Hella Read online

  I didn’t say anything. I just took another bite and chewed slowly. This was a trick I learned from Mom. You’re not supposed to talk with your mouth full, so if you take a bite and chew slowly, you have lots of time to think. I took a big bite.

  Finally, I said, “Hm.”

  Then I took a drink of water. “That’s going to be interesting.” That was another trick I learned from Mom. Don’t volunteer anything. Let the other person do all the talking. Most people can’t stand silence, so they have to fill it up with their own words.

  Jubilee liked talking anyway, so she didn’t notice that I wasn’t saying anything. She went on happily. “You know, they’ll have to restrict her. They’re certainly going to take her off the soccer team. First, she breaks your brother’s leg, then she—oh, you didn’t know about that? She was fouling him the whole game. She got thrown out finally, but not before she pushed him over a bench—”

  “Marley broke his leg?” Jamie didn’t tell me that. “Why?”

  “I dunno. I guess she had an extra big bowl of grumpy-flakes this morning. I heard she wanted to go out on some big ride-along, but even her dad said no. She didn’t have enough points and your brother had seniority anyway and—I guess she was angry about that. Jealous.”

  Oh. Now it made sense. I didn’t say it aloud. If Jamie gets hurt, she’s next in line. Except it didn’t happen that way, I got chosen instead. Marley got mad, and I got a lapful of dinner. And Mom probably knew the whole story. Jamie’s dad too. And certainly Captain Skyler. That’s probably why he skipped over Marley in the first place.

  I decided I wasn’t hungry anymore. I put my sandwich down so I could think. The noise wasn’t a lot of help. But I was getting better at figuring out these kinds of things.

  This wasn’t about the ride-along anymore. It was about me now. Whatever punishment the Councilors might give Marley, she would blame it on Jamie and me and Mom.

  But it wasn’t just us. Some people thought that Marley might be responsible for a lot of other bad behaviors. There had been vandalism and theft all summer long but always out of camera view so nobody could prove anything. But also, maybe if anyone actually knew anything, they might be more afraid of her dad than her.

  Jubilee stopped talking long enough to drink her fruit juice. “You didn’t hear this from me, but some people are already talking beyond restriction. They think Marley’s going to end up an exile. She is sooo out of control.”

  “That would be very hard to do,” I said. It’s the kind of thing I say when I don’t know what else to say. I wondered if I would vote to put her outside. Yes, I was upset about having to wash my dinner off my lap, but that wasn’t bad enough for me to vote to put her outside. I knew what Jamie would say. He’d make a joke. It would be too dangerous—for Hella. Our local predators would get food poisoning.

  Sometimes people say that there’s another colony somewhere in the northwest, maybe in the jumble just beyond where we send our drones. Supposedly, they’re people who went missing and are now living in caves. Supposedly they’re eating local fish and fruits. Nobody knows if it’s true, or if it is, nobody will say, but if someone is actually surviving outside, without any resources except their own brains, that would be important, wouldn’t it? So I guess a lot of people want to believe it’s possible, because they want to believe that human beings are essentially meaner and nastier than anything Hella can throw at us.

  Jamie says the accounts of the exile colony are just another made-up story that people pretend to believe in—that one day humans will live safely and naturally on Hella. He says that a secret settlement doesn’t make sense. If all of us at Summerland Station are working so hard to minimize cross-contamination, why would we turn anyone out into the Hellan ecology? And if they were being exiled from us, then why would they care about honoring our rules?

  No, even if it’s possible, it’s still impossible. There’s no way to survive outside any of the stations. There are way too many unknown things out there. Really big unknown things. The intelligence engines say that the life-expectancy of an unprotected human in the wild would be less than three days. Twelve if you could stay away from the local kill zones. But you’d still need food and water. There’s not a lot of Hellan stuff that’s been thoroughly tested and proven safe to eat. There’s a lot of stuff we think might be, but we don’t know yet. As fast as we can fab the necessary scanning equipment, we still don’t have enough lab people to do all the testing. Not yet. Mom says it’s something I could be good at. But the real job will take generations. There’s just too much that we don’t know.

  * * *

  —

  0630.

  I’d sat in on briefings before. It’s part of the certification process. Every time a mission team goes out, the student teams parallel their operations on simulators. I’d sat in on mission games since I was four. Hella-years, of course. Or nearly eleven Earth-years.

  I’d simulated so many missions, I already knew the agenda, and the noise knows everything too. Well, almost everything. Mom likes to say that the noise doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. That’s its biggest flaw.

  The briefings work like this.

  First, context and purpose, so everybody knows why we’re doing this. “This is strictly routine maintenance of our northern on-site surveillance. It’s just a little look-see. But we are going out overnight because we’re also looking to increase our observations of nocturnal activity on the plains. I could say that we’re looking to clear up some anomalies, but everything on this planet is an anomaly. We just want to know what’s moving around out there after dark.”

  Second, everybody reviews the route, so everybody knows where they’re going. This morning, Captain Skyler said, “We’re taking five trucks to monitor the migration. We’ll have eight crew in the forward vehicle, nine crew in the middle, eight crew in the rear. We’ll go northeast into the savannah as far as Big Bend, then north along the Dystopic River until we get to Flat Rock. We will not be climbing the rock. We’ll turn west, all the way to Little Jumble and then follow the foothills south and then southeast home. It’s a three-day ride, give or take half a day.”

  Third, everybody reviews the specifics, so everybody knows what they’re individually doing. “We’ll be releasing the new drones every two hours and planting seismic monitors at these sites—here, here, and here. Sniffers and weather stations—here and here and another two up here if possible. Replace or repair these two remotes which have gone offline. Your checklists have been downloaded to your vehicles.”

  And finally, safety instructions, because there are always safety instructions: “Nothing in this mission requires anyone to put themselves in harm’s way. We will take no unnecessary risks. You’re to avoid close contact with the herds and especially any of their outliers—those are the most dangerous. Over here, this red circle, Grumpy-Butt and his family are feeding off a land-whale. That should keep them happy for a week or two, but let’s give them a wide berth anyway.

  “We’ve got high confidence that our local predators are tagged and located, but as always we can’t guarantee that there aren’t a few hungry juveniles wandering through. They’ll be following the migrations. Your monitors will warn you if you get within ten klicks of any of the locals, and the drones will be watching for tourists. As always, safety procedures take precedence over all other operations. Stop often, at least once a klick, and listen for thumps and sniff for trace. We’ll have six lifters sitting hot on the pad. If anything with teeth even grunts in your direction, holler and all six will be airborne in thirty seconds. I know that a couple of you have been calling this a ride in the park. It isn’t—it never is. And it never will be—at least, not in our lifetimes. And those who think that way won’t be riding out on any mission that I’m running. Any questions?” Captain Skyler stood next to the big display and waited.

  Usually there aren’t any questions. Captain Skyler always publ
ishes the mission objectives and briefing books a day or two in advance, and everybody assigned would have the appropriate checklists on their tabs. But today, a hand went up. Lieutenant Bo-Say. “I’m not clear about one thing. Why are we going out so far? Wouldn’t this be better in two operations? One close, one far?”

  Captain Skyler nodded. “Ordinarily, yes. But time and cost analysis gives us a forty percent advantage. And we need to have all the monitors operational before the tenth of Curie. There’s an important birthday coming up, right, Kyle?” He turned back to the screen, pointed at the map. “It’s been a good year for the herds. Most of the calves survived. So we’re looking at an aggravated situation when they get here. Not just the herds, but the predator packs as well. If we run this operation now, we can go to Lockdown three days early. It’s about margin.”

  That was the way Captain Skyler always talked. He talked about plans and consequences and cost-effectiveness and investment of resources and always with one eye on the calendar. So I didn’t understand why Lieutenant Bo-Say asked the question. Unless the question was about me and that’s why he said what he did. Why were they taking me along on a three-day drive-around? Wouldn’t it be better for my first ride-along to be a close perimeter check? Maybe the Captain was trying to make a point and the point wasn’t about me. Maybe it was about . . . I don’t know. He didn’t need me, he could have left me at home. Maybe this was about making a point to Marley—or her dad. Jubilee said that Captain Skyler might be running for a councilor’s chair next election. I need to pay more attention to those things. I’ll be able to vote soon, not on everything, but some things. I have Class 3 Certifications in six domains, I only need one more Certification for my 5th birthday to be a Passage Ceremony, that’s what Captain Skyler was hinting at.

  Captain Skyler looked at his pad. “Suit up. We roll in fifteen.”

  * * *

  —

  Three concentric fences surround Summerland Station. After the Big Break-In—I remember it because it was just before my fourth birthday, and I never had a real birthday party—the Council ordered planning for a fourth fence, but it got slogged down in arguments about whether or not we should establish a second summer station instead. Shouldn’t we decentralize? We’re three years past the timeline. But whichever side of the argument was right, it didn’t matter. We didn’t have the resources to do either. Not enough people. Not enough machines. Not yet.

  The fences are made from Atlas trees. That’s what everybody calls them. The scientific name has too many syllables, but it mostly means the same thing: “Holy crap! Can a tree really grow that tall?”

  On Hella, it can. A fully grown Atlas tree can be three thousand years old (Hella-years) and easily 150 meters high. There are even older and taller trees in some of the eastern reaches, but aside from the drones and robots and satellite scans, we haven’t explored anywhere near as much beyond our range as we’d like to. There’s just too much planet.

  At its base, an Atlas trunk is so thick you could carve out a house inside. A large house. How safe it would be with all that unsupported weight above, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t sleep comfortable. It can take more than a month to bring down an Atlas tree. A year is eighteen months, a month is thirty-six thirty-six-hour days. So that should give some idea how big a job it is. In the history of the colony, we’ve only done it twice. And probably never again. We still haven’t used up all the wood from the first felling and most of the second felling is still in the forest. It’s a formidable barrier all by itself. That was the original plan—to make a wall by putting sections of trunk all around the Summerland Station, but the logistics of carving a road and dragging the pieces were impossible. Well, not impossible, but ultimately impractical. It’s another thing that isn’t “cost-effective.” We don’t have the heavy machinery for the job. We’d have to fabricate two or three new fabricators just to print all the pieces we’d need. It’s too ambitious. We had an easier solution.

  An Atlas tree has the right size branches. We can send a crew up top and they can find exactly the size and length desired. We never take more than one or two from any tree. We don’t know how much injury a tree can take, and we can’t risk killing a whole slice of forest. We don’t know what consequences there might be, probably none of them good.

  Two scooters can pull a branch, but even a small branch can be as big as an Earth sequoia. You get enough of them, and you can build a pretty sturdy fence. You put up anchor-towers every thirty or forty meters, you stack your branches like crossbeams with enough space between them for a person to scramble through, but you couldn’t if you wanted to, there are carbon-fiber nets on the fences to keep the smaller creatures out, and you send out scuttlebots to patrol the spaces between, checking for breaks or intrusions. It mostly works. And afterward, you tell yourself it seemed like a good idea at the time. Because anytime we forget, the planet is quick to remind us how the laws of physics work on a Hella scale.

  It’s not just that everything is bigger—it’s that big moves differently than little. It’s not about size, it’s about mass. And if enough mass leans on a fence, you find out the hard way that you’ve got to have lateral shoring too. That’s why the fences now have a triangular cross-section. And maybe this time they’ll hold.

  We still have to work to stop the littler creatures, the mice-like things and the lizard-like things. The scuttlebots help, but every so often we still have to shut everything down for a sterilization. We’re still working on the problem.

  Anyway. We rolled out early.

  First we launched the drones, “the umbrella.” As soon as they were up and confident, the trucks powered up. We exited through a gated tunnel. Like the fence itself, it’s made of giant horizontally spaced logs. The three gates work like a kind of double airlock, so nothing unwanted can get in easily. But it takes time to get through them, because they’re heavy and slow to move. And it takes a while to cycle five trucks through. We didn’t always send this many trucks out a time, but this was a shakedown cruise for the newest one and practice for the seasonal migration when most of us would be moving to Winterland.

  We rolled out past the final gate and down the slope and out toward the plain and the view opened up before me—and for a moment I felt very uncomfortable. I’d never been out here before, only in simulations. In the sims, I know I’m safe, no matter how scary the situation. But here, I suddenly felt naked and unprotected, as if just rolling out the gate would attract a dozen hungries.

  But there’s this thing I do. I go to the noise and it calms me down. It sends a signal back that everything is all right. That wouldn’t be the best response to a dangerous situation, but it’s the best response to irrational fear. That’s what Mom says anyway.

  Captain Skyler was down in the bridge. I was topside in an observation turret, but he must have been monitoring me on his display. He said, “You made it. You are now a candidate for Class 3,” and that made everything all right. Now I could get my seventh.

  Outside the truck, Hella looks empty. The biggest trucks are called Rollagons. The Rollagons have huge honeycomb tires, three times as tall as the tallest man on Hella and more than a man-length wide. During migrations and storms they have chain tracks, and sometimes just because the Captain thinks it’s a good idea. Like always.

  We have two dozen at Summerland and another two dozen at Winterland, they convoy back and forth all year—except during storms. The Rollagons are tall, five or six stories, depending on how they’re outfitted, and big enough that you could play tennis on the lifter deck on top. The bridge was just forward of the lifter deck and there were six turrets spaced around the edges, so everybody on shift always had a good view.

  Tall summer stiffgrass surrounded us on all sides, making visibility across the plain an interesting challenge. It was like an ocean of rippling yellow. Captain Skyler said the stalks were high enough to hide an elephant—he’d seen elephants on Earth, I’d only
seen pictures, but they’re big. Not as big as Hella-critters, but still big. The grass was hardening, getting stiffer every day. If it weren’t for the autumn fires and even our own regular burnoffs, Summerland Station would be lost inside a forest of things like bamboo.

  Ahead, in the distance, scattered clusters of pink-trees waved in the wind. They stuck out of the yellow sea, towering thirty or forty meters high. The pink-trees are very thin, they don’t have any low branches, only high ones with broad leaves of orange and red, sometimes shading all the way to deep purple, sometimes so dark they look black. But their long necks are mostly pink, so that’s why they’re called pink-trees.

  They aren’t really trees. Even though they’re rooted, they’re part animal, and instead of bark they have layers of pale skin, thin as paper, that peel away in long strips in molting season. They all grow from a common root system, so they only occur in thick clusters that we call families, but they’re so very tall, and they have such broad leaves, that we called them trees anyway. Someday we’ll figure out a better term for what they really are. Anyway, they wave gently whether there’s wind or not.

  The very tallest pink-trees in this family had leaves ten or more meters across, stark red with white veins outlining and highlighting them. Maybe they were the daddy-trees, that’s what some people thought, but nobody was sure yet. It was the trees that huddled beneath them that had the darker foliage, all the way from red to purple, maybe those were the mommy-trees. But the very smallest trees at the edges of the cluster sparkled with leaves so pink and pale they were almost white. Right now we think that the colors reveal their separate genders—males and females, but nobody knows yet what the pale colors mean. Maybe those are the children? Nobody is sure. Life on Hella is on a different evolutionary path.