The Symbionts of Murkor Read online

  “Before offering an opinion,” she said, “I’d like to pose a question. We’re assuming Zenith’s thirst for water is the motivating factor behind an attack on Nadir. Okay, I can buy the premise. So why not just come and take it? Isn’t sabotaging the ESS, in the process jeopardizing the lives of six people, rather extreme?”

  “Give Coalition credit for being devious,” Carlos replied. “A more blatant incursion would put the blame squarely on them. Eventually, it would trigger an immediate Unión response, which I’m assuming Coalition wishes to avoid. On the other hand, everyone knows Nadir was poorly designed and constructed. Without tangible proof, who’s going to believe that we were incapacitated by the insertion of a type of nanoparticle yet to be perfected? Can’t you see what’s happening?” Carlos added, exasperation in his voice. “Coalition is surreptitiously forcing us to abdicate our claim here.”

  Roya remained unconvinced. “I believe you have strong feelings about this. Except too much of your supposition is predicated on the idea that nanoparticles have infected the Nexus.” Turning to Garcia, she said, “I reserve judgment in the matter.”

  “Fair enough. And what about you, Mariana? Care to wade in?”

  “If I were a member of a jury, knowing Coalition’s rap sheet, I’d probably vote guilty. Except the accused does have a right to face their accuser. Have you considered confronting Ellis with the ‘evidence?’ She might tip her hand.”

  “I’ve given it thought,” Garcia responded. “If she is behind this alleged sabotage, she currently has no assurance of its success. I prefer to keep her in the dark for exactly the reason you mention: To see if she gives away her intentions by making another move against us.”

  “Have you sent a message to our liaison in the Varian System to apprise them of what she’s done?” Carlos asked.

  “To what aim?” Garcia inquired.

  “For them to respond on our behalf,” Amanda chimed in, joining ranks with Carlos.

  “It’s premature,” Garcia replied. “And it would only serve to strain the damaged relationship between Unión and Coalition.”

  “Is that how you characterize it? Damaged, not broken?” Amanda asked, scrutinizing his reaction as she stroked the top of her foot against his calf beneath the table.

  “That remains to be seen,” Garcia replied, swallowing hard. Somehow, he managed to shift his leg. “Does anyone else have additional comments or suggestions? Gustavo? We haven’t heard much from you this evening.”

  “With good reason,” he replied.

  “Here it comes,” Roya said, winking at Mariana.

  Gustavo was undeterred. “‘In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.’”

  “And you prefer not to be the one accused of tipping the balance?” Garcia asked, smiling.

  “Exactly.”

  “Poe?”

  “Who else?”

  “Well, if there’s nothing more—” Garcia said, signaling the end of the meeting. As he stood, one more detail belatedly came to mind. “Sorry, almost forgot. Roya, how much water is in the storage vaults?”

  “Almost two thousand liters.”

  Too low, Garcia thought to himself. His fault. The ease of finding water and a growing reluctance to enter the lava tubes had led to complacency and fewer missions.

  “Carlos, can the ESS still be utilized to refill the CAM-L’s air tank?”

  “Yes. Keeping in mind that the vehicle’s air chemistry, the rebreathers too, will be identical to the base’s air.”

  Garcia pondered this for a moment, then said, “Roya, we must contemplate the interruption of water recovery missions. One last quick excursion early tomorrow should bring the storage tanks up to half capacity. Assemble the usual team: You, Gustavo, and Amanda.”

  6. That Which Has Value

  THEY HAD LEFT NADIR EARLY, before the sun might decide to appear. A mercurial hot breeze had managed to scrub half the murk out of the atmosphere, leaving the air a somber tincture of iodine brown. The eye, the imagination, eagerly consumed the hint of color. On Murkor, it never got any clearer or cheerier.

  “Look there! Do you see it?” Gustavo pleaded, pointing, his face seemingly intent on embedding itself in the front windshield of the CAM-L he was piloting into the bleak landscape.

  “No,” insisted Roya, “I don’t see it. I never see it, so why do you keep on badgering me?”

  Gustavo, incredulous of the curt answer, ignored her question. Fortunately, he had one more hope, a second crewmate to annoy. “Amanda?” he petitioned, in return receiving a blank look. “Not you too?” he protested. “No, go ahead, I’m prepared. Tell me you can’t see it too.”

  Amanda peered up from her navigation duties to concentrate on the sun’s aberrant movement relative to a promontory on the horizon.

  “Okay,” she relented, “I see it.”

  “I knew you would,” Gustavo said, gloating, until out of the corner of his eye he caught Roya and Amanda exchanging conspiratorial smiles. “Uh, huh. I get it. Cute. So why don’t you tell me, Amanda, which direction you think the sun is moving?”

  “Up?”

  Sunrise. The reply made sense. Except, that is, to Gustavo who shook his head. Amanda had three more choices, all nonsensical on every planet except Murkor.

  “To the right—I think,” she offered.

  “No, it’s left,” Garcia exclaimed, exasperated. “The sun moved to the left. What’s the matter with you people, are you blind?”

  They had played this game before. Or at least Amanda and Garcia had, on a few occasions actually agreeing on the direction of the sun’s lateral movement along the horizon, though neither had bothered to calculate whether the frequency they concurred exceeded the law of averages.

  “Any objection to scouting an outlying sector?” Amanda asked. She had taken command of the vehicle’s navigation holo. Because of the relative ease of locating water, outlying referred to an imaginary ten-kilometer circle, Nadir being its center. Missions undertaken within Nadir’s EZ were shorter, and therefore less arduous than those conducted by neighboring Zenith. Filling a two thousand liter tank typically required exploration of one, maybe two, close-in lava tube networks.

  “The Comandante’s intention,” Roya, who tended to be more prudent, reminded, “was for us to make this a short trip.”

  “We’re halfway there already,” Amanda replied, which was a distortion of the facts. The distance to her intended destination would be doubled when taking into account the numerous intervening crevices to be avoided. She had, solely out of petulance, discounted Garcia’s requirement of a shorter mission.

  “OK, then,” Roya conceded, unaware of the excess travel time. “Plot the safest course.”

  “Head for that low jagged ridge,” Amanda directed.

  “You mean los dientes demonios?” commented Gustavo, who took on the task of assigning most of the descriptive names to the planet’s hideous topography.

  “I like it,” Amanda said. “It shall forever be identified as such by the holo-mapping program. What I have in mind lies a few kilometers beyond.”

  The lavascape on the opposite side of the ridge was worse than Amanda anticipated. Gustavo’s firm grip on the accelerator throttles regulating power to the CAM-L’s rotating tracks gave proof that he was having a hard time of it. After a few teeth-rattling jolts that tested the vehicle’s heavy-duty suspension Roya commented. “Gus,” she admonished, “one of these days you’re going to send us hurtling headfirst into a crevice—hey! Now there’s a sight you don’t often see!”

  On the CAM-L’s port side were three rollers ominously barreling their way across a wide-open mesa. Sighting three of the dreaded storms at the same time was a rare occurrence. Seeing three in close proximity was unheard of.

  “I think the sensible thing to do is to observe which direction they take,” Gustavo said, bringing the vehicle to a halt, even tho
ugh stopping did little to increase their safety—a roller’s movement being too fast and unreliable to predict. All they could do was nervously watch as the rollers repeatedly changed directions, alternately approaching and receding, often crisscrossing each other’s paths.

  Within moments, the CAM-L found itself in the proximate center of all three, forcing her anxious crew to repeatedly shift in their seats to keep sight of the storms’ varying locations. “One appears to be heading right for us!” Amanda warned, singling out the closest, a few kilometers away and closing fast. “Gustavo, get us the hell out of here!”

  “Not a great idea,” Roya declared. “It won’t stay on a straight vector for long.” But as she spoke the roller had moved even closer, its outer turbulence sending lava projectiles pinging against the vehicle’s thick metal plating.

  “Damn you, Gustavo!” Amanda screamed, competing against the storm’s deafening noise, the hiss of a wave receding on a pebble-covered shore amplified a thousand-fold. “Move us!”

  Hands bleached white from clenching the throttles, Gustavo remained steadfast. Second-guessing himself, he breathed a sigh of relief when, at the last possible moment, the oncoming roller veered off. Vanishing in the general direction of Nadir, it left behind two identical rivals, each 100,000 metric tons of tumbling pumice, shards, and lava chunks.

  It was believed that nothing on the face of Murkor could halt the forward motion of a roller. With one possible exception. Another roller. The nearest analogous weather event on Earth was tornadoes. Comprised mostly of compressible air, when tornadoes meet they do not collide, they converge. The smaller is absorbed into the larger.

  Rotating at 800 kilometers per hour, moving with a forward velocity of 200 kilometers per hour, a roller accumulates an enormous quantity of material. It attains sufficient mass and momentum to exhibit some of the physical properties of a non-compressible solid.

  And solids do collide.

  The probability of a roller collision had been determined to be statistically insignificant. The phenomenon had never been observed.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Amanda warned.

  “Can you gauge their distance?” Roya asked.

  “Not precisely. Their movement is too erratic. On average, I’d say six, maybe eight kilometers. Perhaps now we should turn around?”

  “Great idea,” Roya offered. “Chase after the one behind us.”

  “I say we stay put a little while longer,” Gustavo said. “Eventually they’ll shove off or die out.”

  “They’re heading straight for each other,” Amanda cautioned, her eyes widening in amazement.

  “Better hold on!” Roya yelled out as the two monsters, each refusing to alter course, met head-on.

  What followed occurred in the span of a two short seconds.

  From the perspective of the CAM-L’s crew, it seemed instantaneous:

  A blinding bright flash of white light, the brilliance of a billion tiny sparks of super-charged static electrical energy;

  Roya, emitting a second high-pitched scream of “hold on;”

  A shock wave, traveling fast through solid rock;

  A microsecond later, a supersonic blast wave, propelling the seven-metric-ton vehicle violently backward;

  The earsplitting krrhhump! of the sound wave radiating outward from the cataclysmic collision, even in Murkor’s thin atmosphere, to be heard and felt ten kilometers away by the startled occupants of Nadir.

  Upright and apparently undamaged, the CAM-L came to a jarring halt twenty meters from where it had previously rested.

  Stunned, Roya looked to her crewmates for sign of injury. “Is anyone hurt?”

  “Don’t appear so,” Gustavo answered.

  “Amanda?” Roya had to ask again.

  “Uh, no. Just a little hard of hearing at the moment.”

  All three had been violently jostled, but kept firmly in place by their harness system.

  “They’re gone,” Gustavo said, mouth agape, staring out toward the explosion. “Completely, utterly gone.”

  “We should report—” Roya began before being interrupted by the vehicle’s audible com.

  “What the hell happened out there?” the Comandante said, sounding worried. “Is everyone alright?”

  “Shaken a bit, that’s all,” Gustavo replied. “You won’t believe it. That was two rollers facing off. Neither gave.”

  Silence, then Garcia: “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  “You heard it?” Roya asked.

  “Felt it first. For a second we thought it might be an earthquake. Registered mag eight here.”

  “I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t see it,” Gustavo said. “Not sure if it was an explosion or an implosion. Maybe both. Total annihilation. If we had the resources and a couple of hot-shot physicists—”

  “If anybody’s interested, I’m okay,” Amanda pronounced, unintentionally raising her voice to compensate for her temporary loss of hearing.

  “Of course,” Garcia replied. “If it shook us here, must have given you quite a scare.”

  “Did you think it was a hostile act committed by Zenith?”

  “Carlos did. His first thought, the epicenter emanating in close proximity to your last known position.”

  “A third roller headed off in your direction,” Roya advised. “Did you see it?”

  “No,” Garcia answered, pausing to add, “You’re telling me three rollers were in the same vicinity?”

  “Affirmative,” Roya replied, looking out where two had been a few moments ago. “None now, though. Do we have permission to continue on?”

  After a silent second or two of uncharacteristic hesitation, Garcia spoke up. “Check for damage. Run a systems diagnostic.”

  “That’s performed automatically, Comandante,” Gustavo reminded.

  “Right. Proceed, then. Report in every ten minutes. Out.”

  Before traveling on to the targeted tube network, which was beyond the area of rollers’ impact, a curious Gustavo decided it was worthwhile to take a short detour to ground zero. Donning a rebreather and grabbing a communicator, he left the vehicle and proceeded to the outer fringe of the blast site, a mounded wasteland of pumice that had fused into shiny fragments of lava glass, most smaller than a grain of sand. Interspersed in the ruin were lava chunks greater than a meter across.

  Gustavo was a contemplative fellow. On the edge of his consciousness floated an idea he could not bring to fore. Squatting down, scanning the hot rubble at his feet, he wondered aloud into his communicator if the blast had been detected as far away as Zenith. Neither Amanda or Roya ventured an answer. Both encouraged his immediate return to the safety of the vehicle.

  With time, the desolation would prompt a disturbing reflection on the implications of human behavior. Of how two similar but opposing forces, in their failure to coexist in the same space at the same time, could extinguish each other in their fury.

  ***

  When the team arrived at the intended destination, even Amanda began to wonder why, by Nadir standards, they had traveled so far. There were closer, productive, tube networks that had been visited multiple times. Relatively little was known about outlying Lava Tube Network N119 other than it was located in an area where there was a high likelihood of a successful mission.

  Nadir’s safety equipment and precautions were nearly identical to Zenith’s. Today, Gustavo was selected to remain in the vehicle while Amanda and Roya, trailing the siphoning hose behind her, entered the convoluted passageways of the tube. All three were exhibiting mild aftereffects from the violent roller impact and symptoms of fatigue from breathing air whose carbon dioxide content, thanks to the malfunctioning ESS, exceeded norms.

  Gustavo, sensing a potential problem, put his own words to it. “No screwing around in there,” he cautioned through the communications link. “I don’t want to have to come in after you ladies.”

  “Roya, did he just call us ladies?” Amanda inquired.

 
“He means nothing by it,” Roya said. “It’s just his way.” Both women understood they were being teased and, for the moment, Gustavo was listening in. “Isn’t that right, Gus? Being a condescending ass is just your way?”

  “I certainly meant no disrespect, ladies. Now get it done and get your little fannies out of there ASAP.”

  “I like a man who speaks his mind,” Roya replied. “Meaning you must have nothing left to talk about.” Smiling at Amanda, she abruptly terminated the com link.

  “This tube looks accessible,” Amanda suggested, bringing her headlamp to bear onto the passageway’s striated walls, sparkling in the first light they had seen in a million years.

  The tube’s geology was unremarkable. Nothing to distinguish it from several they had explored. “Only diamonds,” Roya said. “Do you know that they were once measured in carats? Mere milligrams—before that discovery in the Epsilon system when they started weighing them by the metric ton. Funny how some things once considered precious can become almost worthless. To me, they’re still pretty though. Amanda? Don’t you think so?”

  “Meter’s acting strange,” she replied, trying to decipher the fluctuating readings displayed on the recently calibrated “sniffer” she was holding. “Diamonds? Cheap costume jewelry.”

  The passageway began to widen and decline. Smaller side branches, appearing too difficult to navigate, opened in multiple directions. At one intersection, Amanda stopped. “Picking up water molecules. Meter’s gone off-scale—don’t see that too often. Should be water to waste up ahead.”

  “Waste?! I watched a once-thriving region abandoned by its people from lack of water,” Roya said, holding back stronger sentiments stirred by Amanda’s complacent attitude. “Shallow wells choked with sand. Wells drilled down to 2,000 meters run dry. It’s hard to raise livestock when grassland is replaced by sand dunes.”

  “Running out of water. Let that be Ellis’s headache,” Amanda said.