Chapter 3 Owl

Chapter 3

Owl

“It is time, Owl.”

I’m already at the entrance to the reinforced shaft that extends from the Aurora ’s hatch up to the surface of Minerva. While I’ve been waiting for OS to give me the word, I’ve scanned for mechanical imperfections, using the ship’s portaprinter to solder over each seam. I holster the portaprinter, crack my neck, and stretch my legs. “All right. I’m ready, OS.”

“Remember. Even suited, you will have only twenty minutes out there before the damage to your body becomes irrevocable,” OS says.

Yep. Comet radiation is no joke.

I clamber up the tunnel, using polycarb rungs Rover hastily installed into the passage. They’ll melt during the comet strike, but we couldn’t afford to use any metal on them. We’ll just have to print some more to get out if—when—we survive the strike. As I climb, Rover lights my way from behind me. “Do not panic when you emerge. The surface will be far hotter and brighter than you remember,” OS reminds me. “You will not have time to adjust to the conditions before you need to start moving. Just keep your space suit closed tight and the shading visor down and move promptly toward the gestation unit.”

“Yep, got it.”

I reach the hatch at the top of the shaft. Opening it is awkward, especially in the suit. I wrap one arm through the top ladder rung, pin it in my elbow while I use my free hand to turn the access wheel. It shudders and unseals. I push open the hatch.

The shaft fills with white light, baking and dry. I’m wearing one of Dad’s old space suits, repaired and fortified and tailored to fit my smaller body, but even through the sunshade of the antique helmet I can sense how intensely bright the Minervan sky has become.

Rover beeps, then OS’s voice comes out loud. “Wait, Owl. My calculations are off. Based on visual analysis, the comet is producing 1.08 times the radiation I expected. And its crash site is 1,100 kilometers nearer. Our window for extraction has shrunk.”

“Thanks, OS,” I say quickly, springing into motion. I sense OS might be about to abort my mission, and I won’t let that happen. I want that gestating embryo to be in the Aurora with us, safe alongside all the rest of the dormant zygotes. Once I’m clear of the hatchway, I stand and catch my balance. “Owl, wait!” OS says.

“How much time? Until we need to seal off the Aurora ?”

“Between fifteen and twenty minutes. Fifteen is better. At twenty I must seal the hatch for any of us to survive. Owl, I need Rover to prepare the final sequence. You’ll be alone out there. You need to come down, too.”

I blink into the blinding comet, eyes tearing. Even through the dense brown filter of the helmet, it’s a bluish-white orb, a giant daughter to the two Sisters, reflecting their light down at me. “And sacrifice the embryo?” I say. “No chance.”

“Owl, judging from Minerva’s history, that embryo is highly unlikely to develop into a viable fetus. My priority is protecting you.”

Too bad. I’m already up and out of the hatch and speeding toward the submerged Endeavor and its unit behind the gray portal, raising its small and fragile life. OS is wrong, anyway. We have schematics that will help. This embryo has a better chance than any before it.

It’s helpful that I’ve walked the same small patch of this planet for all my life. The dull familiarity of it, which a few weeks ago was deadening, is now a blessing. The blinding light of the impending comet floods out all detail from the surface, warps the air and gives the sky the same texture as the ground. My feet pass along newly soft soil, crumbling under the heat. When I stumble I switch to all fours, scrambling across the plain. With the uneven ground and no visuals to help, I can’t trust my balance. The ground is hot beneath my gloved hands.

We left the gestation device in place for as long as we could, so that the embryo could have the best chance possible for stable early development before we disturbed it. The rest of the zygotes were long ago transferred to the Aurora. But we know we have to bring the gestation unit down before the comet makes impact. I’d counted on having Rover’s help, but I should be able to drag thirty-five kilograms on the tarp, or maybe even just waddle it over to the hatch so we can get it plugged back into power as quickly as possible.

I glance at the timer counting down in the corner of my helmet. Fourteen minutes until the hatch seals for good.

Once, years ago, the dads stood outside the gray portal of the Coordinated Endeavor , listening and waiting and watching a clock count down to the birth of their daughter. How they must have felt, waiting for the first offspring of our new world. And then she came out of the device, followed by another a few months later, and then baby Yarrow. Those first two children died. I won’t let this latest one meet the same fate.

I have two clocks counting down on my helmet display this morning: the gestation device’s duration, showing 131 days and three hours and forty-six minutes, and the now 13.6 minutes until I need to be inside the bunker. One of these two countdowns can’t go fast enough; the other needs to slow down.

I’m nearly at the settlement site now. I try to stay focused on it and not the glowing mountain in the sky, but it’s hard not to look at something that takes up half my view. It will disappear eventually, impacting the far side of the planet. That’s the only reason this giant light above doesn’t mean my instant death.

The living structures have long ago been deflated and stashed away in the Aurora . The only sign we ever inhabited this planet is the deep pit where we mined hydrocarbons, and the sliver of the Endeavor that’s still aboveground. Even those subtle signs that we were here will soon be eradicated.

I make my way to the gestation unit, through the gray portal, the only part of the submerged Endeavor still visible . Six crucial joists connect the gestation unit to the ship wall, and I need to sever them before I remove the device, unplug it from its nuclear power source on the Endeavor , and hope the embryo survives its slowing centrifuge while I get it to the Aurora. Sparks fly from my cutter as I test it in the open air.

I kneel beside the device and begin sawing it from the Endeavor ’s frame. The ship wall whines in protest. The gestation timer on the outside blinks out, but it’s still counting down inside my helmet. The arm inside must already be slowing, but OS predicts it can go hours before its core has any lethal shift in temperature. I hope it’s right.

Eleven minutes left.

I’m most of the way around the device, the cutter whining and sparking as it goes. The unit starts to wiggle in its frame. While the saw forces its way through the joists, I look around the rest of the remaining wreck of the Endeavor , which for all I know will be melted shut after the comet strikes, never to be accessed again. We’ve ransacked it for the settlement’s needs: its internals are all bared, surrounded by hacked-up polycarbonate. All that remains behind the gray portal is a laminated black book: Surviving Sagittarion Bb. I tuck it under my arm, like a schoolkid out of Pink Lagoon.

Pink Lagoon. Yarrow. He’s somewhere out there, probably dead. If he’s alive, maybe he’s looking up at the sky in fear. Alone. I touch my free hand to the soil beneath me. “I love you, Yar.”

I move my hand to the wall of the Endeavor. Many shades of sadness course through me: I’m mourning Yarrow and the stillborn baby, and I’m mourning the ship itself. Our life in the settlement, which we’ll have to start anew if we manage to survive the strike.

Once I’ve sawed through the remaining joists, the gestation device tumbles forward onto the tarp, the bottom half tilted up where it’s held by one last length of cabling. I unplug the unit from the ship’s wall, squatting so I can fall with it, using my body to cushion its landing on the tarp.

The backside of the device isn’t impersonal gray paneling. It’s slightly translucent. I see, inside, the curled form of a small alienlike human, no longer than my palm, all forehead and hands and blue-pink eyes, a thin cord going from its belly to the device’s internals.

“Okay, let’s go,” I say as I drag the gestation unit through the comet’s blasting heat . It’s heavy, but manageable.

Even though the space suit shields me from the worst of it, I can feel the angry radiance of the comet burning my skin. I have to squint to see anything, even with the helmet’s shading.

Eight minutes left.

I lug the tarp a few yards, and then stop.

Someone’s here.

Way off to the side, in the square of packed dirt where once was an inflatable habitat, the very place we used to sleep and wonder and play, is my brother.

How can this be?

He’s lit up by the impending comet, and the brightness between us eradicates every detail of him except the dark hue of his tunic, his ragged mop of hair. He’s kneeling like a prisoner from a reel, head bowed forward and hands clasped—tied?—behind his back. In this blinding light, I can’t tell exactly what he’s done to himself.

I yell his name over the roar of the hot wind, the muffling shield of my helmet.

He looks up. His mouth drops open.

I let go of the tarp and gestation device, and step toward him.

“Leave me!” he shouts.

I don’t. I break into a run.

As I get closer, I see how terrible he looks. He’s got blisters all over his skin, his lips are cracked and bloody, his hair matted and singed. He must not have had water for days, and this heat—barely tolerable for me in the space suit—is baking him alive.

“Save yourself. Take the gestation device. Now,” Yarrow croaks. “And Owl, there’s a sea. You need to know. It’s to the south. There are giant rusty aliens in it.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, and don’t have time to ask. “Yarrow,” I say, fighting to keep words coming out of me instead of raw shrieks, “Father and I found the beacon. It’s not your fault. We can help you.”

He blinks. He looks to the gestation device, flat on the tarp a hundred yards away.

“Can you walk?” I ask.

Yarrow nods, stunned, his mouth agape. He’s somehow managed to bind his own hands behind him, but his legs are free. He lurches to his feet.

I step toward the Aurora , scanning the countdown as I do. Five minutes.

My brother pitches forward beside me. He cries out, in pain or shock or frustration, I don’t know. His tunic has ridden up, and I see his legs are flayed by the heat and light. They twitch. There’s no way he can walk. He probably can’t even get up to his feet again. Five minutes.

I get my hands under Yarrow’s shoulders, clenching my teeth against the feeling of my brother’s soft damaged flesh bursting wetly under my fingers. I try to lift him. I can’t. He’s always been a good ten kilos heavier than I am. “I’m sorry, I can’t lift you,” I say.

“Leave me,” he cries. “Owl, leave me ! I just came to tell you about the sea creatures.”

I look between him and the gestation device. The wounded brother beside me and the small unaware body, a shadow behind the translucent wall.

The heat bores into the top of my helmet.

Four minutes and four seconds.

I give up on the shoulders and grasp my brother’s ankles instead, one in each hand. He yells in pain as I haul him over the soil.

He screams louder whenever his tender skin drags on any bump on the surface. “I’m sorry!” I cry over the hot wind. To him, mainly, but also to the embryo in the gestation device, left in the increasing distance behind me, on the pounded soil where we used to live.

We pass through the fence, the unpowered guns limp atop it, guarding an open clearing. The home that was.

The comet fills the sky before me, beautiful and horrible, with its hot rocky core, its plumes of radiation. The secondary ion tail flares out to one side, slightly bluish. I scream at it between my own labored breaths. Even with the weight he’s lost, my brother is heavy.

One minute remains. I won’t be going back for the gestation unit. It’s just not possible. OS won’t let me risk the lives of the group for an unaware embryo that has only a small chance of surviving anyway.

As I kneel by the hatch, I get one last look at the fence surrounding a jagged pit and the slowing gestation device. After the comet strikes, all surface evidence of us will be gone. If the integrity of the Aurora fails, there will be no sign that humans ever lived on Minerva at all, except for some skeletons entombed below the surface. Even if what Yarrow is saying is true, and those alien life-forms out there wind up being intelligent, if they survive the comet they’ll probably have no idea that we were ever here until one of them happens to dig above the Aurora and receives the shock of their little alien life.

I get one last look at the impending comet as I push my brother toward the open hatchway. It’s turned the horizon purple. I can see some detail of the giant hurtling mountain—the electromagnetic field it sends cascading around it, the blues and blacks of ice and heat and rock. My skin breaks out in sweat, the cold kind that comes with fainting.

But I will not let myself faint. Twenty-seven seconds remain. I lower my brother into the tunnel to safety, as far as I can, then drop his limp body the rest of the way before barreling in after him and slamming the hatch shut.

Cool darkness.

There at the bottom of the shaft, crumpled against an orange portal that once would have connected the Aurora to Dad’s ship, is the body of a person. Yarrow.

He doesn’t move the whole time that I climb down the rungs of the shaft. My heart seizes as I step off at the bottom. “Yarrow? Are you...?”

He stays in his fetal position, but raises his head enough to look at me with haunted eyes. “You dropped me.”

I stop. “I did. I had to.”

There’s the hint of a smile on his cracked and bleeding lips. My brother might still be inside this shell. “I deserved it.”

I take another step in his direction. His hands are out of view. I know I saw them bound, but my paranoid brain tells me he could have freed them, could now be holding anything: a gun, a blade, some other weapon I don’t expect. Maybe I saved him only for him to murder all of us. “I know you’re joking,” I say, “but no, you didn’t. You didn’t deserve any of this.”

I hear Father’s thudding footfalls elsewhere in the Aurora , his yelled commands and Rover’s calm responses. He’s finalizing the sealing of the ship. Already the comet has struck our planet; the shock waves will come anytime. I can’t risk interrupting or distracting him now. Dad is still out of commission. Yarrow is mine to deal with alone. I take a slow step toward him.

“Stop,” he says, pain in his voice. “Don’t come anywhere near me.”

“I have to ask. Are you armed?”

In response, he holds his hands up behind him. He’s tied something around his wrists. “The opposite. You saw. I don’t want to hurt you all.”

“Oh, Brothership,” I say. I want to free him, and I’m also grateful that he’s restrained himself so I don’t have to do it.

I get down to my knees, still across the chamber from Yarrow. The malevor must have heard our voices and wandered through the Aurora to find me. She nuzzles my side, staring at Yarrow suspiciously.

“It’s not your fault,” I say. Yarrow watches me, barely blinking, as I tell him again, slower this time, about finding the beacon, the schematics coded inside it, how we’ll start the nanotech device printing when and if we’ve survived the comet impact.

He closes his eyes heavily. “I can be fixed. I don’t know if I deserve that, after what I’ve done.”

“It’s not your fault, Yarrow. I mean that, it’s not your fault.”

“Why would they have done this to me? What did I do to deserve it?”

“Nothing. And I don’t know why we were sabotaged. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

“Will you tell Father I’m here, for me?” he asks. “I don’t think I can face him right now. I’m worried he’ll... that when he sees me he’ll...”

Could Father attack him? I can’t imagine it, but I also couldn’t imagine Yarrow shooting Dad. Father loves Dad so much—I guess it’s possible. “Yes, I’ll tell him,” I say.

“If I may,” OS interrupts. “Judging from Kodiak’s vital signs while you tumbled through the shaft screaming, he is well aware of your presence. He’s been too busy with the final preparations to come over.”

I manage a tired smile. “There you have it. He knows you’re here, and he’s just ignoring you. Back to family business as usual.”

“As soon as Rover is available, we’ll prioritize your immediate health, Yarrow,” OS says. “It is at more acute risk than Ambrose’s.”

“You don’t hate me?” Yarrow asks OS. The way he says it, it’s more an expression of wonder than a question.

“No, I do not hate you,” OS replies. “I am still investigating the reprogramming you implemented days ago. It makes me feel scrambled in your presence, but the experience is more akin to anxiety than hatred.”

“I do hate you, a little,” I say. “But I always have. It comes along with loving you.”

A smile spreads across Yarrow’s face. “And I guess I always deserved it. Despite my claims otherwise.”

“No, you didn’t deserve it,” I say. “But you do now, that’s for sure.”