed with Dr. Kimutai. I disliked the one and respected the other, but neither was a friend—Law for obvious reasons, and Kim because I barely knew him. Caspersen was different. She was military, like me.

“Tracie.” Law was on his feet as quickly as I was, smiling for the first time since we’d gotten here.

Even Dr. Kimutai looked up from his work. “Captain Caspersen?”

I couldn’t see her yet, but I could hear her and another—Or is it two?—set of steps heading toward us. My initial surprise fading, it struck me that this fell well outside the established plan. We were supposed to stay here until Kim finished his work, or five days had passed, and then we’d head back. There’d been no talk about anyone joining us. I had a vague sense of unease at that. Caspersen tended to do things according to plan unless she had a good reason to deviate.

I didn’t quite relax my grip on Death, but in a minute, Caspersen stepped into sight. Dr. Kayleigh accompanied her. Though too far away to make out their expressions, their body language seemed at ease. At least, the doctor’s did. Caspersen was relaxed—for her—which meant attentive and two-shots-of-espresso-too-many for anyone else. Still, if they weren’t on alert, it meant things were okay back at the ship. No mutinies or brain-eating aliens, then.

“What are you guys doing here?” I called, holstering my pistol and joining the other two in our informal welcome party.

“Came to bring you something,” Kayleigh replied.

I stopped short, frowning. They were close enough to make out their faces now, even against the glare of the afternoon sun, and they were masked.

Law must have noticed at the same time. “Uh, what’s up with the bandana-things?”

“Not bandanas.” Kayleigh stopped to slip the mask off. “But they’re why we’re here—we brought each of you guys one.”

We exchanged glances. Even Dr. Kimutai seemed skeptical, staring at the sheet of purplish material.

“So…what is it?” Law prodded.

“It’s a mask.” Kayleigh had reached us and handed hers to Law, who examined it gingerly. From a distance, I could see that it was composed of a dark substance, leathery almost, but slick. “It’s from—and don’t freak out—the animal Sergeant Connor shot.”

Freak out was exactly what Law did, although in fairness, I think any one of us would have. “Oh, God.” He tossed it back to her and wiped his hand on his trouser leg. “What the hell? Is that, like, its skin?” He looked like he might hurl, and I felt a similar urge.

“I said don’t freak out,” Kayleigh reminded him. “And, yes, it’s skin. But—”

He recoiled, his face contorted in mortification. “It’s…slimy!”

“Yes.” Caspersen nodded. “The moisture keeps it supple, usable. It’s not a fashion statement, Matt. It’s a respirator.”

“A…respirator?” He’d lost none of his wariness, but he stopped retreating at least.

“Yeah. A damned good one,” Caspersen said, taking her own off. “The smell’s a little much, but you get used to it.”

“How does it work?”

“We couldn’t find a respiratory system in the mole. But there was oxygen in its blood. High levels,” Kayleigh explained, beaming in the same weird, morbid way when observing the mole days ago. “Couldn’t understand it at first. But it’s the skin. It’s basically a filter—a biological filter.”

“You mean,” Dr. Kimutai wondered, “the creature filters oxygen into its body through its own skin?”

“Exactly.”

“Amazing. No lungs, no airways?”

Kayleigh shook her head. Of all of us, Dr. Kim seemed to be the only one to share her excitement. Caspersen was surveying our camp as Law and I regarded them with a touch of horror. “None,” Kayleigh said. “Instead of drawing the air through a small filtration system, the entire body, the skin all over the animal, is the filtration system.”

“Amazing,” Kim repeated.

“And it’s very effective,” Caspersen interjected. “As long as you keep the skin moistened.”

Kayleigh’s eyes lit up. “That’s the other thing. You know how you have to change filters, or clean them? It’s self-cleaning. At least, when it’s on the animal. But there’s a network of ducts throughout the skin. If you look closely, they look like tiny veins…” She pointed to something that Dr. Kimutai regarded with a transfixed expression of fascination.

“Hold on,” I interrupted. “I don’t care about the ducts. Let’s get back to the part where you’re wearing something’s skin.”

*

WHILE DR. KIMUTAI had been eager to try the mask, it took some time to get either Law or myself to even consider wearing them. Caspersen had pointed out that we had no qualms about wearing leather. My own boots were made from the tanned hide of some unfortunate bovine, as were Law’s hikers. If that didn’t repulse us, she asked, why should this?

“That’s totally different. This—this is like shades of Ed Gein,” Law answered. The reference to the American killer, famous for his skin-wearing exploits, struck me as apropos, and I nodded.

“It’s not skin like ours,” Kayleigh argued. “It’s like…like breathable leather. It’s more like a…a suit. Inside, under the skin—” She launched into an explanation of the creature’s anatomy, trying to explain how the outer skin was not really skin-like. Which did nothing at all to help her case in my book, or Law’s.

Only Kim was moved. “Imagine a turtle’s shell,” he said after a bit. “The outer skin is like the shell. It’s there, it’s part of the turtle; it serves a purpose…but it’s not like this.” He pinched a layer of skin on his arm. “You see?”

I didn’t think we did, but Caspersen sealed the deal.

“Uff da. Didn’t think I’d see the day when civilians were willing to try what a Ranger didn’t dare.”

It was shameless, blatant manipulation—shameless, blatant, and completely effective. Grabbing the mask from Kayleigh, I scowled, and slipped it on. It fit like a medical mask, covering the lower half of my face. She’d fashioned ties from cord, sewn into the edges. I tightened the straps until it fit snugly over my face.

Then I breathed in…and almost gagged at the smell. Terrible didn’t do it justice. But the wave of déjà vu that it carried was worse. The smell was the kind of rotten egg odor found in some well waters, a sulfuric odor. I could live without ever smelling it again. But that wasn’t what stopped me. It was where I’d smelled it last, and when, that hit me hard. My mind took a detour back to Earth, to one of my last R & R stints; and in a flash, I’d left this world of reds and blacks, and returned to a campsite with a familiar blue sky overhead, and the greens of a forest all around me.

“You okay, Johnson?” It was Caspersen, of course—ever perceptive Caspersen.

“Yeah. Fine.” I frowned, and the sensation passed. I returned to Kepler-186f. “But it smells like something died in this.” With a pointed look Kayleigh’s way, I added, “Oh, wait…”

They might have strong-armed me into wearing something’s skin. I might have sacrificed my dignity for that. But at least my sense of humor had survived.

Kayleigh rolled her eyes, and I had the distinct impression she didn’t consider that such a fortunate thing. “Yeah, yeah. But can you breathe?”

I’d been too preoccupied to put it to the test, so I took a few more breaths. My frown deepened. The mask was thick, but it didn’t seem any worse or more restrictive than a medical mask. “Actually,” I admitted, “yeah. Shit.” I staggered backward, a rush of oxygen hitting my brain. I’d sucked in a few deep breaths, and now, all of a sudden, I felt the effects. “Wow.”

Extending a steadying hand, Kayleigh laughed. “Told you.”

“That’s…incredible.” I hated to sound like one of the mad scientists cackling over their latest discovery, but this really was pretty amazing. Somehow, not only did it not restrict my breathing, it seemed to filter levels of oxygen like those back on the ship. For the first time since we’d reached Kepler-186f, I was breathing—really breathing—outside our pods.

My reaction sold Law, who took his own mask.

He stared at it for a long moment before slipping it on, and his forehead wrinkled as he breathed in. But in a moment, he acknowledged, “Damn. You’re not kidding.”

For a minute, we savored the sheer delight of breathing easily. Then I nodded at Kayleigh. “Well, Dr. Gein, I’ve got to admit, this is pretty amazing. Macabre, but amazing. Thanks.”

She waved the thanks away. “Please. Couldn’t have figured it out without Michelle. Couldn’t have got here without Tracie. It was a team effort.”

I could deal with the skin-wearing evil scientist persona. But not the motivational middle manager. “Yeah, well, thanks to whoever, then. I’m just happy to breathe.”

Chapter Fifteen

CASPERSEN AND KAYLEIGH spent the night at our camp. The cave, already full to capacity with the three of us, would admit no further occupants. Law and Dr. Kimutai insisted that our visitors should sleep in the shelter, and when they had objected, the pair simply vacated the area.

“You’d better sleep there,” Law had said. “Otherwise, we’re all going to be in the elements.”

“It is not the first time I’ve slept under the stars,” Kim assured them.

“Nor I,” Caspersen put in.

But eventually, they relented and bunked in the cave.

In the end, it made very little difference because the night remained clear. We saw no clouds at all and had very little in the way of wind or noise. I slept well. I think we all did.

We rose early, and Caspersen prepared to head back. “Dr. Ellis is going to stay to work with Dr. Kimutai,” she explained. “Dr. Wu is waiting for the mole to hatch back at ship, so she feels this would be a better use of her time.”

Kayleigh struck me as an active sort of person. Waiting probably wasn’t her strong suit. Seeing how much I was coming to hate patrolling, I got it. “Okay.”

“Matt?” Caspersen said, calling past me.

Law scurried over, and I found my first instinct wasn’t to grimace. I guessed I was more pleasantly inclined toward him since he hadn’t ratted me out to Caspersen than I otherwise would have been. Still, it was an unfamiliar reaction.

“Mornin’ all.” He said this with a hesitant glance in my direction. “What’s up, Tracie?”

“Ellis is staying here.”

“Yeah, she told me.”

“So I was figuring, since there’s three people here, you don’t really need to stick around if you’d rather head back to the ship.”

He glanced at Dr. Kimutai’s setup, and then back. “She brought even more equipment. How are they going to get it all back if I leave?”

“It’s up to you,” Caspersen returned. “I’m sure they’ll manage, but if you think you can help—”

“Yeah, absolutely. It’s heavy stuff.”

She nodded. Like all of us, Caspersen wore her mask, so her expression was difficult to gauge. I thought I noted a flicker of satisfaction in her eyes though. “All right. In that case…” She pulled a pistol and box of ammo from a satchel. “Have you ever shot before?”

“Yeah, my dad had a range. And we’d go hunting, but…” He eyed the pistol eagerly as he trailed off. “Is that for me?”

“Yup. I thought I remembered you could shoot. Figure you should probably have one of these so you can back Johnson up.”

“Wow. Awesome. Thanks, Tracie.” He was beside himself, like a kid at Christmas as he took the gun. He handled it well, too, as if he knew what he was doing.

Still, a slap from Caspersen would have stung less. “I got it,” I declared, trying to sound nonchalant. “It’s been quiet as the grave these last days. Not a peep of anything.”

“Better safe than sorry.” Then, turning to Law, she instructed, “You take your lead from Johnson, Matt. Back her up, do what she says.”

“Yeah, absolutely. Of course.”

“Great. Okay, then. Oh, and Johnson? Brought you this.” She handed me a box of ammo. “Found some extra in one of my walls.” Shrugging, she added, “Forgot I had packed it.”

*

ONCE CASPERSEN LEFT, and after I’d gotten over the shock of being assigned babysitting detail, I got to work. If I had to be saddled with a gun-wielding Law, I was sure as hell going to make certain he didn’t accidentally kill anyone. So we spent the morning on firearms safety.

Contrary to my every expectation, Law proved himself competent. He was familiar with guns and showed an unexpected level of maturity when handling them. He treated his 1911 like a tool, not a toy. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, but he seemed to have the proper degree of respect for the weapon’s lethality. He didn’t tremble in fear at the sight of a gun, and neither did he brandish it with the kind of bravado that could get someone killed.

So, we moved on. “If you’re going to back me up, you need to know how to do it. You’re not a soldier, but you need to learn how to act like one.” We started with guard duty, and the first order of business for Law was learning to detect and identify threats without giving himself away. To that end, I spent the afternoon sneaking into or out of camp, while he tried to find me.

This was a much more satisfying round.

“Bam. You’re dead.”

“Back to the drawing board, Law.”

“Bam. Heard you from a mile away. Better work on that, Law.”

Before the afternoon was done, Law had lost fourteen rounds—he’d been mock shot ten times, strangled once, stabbed twice, and, just for good measure, taken hostage once. As for me, I hadn’t lost a single game.

“I suck at this,” he panted. Sweat beaded his forehead as he sat back against the rocks.

“Yeah,” I agreed. It had been a long afternoon, and I was tired but strangely exhilarated. “Want to go again?”

“Not tonight. Jesus. I’m beat.”

“Wuss.”

“Anyway, you’re enjoying this way too much.”

“What?” I’d hoped it wasn’t that obvious.

He rolled his eyes. “Come on. Let’s get some chow.”

I followed, but grudgingly. The truth was, I had been enjoying myself—and not only for the obvious reasons. War games were fun. And nothing else so far on this planet had been remotely fun.

The scientists had already called it quits and were sharing an MRE.

“If we can isolate Plankton J,” Kimutai was saying, “I think our problem is solved.”

Kayleigh said through a mouthful, “Yes.”

“But how?” His brow knitted in concentration. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?”

I shook my head. Shoptalk seemed to be the only language these two spoke. I had the idea that my day had been better spent with Law than it would have been with them, and the thought was pretty depressing. “Hey, Kayleigh. Kimutai.”

“Johnson.” Kayleigh smiled.

During meals was one of the few times we’d started taking our masks off since getting them. Seeing human faces instead of those purple masks almost made up for the conversation. Almost.

“How’s it going?” I asked, grabbing an MRE from the pile.

“Not bad. We figured out what causes the stomach irritation when you drink the water. Remember the night you camped here?” Kayleigh asked.

I tried not to grimace. Here we go again.

“There are many varieties of plankton in the water,” Kim explained. “Most of them seem to be harmless. But Plankton J—”

“Plankton J?” Law interrupted.

“It’s a tentative name,” Kayleigh answered. “Just how we’re differentiating them for now. Anyway, it’s the one that seems to cause the irritation. Discomfort, diarrhea.”

“Vomiting, if you ingest enough,” Dr. Kim added.

I stared into my packet of stroganoff, feeling suddenly far less hungry.

Law didn’t seem fazed. Wolfing down a mouthful of slop, he said, “Cool. Johnson’s been kicking my ass all day. Teaching me to be a soldier.”

I frowned. Despite the fact that he had been, as he so eloquently put it, having his ass kicked all day, he seemed unreasonably proud of himself. “Well,” I put in, toying with a forkful of stroganoff, “I don’t know about ‘a soldier.’ I’m not sure we’re fully past using-a-gun-without-shooting-ourselves.”

Law rolled his eyes, and Kayleigh and Kim laughed.

“At any rate, you guys seemed to be having a good time,” she remarked. “What was that—capture the flag?”

My lower jaw slackened. “Capture the flag? I was teaching him how to patrol a perimeter, how to get into camp without getting spotted, how to get past someone unnoticed.” Then, with a snort, I added, “At least, I was trying.”

“Oh.” Kayleigh shrugged. “So, capture the flag with guns?”

Law laughed. “Pretty much. Except I don’t remember being shivved when I played capture the flag.”

The scientists cringed, and I snapped, “That’s because it’s not a game. Combat isn’t a game, and survival isn’t a game. You don’t skin your knee and go home if you’re no good. If you’re no good in combat, you get knifed, or shot, or taken hostage. You get killed. And you can get the people depending on you killed too. Because it’s not a videogame or capture the flag. It’s real life, and there are no do-overs.”

All of a sudden, everyone seemed terribly interested in their MREs. Kayleigh and Kim had split a meatloaf dinner, now they stared at their respective ends of the foil package. Law seemed equally intent on the gravy-covered mess he was picking through.

I couldn’t help scowling deeper, but turned to my stroganoff. They’re civilians. Of course they don’t get it. I stabbed into the packet, pulling one forkful and then another toward me. It was disgusting, but I soldiered through the entire meal in record time.

Conversation had ground to a halt until Kim declared, “Well, I think I’m ready to get back to work.”

“Me too,” Kayleigh stood hastily. “Catch you guys later.”

I half grunted but didn’t look up. From the corner of my eye, I saw Law glance uneasily between me and his dinner as they left. I fixed my scowl on him, and directed, “Eat.”

“I’m…kind of full,” he said, stonewalling. “I may see if they maybe need any help…”

“Eat,” I repeated, meeting his gaze this time. He flinched and resumed his dinner, so I guessed my expression had been as stern as intended. “It’s important to eat enough when you’re training.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay.”

I stared at my boots. I’d probably been more forceful than I’d needed to be. It wasn’t that what I said was wrong, exactly. Law was a civilian. And a twit. I needed him to understand this wasn’t a joke or a game, and that carrying a gun to defend people was a serious, downright sacred charge. Still, the nagging voice in my head told me I’d gone a step further than necessary. Again.

“So,” I said after some time, “you should hit the rack soon. We’re going to get started at the crack of dawn.”

“We are?” He seemed hesitant.

“What do you think, this is going to happen overnight? We’ve got our work cut out for us if we’re going to make a soldier of you. So get your rest. We’re starting early.”

He replied, “Yes sir.”

I tried to ignore the stupid smile and the sloppy salute that accompanied it. “Ma’am. It’s only the movies that call a female commanding officer ‘sir.’ And you’re not an officer, and I’m not your commander, but if we’re going to play make believe…”

He grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Yeah, yeah. Now get going.” I waved him away with a shake of my head

“You got it, Cap,” he said.

I watched him go, and a verse that seemed cruelly apropos sprang up unbidden from some recess of my mind.

How the mighty have fallen,

And the weapons of war perished!

Chapter Sixteen

THE CAMP WAS quiet, save for the low snoring here and there. I’d been awake for hours. Finally, I rose and decided to patrol the perimeter.

The two moons shone brightly overhead, though lately, the cloud cover obscured them. Now and then, pinkish-silver glow highlighted the mountainside. But for the most part, the night remained dark and shadowy.

I’d wandered a bit from the main camp. Kayleigh had the cave, and Law and Kimutai slept outside, though the night was warm, as the one before had been. In the comfortable temperature, my patrolling had taken on a more leisurely air until I gave it up altogether and sat stargazing on a rock. Or lately, cloud-gazing.

We’d been lucky these last two nights. Though it was overcast now, we’d still had no more rain, and the temperatures had been some of the most hospitable since we’d awakened. So even though some of us had chosen to sleep under the stars, we did so in decent weather.

I remembered Law’s earlier words, and I shook my head wryly. It really is like a camping trip.

I turned my eyes to my mask at that. I was holding it when I should have been wearing it. But I didn’t feel like putting it on, even if it did mean my breathing would be more difficult without it.

I’d gotten over the macabre aspect of our respirators. It was grim and gruesome, but I could breathe. So I sucked it up and moved on.

No, the smell of the thing made me hesitate now. And not because it stank. After inadvertently bathing in the Thing’s blood, I didn’t think any reek could ever faze me again. I hesitated because of how familiar that smell was.

For all of its grim alien qualities, the mask, gray and ghastly in the moonlight, reminded me of Earth too. I knelt there, staring at it and trying to ignore the slimy texture as I rubbed my thumb across the surface. And for a little while, I found myself back home again.

Not in any particularly great moment, or at any truly memorable point in my life. Just a small campsite in a deserted campground, with crisp autumn breezes blowing in. The late season meant I had the place all to myself. And for a short space of time, that little plot of earth had been all mine: the trees, the blanket of pine needles underfoot, the feel of cool, autumn air.

And the smell, the unfortunate, rotten-egg odor of the water from the old hand pump—the same smell my mask emitted now.

It had been no place special, with no special meaning; it was simply a way to pass my leave, and once I left, I hardly thought of it again. Until now.

But it was home. It was Earth.

And now, with Earth so far away and forever gone for me, the memory felt particularly poignant. Poignant to the point of pain. I stared at the mask, in turns glaring and blinking away an inexplicable moisture in my eyes.

Intent as I was on this little thing, I fell from my seat when a shot ripped through the silence of the night. I had Death out in a flash and was on my feet an instant later.

I heard voices from the encampment. I didn’t catch what they said, but the tone conveyed everything I needed to know: fear.

“Ellis? Kimutai? Law?” I called as I raced for them, seized by a deep-set dread as the shouting continued. I could not shake the idea of Law—Frat Boy—running amok in the camp, armed and thinking of himself as a soldier-in-training. “I’m coming.”

“Johnson?” I recognized Kayleigh’s voice.

Another shot sounded, and Law was shouting. My heart sank at the sound. I had no idea what was happening, but I suspected both Caspersen and I had blood on our hands—her for arming Law in the first place, and me for fostering the delusions she’d sparked. Whatever panic, whatever trigger-happy stupidity he was engaged in at the moment, the blame lay with those of us who had let it come to this.

“Ellis. Kimutai.” I was so intent on reaching them I hardly noticed my path until something gave out underfoot, and I went down. A sharp pain shot up my ankle, and I clawed at the gravel underfoot. I cursed myself for leaving the main body of the group and for ever leaving the scientists alone with an armed Law.

I’d pulled myself halfway onto my feet when something—something large and furry—blundered into me. Death flew from my hand, and I went down a second time. I landed heavily, my skin tearing against stone, and gravel pieces cut into my knees and elbow.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, I drew my knife and pushed up to face my attacker. But he—it—hadn’t paused since our encounter and slid down the mountain face, a mere shadow against the rock. I could do no more than send a hail of curses after it.

And then something else careened into me, and I plunged downward again.

“Motherfucker.” I caught myself before I hit the ground, and sprang back toward the second assailant, blade at the ready.

“Johnson!”

“Cap!”

I stopped in the nick of time, my knife hovering a few inches above Law’s throat. He’d been the second assailant—the second to body slam into me. Kayleigh stood two feet behind him. Even in the meager moonlight, I could see the mortification in their eyes. “What the fuck?” I managed to spit out. “I almost killed you.”

“The monster,” Law gasped. “I was chasing it.”

“Monster? You mean, that animal, the furry one?”

Law nodded. “It went after Kim.”

“Kim?” Suddenly, I realized that there were only two of them. Kim was missing. “Where is he?”

“Back at camp,” Kayleigh answered, a tremble to her voice. “It tried to carry him off, but Matt intervened in time. We thought…we thought it had got you.”

“Where is it?” Law demanded. “Which way did it go? We need to follow it.”

I grabbed his arm. The creature was out of sight now, and with the pain throbbing through my ankle, I was in no shape to follow. Whatever it was, or wherever it was headed, I sure as hell wasn’t about to let a civilian head off into the night after it. “No,” I said. “It’s gone. We need to get to Kim. Is he okay?”

Law hesitated. “You want to let it get away?”

“It did get away. We have to protect the camp. Now, take me to Dr. Kimutai.”

It was a short hobble back—hobble for me anyway, as my ankle throbbed. Try as I did, I could only put so much pressure on it. Law and Kayleigh reached camp first, pausing every few steps to check on me as they went.

Cloud cover mostly hid the moons, so a series of lighter and darker shadows hovered over the camp until we reached the center. One gray form lay separate from the others, though, and I knew at a glance what—who—it was: Dr. Kimutai. He’d curled up, unmoving near his bedroll, as still as the rocks around us.

I took a quick look at him. He seemed to be sleeping, so I made way for Kayleigh. Medicine was her purview. Security was mine. And right now, in this lighting, there could be any number of unwelcome guests lurking on the outskirts of our camp. “I need to scout the perimeter,” I told Law, “and make sure it’s clear.”

“What about Kim?” he asked. “I don’t know what it did, but he’s not waking up. Not even when it was dragging him away.”

Kayleigh had knelt beside the doctor and in a minute declared, “He’s got a pulse, and he’s breathing. But he’s unconscious.”

“You need me?” I asked, anxious to ensure there’d be no repeat of whatever had happened to Dr. Kimutai.

She shook her head, rifling through her bag. “I don’t think so.”

“Good. Matt, you stay with Kayleigh. I’m going to take a look around.”

“Sounds good,” he said, and I’d hardly limped two steps away when he added, “But maybe I should go, Cap?”

“What?”

“Your leg…maybe you should stay while I check it out?”

“Shut up, Law,” I snapped. I might have been too busy feeling sorry for myself to notice that some sort of animal had snuck into camp to pick off our top scientists, but I wasn’t going to be taken by surprise a second time. “You concentrate on making sure nothing gets to them.” I gestured to Kayleigh and Isaac.

He nodded tersely, asking, “You think there’s more of them out there, then?”

“I don’t know. Let me worry about that. You stay here. And don’t shoot anyone.” So far, he’d proved himself fairly competent. Still, I couldn’t quite shake the fear of winding up with a .45 in my back from a panicked overreaction. And I’d be damned if that was the way I went out. Furry kidnappers were enough to deal with; I didn’t need him to throw friendly fire into the mix.

I left them and headed to my bedroll. I’d left my flashlight there. The low power solar light, sustainable though not terribly bright, was better than the nothing I had otherwise. With this in tow, I made my way around the camp.

My ankle was sorer than hell, but it was the least of my worries; I’d found nothing. It was as if the furry apparition had materialized and vanished without a trace. I’d found nothing to indicate how it had got here, where it had gone, or even what it was. And that seemed a whole hell of a lot worse than any explanation I could dream up.

When, at length, I felt certain we were alone, I returned to Law and Kayleigh. I could do no more to locate our attacker until morning.

Dr. Kim still lay unmoving and unconscious, but his breathing sounded deeper.

“He okay?” I asked.

Kayleigh offered a tentative, “Yeah, I think so.”

I stared at the prone form. “How do you know?” It seemed that a sudden onset of unconsciousness should be cause for a lot more alarm than either Law or she was expressing.

“Because it left this,” Law answered, shining a light on what looked like a long, thin needle.

“The monster?”

“Yeah.”

I knelt to examine it. “What is it?”

Kayleigh caught my arm before I could touch anything. “Careful. Don’t touch the tip.”

I glanced at the needle again. “What the hell are we dealing with?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” she answered. Her brow was creased with worry, the lines etched deep in the torchlight. “Because whatever it is, it’s capable of developing, or at least utilizing, powerful sedatives; sedatives that can affect a human being. And it’s capable of figuring out a delivery mechanism.” She gestured to the dart.

“It was in Kim’s neck,” Law added. “The tip is coated in something that must have knocked him out.”

“It’s a fine point too. It would have felt like a bug bite. He probably didn’t even notice it since he was asleep.”

That anxious feeling was returning, in spades. “You’re telling me, whatever that thing was, it stuck a poisoned dart in Kim’s neck?”

“And tried to drag him off,” Law added.

“It didn’t kill him though. His breathing is slow, his heart rate lowered. But it didn’t kill him. I mean, I won’t know what it is until I can analyze it. But I’d bet you anything it’s a sedative, not a lethal injection.”

“What kind of animal uses tools and poisons? And for what?”

“Are we sure it is an animal?” Kayleigh said. “I mean, we know there are people out here, somewhere, from the Genesis. You found human skulls in the Thing’s cave. Maybe it was a person?”

That, at any rate, I had an answer for. “No, this wasn’t human. It was covered in fur. It stank too.”

“And it was running on all fours,” Law put in. “At least, it sure as hell seemed like it.”

“Damn.”

“But that probably explains how it knows about poisoning us,” Law noted. “I mean, if it’s dealt with people before…”

“Damn,” Kayleigh repeated. Law didn’t need to finish, and she didn’t need to elucidate; the implications were clear. Whatever that skulking monster had been, it seemed to know a lot more about us than we knew about it—including how to take us down.

Chapter Seventeen

WE LEARNED THAT Kayleigh’s hunch had been accurate. But not before I learned something I would have been happy to go my whole life not knowing. She was a nail biter.

Since we could do nothing further until morning, we carried a still unconscious Dr. Kimutai to the cave and crawled in around him, like so many sardines in a can. It was cramped to be sure, but no one wanted to be outside while a poisoner roamed the area.

Kayleigh said she wished it were light so she could investigate the sedative. Oddly enough, with all of our preparations, light sources had been the one thing we all, consistently, seemed to overlook. Mission Command had packed ample lighting apparatus in the central storerooms, and though we had all taken our own stash of contraband to counter the what-if’s, somehow good flashlights hadn’t occurred to anyone. Now that the storerooms were out of reach if they even still existed, we were at the mercy of the hour. And in the dark, there was little we could do.

After that observation, though she’d gone quiet—except for the crack, crack of her nails as she gnawed on them.

It was frankly disgusting, but I held my peace. It was hardly the worst reaction I’d ever encountered from civilians in trying circumstances. Compared to hysteria or tears, nail biting was almost tolerable.

I think I would have preferred hysteria to Law’s stress reaction, though, because while I tried to ignore the throbbing in my ankle, and Kayleigh attacking her nails, Law devoted himself to the task of playing with his pistol’s safety.

On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.

I was convinced one of us wouldn’t live out the night—either because he’d inadvertently shoot someone or because I would very deliberately murder him—when Dr. Kimutai started to stir.

Another tense half hour passed before he came to, and after a few minutes, he was coherent. “What’s going on? Why are we in the cave?”

Law explained briefly, and Kayleigh and I peppered him with questions. But of all of us, Kim knew the least. He’d been asleep when the attack came, and unconscious thereafter.

Law had seen the most, having woken to odd noises that proved to be a kidnapping in progress. He’d warned the thing off and fired, admittedly, with a poor aim. The noise had frightened our skulking visitor out of the camp and sent him fleeing in my direction. Law had fired his second shot when they’d discovered Dr. Kim’s state, but by then, the critter was well out of range.

I had got the nearest to it, Law had seen it longest, Kayleigh had barely gotten a glimpse, and Kim hadn’t seen it at all. Between the four of us, we still had no clue what we were dealing with.

Despite being the one stuck with a poison of unknown origin and indeterminate impact, Dr. Kimutai seemed to handle the situation better than anyone. He thanked us for saving him and apologized for causing difficulty. But mostly, his thoughts went to the creature. “What sort of life-form,” he marveled, “is capable of such skillful targeting? It’s clear, whatever it is, we’re dealing with a highly evolved creature.”

“That’s cheering,” I remarked dryly, “seeing as how it’s intent on kidnapping us…”

“And poisoning,” Law reminded.

“Speaking of, we’ll have to analyze the dart tomorrow,” Kayleigh put in. “As soon as it’s light.”

“Perhaps,” Kim said. “But perhaps we’d better return.”

“To the ship, you mean?”

He nodded.

“To warn them?”

“To warn them,” he agreed, “and also for our own sakes. Out here—” He spread his palms, gesturing to the great emptiness around. “—we are at the mercy of the creature who is at home in this habitat. In our ship, at least, we have doors that lock and more sets of watchful eyes.”

I nodded in turn. There was wisdom to that. “And more medical supplies.”

“Yes. And your equipment, Dr. Ellis. If we’re going to analyze the needle, it will be better done there than here.”

“But we don’t know what we’re dealing with. If it’s more than a sedative, if there are long-lasting effects…”

“It’s a risk,” he agreed. “But now that the creature knows we’re here, we run a risk in lingering too. What if it returns—what if it returns with company?”

“If we leave before figuring this out, we could be gambling with your life,” she said with all the same bluntness that had made her such a delightful doctor during my own bedrest.

“It’s a gamble either way, Dr. Ellis. The creature may not return at all, or it may be planning a second attack even now. With this level of intelligence, we don’t know what it’s capable of, what it might dare. Where the sedative is concerned, we know that I’m awake now.”

“It could carry a delayed reaction. It could—”

“Yes, it could. But I’d rather take my chances on the road than here.”

“I’m with Dr. Kim,” Law threw in. “Especially now that Cap has turned into a gimp on us.”

It was said with a touch of humor, but I glared at him through the darkness. “I’m fine.”

“Oh,” Kayleigh exclaimed. “Your ankle. I had forgotten about that.”

“It’s fine,” I repeated.

It was too dark to see her expression, but I could sense her rolling her eyes.

“Matt, will you hand me your light again?” she asked.

“Sure thing.” He too had one of the dim solar lights taken from his pod, which flickered on weakly now.

A pale gray light beamed through the cave, and I grimaced as I saw Kayleigh squeeze past Law and Kim, toward me.

“I really am fine,” I said. “It hurt earlier, but it’s good now. I can’t even feel it.” I whacked my calf to illustrate the point that I was indeed fine. A poor choice, in retrospect—no sooner had the blow struck than I was wincing in pain, and Kayleigh laughed at my misfortune.

“Didn’t we have this conversation the last time you hurt yourself?” she said as I gritted my teeth against the pain and said nothing. “Now, let me have a look. Come on; get the boot off.”

Grudgingly, I obeyed. I’d had enough of her doctoring to know better than to argue. “Yes, ma’am.” Unlacing the boot hurt more than it should have, and taking it off was practically torture. I tried to keep a stiff upper lip throughout but was in agony by time the sock was gone.

She whistled. “Geez. Your entire ankle is swollen. Did you break it?”

“You’re supposed to be the doctor. You tell me.”

“I need to examine it.”

“Well, get on with it.”

“It’s going to hurt. Based on how puffy that is, I’m guessing a lot.”

“Of course it is,” I grumbled. There didn’t seem to be any other kind of encounter with Kayleigh when she played medic.

“All right. Here goes.” She hadn’t been exaggerating. Applying a gentle, even pressure, she traced her way down the inflamed portion of my leg and foot, pausing now and again to frown and reexamine something. What she was looking for I wasn’t sure, but I suspected she was homing in on every stressed nerve in the area.

Finally, her appetite for torture sated, she sat back. “Well, the good news is nothing’s broken.”

“Yay” was all I could manage.

“The bad news is you’ve got a wicked sprain going on. You’re going to have to stay off it as much as possible. When we get back, I can wrap it. But for now, don’t use it any more than you have to.”

“That’ll be easy when we’re walking back to the ship,” I returned sourly. It struck me that the entire proceeding had been remarkably unnecessary—I already knew that the ankle hurt like hell, and from there it wasn’t much of a stretch to get to “stay off it.” The agonizing exam, then, had been for naught.

“Quit whining,” she said, sighing. “I’ll be helping you. God, you’re a baby when you get hurt, you know that?”

*

A QUICK SEARCH after daybreak yielded no more than the night before. We found a few scuffs in the gravel here and there but not so much as a paw print to identify what we were dealing with. So we enacted the second part of our plan: retreat.

The trip back was hellish. Dr. Kimutai needed frequent rests to catch his breath and seemed at times disoriented and confused. Whatever he’d been poisoned with, the effects clearly lingered. Law struggled under the weight of most of the lab equipment and tried to keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. Kayleigh had the rest of the gear and assigned herself the role of support for me. Very ornery support.

As for me…well, I couldn’t really blame Kayleigh for losing patience. I was in a hell of a lot of pain and feeling more than a little sorry for myself. To top it off, I hadn’t scrubbed down in days, and I very much smelled it—a fact of which, gagging, she reminded me. Frequently.

It was hell on all of us. Slow, painful hell. But in the end, we made it. The ship, our little portion of it, appeared on the horizon. No sooner had they spotted us than concerned crewmates swarmed us, took our burdens, and whisked us away to be fed and pampered as we told our story.

Chapter Eighteen

OUR ENCOUNTER WITH the mysterious, body snatching life-form by the river caused a fair measure of consternation among our party. But there was a sense of adventure and victory in the tale of our escape too.

The story reflected well on Kim for his courage and forbearance, and Kayleigh for her courage and steady nerves. But, without a doubt, Matt’s star shone the brightest. Despite my noting that not one but both of his shots had missed, Caspersen went so far as a “good work” and clap on the back. Not much from anyone else, but accolades from her. And everyone, in their own way, was effusive with praise.

Matt saved the day.

We’d all have been carried off to who knows what end, but for Matt.

Gosh, what luck that Matt heard it creeping around the camp—what luck!

It was more than a little hard to swallow, but I tried to be a good sport, mostly because there was some nugget of truth to it. If not for Frat Boy—Matt—noticing our unwelcome guest, Dr. Kimutai likely would have wound up some monster’s lunch. And even though Matt had missed—both times—he’d still eked out a victory.

One source of consolation, minor though it was, was that Kayleigh managed to work some sort of magic with my ankle wrap. It still hurt, of course, but I could almost forget about it as long as I applied no pressure.

Then, banishing Dr. Kim and me to sick bay, Kayleigh and Dr. Wu got to work analyzing the needle.

I took the opportunity to nap and woke to excited chatter sometime later. They’d figured out that the weapon our evening interloper had plunged into Isaac’s neck was a spine, like a rather larger-than-normal porcupine quill. It still carried a trace of the original owner’s tissue. But the excitement among the scientists was that the poison had been applied to the tip.

“There’s nothing in this quill to secrete or release toxins,” Kayleigh explained. “The sedative was absolutely added after the fact, deliberately, from some external source.”

“Incredible. The creature is not only using tools, but creating weapons,” Dr. Kimutai marveled.

“That it’s then putting in your neck,” I felt it necessary to remind him. Their delight at the idea of a tool-using, poison-wielding beast was downright ghoulish.

“Yes, but what intelligence. What ability. Intelligent alien life—we have discovered intelligent alien life.”

“More like it discovered us. And if it’s that smart, that means it’ll be that damned much harder to kill.”

They shook their heads at that. “True,” Dr. Wu agreed. “But think of what we’ll learn, simply observing it.”

“This may in fact be the most important discovery in human history,” Dr. Kimutai nodded.

*

IT WAS SOME hours later before our crew of suicidal researchers cleared Dr. Kim. The agent used was powerful, would have taken some time to take effect—no doubt, the reason for waiting until nightfall, when he was already asleep—and would wear off completely in a few days.

Which, somehow, added to their morbid fascination with the monster and its ability to choose a nonlethal weapon. And since Kim was in the sick ward with me, I had to endure the full nerd fest.

By time dinner rolled around, I was so sick of hearing about it that I was genuinely happy to see Matt. Even after he greeted me with, “How you holdin’ up, Cap?”

But Matt wasn’t alone in treating me as if I was some sort of invalid. Over the next week or so, I would suffer through more infuriatingly solicitous inquiries to my well-being than a person could reasonably be expected to tolerate.

It wasn’t only the concerned queries though. It was Lieutenant Cohen stopping by to talk shop, despite the fact that our careers, contacts, and experiences were separated by a good decade, and we barely knew each other. It was Caspersen popping in to give me status updates: Granges was still picking up the professor’s signal, Dr. Wu’s observation of the mole was going well, Dr. Kimutai had figured how to neutralize Plankton J, and so on and so forth. It was Kayleigh, stopping by to expound on every tedious detail of her and Dr. Wu’s research. It was Matt, bringing me water or a meal, and lingering to make some of the most awkward conversation that ever a mortal man had attempted.

The odd thing, though, was that while they damn near drove me crazy, I did appreciate their efforts. I was stuck in sick bay, now by myself after Dr. Kimutai got the last all clear. And for all the internal griping I’d done back at the river about the tedium of my day-to-day, being stuck in a sterile space cube put it all in perspective. I was damned lucky to be alive.

And their insistence on stopping by to chat illustrated another point. I was damned lucky to be with a crew like this. Even, I admitted in my lowest moments, Matt.

So although I really couldn’t say it interested me, I made an effort to remain engaged as Dr. Kimutai explained why Plankton J caused bowel irritation in humans. I made an effort to overlook the use of “Cap” in Matt’s conversation. And I tried my best to care about the mountain mole Kayleigh and Wu were monitoring.

Still, I was beyond glad when Kayleigh declared I could start venturing out of the ship, albeit with assistance. The first day, she helped me out to where Patel, Evans, and Robinson, the crew geologists, were working. Out in the sunlight on an open plateau, as near as I could tell, they were sifting rocks and rock dust. I’m sure there was more to it than that, but I couldn’t determine what.

Regardless, they were decent enough babysitters in their own way; after an exchange of pleasantries, they promptly ignored me. And, aside from the occasional joke, I did the same with them. I quickly learned two things—the first was that, somehow, it was less boring to sit around with nothing to do in the open air than inside. And the second, that geologists, if this sample was anything to go by, had no sense of humor. Even my “unearthing clues about Kepler” geology joke left them unfazed.

The next day, remarking that she’d heard I was “quite the joker,” Kayleigh left me with Kim. Unlike my geologist keepers, Dr. Kim seemed downright pleased to see me—and determined to keep me abreast of everything he was doing. I learned more about collecting rainwater that afternoon than I imagined possible. It was a long day.

But that was nothing compared to what fate had in store for me. The following day, it rained from dawn until dusk. Dr. Kimutai was thrilled because he’d wrapped up his preparations for capturing rainwater the day before, so the timing was perfect. I was less thrilled because that meant I was stuck with Kayleigh.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like her. Other than her bedside manner, I did. But Kayleigh was even more conversational than Dr. Kimutai had been. Which generally wouldn’t have been a bad thing either. But today, she was examining slides of mountain moleskin shavings. She’d already expounded at length on the leathery, long-lasting nature of the creature’s skin. Other than the ducts for cleaning, this outer coating was essentially dead skin. But it was also capable of healing from injury and expanding as the mole grew.

“That comes down to the blood,” she explained. “You know how we form scabs?”

I shrugged. I knew, of course, that we did. I was less clear on the how.

“Well, the process seems to be very similar for them. Here, you see this?”

She brought a sample of skin over for me to examine. I frowned at it and then her. It looked like nothing more than a rough patch of dark leather.

“See the scar tissue, here and here?” She indicated the rough patches I had noticed. “At some point, something damaged the mole’s skin. Unlike our skin, though, the mole’s is essentially dead. There is no regeneration, like how our skin heals. When it’s formed, it’s formed. But its blood acts almost exactly like ours does.”

“That’s…great.” I nodded. She seemed pretty excited about the revelation, so it seemed the right response. My attempt at feigned interest didn’t fool her though.

She eyed me curiously and finished with, “At any rate, the blood clots when exposed. My guess is the wound-healing process is the same, or similar, to ours. But instead of living tissue, it builds dead tissue.”

“Interesting.”

She laughed. “I hope you’re more convincing in the field than here.”

“What?”

“When you’re on a mission, undercover, or whatever. You lie as convincingly there as you are now, and you’re a dead man.”

“That’s a little more ‘spy’ than ‘Ranger.’ But I’m not lying, exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“Well, at all. It’s just…I mean, it’s interesting and all, but you know what you’re talking about, and I don’t, really. So it’s more interesting to you.”

“Right,” she said, bemused. “At any rate, you don’t have to stay, you know. You’re welcome to if you want. But if this is boring you, I can help you back to sick bay.”

“No,” I protested, as much because I was keen to avoid medical solitary confinement as anything else. “It’s not. I’m just…not really big on touching a dead thing’s skin, you know?”

She laughed again. “That’s right. I had forgotten what a wuss you were about that.”

I frowned, and for a moment, we both fell silent. “But, uh, what about when it’s growing? The mole, I mean. How does it keep from bursting its skin as it gets bigger?” If I was going to pretend to be interested, I was obviously going to have to put up a better show of it.

This seemed to do the trick. “That’s a good question, actually,” she responded. “When the creature is young, it’s in the egg pod, like the one we found. Its skin is thin, very thin, and still growing at this point.” She looked up from her equipment. “Here, I’ll show you. We bored a tiny hole into its pod and moved it under the overhang of Weidner’s room, so we could observe its development. Come on; it should be mostly out of the rain. We can take a look at it.”

I tried not to groan. Apparently, I had been too convincing because she was downright beaming with excitement. “Oh, yeah. I haven’t seen the baby mole yet.”

She beamed. “You’re going to love this. You know how the parent is so dark? The baby is a wan pinkish-gray. The color must develop later—whether it’s all at once, or if it continues to darken as the creature ages, is one of the things I’m trying to figure out. And, here, let me help you. There. At any rate, one thing to notice…”

Chapter Nineteen

IT WAS A long week before I was able to start making myself useful and another before I could do much. The time passed with only marginally more excitement for the rest of the crew. The highlight came about a week and a half in, when we woke to find that the mountain mole had eaten through his pod and given us the slip overnight, leaving a slew of bereaved scientists in its wake.

Finally, during the third week—three and a half weeks after our recon team had left—we caught sight of Dr. Carter and Sergeants Connor and Russell. They were in a sorry state: footsore, haggard, scruffy, and chronically short of breath as they limped back toward us.

The first order of business after we got them back to the ship was medical attention. Kayleigh administered the exams while the rest of us waited. The results were as good as could be expected: low oxygen levels, high fatigue, and moderate dehydration. Otherwise, they had come to no harm.

Kayleigh said they needed rest before anything else. They had left before we’d discovered the useful properties of moleskin, so their blood oxygen was lower than she liked. We’d have to wait until they woke up to get a full account.

There were grumblings aplenty, but Caspersen backed her up with “doctor’s orders,” so grumble was all we could do.

Still, we were able to glean a little. Connor had confirmed, with a weary nod, that they’d found the ship. Russell shook his head grimly to questions about survivors. And the professor…well, he seemed to have shrunk during the journey from a confident, bellicose little man into a wary husk of a littler man. Aside from grunting a few acknowledgments, he ignored everyone.

We weren’t to know the extent until the next day, but we had the strong impression all was not well with the rest of the ship.

Russell woke first, and after quenching his thirst and sating his hunger, Kayleigh subjected him to a second exam. Finally, when he’d passed it, he told us what he knew.

“We followed the professor’s signal to the ship for a week and a half. It took about two days to get out of the mountains, to the lowlands. As soon as you reach flat land, the trees start. And it’s humid down there. Cold, but humid.

“There’s not much by way of smaller vegetation—no grass, not many bushes and stuff like that—except ferns. Not until after you get to the river; there’s a lot of dark, leafy plants there. And more ferns.”

Dr. Kimutai nodded. “And the soil?”

“Dark. We didn’t take any samples, but it looked rich, fertile. There were a lot of dead leaves, downed wood, that sort of thing.

“But we kept following the professor’s signal. The farther in we got, the more we got the impression we weren’t alone.

“It was subtle, at first. Imagination, we thought. Cooing, calls, strange noises.

“But we heard things. In the trees, I mean. Far, far above us. And when we’d camp, shadows, echoes. Like it was haunted or something. And every time we’d get near, it was gone, without a trace.

“Then we found the ship, on the twelfth day. What was left of it.” Russell’s face was grim. “It was all overgrown, covered in moss and fallen debris. But there was a lot of it left. The bulk of the ship, it was all there. Storerooms, armory, bridge, hundreds of cryopods.”

Despite Russell’s less-than-encouraging demeanor, a ripple of excitement escaped us.

“And the crew?” Caspersen asked.

“In a sense.” His gaze seemed to shift to some point beyond the walls of our enclosure. “It was a mess, Captain. A disaster. The ship was torn to pieces. Everything that wasn’t rusted to ruin was smashed, broken, doors ripped off, furniture ripped apart. I don’t know what the hell happened, but whatever hit them must have been incredible for its sheer destructive force.”

“And the crew?” Caspersen repeated.

“Bones. All bones. And…not only bones. There were teeth marks on them, like they’d been gnawed. And they were scattered, too, as if they’d been ripped apart.

“Most of them were just fragments. But some were well preserved, especially in the pods. There were a few pods that survived the destruction, were still operable. But unoccupied—other than the skeletons.”

“And the armory? Supply rooms?”

“Ransacked, completely emptied.” He spread his hands. “There must have been one hell of a battle. There were bullet holes in the ship, and everything was gone. And—”

“And?” Caspersen prodded.

“The noise? The echoes, the chatter in the trees? When we reached the ship, it stopped.”

“Stopped?”

He nodded, and there was an expression in his eyes so similar to the one I’d seen the night before in the professor’s that I shivered. “Completely. Not a sound, just dead silence. It sounds crazy, I know…but it was uncanny. It had followed us for days, but as soon as we got to the ship…” He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“What about the computers? Did Carter find anything useful?”

“No. We didn’t find anything useable anywhere. It was all either gone or exposed to the elements or smashed.”

“He wasn’t able to retrieve anything?” I asked. “Nothing?” This was bad news indeed, and not only because it meant one of the chief objectives of the mission couldn’t be achieved. Without the data from the Genesis computers, we had little hope of ever figuring out what had happened to the ship.

Russell shook his head. “The humidity did in whatever the landing and battle hadn’t.”

“Any remains of what they were fighting? Any clues as to what it might have been?” Caspersen put in.

“No. The only recognizable bones we found were human. And there weren’t too many of those.”

“What about the ship? Any indicators as to what brought her down?”

“No. To be honest, Captain, we learned very little, except that there’s a fuck of a lot we don’t know.”

*

CONNOR AND THE professor had little more to offer when they woke. The professor was spooked about the so-called ghosts. The noises in the trees had resumed as soon as they’d left the ship and followed them almost all the way back to the base of the mountains. This sequence seemed particularly significant to the professor as he emphasized it again and again. When he started speculating that it was “Like they wanted us to find it, find what had happened to them,” Kayleigh stepped in.

The professor was still not well and needed further rest and care, she said.

Connor’s tale proved a bit more lucid. They’d found the ship heavily overgrown near the breeches, but barer the deeper into the interior they went. “It looked like nothing had been there in years. Decades.

“The main server room was trashed. It had been open to the elements for God knows how long. Professor damn near died when he saw it. The backup server room was gone—that whole wing of the ship was missing.

“We found the signal emitter. It was in the storeroom. Whatever happened when they cleared everything else out, they hadn’t disturbed that.

“And that’s another thing; they didn’t touch the solar panels either. The pods were full of them. Some still functional. Hell, some of the pods still had power—the ones deep in the ship, where we found the…the chewed-up bones.” Her mouth drew back into a grimace that looked all the grislier for the scar that ran the length of her cheek.

“There’s enough paneling to power a city,” Caspersen observed. “To leave that behind, they must have had to leave in a hurry.”

Connor said, “And, I know you think the professor sounds nuts…and maybe he is. Maybe we all were. But the things we heard… They didn’t sound…real. Like, voices in the wind. But not voices. They didn’t make any sense.”

“There are some birds—” Dr. Wu started.

But Connor shook her head. “These weren’t birds, Doctor. It wasn’t wind. It wasn’t human. It was just…” She trailed off frowning and then shrugged. “I don’t know. But it scared the shit out of me; that’s all I do know.”

*

WHATEVER WAS GOING on, one thing stood out to all of us. We’d never figure it out stuck in the mountains or in one-off expeditions here and there. I’d seen the evidence of human occupancy in the Thing’s cave. Presumably, they were the descendants of the rest of our crew—whoever had survived the catastrophe that befell the Genesis. It seemed the likeliest cause, but we were far from certain on that score. For all we knew, the bones I’d found were the remnants of a second craft sent to the planet or another break-away portion of the ship, like ours.

However they’d come here, we knew we weren’t the only people still alive on Kepler-186f. Where the rest were, or whence they’d come, we had yet to discover.

As, too, we needed to know the source of the other life-forms we’d encountered—the hairy beast that had tried to make off with Dr. Kimutai in our riverside camp and the cooing spirits in the trees. Did the noises Connor, Russell, and the professor reported originate from the same creature Kayleigh, Matt, and I had seen? It was good at disappearing…was it that good? We didn’t know.

We made the decision by near-unanimous vote to pack what could be carried, lock up what could not, and venture together down to the ship. The professor was the lone dissenting vote.

“All right, then,” Caspersen declared. “We’re decided. We’ll start at the Genesis and see if we can figure out what happened. We’ll figure out what to do next after that.

“Bring what you need to stay alive and to do your jobs. Leave the rest. If we make it back, it’ll still be here, and if we don’t, well, you won’t miss it anyway.”

Chapter Twenty

PACKING TOOK LONGER than it should have. The civilians all had their own ideas about what constituted essential—and most of it didn’t. Even after Caspersen had declared “if you can’t carry it, you can’t take it,” the problems continued.

The professor said the “lazy soldiers” should help carry some of the equipment since he couldn’t lift it all. “My tools are essential. All of them. Granges can help me. He’s not doing anything useful.” When Matt volunteered to carry some of it, the professor recoiled. “Someone competent.”

Kayleigh protested she shouldn’t have to choose between medical supplies for the team and her own research.

Caspersen conceded the point. “Johnson, you’ll help her, won’t you?”

Dr. Wu prepared a pack so bulky I would’ve had a hard time with it…and I’d hauled so many rucksacks in my day it was second nature by this point. She couldn’t even stand up straight under the weight. But she wouldn’t consider leaving anything behind either. “I did as you asked, Captain. Nothing here is unessential.”

Finally, Caspersen shook her head and told her she could take it under one condition. She had to demonstrate she could handle the weight and bulk by hiking up the slope behind us and back down again. She made it halfway.

Kim stared mournfully at his belongings, declaring the captain might as well be asking a parent to choose which child to abandon. He was joking. I think.

Only the geologists, Patel, Evans, and Robinson, seemed to have figured out a system. They divvyed up what mattered most to the three of them and a assigned a portion to each man.

The engineers proved less cooperative. Madison, Rodgers, and Lee had a collection of virtually identical gadgets and gizmos but were absolutely, positively unwilling to part with or entrust any of it to one of their colleagues. What started as unpleasant disagreement devolved to nothing short of all-out war, with degrees called into question, research belittled, and alma maters ridiculed. Had there been dueling pistols on hand, blood would no doubt have been spilled. Fortunately, Caspersen intervened before things got out of hand, and offered a good dressing down to each of the offenders. The recruits were damned lucky she’d gone into special forces, instead of pursuing a career as a drill instructor. Regardless, this did the trick, and the trio managed to return to their work with not much more hostility than the occasional snide comment back and forth.

Dr. Wilhelm Verner was the only one who seemed to have taken only what he could carry onto the ship. He packed and stood at the ready in half an hour, watching the rest of us with evident amusement.

Caspersen, on the other hand, had taken a good deal more than she could carry. And, naturally, all of it was practical and combat-oriented. She had a few spare rifles and extra ammo aplenty, most of which she divvied up between those of us with guns. It was the M60 that gave her the most trouble though. “You never know when you’ll need a machine gun,” she explained. How she’d smuggled the thing, much less all of its ammo, on board I hadn’t a clue. Nor did she elucidate, saying simply, “With difficulty.”

Transport proved difficult too. At close to twenty-five pounds, the gun itself wasn’t too bad. It was the ammo that really made for a hellish experience. Caspersen took the gun and as much ammo as she could carry while maintaining a good pace. Matt picked up the tripod and extra rounds.

In the end, we all whittled down our possessions until we had manageable loads. A few mornings after the professor, Russell, and Connor returned, we locked down the ship and undertook our first joint expedition.

*

OUR GOING WAS slow but steady. Steady because we wanted to pace ourselves for the journey ahead, and slow because the way down was long and perilous. Even a small misstep could have meant injury or death among the rocks and cliff ledges.

The scenery shifted far more quickly than we actually moved. One minute, we could see nothing but stone, and we progressed almost blind to the world beyond our particular vicinity. In the next, we rounded a bend to find ourselves staring into an open expanse of mountainside, overlooking the valley far below. I saw again the trees I’d first noted, great and grand in their own way, and oddly dark and spindly too. And at the next bend or dip in the trail, we saw nothing but stone again.

The journey down the mountain took the better part of the day, which was still a better pace than the professor’s team had managed. This came down to our grisly respirators; we could breathe as we went. We had to make a few stops along the way, as laboring under weighty packs was a new and unwelcome sensation to the civilians. Connor and Russell seemed more than usually fatigued, too, although they made no complaint.

The professor, on the other hand, did nothing but complain. Despite every warning, he’d packed more than he was comfortable carrying. And no sooner than we’d hit the trail, he began griping. It had reached a near fever pitch by time we were at the foothills.

The foothills were less “hills” than great chunks of rock and piles of gravel—green mounds that had fallen from the mountains above or been carried down by rainstorms to accumulate at the base. Here, though, there was something we’d not found earlier: soil. Though sparse and of poor quality, it managed to sustain a little vegetation. We found small, fern-like plants and a hair-thin, grassy plant growing in small clusters.

It was oddly relieving to see them. After so long in the barren heights above, even a little plant life cheered me. And the scientists? Well, one would have thought they’d found El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth. It was a nerd fest all over again.

Caspersen decided we should make camp among the foothills, probably because she didn’t trust her ability to pry the scientists from their study of those small, green-black plants. We had a good view of both the mountains behind us and the forest ahead here. Connor and Russell paid little attention to our rear but eyed the way forward with palpable discomfort. The professor shut up for the first time since we’d left the Genesis. He didn’t watch the trees the way the others did. He refused to even glance in that direction. But no one heard the cooing they’d reported. Beyond the sounds of our movement, the night remained still.

Caspersen took the first watch, and as the civilians slept, the soldiers and Marines traded shifts. All of us, that is, with the exception of Connor and Russell, who Caspersen deemed in need of a full night’s rest.

My watch proved uneventful. The rustle of the wind as it moved through the ferns, the shimmering silver of the moons overhead, and the deep shadows of the forest beyond were my only companions, and time passed quietly and comfortably.

We rose early the next morning and, after choking down our MREs, set out. Like the previous morning, the sun shone brightly, or as brightly as could be expected from a red dwarf. We had a clear sky overhead, too, a comfortable temperature to work in. So, despite the tense posture of our companions who had gone before, we entered the forest without reservation. There was nothing odd to be seen, and it was too fine a day to worry about ghosts.

The trees that had seemed so spindly from a distance actually grew great and wide, reaching far into the sky like massive woody pillars, unmarred by branches for the first two-thirds or so of their height. From there, they sprouted broad, impenetrable clusters of branches upon which grew sharp-tipped, spindly needles. Like most other living things on Kepler-186f, they were a deep green, bordering on black. A thick layer of dry needles carpeted the forest floor in ebony black, several shades darker than the living ones on the trees.

The sight inspired great discussion among the biologists as to how the trees might be classified. The fallen needles, flat and broad though they were, were highly reminiscent of Earth’s pine trees. Had we discovered a type of conifer tree? This was the breathless speculation, and it entertained them for a good, long while. The discovery of an old, dry cone nestled among fallen needles nearly sent half the crew into a dither, but Caspersen wisely cooled their scientific ardor by observing that time was of the essence.

The low-growing plants we’d found in the foothills grew more numerous as we delved deeper into the woods too. Little groves of dark ferns and creeping vines could be found between patches of shed needles. We discovered a new species of squat, flowering bush that produced red blooms of a sickly-sweet odor. If not for Caspersen’s insistence that we continue, I suspected we’d have seen a makeshift lab pop up on the spot so our researchers could analyze and dissect and study the unlucky shrub. Her singular focus on the mission spared it such a fate, and the little bush survived our gaggle of mad scientists.

We pushed on, with much excitement in our ranks. And, for the first few hours, we congratulated ourselves on our steady nerves and level heads. We heard nothing but our own footfalls, the occasional twittering of small animals, and the movement of the wind.

For the first few hours. And then it began. Irregular at first, strange and high in pitch and far overhead, growing more regular the farther into the wood we marched. Cooing? Whispering? Howling? Laughing? Hooting? Talking? We couldn’t tell, so convoluted and eerie was the sound. One moment, I’d have sworn I heard a man’s speech, and the other, some wild animal’s chirp. It was at once familiar and foreign, like the sound of a colony of animals abuzz with excitement at our approach.

Were they friend or foe? Was the noise a show of interest? Fear? Anger? Were they real, or figments of imagination? Were they solid, flesh and blood creatures, or something else altogether? Again, I could not tell. We could see nothing—no sign of life, animal or otherwise. And yet, the chirping went on.

Connor, Russell, and the professor, meanwhile, had gone pale as a winter morning. The civilians clustered together, and as if with one instinct, the military moved to encircle them.

We made a poor circle indeed—five soldiers or Marines and Matt tripping along behind Caspersen. He had the look of a lamb, frightened and small, trying to take heart outside the wolf’s den. Still, he had the guts to take his place alongside the rest of us. That was something.

And in the moment, I thought we all felt a little like lambs being led to slaughter. All around us, noises danced on the breeze, like phantoms hailing from some unseen source. I darted my eyes to the trees above, the foliage around, and back to the trees again; for all I could tell, we were alone. Utterly, completely alone. Except, the evidence of my ears told me a different story.

Caspersen gave a signal, and a few of us broke off to scout out the area. We trampled every bush in sight, looked behind every tree, into every patch of shadow. The sounds did not abate, and we returned empty-handed.

“Nothing.” I shook my head.

“Same here,” Granges confirmed. “Not a print, not a shadow.”

Caspersen nodded. “All right. Let’s move out.” Her posture told me every fiber of her being was on high alert, but her tone sounded calm, controlled, and almost reassuring. “We want to make that ship before the next century.”

“Keep going?” the professor whispered, his voice vacillating in unmasked terror. “But don’t you hear them?”

“I hear something,” she said. “But we need to get somewhere. And unless our friends are going to show themselves, we keep moving.”

“But is it safe?” Dr. Verner wondered.

“Maybe we should…wait,” someone else threw in.

“We keep going,” Caspersen said resolutely. “There’s nothing here, nothing that we can see. If it’s above us, we’ve no way of reaching it. If it’s somewhere else…well, whatever’s here, it knows how to remain unseen. Now let’s move. And keep your eyes on the trees.”

Chapter Twenty-One

A PROFOUND TRANSFORMATION reshaped our party. In a matter of minutes, we’d gone from cheerful and exuberant to fearful and quiet. The mood held and, if anything, grew worse as the day wore on.

Dr. Wu had taken to reciting a passage from Psalms. Clutching a little silver cross, she repeated again and again, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”

Kayleigh wrapped an arm around her, assuring. “We’ll be okay, Michelle. These guys are the best; they’ll keep us safe.”

This had quieted her for a bit, but before long, she was back to praying.

The professor seemed to find his courage in equal proportions to his ire being raised, for he spoke for the first time in hours. “Lady, do you mind? How about a little more ‘leadeth me to green pastures’ and a little less ‘valley of the shadow of death,’ huh?”

“Come on, people,” Caspersen interceded. “Let’s just keep moving.”

We did. And the deeper we went, the more another feature of the forest played against us—the humidity. In the mountains and even the foothills, the air had been relatively dry. But here, the longer we traveled, the more humid it seemed to get. And no wonder. The canopy of foliage overhead admitted very little light, so whatever moisture had accumulated just remained.

It was cold, too, like a damp, rainy autumn day on earth. Except there was no rain, and the sun shone brightly above the trees. As I traveled among the mosses and ferns underfoot to the sound of aerial chatter, cold sweat poured down my back, making me shiver against the chill.

The professor’s addled state no longer surprised me. My own nerve was faltering, and I’d been in my share of battles and life-and-death situations. But to blunder into a situation full of unknowns—quite possibly walking, as Michelle put it, into the valley of the shadow of death—against an unknown force? If I was getting the heebie-jeebies, I couldn’t imagine what the civilians were going through. And their ability to keep their cool as well as they had impressed the hell out of me. Kayleigh, in particular, handled herself with extraordinary calm and worked hard to allay Michelle’s fears. Isaac Kimutai exuded a similar calm. And while the others were jumpy, they seemed to take heart from the better example of their peers.

Matt, meanwhile, took his role as gunner’s assistant deadly seriously, practically treading on Caspersen’s heels, he followed so closely behind her. I had the thought that if she drew up suddenly, he’d crash into her and send us all toppling over like dominoes.

The image crept into my mind’s eye, and I laughed aloud. I guessed the creepy-ass voices were getting to me after all.

Caspersen glanced back at me questioningly, and I flushed.

“Nothing. Just…thought of a joke.”

“A joke? Good. I think we could use a joke right about now. Why don’t you tell us?”

The geologists groaned as of one impulse, and I stalled. I figured the imagery would be hard to explain, and I didn’t want anyone thinking I was still talking shit about Matt. “Now? Oh, no. It’s probably not that funny anyway.”

“Probably,” the professor agreed.

“Come on,” Caspersen prodded. “Give it a shot.”

“Oh. Um.” My mind was racing. My humor tended to spring from a more organic process, arising in response to the circumstance rather than being drawn from some mental archive. Still, I knew a few groaners. “Well…uh…why did the chicken cross the road?”

More grumbling ensued, but Caspersen pushed on doggedly. “I don’t know, why?”

“How the hell should I know? I don’t speak chicken.”

I think the whole party groaned, except for myself. And I had to force a half laugh.

“You might want to stick to the soldiering,” the professor declared through his nose.

“I’ve got one,” Kayleigh cut in. “What do you get if you cross a donkey with an octopus?”

“Something with a better sense of humor than Captain Johnson, probably,” the professor said.

“What?”

“An Octokey? A donkopus?” Matt threw out.

“It’s definitely gonna be smarter than Mr. Law,” the professor said.

“A visit from the ethics committee and an immediate revocation of funds.”

This got a few chuckles, mostly from the scientists. The professor rolled his eyes.

“All right, your turn, Tracie,” Kayleigh prodded.

Matt sounded an agreement, and I joined in. It felt right she should be put on the spot, after I had been.

“Okay.” Her posture was as controlled as it had ever been, and her eyes scanned the trees as she talked. But her tone was relaxed, congenial even.

The joke was an Ole and Sven story, which, near as I could tell, seemed to be an upper Midwest–specific subset of usually bad jokes featuring Scandinavian characters getting themselves into some kind of trouble. This one was an argument between the two friends about Sven’s truck not working due to water in the carburetor—the punchline being that Ole had driven it into a lake, thereby getting water into the carburetor. Caspersen affected accents and everything, and though the joke wasn’t very funny, her performance did elicit a few chuckles.

Matt busted a gut, which was probably more than it deserved. But I laughed, too, if only because of how much Caspersen seemed to relish the telling. And it seemed apropos; she would tell a Norwegian joke, of course.

“Well, that’s it,” the professor said with a sigh. “If they get us, whatever the hell’s out there, they’re probably doing the world a favor.”

*

WE MADE CAMP before sunset. We found enough fallen wood for a fire—our first since landing on Kepler-186f—but it took some time to get it lit because the wood was soaked. Even after it ignited, it emitted a slow, smoky flame that wasn’t very hot and didn’t cast much light. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and a little fire was better than none. It meant we wouldn’t be sleeping on the cold, dank forest floor, surrounded by unknown creatures in absolute darkness.

Caspersen doubled the watch that night and pulled Connor and Russell into the pool. She took the first shift, and Matt sat it with her. My turn came next, and in a few minutes, Matt lay sound asleep, snoring away.

Caspersen lay still, too, but her breathing did not relax; she stayed awake throughout my shift and was still awake as I drifted off afterward.

My watch had proved uneventful, which, in its own way, was something of an event. I didn’t notice at first, but it struck me about halfway through my shift that the sounds seemed to have quieted and almost disappeared. I still heard a faint hoot in the night air every once in a while. But the constant chatter had gone.

I pondered this, my mind a whirl of uneasy apprehensions as I drifted off to sleep. But I slept well, and the night passed quickly. Before I knew it, Caspersen was rousing us for another day’s march. She kept the fire burning as we ate, though the billows of smoke choked us all, and extinguished it before we set out.

The forest remained dim. It wasn’t as impenetrably dark as it had been during the night, but I couldn’t see the sun. I didn’t even know for sure what manner of day it was. It could as easily have been bright and sunny as gray and overcast. But as we walked, a thin mist rose along the ground, and a pronounced chill settled in the air. I had the unhappy sensation we were in for another rainstorm.

Caspersen had the same idea, and she tasked Granges and Cohen with setting up the rain shelter should the first sign of rain appear. In the meantime, we kept walking, the sounds of high-pitched chatter following us as we went.

We made the river by midday, and still the rain had not come. The scientists barely noticed the heavy growth of plant life here. Even Dr. Kimutai, who had expressed so much interest in seeing what life had congregated around the river, displayed only the mildest curiosity. We were all anxious to get to the ship as soon as possible.

Still, Caspersen’s confidence seemed to have worn off a bit. We all looked a little like hunted animals, but not nearly so much as the day before. Even the professor seemed to have relaxed. He hadn’t snapped at anyone since breakfast.

Since the rain still hadn’t shown up, we pushed on until the dimness started turning dark, and still, we hadn’t had a drop of rain.

We pitched the rain shelter just in case and built a fire a ways away. It wasn’t until I saw Caspersen’s satisfied smile and inquired as to its cause, that I noticed what she’d already figured out—the voices had disappeared, again.

“They’re in the trees,” she said quietly. “The smoke…they pull back when it reaches them.”

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “But when the fire’s out…it sounds like they’re all around us, in every direction.”

“They probably are,” she nodded. “Up there. That’s why we can’t pinpoint them, and we can’t see them. There’s nowhere for them to be, down here. But you could hide an army up there, and you’d never see it from the ground. They sound like they’re everywhere because they are.” She smiled again. “But they don’t like smoke.”

“You think they’re friendly? Or hostile?”

She shrugged. “They haven’t moved on us, but they’re definitely monitoring. Depending on what they are, they could be afraid. We might be bigger; we might be something they haven’t seen before. Who knows? Or they could be neutral. Until we find one of them, we’re stumbling blind in the dark. We don’t know what kind of animal we’re dealing with, what kind of intelligence and capabilities. It could be the thing that tried to take Dr. Kimutai; it could be something else.”

I nodded. “But we know it doesn’t like smoke, anyway.”

“Yes. And if it is the thing that went for Kim…” She smiled again. “It doesn’t like guns either.”

*

THE NIGHT RAN long but proved uneventful. A heavy fog rolled in around the base of the trees until the whole world had been blanketed in eerie whitish-gray. Still, the rain did not come.

We didn’t have a droplet of downfall that night or the next morning. We went on for several hours until midafternoon. Then, without so much as a boom of thunder for warning, the downpour began.

The tent was up in a matter of minutes, and we were able to keep the equipment mostly dry. As for us? Well, that was a different story. The packs had gone under the tarp as soon as the storm started, but we’d been soaked through by time everything was tied off.

And then the hours of waiting began, with cascades of water pouring down from above. The earth underfoot turned to muck and then mud. Before long, we were in great puddles.

It was a cold rain, too, one of those bone-chilling downpours in October or November back home when it was about two degrees too warm for snow. People always seemed to envision hell as a place of heat and fire. I suspect those people had never spent a night huddled in icy mud, or those stories might have had a different setting altogether.

There was a single source of comfort amidst all this misery. The rain seemed to drive our chirping friends away, or else to drown the sound of their songs out under the constant splat-splat-splat. Either way, no one missed them.

Chapter Twenty-Two

THE RAIN CONTINUED throughout the night and into the early morning. None of us slept a wink, and even after the storm receded, there was nowhere decent to sleep. So, following a bland meal-in-a-bag, Caspersen gave the order to move out.

Again, it occurred to me that the civilians seemed to be handling matters very well. We were wet, cold, and generally miserable, but they barely complained and remained largely cooperative.

We trudged through the day in this manner. Thick, heavy humidity hung in the air. Our clothes refused to dry, and even breathing came with an effort. Everywhere we stepped, mud oozed and sloshed around our soaked feet.

The chattering overhead picked up midday and continued after we set up camp. Our half-hearted attempts at lighting a fire met with failure since we had nothing dry enough to ignite. We settled in for another long, unpleasant night with the knowledge there’d be no smoke to drive away our unwelcome observers this time.

Sleep proved evasive, coming in little, uneasy spurts here and there. My watch was one long, constant battle against nodding off, and no sooner had it ended than I was fighting to nod off.

My companions seemed to struggle in similar fashion because they tossed and turned and fussed all through the night.

This wakefulness had one benefit, though; I was able to mark the time when the cooing ceased. It happened an hour or so before dawn, preceded by the briefest uptick in pitch. And then, quite suddenly, all was still.

The abruptness of this change alarmed us all, and I think for a while, we assumed the worst. Caspersen gave the order to take up defensive positions, and we held them for some time. A tense hour of near-absolute silence followed, seeming now more terrifying than the noise had ever been. It amplified every noise. Every droplet falling from above, every snapped twig as one of our companions shifted their weight, and every rustle of the wind put our hearts in our mouths.

But nothing happened. No onslaught of attackers dropped down on us; no mysterious forms materialized in our camp. Neither did any kind of explanation show up. So as soon as it was light enough to move, we did, skipping breakfast in our haste to get the hell out of there.

This morning proved no more congenial than the previous. We seemed to be stuck in a kind of perpetual twilight. A thick layer of mist diminished what little light managed to filter down through the clouds and treetops, and we wandered on, nearly blind to the world around us. None of the moisture had left the air, and consequently, nothing we wore had a chance to dry. We were only slightly less wet than we’d been the day before. A profound stillness settled all around and an odor of dankness that seemed to permeate every inch of the forest. Again, I remembered my theory that hell had nothing to do with fire and brimstone.

The only remotely good thing about the morning chill was that at least we didn’t have heat to compound the misery of the humidity. Even with our masks, breathing was a chore. I couldn’t imagine what heat would have done.

Not that any of us felt particularly lucky, even with things being slightly less miserable than they might otherwise have been. Not with beads of cold sweat running down every inch of our skin and wet clothes clinging, chafing us raw. Not with the air itself a chore to breathe. It was hard to see the good, even where it existed.

Not even the professor’s observation that we were about two day’s march from the ship helped much. We sloshed through the soggy expanse of endless trees in grim, fearful silence for some several hours.

Midmorning rolled around by the time we heard the first sounds. Caspersen heard them before anyone, and she drew up short, her hand raised to signal a halt. Matt nearly ran into her and half of us into the pair of them. She silenced the inevitable queries with a sign and craned her neck toward a distant point.

We weren’t long left wondering about the cause of her interest, however. A distant cacophony of sounds, like excited hooting, rolled across the horizon. Mist and distance hid the source, but we could hear an ever-rising stream of raw, animalistic jeering.

My skin crawled. There was something so soulless, so malicious in those tones that I felt a preternatural terror set in, as if those strange, alien voices had triggered the oldest part of my primate brain. I didn’t know what manner of beasts approached, but all I could think of were two possible responses: fight or flight. It was the most primitive instinct programmed into our minds…a purely binary response: kill or be killed.

I think the mist, and the place, and all the uncertainty around it all, amplified my terror. I could count at least half a dozen distinct pitches among those strange voices, which I took to be half a dozen separate alien animals. And I stood there, battling the urge to run.

Then Caspersen offered a quick, low command to take cover. Instinct told me to run, but I’d been trained better than that. I followed her order, as did everyone else. We hid behind the slim undergrowth where available and the broad tree trunks elsewhere. The military personnel and Matt took up defensive positions a few paces before the civilians, who sheltered out of sight. We formed a sort of half circle, facing the approaching hostiles.

And I didn’t doubt that they were hostiles. I couldn’t speak for anyone else, of course. But I felt it on an almost cellular level.

We waited, our guns trained on the distant mist. I lay on my belly in the mud, behind a great fern that still dripped residual rainwater. Every now and again, a ball of water accumulating at the edge of one of the leaves grew too large, and gravity sent a great, icy droplet plummeting toward my back.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

It was damn near maddening, and more than once, I considered moving. But the sounds booming out through the mist seemed too close. I didn’t dare.

And yet, minute after minute crawled by, and nothing came into sight. The noises grew distinct, and I started to pick out individual hollers and hoots. My count increased. I figured we had a dozen incoming, possibly more.

The sound made my skin crawl all the more, and not only because the approaching party had doubled in size in my imagination. The edge of malice I’d noticed so many minutes ago came through loud and clear now, interspersed with occasional shrieks of what could only be amusement. I’d never seen a hyena in real life, but I remembered watching them on a nature show once, shrieking with laughter as they tore some poor creature to pieces. The laughter rippling through the mist reminded me very much of that pack of beasts, and their cruel meal.

I think Caspersen had guessed at what was only vaguely beginning to creep into my mind. She warned us all to be silent and still and seemed more confident than she had only minutes earlier. But at the time, the thought had not yet taken form for me. The unnerving sense of familiarity, of terrible comprehension, flitted about the corners of my mind—there but just out of reach. I almost got it, but I didn’t know what these creatures were. She did though.

Soon enough, we all knew. A dark, indistinct mass appeared in the distance, moving as of one impulse between the trees and through the shrubbery. Then the figures grew distinct.

Even now, it took me longer than it should have to realize what I was seeing. But when light finally did dawn on marble, it happened at the end of a series of observations, all of which occurred in quick succession.

They’re tall.

Walk on two legs. Upright.

Furry.

No, not furry. Not all of them. Are they…wearing furs?

And then it all clicked. These were no strange creatures, no alien beasts. These were men. Flesh and blood human beings.

And yet, beasts all the same. The malevolent laughter, the high, cruel tones, and jeering pitches made that plain enough. The words were lost to me, but the import of those tones? I had known that from the first, long before I’d even recognized it as human.

A breath of relief sounded around me, and there was even a bit of movement from somewhere to the rear; but a fierce glance and a hand signal from Caspersen put an end to that. She seemed to sense what I did and what some of our companions apparently did not. These were not friendlies.

They moved and spoke, however, as if they were completely unaware of our presence. I, for one, was keen to keep it that way, at least until we got a better measure of what we were dealing with.

That didn’t take long either. By now, they’d come within a few hundred feet from us, and they grew more distinct with each step. The party was hauling a number of bundles, some small and dragged behind a single person, and others larger and slung over several shoulders. As they drew up closer, hooting and hollering like hyenas, the mist rolled back a little. I got a glimpse of one of those grisly bundles.

It wasn’t a sack or hunted game. This was, or had been, a youngish human being thrown over one of the other’s shoulder, hanging lifeless. And as I glanced around the party, I saw more of the same—dead men, women, and children, thrown over a shoulder or dragged through the mud like sacks of potatoes.

I’d only just come to that realization when a second and more terrible one hit me. There was at least one live captive among these strange men—a tall child, bound and dragged on a tether. He seemed to be the focal point of much of the jeering we’d heard. As we watched, his captors took turns unleashing abuse of one form or another on him to the amusement of their companions: here a kick, there a blow upside the head, another time, a jerking of the cord that bound him.

The boy remained quiet throughout, but whether his silence was borne of terror or dignity, I could only speculate. His face was ashen, but, stumbling under a blow or pushing himself out of the mud below, he uttered not a sound and set his jaw resolutely, almost defiantly. This attitude seemed to amuse his captors to no end, and they hooted and hollered with laughter with every new round.

They’d come close enough now that I could make out something of their features. They were all big men, tall like the boy but broad as well, with thick ropes of sinew running down their legs and arms. No one among them was small or weak, save the captive.

They wore furs, as I had earlier observed, but now I saw leathers as well. The colors ranged from shades of green to shades of purple. That, I supposed, depended on the animals from which they’d been harvested. The vestments were rough in composition and rougher in cut, and they seemed to vary from man to man. I saw no commonality between them, except they were made of similar stuff and, in general, served to cover the groin area. Beyond that, they diverged wildly. A combination of furs and leathers comprised some, while some were only made up of one or the other. One man’s garments covered his entire body, from his head to his feet, in a patchwork of furs of a similar dark gray hue; another’s was nothing more than a piece of leather hanging around the front-most portion of his body, secured by a rough cord tied at his waist. Some seemed to be offering their best wolf-man impressions, while others mooned the world.

They carried a host of weapons, too, ranging from spears to hatchets. These had been fashioned mostly from wood and bits of metal or stone. But every man, whatever else he carried, had a blowgun strapped to his back and, at his waist, a leather pouch. From a distance, I couldn’t tell what the pouches contained. But I surmised they probably related to the blowguns since the weapon and pouch were the only constant to be found among these otherwise vastly dissimilar wretches.

Though they dressed peculiarly, and despite the visceral revulsion that the cruelty and coarseness I witnessed stirred in the pit of my stomach, I could not deny these men were as human as any of our own party.

Drenched in the blood of their victims, hauling away, for what purpose I couldn’t fathom, the corpses of their enemies, and mocking the plight of their captive, they were as sorry a set of representatives for humanity as I could envision. But the cruel light in their eyes bore the color of human intelligence and human reason. The biting malice tinging their laughter rang with a human understanding of suffering. These were men before us.

Men, and monsters.

Chapter Twenty-Three

THIS REALIZATION SEEMED to have dawned on the rest of our party at about the same time it hit me. And, with it, the wall of silence we’d all maintained faithfully came crashing down.

I’m not sure who spoke first. As near as I could tell based on location, the voice came from Rogers or the professor. The tone was so strained I couldn’t recognize it—and no one fessed up after the fact. Whoever said it, they called, “What are you waiting for? My God, shoot them already.”

If there had been any chance of our going undetected, we lost it in that moment. The Keplerites went from exchanging jests to taking up defensive positions in the blink of an eye. Almost before we had time to react, the dead had been discarded, and the raiders had vanished behind cover like our own. The bound boy crouched in the dirt beside the bodies, his eyes darting every which way as he searched for a viable escape route.

A tense twenty or thirty seconds followed, punctuated only by the occasional command in the language of the Keplerites. As soon as Caspersen gave a command—“protect the civilians”—the projectiles started flying.

At first, they flew in her direction: a quick succession of little dark quills, cutting through the air from a variety of positions. If anything hit its mark, Caspersen made no sound.

I’d watched one of the raiders disappear into a little cluster of foliage; when I saw a dart whiz out from roughly the same spot, I returned fire.

I put one round into the center of the undergrowth, and this time, there was no doubt about the effectiveness of the shot. A sharp cry of pain preceded a clumsy exodus of two persons from the location. A stream of red ran between the fingers of one, from a hand clutched to his side. The other seemed panicked rather than harmed as he made his way haphazardly for the nearest tree. Cries of alarm went up all around us from a dozen different hiding spots.

At the same time, the crack of gunfire sounded on our side of the field, and both men went down. More panicked shouting merged with a hail of darts in my direction. Two hit their mark, one planting deep in the flesh of my upper arm and the second grazing my cheek. The others missed.

Pain didn’t really register beyond a quick pricking sensation. I glanced down at the thin, needlelike projectile embedded in my arm. And with a degree of panic, I recognized it as the same sort of dark quill that a midnight visitor had stuck in Dr. Kimutai’s neck an eternity ago now.

Fuck. I’d hardly made the connection before I pulled it out, hoping fervently I would last at least until the battle was done.

Not that I had much to worry about on that score. The battle was over almost as soon as it had begun. Whatever nerve the Keplerites had mustered after the first round of shots disappeared when a small group of their party mounted a head-on assault.

Five of them came at us, chucking spears and wielding axes and machetes. They’d hardly covered ten feet before they lay, dead or dying, in a soup of mud and their own entrails. I put a round through the skull of one of the great, shaggy-maned monsters I’d seen abusing the captive. And in the twilight of his existence, I saw the fear that colored his light eyes a moment before a bullet evaporated the top of his skull. He went down, and I stared into the void where once a human being had stood.

It was not a new feeling for me, to kill another person. I was a Ranger, and it came with the territory. I’d hoped to leave any use for that particular skillset on Earth. But I’d prepared for any eventuality. I didn’t feel guilty either. I’d worked through that long ago. There was plenty of room for nuance and gray areas in the diplomatic field. But not here on the battlefield. Everyone, man or animal, friend or foe, had the right to fight back when something meant to kill it. And they meant to kill us.

Still, I couldn’t help but feel a profound sadness and a sense of deep grotesqueness about the situation. I carried some of the finest weapons of my era, only to dispatch men who looked like they’d stepped out of the annals of human history. Like a time traveler countering the spears of early Greeks or Romans with the fire power of the last Great War, it seemed somehow unjust.

But, just or not, it was done. Not only my shot, but the entire skirmish. Panicked indecision sent our attackers every which way, and before a minute passed, they’d either fled or died. We didn’t pursue anyone who ran, but we did kill everyone who attacked.

The captive boy had gone, too, vanishing during the height of the commotion.

The dead, killed by our hands and theirs, lay all about. Here and there, the last gasps of life sounded as a few of the attackers struggled at the edge of that final precipice, fighting to stave off the free fall to the Great Beyond.

I started as a splatter of icy rain landed on my back. The moment, the breathless tension of battle, had gone. Caspersen was already emerging from her hiding spot. I noted a few spots of red on her uniform where Keplerite darts had found their marks. But she was on her feet, with Matt at her side.

I followed and heard the footfalls of the other soldiers and Marines sloshing through the mud behind me. We wove our way between the corpses.

The sensation that I’d somehow stepped through time to a previous era of human history again arrested me as I gazed at the fallen. I found my kill, the tall auburn-haired man. My bullet had disintegrated most of the upper portion of his skull, but his eyes remained open: two light-blue orbs peering heavenward in dead terror. His skin was fair, though stained with dirt and sweat. He dressed like his peers in a piecemeal fashion that seemed to promote desired function over appearance. He wore a type of laced leather shoe and makeshift greaves around his lower legs—leather tied from the ankle to the knee. Vambraces of a similar make protected his forearms. This effort at protection stood in stark contrast to the rest of his body, which was largely naked except for a loin cloth and a fur cowl, now drawn back. I had the impression this was a defense against the rain, for water—and blood—seemed to roll right off it.

As to the remainder of the peculiar combination, the greaves had served more as a defense against the foliage than anything else. They bore a few earthy stains and minor scratches, as if from passing through heavy undergrowth, but no other injury. The vambraces, by contrast, had been instrumental in preserving the dead man’s wholeness at least once. I counted half a dozen cuts on these, with one pierced full through the leather. They’d obviously deflected cutting instruments during the dead man’s lifetime.

He carried a spear, fashioned from a woody substance and bearing a charred, presumably fire-hardened tip. A pouch of rough-stitched leather hung at his waist. This I found to contain more of the darts I’d already unhappily encountered. I didn’t see a blowgun near his body, so I concluded he must have lost it during the battle.

The sight of those darts reminded me again of the creature who had assailed us back at the riverside camp, and the memory took on a new horror. That furry monster, the skulking kidnapper who had utilized darts exactly like these, the intelligence that had so delighted our scientists, the cunning that had so intrigued them: I understood now.

This battle wasn’t our first encounter with these men. We’d met one in the mountains. Only it had very nearly been Dr. Kimutai who was carried off to unknown ends that night.

“This one’s still alive.” Connor’s voice drew me from my observations. She was halfway across the field, hovering over a grimy, dark-haired giant.

We moved of one volition toward her. He was in a bad way, this Keplerite, having been shot twice mid-torso. His breaths came in gurgling gulps, and a mixture of blood and worse-smelling substances leaked from the gaping holes in his unarmored chest and stomach. He seemed incapable of doing anything but watching us and now and then attempting to pull away from our group. He made very little progress on that score. He didn’t have the strength left for it.

Connor had already disarmed him, removing both a battle-ax and a dart gun. He stared up at us, his dark eyes circling from person to person.

“Who are you?” Caspersen asked, first in English and then half a dozen other Earth languages.

A flicker of hope passed across all of our faces when, after the fourth or fifth entreaty, he answered with a single grunt. It was Greek to us, but we expected it meant something to Caspersen.

She shook her head to our inquiries and continued her questioning, cycling through all the languages she knew. Now and again, he would manage the same word—if word it was—between breaths. His strength ebbed quickly, though, and he didn’t survive a full minute. Kayleigh had barely begun to look at his wounds when he died.

“What did he say?” Connor put the question on all of our minds to her.

“I have no idea. Whatever he was speaking, I’ve never heard it before.”

“Me either,” Kayleigh piped up.

I started. I’d seen her out already, looking over the dying Keplerite. But now it registered that the civilians had left their positions of safety to join us.

“Who the hell are these guys?” Granges wondered. “Are they ours? Or…?”

“Without running their DNA against the computers?” Kayleigh said. “Impossible to say. But they’re human. So they’re from Earth.”

“They’re cavemen,” the professor protested. “Primitive. Barbarians. Look at them.”

“They’ve progressed somewhat more than cavemen,” Dr. Kimutai remarked dryly. “But, no, they do not appear to be very technologically advanced. Certainly not at the level of any human civilization capable of transporting life across deep space.”

“Then how did they get here?”

“I’d need to run their DNA,” Kayleigh said again. “Cross-reference it with the ship’s databank. But…if I had to guess, I’d say they are the descendants of our crew, or a crew that followed us.”

“What?”

“Bullshit,” Robinson snorted. “We have weapons, electricity, complex tools. These guys are barely making tools. No way these are ours. They must have come afterward. Earth must have plunged into a second Stone Age…”

“Then how the hell did they get here?” the professor asked and added with a sneer first at Kim and then Robinson, “My recollection of human evolution may be a little off, as Dr. Kimutai suggests, but even I know the cavemen weren’t flying spaceships.”

“People, focus,” Caspersen interrupted. “Ellis, gather some samples to analyze. Wu, Kimutai, help her. Granges, check for survivors. Connor, Russell, keep an eye on the perimeter. Johnson and Cohen, I want you to see if you can find where that boy went. But stay in range of call and be on your guard. The rest of you…stay close.”

“Look at them, Tracie,” Matt put in. I glanced in his direction, several bodies over. “They’re not all the same. I mean, the way they dress. Look.” He pointed to one of the bodies that had been discarded by the raiders.

I frowned. He was right. The man in the mud at Matt’s feet was tall and thin, like the boy we’d seen—and unlike those who had killed him. But the most striking dissimilarity lay in his dress: there wasn’t a fur, not a scrap of leather, to be found on him. I stood several feet from the body, but even at a distance, I could tell his clothing had been constructed of some sort of fibrous material.

Again, we migrated of a single impulse toward this new corpse. It was badly mangled, missing a leg and most of an arm. Still, we found enough of each garment intact to ascertain the dead man wore a loose, tunic-length shirt of coarse weave and a pair of trousers of similar material. Under the crimson blood and dark mud, a bit of color made itself visible here and there in the fabric; before his grisly end, the dead man had been decked out in earthy greens and browns. At the end of the whole leg, he still wore a shoe, the sole of which was made of a flexible substance of dark composition. It looked something like rubber. The shoe, in turn, was secured to the foot with cords of fabric, tied round the ankle.

Though the rest of him had been badly mangled, his face survived unmarred. I was able to get a good picture of how he must have looked in life: a middle-aged man, with brown hair starting to gray around the temples and at the chin; lines and crow’s feet etched little chasms into his fair skin; and he stared up at the sky with unseeing hazel-colored eyes.

“It looks like some sort of animal got him,” Dr. Verner said, edging in between Drs. Wu and Kayleigh to get a better look at the body. “See, here? Those look like teeth marks.”

Kayleigh and Michelle nodded, peering at the dead man’s mangled arm.

I gritted my teeth as I stared at the grisly sight, at the strands of flesh that had been torn loose here and there, at the bare bone that ran from the elbow to the wrist. Occasional puncture wounds perforated the upper arm to support the suggestion, and I wondered at what sort of animal the Keplerites bred to inflict such damage. And where the hell is it now?

“And here,” Matt called out. He’d moved to another body, another of the raiders’ prizes. “There’s teeth marks in this one too.”

I was just moving toward the second body, driven more by morbid curiosity than anything else, when Michelle gave a cry. It was short and muffled under a hand she’d clasped over her mouth. But it had been so full of horror that we all turned. Both Kayleigh and she looked ashen as they exchanged glances.

“What?” Caspersen demanded. “What is it?”

Dr. Wu turned away, shaking and breathing in great, sobbing gasps.

“Kayleigh?” Caspersen asked.

Kayleigh was grave, but steady, as she replied, “These are human teeth marks, Captain Caspersen. This man’s arm has been eaten—by a human being.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“CANNIBALS?” SOMEONE ASKED rather than said.

Kayleigh had gotten to her feet and was moving from raider to raider, opening their mouths and examining their teeth. More than once, she looked as if she might be sick, but she carried on. In a few minutes, she turned to us again and nodded. “The bite wounds are inflicted by human beings. And the ones we fought…they’ve still got strands of human tissue between their teeth. They must have—” She cringed at the word. “—dined before they set out.”

“My God,” a voice gasped.

Dr. Verner crossed himself.

“Cannibals,” I repeated, less as a question and more a stunned proclamation. “You mean…we’re on a cannibal planet?”

It was a stupid thing to say because panicked murmuring started immediately among the civilians. I wasn’t so far from the sentiment myself as to have demonstrated the forethought to keep this idea to myself.

Caspersen shot me a glare. “Not necessarily. Not all of them. We don’t know that these guys—” She gestured at the fabric-clothed dead. “—are cannibals.”

“But they’re the ones getting eaten,” the professor protested in a tone halfway between a shriek and a shout. “They’re not the ones I’m worried about.”

“Calm yourself, Dr. Carter,” Kim put in. “Remember, we have the guns. And these fine soldiers, who have already kept us safe once.”

“My point is, there are obviously different communities on Kepler,” Caspersen continued. “It’s unlikely they’re all going to be foes.”

“Great. So as long as we don’t get eaten before we figure out who our friends are—provided there are any friends out there—we’ll be fine,” the professor said, again in a wailing tone. “And now we’ve killed them—you’ve gone and shot a bunch of them. They’ll be after us for sure. And we don’t know where they are, or—”

“Come on,” Matt put in. “This isn’t helping.”

The professor’s eyes flashed. “Helping? As if you even know what that word means, Frat Boy.”

“Hey,” I objected. It didn’t seem right that the phrase I’d coined for Matt should be thrown out by someone other than myself, especially in the circumstance.

“All I’m saying is—” Matt continued.

“I don’t give a fuck what you’re saying,” the professor interrupted. “We’re dealing with cannibals—fucking cannibals. I’ve never given two shits what you think. You think I give a fuck now?”

A few voices rose in protest, with Dr. Kimutai trying again to soothe the professor.

Matt, characteristically, was perfectly capable of expressing his own thoughts. “Jesus, grow a pair already.”

“Dr. Carter,” Caspersen cut in, “I’m going to need you to focus.”

“Focus?” He snorted. “Focus on what? Focus on the cannibals? Focus on the fact that we’re all going to die?”

“Focus on staying alive.” Her tone was even, and she held the professor’s gaze so intently that he shrank back. “Focus on the mission. Focus on getting to that ship so we don’t end up dying. Because if you want to sit down and wait to be part of their next buffet—” She gestured to the fallen cannibals. “—you’re free to do that. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow you to endanger the rest of this crew. So unless that’s your plan, I need you to take a deep breath and calm down. Right now.”

The professor stared for a few moments, flapping his mouth wordlessly as if he was trying to say something or think of something to say. But no sound came out.

In a minute, Caspersen said, “Good. Now, you should join the rest of the group.” She gestured toward the civilians who were not otherwise engaged. They’d huddled together at the edge of the battlefield, staring aghast at the fallen.

“Patiently await my slaughter, you mean,” the professor mumbled as he brushed past her.

Caspersen ignored this and crouched, resting on her heels beside Kayleigh, who was bagging hair samples. “Dr. Ellis,” she said, her tone low. “The sedative these sons of bitches hit Dr. Kimutai with at the river…how long does it take to take effect?”

Matt frowned. “Were you hit?”

She nodded. “Multiple hits.”

“Fuck.”

I cleared my throat and moved toward them. “Me too. One full hit, one graze.” Following her lead, I kept low and kept my tone subdued. I’d gained enough control of my wits to realize what an injudicious comment could do to the morale of the crew.

Caspersen grimaced. “I need to know, Doctor…how long do we have?”

“You pulled them out? The quills?”

We both nodded.

“When?”

“Right away.”

“Immediately.”

Kayleigh shook her head. “Then you should be okay.”

“What?”

“You may experience some temporary light-headedness, some dizziness, but you won’t lose consciousness. You’d have to be consistently exposed for a few minutes to be in danger. Or inundated with darts, all at once.”

Caspersen, Matt, and I breathed a sigh of relief simultaneously.

“Well thank fuck for that,” I muttered.

“They’re not heavy on ranged weapons, then,” Caspersen observed. “The only thing they have is nonlethal.”

“They had spears,” I reminded her.

“These guys were gathering food,” Kayleigh put in. “This was a hunting party, nothing more. And judging by the victims’ wounds, they seem to prefer blunt weapons and melee combat to stealth. The darts are probably a secondary measure. Like if they find someone sleeping, like Kim.”

“They sure were making a hell of a lot of noise when they stumbled on us,” Caspersen agreed. “So they weren’t worried about a counterattack.”

“Captain?” It was Cohen. “You still want us to try to find the boy?”

“You up to it?” Caspersen asked me.

I nodded.

“Okay. Watch your backs out there. And get back at the first sign that something’s not right.”

“All right, Lieutenant.” I was on my feet again. “Let’s move out.”

“Ma’am,” he said and nodded.

I headed to where I’d last seen the boy. That had been in the midst of the pile of victims. We found a mess of blood and dirt, with pieces of flesh and entrails joining the putrid soup of death. Footprints led in every direction in such a convoluted mass I wondered if we’d be able to even find the boy’s.

But in a minute, I pinpointed a half print, smaller than the others and seeming to have been made by a distinct sole. The raiders all wore leather wraps around their feet, so their prints more closely resembled the nuance of the human foot. “Here,” I said.

Cohen scrutinized the imprint and nodded. “And here,” he declared in a minute, pointing to a second partial mark a stride away, heading toward the woods. Though less complete than the first, the shoe type was unmistakable.

For a few strides, we found nothing distinguishable. And then we found another print, and another, heading in a generally southwest direction from the site of the battle. A few more strides, and his prints were the only ones visible.

We followed quickly but cautiously. At last sighting, the boy had been bound. But we had no guarantee he hadn’t freed himself since. And either way, he’d be panicked and desperate and wouldn’t necessarily have any reason to trust us.

If we did locate him, our primary objective would be to avoid frightening him. If he bolted, we might never see him again in the mist. More than the boy, though, I worried about the raiders. If there were any more of them in the woods, I didn’t want to stumble upon them unawares.

This, however, proved to be an ill-founded concern. No one harassed us as we searched. The boy’s trail was easy to follow, and we made good time. We got a little ways into the woods, and then it ended abruptly at the base of a broad tree.

We scouted a good section of forest in every direction and found neither sight nor sound of the prisoner.

“How the hell could he have vanished?” Cohen wondered. “He couldn’t have gone up the tree.”

I nodded. The tree had no branches, or nooks, or anything on trunk’s surface that might lend itself to climbing. It was, for some fifty or sixty feet, a great, smooth pole. It would have been nearly impossible to climb it without tools, even if he hadn’t been bound. Nor did we find any evidence on the tree itself that he’d attempted it. We found no scuffs or damaged bark or mud.

“Well, whatever the hell he did, he’s gone. Let’s get back,” I said.

We returned without incident and found everyone ready to head out after we gave our status report. No one else had found anything useful in identifying either our attackers or their victims, and Caspersen itched to be underway. I don’t think anyone disagreed.

With more unanswered questions than ever, we headed out in the direction of the ship. Where before there had been a muted sense of unease among us, now the feeling of dread that hung in the air was thick enough to cut with a knife. The military and Matt encircled the civilians, providing a rather thin barrier between them and any unknown threat, and we neither pretended to ourselves nor to them that it would be sufficient against a surprise attack.

It wouldn’t. Our best hope lay in finding some sort of defensible position, like the ship, to set up our base. We’d be little better than sitting ducks on the march or encamped in the woods. Our only advantage was that we seemed to have surprised the cannibals as much as they’d surprised us. If we were to make the most of that, we had to travel as speedily—and silently—as possible.

No twig snap, no murmur of the wind, no distant sound failed to trigger near panic during that long march. Nothing put our minds at ease. Not even the weather showed much sign of improving. The mist remained, and now and then the rumble of thunder far above the trees warned we might be in for a second downpour.

Still, in spite of all of our desperation and fear—or, perhaps, because of it—we kept at it, making remarkably good time. The civilians, even the professor, showed near-legendary endurance. We were all footsore, all suffering the discomforts of chafing clothes and soggy shoes. We had already endured poor sleep and had done so without a meal.

Now, we kept walking. When it was time to eat, we ate on the march. We walked until it was too dark to keep walking and then sought out a thicket of brush in which to set up a makeshift camp. Caspersen allowed us a shift of an hour’s rest apiece, but for the military, the majority of the night was spent on watch.

Despite my exhaustion, I didn’t sleep a wink. I spent my time huddled under a bush, trying to brush off the occasional dripping from above. Before I knew it, I was back on watch.

Shortly thereafter, the rain broke, and we endured a short but icy downpour. Anyone who had managed sleep by this point woke to a cold, wet night. We spent the rest of the evening in miserable, teeth-chattering expectation.

And with the first hint of morning light, we set out again.

Chapter Twenty-Five

WE REACHED THE ship right before sundown. The day had been somewhat less miserable than the previous ones. The mist receded, and the air carried less humidity. The world had begun to dry.

Other than our shoes, our clothes had dried by midday. Our feet hadn’t been so lucky as we slogged on for the rest of an otherwise uneventful march.

For a slew of reasons, not the least of which included getting out of my damned boots, I felt an incredible sense of gratitude when the ship finally came into view.

Heavy vegetation covered the Genesis, but there was no doubt the landing had been a violent one. The flat forest floor rose here in great mounds of dirt and stone around the ship to form a massive crater.

Time had restored plants to the area, but the abrupt change in elevation, the great ridges surrounding a deep gulf, remained an unmistakable testament to the damage that had once been done. The Genesis had carved out a mighty resting place no amount of plant life could fully conceal.

It was here, for the first time since we’d ventured into the forest, that we had a real break in the canopy of trees. Rosy sunlight, all the redder for the time of day, angled into the clearing, filtering through the trees that grew near the edge of the crater. This younger growth seemed like saplings in comparison to the old trees. But that was a matter of comparison. They rose to the height of any respectable Earth tree.

It struck me vaguely that this forest must be extraordinarily ancient if the thousands of years of growth that had taken root after the Genesis’s landing was so minuscule by comparison.

Because of the break in dense foliage, light and corresponding shadow bathed the ship where it either faced the sun or away from it.

I found myself oddly unprepared as I mounted the summit of the crater and stared down at the wreckage of the Genesis II, half buried under tons of earth and years of growth. A sense of awe and confusion swept over me as my eyes followed the great stretches of charring still visible on the hull. I’d heard the description of all of these things from Connor and Granges. I already knew what to expect.

And yet, staring at the shell of that great vessel, at the long-overgrown windows of row upon row of pods, a sense of profound desolation settled on me. Just months ago, to my awareness, we had set out in the Genesis. And here it lay, a relic of ages gone by. Our ship, the vessel that had borne us all to this place, to this new life on Kepler-186f, lay as ruined and forgotten as any Mayan temple or desert pyramid.

And if it was just an ancient relic…what the hell were we?

A murmur of wondering disappointment rose from my companions, and I imagined they must be experiencing similar sensations to my own. But I couldn’t draw my eyes away from the wreck.

Caspersen let us soak the sight in for a few minutes but brought us back to the present with orders to scout the ship. “Russell, we’re going to take point. Johnson, Cohen, follow our lead. Granges, Connor, Law, stay here with the crew.”

And so it was. Caspersen took the lead, and we followed. The ship had planted nose first in the ground at roughly a fifteen-degree angle. We were coming upon it at about the same direction it had entered the atmosphere, and the nose lay directly away from us. The end that faced us opened heavenward in a mass of twisted metal and long rusted cable. Great vines and leafy lichens covered much of it, but as with our portion of the ship back in the mountains, there was ample evidence of charring and melting at these rough edges.

The breech stood a good four feet off the ground, and Caspersen poked her head over the ledge gingerly. When satisfied that we could safely proceed, she pulled herself up. Russell followed a second later, and Cohen and I took up the rear.

The interior of the ship looked little better than the exterior. A thick, mossy growth had taken up residence on most of the surfaces near the breech, which managed to quiet our footsteps. But light was sparse as that same moss grew over the windows internally and externally.

We entered in one of the cryochamber halls. Bent, misshapen pods surrounded us. To our immediate right, the frame of the ship angled sharply downward toward a pod that had been crushed to some two or three feet in height. The corresponding pod on the left was missing its door and half the floor. Great, charred breeches stretched down several chambers.

I doubted anyone in the area had survived initial impact. I was certain no one in the lower hall had. There wouldn’t be a lower hall there, for all intents and purposes. Not anymore.

Here and there, a piece of frame or some other rubble from the level below pierced the decking. We made our way carefully around it, unsure of the structural integrity of our path. Whatever had happened to the Genesis, it wouldn’t have been pretty. She’d literally been torn to pieces and flung across the surface of the planet, crushed and seared as she went. It remained to be seen how stable the floor could be after such violence and so much time.

The truth was, it seemed a miracle of engineering and dumb luck that any of the ship remained navigable. But I didn’t feel it in the moment—not stepping among the half-melted ruins of pod upon pod, remembering where only weeks ago in my lifetime my crewmates had settled in for their final journey. Miracles were the last thing on my mind.

We worked quickly, clearing room after room and finding nothing. The moss faded and eventually disappeared as we moved deeper into the ship. The state of the chambers, too, improved as we went on, with the damage to the pods lessening the farther away from the breach we got.

It was at this point that we started encountering partial skeletons. Before, there had been the occasional bone, some human and some of indeterminate origin. But here, we found more than a few aged human remains.

Though we wasted no time, time was nonetheless against us. Before long, the sun set, and little enough light filtered through the green growth that encrusted the ship windows at the best of times. We’d made it through most of the upper chambers when Caspersen sent Russell back for the civilians.

We had passed some solid chambers, unharmed by the landing, with their door mechanisms fully intact and operational. They’d be easily defensible, come what may. “Set up base, wait for us until we get back,” Caspersen directed.

I joined her at the front of the pack, and Cohen took up the rear. Caspersen switched on the tactical flashlight on her gun, and we proceeded.

“I want to finish this floor,” she said. “It’s too dark to go farther tonight, but I don’t want surprises here.”

A surprise is exactly what we got, however, when we reached the bridge. This was in the lowest section of the ship due to its current angle. It spanned both floors and was reached by a set of stairs that groaned under our weight rather more than I liked.

It being too early for moonlight but well past the hour of sunlight, the interior of the ship was virtually solid black at this point. As Caspersen had been one of the only ones in our party with the foresight to bring a flashlight of any kind—and, naturally, hers was affixed to a gun—we relied on her to light our path.

The bridge was massive and cluttered with all manner of debris. Caspersen traced a long, spindly beam of light around it, and tall shadows stretched behind piles of smashed and ruined furniture and framing. The floor itself had buckled up in places, exposing jagged edges of metal and even the ground underneath. As with the portion of the ship where we’d entered, vegetation had taken hold, and a soft carpet of moss muted our footsteps.

She moved forward, circling behind heaps that obscured our view, bathing each hidden nook and cranny in a moment of light.

We’d just rounded a section of bushy plant life when my foot landed on something soft. Something that moved. I damn near shit myself and jumped back before I even found my voice. At the same time, a shadow darted past me to the left.

Gesticulating with my free hand, I tried not to squeal as I called, “There. Something’s here.”

Cohen tensed, pointing his gun in the general direction I’d indicated. Caspersen’s light spun around, casting the dim gloom around us into something recognizable.

There, waddling in the direction of the stairs, was one of the moles we’d encountered in the mountains, its stout body wobbling from side to side in haste.

“Motherfucker,” I breathed. I could have sworn I heard Cohen release a sigh of relief too.

“Just a rat,” Caspersen spoke. “Keep it together, people. We’re almost done.”

She was right. We had no more surprises waiting for us on the bridge, and it was too dark to spend any time investigating. Our questions as to the ship’s fate and, more importantly, the crew’s, would have to wait until tomorrow.

We made our way back up the aged stairs and down the long corridor to our camp.

Where the ship had seemed desolate in daylight, night painted in an altogether more sinister light. Silvery-pink points of moonlight filtered in between the moss on the windows, throwing long, strange shadows into the hall. Now and then, a passing breeze would whistle through some invisible perforation in the ship’s hull, or a footstep would echo off the metal flooring in such a way as to send a shiver up my back.

I understood why the professor had fancied the place haunted. Even without the occasional skeleton or set of shadowy eye sockets staring back at you, the combination of decay and desolation was the stuff of nightmares, with each element feeding the imagination’s perception of the other.

Even the disembodied voices of the rest of the crew sounded hollow as they traveled down the long hall, and I took no comfort in them until I could actually see them.

When, at last, we reached the main party and locked the door of our new, shared quarters behind us, nervous sweat covered me from head to toe.

The crew was happy to have us back though. They had set up a base in one of the storerooms, which was some two or three times bigger than the individual pods. They’d even rigged up a bathroom facility, of sorts, in a pod down the hall.

“It’s some real high-tech stuff,” Matt explained. “The professor’s own handiwork.”

“It’s a bucket,” the professor said. “A bucket to shit in. You don’t like it, go dig a hole.”

And welcome back…

Whatever was outside these four walls, whatever my own state of mind, the group seemed to relax a degree in safety. Our return was the final push, the jolt of energy that broke the tension of the last two days.

Matt dished out MREs, starting before we even had a chance to sit. Cohen started telling jokes about the killer mole “that almost did Johnson in.” Kayleigh nudged me good humoredly and joined in on the ribbing. The professor took time out of criticizing everyone who crossed his path to shake his head in disapproval at my “utter lack of nerve.” Even Caspersen cracked a smile now and then.

It was a curious facet of human nature that there was only so much fear or grief or anger that the mind could tolerate before mirth pushed it aside. In the particular instance, we really had nothing to laugh about and not much reason to think our situation had improved.

We’d gotten out of the open and established a somewhat more defensible base, it was true. But the cannibals were still out there, and our supplies hadn’t grown any. Who the cannibals were and how many of them there were remained as unknown as ever. We had no clue if we’d run into them often or if they were a minor force in the area.

But no one might have guessed how precarious our plight really was by watching us that night. Everyone seemed to be full of hope and good humor, bandying about awful jokes that elicited uproarious laughter. The dam of terror we’d worked so hard to stop up burst in this moment of quiet, and it primarily took the form of ridiculous levity. But everything seemed better. Hell, even the MREs tasted all right after our heavy exertions.

It didn’t happen right away for me, but I got into the spirit of things too. The creaking halls and shadow-filled chambers beyond us became a distant memory when we were all gathered together, pretending to be safe.

And then, having wolfed down his MRE while we all joked, the professor decided he was ready to turn in for the night, so he turned his focus toward setting up a makeshift bed. After that, off came his boots.

A new kind of horror descended once again on our happy party. Now I had spent more than a little time in the company of men and women who worked their asses off on a daily basis. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the reek of sweat or the odor of stinky feet or the blending of the two.

The professor, though, took those unpleasant qualities in combination and marinated them—literally—in days of moisture. And did they ever smell it.

“My God.” Verner practically choked on his food.

“Fuck.” Matt plugged his nose. “That’s some nasty shit.”

“Fuck you, Frat Boy.” The professor sniffed. “Like you smell any better.”

“Jesus, did you have to do it here though?” Russell asked. The smell had apparently carried from the professor’s corner to the other side of the room where Sergeant Russell was eating.

“Go to hell, Ghoul.”

“I think we found a secret weapon against the cannibals,” I said as he flipped me the bird. “If that doesn’t cure them of wanting human flesh, nothing will.”

“Seriously, man, couldn’t you have stepped out of the room?” Cohen pressed. “I mean, for a few minutes anyway?”

“No one should be stepping out of the room,” Caspersen interjected before the professor had the opportunity to offer up another of his signature witty comebacks. “We need to stay together.”

“Can you smell this?” I asked. It seemed hard to believe she’d be advocating for the professor to remain if she could.

But she ignored the question. “I don’t want anyone wandering around. If we’ve got to use the bathroom, we’ll leave in groups. Always make sure there’s a Marine or soldier with you. We’ll explore tomorrow. Tonight, let’s stick to this room. Let’s focus on finishing our food and getting some sleep.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

THE PROFESSOR MIGHT have been the first offender of the night, but he was far from the only one. As soon as the rest of us finished eating, we all followed suit. We picked a spot to sleep. And off came the boots.

Soon the entire room reeked of soggy, sweaty feet. It got so bad we had to prop open the door for a few minutes, despite Caspersen’s protests.

Finally, we settled in for the night. As we were back on a rotating watch schedule, and Caspersen took the first shift, I took the opportunity to get some long overdue shuteye. I drifted off almost as soon as I lay down.

My dreams were troubled, and full of endless halls and haunted cryopods. The ship seemed to stretch on forever, and everywhere I heard the whispers of the dead. The bones we’d seen so briefly during our earlier search had multiplied. The evidence of death and the cries of the deceased followed me wherever I went.

I started to wakefulness when Cohen roused me. The particular dream images vanished, but the uneven beating of my heart signaled it hadn’t been pleasant.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, fine.”

“All right. Your turn, Captain.”

I pulled myself onto my feet. Fuck. It seemed a moment of downtime had given every ache and pain I’d ginned up over the course of the journey time to catch up with me. Either that or I was just getting old. I seemed to remember being able to do a lot more than this, on less sleep, and still feeling better when all was said and done.

It’s probably atmospheric differences or something. That had been on Earth, after all. New planet, new problems.

That settled to my satisfaction, I chose to ignore that Cohen walked without a limp, and his joints didn’t creak and groan as he lowered himself onto his bed as mine had done as I’d gotten up.

I concentrated on my watch, and the night wore on. Time seemed to drag during my shift. The moons were bright enough now that light made it past the growth on our windows, illuminating the room in a ghastly pallor.

Now and again, a shadow flitted across my field of vision, sometimes from the hall and sometimes from outside. The first two or three times, my heart discovered a direct route from my chest to my mouth. But in a bit, I relaxed. There was nothing nefarious about it, no cannibals lurking in the far shadows, no ghosts prowling the ancient halls.

Nerves turned pretty quickly to boredom, and I was fighting drooping eyelids when Dr. Kimutai stirred awake, saying he had to use the bathroom.

Grumbling to myself at Caspersen, whose bright idea this bathroom buddy system had been, I escorted him all the way out the door, across the expansive few feet of hall, and to the far distant…opposite door. There, I waited rather impatiently until he emerged, and we braved the perilous return trip.

Somehow, we made it. All five feet or so. Caspersen will be so proud. Naturally, she was sound asleep while I was making sure people could figure out how to cross the hall.

But while my mind had flooded with complaints at the indignity of waiting outside our makeshift toilet facilities, I had acknowledged it was the first time in days Caspersen actually slept. I didn’t really begrudge her the rest, but I did resent playing babysitter. And was tired and cranky myself.

Dr. Kimutai didn’t seem to notice. On the contrary, he seemed to be in a talkative mood. “Any trouble so far?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s good. No sign of anything?”

“Nothing.”

For a minute, he fell silent, and I supposed that he was going back to sleep. But then, in a tone low enough not to wake anyone else, he continued, “I’m guessing this probably wasn’t how you pictured your tour when you signed up.”

I laughed at that. Not a laugh of genuine amusement but a sardonic acknowledgment of the understatement in that observation. He was sitting rather than lying, so I figured we were in for a chat. I wasn’t in a talkative mood, but Kim was one of the few members of the crew I’d make an exception for, even when I preferred to mope in solitude.

“No, not really. I mean, I figured there’d be tough times. Can’t say I counted on cannibals though.”

He nodded. “No. Not cannibals.”

“Yeah. Figured the environment and other life-forms would be a problem. Not…us.” Despite the truth of my words, it occurred to me I probably wasn’t doing much to boost morale, so I offered a “But I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

It was his turn to laugh. “And I am sure pigs will fly.”

“Well, I think we’ve got a good chance. I mean, we’ve got some brilliant people on our side,” I stonewalled. He didn’t bite, so I opted for a bit of self-depreciating humor. “And the rest of us are pretty good shots.” Not even that worked. An uncomfortable silence descended on us, and I had the sinking sensation that Caspersen, if she ever found out about this conversation, would kill me.

“Who do you suppose they are?” Kim asked in a bit.

“The cannibals?”

He nodded again.

“Who? Well, I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I mean, they’re obviously human.”

“Oh, yes. That much is clear.”

“So I suppose they came from Earth.”

“Yes.”

“Did they come with us, you think? Or after?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” he mused.

I didn’t have a response to that. He was the one asking the questions, after all. But he seemed to be thinking aloud, bouncing his ideas off of me. So I chose a response that might prompt him to keep going and said, “I guess so.”

“What’s the likelihood, do you think, of a second journey following ours?”

“Hell, how should I know? We barely survived getting here ourselves. But if things got better on Earth…”

“Hmm,” he mused. “Do you think they’d send a second mission here? After losing contact with the first?”

“Maybe…I mean, it depends on…on the tech, you know? If they could figure out what happened, or if any of us survived…maybe then they’d send someone else.”

“For a one-way trip? For six hundred people? You think they’d send a rescue mission that would take hundreds of years to get here?”

I blinked at the implied reproof. He had a point—my logic didn’t hold up to scrutiny—but I wasn’t claiming to have the answers. “Well, what do you think they are?”

“Hmm,” he repeated. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Trying not to shake my head, I answered, “Yeah, maybe so.” I could have left it there, as a mystery neither of us would be able to solve.

Based on the silence that followed, I’d almost convinced myself Dr. Kimutai had finished with the topic too. But then he asked, “Why did you apply for this mission? If you don’t mind my asking, I mean.”

“Why?” I shrugged. “Hell. New start, I suppose. Someone had to do it. I fit the criteria. Had the expertise, didn’t have the attachments back home.”

“No family, you mean?”

“Yeah.” It had practically been one of the requirements since this had been a one-way trip after all. “Seemed a better use of my skills than staying. Chance to do something good. I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted an adventure.” I shrugged again. I was tired and not really in the mood for introspection.

“It was quite the risk,” Dr. Kimutai observed.

The sardonic laugh surfaced again. “Yeah. Yeah, it was.”

“Do you know why I applied?”

“No.” I had no idea, but I had the sneaking suspicion I was about to find out.

“Well, I wasn’t ‘wanting an adventure,’ as you put it.”

Again, that implied reproof to his tone. “I suppose you were in it for the science?” I asked, with only a touch of mockery to my own voice. I could well imagine Kim, or any of the scientists in our band, blinded to the dangers of our endeavor by the lure of discovery. They were like kids at Christmas with every new species we encountered. What would the prospect of an entire planet of new species have done to cloud their reason?

“No.” He shook his head and, for a minute, stayed absolutely silent. I was on the verge of inquiring if he was okay when he resumed, “I tell you, Captain, do you have any idea what wealth meant when I was a child?”

“Umm…no, what?” I was somewhat taken aback by the journey our conversation had taken in that span of time—all, apparently, in Dr. Kimutai’s head as I had no clue how we’d gotten from there to here.

“To be safe, to have food, clean water, medicine, a good school for the children, a home for the family. That was wealth in my village. The man who had that, had everything.”

I still didn’t see the import, so I quipped, “Sounds nice right about now, doesn’t it?”

He ignored this. “It is what you would call ‘the American dream,’ I think?”

“Yeah, sounds about right. As long as you threw in a fast car and a big TV.”

This, at last, elicited a laugh from him. He lapsed again into reflective silence. Then he resumed on seemingly another topic altogether. “What do you suppose I did when I was out of school and had my first job that paid?”

“No idea.”

“I put aside enough money to pay my bills and put the rest in a jar. It was not much, but every check, I did the same. Can you guess why?”

“To get that sports car?”

“I did not take you for such a…how is it called? Gearhead. But no, not for a car. So I could build that home for my mother. She was my family, and I wanted to provide for her in my wealth.”

“That’s…that’s really decent of you.” I had absolutely no idea where this story was going, but I was getting the feeling it was actually leading somewhere. Despite the random threads, there seemed to be a point. “So, did you build it?”

“Of course. You see, in your country, I was not very wealthy. My work was grant-funded; it belonged to the university, so I earned my salary, but that is all. I was not wealthy by American standards. But in my village, that was wealth. I had everything I could ever need and could provide the same for those I loved.”

“I dunno, I think most people would consider that pretty successful.”

“Would they though? In the world we lived in, success was not measured by providing for your needs or preparing for future needs. It was measured by excess.”

“That wasn’t ‘the American Dream.’” I frowned.

“No. But, tell me, Captain, was it the teacher or the accountant that our society revered? Was it the grocery clerk and the delivery driver? Or was it the tycoon, the movie star, the man with private jets and overseas accounts? Was it the man who had enough or even a little more than enough who had the success, or was it the man who always wanted more because he felt there was no such thing as enough? Did we celebrate that American dream, or did we celebrate the insatiable appetite?”

“I don’t know. I think we confused the two a lot.” I recognized he had a point, but I was too tired to delve into the economic and societal reasons behind it. This seemed a good time to cut to the chase. “But what does that have to do with the Genesis mission?”

He spread his hands, and his deep voice was rich with passion. “Everything. Because if we are honest with ourselves, it was the men who could never get enough, even when they had everything, who took everything from those of us who had just enough. Yes? Would we be here at all, if some men hadn’t been so concerned with their personal wealth that they disregarded the future of our entire species? Would there have been a Genesis mission?”

I thought about it for a moment before conceding, “Probably not.”

“Men like Matt’s father and grandfather. Men for whom the Earth herself was made to bow.”

I nodded silently, the old, familiar dislike of Matt seeping back into my thoughts. It was irrational, of course, to place culpability on Matt for the crimes of his ancestors—irrational, but very difficult to avoid.

“Our greed, human greed, pushed us almost to our own destruction. So why did I apply? Not for perhaps a very good reason, if we’re still being honest. I wanted to believe we could get it right if given another chance. That humanity, our species, was good, was worth saving. That what we had done on Earth was the mistake, the perfect storm of bad choices and misfortune. That we would not fall again if only we had that one second chance. I wanted to believe it, so much that I would travel through deep space to make it happen.”

“And your mother?” I asked. It seemed out of character for Kim to leave behind his only family, even for a cause he clearly believed in so deeply.

“My mother? Ah.” His tone held bitterness now, raw and palpable. “My mother is dead. She was asleep in her bed, in the house I had built for her, when the floods came. Our entire village. Half of our nation, like so many other nations—washed away.” Again, he spread his hands. “Gone.”

“I’m sorry.” I should have guessed. Many people had lost family in the climate catastrophes. Most of us on this voyage had lost someone.

“So I, too, had no more ‘attachments’ when the call came.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated.

“You have nothing to be sorry about. No more than I, or any one of us who was so busy with our day-to-day that we did not see the world slowly catching fire around us. But that, you see, is my own selfish reason for applying.” He laughed a strange, hollow laugh. “And now, I am not so sure it was worth it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, here we are again, are we not? We find ourselves in the midst of cannibals. The last vestiges of our species, almost certainly the distant offspring of our own crew, descended to this.”

“You do think they’re from the Genesis, then?”

“Don’t you?”

I’d rather been hoping there might be another explanation. “It seems likely.”

“So now, perhaps, I have the answer to my own question. What, if given a second chance, would we achieve?” He paused for a moment. “Only it is not the answer I had hoped for.”

“Are you sure? I mean, there are cannibals, but what of us? We’re still here; we haven’t given up. Even Carter is making a brave show of it. Shit, even Frat Boy is pulling his own weight.”

“Yes.”

“And what about the other people, the ones the cannibals were eating. We don’t know that they’ve resorted to cannibalism, do we? Who knows what their culture is, what their moral system is?”

“And what if they are no better?”

“Well…well, we’ll figure something out. But, damn it, as long as there are decent human beings left, I’m not ready to give up.”

A spell of silence followed my declaration, and then Kim laughed again. This time, there was more genuine amusement to his tone.

“Well, Captain Johnson, in that case, I, too, will maintain the faith. As long as there are fifty righteous men in Sodom, eh?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

DR. KIM WAS still thoughtful and quiet when morning rolled around but seemed in better spirits than he had the night before. I had gotten to sleep as soon as my shift ended and woke in decent spirits myself.

I didn’t have a chance to ruin it by thinking, either, as Caspersen wasted no time. Breakfast was the first order of business, and from there, we got straight to work. She had the idea of fortifying the hall facing the open end of the ship.

“No idea who or what might have picked up our trail,” she explained. “Before we start anything else, let’s make sure we don’t wind up getting taken off guard.”

We turned our attention to the pod doors down the hall from us. They were solid with high-quality windows, designed to withstand everything from bullets to deep-space conditions. They’d be a good barrier against pretty much anything—certainly, any of the weapons we’d seen the cannibals wielding.

In theory, the pods were supposed to disassemble easily. In theory. The reality was a little less rosy. The violence of the ship’s landing, in combination with subsequent years of exposure, had left many of the fasteners less than cooperative. A few were too twisted to budge at all, and others put up a hell of a fight. In the end, we managed to pull off four doors and a few wall panels. Put together, they assembled into a very serviceable barrier a few doors past our storeroom. It stretched from ceiling to floor, except in the very center, where Caspersen had fashioned a sort of machine gun nest.

The M60, propped up on its tripod behind the barrier, pointed ominously toward the open end of the ship.

“There.” Caspersen nodded with a satisfied grin that reached from under her mask to her eyes. “Nothing’s going to get past this. All right, let’s get this show on the road.”

The show, such as it was, would feature the scientists predominantly. But Act One was nothing more than a repeat of last night’s scene. Having left Matt and Ghoul with the gun, the rest of us did a sweep of the hall and pods we’d already cleared.

As on the previous night, we found the entire floor unoccupied. One feature of our search stood out to me, however. We’d seen the skeletal remains before, but in this light, we could pick out the strange scrapes and marks the recon team had reported. And I noticed a second feature they’d emphasized—the evidence of a gun battle.

The exterior of the ship and the frames of the pods were constructed to be as nearly indestructible as a ship could be. But inside the pods themselves, bullet holes marred the paneling and cabinets. Some areas remained untouched, but whatever had happened, it had clearly spilled into the crew’s quarters.

This was a curious point, to my mind. Whatever had come after the crew would have had to get past the doors into each of these chambers. Get in and get out, shutting the doors after them. What kind of animal could manage that? It didn’t make sense.

But we kept moving, and I didn’t have much time to ponder the problem. We made it to the bridge with greater speed than we had the day before, thanks to the light. The state of devastation was more pronounced than the evening had revealed.

The great windows overhead had been severely damaged in the crash. Long, spindly fractures ran through the glass. Here and there, pieces had fallen away, shattering over the floor.

We progressed down the rickety stairs one at a time until our entire group stood on the ground floor. Caspersen spent some time examining the apertures in the glass. After determining they were either too narrow or too far above the ground to pose an entry risk, she moved on.

In the meantime, we scoured the floor. We found a few remnants of bones here and there, weathered beyond recognition. I couldn’t determine if they belonged to humans or some other creature.

Vegetation had started to take over the bridge too. Mosses coated most of the metal surfaces, and bushes and ferns grew through the breaks in the floor. A few vines dangled from the stairs.

At first, I missed the evidence of gunfire under all the growth. Granges spotted it, brushing away a stretch of the furry green plant life to reveal a cluster of holes. “Attackers must have reached the bridge.”

We moved on. A minute later, Cohen was by a cluster of bushes. Tapping a fibrous husk with his toes, he called out, “Here’s where your friend was nesting, Johnson.”

“Oh, the infamous mole?” Kayleigh teased. Then, her tone grew serious. “Any sign of where it went?”

“Why, you haven’t skinned anything recently, Dr. Gein?” I needled.

“Our respirators won’t last forever,” Dr. Kimutai said. “Not a bad idea to have some extras on hand.”

“First things first,” Caspersen directed. “Let’s focus on why we’re here. Ellis, Wu, Kim, you have what you need to get started?” Three affirmative responses later, she continued, “Great. Granges, you stay with them; Cohen, Connor, and Johnson, come with me. We’re going to move on to the lower deck. Carter, you come with us. The rest of you can follow if you want or stay with Granges.”

Dr. Verner expressed an eagerness to follow. Madison and Lee decided to join him. Everyone else was content to stay at the bridge.

“All right, remain behind us, but don’t leave the group, understand?” When no one disagreed, she nodded. “Okay, let’s move out.”

The first thus concluding, we moved on to Act Two.

The server room lay directly behind the bridge on the lower level, and the recon team hadn’t been exaggerating when they’d described it as a mess. The damage we’d seen on the upper level and on the bridge was nothing in comparison to the state of the rooms on this floor.

The server room frame, with its shattered windows, bowed outward. I imagined this was a result of the initial impact. A force powerful enough to carve the kind of crater like the one that housed the Genesis would have been devastating to the ship’s structure.

Great heaps of dirt rose up outside the empty windowpanes, obscuring the light. The sides of the crater, I realized. In some places, musty soil spilled inside to form slopes that reached from the ceiling to the floor. All of it smelled dank and old.

Still, though the windows had been blocked, the server room wasn’t entirely dark. Light made its way in from the bridge, allowing a muted visibility in the interior that dimmed the farther back we got. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by—and enough to maintain some plant growth. I found more growing things here than on the bridge.

We made our way through, the professor groaning as we went. His laments followed us from section to section:

“Do you have any idea how much these machines cost?”

“My God, you know how long I wanted to get my hands on a piece of equipment like that? And now look at it.”

“This AI system was the most sophisticated known to man, a computer that dwarfed the intelligence of the average human being. I designed it myself. And someone put bullets in it. Fucking animals.”

Even without the professor’s play-by-play, it didn’t take much to figure out why he’d been unable to retrieve anything useful. Between the gunfire and the elements, these computers had perished many moons ago.

Having completed our sweep of the server room and finding nothing of interest beyond some colorful clumps of vegetation, we moved on. Once we left the bridge and tech wing, the lower level assumed the same model as the upper: a long hall, surrounded by pods on either side.

Now, the darkness started to deepen. Walls of dark soil obscured what remained of the windows on either side, and the farther from the bridge we traveled, the less its light did for us. Before long, Caspersen had to switch on her flashlight, and we picked our way through the solitary, macabre halls much as we’d done a level higher the night before.

We found no surprises here. The pods were generally in worse shape than those on the floor above, although a few had survived in relatively good repair. We’d anticipated that, based on the damage we’d already found.

The storerooms had been stripped bare of useful items, leaving only smashed or otherwise useless apparatus and—luckily for us—the signal device that had led us here. That matched the recon team’s report.

And eventually, the hall came to an end—not terminating in a proper sense, by some design, but compressing into a smashed heap of metal and dirt that blocked any further passage.

All in all, we found nothing more interesting than the evidence of a few more mole residences.

“All right,” Caspersen said, “anyone need to double back to anything in particular?”

“I’d like to return to the server room, if we can,” Dr. Verner requested.

“What for, you damned sadist?” the professor asked. “There’s nothing left.”

“It’s possible we overlooked something.”

The professor snorted. “Possible you overlooked something, you mean. I built half of those machines. I didn’t overlook anything.”

“Still,” Verner persisted. “Unless you’ve got something more pressing?”

“All right, if no one needs to go anywhere else, computer room it is.”

The professor groaned. In fact, he kept on complaining until we were there and all the while Dr. Verner examined the badly decayed servers.

Despite his protests, though, when Caspersen sent Cohen, Connor, and the two engineers to join the rest of the party, the professor insisted on staying. Griping the entire time, he waited out Dr. Verner’s investigations.

He quickly and gleefully laid to rest my curiosity as to why, exactly, he would stay when he so clearly found the exercise to be an agony. “So, we’re waiting, Dr. Verner…do tell us, what did you discover that I overlooked?”

Ignoring the professor altogether, the other man addressed Caspersen. “I’d been hoping to retrieve something of use, Captain, but I’m afraid we’re well past that point.”

The professor snorted derisively. “And since when does anyone, much less a physicist, have to confirm what I’ve already said? You might as well have asked a rock for a second opinion—it would have had as much chance at faulting me.”

Caspersen cleared her throat. “All right, I appreciate the effort, Dr. Verner. Let’s rejoin the rest of the crew.”

This was too much for the professor, who sputtered indignantly at the idea Verner had done anything whatsoever of use as he followed along.

The crew, as it happened, waited on the bridge, huddled together in hushed conversation. Seeing them, their backs to us, I had the uneasy thought the Final Act was upon us, and something told me this was shaping up to be a tragedy.

“Connor?” Caspersen called.

“Captain,” the other woman acknowledged, turning toward us. “Dr. Wu and Dr. Ellis have…news.”

My heart sank. Her tone matched Kayleigh’s grim expression. It matched Michelle’s haunted eyes and the troubled posture of the rest of the crew. And none of it promised good news. Fuck.

Caspersen sensed it, too, because she nodded resolutely and picked up her step. It wasn’t until we reached the rest of the band that she asked, “Well?”

Michelle glanced at Kayleigh, and Kayleigh glanced at Dr. Kimutai. Kim spread his hands and turned to Connor.

Finally, Kayleigh spoke. “The bones? The crew that we found in the pods?”

“Yes? What about them?”

“The marks that we saw on them? You remember, the marks Connor and Carter and Russell saw?”

Caspersen nodded. “I remember. What about them?”

Kayleigh met her gaze. “They’re human, Tracie—marks from human teeth and human tools.”

“You’re telling me…” Caspersen said measuredly, “the catastrophe that hit the crew…was human? The things that ate the crew…were humans?”

Kayleigh nodded. “There’s knife marks on some of the bones. Some look like they’ve been gnawed. And the cause of death… I mean, it’s impossible to tell in some cases, but some of the skulls? Blunt force trauma. Gun shots.” She shook her head. “Tracie, these people were killed—by other people. I don’t think this was any external catastrophe. I think…I think the crew turned on itself. Cannibalized itself.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“MOTHER—” I CLAMPED down on the last part of the word before it escaped my mouth. I grunted instead as the panel I’d been prying from the wall slipped, clattering down to land with special emphasis on my toes.

“You okay?” Kayleigh asked.

“Yeah. Damned panel didn’t want to come out. Until it did, and got my foot in the process.”

“Well, be careful. You never know what’s behind these things.”

That much was certainly true. We were all still reeling from the revelation that our mission hadn’t just gone awry because of damage to the ship but because some portion of the crew—the people we’d worked and trained beside day after day, month after month—had descended into cannibalism and murder. Caspersen decided we needed to make a thorough sweep of the ship for supplies, restock anything we could, and figure out what we were going to do next.

Our position, if we were honest with ourselves, was not a great one. The original crew had fallen to madness and murder—either some or all of them. Now we, a handful of Johnny-come-latelies from the original voyage, had stumbled blindly into the scene. We had no idea what kind of world we’d woken up into. We had no idea if the cannibal descendants of the crew had preserved any knowledge of their ancestors.

But none of it mattered. Their ancestors had turned on the rest of the crew and devoured them. We harbored no delusion that anything would compel decency from their descendants. Joint purpose, camaraderie, even shared circumstance had not stayed the hands of the first cannibals. What would persuade their heirs toward anything resembling humanity?

Fire and steel. The oldest, worst, and most consistent tool in the human arsenal.

From what we’d seen of our cohabitants of Kepler-186f, mercy and compassion were relics of the past, like the Genesis II. Like us. But these cannibals retained all the same vulnerabilities, the same fear of death, as men from our own era.

So here we were, searching for fire and steel. Caspersen had theorized there were probably items of use stashed behind the pod walls. “I’m sure we weren’t the only ones to think of it,” she’d said. “And some of it might still be there.”

Which was what we were doing at the moment—pulling the pods apart and searching every inch for anything of use.

Many of the pods had been empty from the beginning or long since picked clean. But we’d made a surprising number of finds. Much of it had been personal mementos. We found photographs from happier times and images of crew members’ family that had passed prior to the voyage. We stumbled across other artifacts, too, from jewelry to religious texts. In one of the civilian pods, we found an old, handwritten notebook full of recipes. In another, someone had stashed a pile of adult magazines.

But among all the evidence of humanity’s less destructive tendencies, we found what we were looking for: weapons and supplies. Most of it had been stored in the same lockers in which we’d transported our own contraband, preserving it in its long journey across deep space—and inadvertently saving it for our use. The few items we found without any such protection had long since shriveled or decayed past the point of use or, in some cases, even recognition.

The lockers, however, provided us with a decent set of weapons and ammunition, a handful of medical supplies, and even some stolen MREs. Strange as it was, in the midst of such dire prospects as ours, our little haul cheered us rather more than it probably should have.

For my part, I threw myself into my work with gusto to avoid thinking too long on what came next, when our supply run finished. I’d been paired with Kayleigh to search a section of the upper hall. The rest of the crew had been similarly divided and a set of watchmen assigned to the gun. I was tasked with removing the panels, and she with retrieving anything of value.

We’d discovered a few boxes of ammo and two pistols so far. For all its stubbornness, however, the latest panel hid no great finds.

“Looks like you suffered for nothing,” Kayleigh declared after examining the empty space.

I grunted and started fitting the panel back into place. “All right, we’re done in this room, then. As soon as I get this damned thing back.”

She smiled at me. “You need any help?”

“I got it. Just one second. This…piece…of…shit…isn’t cooperating,” I said between grunts.

She gave me a moment, then asked, “You sure?”

“I got it,” I lied. I didn’t, but I was not about to let a piece of wall paneling defeat me either. “I—” I broke off suddenly, dropping the panel a second time as a short burst of gunfire tore through the air.

“Fuck. It’s the M60,” I said as another followed the first, and shouting came from down the hall. Which meant only one thing. We were under attack. “Quick, we need to get back to base.”

Kayleigh needed no prodding; she started moving for the door almost before I’d finished the sentence. We burst into the hall, Cohen and the professor right behind us, with more footsteps down the hall as the others fell in line. The bursts of gunfire came pretty steadily now. We all ran for the gun.

Granges and Connor had been stationed there, and Connor was firing. The far end of the hall, where sunlight used to stream in, seemed to have been blocked up. It took a moment to figure out why, but the nearer we got, the clearer the reason became—a fast-moving wall of bodies was descending on us from the entrance.

Caspersen reached the gun before we did. “Fucking cannibals.” Throwing a quick glance around to ascertain where everyone was, she started barking orders. “Johnson, get the civilians inside, now. The rest of you, take up a position and kill these sons of bitches.”

I’d just turned to follow the directive when she caught up my arm.

“Give them guns, make sure they know what to do if they get past us. And Nikkole? Make sure they know that no matter what happens, they should not let themselves be taken alive. You understand?”

I nodded. If the irregularity of her addressing me by my first name hadn’t already braced me for something bad, the grim tone would have done the trick. Still, this was about as bad as it got. I gritted my teeth and started giving orders. “All right, everyone, get inside, get inside!”

The civilians ran past me. Kayleigh. Carter. Madison. I checked the names off, one by one, in my mind. When they were all in the storage room, I followed. After shutting the door against the sound of gunfire, the short bursts of machinegun fire, and the constant string of rifle shots, I addressed them. “All right, listen up. Any one hurt?”

This was the wrong question to lead with because everyone ignored it, instead demanding reassurances about our situation. Reassurances that I, unfortunately, could not give. “Calm down. Hey, listen up. People.”

Kayleigh and Kim joined in my efforts to quiet the crowd, and in a moment, we’d restored order.

“Listen,” I said, “we’ve got the guns, all right? We’ve got the M60. We’re going to do everything we can to keep those motherfuckers out of here, and with the weapon power we have, we’re probably going to be successful. But”—I tried to exude a calming confidence—“there’s a lot of them. So we want you to be armed.” A murmur rose from the crowd, indicating that my efforts hadn’t been quite as successful as I would have liked. “Come on; you guys all know how to use a gun. They covered this in basic training.”

“Yeah, but…not to fight,” Rodgers protested.

“We’re not expecting you to fight. Just, take a gun, make sure it’s loaded, keep the safety on. Don’t shoot each other. Hopefully, you’ll be able to turn ’em in without having to fire a shot. But if things go south for us out there, would you rather be armed or not?”

Heads started nodding.

“Definitely,” Kayleigh agreed.

“Already am.” The professor scoffed. “Just let those cannibal fucks come near me.”

“I will take a gun too.” Dr. Kim nodded.

One by one, the rest of the voices joined in.

“Good. Now, you know how to shoot. If it comes to it, it’s going to be close quarters. Chances are you’re going to be looking them in the eyes when you pull the trigger. Don’t you hesitate; you understand? You hesitate, you will die. Because they will not be hesitating. We’re a meal to them. You might see a man, but they’re going to see dinner. They’re not going to hesitate to kill.”

“Neither will I,” the professor assured, waving his pistol over his head.

“Good. In the meantime, keep the safeties on. And one other thing.” I hesitated. For a full two or three seconds, I heard nothing but the gunfire beyond. “Look, I don’t know how to say this any differently, so I’m just going to say it. If it comes to it—and I promise you, it will be over our dead bodies—but if it comes to it, and they get in here…make sure you save at least one round. You don’t want to be taken alive by these guys.”

I had expected protests or a wave of panic at this. I got neither. They nodded again, slowly. The thought, then, had occurred to them as well.

“All right, I’m going back out there. You know where the guns are; you know where the ammo is. Keep the door shut. And if it sounds like they’re winning, you lock it, you understand?”

And with that, I left. Keeping low so my head didn’t rise above the barriers we’d erected, I crawled toward the rest of the group. Caspersen had taken the M60, and Matt was acting as gunner’s assistant. Everyone else had taken up a position and was raining hell on the cannibals.

I took a spot beside Connor. We’d spread out along the corridor, angled so as to situate ourselves as much behind cover as possible while still providing a vantage point from which to shoot. The Keplerites poured in, packing the hall with bodies. Caspersen was doing her best to keep them back, and we were picking off anyone who managed to get too close.

The fact was, there were a damned lot of them. Their weapons couldn’t match our bullets, but the sheer force of numbers they had scared the hell out of me. Already, great piles of bodies amassed in spots here and there, and still, they came as if they feared nothing.

Whatever had happened in the interim since we’d met that first party of raiders, they’d steeled themselves to face gunfire. These men weren’t running away. They didn’t flinch at the sound or hesitate as their men went down. They seemed in a race to meet death, leaping over the downed bodies of their comrades in their eagerness to get to us.

They had their darts with them as well, but these quills hadn’t been coated in the dark substance that tipped their sleep darts. Rather, they carried a bright yellow tip. I guessed the difference had nothing to do with aesthetics. I guessed the sleep these darts would bring would be of a permanent kind. Still, behind our fortifications, we remained relatively safe. Most of the quills bounced off the barriers, and the few that made it past landed harmlessly in the empty hall.

I fired as fast as I could find targets. I think we all did. Line after line of leather and fur–clad bodies fell, just to make room for another wave, each pressing a little closer than the previous had gotten.

Somewhere in the midst of this, it occurred to me there seemed to be a haze in the air. The distant streams of sunlight from the open end of the ship—what could get past the invading horde—had dimmed. The clear midmorning light had gone gray and grim.

I paused to reload. When I glanced up again, the wall had ebbed closer yet, and for a moment, I had to focus on the new targets. I almost forgot about this new development.

A spear flew past Connor and me, coming dangerously close to the pair of us. “Fuck,” she said, putting a bullet between the eyes of the thrower.

He’d had a good arm—few would have been able to chuck a spear that far. But it was more than a little worrying that we were now within range of these projectiles.

And then the smell hit me. “Smoke.” It was faint, a light, acrid tinge to the air, and it burned my eyes. But it explained the sudden haziness and how the hall had gone dark.

“What?” Connor asked without missing a shot.

“There’s smoke in the air.”

The observation was a little too late to be particularly helpful though. Several rows of cannibals dropped suddenly and deliberately, not because they’d been shot but to make room for the figures behind them.

And these—men? They seemed not men but ghouls that had taken the form of men. Emerging from a cloud of billowing smoke, three large, humanoid shapes stepped into view carrying smoking torches behind them. They were, at first glance, naked from head to toe. As near as I could tell, they were human beings. But they seemed at the same time not human, as if I gazed into the face of a human puppet or some sort of humanoid ghost or possessed figure. As if the eyes that stared back at me were of some otherworldly demon.

The eyes were alive, full of vigor and hate. But the skin of the face hung almost like a mask, loose in places where it should have been taut, without evidence of muscular activity despite movement.

I wasn’t, as a rule, a superstitious woman, but at the sight of that trio, a chill settled in me to my very core. I couldn’t articulate why, but I was deeply, profoundly shaken as I watched those soulless faces.

It took a moment of further observation to understand. The duality I’d seen in their faces carried over to the rest of their bodies. One in particular, the rightmost warrior, caught my eye for the sheer grotesqueness of his form. His great chest seemed stretched, and the movement of his overall body seemed at odds with the movement of his flesh. Again, I felt as if I was watching a form possessed, driven by a will other than its own. A puppet. I had the impression this vacant creature before me was but a performer’s mask, hiding the true monster below.

And then I understood. They were not naked at all. These men—these monsters—wore the skin of other men like clothing. The eyes that seemed out of place, the expressionless faces, the look of an outer form that didn’t quite fit its body—it all made sense.

Terrible, morbid sense.

I opened fire. I think I was screaming, full of rage and terror. I put two bullets in my monster’s head and saw someone else had blown a hole through his chest. He went down in a cloud of smoke and blood.

I turned to his nearest companion. He was mid-throw, in the process of hurling the smoking bundle he carried at us, when half a dozen bullets ripped into him.

The final skin-walker met a similar fate, but a moment too late. He’d already loosed his smoldering smoke bomb before a well-placed round released both his stolen hide and the monster inside from life.

It landed at the base of Caspersen’s machine gun nest. I was a good distance behind her, but I felt like my eyes had caught fire as the smoke billowed past the barrier. I had no idea what the bombs were made of. But whatever the hell it was, I didn’t wonder that the skin-walkers ran in front of the smoke, with the worst always behind them.

At the same time we were recoiling, the wave of cannibals that dove aside to let the skin-walkers pass suddenly sprang to life. Fighting the tears streaming down my cheeks, I held my ground and tried to aim.

I’d assumed Caspersen and Matt would fall back. It took everything in me to hold my position as the smoke hit me, and they were in the thick of it. But I still heard the ratt-tatt-tatt of machinegun fire and saw her silhouette amidst the billows of smoke.

She wasn’t alone either. Matt—that crazy son of a bitch—was there too. He dove into the thick of the smoke, choking and wheezing over the sound of gunfire. In a minute, he stood, the smoke bomb in hand, and hurled it as far away from the nest as possible.

In the meantime, Caspersen didn’t relent. Neither did the rest of us. For an instant, it looked as if the cannibals might make it past our defenses. But each shot, each burst of machinegun fire, made that less and less likely.

In a minute, the last wave of Keplerites had either turned tail, racing for the exit, or lay dying among their own smoke bombs.

We had won the first round.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

ONLY AFTER THE last cannibal disappeared into the forest, to our cheers, did Caspersen relinquish the gun. And when she turned, she was practically unrecognizable. Tears streamed from red, bloodshot eyes, and her breathing came in loud, hoarse gulps. Her entire face had swelled up and turned red.

Matt didn’t look any better. His cheeks had swollen into great puffs over the top of his mask, and the whites of his eyes had gone almost entirely red.

We raced to escort them to the supply room in the hope Kayleigh might be able to do something—anything—to help.

Caspersen didn’t resist, but she gave orders the entire time. “Don’t leave the gun unattended,” and “make sure there are no survivors,” and “we don’t want any surprises; you hear Johnson?” Matt was wheezing too much to say anything at all.

“Kayleigh,” I called, bursting into the room. I ignored the barrel of the professor’s pistol, which trembled about two inches from my face as I first stepped in, and tried not to consider how close I’d come to being shot. “Kayleigh, quick. Caspersen’s been hurt.”

“And Matt,” Connor put in. “Sons of bitches threw some sort of smoke bomb.”

“I’m okay,” Caspersen wheezed, gesturing toward Matt. “He got the worst of it.”

Matt tried to choke out some assurance of his own, but a coughing turned vomiting fit cut short the knight-in-shining-armor routine.

Kayleigh, meanwhile, moved with the precision and determination of someone who actually knew what she was doing, so I got out of her way. “All right, don’t talk. Here, let’s get you away from that.” She backed Matt away from the puddle of vomit and lowered him into a seat. “Carter, I need water. Right away.”

“What?” The professor seemed surprised, and not pleasantly, to be called on.

“Water. Now.” Then to Caspersen: “Okay, Tracie, you shouldn’t be standing either. Here.” Deftly lowering her patient, Kayleigh continued, “Johnson, what are we dealing with? What the hell is this smoke bomb?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It resembled…I don’t know, a bundle of weeds or something. It was smoldering. I didn’t get close to it, but it burned like hell to breathe it in, even through the mask. And my eyeballs felt like they were on fire.”

The professor, meanwhile, had produced a canteen of water and thrust it toward Kayleigh. “Here.”

“Good. Get another.” She turned back to Caspersen. “I’m going to try to flush your eyes out, okay? I need you to open them as wide as you can.”

“Matt first,” Caspersen wheezed. “Johnson, need you back out there.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to leave without at least knowing she was going to be okay. On the other hand, I had exactly no idea of how to help anyway.

Kayleigh seemed to sense my reluctance. “Go. I’ll get you if you’re needed.”

I left, casting a final glimpse over my shoulder. The last thing I saw was the professor’s scowling expression as he returned with another canteen, and Caspersen’s face, bloated and discolored.

I tried to swallow the fear that sight inspired and turned to the work at hand. With Caspersen down, I was now the lone captain on board. And as the highest-ranking officer fit for duty, it would fall on me to lead.

“All right,” I said as I stepped out, Connor following in my footsteps. “Caspersen is in good hands, so we need to get to work.”

Russell was a few steps behind us. The rest of the group had stayed outside by the gun, on orders.

“What now?” Granges asked.

“Now? We check for wounded, make sure there’s no one left to surprise us.” So maybe I wasn’t issuing my own orders, yet. But as long as I was confidently parroting Caspersen’s, I figured I was doing okay. “Granges, you and Cohen stay with the gun. You see anything so much as poking its head into this ship, you shoot it. Russell, you and Connor with me.”

Ours was a uniquely grisly task, as we had to sort through the downed cannibals and figure out what to do with whatever survivors we encountered—all without getting ourselves killed in any final act of vengeance. We also had to keep ourselves well within the ship and away from view to the outside world. The chatter of our enemies rang loud and clear outside, and no one wanted to be the poor fool who poked their head up and wound up skewered on a spear.

We had to move fast. If there’d ever been any doubt, the voices assembled outside made it clear: this was only the beginning. Round one had ended, but there’d be more to come.

Mostly, we encountered dead bodies. The hall ran with blood, and chunks of flesh and gore littered it. Survivors were few and far between. This was less a testament to our steady aim than a product of our superior weapon power and their inferior armor. Among those we found still clinging to life, few had long left, even with medical care. One had been riddled with bullets, and a terrible blend of liquids streamed through his wounds. Another gurgled up blood with every breath. These were easy decisions—we either ended their suffering or left them to die in agony. Connor said we should conserve the rounds, and maybe she was right. But we didn’t.

The real dilemma came with those who might have survived with medical attention. We came across two such men. One had taken a bullet to the leg, splintering the femur and ripping a massive chunk of his thigh apart. He’d almost certainly lose the leg but might live if we stopped the bleeding and got him care. The second’s prognosis proved better yet—he seemed completely uninjured. He’d huddled beside a pair of bodies and lay in wait as we approached. By the rules of engagement, at least back on Earth, we should render care where needed and humanely capture the enemy combatants.

Did the rules of engagement apply on an alien planet, where supplies were thin and the enemy wanted to make a meal of you?

I didn’t have to sort through the practical, moral, and ethical implications though. In both cases, the Keplerites acted first. The guy with the leg shot struck out with a great cleaver as I neared, and Russell put a bullet through his head before he could do any damage. The second, the one playing dead, had his blowgun and a dart at the ready. He might well have killed us if Connor hadn’t spotted a flicker of movement and reacted accordingly.

In the circumstance, we could do nothing else. Still, there was something particularly distasteful about killing a defeated man. Even if he did mean to cannibalize you.

I forgot something of my discomfort when we returned to the skin-walkers. This happened less by choice than necessity. We’d already made quite sure they were dead, and I would have been entirely happy to ignore them henceforth. But Kayleigh, presumably having concluded her efforts for Caspersen and Law, slowly opened the door of the storeroom.

She called out, “Nikkole?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it safe to come out?” She peeked her head out.

“For now, I guess. Just, keep low.” I headed over to the door. I suspected she had something to tell me about her patients. Since she seemed to want to be out of their hearing, I feared it wouldn’t be good news. I waited until she stepped out and closed the pod behind her. Then I asked, “Are they okay?”

She shot me a worried glance. “To be honest, I don’t know. The inflammation is really bad. I can’t tell if it’s temporary, like a bad case of inhaling smoke, or if there’s going to be any long-term damage.” Her forehead creased. “That smoke bomb, is it still around?”

“Yeah.” It was still in the hall, where Matt had thrown it. It had burned itself out, leaving only a smoking stub, and most of the smoke had cleared up by now. We’d given it a wide berth during our macabre search mission.

“Can I see it?”

“It’s still smoldering,” I cautioned.

“I’d like to get an idea of what we’re dealing with.”

“All right. Come with me. But, stay low. They’re still out there, and they’re probably coming back. We just don’t know when.”

By this point, the bombs were little more than glowing clumps. My eyes started watering as we got near, but Kayleigh moved close enough to prod it with her foot.

It was a cluster of some sort of thin, tubular vegetation, bound with a cord. Much of the cord and most of the plants had burned away, but what remained was enough to impress me it was some sort of grassy weed—possibly even the same weed we’d found in the foothills.

She got close enough to examine it and remained until her eyes started watering; then she pulled back, got her breath, and did it again. She repeated this cycle a few times before she stood, eyes red and glistening, and shook her head. “I wish I had my damned lab.”

“You think they’re going to be okay?”

“I don’t know.” Then, she paused to frown. “Hey, how did the cannibals get them in here? The smoke bombs, I mean?”

I grimaced with an offhand gesture to the skin-walkers. “They carried them in. One of them was able to throw this one before we shot him.”

“You mean, they came in with them already lit? While they were smoking?”

“Yeah. But they were running, and they carried the bundles behind, you know? So the smoke followed them?”

I noticed a gleam in her eyes beyond half-formed tears. “Are they wearing any sort of face coverings? Masks?”

“What?” The question was so unexpected I did a double take. I had deliberately not mentioned this horror to the civilians and was pretty sure Caspersen would have the good sense to keep it under wraps too. Did Frat Boy spill the beans?

Surprise crossed her face at my reaction. “To stop the smoke from affecting their eyes or lungs?”

“Oh.” I hesitated. In a way, they’d been wearing masks, I supposed. But I couldn’t imagine any use for them beyond the psychological impact on their foes. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay. Where are they? The guys who brought the bombs?”

I tried to think of a reason to put her off this line of inquiry. “Actually, Kayleigh, maybe you should head back to the room now. Check on Caspersen and Matt. They probably shouldn’t be left alone until we know they’re okay.”

She stared at me quizzically. “What are you talking about? My best chance of helping them is figuring out what we’re dealing with.”

“It’s dangerous. They’re still out there. They might be coming back. You shouldn’t be…” I trailed off as she’d brushed past me, heading in the direction I’d indicated a moment earlier.

“It’ll only take a minute, Johnson, and then I’ll be done. Which ones were they?”

“Kayleigh, wait.” I caught her arm, and she regarded me with genuine surprise. I knew I had to level with her. There was no getting around that now. “There’s something there.” Her eyes darted to the entrance, and she instinctively ducked. “Not alive,” I continued. “Not anymore.”

She straightened, her brow furrowing with concern. “What are you talking about, Nikkole?”

“Listen, this is… Kayleigh, what’s over there…it’s bad. Worse than anything I’ve ever seen.”

She scanned the hall and then turned back to me. “I’ve seen corpses before. Long before I ever got on this ship. Not this many, but I can handle it.”

I didn’t doubt that. But I wasn’t talking about corpses. “Not dead bodies. Worse.” There was no delicate way to say this, no way to downplay the horror. So I went for it. “Those men…they’re…they’re wearing human skin. Someone else’s skin, I mean.”

It took a moment for the words to register, and then she glanced between the bodies and me. “You mean…wearing skin?”

I nodded. She’d gone quite pale, so I reached out a hand to steady her. “Maybe we should go back now?” I expected her to acquiesce this time, now that she understood the full measure of the horror.

But she raised her chin resolutely. “No. I need to see them.”

“Kayleigh…”

She clasped my forearm reassuringly, and I knew she didn’t need a supporting hand. “If they’ve got some sort of protective gear on, I need to know, Nikkole. Because if they don’t…they’re not worried about long-term effects.”

I tried to ignore the shiver that ran up my back as I declared, “If you want, I’ll look for you.”

She hesitated but shook her head again. “I’ll do it. I’m the doctor.”

Miserably, I gestured to the nearest skin-walkers. “All right.” If I couldn’t dissuade her, I’d go with her as a show of moral support. Although, if I was honest with myself, the idea made me so damned queasy I doubted I’d be much help. Still, I followed her and tried my best to seem unaffected by the monster at whose side she paused.

For her part, Kayleigh was remarkably calm. She went pale again as she knelt by the dead man, and her hands trembled a little as she examined the mask.

It seemed all the more terrible from this vantage—and it’d been bad enough at a distance. Seams and tears that hadn’t been visible from afar covered the skin suit. They only emphasized the unspeakably gruesome nature of the Frankenstein-esque patchwork. Rough stitching and coarse edges appeared here and there. As I’d noticed before, the outer shell seemed too small for the wearer.

But the true terror lay in the face. The skin of the poor soul, whose body this had once been, ended in worn, fraying holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. From these gaping apertures, the cannibal’s own features protruded. The mask seemed old, and it too had been torn in places. A gash ran down the back of the head, through which the wearer’s hair peeked out. A few cuts marred the cheek, too, and revealed the skin of the man underneath.

More than anything, though, it was the effect of seeing this poor, dead face take on a shape that wasn’t its own, morphing into a monstrous combination of the two, which struck me with a deep, visceral horror.

I nearly jumped out of my own skin when, after a minute, Kayleigh asked for help in turning him over. And I tried not to cringe as I acquiesced.

The skin-walker had been larger than most, and he was deadweight now. It took both of us working together to get him turned over.

Here, the Frankenstein effect seemed even more pronounced. I almost dropped the cannibal at first glimpse. Stitching and lacing ran up the body, confirming my earlier observation that the skin-walker had been somewhat larger than his victim. Like a corset laced around someone a few sizes too large for it, the skin suit wrapped nearly around the cannibal, but left a strip of bare back, crisscrossed by ties in the center. This bare strip followed down the legs and arms, terminating in the same jagged edges that had marked the facial features. Even the back of the head had a seam of laces running up it.

“Fuck,” Kayleigh breathed. “Imagine…wearing this.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Do you have a knife?”

“Here.”

She took it, drew a deep breath, and then snipped the cords, one by one. I think we both shivered as the skin suit slid off the cannibal. For a minute, she said nothing. But then she handed me back the knife with a “Thanks. Can you help me turn him back?”

I did as requested. The skin-walker lay on his back against a throw of human skin, stark naked and staring with dead eyes at the ceiling.

“All right. They weren’t wearing any sort of breathing apparatus or eye protection. Which means they weren’t worried about effects.” She paused and added, “Or weren’t planning to survive.”

“So Caspersen and Matt…?”

“May be okay.”

I stood as she did. “And you?”

She glanced up at that. “What?”

Her tone was steady, but her eyes and posture told another story as she worked hard to exert control.

“Hell, Kayleigh. You know what I’m saying—that’s some twisted shit we just saw. Are you okay?”

“Of course.”

“You sure?”

Her gaze flickered. “I do feel a little like puking,” she admitted. “But…I’m okay.”

Chapter Thirty

KAYLEIGH WAITED BEHIND the barricades until her stomach settled. Then she returned to the rest of the crew. She understood why we didn’t want to broadcast news about the skin-walkers and had agreed it could wait until the siege was over—if we lived that long.

Based on our experience with the smoke bombs, she’d assigned herself the task of restoring the filtering system for the storerooms and threw herself into the work with even more vigor than usual. I had the impression, watching her come and go as she scavenged parts from other pods, that she would be okay. She was made of strong stuff; she was a survivor.

The rest of us, meanwhile, worked at disposing of the bodies. Every once in a while, we caught sight of a cannibal at the far end of the ship and opened fire. Mostly, though, we kept tabs on them based on the sounds coming outside the Genesis. The increasingly loud chanting, hollering, and hooting made clear they hadn’t gone anywhere, and weren’t planning on it.

Which meant we were stuck with the bodies, for now anyway. Since we didn’t know how long our attackers meant to keep us trapped, it seemed prudent to clear the dead. Festering corpses would certainly not make our stay any better. We picked a vacant pod to serve as a temporary tomb, and when we’d filled it beyond practical use, we chose a second.

Then we worked on setting up more barricades. Though I didn’t know one way or the other, I had a very strong hunch we were going to need them sooner rather than later.

A few hours passed, and despite occasional sightings and an ongoing ruckus audible throughout the ship, the cannibals didn’t make a move. It was now that Caspersen rejoined us. The swelling had gone down, but she looked terrible. Her eyes were still bloodshot, and her breathing rough. She dismissed my “You sure you should be out here?” as I figured she would. I was pretty sure she shouldn’t be up and about. But I was equally sure if our situation had been reversed, there was no chance in hell I’d have remained in sick bay.

She examined the deck and nodded. “Good job. What about ammo? How are we doing?”

“We’re good on rifle ammo. But we’re getting low on the gun.” By “the gun,” of course, I meant the machine gun.

“I was talking to Verner and Madison,” she croaked. “And Lee and Rodgers. We don’t have the fuel stores. Engines are gone. Nothing flammable. But the cryotubes…some of them are still operational.”

I shrugged. “I guess. That’s what Kayleigh was saying.”

“They think we can weaponize them.”

“Weaponize them?” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my tone as I spoke. “A cryotube?”

“No, not the tube. The liquid nitrogen.”

I looked up at that. “Damn. That’s good thinking.” Every pod around us contained liquid nitrogen or had at one point. If we could turn it into a weapon, we had an incredible supply at our fingertips.

But that was an awfully big if. “How?”

She offered a vague gesture. “I don’t fully understand it all, to be honest. But it sounds like we have most of what we need. Madison will fill you in on the details. Will you work with them?”

“Of course.” I frowned. She’d leaned against the wall for support, and her breathing still sounded heavy and rough. I wanted to advise her to take it easy, to get back to sick bay, at least until we needed her.

But I knew better than that, so I headed back to our quarters.

Matt sat propped up against the wall, looking about as bad as Caspersen had. The professor was organizing a stack of magazines in front of himself. Kimutai, Wu, and the geologists conversed quietly in the rear of the room. Dr. Verner and the three engineers were engrossed in a more animated conversation and glanced up eagerly when I came in.

“Captain Johnson,” Dr. Madison practically jumped up to greet me. “Tracie has relayed our weapons suggestion, then?” Ted Madison was a tall man, somewhere south of young but still north of old. In general, he struck me as reserved and even aloof, but at the moment, his eyes sparkled with enthusiasm.

“She mentioned you had an idea to use the liquid nitrogen canisters, yes.”

A murmur of satisfaction rose from the four men, and the trio that had so far held back now joined Madison. They swarmed around me and deluged me with questions.

“Have you ever worked with liquid nitrogen?”

“What do you know about liquid nitrogen?”

“Did you find a lot of intact nitrogen cannisters, Captain?”

Dr. Lee asked a different type of question. “You have heard of the flamethrower, Captain Johnson?”

“Of course she’s heard of a flamethrower,” the professor snapped, pausing from sorting magazines to glare at the assembled scientists.

I preferred a more tactful reminder. “I was in the military.”

“Military.” The professor snorted. “You don’t need to be in the military to know what a flamethrower is. Read a book, damn it.”

I cleared my throat. “Dr. Lee? What about flamethrowers?”

“Well, we, um, we have no fuel sources. For flamethrowers,” he replied.

I had the impression the professor’s comments had thrown him off his train of thought and cut his spiel short. He seemed flustered and discombobulated.

“That’s my understanding, yes.”

“And we are running out of our conventional rounds as well.”

I said nothing, deciding it was better not to interrupt.

“But if we can’t shoot our enemies, and we can’t burn them, let’s take the opposite approach. Let’s freeze them.”

“Well, I’m all for it, Doctor…but how do you propose we do that?”

He exchanged excited glances with his companions. “That’s the best part—the ship already has everything we need. With only some minor modifications of the cryotubes, we’ll transform the cooling apparatus into an incredible weapon of death.”

I knew they were excited, but if they could really invent the kind of weapon they thought they could, we needed to get to work now. It didn’t matter how good it was if we ended up the main course before we could build the damned thing. Of course, I didn’t want to say that outright because, well, there really was no nice way to say shut up and tell me what to do. So, I tried: “Great. How?”

“That means cut to the chase, dumbasses,” the professor offered.

For once, I almost welcomed his input. It seemed to have the desired effect too.

“We’ll need to get the liquid nitrogen tanks from the cryochambers, Captain,” Dr. Verner put in.

Finally. Specifics. “Okay,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Yes. Each chamber is fitted with a pressure valve to regulate flow and the tubing to deliver the liquid nitrogen to the chamber. We’re going to need those as well.” His eyes twinkled. “When we’ve got all that, we’ll be able to rig up a weapon that can spray a stream of icy death onto anyone in its way.”

His excitement defiantly struck me as a bit grizzly, but having encountered the skin-walkers, I was inclined to share it. “Great. Then let’s get to work.”

The engineers nodded in unison. “The best part,” Dr. Lee put in, “is it’s not just going to be one. We can make as many as we have chambers.”

We started to head to the door. Dr. Madison grinned. “Ice throwers. I think that’s what we should call them. That sounds pretty cool.”

“Tell me that wasn’t a pun.”

Dr. Rodgers ignored this detour and spoke to me. “Unlike a flamethrower, the beauty of an ice thrower is you don’t even need to concern yourself with any kind of ignition mechanism. Because you don’t need to ignite ice.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock.” The professor whistled. “You four really are a regular old brain trust, aren’t you?”

It was only now that I realized the professor seemed to have some idea of following us. He’d stuffed his magazines into his pockets and hurried after the group.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. The last thing I wanted was Mr. Trigger Happy trailing along while we were dealing with tanks of liquid nitrogen. That sounded like an express ticket to Deadville in the making.

He glanced behind him, realized no one was there and that I was addressing him, and shrugged. “What does it look like? Going with you clowns. If we’re going to get these tanks, the more of us working on it the better, right? I mean, the cannibals aren’t going to wait forever. It’ll be dinnertime soon.”

He had a point. I frowned. “All right, but put that damned gun away. You shoot one of these tanks, we’re all dead. Got it?”

He rolled his eyes, assuring me the safety was on.

But I didn’t budge. “Either the gun stays, or you do.”

He protested loudly, but in the end, agreed to a compromise. He would cede the gun to my safekeeping, and I’d return it if we wound up getting attacked.

The argument cost us a minute or two. But the ensuing noise had drawn the attention of more crewmembers, who now shared their intention to pitch in. So, leaving Matt, Robinson, and Michelle in the storeroom, we headed out.

Our first tank retrieval was essentially a proof of concept and a demonstration, with Dr. Rodgers showing us how to safely remove the tank and tubing they needed “without turning yourself into an icicle in the process.”

After that, though, we split up. For the next hour and a half, we retrieved every operable tank we came across. Once we’d gather a few, the engineers set to work while we kept up the scavenging.

Their murderous enthusiasm prompted us all to work at a feverish pace, and I found myself yet again impressed by how well the civilians were handling themselves. From Kayleigh to Matt, and Kim to the professor, everyone was giving their all. We were two shakes of a lamb’s tail away from death, but not a soul onboard had succumbed to panic or thrown in the towel. Not even the professor. On the contrary, he was doing himself proud, working as hard and fast as people half his age. Now, as long as he doesn’t shoot anyone…

I felt a swell of pride for this crew and for humanity too. The world might have gone to hell, but the indefatigable human spirit still survived. It reminded me of what Dr. Kimutai had said the other night about a few righteous men left to represent our species. Men and women, in this case, and nowhere near fifty. But half is surely better than none, right?

I had no delusions we had a good chance of making it out of here alive. I figured we’d probably die, and I figured every one of our crew knew it too. But I’d be damned if I’d go down without a fight. For a short time, something other than cannibals remained to represent humanity. And that was worth fighting for, whatever came of it in the end.

By the time Dr. Lee was ready to give his first demonstration of the finished ice thrower, a strange sense of anticipation, almost eagerness, had seized me. I felt readier than I’d ever been for a battle because no battle I’d ever fought mattered more than this one.

Lee said, “All right, so operation is really simple. You see this valve? You turn this, okay? It releases the nitrogen into the tube. Now this one—this one is important.” He pointed to a second valve on the end of the tubing. “The more you turn it, the more comes out. But don’t waste it. This stuff is lethal; you don’t need much, and we have a limited supply.” He seemed to be relishing his role as guide almost as much as the professor—who rolled his eyes at every other sentence—resented it.

“Now, here’s the important part. At least, if you don’t want to end up a popsicle.” Lee laughed at this, which I guessed signified it was a joke. When no one else laughed, he gestured to the end of the tubing. “Where you point this is where the liquid nitrogen goes. Do not—do not—point this at someone unless you mean to kill them. It’s like a gun, but deadlier.” He smiled and added, “And way cooler. Pun intended.”

I tried not to groan. The engineers chuckled. But we were all soon distracted by the demonstration itself. A whoosh of clear liquid surrounded Lee’s target. He’d aimed for a section of rusted debris over which a thick layer of moss had grown. In an instant, ice crystals encased the moss.

Lee smiled. “Instant death to living tissue.”

“Now, we’ve put together one for each of you,” Dr. Rodgers declared, co-opting his colleague’s demonstration. Then, with a sniff in the professor’s direction, he added, “Even you.

“A lot of the tanks were compromised, and the tubing was worse. But we’ve got enough to put a lot of these bastards on ice. Pun intended.

“So we sorted the tanks between the ones that will be reliable refills, and the ones that will popsicle-ify you if you try to use them. Use the refill pile. We want you to kill the bad guys, not yourselves.”

“Well, congratulations,” I said. “You’ve gone from men of science to remorseless, ice-cold killers. Pun intended.”

The professor groaned from deep in his gut. Rodgers, meanwhile, looked up at me, paused for half a moment, and then laughed. “Ice cold. Ha.”

The professor shook his head, at me or them or all of us; I couldn’t say.

“That pile is the refills. The use pile.” Madison pointed to a neatly organized stack of liquid nitrogen canisters. Then, he pointed to another, equally well-arranged collection. “And that’s the gruesome death pile. The do-not-use pile.

“We have two options with those. The first is, we get rid of them. The second is a bit riskier.”

“Risky, but we could get crazy payoffs,” Lee said. “Think of it like…upcycling it into a powerful weapon. Only we’d be getting rid of some volatile equipment in the meantime.”

“How?” I asked warily.

“The tanks are already unstable. If you shoot one of them—” Lee made a waving gesture with his hands. “—liquid nitrogen, spewing out in every direction.”

I exchanged glances with Caspersen, who had been observing the entire endeavor silently. Her expression rather mirrored my own thoughts. “Maybe as a last resort,” I said, pointing to the refills. “If…if we’ve run out of those ones, and we still need to freeze someone.”

Chapter Thirty-One

THE ENGINEERS’ DISAPPOINTMENT soon faded. Ice bombs might have been rejected, but as they demonstrated how to change nitrogen tanks, they remembered their original enthusiasm. And, after a few more temperature-themed puns, all seemed well again.

Then the long wait began. Granges and Russell took up positions in chambers down the hall, lying in wait to spring a trap on the first unlucky cannibals who ventured into the ship. A deadly zeal filled the civilians, and they took up places behind the barricades. Even Robinson and Michelle heard the excitement and joined in. Matt followed shortly thereafter, though he looked like he shouldn’t be on his feet, much less preparing for battle.

Lee made the most of the opportunity presented by three new warriors and repeated his demonstration.

The hours dragged by as the cannibals prepared for another attack outside the ship, and we waited inside. After the sun set, the reddish glow of fires sprang up outside. Shadows, great and numerous, flitted about beyond the ship. The sound of song and merriment continued as if our attackers were throwing a party and not preparing for a second deadly siege.

Dusk turned into dark, and the long wait seemed to have the opposite effect on those of us in the ship. We grew quieter and more apprehensive until you could feel the tension in the air. Even the professor, who had seemed to channel his fear into overt bloodlust, started to revert to his former jumpy state.

And then it came: a wave of bodies, emerging against the backdrop of fire and night.

Caspersen and Matt were back at the gun, but they held off firing. The cannibals raced down the hall, heading unawares toward Ghoul’s pod. The door burst open, and a stream of death engulfed the attackers.

The cannibals turned to ice statues before us as easily as the moss had done earlier. Lee hollered with delight.

At the same time as our side cheered, the Keplerites had to react to both an ambuscade as well as a new and terrible weapon. A few faltered and fell. But then horror turned to fury—and that fury turned on Russell.

It was my job to make sure no one got a chance to do anything about it. Caspersen had given me her M24 sniper rifle for that express purpose, and I watched the entanglement go down through the scope.

Russell had no problem disposing of those nearest him. My focus remained on those who wielded ranged weapons—anyone with a spear or a dart who looked like they might take a shot.

Crack.

Crack.

Crack.

I worked the bolt as quickly as I could, dropping targets as soon as they came into view. The sound ripped through the air, echoing off the walls of the ship, high above the cries of the cannibals. The gun’s precision was incredible, and I made every shot count.

Russell, meanwhile, started to retreat, heading back to the barricades. The cannibals followed with a dogged determination to survive long enough to finish off the man capable of delivering a blast of icy death.

They clearly weren’t expecting Granges to spring the same trap on them because he, too, took them by surprise when he emerged from his pod. He waited until Russell and a goodly horde of cannibals had passed and then unleashed a stream of death on the crowd. Cries of surprise and horror mixed with anger.

The engineers whooped with joy as they watched from behind the barricades. The two men worked in unison, the first taking full advantage of the sudden confusion the second’s appearance wrought on their attackers. The cannibals split, some turning back to face Granges and some focusing still on Russell. Between the two, and with my own judicious application of .308s, we left no one alive.

While I maintained covering fire, Granges wove his way between the human icicles to join Russell. They’d managed to put good distance between themselves and any living cannibals and made cover long before the attackers got close to them.

That was when Caspersen and Matt unleashed the full fury of the machine gun. The horrors of these past days, and everything leading up to this final battle, had impressed themselves so deeply on my mind that the sense of unfairness I’d once felt at such sights had long since vanished. On the contrary, every instinct for self-preservation, and every blood-thirsty impulse that those instincts generated, jumped into overdrive. Fair play and sportsmanship be damned. The Keplerites meant to kill and eat us, and maybe to skin us and wear it as their own. I’d take any advantage I could against that.

Body after body dropped. Now and then, a bullet tore through the frozen corpses Granges or Russell had left behind, shattering them into a thousand, icy shards. I was numb to anything but grim satisfaction and vague hope. Every downed cannibal, every dropped foe, kept that flicker of possibility alive.

And for a while, I thought that hope might not be misplaced. The crowd thinned under fire, and reinforcements did not appear. In a minute, Caspersen had cleared the hall. No one followed.

Rodgers and Madison burst into cheering, and the professor shouted challenges to the “cannibalistic cowards.”

But I felt, instinctively, that something was off. It wasn’t this easy; it couldn’t be. They’d already proved earlier today they wouldn’t stop, not even after heavy losses. They’d taken all day to mount a second attack. There was no chance, my mind kicked in, that they’d abandon it this easily.

“Quiet,” Caspersen called.

My heart sank. She feels it too, then. The end of the hall remained unobstructed, and for all that we could see, we were utterly alone in this ship—alone, save the dead that had fallen here and frozen there. But now and again noises, a distant thump or a metallic squealing sounded. Which meant we were not so alone as it appeared.

I couldn’t say how long this new wait lasted, although I suspected it was only a matter of minutes. At the time, it seemed interminable. The civilians, many of whom had initially believed themselves to be witnesses to a quick victory, sat quiet and tense. But no more so, I think, than the rest of us. The occasional crack, crack of Kayleigh’s nails was about the only sound emanating from our side. We all waited with bated breath.

The clangs and scrapes from the open end of the ship continued. Whatever our cannibal friends were up to, they were clearly working industriously at it.

I scanned that end of the ship through my scope, back and forth, over and over. And finally, I got a first glimpse of what they’d been up to. From one of the farthermost pods, nearest the breach in the ship, a glint of steel appeared.

At first, I watched in confusion as a three-or-four-foot-tall silvery strip grew, stretching in length until it was a good six feet long. Then another snaked out from a pod opposite it, and I noticed a clear patch running about a third of the length of the panel. Through this, I saw legs and knees, all crouched low. Glass.

“Shit,” I shouted. “They’re using the pod doors as shields.” The clanging and scraping made sense now. The pods had been designed to be easily dissembled, with quick release mechanisms wherever possible; it was how we’d been able to set up our own barricades so quickly. And these fuckers must have learned from that.

Seeing our barriers must have inspired them to take pod doors as shields of their own. And the charge we’d so congratulated ourselves on? That had been nothing more than a distraction, so a few of them could slip into the pods unnoticed.

They advanced slowly, crouched behind a set of doors designed to withstand just about anything. There wasn’t a round in our possession that could pierce them.

“Johnson, put a bullet in anything that shows itself above or below those doors,” Caspersen directed.

I nodded, watching through my scope. They were carrying the doors low to the ground and kept themselves crouched behind them. But every once in a while, the silhouette of a foot appeared in the gap between the invincible shield and floor.

I didn’t miss an opportunity. Through the slits of glass, men went down when my shots hit, and occasionally, the shields faltered. But though my hits caused plenty of podiatric pain among the cannibals, they never ran out of reinforcements to replace the downed. And the advance continued.

Caspersen, meanwhile, had sized up the situation and was reacting accordingly. “Cohen, Granges, over there. Russell, Connor, there. Their shields will have to come down when they reach our barricades, there’s not enough room to get past. Do not let them survive that. Civilians, to the rear. Stay behind cover. Engage only if they get close enough. Do not go out to meet them.”

Orders given, she turned her focus toward the gun. The Genesis rested at a downward angle, which meant that as the shield walls advanced farther down the tunnel, it exposed the rear of the cannibal force, where the elevation was higher. Because of the angle, we could see their heads and upper torsos above the pod doors, even though they kept low.

Caspersen and Matt took full advantage of that and poured round after round into the cannibal flank. I, meanwhile, did everything I could to take out the shield bearers. The rest of the soldiers and Marines joined, doing what they could with their own rifles.

But our best efforts succeeded only in slowing them.

We soon encountered another difficulty as well. We could do a little with our rifles to slow their advance, but the gun chewed through the reinforcements with a vengeance. Which was great—except Caspersen’s ammo supply had been low when we started. Before long, we heard the call we’d all been dreading. “I’m on my last belt.”

Fuck. I tried not to dwell on what we were going to do once we lost our most effective weapon. Instead, I focused on putting holes in any extremities that revealed themselves behind the pod doors. The best opportunities came when the shields reached a pile of bodies. They couldn’t be dragged along at the level of the floor but had to be lifted above the fallen. I was happy to add more bodies to those piles.

Still, the makeshift shield wall advanced, and then the inevitable click. The M60 was out of ammo. Caspersen and Matt took up battle rifles and kept pouring rounds into the incoming cannibal horde. But without the machine gun to slow them down, the hall soon overflowed with advancing bodies.

The steady advance of the pod doors picked up its pace as the stampede increased behind it. Our attackers hadn’t reached them yet, but they were close to our barriers now.

And then their progress stopped all of a sudden, and half a dozen forms darted upward, launching dark, oval shapes with them. They resembled tiny footballs, hurtling toward us.

Someone called out, “Grenade.”

The shape made sense then, and I wondered at how the cannibals had acquired weaponry of that sort. The wall resumed its advance even as my eyes traced the progress of these projectiles. One fell short, its trajectory arrested by a bullet that reached its thrower a second before release. Caspersen and Matt fell back as another angled for the machine gun nest. A third headed in my direction, flying high enough to pass over me but not high enough to pass by the civilians.

“Kayleigh!”

She’d taken cover below one of the pod doors we’d erected as a barrier, and right now, she was directly in the path of the grenade. Instinct rather than conscious thought propelled me to my feet. I reached her a second before impact and threw the full force of my weight against her.

She went sprawling back, and I felt the grenade land against my back. I had the fleeting thought that she would be safe, and I would take the brunt of the explosion. And then pain ripped through my sides and back, like a thousand jabs of flame.

But no explosion came. I registered the professor yelling. I couldn’t see much of anything. Pain blinded me, and I tried to crawl away. Then the sound of a pressurized spray came somewhere behind me. A blast of icy wind, far too close for comfort, chilled me to the bone.

“Nikkole…” Kayleigh had reached me.

At the same time, I was vaguely aware of the professor cackling with delight, “Take that, you fuckers.”

“Nikkole, are you okay?” Kayleigh said again.

I found, to my surprise, I hadn’t died. I was still very much alive and in a considerable amount of pain. “What the hell was that?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Some kind of nest, it looks like,” she said. “Like a hornet’s nest. Are you okay?”

“They’re dead now,” the professor added. “Froze the little bastards.”

My back still felt like it was on fire, but I tried to push myself up. The first attempt failed, and I would have face-planted on the floor if not for Kayleigh catching me. The second time, I got to my feet. “Stay back,” I warned, again through my teeth.

I ignored the concern in her expression and headed back to my post, past the now crystallized nest and the dozens of frozen insect bodies lying beside it. The cannibals had dropped their shield now, and a great flood of them washed over our barriers. Most of the military had switched to ice throwers. I drew Death from its holster and pressed forward to provide supporting fire.

My back and shoulders protested with every movement, and more than once, my vision clouded from the sheer intensity of the pain. I had a vague fear I might pass out and be left alive when the cannibals overran us. I gritted my teeth and focused on finding targets.

Cohen and Russell were in the forefront, their two ice throwers working in unison to stop anything that got near them dead in its tracks. Spears and other ranged weapons flew past them though. As before, I turned my attention to those attackers.

I ran through my first magazine, and then a second. Cohen and Russell fell back to swap out tanks; Connor and Granges took the lead.

Still, the cannibals showed no signs of stopping. It didn’t seem to matter how many of their fellows turned to ice before their eyes, or how many, screaming and terrified, found limbs suddenly frozen and inoperable. It didn’t matter how many lost their lives to gunfire or dropped with gaping holes punched through.

They kept coming, line after line.

They were near enough to see their faces now, to see the light of the moons and the fires outside reflected in their wild eyes. Caspersen and Matt, I could see, were still firing; I was running out of magazines.

I picked up my own ice thrower and pressed forward. We were slowly retreating. Despite our best efforts, the cannibals had been advancing faster than we could kill them.

The pain that had started in my shoulders and back had reached throughout my body, and my head throbbed with agony. My senses seemed dull, my thoughts lethargic. I knew one thing, and not much more than that: I—and all these people—were not long for this world. I had come here frozen and lost, and now I would leave it in a fever of agony.

Frankly, it pissed me off.

I turned on a jet of liquid nitrogen and drove forward into the cannibals. I wasn’t going to go out afraid and retreating. I wouldn’t wait and watch them turn to ice as they came at me. I’d bring death straight to those fuckers. They weren’t going to put me on the menu without working for it. No, when I went out, it would be with my boots on, taking out as many of them as I could.

I pushed past the frozen forms and made my way through the bodies at my feet. I think I was screaming as I went. I heard someone call my name, but I picked up my pace. I knew Caspersen and the rest of the team would try to stop me. But I couldn’t allow myself to be stopped.

Connor and Granges followed, the three of us charging the advancing cannibals. Spears flew all around us. Here and there a bullet tore through a Keplerite in our path, indicating that Caspersen and Matt hadn’t slacked off at all.

I was aware of being ghoulishly delighted with the destruction my ice thrower inflicted. I think I had half a mind to run all the way through the hall, freezing everyone in my path. I wasn’t entirely sure, though, because I was definitely more than half out of my mind at the moment.

Which was why I missed a rather glaring flaw in my plan—I would run out of liquid nitrogen long before I reached the end of the hall. Which, in the event, was exactly what happened. The stream of pressured nitrogen dwindled and then petered off completely. And my pain-induced euphoria turned to fear, and fear to panic.

Whipping Death out again, I started emptying my last magazine into the cannibals as I beat a hasty retreat. I was just about to take to my heels in flight when I saw that Cohen and Russell were barely three steps behind me.

“Swap your damned tank,” Ghoul shouted, brushing past me to deal with the descending wave.

Whether it was the rush of adrenalin at realizing how close I’d come to death, or if the hornets’ poison had finally started to clear, I don’t know. But something in the encounter roused my brain from its lethargy. I fell back to swap out tanks, more than a little amazed I’d survived such a bout of idiocy.

The engineers, as it happened, already had a refueled ice thrower ready, and trading this for my own, I returned. Cohen and Russell had fallen back to our first barrier, where we were better positioned than we had been in the midst of the hall.

Several of the civilians—inspired, I’m ashamed to say, by my recklessness—followed me to this barricade. Among them was the professor.

For a minute, he ducked behind the pod door, shaking at every shot, jumping every time a spear or dart flew overhead. And then, as if having mounted the requisite courage, he leaped to his feet, screaming wildly and spraying a steady stream of liquid nitrogen in the general direction of the cannibals.

He didn’t stop until he had emptied his tank—which was rather sooner than he should have, as he’d cranked the valve to its most open position. Then, after throwing the tank to the ground, he pulled his pistol.

For all of his enthusiasm, the professor’s real effectiveness lay with the liquid nitrogen rather than pistol. Still, he managed to take a few cannibals down before he ran out of ammo.

Even then, though, he hadn’t finished. Darting for the nearest spear, he seemed intent on leaping over the barricade to throw himself into the midst of the fray. And he might well have done it had not Connor caught up his arm and said, “Jesus! Easy. Get some more nitrogen.”

Working together, civilians and military alike, we managed to hold the first barricade for some time before sheer force of numbers drove us back to the second. During this retreat, Russell took a full hit from a Keplerite spear.

Kayleigh dragged him behind cover to do what she could. The rest of us were so intent on surviving we hardly noticed, except to register we were now down in numbers. We’d spent most of our ammo and gone through quite a number of the nitrogen tanks.

And somewhere in all of this, day had started to break. A dim light filled the ship, illuminating the grim reminders of what it had cost to stay alive so far—what it had cost and what our own eventual fates would be.

Still, the battle raged on. The cannibals poured into the ship as eagerly as they’d ever done, cutting through the frozen remains of their companions, when necessary, in their haste to get to us.

We hadn’t admitted defeat yet, but they had won. They knew it, and we knew it.

Still, as far as I was concerned, these sons of bitches were going to have to work for their meat today. Not even I anticipated just how hard though.

We all heard it at about the same time, some ten or so minutes after Russell had been wounded—a high, loud sound from outside, like a martial chorus. Our party recognized it vaguely, but the cannibals seemed to know it immediately.

Indecision struck our attackers, with some at the rear of the ship spinning around to vacate the premises. Even those who didn’t turn to leave threw a furtive glance toward the outdoors before continuing the assault. All at once, the swarm of bodies that had been pouring through the entry to our ship vanished.

We fought with renewed vigor at this, sensing some inexplicable shift in the winds. Explanation was not long in coming, for the strange chorus we’d heard gave way to the sounds of battle.

Or, more precisely, less battle, and more massacre.

Nor did the cannibals miss it, or the import. Those who remained turned tail and fled. In the course of a few minutes, we’d gone from facing certain death at the hands of cannibals to seeing our attackers run for their own lives. What this portended for our survival, however, was a mystery. Who—or what—was attacking our attackers, and what did they have in mind for us?

Chapter Thirty-Two

THE SOUNDS OF battle outside the ship died down until all we heard was chatter. I understood, then, the familiar refrain we’d noted before the cannibals fled. These were the voices that had accompanied our journey through the forest. The professor’s ghosts. The woodland spirits that had haunted our steps and fled our fire.

We could see very little through the windows on account of the moss and vines that covered the ship. Now and again, we caught a fleeting glimpse of forms passing by, nothing definite and nothing identifying, but enough to tell us we weren’t alone.

“All right,” Caspersen said. “We’re going to have to figure out what they want. And that means one of us has to go out there and meet them.” She handed her rifle to Matt. “I’m going to go. Johnson, if this doesn’t go well…” She met my gaze. “Do what you can.”

We all protested at this—it was too dangerous, the risks were too great, and so on. But she wouldn’t be dissuaded. And though the idea of her going bothered me, I understood and supported her reasons. We had to know what we were dealing with, and there was no way to do it except by marching out of hiding and facing it, whatever and whoever waited. That part I believed wholeheartedly. The part about me being in charge is where she’d lost me. The truth was, of the pair of us, she was the better leader. She always had been, from the first day we opened our eyes. She kept us going, she kept us focused, and she kept us from turning on one another.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “You stay here.”

“Let me go,” Matt said.

“I got this.” She went through her gear piece by piece, unclipping this from her belt, removing that from its holster until she was left with only a combat knife. She’d even surrendered her mask. “These are going to do you more good than me, if they’re hostile,” she explained. “And it doesn’t sound like they have guns. No sense changing that.”

When she finally concluded, she glanced between us and cracked a grin that almost belied the tenseness of her posture. “Well then. Here goes nothing.”

I grimaced as she turned. I knew if I’d been in her shoes, I’d be scared shitless as I headed down that long hall, perhaps for the last time. It seemed somehow worse to watch someone else take that walk. And yet, I knew her well enough to know that nothing I could say would change her mind now that she’d made it up.

A lesson, it seemed, Matt had not yet taken to heart because she hadn’t gone more than twenty steps before he darted after her. “Tracie, wait.”

“Matt, what are you doing?”

“Here,” He extended the rifle. “It should be me going. You know that.”

“What are you talking about?” She seemed more surprised than irritated.

“We…we need you. We need Johnson and Connor and Cohen and Russell. We need Kayleigh and Kim. We need—hell, we even need Carter. But…” He shrugged, and his point didn’t need further explanation. It was exactly what I’d said from the beginning—although, in the moment, I felt somewhat ashamed for having thought it—we didn’t need Matt. “I should be the one to go.”

Caspersen clapped him on the shoulder. “This is a tactical risk, Matt. I’m not looking for a sacrificial lamb. If I didn’t think there was a chance I might come back, I wouldn’t be going out there. And Law?” Her tone had grown sharper, more determined. “What you did, with the smoke bomb earlier? We’d all be dead if they’d gotten past the gun then. There are no dispensable parts of this team.”

“But Tracie—”

She shook her head, interrupting, “Now, you need to get back there.” The crooked smile reappeared. “And I expect you to take damned good care of that gun while I’m gone, you hear?”

With that, she turned and left him standing there. He waited for a few moments and then did as she’d said. For a minute, no one spoke.

Then the professor, of all people, chimed in with, “She’ll be fine. If anyone’s going to make it, it’ll be Caspersen. They won’t lay a finger on her, mark my words. I’d put odds on Caspersen with a knife verses an army of cannibals any day.”

I don’t think anyone believed him. I’m not even convinced he believed himself. But it helped to hear it said all the same.

We kept watching as Caspersen walked carefully, keeping an eye out for survivors as she went. It might have been possible to hear a pin drop in that hall between every footfall. Beyond our ship, the constant chatter of the voices grew lower but remained audible.

Past chamber after chamber, she went. We caught our breath collectively as she stepped outside, a dark silhouette against the morning sky. And then she was gone.

The chatter ended abruptly. The words were lost to the distance, but Caspersen’s voice, calm and moderated, carried down the hall.

A set of strange voices, higher, almost musical in tone, answered; and then Caspersen spoke again.

I couldn’t begin to guess what was happening, though it seemed, for now anyway, the situation hadn’t devolved into bloodshed. But the wait was agony, second after nerve-racking second of agony.

I nearly jumped when a loud crack sounded near me. It was only Kayleigh, gnawing at her nails. I wasn’t the only one taken by surprise though. A few sharp intakes of breath, and the professor’s cry of “Fuck” were evidence enough of that.

I suspect, had something chosen that particular moment to fall from a shelf, half of us would have put ourselves in an early grave on the spot. We waited, our nerves taut to the point of breaking.

The chatter continued outside for a long time, and then Caspersen pulled herself into the hall again. Every rifle in the vicinity covered her return to us. She walked calmly, with the same measured assurance with which we’d heard her speak. We were a heartbeat away from extermination, but it would have been impossible to guess it from her confident demeanor.

Her pace increased as she put distance between herself and the outdoors. We were supposed to wait behind the barricade, but no one—not even Russell—did. Matt seemed to be shaking with relief, and I figured the rest of us weren’t far behind.

“Well?” I asked.

“So? Are we on the menu? Or are they going to help us?” the professor demanded.

Caspersen exhaled and spread her palms. “I don’t know. They’re the same people we saw in the forest, the ones the cannibals caught. I think they’re friendly. But I’m not sure. I can’t understand a damned thing they’re saying.”

“They didn’t kill you,” Kayleigh said. “I mean, that’s good, right?”

Caspersen nodded. “Yeah, I think so. Unless they’re waiting for us all to come out. But that kid…the one we saw with the cannibals? He was there. He seemed pretty excited. I think it was a good excitement—not a ‘there’s dinner’ excitement. But, again…I can’t understand them.”

“So what do we do?” Russell asked. He’d leaned up against the wall, and blood seeped through the bandages around his shoulder.

Caspersen loosed a long breath. “I don’t know. We can’t stay here, not forever. Not with the kind of supplies we have, not with all these corpses.

“And if they’ve got a mind to, there’s enough of them to make their way in here.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Hundreds at least. They’re all around. More in the trees.”

“So do we go out?”

“We won’t last long in here. But we’re sitting ducks if we go out there.” Silence descended as we pondered the predicament. Caspersen glanced between us. “And I can’t make that call.”

“We can’t do nothing,” the professor protested.

“No. Let’s put it to a vote,” Caspersen suggested. “Do we stay here and see what happens? Or do we go out there and try to make further contact?”

*

WE TOOK THE vote and chose contact by unanimous decision. Technically, near unanimous as the professor opted to reverse his vote a full two seconds after placing it. Still, complaining the entire way that his blood was on our heads if he came to harm, he trailed along with the rest of us.

“No matter what happens, keep calm,” Caspersen said. “No sudden movements. Do not overreact. Carter, that means you.”

“Me?” He seemed genuinely surprised at this comment.

“Yes, you. Don’t shoot anyone if they get too close, you understand?”

“He’s out of ammo,” I said, reassuring her. I’d seen the professor pour through the last of his stash back in the ship.

“No, I’m not. I grabbed a few of the spare magazines.”

“Great,” Caspersen said. “Just don’t shoot anyone unless they’re actually trying to kill you, okay? And Kayleigh?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know what they’re speaking. I’m going to need you to help with communication, okay?”

She nodded. “Of course.” Between them, Kayleigh and Caspersen spoke more languages than any dozen people. If anyone could open the channels of communication, it’d be the pair of them.

“Do not show fear. It doesn’t matter what you’re feeling; you don’t let them see it, you understand?” We were near the end of the hall now, and the great forest lay before us. Caspersen turned, took a deep breath, and said, “All right. Game time, people.”

And with that, she stepped down. I followed with Granges. Russell and the civilians trailed us, with Cohen and Connor taking up the rear.

My heart hammered in my ears so loudly I could hardly hear the murmur of chatter above it. We were utterly, completely surrounded. Everywhere, men and women and boys stood, armed with spears and slings. There was no mistaking the distinctive brown and green tunics we’d seen at our first encounter—so many eons ago, it seemed now—with the cannibals. These were the same people the hunters had captured and feasted on.

Their clothes, such a stark contrast to the wild combination of furs and leathers worn by the flesh eaters, were the first giveaway, but their frames were a close second. These were tall people, but thin by comparison to the cannibals. Their frames were not so broad, their chests not so deep as those men who had attacked us. They had a leanness to them the others hadn’t.

And as for those others, the cannibals who had attacked us lay in great masses all around, dead and dying. Dead bodies had been strewn haphazardly over the remains of their campground from the day before.

But I had little time to reflect on the state of our foes. We were approaching one another, slowly, cautiously, as one dog might approach another for the first time. They moved first, and then Caspersen advanced a few steps before stopping; we followed. It was a show of confidence but not aggression. I had the passing thought we were not so unlike the other members of the animal kingdom in the moment: one little pack surrounded by so many hundreds, trying to project confidence but not hubris, to be formidable but not a threat.

It seemed to have the desired effect, for the Keplerites continued until they were very near, and then one of their band stepped forward to cover the final distance. He stood tall, as they all did. He wore a dark, close-cut beard the same dark color as the hair atop his head. His eyes conveyed an unmistakable sharpness, and though I knew nothing at all about him, I’d already learned one thing. He was no fool, this stranger.

He spoke to us now in an introductory fashion, in the high, lyrical tongue we’d heard for so long—heard without understanding. The words remained incomprehensible, but the manner and gestures were universal enough to be understood as friendly.

Caspersen advanced to greet him in the same way, saying she was pleased to meet him. And, acting on impulse, I think, she extended her hand to shake his. This seemed at first to take the Keplerite by surprise, for he jumped back and studied her quite quizzically.

But then, even as Caspersen started to offer conciliatory phrases and pull her hand back, he extended his own, and they met in a handshake.

Chapter Thirty-Three

THOUGH THE LANGUAGE barrier still remained, that simple gesture had torn down much of it. The Keplerites no longer held back, but swarmed around us, shaking our hands and speaking—well, I had no clue. Their tones and expressions conveyed friendship though.

A round of what we took to be introductions followed, with the tall man who had shaken Caspersen’s hand gesturing toward himself and repeating a word that sounded like Gat. He said it a few more times until our repetition sounded near enough that he smiled broadly, nodding. His closest companions repeated the move, each with words of their own. And then we, one by one, did the same.

It struck me that, for all we knew, they might have been planning who among them would dine on us first. And we, like a pack of imbeciles, nodded along, grinning with nervous excitement at our own doom.

In a minute, when these introductions finished, the boy stepped forward. Tall and thin, almost gangly, he had a haggard look that I assumed was because of his run-in with the cannibals. But his eyes sparkled with eagerness as he approached us, and he spoke at a rapid pace. Whatever he said, he said it with a good deal of pleasure.

Kayleigh and Caspersen made attempts to communicate with him in our language—and met with no more success than he’d had. He seemed at least to understand the congenial sentiment, though, because he peppered his confused queries with ample nods and smiles.

This non-conversation was still underway when the leader of the Keplerites, the one who—we assumed—called himself Gat, stepped forward. A collective hiss of caught breath sounded as quite suddenly he reached a hand to tug on my sleeve. “Ihnsa,” I thought he said. His expression had gone deadly serious and lost all of its jovial qualities.

He stared expectantly at me, but I had no idea what manner of response he wanted. So I resorted to, “What?”

“Nehsa,” he repeated, tapping my sleeve. It was the same word as last time, but I processed it more clearly this time. And a feeling settled on me—an impossible feeling—that I knew this word. I knew the leading in, the faint hint of a vowel couched between it, and the final syllable. I knew it…but I couldn’t place it. I glanced at my arm, where he had caught hold.

He pointed to one patch in particular on my uniform: a NASA patch. Then, I understood why the word sounded so familiar, and yet so different. He’d almost dropped the first a, and that changed the emphasis. But I was almost certain I knew what he meant all the same.

So I asked, “NASA?”

He glanced at his companions, and back at me, and said again, “Nehsa?”

“NASA,” I repeated, somewhat stupidly. I had no idea what to do with our new bit of common ground.

Gat turned again to the Keplerites with him, doing his best impression of my pronunciation. They repeated it back and seemed to find the pronunciation amusing as they laughed. Then he turned back and clapped me on the shoulder, taking my hand and shaking it heartily, saying again and again, “NASA.”

This, apparently, was the breakthrough Kayleigh needed because she exclaimed suddenly, “Gat!”

He looked up, seeming as startled as me. She approached with her hand extended, introducing herself again. “Kayleigh. I am Kayleigh.” Then, gesturing to the earth at our feet, she knelt to trace out a sentence with her finger. “We are from Earth.”

He nodded. “NASA.”

“Yes,” she agreed, turning again to the dirt. This time, she scrawled, “Can you read this?”

He glanced up at her and smiled, tracing one word beside it. “Yes.” Then he spoke slowly, “You are from Earth.” The words were almost incomprehensible to me, so altered was his pronunciation. But at this new pace, with the knowledge we really did share a language, my brain registered them.

Kayleigh, for her part, looked so overjoyed she might weep. “Yes. Yes, we are.”

Gat seemed almost as affected as she, for he burst into an effusive stream of chatter that quite bypassed my comprehension. Seeing this fail, he turned again to the dirt and brushed away their conversation so far to spell, “We are descendants of Genesis. You are welcome among us.” Then he spoke, carefully enunciating a word. “Frenz.” He nodded, smiling. Seeing the confusion on our faces, he spelled out, “Friends.”

Kayleigh repeated the word aloud, and her pronunciation seemed to amuse the Keplerites, because they mimicked it with a keen emphasis on the letter d. Gat nodded approvingly.

*

A LENGTHY CONVERSATION of sorts followed, written out in turns in the dirt between Kayleigh and Gat. While the most abundant changes to the language had transpired in the spoken form, in which almost all hard consonants and unnecessary sounds seemed to have been shed over time, the written language had evolved somewhat as well. Many of the spellings had changed to omit silent letters or hard consonants, and many words seemed either to have been dropped altogether or added. There were more than a few times when one party or the other would use a word that confounded the other.

But we made do, and in the end came to understand that these people, who called themselves the Nation, were descendants of the original Genesis crew. So, too, were our attackers, the cannibals—called by our new friends the Lava Dwellers. This appellation would later make sense but, at the time, seemed inexplicable.

The Nation lived among the trees. There, they told us, they had a great city, high enough above the cannibals to afford safety.

More importantly, Gat assured us we would be welcome among them in their city. They’d watched us make our way through the forest. They’d seen us save the boy. They’d seen us fight the cannibals. And they would be happy to share their homes with us.

The boy, we learned, was called Quess, and Gat was their leader. We discovered, too, that our eleventh-hour rescue was not so much the miracle of timing it had seemed. The Keplerites hadn’t happened upon us at precisely the right moment. On the contrary, they’d been spectators to the entire event. For what reason they had delayed, Gat didn’t specify. But judging us finally to have run our course of luck, they made the decision to come to our aid. Though neither said so directly, I had the impression this last-minute save was as much due to the influence of Quess as Gat.

For our part, we remained reticent about the details of our mission. We didn’t specify we were off the Genesis, only that our ship had come to harm in the mountains. Caspersen deemed it wiser not to reveal that we were essentially stranded on Kepler-186f, a long-forgotten remnant of the crew from which these people claimed descent. Our initial contact seemed to be going well, but it would be folly to reveal the desperation of our circumstance at such an early stage of our acquaintance. So Kayleigh exercised all the skills of a seasoned politician in giving answers at once absolutely true but simultaneously misleading.

We were from Earth; we were part of a mission to the planet, sent by NASA; we’d landed in the mountains. It was all true but also missing a key detail: we were three thousand years out of time into the bargain.

After a space, the exchange concluded, and the Keplerites turned to the trees. Gat issued a call, and suddenly great bundled rope ladders fell down from the trees all around us, unfurling as they went. They seemed to appear as if out of nothing, materializing from among the dense foliage far overhead. Our companions set to climbing these, and Gat bid us follow them.

We did as directed. When his turn came, the professor stood at the base of the tree, gazing up into the dense green overhead, and shivered. “Oh hell. I hate heights.”

I can’t say I didn’t sympathize. The climb was easily sixty feet straight up. The ladders had been constructed of great, sturdy bunches of some sort of plant material. I suspected they would more than adequately support us. But there was something about feeling my lifeline twist and move with every shift of my weight that seemed to carve an express lane for my heart, straight from the chest to my mouth. It didn’t help that the Keplerites had long since shed any such hesitation and nimbly scrambled up the rope ladder—sending shivers and jolts of movement down to me with every step.

It was a gut-wrenching climb. the professor picked a ladder two trees over from me, and I heard him whimpering the entire way up. I nearly whimpered myself when I made the mistake of looking down as we started nearing the bristly clumps of needles.

Still, in the end, we all made it—even the professor. The Keplerites hoisted Russell up in a makeshift sling. The rest of us climbed some twenty feet above the first real branches and ended at a plank platform. One of the Keplerites extended an arm to me as I reached this, and I stepped up with an inward sigh of relief. Only when I was a good few feet away from the edge did I take a moment to really examine my surroundings.

I’d stepped onto one leg of a wide network of bridges and roads, all reaching from platform to platform. Some of the structures were crafted of dead wood fastened in place with the same thick ropes that formed our ladders. In other spots, live branches had been twisted and molded into place.

From the forest border, a broad road stretched into the distance. And still, rising even higher above us, the trees formed a canopy of branches over the woody highway. Gat gestured for us to move in that direction, toward the forest interior, and we made way for the last of the army. We waited to go farther until the entire party made the landing. Now the Keplerites drew up the ladders, rolled them into bundles, and fastened those bundles to the planks, one by one.

Finally, with a grin, Gat signaled we should move out, and, all of us attempting communication as we went, we headed into the forest.

Light streamed through the branches overhead, and patches of light and shadow covered the road. Unlike the forest floor, where the sunlight almost never made an appearance, here we moved for long stretches entirely in light.

The road continued for some time, and we kept up a good pace. After the day and night we’d had, it wasn’t the easiest march. Nobody complained, but I could see it taxing the civilians’ strength. And poor Russell started to look like a ghost.

Kayleigh had managed to keep the bleeding to a minimum, but it didn’t change the fact that he had a gaping wound in his shoulder. Still, he soldiered on with as much forbearance as he could muster.

The Keplerites chattered the entire time. Every once in a while, I caught a familiar word or phrase. But their inflection in tone and their enunciation was so very different than Earth English that I struggled at times to remember they really were the same language. On their tongues, speech seemed to become song. All the guttural tones and hard sounds of my day had given way to light, rippling notes. It was, in its odd way, at once both beautiful and disconcerting.

Through the long journey, I found ample time for more substantive reflection, not only on our current position but also the remarkable state of the Nation’s infrastructure. As to the former, the farther we went, the less convinced I grew of our prospects. It seemed to me that here, high among the trees, we put ourselves at an even greater disadvantage than on the ground. This was their territory, the byways from where they were adept at descending. We were terrestrial creatures, and this feeling of being suspended somewhere between heaven and earth was new and foreign. Which meant if our hosts had any ill intentions, we would be grossly outnumbered and in a strange world. Screwed, in short.

As I could do nothing about that but hope Gat hadn’t misrepresented his intentions, I set aside those dark thoughts and buried myself in wonder at this midway realm. It might prove to be our final resting place, but I couldn’t help but marvel at it anyway. The road we traveled seemed to be one of several main thoroughfares, intersecting now and again with a minor path and, less frequently, a road of equal breadth. All of them had been constructed of wood and anchored in place with ties of rope.

I saw the same manner of landings and bundled ladders as those upon which we’d ascended, placed in intervals all throughout the forest. Sometimes, a watchman stood guard nearby. Sometimes, the platform went unwatched. But everywhere, the Keplerites had built escape hatches—or, perhaps, portals from which to attack.

Time will tell.

Chapter Thirty-Four

WE REACHED THE City shortly after midday. In our travels, we’d already run into a few homes, quite remarkable in their own way. But nothing prepared me for the City.

I supposed I’d formed an idea of a collection of tiny, tree-bound boxes, like a city full of a thousand children’s tree houses. I’d envisioned something very drab and sad and cramped. How could this manner of habitation be anything but? That proved to be a failure of my own imagination.

The influx of people who came to greet us was the first and only clue we’d neared the City. Our band, already at some several hundreds, seemed to be growing exponentially. The hum of chatter reached a fevered pitch, and curious faces lined the way to catch a glimpse of us.

And then, with no warning at all, the dense growth vanished, not above or below us but in front of and around us. A city stretched out as far as the eye could see, springing out, huge and wondrous, from behind a veil of branches and needles. I stopped short, catching my breath at the sight.

The highway continued, crisscrossing with a wide network of smaller roads. And everywhere, buildings—genuine buildings—lined the way. Single-story structures had been built around one or more trees, made of wood and thatch, with shutters surrounding open windows. As with our path, these homes incorporated both dead and living wood, building off of the vast trees and pressing them into service as a part of the construction when possible.

It seemed very surreal, as if we’d stepped into the pages of a fairy story and found ourselves in the company of wood elves or something of that nature. But with this sensation came another, even more powerful. This was no makeshift shelter or tent city in the trees. These people had real habitations, real homes. A real city.

Time moved very quickly for us after this. I was, I suppose, still in somewhat of a daze, reeling from the discovery of a civilization that had advanced so far beyond what my initial encounter with residents of Kepler had led me to expect.

We passed a great many homes, ending at last at a large building that spanned across some several dozen trees. This, we learned, was Gat’s residence. He invited us in and dismissed the throng of Keplerites who still trailed us.

Again, I found myself stunned to see how similar this residence was to a home on Earth. The place contained chairs set with cushions, tables, a desk, and even décor. In a distant room, I caught a glimpse of something like a loom, and at the far end of the main hall, what looked like musical instruments.

I wondered, surrounded as I was by the accoutrements of life, at my earlier expectations. These people had long ago dealt with the basic necessities of existence and since moved on to concern themselves with comforts.

A handful of attendants waited on us here, and Gat issued a command I didn’t understand. The man disappeared forthwith and returned a minute later carrying a stack of paper-thin sheets of a light greenish composition. Gat seated himself at the desk—a curious affair that rather resembled a wicker basket in composition, with the sides and back formed by a network of interwoven boughs, and the top a polished plank.

“Kayleigh,” he said in his curious tones, gesturing for her to take a seat opposite him. He’d peeled one of the sheets from the stack and began tracing letters with a long stick of charcoal.

“Your people are wounded?” he wrote, then slid the page toward her.

With a glance for guidance at Caspersen—a glance, I noted, which didn’t get past Gat’s notice—Kayleigh took up the charcoal. “Mostly, we are tired. But Sgt. Russell and Capt. Johnson took injuries.”

“I’m fine,” I protested. Which was not really true—my back still burned with pain. But no one paid me any attention.

He read this and seemed to struggle with the word “injuries.”

Kayleigh pointed to his use of ‘wounded” up page and explained further. “Russell was hit with a spear. Johnson was swarmed by insects.” Gat’s eyebrows raised at that, and she elucidated through text and a series of gestures.

The hives, we learned, were raised by the Lava Dwellers, who weaponized them in order to take advantage of the firewing’s powerful venom. The firewing’s sting, Gat told us, caused severe inflammation, discombobulation, and even in some cases temporary paralysis. I had, apparently, made out rather well, all things considered.

“Our herbalist will help your wounded,” he wrote. “And we will prepare a meal for you, and beds so that you may sleep. Tomorrow, we will talk more, of your ship and your crew.”

This settled, Gat called for the herbalist. She appeared a few minutes later—a tall, fair woman of middle-age, clothed in the same sort of tunics and leggings the others wore. Hers were not the standard browns and greens but were purple in color—a deep, dark purple, adorned near the hems in bands of brilliant white, embroidered with threads of purple. Whether this was a sign of rank, wealth, or simply preference, I couldn’t say. I suspected it had more to do with status than preference.

She conversed for a few minutes with Gat and then turned to us. “Marge,” she said, pointing to herself. Then, taking up a writing stick and papyrus, she penned in a neat hand, “I am Marge. I am pleased to meet you. Please, if you are hurt, follow me.”

Kayleigh glanced up at Caspersen. “Can I go with them?”

Tracie nodded.

So, picking up the charcoal she’d been using earlier, Kayleigh wrote on her own sheet, “I am our ship’s medic. May I observe your methods?”

Marge frowned at the word “medic,” speaking it aloud in musical tones that sounded very little like the actual word. On her page, she inquired, “What is a ‘medic’?”

“Herbalist,” Kayleigh wrote. “In Earth terms.”

Marge’s eyes lit up at that, and she lowered her upper body in what could only be described as a bow. “Medic,” she repeated. Then, turning to her sheet, she wrote, “I am honored. Please come.”

Kayleigh flushed and hastily bowed as well. “Honored.”

Marge smiled and seemed genuinely quite thrilled. She beckoned us to follow, and I did, throwing a glance behind me at the rest of our crew. I caught Caspersen’s gaze for a moment, and I imagine my own expression mirrored the uncertainty in hers. We were splitting up. What happens now?

But whatever ill intentions the Keplerites might have been harboring, they didn’t manifest during our visit to Marge’s home.

Gat’s had been substantial in size, one of the larger residences we’d passed, but Marge’s was easily several times as big, spanning a huge chunk of the forest. My first thought was that she must, indeed, have been wealthy.

But entering the facility dispelled this notion. We stepped into a main room, well stocked with shelves and racks full of herbs and chests. I saw a worktable covered in earthen and wooden bowls and a vat of water in the center of the room. Beyond this room lay a long hall, which, if I judged rightly, spanned the length of the building. And down this hall sat a number of open rooms, in which I glimpsed mattresses and sometimes patients.

We’re in the hospital. They have a hospital.

She led us past these rooms to the rear of the building. Here, we found another large space, stocked like the first with herbs aplenty. But there was a bed in the center, a low mattress like the ones we’d passed, and tools of an ominous nature: knives and tweezers and needles.

I shivered at the sight, and my mind wandered of its own volition to the early Earth hospitals and all the horrors those had wrought on their unlucky patients. Marge, meanwhile, busied herself at the shelves, fetching various herbs and tools. In a minute, she returned and donned an apron. Glancing between Russell and myself, she took up her page and wrote, “Please wait for firewing treatment.” She gestured to a seat on the far side of the room.

Nodding, I did as I was bid. I had half a mind to refuse treatment, to declare myself miraculously healed if Russell’s session took a particularly brutal turn. I was glad Kayleigh was here anyway. If Marge started to get too medieval, she could hopefully rein her in, one herbalist to another.

The image of our first work together, of Kayleigh’s early attempts at healing me, came suddenly to mind, and I had to repress the urge to laugh. That she, with her curt, no-nonsense approach to medicine, was the model of medical expertise to which we now had to appeal indicated perhaps just how screwed we really were.

Still, I felt damned glad to have her there. Russell, too, I could see was easier for Kayleigh’s presence. Marge’s directions came through in written form when simple gestures wouldn’t suffice, and now and again, he threw a glance at our medic for reassurance.

In the end, he stripped off his shirt and sat on a stool, chewing a chunk of bark. My skepticism increased by the moment. Marge filled a bowl of water from her vat and proceeded to sponge down his torso.

At first, when the rag got too near his shoulder, Russell grimaced or grunted. Inflammation and swelling had spread across the entire area, and I could only guess it hurt like a motherfucker. Before long, he seemed almost not to notice. When his chewing slowed and his head started to sag, Marge gestured to Kayleigh, and together, they guided him to the mattress.

Signaling for him to spit out the bark, the herbalist laid Russell back against the bed. She disposed of his expectoration while he lay still, and by time she returned, he was snoring. Conferring over notes to which, at my distant vantage, I wasn’t privy, Marge and Kayleigh set to work.

The elder woman threaded one of those needles I’d earlier noticed, and Kayleigh fetched a vial of some sort of liquid. They returned to Russell’s bedside, and the herbalist took the vial, sprinkling its contents over the wound.

Ghoul flinched in his sleep but did not wake. Then, after pouring the same substance on the needle, Marge drew the wound closed and began to sew. Now and again, Russell would twitch. Still, he remained fast asleep throughout the process and was still snoring away when they tied the last threads off. It took a half hour easily, but the work seemed neat and professional enough.

Then it was my turn. When Marge seemed content to skip the step, Kayleigh made a show of drawing water to wash her hands. To my relief, the herbalist followed suit.

Then she offered me a root.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a painkiller,” Kayleigh answered. “From the same plant Russell’s bark came from. The root is milder. It relieves pain, but you won’t lose consciousness.”

I shook my head. “No.” We were in a strange place among strange people. I was in pain but not enough to justify letting my guard down. “I’m good.”

Marge, seeming to understand my intention if not the words, shrugged, and Kayleigh nodded. “All right. Well, then you can get undressed now.”

“You know, none of this is really necessary,” I protested. “It hurt earlier, but I’m fine.”

“Really? Because you’re covered in welts,” she told me.

I glanced down at my arms and hands and saw to my mortification that she was right—my injuries betrayed me. “Speckled,” I quibbled. “They don’t even hurt anymore.”

“She’s got something that will reduce the swelling, some kind of balm. Apparently, they have to deal with this fairly frequently.” A smile caught the corner of Kayleigh’s lips. “Don’t worry. She won’t be using any needles.”

I flushed. I wasn’t sure if she’d caught my cringing as they’d sewed Russell back up or if she was simply poking fun. I decided to ignore the comment. “It better not kill me, that’s all,” I said instead.

She laughed. “Get going.”

Sighing dramatically, I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off.

“Fuck.” Kayleigh caught her breath as I turned to set the shirt on a chair.

“What?” I asked and glanced downward. There were a few more welts but nothing worse than I’d already seen.

“Your back. It’s…covered.”

I reached back instinctively, and no sooner had I done it than I regretted it. Renewed pain flashed through me from the pressure, but more than anything, my skin crawled as my fingers brushed a dozen rises and valleys in an area no bigger than a quarter. “Shit.”

Marge had fetched another bowl of water and, seeing me, frowned. She turned to her note, wrote something, and passed it to Kayleigh.

“Uh. Pants too,” she read.

That was not happening. I shook my head firmly. “My ass doesn’t need any balm, thanks. You can tell her I’m fine; they only got my torso.” I’d been stung all over, but it was leap of faith enough to trust the herbalist’s remedies anywhere above the waist. I’d be damned if I would take a chance lower.

Shaking her head with what looked like a subtle smirk, Kayleigh wrote my response. I suspect her transcription was something less than faithful because Marge laughed aloud and nodded when she read it.

“All right, then,” Kayleigh said. “You can take a seat.”

This I did, rather stiffly, and Marge proceeded to sponge off my back. Put mildly, it hurt, but as a point of pride, I refused to flinch and sat rigidly, swimming in a sea of agony.

And the herbalist had only just begun. As soon as they’d sponged me down, she began applying the salve. She rubbed the paste on the individual welts on my face, chest, and neck. But on my back, where the attack had been the worst, she simply spread the balm everywhere.

I’d grown more or less used to the dull burning of the stings. This treatment, though, seemed to send a shard of ice straight into every welt. My facade of immovability was well beyond shattered by the time she was done, for I was physically trembling with pain long before she finished. Marge, seeing this, shook her head and retrieved the root from where Kayleigh had set it.

This time, I didn’t argue, and I chewed as if my life depended on it. It carried a bitter taste but, mercifully, acted fast. In a few minutes, the agony lessened and, by degrees, receded until I felt nothing more than a dull tingling.

Kayleigh sat with me when the herbalist had finished, her brow creased as she watched my recovery.

“Careful,” I told her when the pain had finally lessened enough to allow a focus on anything else. “I might believe you’ve finally adopted a little bit of the empathy a real doctor is supposed to have.”

The frown didn’t disappear. “You shouldn’t have had to go through this.”

“What?”

“It should have been me. The hive, it was aimed at me, not you.” I tried to shrug the comment off, but her gaze held mine. “But you pushed me out of the way, and…” She gestured to the welts. “Why?”

“Why” was very much not what I expected, and it struck me as decidedly unfair to wait to ask until I had ingested something to dull my senses. “Hell. I don’t know. You were going to get hit.” It wasn’t much of an answer, I supposed, but it was true. I didn’t add that I’d thought the hive was a grenade. It didn’t seem necessary to emphasize I had covered her thinking it would cost my life.

She held my gaze for a minute more and then nodded. “Well. Thank you.”

I shrugged nonchalantly and shivered as pain inched up my spine with the move. “Of course.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

RUSSELL WOKE UP a while later, and Marge fitted us with loose tunics. Then, with a smirk, she handed Kayleigh a pouch and a smaller packet and sent us on our way.

“What was that about?” Russell asked.

“It’s for Nikkole.” The corners of Kayleigh’s lips twitched despite the evenness of her tone.

“What is it?” I tried to keep the wariness out of my voice.

“It’s another root and more balm,” she replied, flashing me an impish smile. “Just in case you find any more welts that need attention.”

We made the trip back to Gat’s residence in relative silence. When we did converse, Kayleigh instigated it. She’d been quite impressed by Marge’s skill and knowledge of Kepler-186f’s plant life, and the medicinal purposes of those plants.

Russell seemed to be still under the influence of the bark he’d chewed—a substance known to the Keplerites as bitter bark. And I was smarting a little from being the object of ridicule, even if I had been a little ridiculous. Together, we said very little.

Caspersen was waiting for us when we returned, and I saw a flicker of relief cross her features. She said only, “Ah. Good to see you back so soon. They’ve saved you dinner.”

“I’m starved.” Kayleigh sighed. “Is it good? Hell, it doesn’t even matter.”

“It’s better than MREs at any rate.” Caspersen smiled. “It’s this way.”

She headed past one of Gat’s attendants, toward the rear of the building.

“Everything okay?” I asked in as nonchalant a tone as I could muster. If there was trouble brewing, the less they realized we realized, the better off we’d be.

She nodded. “Yup.”

“Are we…expecting trouble?” Kayleigh asked.

“No,” Caspersen said. “Not exactly.”

“But we are strangers in a strange land, so to speak,” Russell piped up.

“I think we’re among friends,” Caspersen added. “But nonetheless, caution is the byword of the day.”

Kayleigh’s brow puckered, and she nodded thoughtfully.

“Careful now,” I sniped. “Our ‘herbalist’ is feeling quite at home here.”

“If we’re lucky, this will be our home,” Caspersen said. “But until I know that, I’ll be sleeping with one eye open.”

Our meal was served at a long table, and we were bid to eat our fill. The food was presented on wooden platters, and we found a variety of offerings. I would have traded the whole thing for a single cheeseburger and a side a fries; but the Keplerites weren’t serving either burgers or fries, so we were left with what choices we had.

These consisted of three main types of food, though the selections of each were many: trays of brightly colored fruit, leafy salad arrangements, and some sort of stuffed leaf rolls. These last in particular caught my eye, despite that they were wrapped in foliage, because the color and texture of the filling reminded me of a meat roll.

I had practically swallowed one whole by time the taste hit me. Suffice it to say, I was sadly disappointed. I didn’t object to the flavor; it tasted fine, I thought. But it was definitely not meat either. “What the hell is this?” I sputtered.

“Some sort of ground nuts and seasoning. Along with what sounds like vegetables,” Caspersen answered.

I looked up and down the table and counted more than a dozen different types of food. “Is there anything with meat?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s like a vegetarian smörgåsbord.”

“Hell.” Russell sighed. “We would have to be rescued by vegetarians, wouldn’t we?”

“How do we know this isn’t poisoned?” Kayleigh said. She still wore a subtle frown as if she hadn’t quite moved past the conversation in the hall.

“We don’t,” Caspersen answered. “But at this point, not eating isn’t really an option.”

“Anyway, look on the bright side,” I said. “If it is poisoned, at least we won’t be stuck eating vegetarian food for the rest of our lives.”

*

IT WASN’T POISONED, and for all my whining, the food was actually quite good and perfectly filling.

We all woke the next morning, alive and, what was more, unmolested. There had been no surprise attacks during the night, no sudden confiscations of our property as we slept. Either the Keplerites truly meant us no harm, or they were waiting until they knew more about us to spring a trap.

Gat was waiting for us, and after we had breakfast—another meatless meal—the conversation began anew.

“You have slept well?”

“Yes,” Kayleigh replied.

He wrote, “Marge tells me your wounded people will be well.”

“They are doing much better, thank you,” she answered.

This was true, for Russell rose with more energy, and the swelling on the treated areas of my body had almost entirely gone. My backside and lower body were another story, but I still had the herbalist’s salve.

He sat back now and crossed his arms, studying us for a minute. Then, picking up his charcoal, he wrote a list of names—our names.

Caspersen

Johnson

Russell

He ran through the list, counting all of us. We exchanged glances, and Kayleigh nodded.

“These are familiar names,” he wrote, watching us carefully as he passed the note over.

At length, Kayleigh put down, “I do not understand.”

Gat rose then, walked to a trunk behind his desk, and retrieved a box. We, all of us, took in our breaths at the sight of it. It was one of the long-term storage trunks from the Genesis. From this, he retrieved a book and a uniform—a NASA uniform, identical to our own.

He set the uniform in front of us. Long years had begun to fray the edges, but despite its tattered appearance, I could read the name patch clearly. Sanders. The insignia of a captain in the United States Navy had been equally well preserved.

Sanders, I thought. David Sanders. He was—had been—one of our crewmates, a naval captain who had joined the Genesis mission. I didn’t know him well, but I recognized the name.

Gat, meanwhile, opened the book. He flipped through to the spot he had in mind and tapped the page before handing it to Kayleigh. It read:

Day 2: The crew, what remains of them, is awake and responsive. We’ve lost Smith and Diaz. Resuscitation did not complete for Smith; machine malfunction. Diaz went into cardiac arrest after waking; could not save him. With the shattered pods, this brings confirmed crew deaths to 17.

In addition to missing, presumed dead, crew is down 183 souls.

The page then listed names—one hundred and sixty-six names—of missing Genesis crew members. This tabulation continued onto the next page and the page following that. But near the top of the list was a handful of names we all knew: Carter, Caspersen, Cohen, and Connor.

An icy chill settled in the pit of my stomach when my eye rested on my own name listed as missing, presumed dead.

Kayleigh passed the book to Caspersen and penned the question on all of our minds. “What is this book?”

“The log of my ancestor, David Sanders, first president of the Nation.” Now, it was his turn for a question, and he watched us with sharp eyes when he presented it. “Why does he list you among the dead crew of the Genesis II?”

With a word to let her take the seat, Caspersen took the pen from Kayleigh and wrote, “Because he believed we were dead. But we were not. Our pods crashed in the mountains.”

“The Genesis landed sixty generations ago. It is not possible that you are still alive.”

“We remained in cryosleep until about two months ago.”

“What are ‘months’?”

“A measure of days, in Earth time.”

“You were in the mountains in the same manner of pods that my ancestors traveled here in, from Earth? All these years?”

I would have pitied the liar who sat before him in that moment, under the full intensity of Gat’s shrewd gaze. Caspersen held it evenly, then replied in the affirmative.

“How did you wake now, if you did not wake then?” Gat asked.

“A rockslide shifted the ship. Johnson’s pod was damaged, and her resuscitation sequence initiated.”

He fixed me in his gaze for a minute, and then apparently satisfied she was telling the truth, returned his attention to her. “You knew my ancestor?”

“Captain Sanders?” Caspersen spoke aloud. “Yes, I knew him.” She then wrote simply, “Yes.”

For a minute, he seemed pleased with the answer. But the wary look crept back into his eyes as he wrote, “Why did she—” He looked up from writing to point at Kayleigh. “—not tell me you, too, were of the Genesis yesterday?”

Caspersen held his gaze and then wrote, “I directed caution. I wanted to be sure you meant no harm to my crew before divulging more.”

An eyebrow raised as he read this, and he glanced up to meet her still steady gaze. He seemed at once surprised by and pleased with this frankness, for he laughed aloud. Then he nodded and wrote, “Fair answer. But I spoke true yesterday. We are pleased to welcome you among us.”

Caspersen smiled. “Apologies for my caution. We are deeply grateful to you for your hospitality.”

Gat waved this away with a brush of his hand. “You have given the meat-eaters reason to fear. That is enough. You knew our forebearers. That is more.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

OUR TRUST ISSUES more or less resolved, Gat and Caspersen spent the better part of the day conversing. We progressed slowly, since every question and answer had to be scribed out. Still, we each came to learn a great deal about the other.

Gat got the details of our time so far on Kepler-186f. But his true interest lay in our stories of his ancestor, Captain Sanders, and our time on Earth. Caspersen knew Sanders better than most of us, but not even she’d been closely acquainted with him. Still, our host hungrily ate up every detail he could glean.

We, in turn, pressed the conversation toward the Genesis and the state of humankind since its landing. Gat offered an abbreviated history but gave us leave to read David Sanders’s log, where the struggles of the Genesis crew in its early days had been laid out by a firsthand witness.

It was a gripping and terrible read. The first entry set the tone for the early part of the document, and it went downhill from there.

Log of Captain D. Sanders

Day 1

Genesis has reached Kepler-186f in a state of some distress. Flight captains are missing. Computers are badly damaged, and a number of pods are destroyed or missing. Secondary data center, flight deck, and reserve fuel tanks are gone as well.

No information on what caused damage to ship. Intense heat searing suggests damage occurred during or prior to entering orbit.

No information on who triggered reanimation sequences. Not all pods are online yet. Working to awaken everyone. Some confirmed deaths.

At this point, Sanders listed those he had found dead already in their pods. The next few entries were spent detailing crew difficulties, from limited and lost supplies to the low oxygen in the atmosphere. The true bane of the Genesis crew wasted little time making its first appearance: malcontent.

Week Two

Grumblings among the crew. MREs not popular. Trying to locate alternate food sources, but investigations moving slowly. Drs. Bueller and Singh ruled out two avian creatures for high toxicity, and a large snail. Too bad about the birds, couldn’t pay me to eat the snail. But disappointment among crew. Hope we find something soon.

Day 18

Dr. Singh gave the all-clear on two types of leafy plants. High in fiber, safe for human consumption. Sharp, metallic taste; does not cause gastrointestinal discomfort, but not very palatable. Not much excitement among the crew.

Low oxygen taking its toll on strength. Some of the civilians finding it hard to cope. A lot of talk about this being a mistake. Trying to boost morale and keep everyone focused. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but we’re not in a bad way. The planet can support life and is full of potential.

Week Three

Lt. Roach caught an animal today. Ugly son of a bitch, ratlike appearance, but about the size of a dog. Enthusiasm among the crew that it might provide a new meat source. Singh investigating.

Sergeant Warren working with a contingent of civilians to clear section of forest for initial planting.

Update

Was with Dr. Bueller at the river. He’s constructed a primitive distiller to purify water. While we were gone, Alcorn and Paine led a few of the crew into Dr. Singh’s lab. They said she was allowing the meat to spoil. Stole the carcass & disappeared into the woods with it. Built a fire and cooked the damned thing. By time we found them, they’d eaten it.

Damned fools were already sick as hell. Dr. Harris has them in sick bay. Uncertain prognosis at this point.

Day 22

Matheson did not survive the night. Harris is not hopeful about Reid either. Time will tell as far as the others.

Day 23

Reid passed away this morning just after sunrise. Hard on the rest of the crew, he was popular with all. Damned unfortunate. It looks like the others will pull through though. I hope at least it’s clear from this that caution may not be convenient, but it is necessary.

In other news, Bueller has cleared a species of vine-grown fruit for consumption. Sweet, flavorful flesh, like a peach. Not plentiful in the area, but promising discovery.

Day 26

Everyone is back on their feet. Harris is a miracle worker.

Week Four

We’ve scouted to the edge of the forest. Barren mountains. Plan to wait until settlement more established to strike out farther.

Work on clearing fields progressing slowly. Civilians finding it very difficult to work in low oxygen setting. Shifting some of the Marines onto this project.

For the next several months of entries, Captain Sanders detailed the Genesis’s efforts to grow Earth foods and the series of minor disasters and catastrophes that accompanied it, from bad weather to fungal rot. The first harvest was essentially a bust, but by this point, the crew had discovered a handful of edible plants native to Kepler-186f: the aforementioned metallic-tasting blood leaf; two varieties of fruit, a Kepler peach and sweet berry; and an apparently tasteless legume the crew had nicknamed “cardboard bean.”

He noted one additional point of interest—the discovery of a great magma flow past the forest. The mountain range, it seemed, was an active set of volcanoes. Some of the scouting parties had discovered a slow, steady stream of lava belching out of one of the great peaks, running into a valley far below. The eruptions weren’t violent, but steady. They’d found a network of lava tunnels running throughout the mountains too. But the explorations of these had been cut short by the settlement efforts.

Day 156

The weather is turning colder. Construction on greenhouse wrapped up today. Singh is confident we can grow the native plants here. Winter wheat planted; we will attempt other Earth crops next season, but our supply of seeds is low, so we will not risk them in the winter. Hope she’s right, as our MREs are running low too.

Worst-case scenario, we should be able to survive the winter with a few to spare. Provided seasons are similar to Earth.

Still, crew dissatisfaction high. Alcorn seems to thrive off fomenting discontent. Paine not much better. They staged another protest during our morning briefing today. Suggesting we’re going to starve, not survive the winter, etc. Still no damned solutions as to how to survive. Just complaints that we don’t know what we’re doing.

Day 163

Some seedlings starting to sprout. Looks like Rupu was right.

Day 171

Hail today. First time we’ve seen ice on Kepler-186f. Melted shortly after it fell.

Day 172

Roach was doing inventory on supplies this morning. Two crates of MREs missing. He’s repeating count now. Hope they were overlooked. Otherwise, we’re going to have to start locking the supply room.

Can’t imagine who would have taken them. Everyone hates MREs; who would want more?

Day 173

MREs confirmed missing. Locking storerooms. Allowing access to select personnel only. Still not sure who might have taken them.

Greenhouse project continuing to go well. Plants are getting bigger. Scientists happy to see progress.

Day 180

Occasional frosts and ice storms. Temperatures generally moderate though. No permanent ice.

Still, pods can be cold at night. Been building fires lately, sleeping in communal areas. Seems to be improving matters.

Day 186

First sprouts on the legumes. Great excitement among the scientists and crew. The sooner we can supplement our diet, the better.

Day 194

Flowers on the peach vines. Should be able to harvest some beans in a week or two. Greenhouse retaining heat very well. Helps that Kepler’s winter—so far at least—is very mild.

Crew morale on the rise. Even Alcorn seems quieter these days.

Miracles do happen.

Day 202

First harvest of beans today. Haven’t seen the crew this excited in a long time. Richards cooked them with salt. Tasted like seasoned cardboard.

Never thought I’d enjoy that, but damn, it was good to eat fresh food again.

Fruit starting to grow on peach vines. Blood leaf will be ready for harvest soon. Only the berry bushes have not yet bloomed, but they’re growing well. Life cycle uncertain, so we may be in for a wait yet. Time will tell. In the meantime, we should still have plenty of food if everything continues to grow at its current rate.

Day 205

Still reeling from this morning’s discovery. Rupu went to the greenhouse this AM. The door was ajar. Some of the produce had been lifted during the night.

But much worse. We had frost last night. Everything is wilted. The peaches shriveled on their vine. The fruit is gone, and Rupu fears the plants are too. Blood leaf curled up and blackened. Bean plants slumped over.

No one has admitted it, of course. But Rupu and the horticulturists always secure everything. My God. Could someone have been this careless?

And what’s the alternative? Sabotage?

Day 206

Less hope for the plants this morning. Crew is despondent. Usual troublemakers predicting end-times.

I begin to feel for the first time that I don’t know what to do anymore. How do I keep this crew together if we can’t even trust one another?

Day 208

Most of the crops are dead.

Alcorn telling the crew it was my fault.

Worst part is he may have a point. After the MRE thefts, I should have put locks on the doors. Why didn’t I think of that?

Chapter Thirty-Seven

CAPTAIN SANDERS’S LOG detailed a long, melancholy winter. Dr. Rupu Singh had managed to save a few of the bean plants and was able to sew anew from the harvest. But the resultant crops yielded little since they had few plants to work with.

Two figures who made regular appearances in Sanders’s notes were Brent Alcorn and John Paine. Paine was a so-called “sponsor guest”—a euphemism to indicate he’d paid for his seat on the Genesis. Alcorn, on the other hand, had been one of the program’s settlers. Despite their very different backgrounds, the two men seemed to have connected in mutual opposition to Sanders.

As the captain told it, their opposition sprang from discontent rather than any particular grievance. They didn’t have solutions to the problems they all faced; they only had complaints. And they preyed on the general discomfort and disappointments that arose during the settlement process to fan whatever flames of discontent they stumbled upon.

Even from the reading, I could tell things were heading for a showdown, and as spring rolled around, it came.

Day 254

Came back with scouting party to find that Alcorn’s crew had made off with a number of MREs and some supplies. Roughed Roach up to get his key; broken nose and two fractured ribs. For the record, Roach put up a strong defense but was vastly outnumbered.

Alcorn and about two dozen men disappeared into the forest, apparently with the intention of setting up a settlement of their own. Paine among them.

Did not pursue; no way to compel them to return without violence. Truth be told, at this point, even if there was a way, I’d be hesitant to attempt it. I wish them well, but frankly, I would not be sorry to see them stay away.

Since they’re the laziest bunch of the crew, though, I fear we’ll see them back sooner rather than later—as soon as the food is gone. Then they’ll come crawling back expecting a welcome.

Sanders’s prediction turned out to be partially accurate, although the manner of return was not what he’d envisioned.

Day 289

Son-of-a-bitch Paine showed up before sunrise, while we were all still asleep. He and a handful of the crew made off with another two crates of MREs. Warren saw them heading toward the mountains.

If we cut rations to bare minimum, this leaves us with about one month of food.

Warren advises pursuing and retaking supplies. He’s right that we need them. But if I pursue, it will end in bloodshed.

First harvest of wheat almost ready, and Rupu’s garden is going well. I can’t in good conscience sanction an expedition that will lead to death, even if it is one of those bastards. We’ve already lost too many. We will have food soon.

Day 297

Watchtower complete. Trees are monsters. Incredible height. I wonder how old they are? Climbing to the top is more than a little nerve-racking though. It took me a full five minutes to recover my breath; nerves in conjunction with low oxygen and the climb.

Still, the view is remarkable. This forest is huge.

Day 298

Wheat harvest begins today.

Day 304

Harvest complete. Fair yields. Of course, the harvester is gone (it vanished with the rest of the ship), so we’re threshing by hand. Everyone is exhausted. Bueller is working on a watermill meanwhile, and Richards is trying to figure out how to work with Kepler ingredients to make something that doesn’t taste like sawdust. His early cakes and crackers haven’t been promising.

But they’re fresh and warm and not from a package. So that’s something.

Day 313

Found out from some of the crew that Alcorn has been coming back around, trying to recruit more to his little experiment. They’ve set up camp by the lava outflow, apparently. Warmer temperatures. Doesn’t sound like they’re even attempting any sort of agricultural endeavors though.

How do they expect to eat once the MREs run out?

Day 321

About fifteen more members of the crew vanished last night, taking their gear and a few sacks of wheat with them. Tracks heading toward the mountains.

Day 322

Another exodus last night. Seven men from the threshing crew, following the others.

Grumblings from the remaining crew that the workload is going to increase now. Goddamn it, we lost almost two hundred able bodies coming into orbit…why couldn’t Alcorn and Paine have been in that bunch?

Harris reports first pregnancy from the crew. Jane Garrison, about two months along. Father is Bill Eaton. They’re excited but nervous.

Day 328

Woke to gunfire this morning. My God. It’s come to this.

It started as a raid on the gardens. Roach was on watch, spotted Alcorn and three of his people creeping through the fields. He sounded the alarm.

He caught them red-handed with bags full of crops. Our crops, our food. They refused to surrender their stolen goods. Roach grabbed at a sack Paine was carrying.

Paine put a knife through his neck and ran for the forest. Warren gave the order to open fire.

Roach is dead. Paine and Rivers are dead. Thank God, Alcorn and Forrest made it out alive.

I’ve relieved Warren of command. Paine deserved a trial, not being gunned down. Rivers wasn’t guilty at all.

I am bound to note Warren’s official objections in the record. He believes he was justified in using lethal force to protect other lives. He urges treating Alcorn’s crew as hostile and taking military action against them. He feels (without evidence) that Alcorn was responsible for the greenhouse fiasco, as well as the early MRE thefts, and poses a present threat to our safety and food supply. After Lieutenant Roach’s death, he would have me treat the entire force as hostile.

Civilians. He would have me make war on civilians.

What have we become?

Day 331

Warren has taken to sleeping in the watchtower, armed. He is officially relieved of duty, but I have not confiscated his sidearm.

I am beginning to wonder if that was a mistake.

Amazingly, many of our settlers are on Warren’s side. Paine was never popular, and Lieutenant Roach’s death has galvanized them into opposition to his allies. I miss Roach, and his death was tragic. But to hold everyone guilty for Paine’s actions?

Tomorrow, I will be setting out to find Alcorn’s encampment. It is clear I cannot let matters stand, or there will be more bloodshed. Warren was in command at my direction, so the responsibility for his mistake is mine.

I will make peace between us or die in the attempt.

Day 342

Returned to the lava flow. I understand the appeal of the spot, as the entire area is warmer than the forest, and the tunnels are expansive and sheltered from the wind and elements. But there is no fertile land for farming.

I found where they had been camping, but the site was deserted. Lost their tracks in the mountains, so here I am, back at the ship.

I’m not sure what that means. Are they striking out to new territory? Maybe they’ve realized that raiding us isn’t going to be a viable long-term option.

Somehow, though, I can’t shake the grim feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Day 344

Corn showing promise. First harvests of beans complete, more to come. Rupu says we planted too late last year, but this year should be much better.

Finally, some good news.

Day 346

Warren telling me he’s spotted scouts around the outskirts of the farm. He thinks Alcorn is planning something.

He’s become so paranoid lately that I don’t know if I can believe him or not. Searched for evidence that we had company but could not find anything.

Still, I’m doubling the guard tonight as a precaution. Probably a waste of manpower, but better safe than sorry.

Day 347

Sergeant Markeson reports spotting figures during watch last night. I guess Warren wasn’t seeing things after all. Will keep the watch at heightened levels.

What the hell is Alcorn playing at?

Day 350

Quiet for the past few days. No new sightings, but continuing to maintain watch levels.

Day 353

Warren wants me to work on fortifications. Medieval shit: pits and palisade walls and traps. Thinks we should start building some sort of tree fort. He’s got schematics and layout plans and everything.

It’s finally come to it, I guess. Demanded his weapon, and recommended him to Dr. Harris for an eval.

Day 354

Harris cleared Warren. I gave him his firearm back, with reservations. He’s talking like a crazy person, but the doctor is telling me he’s not crazy. Harris better know what he’s doing.

Day 356

Warren is apparently quite serious about the tree fort thing. Going on about being more defensible off the ground. He’s been spending his time up there, constructing God knows what. Unfortunately, he’s got a couple of the settlers wrapped up in this fever, and they’re working with him on their own time. At least he’s out of my hair.

Day 359

Goddamn it, I knew it would come to this.

Alcorn and about fifteen others stormed the place last night, looking for Warren. Told the men to hold their fire. No one was injured beyond some roughing up.

But Alcorn is pissed. Accusing us of murder. Thought we were hiding Warren, keeping him from justice, and so on. Alcorn’s flair for drama, it should be noted, has not diminished in his time in the wilderness; on the contrary, it seems to have grown from a penchant to a way of life. Framing himself as a moral crusader against tyranny. Tried to reason with him, but he was having none of it. Luckily, Warren was not around, or there would have certainly been more bloodshed.

Alcorn left peacefully but not before demanding, most theatrically, that if I intended to shoot them all anyway, damn it, be done with it already. “Or else let us have our settlements, too, without fear of being murdered!”

Seems to forget that it was that son-of-a-bitch Paine who drew the first blood. And now it seems they want Warren’s hide.

As for Warren…on this, at least, his paranoia might actually be well founded; Alcorn looked like he was out for blood.

Day 360

Should have known all that moralizing was just a cover. Son of a bitch was here to recruit. He kept me occupied while his people reached out to their friends among the crew.

About two dozen more absences this morning. And they got to Sergeant Strauss; Strauss had one of the keys to the armory, and the son of a bitch took a bunch of ammo and weapons with him. No good will come of that.

Day 365

Quiet. Crops continuing to grow well. Rarely see Warren anymore, so I guess his treehouse project must be progressing.

Day 367

Alcorn stopped by again. Just him this time. He’s looking awfully lean these days. He was armed with one of the stolen pistols.

Seemed conciliatory. Refused to return stolen weapons but said they needed them to survive, to hunt, and to protect themselves against wildlife.

Said he was willing to trade, crops for meat. Problem is we still haven’t found any meat that’s worth eating, and neither have they. But he says they’ve got hunting parties looking. “They’re bound to find something. And we may not see eye to eye, David, but in the end, we both want what’s best for this crew. And if we find a food source, we won’t hide it from you guys.”

I’m willing to rebuild bridges, and told him so. We’ll see what comes of it.

Day 368

Well, it looks like Warren hasn’t been wasting time. Harris stopped by today. Another pregnancy. Jessica Ivers—and Warren.

Wonder if he’s filled her in on his little tree house ambitions and how she feels about raising the next Tarzan?

Day 369

Hardwick didn’t show up for work this morning. Farm crew reported him missing.

I thought he might have been another defector to Alcorn’s band, but we found him down by the river. Stoned out of his mind. He’d been smoking some sort of brown lichen plant. First I’ve seen of it. No idea where he got it, and he was too out of his senses to respond to inquiries.

Harris has him under observation. What the hell possessed him to smoke a random weed?

Day 370

Well, Hardwick’s not in danger (unless it’s that I’ll strangle him for being an imbecile). It turns out there’s less mystery to this than I’d thought.

I’m not the only one Alcorn has been making overtures toward, but he’s not interested in a bartering game. Hardwick’s high was traded for a bag of flour. The plant, apparently, grows in hot temperatures, so it’s plentiful around the lava flow.

And, naturally, Alcorn and his people figured out it had extra-medicinal properties. No wonder they’re not bothering to grow crops; they’ve found something much more entertaining than work.

Day 377

What a week. That bastard Alcorn has been peddling the lichen to whoever will try it; he’s got his own black market going. We’ve had quite a bit of produce go missing, stolen for these black-market trades. Half the farming crew has been out at one point or another throughout the week, and plenty of the rest of the workforce too. Falk laid up due to a bad reaction. Seems unique to him, but concerning; he’s developed muscle spasms and convulsions.

What’s more, we lost about thirty people this week. Largest defection yet, and all because they’ve found this damned drug.

I feel at this point I have no choice. Alcorn is, and is determined to remain, a threat to the prospects of this mission. I’ve drawn up charges against him and issued an order for his arrest. Accessory to Lt. Roach’s death, theft of various property, contributing to crew delinquency, etc. The crew is aware and understands that materially aiding him is also an act against the settlement. Ash lichen use prohibited.

There will be no charges for anyone who has worked with him up to this point. There is a place for everyone in this crew, and I’ll be happy to welcome any of them back. Alcorn, as far as I can tell, is the only obstacle to that actually happening.

In good news, two more expectant couples checked in with Dr. Harris this week.

Day 380

More defections. More theft. I’ve increased the guard, but it’s impossible to secure the fields and the garden and the mill, as well as the ship’s storerooms. Can only hope we catch that son of a bitch sooner than later.

Day 381

Well, Ivers has moved into the trees with Warren. What the hell a pregnant woman is going to do living in a tree house is beyond me, but I’ve got more important things to worry about with Alcorn. Crew dissatisfaction high about banning the use of the ash lichen.

Day 383

Warren has brought down a selection of fruits and nuts he’s found in the trees for analysis. Says the pine nuts are particularly plentiful. May be some point to his Tarzan routine after all.

Day 384

Found Sergeant Martin at the mill today. Dead. Shot dead, mill ransacked. There wasn’t much, but all the grain we had there is gone and so was Martin’s weapon. Tracks led toward the lava flow.

God forgive me. But I’ve issued the order to shoot Alcorn on sight.

Day 387

Fire and blood. Today has been a day of fire and blood, the twilight of our humanity on this hellish rock. Fire and blood, murder and death: this is what has become of the Genesis mission.

It started before dawn. The watchman spotted movement in the forest. I had given strict orders that Alcorn, and only Alcorn, was the target. We were not going to kill civilians. They sounded the alarm but did not shoot. As I told them.

Alcorn’s men swarmed the ship, making their way to the weapons locker. Their numbers were great, and we held our fire. Again, on my orders. Tried to stop them by using nonlethal means. We were overwhelmed; some of the crew joined on our side, and a few on theirs.

When they had the guns they wanted, they retreated, opening fire on anyone who tried to stop them.

I gave the command to return fire. We killed a few of theirs but most escaped into the forest.

Alcorn—the lunatic—hadn’t been content merely to kill and rob us. He’d sent men to the fields. They had butchered the guards and burned everything that would catch fire. The corn was ablaze when we emerged from the ship.

I suppose it had been his escape plan—to distract us from pursuit by putting our food source to the torch. It worked.

But, my God, what does he think he’s accomplished in the long-term? What good is steel, without food? He has taken many of our guns now. So what, when he has burned the crops that we—and he—have relied on for survival?

I’ve reinstated Warren to active duty and given him the go-ahead for his fortifications. Either he was right, or I’m as fucking crazy as he is. At this point, I don’t even know.

Day 388

The crops are still smoldering. There is little left that has not been destroyed. We had feared the start of a forest fire, but the live trees are too wet to burn.

Warren is requesting permission to lead a party in pursuit of Alcorn. It would be a search-and-destroy mission.

I see now that Warren understood Alcorn’s character when I did not. But what he proposes is at once morally and strategically indefensible. The sort of losses we’d take in an attack would all but ensure failure for the mission. Their forces are armed and numerous, and we’d be going into their territory. Even if we were sufficiently positioned…hunting a group of civilians down for extermination?

If that’s our best option, what are we fighting for?

I’ve rejected his request. We will focus on fortifications and defense. Alcorn will not take us by surprise again.

Day 392

Rupu cleared the pine nuts and tree berries for consumption. We may not starve this winter after all.

I visited Warren’s tree community today. Progress is remarkable. The huts are invisible from the ground. Completely hidden behind branches. And the trees are strong, with giant limbs that can support whole structures.

Getting between them, though, is frankly traumatizing. Right now, they’re connected by planks. This won’t work, especially once the kids start arriving. Warren’s working with some of the engineers to redesign infrastructure.

I must be losing my mind because this is actually starting to sound like a good idea to me.

Day 411

Another attempted attack today. We killed three of them before they fled. Unfortunately, Alcorn wasn’t among them.

On high alert.

Day 413

All quiet. Building going well. Warren is working the men like a slave driver, but he’s doing as much as any of them. And after the last month, no one is complaining. We want these habitations ready before the weather gets too cold.

And now that we know the trees, unlike the dead wood, will not burn, it seems we’ll be that much safer from sabotage.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

CAPTAIN SANDERS’S LOG continued to detail the construction of the early version of the City among the trees. The settlers constructed a number of primitive shelters and stockpiled a great store of pine nuts for the winter.

After a while, the occasional appearance of Alcorn’s band ended. The crew again began to hope that their rebel compatriots had moved on to some other area, intent on making a settlement of their own.

There was also a note of personal good news for the captain when Dr. Singh and he learned they were expecting their first child.

All of these revelations were dwarfed by a series of entries near the start of the second winter.

Assault on the Genesis today. We took civilian casualties.

Alcorn’s band struck after sunset. They hit the ship. Looked like a goddamn bunch of skeletons, like Alcorn has them starving.

They must have been looking for supplies, but we’d shifted almost everything to the trees already. They found some of the crew, who hadn’t made the transition yet, and there was fighting. Some escaped; some were killed.

We managed to get most of our people into the trees, but those who were abed when Alcorn hit were killed. Fucking animal. He’s set up base in the ship. Can hear them ransacking it, looking for supplies.

We’re waiting for them to emerge. I’m going to try diplomacy a second time. They are starving and desperate. They’ve seen what Alcorn’s leadership has done to them. They may be willing to turn him over and surrender. I will reunite the crew, if I can.

But my primary focus is—must be—on preserving the mission. Warren wants to lead a counterattack. If they will not surrender, I will let him.

The next few days detailed their attempts to communicate with Alcorn’s crew and the lack of response from the ship.

It’s been three days now. I cannot believe the scraps of food they would have discovered were enough to sustain them. Still, they haven’t so much as poked their heads out yet. We hear them partying all night, hollering and laughing as if intoxicated, and see the light from fires through the windows. But they don’t come out.

I’m going with Warren to one of his lookouts later tonight. It’ll require getting across a number of trees, but it should position us near the nose of the ship—more or less directly over the bridge, which is where most of the light and noise is coming from.

Update

My God. What things I have seen tonight.

Cannibalism.

My hand trembles to write the word. But there it is. Alcorn, his crew: cannibals!

Warren led us through the trees, high overhead along the perimeter of the crater until we reached one of his lookouts. He had a platform from which he let down a ladder, and we climbed down until we had a more or less clear view of the bridge.

At first, I thought I saw meat of some sort—great chunks of meat roasting over fires, shared by Alcorn and his people.

But this was human flesh—slabs of human flesh, cut from human bodies. Arms and legs suspended over fire pits, roasting away. Human flesh being devoured.

And it was not only Alcorn who was eating. Men and women—men and women beside whom, a few short months ago, I had threshed wheat and planted crops—were devouring their fellow man.

I had seen enough at once, but Warren stayed some time longer, taking a measure of their arms, and their state of alertness, and so on.

Now we are back.

Warren is leading a counterattack tonight. I have cleared it. He thinks he will take them by surprise, while they are yet passed out and sleeping.

The next entry was undated but written in a shaky hand. It read:

Massacre. I have sanctioned a massacre.

Warren led a dozen men into the ship and killed…so many. Those who were not killed fled to the woods. Alcorn was with them. He has the devil’s own luck, I think.

Warren went after them. I have ordered everyone else to remain in the trees. This morning, we had a terrible downpour, and now it has frozen over. Already the weather is colder this year than it was last. It may be that all of Warren’s efforts were for naught after all.

Here, the tale broke off, and there were no further journal entries detailing the winter. The next note was dated as follows, and said:

Spring

We have survived the winter with few casualties. Dr. Bueller lost his footing and fell to his death; we lost Pachis and Star to ill health. Too, Sergeant Warren and his band never returned.

But it has not been only Death that has visited us this winter. Ivers delivered a healthy baby boy. Named Richard, after his father. Garrison and Eaton’s child is healthy as well, and Bedford delivered twins, a boy and a girl. Rose Trevers miscarried but will conceive again.

And soon, Dr. Harris tells us, Rupu and I will welcome our own child into this world. These children are the first real generation of Kepler-186f.

We have spotted the cannibals, now and again, skulking into and from the ship. But it seems to me that here, among the trees, we are safe. Alcorn cannot reach us without our knowledge, and we have little need to be below and none on a permanent basis.

Here, we are safe. And perhaps, in time, our children, these new Keplerites, will right the mistakes their parents have made.

Here the log ended, and the pages that followed were empty. As I understood it, there were other books that picked up the tale some years later—Captain Sanders had, apparently, resumed the practice of keeping a journal during his later life. But this gave us the general idea, and in combination with Gat’s histories, we understood that Alcorn’s band had been the predecessors to the cannibals we met earlier, just as Sanders’s people had become the Nation.

The revelation that men and women we had known, had trained beside and flown with through deep space, had descended into cannibalism and butchery was more than a little disconcerting.

But no one seemed to have time to linger on the surrealism of it as we were plunged forthwith into our new world.

The people of the Nation regarded us with a measure of respect bordering on awe. Our defense of the ship had won us that from the beginning, but as word spread that we were from the original crew of the Genesis, friends to their ancestors, their goodwill only multiplied. It didn’t even matter if, for all intents and purposes, we spoke distinct languages and could barely communicate. They were happy to make our acquaintances at all. Of particular interest were our pronunciations. It never failed to amuse when we’d say some shared word in the manner of our own time.

Caspersen occupied herself with understanding the layout of the City, learning all she could about the cannibals, and so on. Kayleigh, Michelle, Kim, and the rest of the scientists seemed in both high demand and perpetually busy. Their scientific knowledge made them useful to everyone, and the world was so full of wonders it kept them ever occupied. Kayleigh and Caspersen were intent on learning to speak the Keplerite version of English and teaching it to the rest of us.

The excitement of the first few days wore down, and I was left with less and less to occupy my time. I could have thrown myself into the business of discovery as Granges and some of the others did. But it occurred to me that, here, I was little more than a fish out of water. I’d trained in any number of skills. I could operate most weapons of my era with precision. But none of that was applicable here. With our ammo stores running as low as they were, it wouldn’t be long before we were completely out; and without ammo, it wouldn’t matter how accurate a shot I was.

I was joined in this manner of reflection by none other than the professor. Being a computer expert in a world without computers apparently had the same appeal as being a soldier in a world without soldiering. It certainly wasn’t the life he’d envisioned for himself.

So, in perhaps one of the strangest turn of events thus far, our mutual disappointment morphed into a sort of camaraderie. It was slow going at first. I’d spend my days wandering the midair realm, finding some secluded spot to observe the vast, sad planet that had become my new home. Somehow, the professor caught wind of these excursions and took it upon himself to join me.

It struck me he was a strange creature, solitary and cantankerous, but simultaneously desirous of human companionship. That need, in turn, irked him very much. So we spent more than a few days in near silence, sighing into the endless expanse of trees.

It didn’t prove weirder than finding out our crew picked eating one another over farming. But it definitely ranked up there on the weirdness scale. Especially when he started to take me into his confidences.

“Civilized people,” he opined one afternoon, interrupting a perfectly serviceable silence to strike up conversation. “You and I, despite your profession—we are civilized people. Granted, you’re a bit bloodier than myself. But you do not kill the way these Keplerites do. I imagine you’ve never eaten anyone?”

I couldn’t tell if he wanted an answer, but when he paused in an expectant way, I ventured, “None?”

“Exactly so. We’re civilized people—you a woman of war and me a man of learning. And now…now what are we become, eh? What good is my brain, all those years of learning, all this brilliance, now? Among such…” His face wrinkled and he gesticulated vainly. “Such…ignorant, primitive men as these.”

I chose to ignore the unabashed way in which he lavished praise on himself, saying instead, “It’s a different world.”

“I might have transformed it. We might have, people like you and me, working together. But that future is gone. Now, we who are educated, skilled…we are of no use… Now, we wait to die, among the embers of humanity.” He sighed and fell silent for a long moment. “I was made for the opportunity we had, you know. I was perfect for it. I didn’t waste my life building up the relationships and commitments that would have tied other men down. I spent my time learning, so I was free to leave when the call came. It felt like destiny, like what I’d been training for all my life, though I hadn’t even known it.

“And now it’s gone. My learning, my work…it means nothing here. We’re outdated tech. Obsolete hardware.”

When he wasn’t focused on his own sorry plight, the professor shared his thoughts on the rest of the crew. They were rarely pleasant. The engineers in particular seemed to have stirred a deep irritation in the professor’s breast.

I concluded after a few rants that his dislike sprang from the fact that they had achieved somewhat of a celebrated status among the Keplerites. Tales of the weapons they had created, weapons that could turn men to ice, spread far and wide among the Nation. Only adding to their fame, the other men’s penchant for improving systems had already been put to good use. Before we could communicate in more than monosyllables and grunts, they had rigged up an elevator in the center of the City, near Gat’s house. Beyond the practical advantages—speed of ascent and descent—the novelty thrilled our hosts.

All of this, in turn, disgusted the professor, who saw their rise in popularity as a mark of the Keplerites’ intellectual poverty.

“Well, we may be wasted people, but at least Ted has found his calling. Twining together twigs among the trees. And Rick and Don are equally happy swinging through the branches.” He added simian hooting by way of emphasizing his point.

When, after a few weeks, he got wind of a budding attraction between one of the Keplerite women and Dr. Lee, he was beside himself, as much from amusement as revulsion. “Well, that actually makes sense. Don’s an engineer, after all. His best chance of getting laid would be traveling through time and chancing on a woman who couldn’t understand a word he said.”

Unsurprisingly, chatting with the professor rarely improved my outlook. For those brief moments of reprieve, I looked rather to Kayleigh and, more by the boy’s choosing than mine, Quess.

As to the former, Kayleigh’s work kept her busy most of the time. But for some reason, she seemed to set her evenings aside for me. Thus, I kept abreast of her progress in mapping the language. Not only kept abreast, but quizzed regularly as she was determined the entire crew should master this new form of English.

It was hell to speak. My early impressions proved true: hard sounds had become a thing of the past. The exception to this regarded proper names, which, oddly enough, often began with some sort of hard consonant. The change was more fundamental than this, though; the entire way of speaking had shifted. Individual sounds were less distinct and more fluid. Minute variances in intonation and pitch transformed the meaning of a word or phrase. Guttural utterances made way for high, musical tones.

Kayleigh had plenty of ideas as to why the language might have evolved in this fashion. The difference in oxygen levels between Earth and our new world, she theorized, would have made every breath precious. Consequently, pronunciations that would have expelled more air than necessary would have been softened, to ease the oxygen burden. In time, the spoken language would have become what it was now.

I didn’t care as much about the whys as she did. I only knew I hated the strain on my vocal cords and hated the feeling of singing all day long. Still, she kept at teaching me, and in time, I understood it well enough to communicate with our hosts. No one ever would have accused me of being proficient, but at least they could understand me, and I could understand them.

Kayleigh found more than language to concern her though. She was particularly interested in the evolution of the human lungs. Unlike us, the Keplerites did not wear or need masks. Indeed, they had initially expressed some surprise and consternation at seeing us don them, this apparently being too like the skin walkers for their comfort. While Captain Sanders’s journals mentioned the struggles of his crew to adapt to the new environment, later generations of humanity had obviously overcome this difficulty.

“I tried to ask Marge if they do autopsies here,” Kayleigh explained rather dejectedly one evening after dinner. “I’d love to see what the lungs look like now. But she had no idea what I was talking about.”

I heard much of Marge too. Kayleigh was consistently in awe of how much medical knowledge the herbalists had retained from Earth days and how much they’d adapted their practice to Kepler-186f. In turn, her own learning seemed to have made quite the impression on our hosts. I didn’t realize how great until she showed up one night wearing the same type of purple-and-white tunic Marge wore.

It was downright disconcerting to see her dressed as one of them. Not because the clothes were ill-fitting or unpleasant on her. On the contrary, it was a good look, and she wore them well. It struck me though, with a measure almost of pain, to see how quickly, how easily, she had adapted.

Learning how she’d come to acquire those curious garments did little to improve matters. Marge had recommended her to Gat as an herbalist, which was, among the Keplerites, a high honor reserved only to a few and generally after many years of apprenticeship and study. The distinctive robes could be worn only by one who had been recognized by the Nation, on the recommendation of another herbalist. Kayleigh’s wealth of knowledge and eagerness to learn had earned her this.

I was happy for her, deeply happy, and yet profoundly sad for myself. My conversations with the professor returned to the forefront of my mind, and I thought once again of how obsolete we had become. Before, I’d had a role in our survival, in our crew’s well-being. Now, I was on the sidelines. Where before the crew had relied on me and the rest of the military, we were, at best, laborers now. I’d become what Matt had started out as. And I had never envisioned a life on Kepler-186f like that. Seeing Kayleigh look so settled, so happy, I saw my own listlessness reflected back at me.

Somehow, though, she didn’t seem to see it. I never had the impression I was useless or obsolete in her eyes, no matter how I looked to my own or the professor’s. She would solicit my opinion on matters far beyond my realm of expertise as if she trusted my advice in general. Since we’d been encouraged not to descend alone, she would bring me along as her bodyguard when she needed to make an excursion to the world below for some root or food-gathering exercise. Those were the moments when I felt most at home on our new planet—when my feet were planted on the earth with Kayleigh at my side, and I had purpose.

And in the absence of those moments, I anticipated my daily chats with her. They were my chief source of joy in those days.

The boy, Quess, brought a more persistent though less pronounced measure of happiness to my new life. He, like the professor, had picked up on my daily outings. Most of the rest of the crew were generally too busy, and the professor was far too unapproachable to be bothered.

But Quess had something of the instincts of a seasoned predator, honing in on vulnerability. And, seeing that I had neither the occupations of the others nor the ill temper of the professor, he went in for the kill.

Not that I minded, really. Day after day, week after week, he followed me, chattering away. It didn’t seem to bother him that I had no idea what he was saying.

As my comprehension of the language grew, he started expecting answers. More than once, I slipped into my familiar habit of ignoring him only to be prodded out of my thoughts by an impatient query. It annoyed me at first, but in a while, I came to appreciate his conversation, persistent though it was.

Earth fascinated the boy, and he pried out every detail of my life there. The technology, in particular, he regarded with a measure of awe bordering on worship. To him, the notion of cars and airplanes seemed a hair away from magic.

In time, I learned something about Quess as well. He’d been orphaned young after both parents fell in separate raids to the cannibals. Since then, he’d been a ward of the Nation, beholden like ourselves to Gat for his home and provender. It was the custom of the Nation to provide for those who found themselves destitute until such time as they could fend for themselves. It seemed to be a kind of tax, levied against goods and labor rather than currency.

In our own case, those of us without specific skills useful to the Nation were drafted now and again into the labor crews to build homes, repair infrastructure, etc. In the child’s case, his assignment was pursuing his education—an occupation from which I became rather a distraction. In time, he would choose either an apprenticeship or, like many others, join the general labor force. I feared if he kept neglecting his studies to trail the Earthlings, the choice of that path would be made for him.

Which did not reflect at all on his intelligence or aptitude. As far as I could tell, Quess had a sharp mind and a gift for numbers. He followed the work of the engineering team with rapt interest and seemed to understand a good deal of it. He could calculate the velocity of the elevator’s descent, what limits had to be put in place to prevent untimely demises, and so on—and all at the drop of a hat. Like many of his peers in the City, his knowledge of arithmetic seemed gleaned from practical application and lessons given with practical application in mind.

But, for all his natural ability, Quess preferred to listen to stories about old Earth rather than studying. Here, the professor’s particular brand of brutal bluntness did a good turn. I suspected the boy’s unscholarly habits had less to do with the lecture than the fact that he’d spoken rather too admiringly about the engineers in the professor’s presence.

“For the love of God, can’t I get a moment’s peace and quiet? You want to talk about rockets and airplanes. Well, who do you think built them? You think it was people like you, who sat around and talked all day? You think they’d ever have gotten off the ground if they did that? No. Mankind never would’ve left its caves if we acted like you.

“You talk about wanting to fly…well, at the rate you’re going, the closest you’re ever going to get to flight is falling out of a damned tree.”

Not exactly positive reinforcement, but it seemed to do the trick. Two tricks, in fact. I was thankful for the first; it convinced Quess to reapply himself to his studies. The second pleased the professor; it convinced the boy to give him a wide berth moving forward.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

DAYS TURNED TO weeks, and weeks to months. The weather grew colder, and we grew more accustomed to our new home. Even the professor and I started to come to terms with our lives.

Most of us still resided in Gat’s great home. Lee had moved in with Olga, the woman who had caught his fancy early on. We saw him less frequently these days, though even that was still too much for the professor.

In time, we learned something else: we hadn’t been the only ones to keep secrets. Gat had his share of them too.

Specifically, he’d concealed several of the journals of his ancestor, Captain Sanders. He’d let us read most of them, but the few detailing some of the later explorations of the planet he withheld until he was sure of us.

It didn’t take long now that he’d started working with Caspersen to build that trust and respect. So he handed them over, saying he felt it right she know the full story. “You are a warrior and a leader of your people. This is your story, almost more than it is mine, for you were a part of this crew. Read it and share it with your crew.”

The journals provided fascinating insights into everything from the early skirmishes between settlers and cannibals to the topography of this particular area of the planet. But one set of passages in particular captured our imagination when we read them. They were written later in Sanders’s life, roughly a decade or so before his death.

Davidson is back with big news. And guests. He found a missing part of the ship. Still had occupants—human occupants—in it! Thirty-eight men and women from the original voyage.

My God, it’s strange to see them—so young and healthy, still coming to terms with all of this, while we’re all so old, so used to this place. I guess it’s worse for them. To them, we just set out, and now we’re old, and they’re not. We know how to survive here—and survive the rest of the crew—and they don’t.

But it’s not just the people. Davidson found the missing part of the west wing—the reserve server rooms, the flight deck, all of it.

The kicker? It’s deep in the mountains, almost directly behind the lava flow. Somehow, Alcorn’s people have missed it. Davidson says it’s hard to get to and impossible to see. He more or less stumbled on it by accident but had a hell of a time getting the crew out without getting detected.

We’re heading back tomorrow. I’m going with him, taking a few men and guns. The plan is to avoid detection, but we’re not taking chances.

The next entry had been dated some days later and read:

What a hike. Davidson was barely able to find his way back. And no wonder. The ship is on the far side of the range, in a deep ravine behind the active volcano. I’m not sure what prompted him to even come this way, but I’m glad he did.

This section of the ship is in remarkable condition. Storerooms untouched, supplies plentiful.

But more importantly, the server room looks like it’s fully intact. We might finally be able to find out what happened to the Genesis.

The next day’s entry was less optimistic.

Well, we’ve hit a snag. The secondary data center was sealed with a passcode known only to the flight officers.

And they’re all dead or sitting in some other corner of this world, undiscovered. It’s a ten- digit number/letter combo, so the possibilities are, for all practical purposes, endless. The lock was supposed to protect the data from sabotage or meddling; so far, it’s protected it from everything else too.

I’m trying every significant combo I can think of, but my fear is that it was a random string of characters. If that’s the case, we’re locked out for good.

The flight deck is accessible, and the fuel reserves are plentiful. But here, too, we’ve been flummoxed—this time, by gravity. Due to the angle of the ship, most of the hangers have shifted. A lot of damage to the craft, but nothing that can’t be fixed. The real problem is that we can’t get them out—not without a lot of manpower. And a lot of noise. Even if we did that, and none of Alcorn’s crew found us, we’re still in a ravine.

Without equipment or, at least, the freedom to lift them, they’re no good to us.

A few short entries followed, detailing the crew’s attempts to enter the server room and access the bounty they found in the storage rooms. Eventually, though, Sanders had no choice but to admit defeat.

We’re back today. We could not crack the server room code, nor could we find alternate access. The room is a fortress, and the design is flawless. Too flawless.

With the ship being as close as it is to Alcorn, I decided to lock off the flight deck. With the fuel and firepower there, he could flatten the forest. And his men would have the freedom to retrieve the ships that we do not.

I could not take that risk. So the flight deck is sealed.

Code: X83LQ02KP5

Perhaps in time, we may be able to return. At least we may rest easy that, even if they find the ship, they will not be able to get through.

Along with the code, Sanders included a rough map of the path to the missing part of the ship. The revelation of this journal ignited our imaginations like a wildfire. But the missing access code presented the same challenge to us that it had to Sanders: we hadn’t found the flight captains’ either, so their codes were obviously lost to us.

The professor scoffed when we said this. “The flight captains? They weren’t the only ones with the password.”

“Who else had it?” Caspersen asked.

“Only the guy who designed the damned room. Moi.”

“Wait.” Kayleigh was so excited she grabbed his arm. “You mean, you have the passcode to the server room?”

Shaking his arm free, he declared through an upturned nose, “Of course. Not the password they had. But the backdoor code.”

“What?”

He snorted again. “You always build a backdoor. You don’t put the keys to the kingdom in the hands of amateurs without leaving yourself a backdoor.”

“You mean…a second password?” Caspersen asked.

“An override code, technically. But, yes.”

“Would anyone else have known about it?”

The professor turned a cold gaze to Kayleigh. “You know what a secret isn’t when you tell someone? Secret. You don’t have a secret backup plan and tell people.”

“Especially when it’s illegal,” Caspersen noted dryly. She was right. Building in a secret override to government systems would have violated half a dozen laws, not to mention ethical considerations as well.

“You’re saying you’d prefer we didn’t have a code? Okay, fine. I was just joking. Of course I didn’t break the rules. Of course I didn’t build in a backup plan. I put all my eggs in a single basket. Only now, someone’s tripped, and there’s a mess everywhere.

“If only—if only—I had anticipated disaster and thought to build in some sort of safety override. But that would have been illegal. Darn.”

It took some coaxing and groveling to convince the professor to admit that the code existed, and he flatly refused to share it with us.

“It’s my code,” he maintained. “My servers. No one enters that server room without me.”

*

MATT SUGGESTED—JOKINGLY, I assume—that we beat the code out of the professor. And though Caspersen called it a tempting choice, we included the professor in our plans. Because, of course, we made plans. There was a whole fleet out there and all of our data waiting to be retrieved.

Caspersen declared she would go, of course, and Matt insisted on tagging along. And even though Matt and the professor made up two-thirds of our team so far, I volunteered too. Kayleigh declared she would not stay home. Not with the medical databases out there waiting to be found.

Caspersen assigned Granges, Russell, and Cohen to stay with the rest of the civilians and asked Connor to come with us.

I was full of eager expectation and purpose, both at the prospect of leaving the trees and being of use. For the first time in some months, I’d be able to do more than gather pine nuts or repair roads. Not even the potential of running into cannibals did much to dampen my enthusiasm.

Gat, on the other hand, felt considerably less enthused about our campaign. He seemed convinced we’d assigned ourselves a suicide mission. I couldn’t shake the incongruity between how openly our hosts admired our bravery in confronting the cannibals, yet how alien it seemed to them. Even coming to our rescue had been an aberration. “Your courage,” Gat had told us, “left us no choice.” But in general, as near as I could tell, their entire way of life revolved around avoiding the cannibals. Even the mention of the surface caused visible distress as it did now, when he thought we would surely die if we pursued these explorations.

But his objections held little sway over us. We understood the risks, but the lure of knowing what had happened to the Genesis was too great. The idea that we might retrieve usable tech to aid us against the cannibals only sweetened the deal. We were going, with or without Gat’s approval.

And, in the end, it was with his approval, though with many forebodings. He had faith enough in Caspersen to believe we stood some chance, and the prospect of what the professor’s override might unlock fired up even Gat’s imagination. He told us he wished us well and hoped he hadn’t caused our deaths by revealing the hidden journals. And then he sent one of the Nation’s scouts, a young man called Bak, with us.

Bak was of a moderate height and had a thin, wiry frame, with a wedge-shaped face and piercing gaze. In combination with his sandy hair, he reminded me rather of a juvenile red-tailed hawk—gangly, and maybe a little predatory.

We learned he’d actually volunteered for the assignment. And though he’d never personally visited the ship, he knew the general location. More importantly, he knew his way around the mountains, which areas the cannibals frequented, and which they ignored.

I got the impression scouting fell to those Nation members for whom sticking to the trees proved a challenge. It gave the young and adventurous the liberty to take whatever risks they felt compelled to take. If they survived, they would bring back valuable intel. And if they didn’t…well, they’d serve as a grim reminder to their peers of the perils in the vast world below.

With the party formed and well-wishes from the Nation and the rest of our crew, we set out. Bak led us through a long maze of wooded byways, from the solid, sturdy roads we’d grown familiar with to poorly maintained and ancient paths that trembled as we crossed.

He grinned at our discomfort—a great, toothy, angular grin—and made a show of emphasizing the ease with which he passed these points. More than once, the professor reminded him that if he died, the override code died with him.

This was not entirely true though. Not even the professor had been mad enough to venture into cannibal territory without confiding the code to someone else. And though he’d been quite dismissive when she’d asked, he picked Kayleigh for the dubious honor of sharing a secret with him. First, he’d sworn her to thirteen different levels of secrecy on the soul of every relative within the past ten generations of her family. She was only—only—to use the code in the eventuality of his death. Even this concession came with lectures on how to operate the servers she would encounter.

She didn’t violate his trust, although—truth be told—I encouraged her to do so. She kept the code to herself throughout the trip. “I gave my word, Nikkole” was all she’d say.

Bak, though, seemed to enjoy rattling his cage. And not only the professor’s. We were all targets, at one point or another. He wasn’t cruel, exactly, but he had a singular sense of humor. Our discomfort with heights amused him to no end. The better I got to know the young man, the more convinced I grew that in choosing a solitary career for himself, he’d chosen well.

And he knew his way around every corner of the forest, where every rain basin was, and where to find every traveler’s cabin. He even had a sixth sense about finding the vine grown fruit that crept up the trees here and there.

We journeyed through the forest for days. Once we’d left the City, we relied on the occasional way-stops built along the byways. A few had been extremely aged and decrepit, but most remained in good condition. The humble cabins were furnished sparsely if at all, but they offered a space to sleep out of the elements, and that was all we really needed.

Our path followed the far edge of the forest, swinging as close to the mountains as the Nation’s infrastructure allowed. We got close enough to behold those great green masses of stone again, towering tall on the horizon.

Now and again, Bak would scale down one of the trees, survey the area, and then return to us. He required no ladders or climbing gear to get where he wanted. “Not yet,” he’d say. “A little longer.”

On the twelfth day, we descended to the forest floor.

“Quiet now,” Bak cautioned us. “Sometimes the Lava Dwellers pass this way.” He remained in the trees, unfastening the ropes he’d used to let us down. Then, coiling them around himself for the return trip, he followed.

Chapter Forty

OUR ROUTE THROUGH the trees had been circuitous for a reason. We left the forest very near the mountains, near a set of tunnels that Bak knew from previous travels.

These were old lava tunnels, he told us. Once, this area had flowed with magma directly below the surface, and the cannibals flocked here for the warmth. Now the volcanoes lay dormant, and the cannibals had moved on. But the tunnels remained and led deep into the heart of the mountain range.

So began the next leg of our journey. The Keplerites definitely had something against walking on the surface like ordinary men. Where before we’d traveled in midair, suspended between heaven and earth, now our way took a subterranean turn.

We no doubt would have been hopelessly lost if not for Bak. I got so turned around among the networks of intersecting tunnels that before I knew it, I’d lost any sense of direction. But in the meager light of his lantern, Bak led us through the tubes with unshaken confidence.

The tunnels themselves, it must be noted, were phenomenal to behold. I’d been many places on Earth, but never had I seen anything like this.

The walls shimmered with minerals, and here and there we found lavacicles—great stalactites hanging from the ceiling, formed by dripping lava. Sometimes, they paired with stalagmites and sometimes they hung alone.

The floors stretched for long spaces in the smoothest, most unmarred rock I’d ever seen. And in other places, the stone rippled and bulged in strange, whimsical patterns. Kayleigh said these were exquisite examples of pāhoehoe lava. Which meant very little to me, but I admired the beauty anyway.

Occasionally, the ceiling hung so low we proceeded on our hands and knees. But for the most part, we had plenty of room to walk upright—usually, with space to spare.

I didn’t immediately see it, but in addition to a wealth of minerals, the walls bore very curious marks of a graduated flow, with new depths indicating the height at which the lava had traveled as the volume diminished. The crew’s geologists, I had no doubt, would be profoundly disappointed to have missed this opportunity. At least, they would have been, had it not come with the ever-present threat of discovery by the cannibals.

That threat weighed heavily on all of us, and most particularly the professor and Bak. Every ring of boots on the tunnel floor provoked an urgent exhortation for caution from one or both. It was a disconcerting turn of events that these two who, in the trees, had been at each other’s throats, now aligned in common purpose.

Their concerns weren’t entirely without justification. Some patches of rock seemed to absorb the footfalls rather well, but the slightest movement rang out sharply on others, echoing up and down the tubes. Still, no one tried to make more noise than we could help, and these panicked demands for silence only put us all on edge.

For two days, we made our way through the tunnels, and the professor’s jumpiness grew with each passing hour. Finally, we emerged midway up one of the peaks, surrounded on all sides by stone.

I had no idea where we were, but Bak didn’t seem fazed.

“We’re headed just behind the primary lava flow. That’s this way.”

And with that, we set off again. This time—finally—above ground. It felt good to simultaneously plant my feet on solid earth and also stand in sunlight. A rare treat I had been mostly denied these past months. It seemed to have the opposite effect on Bak though. Despite the fact that the cannibals rarely ventured into the mountains, he grew, somehow, even jumpier. The professor calmed a little once we reached open ground, but not much.

So their continued unease only added to the tension we all felt, and there was plenty of that already. Our path lay almost directly behind the cannibal settlement.

The settlement, Bak told us, consisted of a large expanse of habitations all along the lava flow. The Mountain—the aptly named source of that flow—was the largest volcano in the area and the focal point of their civilization.

The Mountain itself was actually a set of cojoined mountains, one greater and one lesser. Each spewed its own stream of magma, which joined midway to form the great flow around which the cannibal settlement existed.

Our destination was a crevice on the major peak, high above the cannibals. After our last encounter with them, none of us wanted a rematch, and the thought of being in that kind of proximity—no matter how far above, or how shielded from view below—cheered no one.

So we marched in silence, the professor jumping at every shadow, until we reached the Mountain. Then began the long climb. This proved to be the most difficult leg of our journey so far because of the steep, sometimes almost sheer, grade. And it seemed to stretch upward forever.

It took two and a half days to reach a pass, about three-quarters of the way up. This led toward the front of the Mountain, and from here we progressed in the general direction indicated on the map. Shortly before the third evening, we discovered the ravine.

It was situated almost directly at the point where the mountains merge, and the climb proved hair raising. There were no easy ways down in any direction, particularly in the sparse light of dusk. But the sight of another lost portion of the Genesis nestled deep among the rock gave us the incentive we needed, and somehow, we all made it down with nothing worse than skinned knees and battered nerves to show for our trouble.

Dark had settled by time we reached the ship. Finding an operable pod, we locked ourselves in for the night. Now that we were sheltered and in relative safety, I would have been content to sleep through the evening, but Caspersen insisted we set up shifts for watch. As per our habit thus far, she divided it between me, her, Connor, and Matt.

The night passed uneventfully, and we rose early and eagerly. As far out of the sunlight as we were in the ravine, the ship was still dark inside—not with the same, solid depth of nighttime, but dim like the hours before sunset. Still, we had enough light to make our way around, and no one wanted to wait longer.

The professor almost managed to bury the jitters, and even Bak started to pick up on the excitement.

“All right,” Caspersen said, “let’s scout this place out, make sure we’re alone…and then get to the server room.”

The survey of the ship took very little time. We were at an angle, a good thirty degrees or so, with the flight deck raised as it rested against the cliff face. Our temporary quarters had been at the lowest part of the wing, and a number of rooms lay between those ends.

We discovered some changes, none for the better, in the state of things since Captain Sanders had been here, and not merely due to the passage of time. The cannibals might not have located this wing before the Nation did, but they’d certainly had some time in the intervening millennia. The halls, most of the pods, and storage rooms had been ransacked. Anything that could be carted off and used had gone missing, and what remained had been destroyed.

Our search turned up no visitors. We found evidence of prior encampments but nothing recent enough to give us concern. As near as I could tell, and despite the ancient camps and damage, no one had disturbed the ship in some years.

What the search did turn up, though, was no less worrying. The keypads to both the flight deck and server room doors had been smashed. The server room panel, in particular, had been brutally handled; a chunk of what looked like a maul head was still wedged into the mechanism.

“Someone had a temper tantrum when they couldn’t get in,” Matt said, smirking.

Obviously, this was a poser. Caspersen’s brow furrowed, and she asked the professor, “Is this something you can fix?”

The professor shook his head. “Doubt it. But no need.”

“Then how do we get in?” Matt asked.

The professor only smiled, saying, “Give me a boost, and I’ll show you. Up here.” With no further explanation, he insisted that we hoist him up toward the paneling above the door.

He seemed to relish the idea of being of use as much as I was—but in a far more irritating fashion. Which, all things considered, didn’t really surprise me.

I bit my tongue and lifted him up with Matt. The professor grunted and mumbled to himself, and shifted his weight from one of us to the other so many times I was about ready to drop him and demand an explanation. Then, at last, I heard a hiss of satisfaction.

A moment later, he jumped down, declaring, “There we are.”

Straightening up, I saw now what the professor had been working with—a secondary keypad, tucked into the panel above the door.

Noticing the direction of my gaze, he smiled appreciatively. “Mechanical keypad. Command thought we wouldn’t need them; said the digital panels would be sufficient. This was just added expense. Sure as hell glad now that I didn’t back down.”

The idea of the professor ever backing down on anything struck me as unlikely, but I had to admit I was glad he’d stuck to his guns on this one. Even though the vandals had destroyed the wall panel, he could still enter a code into the keypad. And sure enough, the door slid open when he tried it.

The server room beyond seemed entirely in order except for a few machines knocked out of their racks. The professor stumbled through the chamber in a euphoric haze for the first fifteen minutes, and the rest of us weren’t much better.

The pinnacle of Earth’s learning, the height of our planet’s human knowledge, had been gathered here on these servers and in these databanks. With them sat the answers we’d been seeking about the Genesis’s plight.

One particular server nearly brought the professor to tears when he found it in serviceable condition. “My AI system—it’s here. My God, I thought I’d never see you again. And here you are.” He dabbed at his eyes and shook his head. “My God, here you are.”

“Jesus, get a room already,” Matt said and groaned.

The professor was too delirious with joy to be bothered by Matt’s comments though. After he was finished admiring the server, which, to my eyes, looked exactly like all the other boxes in the room—he moved on, mumbling exultantly about the state of this machine or that.

Caspersen allowed him time to revel in the discovery, but in a bit declared, “All right, let’s get to work. What do we need to get these machines online, Carter?”

The question dragged the professor to the present, and he nodded. “Power. I don’t know how much sunlight we get in this ravine, but the solar panels should be able to power some of the servers anyway.” He headed to a control center at the far end of the room and started poking around. “These machines are old, but they’ve been dormant. In theory, they should just power on.”

I had long ago learned that the words “in theory” and “technology” were rarely good bedfellows. The increasing volume of the professor’s growling and cursing as he worked, flipping various switches, changing cabling, etc., seemed to indicate the pattern would hold awhile longer.

“Anything we can do?” Kayleigh queried in a few minutes.

“Did you pack a portable generator?” the professor snapped. “Then, no.”

No one dared speak after that for several more minutes as the professor focused on rerouting cabling. When he turned to the power button on his console station and pressed it expectantly, to the same results as before, Caspersen ventured, “I take it we do not have power?”

By way of answer, he simply glared at her, jaw clenched.

“All right. What do we do then?”

Chapter Forty-One

THE PROFESSOR’S INITIAL plan of action involved sinking into deep melancholy and refusing to attempt anything further. He had a lot to say about his fate, and what he saw as a destiny to see his life’s work, to have it within his grasp, but to be denied the fruits of his labor. It was a weird blend of melodrama and quasi-Biblical theology, and it took Caspersen a long time to get him back on track.

But when he finally came round, he had a good plan. “If we can’t get power to the computers here, we have to take the computers to somewhere where we can get power.”

It sounded good until I realized he meant literally every computer.

“We’ll only need one or two boxes if I can get all the drives,” he explained. “I’ll need more eventually, but we can come back for them. In the meantime, the data’s the most important thing.”

“What about the medical database?” Kayleigh asked. The idea had been that she would download it onto a portable device. Without power, that was obviously not going to happen.

“I’ll take the drives from the databank as well,” he assured her. “And we’re going to need cabling. When we get back to the City, we can raid the rest of the ship for solar paneling. I should be able to rig a solar generator from that and get one of the machines up and running.”

And so the despair of earlier gave way to the plans of the present. The professor set to work at a near frantic pace, collecting everything he thought he’d need, de-racking the servers one by one, and disassembling them to retrieve their drives. And, all the while, he rattled off his plans—not only for how he would get these machines running back in the trees, but for how he could, with a few more expeditions, restore the ship’s original technology entirely. Fate and destiny seemed to hold no sway over the professor now.

As far as our role in these goings-on, the professor forbade us to touch or interfere with anything except as transport for the items. And he worked us mercilessly when the occasion arose, driving us harder than any set of pack mules had ever been driven. He barked out orders all morning and well into the afternoon.

“Set that over there—and be careful, damn it.”

“Come on, come on, I need it gone sometime this century.”

“Here, hold this. Not there, over here.”

When Matt stumbled over a cord lying across the walkway, while carrying one of the database servers, the professor nearly had apoplexy.

“What the hell are you doing? That’s one of a kind. Irreplaceable. Its value is beyond words. And you want to drop it? Well congratulations, you almost single-handedly wiped out thousands of years of human learning in one move. Not even Hitler hit the human race that hard—and he was trying.”

Working with him in general was a special kind of hell, but working for him was even worse. Somehow, though, we made it through the day without strangling him. And he, in turn, had loaded us with as much tech as we could reasonably carry. Then he moaned that it wasn’t enough.

We had two cases, a variety of cables that he deemed necessary, all the major data drives, and, of course, the drives for the professor’s AI system. The sun had nearly set by time we finished, so we camped in the server room for the evening.

The professor’s paranoia, which he had buried in his work, began to resurface. He woke us all up during the night, insisting he’d seen something—someone—skulking about in the hall. A quick survey of the hall turned up nothing at all though.

Still, it was enough to ensure we didn’t get much sleep after that. the professor, I think, got none at all. The next morning, he rose an irritable bundle of nerves with a single goal in mind: returning to safety with his precious machines as fast as he could.

“We still have to check the flight deck,” Connor reminded him.

“Why? If Sanders wasn’t able to find anything useful, how are we going to? We have a responsibility, not only to ourselves, but to the future of humanity, to the intellectual legacy of mankind, to get out of here in one piece.”

He found no sympathetic listeners though. He could convince no one to leave before seeing what lay beyond that last set of doors.

We secured the server room after us, both to keep its contents out of cannibal hands, and also to preserve it for our return trip. Then we headed to the flight deck. Here again, we relied on the mechanical input to open the doors, for the digital panel had been wrecked. The ruined keypad, though inoperable, still had power—a revelation that set the professor off on a tirade against the Genesis’s power distribution scheme and the “incompetent bureaucrats” who approved it in the first place.

His computers, apparently, had been assigned to the Tier II grid, which meant they were prioritized beneath the life support systems and locks. In practical terms, that meant in situations like our present one, where we had limited power due to the solar panels receiving minimal amounts of light per day, the needs of the cryopods and door panels came before the nonessential computers. In the professor’s mind, this was a problem.

And again, he found we were unsympathetic to his way of thinking.

Still, he hadn’t been too far off about the flight deck. We found things much as Sanders described them. The aircraft—a few helicopters and small planes—were scattered across the deck, some still fastened in place but many having slid toward the downward end of the hanger. Most had come to some damage in the original landing, but with the right tools, it would largely be repairable. Being up-mountain of the cannibals, however, meant we could do little without attracting attention to ourselves…and winding up someone’s dinner into the bargain.

But Caspersen wanted to scout the area for weaponry before we left. “Let’s make a quick catalog of everything, so we know what’s here if we can ever come back for it.”

She noted the fuel reserves all seemed present and accounted for too. “And that might come in handy later on.” The fuel had been stabilized for long-term storage to survive the trek through deep space; what condition it would be in thousands of years later, we could only guess. Nor could we take any back with us for testing as we’d already hit maximum carry capacity with the professor’s computers.

For his part, the professor did nothing but complain—first about the delay, then our proximity to the cannibals, and how hard he’d worked. He complained about his sore feet and aching back and, of course, about the perceived dangers to his computers.

Even Bak, whose anxiety at being so close to the cannibals had been off the charts since we left the trees, seemed to be tiring of the other man’s whining.

I’d been searching the cockpit of an attack copter and trying to ignore the professor’s protests when he stopped short. The change was so unexpected, since his stream of complaints had basically been a constant since we arrived in the hanger, that I glanced up.

Half a second before I spotted the professor, I heard the shot—one round, discharged from a pistol—ricochet off of something metallic.

A moment later, the professor’s panic-stricken voice screeched out, “Cannibal.”

“Carter!” We all screamed in near unison. Shooting this close to the Lava Dwellers was a sure and certain way to bring them down upon us.

I had already leaped out of the chopper when he fired a second round. I saw, now, his intended target—a fur-clad cannibal, snaking his way through the room for the door. And I saw where the professor’s first bullet had wound up: in the fuel tank of one of the helicopters, directly up the deck from me.

A long slick of fuel streamed out of the bullet hole and down the floor, past me and toward the far wall in the general direction the cannibal was headed. Then, the second round hit the ground. And just like that, thanks to friction and heat, we got the verification we needed that the fuel had indeed survived its time here on Kepler-186f. In a whoosh of flame and smoke, fire traced its way in both directions from the sight of impact, both up and down the deck.

“Fuck. Okay, time for us to get the hell out of here,” Caspersen directed.

We didn’t need urging. The Genesis had been carrying enough fuel to flatten half of Manhattan, and the professor had started a fire on deck. It didn’t really matter whether our skulking friend was on his own or with a crew today. We weren’t going to end up any deader fighting an army of cannibals than we would waiting for the fuel stores to light.

We caught only fleeting glimpses of the cannibal, who, by now, had a good head start on us as he raced for the open end of the ship.

Carter screamed frantically the whole time we ran. “I told you I saw a cannibal. I told you they were here.”

Despite the weight of our packs, fear gave us all the motivation to hustle we needed. We raced out of the ship and scrambled up the ravine walls as fast as we could go.

Our descent upon arrival had been difficult, but the ascent proved worse yet. More than once, one of us nearly plummeted to their death, grabbing for a flimsy handhold or trusting a treacherous foothold. The air grew heavy with the acrid odor of smoke, and glancing back at the ship, great, dark billows emerged from the open end. Fear gnawed at my stomach. Between this and the gunfire, there remained no question about whether the cannibals knew we were here. If the fire and the climb didn’t kill us, we’d still have to contend with them.

Despite the new gear we carried, we made good time. We reached the summit of the cliff and started retracing our steps. Bak led us toward the rear of the Mountain via the pass we’d traversed the other day.

That’s when it happened—an explosion so powerful, so terrible it threw us to the ground like so many rag dolls. I landed hard against a slab of stone and had the wind knocked out of me. The entire mountain trembled underfoot.

Gasping to collect my breath, I tried to push myself to my feet. I made it up, only to be knocked down again by the rocking. It felt as if the entire mountain was collapsing under me. Dust and smoke hung heavily in the air, and every breath choked me. I could see no one. I think I called for the rest of the crew, but my ears rang too loudly to hear if anyone responded.

And then a second noise sounded, not an explosion, but a splitting sound. I was still struggling to understand when, through the dust and haze, I saw the lower peak of the Mountain collapse.

I watched in a daze as foot upon foot of stone dropped before my eyes, plummeting downward.

A hand grabbed my arm, and I started. It was Kayleigh. I saw with relief that she seemed unhurt. She said something—I could see her lips move—but I couldn’t hear the words over the ringing in my head and the rumbling of the Mountain.

She pulled me onto my feet and started dragging me backward. I was transfixed by the sight before me until I realized the ledge underneath us had also started to crumble. Finally, my senses kicked in. I turned and took to my heels with her.

The rest of the crew ran with us. Bak took the lead, scrambling like a terrified mountain goat, leaping over obstacles as if they were nothing. The mountain shivered and groaned underneath us as my hearing ebbed back. But at least we’d reached solid ground, where nothing else fell away.

The explosion had obviously caused a collapse of the second peak, and the extent of the damage beyond that was anyone’s guess. By now, we were so far behind the major peak we could no longer see the lesser. We could only speculate about what had happened.

All I knew for sure was that it sounded as though the world was tearing itself apart, and I was terrified it would swallow us up with it.

We kept running.

Chapter Forty-Two

WE DIDN’T STOP running until the tremors had mostly settled. By then, we couldn’t maintain our original pace. My legs trembled with fatigue, and my lungs burned with exertion. I had no idea how long it had actually been, but it seemed like we’d already run for hours.

When at last we’d recovered our breath enough to speak, Caspersen said, “After that, they’re going to be looking for us. We’re going to need to keep moving, and moving fast.” She amazed me, sometimes, with how tactful she was. For my own part, I was half tempted to leave the professor’s body behind us as a peace offering to the cannibals. I wouldn’t have even cared if it worked, as long as it rid us of the trigger-happy son of a bitch. And I suspected I wasn’t the only one with similar thoughts.

The professor, however, seemed to miss how Caspersen was letting him off the hook for nearly killing us and nearly making us a main course at the cannibal feast.

Instead, he stared daggers at us all, and fumed, “I told you. I told you there were cannibals there. I warned you—all of you. And you told me I was seeing things.” He paused to suck in another mouthful of air. “Looks like I was right. Again.”

“Right? Fuck.” Matt scoffed. “You almost killed us all. I don’t really think now is the time for righteous indignation, do you?”

Righteous indignation, however, seemed to be precisely what the professor had in mind. “If you people had listened to me, that wouldn’t have happened. It’s not my fault you left defending us—and our computers—to me.”

“You shouldn’t have shot,” Connor panted.

“How about you soldiers actually act like soldiers, then? I fucking warned you all. I warned you all.”

“Carter, so help me, if you don’t shut the hell up,” I said, “I am going to—”

But Caspersen broke in, “We’re all going to move out. Save your breath. What’s done is done, and we’ve got a long journey home.”

*

WE WALKED ALL day and rested only until the moon shone brightly enough to light our path. We didn’t dare light a lantern as we were still on the Mountain. The cannibals, we felt sure, would be out looking for us, and we didn’t want to draw any further attention to ourselves.

Bak kept up a brutal pace, and we made the tunnels before nightfall on the second day. We were exhausted, but our nerves were greater than our weariness. In all this time, we’d spotted neither hide nor hair of a cannibal. They couldn’t have missed the incident in the mountains. No one on the continent probably missed that. Nor did it make any sense that they’d let us walk away. Not if they could help it.

Which, as I saw it, left us with one of two possibilities. In my more optimistic moments, I dared to dream we’d had such a good head start on our foes that we’d simply outrun them so far. In that case, every minute we spent resting was a moment of advantage to our pursuers. The other less pleasing possibility was that the cannibals were en route to intercept us via some hidden path. And in that case, we might well be walking to our deaths.

Still, there was nothing to do but walk; and so we did, all night. At least, I assumed it was overnight as it seemed like several hours. And we remained underground with only Bak’s lantern for light.

At any rate, after a space, our exhaustion hit a critical point, and Caspersen allowed us a quick rest. I’d had no intention of sleeping, but she had to shake me out of deep slumber when the time came to resume our march.

Twice more, we repeated this rest, but otherwise, except for quick breathers, we stayed on the move. The tunnels that had seemed so remarkable on our first pass through were now a source of constant concern. Every flicker of the lantern light, every dancing patch of shadow, every errant ring on the stone, seemed to portend our imminent demise.

But it never came. We crossed the lava tubes unmolested, emerging into the daylight with a measure of what could only be described as terror, for if the cannibals had been waiting to spring a trap, this was their last chance.

Terror gave way to confusion as we reached the trees. Bak went before us and let down the rope. One by one, we climbed up to safety. Then the rope came up.

Only then did I allow myself to breathe easy. We were safe. The cannibals, it seemed, had not even attempted to pursue us. Why? We all wondered but weren’t likely to find answers lingering at the edge of the forest. So we moved on.

We followed the same circuitous route we had originally pursued, but in reverse. Now that we were safe in the trees, we allowed ourselves time to rest. Even Caspersen slept well when we reached the first traveler’s hut. Twice, we had to remain for an extra spell due to inclement weather—the first time, a frigid rainstorm, and the second, an ice storm.

The professor was mostly sulky and silent throughout the trek. Now that we’d escaped with our lives, we were more forgiving of his incompetence. But he didn’t escape the occasional joke at his expense. A small price for nearly killing us.

He remained as protective as ever of his machines and worried more than once that we would be caught in the rain, far from shelter. So when the sky looked foreboding, we waited at the nearest waystation until it cleared.

Our return trip through the forest, then, took several extra days. At length, though, we reached the City. The Keplerites were pleased to see that we had returned alive and greeted us here and there with cheering and accolades.

“They really must have considered this a suicide mission.” I hadn’t realized just how bad they thought things looked for us.

“It almost was, remember?” Kayleigh said dryly.

We headed straight for Gat’s house. A crowd had gathered there, at least as great as the one that greeted our initial arrival. Gat was there, too, grinning ear to ear. He forwent the traditional handshake, opting instead to wrap us each, one by one, in a hug. Only now did I begin to suspect this was more than a celebration of our return.

Ending at Caspersen, Gat embraced her warmly, and then stood back to shake her hand. “I do not believe it. You are back. And what you have done for us! How did you manage it? We felt it all the way out here.” He seemed almost beside himself with joy, and releasing her hands, he wrapped her in a second hug. “There are not thanks enough.”

It was now that I spied Cohen in the crowd, standing rather near Gat. In quiet tones, in our own flavor of English, I asked, “What the hell’s going on? What are they talking about?”

He seemed confused by the question. “The Mountain. You guys took down half the Mountain. That was you, right?”

I nodded. “Yes. Well, Carter. But why are they thanking us?”

His confusion seemed to be mounting. “Because it unleashed a wave of lava that swept most of the cannibals away with it? And then the avalanche.” He frowned. “Did you really not know?”

I shook my head. “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.” I inched through the throng toward Caspersen. She was stalling, trying to figure out what Gat was talking about without appearing ignorant of the situation. “We owe much to Dr. Carter,” I intervened, addressing the head of the Nation in as conversational a tone as possible. “It was he who fired the round that set off the avalanche. And to Bak as well, for he led us both to the site and back again to safety. Without both of them, we would never have been able to destroy the cannibals.”

Our crew looked at me in astonishment, but Gat beamed. “Then tonight,” he said, “we feast in your honor—all of your honors, but particularly Dr. Carter’s and Bak’s. For you have done what sixty generations of Kepler’s children could not. You have destroyed the stronghold of the Lava Dwellers.”

Chapter Forty-Three

WE GOT THE full tale from the rest of the crew as the commotion died down. All through the forest, they’d felt the explosion. We’d witnessed the collapse of the second peak, but that was only the beginning of the devastation we’d wrought. Ton upon ton of stone crashed into the habitations below. A flood of lava, now free of its mountain channels, rushed after the stone.

It had taken the Lava Dwellers entirely by surprise, so the ensuing destruction had been nearly complete. Those who were not crushed under solid rock faced a worse death in molten rock. A handful escaped—some hunters who had been out of the camp at the time, and those who managed to outrun their compatriots.

But in one incredible, unwitting move, the professor had reduced the long-term nemesis of the Genesis mission to a handful of stragglers, bereft of their homes and community.

No army could have hoped to achieve so much wanton destruction and death by design as the professor had managed through sheer incompetence.

And for this, they heralded him as a hero. I could understand why the Nation saw it this way. We hadn’t told them what a miserable mess we’d made of everything, for starters. So they didn’t know that they celebrated a panicked, trigger-happy dumbass who almost got us all killed. We didn’t volunteer that information, and neither did Bak. I couldn’t say why the Keplerite kept our secret, but it probably didn’t hurt that he had suddenly become a national hero too.

That didn’t bother me. There was good, sound strategic thinking behind the decision. A revelation of “oh, by the way, we’re actually a bunch of dumbasses who almost brought a mountain down on ourselves and, in the process, killed a bunch of people” would surely hurt us more than help us. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life having my work second- and third-guessed for fear I’d destroy the forest or trigger some other calamity.

So that didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the fact that everywhere I went, people had turned out to celebrate mass destruction and death. I couldn’t shake the feeling that among all of those people we’d killed, surely there must have been some civilians and some innocents. They hadn’t all been warriors and cannibals, had they?

But to the Nation, there were no innocents among the cannibals, except the captured members of their own people; and death would be a better fate than what the Lava Dwellers had in store for a captive.

On some level, I got it. These people had spent thousands of years being hunted as prey. They’d seen their loved ones dragged off to be butchered. They’d watched cannibals feast on the flesh of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. So, I understood their perspective. The death of the cannibals meant no more midnight raids, no more kidnappings, no more screams in the middle of the night.

I understood, but still I grieved that humankind had come to this. I grieved that here, on our new world, where the follies of humanity’s time on Earth were supposed to be nothing more than memories—even here, the answer was always death. Ours or theirs, us versus them. Not even thousands of years and a new planet could rid us of that brutal binary.

I sat for a long time at the feast in melancholic and fatalistic thought. And so I might have remained, except that Gat brought out the spirits. This was another, and better, constant of humanity: we’d never found a crop we wouldn’t try fermenting and distilling.

I found I didn’t like most of what I’d tried, but I didn’t drink for flavor. Anyway, our discriminating tastes had gone out the window when we had to rely on MREs. It didn’t really matter that it felt like drinking liquid fire and tasted worse. If it did its job, the taste wouldn’t be noticed after a few rounds.

And the Keplerite brews and spirits did the job.

Pretty soon, I forgot my moral qualms. I set to eating. The promised feast was not the stuff of Earth lore, where kings gathered around tables overflowing with the bounty of field and forest. We had no roasted fowl or freshly hunted game here. We had a hundred types of food set before us, and more than we could ever eat in a sitting—but all of them were meatless.

I wasn’t sure if I was happy or not about that. Though everything served tasted excellent, I missed meat. Part of me would give my right arm for a good steak at the moment. But then my mind would wander back to the cannibals, for whom that right arm would be a good meal. And then I thought I could never eat another bite of meat as long as I lived.

In the end, I drank more than I should have, and ate enough. Perversely, though, my mood only deteriorated as the night wore on. My initial melancholy had made way for excitement and that, in turn, brought me only emptiness—and melancholy all over again.

It seemed to me I was once again useless. The cannibals had been defeated—this time, permanently. So what use was I to the group? I wouldn’t even have to go along for those herb runs Kayleigh made.

And, inexorably, my thoughts would linger on Kayleigh. They often did these days; it had been she who filled the lion’s share of my pleasant thoughts these past months, she alone who I eagerly waited to see day after day. But now, the sensation was one of sadness, as if someone had punched a deep, empty hole through me.

Kayleigh sat at a table across from me with Marge and Gat and a host of others, drinking far less than I and seeming to enjoy herself far more. God, she’s beautiful. I started as the thought crossed my mind. She was, of course, but somehow, I’d never really considered it before.

She seemed at ease, there among the Keplerites. They loved her and respected her. She had a future here; I had no doubt.

Again, that empty feeling settled in the pit of my stomach, just as it had when she’d been recognized as an herbalist. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, but the deeper a part of the Nation she became, the further away from our shared experiences she seemed to get. And that hurt with a physical pain not even the Keplerite drink could alleviate, although I did my best to prove otherwise.

I’d gotten through either my fifth or sixth serving of a particularly noxious grain-based brew when I had an epiphany. I was in love with Kayleigh.

I turned that thought around in my head and couldn’t deny it. The feeling had been growing on me for some time. And now, I couldn’t escape it. I didn’t think it improved my situation. On the contrary, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to have the opposite effect—turning a vague wound into a pronounced one.

She had purpose and meaning here. She had a calling. She could do great things and help many. And me? I was a washed-up soldier with nothing to offer anyone, a washed-up soldier in love with her.

It didn’t help matters that people would randomly drop by to offer their congratulations and thanks. As one of the triumphant band of imbeciles, I had to accept these well-wishes with good grace. But in the moment, I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want congratulations for a job well done. I was an imposter, enjoying stolen glory, a fool, nursing a wounded heart. I wanted to crawl into a dark hole and never leave.

Not even the parting conversation of Dr. Kimutai, for whom the party had become too much, did much to boost my mood. My thoughts were at once muddled with drink and far, far away. I barely heard half of what he said. In the end, he turned to his own quarters to retire, but not without leaving me with a bemused pat on the shoulder and a warning to watch how much I drank lest I find myself saddled with the mother of all hangovers the next morning.

I took no heed. Indeed, with each new dose of liquid courage, I began to formulate something like a plan. I would tell her, Kayleigh, how I felt. No more of this waiting around, my mind kicked in. It’s time for action. Take the bull by the horns. Haste makes waste. I frowned. No, that wasn’t right. Who dares, wins. That was better.

Having settled on the right catchphrase for my new mission, I decided to bide my time. Kayleigh had been eying the exit. It wouldn’t be long now before she followed Kimutai. I’d time my own retreat to coincide.

So a little while later, I was smiling—simpering, probably—into my mug at what a bold, brilliant plan I’d concocted when a voice sounded behind me. The voice. I nearly choked on my brew but managed to pull myself together without looking like too much of an idiot. “Kay-Kayleigh.” How she’d crept up on me, I had no clue, One minute, she’d been at the table over, and suddenly, here she was. Maybe I was drunker than I realized.

“Well,” she said, regarding me with a measure of amusement. “No need to ask if you’ve been enjoying the party, Nikkole.”

For a moment, I didn’t understand, but then I followed the direction of her gaze toward the line of emptied glasses and mugs before me. “Oh. That.”

She smiled. “I just wanted to say goodnight.”

“You’re leaving?” The words I’d planned evaporated in a kind of haze.

“Yes. I’m exhausted.”

“Oh. Me too.”

“Well, then, goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” Then I remembered my purpose and something about haste and waste. I knew that wasn’t right. But it didn’t matter. “Kayleigh, wait.” She turned midstep. “Kayleigh, there’s…” I tried to control the uncertainty in my tone. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“Oh?”

“Um. Not here.” I stood far too quickly and was glad of her hand to steady me. In a minute, my senses stopped swimming, and I led her a little ways away from the main throng. “Kayleigh, the thing is. That is.” I was drunker than hell and somehow still tongue-tied as I stared into her eyes.

“Nikkole, are you okay?”

I waved away her concern, willing myself to do it. Grab the horns by the bull. No, that’s not it. I couldn’t remember my catchphrase. But I didn’t need it. So, impulsively, I blurted out, “I love you.”

Briefly, she stood completely still. Then, she nodded and took my hand. “I know you do, Nikkole.” She smiled up at me, and I felt the blood pulsing through my head. She leaned in toward me, standing on tiptoes to bring her face to mine. Stunned by my success, I moved to kiss her.

But she circumvented my lips, planting her kiss on my cheek instead. Then she stood back and squeezed my hand. “But you need to tell me when you’re sober. Good night, Nik.”

And with that, she left, leaving me to watch her in stunned silence and ponder how she could possibly have known when I myself had only figured it out that evening.

*

I WOKE THE next morning to a marching band playing inside my head. I had no idea how I’d gotten back to my bed, and the air smelled vaguely like vomit. Light streamed in from outside, which only made matters worse.

I was mid-groan when I heard the rustling of footsteps on the floor. Starting upward, I immediately regretted my haste. My head swam and pain stabbed through my brain. I pressed my eyes shut against the blinding light.

“Take it easy; it’s just me.” Kayleigh’s voice. I opened my eyes, pain or no pain. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m bringing this.” She set a mug of something by my bed.

Images of the night before, or as much as I could remember anyway, were coming back to me. “What is it?”

“It’ll help with the hangover.” She grinned. “Don’t worry; you’re not the only one. We’ve been getting requests for a lot of these today.”

With that, she headed for the door in a swish of purple and white.

“Kayleigh, wait.” I had the feeling there was more to be said, but I couldn’t remember why, exactly. Every time I almost captured the thought, it flitted away. But I had a vague sense we had discussed something—something important. “Did we…did I say anything to you last night?”

She hesitated and shuffled in place, which meant that I had. “I don’t know, Nik…we all had a lot to drink. You were pretty hammered. I don’t remember half of what we said…”

Even as she stalled, it came back to me. All of it. “Shit.”

We stood in awkward silence for a full half a minute or better.

Then she said, “You should probably drink that.”

My head felt like it might split in two at any second, as much from the hangover as from the recollection of making an ass of myself. I figured she was probably right. I reached for the mug, and she turned again to leave. “No, wait. Don’t go. Let me drink this. But don’t go.”

“All right.” What followed were some of the most awkward moments of my life as I fought to regain both a modicum of clarity as well as dignity.

The substance—I refused to dignify it with the term medicine—she’d provided was absolutely appalling. If she’d mixed up a concoction of the devil’s bowels, ground and powdered, with the runoff from a leech field, it couldn’t have had a worse taste or texture. I would have preferred chewing a mouthful of coffee grounds. All of which I told her, and she laughed.

Still, it seemed to work in inverse proportions to its palatability. My head cleared—too soon, as it meant I had to address the looming elephant in the room. I wondered now if I, too, should have feigned drunken amnesia.

Who dares, wins, indeed, my mind taunted. Well, to hell with it then. I’d left myself with little choice, so I might as well get on with it. But first, I drew myself out of bed and got to my feet. A disheveled mess I might have been, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to have this conversation while lying back, nursing a hangover. “Kayleigh, what I was saying last night?”

She shifted again. I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. Was she nervous or uncomfortable talking about it? And was it a good nervous or bad nervous? A let’s get the awkwardness over because I feel the same, or a God, I hope she doesn’t go there nervous?

“Nikkole, you don’t have to explain if you don’t want to. You were drinking; it’s not a big deal.”

“No,” I protested. “It wasn’t just that. I mean, I was drinking. But I meant it, Kayleigh. I’m in love with you.” Just as I said it, the smell of vomit hit my nose again, and I glanced down at my shirt. Sure enough, I was wearing remnants of last night’s good time.

Kayleigh, meanwhile, followed my gaze and tried, a second too late, to catch the laugh that burst forth. She pressed her hands to her mouth, and I probably cycled through every shade of red and crimson known to man. She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Nik. I care for you too. It’s just…” She paused to catch her breath and stifle the last of her laughter. Still, she’d moved toward me, and now she wrapped her arms around my neck—steering clear of the streak running down my uniform. She might have been laughing at me, but all things considered, I remained hopeful. “I think you may be the least romantic woman I know, that’s all. And I love you anyway.”

I felt a wave of relief, and I laughed, too, conceding, “Well, my timing kind of sucks.” I was pretty sure there was no scenario in which waiting until you were drunk, or hungover and covered in puke, qualified as romantic.

She nodded. “It is the first time I’ve ever wanted to kiss someone who smells like you do.”

Chapter Forty-Four

LIFE MOVED QUICKLY after that. We found it impossible to carry on any sort of relationship while living under Gat’s roof, for we rarely had any privacy. And, quickly tiring of afternoon trysts and stolen moments, we decided it was time to move out.

It being the onset of winter, the building crews had wound down, but with a little work, we were able to restore a small cottage on the outskirts of town. We had no want of assistance, for, aside from the rest of our own crew, the Keplerites proved eager to aid us in whatever way they could. And I found a little of my lost purpose in throwing myself into this work.

As soon as the roof and fireplace had been restored, we moved in. It didn’t matter that we had no furniture yet. It still beat living like teenagers, sneaking around behind our parents backs for a few minutes of alone time.

The furnishings were not long in coming. Kayleigh’s popularity as an herbalist ensured that we had more than we knew what to do with in the first few days alone. The advantage, Dr. Kimutai told me bemusedly, of finding a more successful partner.

“I did not take you for a gold digger, Captain Johnson.” He laughed as he picked his way through piles of as of yet unsorted goods. “But it appears that pays well. Very well.”

Nothing in my life so far really prepared me for the strangeness of managing my own home in the trees. The fireplace never ceased to concern me. It was built entirely of stone and sand above a wooden base. Which was about as fireproof as a fireplace could be. But the idea of lighting a fire among the trees still scared the hell out of me. It didn’t matter how many times Kayleigh explained that the living trees were too wet to catch fire. It didn’t matter how many times she pointed out that people had been lighting fires in wood houses and the middle of forests since time immemorial. It didn’t even matter that the Nation had been building fires in these trees since they’d first built the City. I still had recurring nightmares about waking to find we’d lit the entire Nation on fire.

It was the first windstorm we weathered that really tried my tolerance of treetop dwelling. It came during the night while we were fast asleep. My first inkling was the rocking sensation that invaded my dreams, gentle at first and growing increasingly more ferocious as time went on. My thoughts turned to the sea, and before long, I was tossing on a skiff far from land.

I woke abruptly from this unpleasantness when Kayleigh shook me. “There’s a storm moving in, Nik. It looks like it’s going to be bad.” If there was a prize for understatement, she would have won it. The wind roared around us, and the house had already started to shift and convulse with every fresh gust.

It only got worse from there. Before long, the hail began, bombarding our little cottage in golfball-sized chunks of ice. And with the onset of precipitation, the winds intensified. The trees that formed the three central pillars of our home shifted and bent as the storm raged on until I was sure they would snap.

They didn’t. Neither, for that matter, did the house—which was a testament to the genius of Keplerite engineering. Rather than being fixed and rigid, the buildings had been constructed in a jointed design that allowed a few degrees of give per section. Though practically imperceptible in regular circumstances, in inclement weather like this, it made all the difference between the house flexing with the trees or snapping into pieces.

Yet there was something uncanny about watching the walls bend back and forth, seeing the roof slide in one direction or another, or feeling the entire base sway this way and that—something that put a knot deep in the pit of my stomach.

Kayleigh felt it, too, and we sat huddled on our mattress until the storm passed. Now and again, we’d make a brave but futile show of ease. Mostly, we crouched together, waiting what might come.

In time it passed, leaving us unscathed. It struck me as one of my worst experiences so far on Kepler-186f. There was a joke to be made in there, somewhere, about Kayleigh and I weathering the first storm of our relationship together, but my stomach had been tied in so many knots that the moment passed.

Ice and wind storms notwithstanding, these were very happy days for us. Trite though it might be, there was no one I would rather have spent my time with than Kayleigh, whatever the circumstance. I loved her more and more by the day. The problems with settling on our new planet, all the complaints I’d had, diminished by proportion. I knew life would throw us more curveballs. It always did. But I remained confident that, together, we’d figure them out.

We weren’t the only ones to find happiness in love either. The professor, in those days, savored the two great loves of his life: his computers and himself. The former had come to some damage during our flight from the Mountain, but he had full confidence in himself and his ability to repair them. As for the latter…well, the Keplerites hadn’t yet built a shrine to the professor, but their worship of him came just shy of it. He’d defeated their age-old nemesis, and they loved him for it. His head, always big, had grown to epic proportions with the attention.

Those of us who knew the professor fully expected both eventualities. What we didn’t expect was his sudden appreciation for the Keplerites. Where only weeks before he had heaped scorn upon these inhabitants of the Nation, now he held a tolerant and deeply patronizing outlook. He decided these people were capable of learning what Earth had to teach—if they but have the right instructor. By which, naturally, meant himself.

Where the engineers’ work with the Keplerites had earned them his contempt, as soon as his star eclipsed theirs in the public eye, he suddenly saw noble purpose in sharing his knowledge with the Genesis heirs. He spoke again of his destiny and fate, and he saw the work of some guiding force behind his emergence in this particular time and place.

He was, in short, thoroughly infatuated with his work and his idea of his role in the future of humanity. And, accordingly, that much more insufferable than usual. Still, the Keplerites held him in such high esteem no amount of patronizing outreach or pretentious airs could shake their faith. In their eyes, he was almost as great a hero as he was in his own.

Life progressed less happily for the cannibals, however. The winter proved harsh, and their losses mounted. Our scouts reported that some few hundreds had made it out of the chaos unscathed. Perversely, the warriors had fared the best, for they had been the best equipped to escape. Without shelter or food supplies, they’d grown lean and again descended to infighting. Once or twice, we found the mangled body of a cannibal who had attempted the climb into the trees, only to plummet to his death far below.

Caspersen believed we should find and destroy the remnant of the cannibals’ fighting force while we had the opportunity. Gat, though, could not be persuaded. Our success inspired him, but not enough to overcome his fear. The cannibals, he argued, were no longer a threat, and his people were safe in the trees.

Caspersen saw this as cowardice and confided in moments of irritation that Gat was repeating the mistake of his ancestors. A small force of foes today could survive to become a great force tomorrow.

Yet, we could do nothing about it. Gat had made up his mind, and without the warriors of the Nation, we could not mount an assault of our own. It seemed the winter might do what Gat was unwilling to attempt. Every time we caught sight of one of the cannibals prowling through the forest, they looked leaner and more desperate than before.

I was content to leave it be and trust to hope.

Chapter Forty-Five

HOPE, THOUGH, WAS the losing bet. And here, too, the professor played an unwitting role.

Part of his efforts to reshape Kepler-186f in his image involved the construction of a solar generator. Gat had advised, particularly with the cannibals on the move, that we stick to the trees until spring.

The professor insisted his work couldn’t wait at all, much less for spring. And when he could persuade no one else of the fact, he took matters into his own hands. More than a few times, this involved descending to the surface to scrounge electronics and solar panels from the Genesis. He would find what he needed and lug it bit by bit back to his workshop. Then, finding that he needed some new part or some supplementary piece, he would return.

It was dangerous, as it left him exposed, sometimes for hours at a time, as he hammered and pried and cursed at stubborn portions of the ship.

And, eventually, his luck ran out.

Kayleigh and I had the first hint of trouble when Quess burst into our home. We’d sat down to lunch, and though it wasn’t unusual for him to show up at this hour, the urgency in his manner and the fevered pitch of his words certainly were.

“Calm down, Quess,” Kayleigh urged. “Slowly.”

“Professor Carter,” he hissed breathlessly. “They’ve got Professor Carter.” The professor insisted on being addressed by the Keplerites either as Professor or Dr. Carter, and it was a token of the success of his campaign that even in a moment of such desperation, Quess stuck to formalities.

“Carter?” Kayleigh was on her feet. “Who has Professor Carter?”

“Lava Dwellers. And Matt. He tried to save him, but they got him too.”

Again, Kayleigh had to pry a coherent version of the tale from the boy. Carter, he told us, had been on one of his foraging missions to the Genesis. His assistant, Will—one of the Keplerites he tolerated well enough to enlist into personal service—had accompanied him to the edge of the forest but had refused to go down with him. This was not uncommon as the Keplerites were united in their terror of descending.

At any rate, while Will watched, a band of cannibals stumbled across the professor. The professor put up a fight—a valiant fight, if Will was to be believed—but the cannibals overpowered him.

The Keplerite, on seeing this, took to his heels to find aid. Matt had been on patrol in the vicinity and answered the call. Will watched terror-struck as the cannibals took him too. Then he fled to spread the bad news to everyone he encountered.

Quess, having picked up on this tale, brought it immediately to me. And Kayleigh and I, in turn, knew to seek out Caspersen.

Caspersen had already been apprised of the situation though. We learned this when we reached Gat’s residence because the pair of them were halfway through a heated exchange behind closed doors.

We waited outside the room, catching only snippets and phrases. The general gist we knew well enough: she wanted to take action, and he did not. Russell and Connor joined us in a minute, and shortly after, Granges and Cohen. The civilians from our crew streamed in, one at a time, until we had all gathered, waiting anxiously.

It seemed to me we were wasting precious time arguing over what to do. It had been one thing to leave the cannibals to their own devices when they were no real danger to us. But now, surely, matters had changed. The longer we debated the obvious, the greater the danger to the captives and the smaller our chances of reaching the kidnappers before they reunited with reinforcements.

The pause gave me time to consider the situation, and my conclusions were not good. The cannibals had gone to lengths to capture both Matt and the professor alive. That didn’t—couldn’t—bode well. If food had been their only objective, killing them would have simplified that. But according to Will’s account, both men had fought with the courage of ten and dealt serious damage to their attackers. Discounting the influence of the young man’s hero worship, I figured there still had to be a modicum of truth in there: the cannibals had taken damage in order to take the pair alive.

Then there was the business of transporting two uncooperative captives back to camp. Why go through that unnecessary trouble for a meal?

I could draw only one conclusion. The cannibals didn’t mean to eat them. Not right away anyway. My blood ran cold at the thought.

They’d lost their civilization, their homes, most of their friends and family. And now they’d gotten their hands on two of the people responsible. Of course they didn’t mean to kill them right away.

The door opened a few minutes later, and Caspersen and Gat emerged. We knew at a glance that neither had budged. Caspersen headed to her bunk, where she kept her gear.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“I’m going after the cannibals,” she returned. “I’m not leaving my crew to be tortured and killed. Our best chance of getting them back is if we can hit the raiders before they get back to base.”

“Wait, alone?”

“Apparently.”

“It’s a suicide plan.” Gat shook his head. “They are already gone. No one comes back alive from the Lava Dwellers.”

Caspersen held his gaze evenly. “Nor will they ever, if fear paralyzes their friends into inaction.”

“If you’re going, I’ll go with you,” Connor volunteered.

“Me too,” Russell put in.

“You can’t be serious.” I frowned. “They’ve got the head start. We’ll never reach them in time. We don’t stand a chance by ourselves.”

Caspersen nodded. “Probably not. But I won’t leave them. I don’t ask anyone to come because we probably won’t make it out alive.” She clapped me on the shoulder, her eyes meeting mine. “But semper fi? They’re not just words to me, Nikkole. I can’t leave them.”

And with that, she turned. Connor and Russell followed her, and then Cohen, and finally Granges. I stood rooted in place. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to get my own gear and follow them. It was what I was here for; it was why they’d sent people like me in the first place. And I owed it to Caspersen and the rest of the crew. Hell, I even owed it to Matt and the professor.

But how could I tell Kayleigh I was going to leave her, now, for a doomed rescue mission? I was a soldier, yet the need for soldiering had passed, or so we’d thought. We’d built our castles in the sky together with that understanding. It would be one thing if we had a hope of success. It would be one thing if the warriors of the Nation meant to join us. But our band, alone?

I nearly jumped when I felt her squeeze my hand. Her gaze rested on my face, and there was a sheen of moisture in her eyes. She knew, or at least had some understanding, of what was going through my head.

“Kayleigh,” I said, “I need to…”

“I know, Nik.”

“You should not go, Captain,” Gat declared. “They are going to their deaths. You should not join them. You have much to live for and no reason to die for nothing.”

“They don’t have to go to their deaths,” Kayleigh piped up, responding before I had the opportunity. “If they weren’t going alone—”

Gat brushed this aside. “Believe me, Kayleigh, I have heard these arguments from your Captain Caspersen. She makes a passionate plea with her words of courage and honor and duty. But my duty is to protect my people. And they are safe here.”

“They are not safe, Gat. They are not free. Their illusory safety is bought by living in constant fear. They’re safe only as long as they are prisoners in these trees.”

He shook his head. “I know it is not the way of your people. But for three thousand years, we have been safe in the trees.”

“For three thousand years, you have been preyed on, slaughtered like livestock. But this is the moment your ancestor Captain Sanders wrote about. The moment he predicted, three thousand years ago, when his descendants would have the chance to right the wrongs of their predecessors.”

Gat still shook his head but with less vigor now. I had the impression the mention of his ancestor gave him pause.

Kayleigh went on. “For three thousand years, Gat, the Nation has waited. For three thousand years, you’ve been confined to the trees for fear of death and worse. And now, you have the power to change that. You have the power to ensure that your sons, and your sons’ sons, don’t live in that fear. David Sanders knew that day would come. But it means nothing if you can’t act.”

In the end, it was Kayleigh and David Sanders who persuaded Gat to act. He wouldn’t launch an offensive against the cannibals. On that score, he remained adamant. But he would help us recover our kidnapped friends.

It wasn’t what Caspersen had been pushing for, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

So the call went out, and in half an hour, a few hundred warriors had assembled. Caspersen waited impatiently, but finally, we set off.

I had a rifle and sidearm—Death, of course. The others in our group had been similarly outfitted. Gat’s men carried spears, blades, bows, and slings. Together, we made quite the eclectic group.

Caspersen set the pace, and it was necessarily brutal. The cannibals had a head start of some hours on us already. Our only real hope of catching them was the Nation’s timid reputation. For many long years, captives had been abandoned to their fate. There had never been a reason for a raiding party to flee. We’d seen that ourselves in our own encounter with them en route to the Genesis.

But that was then. Since then, the cannibals had lost two successive encounters, first at the ship and then in the mountains. Their tactics might well have shifted in light of those events.

Caspersen wanted to travel along the forest floor, as we could make our way more directly without relying on treetop passes. The warriors of the Nation blanched at the suggestion until Gat reminded them we were headed for the ground anyway, whether we began here or at the ship.

Their fear as we descended hit me with a visceral force. I hated seeing my fellow human beings so terrified of the surface. Their eyes darted this way and that, and they walked as they might on a field of eggshells. But, to their credit, they walked anyway, and we only lost a few of our number in the process. Some, I guessed, couldn’t bring themselves to do it, so melted back into the trees while no one was watching.

We made good time, like Caspersen said we would, and found the tracks just as dusk started to set in. They were impossible to miss as they crisscrossed all around the end of the ship. I counted a good twenty distinct sets of prints and possibly more. I saw plenty of evidence of a scuffle, too, and a trail of blood that aligned with a pair of boot prints. The professor. A second set of boot marks also followed the row of prints.

Matt. The strides for that second set were long, as if he’d been running. We followed suit, racing along the forest floor. Eventually, Matt’s prints met with the soft markings of the cannibals’ leather wraps. We found evidence of a new fight, with prints crossing and recrossing one another, and a few spent shell casings. And more blood—a lot of blood.

“There’s no bodies,” Granges said. “Matt’s a pretty good shot—he should have got a few hits in anyway.”

“Here,” Caspersen said, pointing to a long patch of ground that ran with blood and scuff marks. “They dragged something this way. Probably whoever Matt shot.”

“Meat is meat.” Connor grimaced. “Fucking animals.”

Caspersen glanced up. “We can’t lose sight of the trail. We’re going to need to light lanterns.”

This we did and proceeded. We traveled all night. Once or twice, where the ground was too solid to capture imprints of passing feet, we had to double back and find our path anew. We stopped only for short pauses to catch our breath before pushing on again. Fatigue and activity were the constants of the night.

An hour or so before dawn, we found evidence of a makeshift camp, now abandoned. Their purpose seemed to have been taking a breather rather than sleeping. We found the imprints of only three bodies in the dirt. Next to these patches, we found marks of movement, scuffs in the dirt, and a half boot print. Boot prints led away from them, deeper into the forest. That meant Matt and the professor had left the encampment alive.

Not all that we gleaned was good though. We found a lot of blood—primarily in the third impression, where the presumably dead body had lain. But we found some where our crew had been thrown too.

We made a second grisly find as well, which further explained the cannibal’s rest: a pile of freshly cleaned and gnawed bones. They seemed to be mostly leg bones. I saw femurs, tibias, fibulas, and even a knobby patella, still covered in stringy tissue and bleeding strands of ligament. Where the other leg might be, or the person to whom it had once belonged, I neither knew, nor cared to discover.

Connor pointed to some of the deep gouges in the bone and grunted. “Knife marks. Hungry sons of bitches.”

The sight mortified our Keplerite companions even more than the rest of us, and it took a few minutes of persuasion to convince them to continue. Caspersen, I could tell, found this a difficult task. She was, as ever, tight-lipped about what she was feeling, but she was a Marine. If she ran when she got scared, it was straight into battle. Not back to safety.

Gat played an instrumental role here. He seemed either inspired or shamed by Caspersen’s unruffled determination, in turn demanding support from his own men and women. And they listened to him where they hadn’t listened to her. So before too long, we set out again.

Chapter Forty-Six

IT WAS MIDMORNING when we heard the first gunshot. It ripped through the stillness and echoed far and wide. It hadn’t been near us but well within audible range.

We heard nothing else for a few minutes. Then, just as suddenly, came two rapid-fire shots, and a scream followed. Or more aptly, a set of screams. If there had been words in those wails, I couldn’t make them out.

“We’re closing the gap” is all Caspersen said, picking up the pace as she went. We pushed our exhausted bodies to comply. She was doing no more than needed, but I had the impression she’d have run a mean galley ship in the day.

The screams continued intermittently as we ran. As we got closer, and I heard them again and again, I formed a clear picture. They were cries of agony, with a word or phrase thrown in now and then. And I knew whose cries of pain: the professor. His voice carried clear and terror-struck through the trees.

A clutch of fear caught us all, and that desperation gave speed to our feet. We were close—close enough to hear the cries of our friends—but too far away to stop their torment. A thousand ghoulish horrors played out in my mind. I couldn’t forget the skin walkers, nor did I put it past the cannibals to feast on a live victim.

We started to pick up other voices in a lower register. I heard Matt’s, though I couldn’t tell what he said. There were too many other voices drowning his out, all speaking a garbled dialect I didn’t recognize. As with their cultures, the Nation and the Lava Dwellers seemed to have developed completely distinct languages. I could make out nothing they said.

In time, we caught sight of the band, small and distant in the far trees. They were on the move and seemed to be unaware of us. The professor’s wails kept up a steady pace.

Caspersen gave a sign to hold up. “There are about three dozen of them. They haven’t been running. If they catch sight of us, they’ll be able to make better time than we can.” Her eyes were alight with a steely gleam. I knew immediately that she had a plan. “Gat, your people should stay out of sight. Follow, but at a distance. We’ve got the ranged weapons—we’ll pursue, get close enough to make every shot count.”

He nodded, perhaps a bit too eagerly.

She turned to us now. “It’s going to be six shots each. Every one of them has to be lethal. Protecting Matt and Carter is our number-one priority. Kill anyone who gets near them.” She surveyed us. “You ready?”

“Let’s get these sons of bitches,” Connor said.

“All right, let’s go.”

We were about to follow her lead when Gat seized her arm. “There.”

“Fuck.” Caspersen summed up all of our thoughts as we saw what Gat had pointed out: a second band of cannibals on an intercept course to the first. I couldn’t see them all due to the trees between us and them, but I had the impression the second group contained at least as many as the first. “Get down, everyone.”

We weren’t in their direct line of sight, but they’d be able to pick us up in their peripheral vision.

What they lacked in boldness, the Nation surely made up in stealth. In the blink of an eye, hundreds of warriors vanished from sight. They slipped so seamlessly behind the broad trees and through the undergrowth that, if I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t have believed they were there at all. We followed their example.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “We won’t be able to take that many.”

Caspersen’s brow creased. “We’re going to have to approach without being spotted.”

“There’s too many of us,” Russell offered.

“We’ll have to split up,” Caspersen agreed. “Some will have to stay here.”

“No.” Gat shook his head. “Not stay behind. We will approach from above.”

“Are we near a road?” I asked. That seemed too lucky a coincidence.

The leader of the Nation shook his head again. “I will take our most surefooted. We will not need a road. We will get above them and send down death. And you will approach from the rear and also send death.”

Caspersen nodded enthusiastically. “Good—good, Gat. It’s brilliant. They won’t plan on an attack from the ground and above.”

The plan decided, we and a contingent of warriors set out, approaching as quickly as we could behind cover. Gat, meanwhile, and a number of the remaining Keplerites scaled the trees, disappearing into the branches overhead.

Needless to say, our pace took a serious hit. We were reduced to crawling and crouching runs for long stretches of forest. Rather than gaining on the cannibals, they put distance between themselves and us.

Until they spotted the second group of Lava Dwellers anyway. They cheered at that and changed course, toward their reinforcements.

They were still headed away from us but at an angle now which cost them time. We started to gain on them again.

Before long, we realized we had traded one difficulty for another. The cannibals were heading for a clearing in the forest in which sat a large lake. We would catch up to them—but not before they reached the open.

A great, rocky shore surrounded this body of water, speckled here and there with shrubs, bushes, and the occasional sapling. But the trees ended long before the jagged shoreline, and there wasn’t enough cover for our band to approach. Which meant the cannibals had a clear path for a retreat from both Gat and us, should they choose to pursue it.

The first band reached the rocks before we neared them and waited for the second. Their conversation wafted toward us, and though I could make out none of the words, the jocularity in the tone came through loud and clear. So did the professor’s continued cries.

We drew up shortly thereafter, a few hundred yards from the shore. We could see everything from this vantage without leaving the forest.

The cannibals had broken for a meal, with the newcomers helping themselves to the flesh of their dead comrade. They’d dumped the prisoners—Matt and the professor—in a heap. Now and then, one of the captors would rise and subject the pair to abuse, kicking and beating them with a glee that turned my stomach.

They never lingered long, though, as one of the first band, a great, grizzled fellow in skins, barked out a command at anyone who extended his stay too long. And eschewing the bravery with which they’d assail bound men, the offender slunk away to his meal.

I saw two unmoving bodies beside our own crewmates, both clothed in the mismatched furs of the cannibals. And there was the torso that served as the band’s current meal. The professor and Matt had put up a serviceable defense after all, it seemed.

“We can get some good shots from here,” Connor whispered, “but there’s too many for us to take them all on. Gat’s won’t be able to get close, so I don’t know how much help he’s going to be able to offer.”

Russell nodded. “I don’t think their bows are going to have the kind of range we need either.”

“And if the cannibals stick to the shore, they’ll be able to outrun us and Gat,” I said.

“We need to get them into the trees,” Caspersen added.

“How? If they realize we’re here, they’ll be gone before we get close.”

She considered for a moment in thoughtful silence. Then she said, “They didn’t run away from Matt. Or the professor, for that matter.”

“Well, no—but they ambushed the professor, and Matt was by himself when they took him.”

“Exactly.” She had that gleam in her eyes again. “I’m going to need everyone to stay behind cover. They cannot see you, understand?”

Then, in Kepler English, she repeated the command to the warriors nearest us, with an injunction to pass it along quietly. “Stay down, stay silent, don’t move a muscle until they’re back in the trees. No matter what happens.” She added a particular emphasis on the words that made my skin crawl.

“You’re not going out there to bait them?”

She flashed me a grin, and though the mask hid most of it, I could still see it in her eyes. “Of course. They won’t run from one person. They didn’t run from Matt. They won’t run from me.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

“It will. They know what to expect from the Nation—or so they think. They’ve already figured out we’re less predictable, but they’re not going to be afraid of just one of us. They doubled their haul that way when they took Matt. They won’t run, especially not now they’ve got reinforcements.”

“And if they kill you?”

“They don’t seem to be in a killing mood, not yet.” Caspersen paused, her eyes meeting mine before she continued, “But whatever happens, you wait until they get under the trees before you do anything. Then, you unleash hell.”

“They have a gun,” Connor protested. “Matt’s, and probably the professor’s too.”

“And no idea how to aim. Listen, I’m ears if anyone has a better idea. But we need them in the trees, and we can’t risk them running. I can’t think of a better way to do that. Can you? Anyone?”

We exchanged glances, each hoping the other had some brilliant solution that didn’t put Caspersen’s life in quite so much danger.

No one did, and she nodded. “All right. I’m going to head out. Good luck. And remember, recovering Matt and Carter is our number-one priority.”

She left, keeping low as she cut through the undergrowth. In a minute, she vanished from sight. Now and again, I saw her, always nearer the shore than before. Finally, she came to rest behind a boulder and readied her rifle.

She raised her head and upper torso above the rock, higher than was necessary to take a shot. She aimed and a crack split the air; a cannibal dropped.

Their camp was midscramble by time the next crack sounded; another dropped.

She continued firing, spacing her rounds now. She had their attention, but she couldn’t kill too many. They needed to think they had a good chance of making it out of their encounter alive if they were going to pursue.

The professor and Matt had spotted her, too, and they started to scream their respective pleas. It didn’t take much to figure out who was saying what.

“Get out of here, Tracie. Run.”

“Help me. Help me!”

The cannibals, meanwhile, sprang to their feet. For a moment, they hesitated, throwing wild glances all around the trees. But they must have come to the conclusion Caspersen wanted because they turned for her.

Crack.

She dropped one of them. The others kept running.

Crack.

One of the men who had stayed at the lakeside fell.

Crack.

She picked off another. Now that she had their attention, she started to clear the ranks of those on the shore, near Matt and the professor. Her pursuers, some fifty or better of them, were getting closer now. She fell back, shooting as she retreated.

We saw the blowguns come up. I couldn’t see the individual darts at this range, but I knew they’d be firing a hail of them her way.

Caspersen increased her pace, shooting as she ran. And though she ran backward, most of her shots hit. She went through the rest of her magazine in this fashion. Then, she turned and ran full speed, drawing her pistol as she went.

They’d gotten close now, and she had to weave between the trees. Now and again, she’d pause to fire a round.

Meanwhile, back on the shore, Matt and the professor were on their feet; at least, Matt was on his feet. I hadn’t seen how, but he’d managed to free his legs and was working to pull the professor onto his. Caspersen had cleared the shoreline, and he seemed intent on making a break for it.

My attention returned to her. She’d reached the tree line but had more ground to cover to get to us. I exchanged glances with Connor, who was nearest me. She shook her head as if to say “not yet.”

She was right, but the darts were getting awfully close now. And whatever the cannibals’ ideas about capturing Caspersen alive might have been, she had inflicted so many casualties it seemed some would be content with an immediate payoff instead of an eventual one. Along with the quills that kept flying her way, she now had to dodge spears too. They wanted her down, dead or alive.

I glanced at the shore again. Matt and the professor had started to move for the trees, albeit slowly. I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I leaped to my feet, screaming, “Now.”

Caspersen dove to the ground a second before a hail of bullets rained out of the bushes into the cannibals behind her. Her pursuers pulled up short as we rushed out of our hiding spots. The Keplerites remained behind cover, but they unleashed a volley of arrows at the cannibals. The trees absorbed some of them, but all around us, cannibals dropped like flies.

Caspersen pushed to her feet, running for us again. At the same time, projectiles poured out of the trees somewhat to the right of Caspersen’s pursuers. Gat. He was in the area, then.

I had expected the cannibals to route, seeing themselves outnumbered and surrounded. But the realization had the opposite effect. The grizzled cannibal, the one who had warded off the brutal pursuits of his compatriots back at the waterside, offered a jumble of authoritative proclamations.

The cannibals charged us, chucking everything they had in our direction. A spear passed inches from my face, even as I drew Death to the ready. I heard the dull thud, the splitting sound as flesh parted, and saw Connor go down in my peripheral vision. I kept on firing, emptying round after round into the throng. Caspersen had pulled off to the side, ducking out of our range of fire behind a great tree. She poked her head around the trunk and followed suit. From behind and above us, the Nation’s warriors poured arrows and sling shots into our attackers.

One of the arrows pierced the side of the cannibal leader. And finally, their ranks broke. The few who remained disappeared into the forest on their left, out of range of our weapons.

Chapter Forty-Seven

CONNOR DIED IN my arms. The spear that had been meant for me buried itself deep in her ribcage. It was a quick death, but not an easy one.

The spear pierced her lungs, and she drowned in her own blood. Despite the horror of her death, she handled herself with courage that words could not adequately convey. Every breath was an agony, and it took her closer to that final precipice. Not once did she give in to fear or self-pity. When she could speak, she urged me to find Matt and the professor, and when she could no longer, she squeezed my hand as I tried, vainly, to reassure her she would be okay.

And then she died, leaving me shaking and covered in her expelled blood. Hers was a death that would haunt my nightmares as long as I lived.

We lost Cohen that day too. He’d fallen to an axe. The blow split his skull and severed one half of his brain from the other. Death would have been instantaneous. In that, at least, he’d been lucky.

But he was dead, one of the Rangers’ best, a kid in the prime of his life. Dead.

Ours weren’t the only losses. Several of the Nation’s warriors had fallen too. I didn’t know them, but their companions took their deaths very hard, and their grief amplified my own.

We accomplished our goal though. We retrieved Matt and the professor.

I tried to focus on that. I tried not to consider whether or not it had been worth the cost. It wouldn’t have done to leave them to their fates with the cannibals. I knew that. And so I resisted the urge to measure the men we’d saved against the people we’d lost.

They’d both been pretty roughed up. Bruises and lacerations covered Matt’s entire body, but he could walk. The professor, on the other hand, had been shot in the leg. This, we learned, was the source of those gunshots we’d heard.

One of their captors had been examining Matt’s pistol, peering into the barrel as he did so. Predictably, this did not end well. He’d inflicted a mortal wound on himself with the first shot we heard. His companions put his body into the pile to be eaten.

As for the second shots…well, the professor had laughed at the dead cannibal’s suicide-by-curiosity. Language barrier or not, his captors took his point. So the group’s leader—the grizzled commander I’d seen earlier—picked up the fallen gun and mimicked the action he’d witnessed. Only this time, he pointed the barrel the professor’s way.

The professor had two bullet holes in his right leg as a consequence, one through both the upper and lower thigh. If the gun hadn’t run out of rounds first, he might have fared worse yet. As it was, he was in a world of agony and completely unable to move on his own.

Gat gave the order to construct a shallow grave for the fallen—Connor and Cohen being buried under a skimpy layer of soil along with the Nation’s lost sons—and to bind the professor’s leg to stop the bleeding. Then, we moved out.

We stuck to the forest floor until we reached one of the highways, after which we ascended. The professor had been carried all this way, and now they hoisted him up on a rope. He howled the entire time, even after one of the Keplerites gave him some bitter root.

And he kept on howling for the entire return trip.

I was ready to shoot him myself by time we reached the City, a day and a half later. Marge and Kayleigh, and half the city’s residents, waited for us. Alerted to our coming, no doubt, by the professor’s screams.

Kayleigh wrapped me in a wordless hug, so fierce it nearly took my breath away, and then turned her attention to the patient. At Marge’s urging, they gave the professor bitter bark.

Mercifully, he passed out shortly thereafter.

*

OUR RETURN BROUGHT both joy that we were safe and victorious, and sadness that we’d incurred so many losses. It seemed to have effected a change in Gat. He didn’t speak with regret for our venture; he seemed instead consumed by our success.

“The Nation,” he confided, “has struck a blow at them. Now it is they who will fear us. Your Kayleigh—she was right. We will not live in fear anymore.”

Whether this was a good thing or not, I didn’t know. Nor did I spend much time considering. I was too busy mourning our dead to think of causing more death.

Kayleigh and Marge had to operate on the professor’s leg. I waited with Caspersen and Matt while they worked and, in the interval, learned something of the rest of their capture.

As we’d already heard, Matt had gotten news of the professor’s capture from Will. He’d given the Keplerite orders to get more help and descended at the site of the ship. Will, instead of fetching reinforcements, had followed to watch, and when Matt met up with the cannibals, he’d been quite alone.

They had filled him with sleep darts. By time he’d pulled one out, another ten bit into him. He quickly lost consciousness and awoke sometime later to find himself a bound captive.

The professor had been sure their captors recognized them as the ones who had collapsed the Mountain. One in particular, he identified as the cannibal who had discovered us in the ravine, before the explosion.

Matt didn’t know how much stock to put in the professor’s theories. The professor had been the only one to get a good look at our unwelcome visitor, but he’d also been panicked at the time—and panicked later when the cannibals caught him. So how reliable his witness account was, neither of us could guess.

At any rate, the cannibals had been very careful to keep both of them alive. Which, of course, didn’t mean gentle treatment. But their captors had taken care not to kill them.

The professor had developed a theory about this, too—that they meant to skin them alive for their skin walkers. Matt hadn’t been persuaded by the idea—not until the cannibals’ leader had traced a few slicing motions up and down their backs and across the soles of their boots, while the entire crew howled with expectant laughter. Now, he fervently believed they’d barely escaped that terrible fate.

The professor’s surgery took some time, and when it was done, the herbalists had to tend to Matt’s wounds. Silence descended on us when they left, and my mind turned back to Connor.

“They’re in good hands,” I assured Caspersen, trying to clear the image of Connor’s dead body from my thoughts.

“I know,” she said, then glanced up at me. “Thank you for coming with us, Johnson. I know you didn’t have to.” She shrugged in the direction Kayleigh had gone. “You had a damned good reason not to, in fact.”

“It’s our job,” I said simply.

“I know. We lost two good people, just doing their jobs. We would have lost more if Gat hadn’t changed his mind.”

“That we owe to Kayleigh,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But we couldn’t leave them. They wouldn’t have left us.” I frowned. “At least, Matt wouldn’t have.”

Caspersen laughed at that. “Yeah. I’m not so sure about Carter though.”

“Maybe if we were computers…”

*

SOME TIME PASSED before the herbalists concluded their work, and Kayleigh was free to go. Caspersen went to find Matt, and Marge left to check in on the professor. We stood alone for the first time in far too long.

“You sure you’re okay?” Kayleigh asked me, wrapping me in a hug.

“I am now.”

“I heard about Connor. And Cohen.” She stepped back to look me in the eyes. “I’m so sorry, Nik.”

“Me too.” It was all I could say. There was a wealth of emotion behind the words, but I couldn’t find a better expression for it.

She seemed to understand. Somehow, she always did. “You ready to go home?”

“Very.”

“All right.” She took my hand. “Let me just say goodnight to Marge, and we can go.”

I followed where she led. There was something cathartic simply in being with her, and I could already feel the weight of the past days lifting. She headed to the rear of the dwelling, where the newest patients’ rooms were. We passed a few empty spaces on the way.

It was in front of one that was occupied that I stopped short, struck dumb and immobile by what I saw therein.

Kayleigh’s hand pulled against mine, and I saw from the corner of my eye that she had stopped and turned to see what the holdup might be.

I stared into Matt’s room, agape, too stunned to respond to the query in her eyes. He and Caspersen were there, wrapped around each other in a kiss of such passion I would have been ashamed to be caught spying had I not been so thunderstruck by the sight.

In all of these months, the idea of Caspersen and Matt together had never so much as crossed my mind. On the contrary, the pairing seemed utterly unthinkable.

Kayleigh tugged at my hand, and I turned to her. She signaled for me to move on. I gestured at the couple, confident she hadn’t—couldn’t have—seen, to respond so nonchalantly. But she only urged me on a second time.

I acquiesced, but as soon as we were out of earshot, hissed, “Did you see that?”

“Well, I was trying not to,” she said bemusedly, “you damned Peeping Tom.”

“I’m serious, Kayleigh. That was Caspersen—and Matt.”

She regarded me with an eyebrow raised. “And…?”

I frowned. The objections seemed self-evident. “Matt? Do I really have to explain?”

She laughed. “Look, I know you don’t like him, but they’re in love, so…”

“What? In love? With Matt?”

“You’re really upset about this, aren’t you?” She nudged me. “Should I be worried?”

“Kayleigh…this is Frat Boy we’re talking about. How can she be in love with him?”

She laughed again. “Jesus, Nik. How can you be so surprised by this?”

“How can you not be?”

“Umm…because it’s been painfully obvious for months now. You didn’t really just figure this out, did you?”

Chapter Forty-Eight

APPARENTLY, IT REALLY had been obvious because no one else shared my surprise. In time, I too came to terms with the fact that one of the smartest women I knew had chosen a glorified jock for her partner. There was, after all, no accounting for tastes of the heart. A point that Caspersen noted the one—and only—time I broached the topic, “very much to my benefit.”

I would have said choosing Matt was the one time I’ve seen Caspersen exercise poor judgment. But I’d never seen her so happy, or him for that matter. So, though I couldn’t begin to understand what she saw in him, I guessed it was the right choice after all.

Anyway, other matters soon eclipsed my surprise on that score. The first was the news that the professor would keep his leg. There had been some concern among Kayleigh and Marge that the wounds, in combination with the onset of infection, might necessitate amputation. But they’d been able to get the latter under control, which enabled them to better deal with the former.

As the professor’s fever receded, it fell to us to raise his spirits. This was done in shifts, not of a natural congeniality but out of a sense of duty. So reluctant were we, in fact, that Caspersen threatened to assign visits if we didn’t manage it on our own.

So we did, and each shift turned into an exercise in restraint and self-punishment. The professor was in constant pain due to his injuries, and of course, Carter being Carter, his pain became our pain. Despite the heavy use of bitter root, he claimed to be in constant and indescribable agony—which he spent a considerable amount of time attempting to describe every time we saw him. And he missed no opportunity to remind us how it might all have been avoided had we been quicker.

Still, he seemed to enjoy the visits as both a distraction from his pains and the boredom of sick bay. I suppose the opportunity to berate a captive audience was simply a happy plus.

As for the second development, we first heard whispers of cannibal spottings about a week and a half after our return. Scouts reported they’d returned to the site of their defeat and, under cover of night, carted away the bodies of the dead.

Not only their own dead, but ours as well.

Gat’s fury blazed red-hot. He wanted nothing short of absolute vengeance. Now, finally, he agreed with Caspersen’s plan to destroy the cannibal raiders once and for all.

We were drawing up plans to strike when the weather turned foul. For three days and nights, ice storms raged on. A bitter chill settled on the forest. We were loath to venture out of our homes any more than strictly necessary, much less travel along the ice-covered roads.

So we put the plans on hold, temporarily at first, and finally, when the temperature showed no signs of improving until spring.

But we didn’t have to wait that long. We didn’t have to strike at all. The cannibals did themselves in, and in the end, Connor and Cohen got the last laugh.

Infighting, hunger, and, of course, our skirmish had diminished the survivors’ numbers considerably. The windfall of food—the corpses they’d retrieved from the lake—might have been enough to carry them through the winter. Enough to give them a second chance.

Might have been, had they only preyed upon the Keplerites. But Connor and Cohen were the only hint of victory they’d had over us. It was no wonder they took their bodies too.

No wonder, but a deadly mistake. Three thousand years separated us and men and women of Kepler-186f—cannibals and vegetarians alike. Our blood and flesh still carried the myriad traces of bacteria and viruses of our mother planet—bacteria and viruses that had undergone thousands of years of transformation if they had survived at all on this planet. Our immunities, some developed throughout generations of humanity, others by the genius of vaccines, protected us. But not so the Keplerites.

Our friends encountered these new organisms, too, but slowly and by degrees as they came into contact with us. Sometimes, illnesses resulted, but they were incidental and, between our antibiotics and the herbalists’, manageable. The cannibals, by contrast, directly and violently immersed themselves in the germs of Earth, circa 2093.

And that choice—that awful, disgusting celebration of Connor and Cohen’s death, that inhumanity—spelled their own end.

Sickness ravaged their camp. Unlike the volcano, they couldn’t outrun this invisible death. One by one, they succumbed until, by midwinter, no one remained.

In the end, it wasn’t our efforts or the Nation’s that destroyed the Lava Dwellers. It wasn’t even the collapse of the Mountain. Three thousand years after its first appearance on Kepler-186f, cannibalism itself spelled the end of the cannibals.

Inhumanity had afforded humanity a second chance.

Epilogue

IT IS SPRING now. We’ve weathered almost one year on Kepler-186f.

We have seen no sign of the cannibals since winter. Their camp is a graveyard, of which we have all steered clear.

Gat speaks now of excursions to the surface. His people still hesitate. So long have they viewed the world below with horror, I think nothing will change that outlook overnight. But especially among the young, curiosity is already winning out.

Caspersen plans to return to the mountain, where our portion of the Genesis sits, to retrieve our pods. Matt, of course, is going with her. We already have more volunteers than we’ll need, for dozens of Gat’s people have volunteered their services to our crew.

The idea is particularly popular with the scientists, who desire retrieving the rest of their equipment. Drs. Wu and Kimutai will be returning with Caspersen’s expedition, and so will most of the engineers and geologists.

The professor has been very vocal in his demands that other people make the trip. The success of his computer endeavors rests upon the safe return of equipment from the ship. But he cannot go himself. Though his leg is healed, he doesn’t walk well on it and may never do so again. So he will remain behind and work on what he can in the meanwhile.

But he will not be the only one staying. Kayleigh is a month into her fertility treatment, and I’ll be staying with her. I’m not needed on the journey. But I am needed here, by her now, and if all works out as we hope, our child, eventually.

I’ll be waiting for the crew when they return, for whatever presents itself next.

It has been some time in coming, but I have finally made peace with this new life. There are still days when I reflect with horror on the sheer number of lives lost in our short time here. How different from our original designs, how far astray from our best-laid plans, we have gone.

We are lucky to be alive and to have maintained our humanity despite the cost.

I truly believe we have. We have seen horrors; we have faced monstrous choices and worse odds. We have weathered them together and remained strong. Kayleigh and Quess, and the generations who have survived so long in the trees, remind me of this daily.

I know, now, whatever comes, we will face it together. Not only myself and Kayleigh, and soon our child. Not only our crew but all of us, this forgotten remnant of humanity.

I am not without doubt. I wonder how we, from Earth, will raise our first generation of children who have never seen it. I wonder how much we should tell and how much should be lost to history. I wonder what we will find beyond the forest.

This world is vast and waiting to be explored. Now, three thousand years after the USS-Genesis II landed, we are finally free to do exactly that, to find our way on this planet. Vast oceans and great green continents are waiting.

I know we will find them. We will move beyond the forest and the mountains that have so far made up the bulk of human experience on Kepler-186f.

Though I wonder what waits, I no longer fear. For I know whatever we find, we will find together.

About Rachel Ford

Award-winning author Rachel Ford is a software engineer by day and a writer most of the rest of the time. She is a Trekkie, a video gamer, and a dog parent, owned by a Great Pyrenees named Elim Garak and a mutt of many kinds named Fox (for the inspired reason that he looks like a fox).

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Other NineStar books by this author

Angela McCormack Adventures

The Acquisition

Aubrey Blake Thrillers

Ashes to Ashes

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