Hella Read online

  Past the pink-trees, we splashed across Little Stream and a little while after that Little Big Stream. We gave a wide berth to Deadly Hollow—long before the First Hundred landed, it had been a deep crater from a meteor strike, but now it was just a wide hole that filled up with water every rainy season and then turned into a dangerous mudhole when it dried out in the long summer.

  Down inside, Deadly Hollow had a whole other ecosystem, shifting with the seasons. Raingrass, springblooms, mud-ivy, drygrass, and eventually autumn spracklies. Some of the scientists believed that these were different expressions of the same species, or maybe several symbiotic ones. Like I said, nobody knows. We just don’t have enough people yet to study everything. There’s just too much here.

  A few klicks further and the savannah stretched away in a long slope down and then a longer slope up toward a horizon so far away that it doesn’t make visual sense. Even the electronic range finders sometimes get confused. The land is an endless plain of yellow and pink. Even the slightest whisper of wind sends ripples of color shimmering across the land.

  This far out on the plain, the clusters of trees and tree-things occur less frequently because this is a major part of the migration path. Either the tree-things don’t want to be trampled or the ones that grew here all got eaten. We’re not sure yet. Instead, the summer stiffgrass gets higher and thicker on the plain, maybe because it gets better fertilization from the way the herds stir up the earth, leaving a swampy wake of dung and urine behind them, so the grass gets thick enough to be a real problem for even the biggest vehicles. But we would have traveled slowly anyway.

  Sometimes the ground is deceptive and a truck can sink halfway into soft dirt. So we go slow and test everything ahead. The lead vehicle always has a huge water-filled roller in front, flattening a path through the sea of yellow so the trucks behind can follow. Sometimes all the trucks have rollers and sometimes all the trucks are linked by strong chains in case one of them has to be pulled out of a hole or up a hill. Some people say this is an unnecessary precaution, that we’ve never had a single truck get stuck, but Captain Skyler just says, “Let’s keep it that way.” We can’t afford to lose a Rollagon. Especially not this close to migration.

  The bridge of the truck sticks out forward. It has a slanted window, so the bridge crew can look straight down at the ground in front of the vehicle. The bridge is wide enough to seat twenty people across, although usually there’s only four in front. Just behind, there’s a galley, sleeping bays, life-support services, and a complete communications deck. On each side of the Rollagon is a six-person airlock opening out to a big platform where all kinds of different equipment can be anchored, construction equipment, cranes, even heavy gauge weapons. The official designation is HellaCruiser and you can carry as many as sixty people on journey, if you have to. If they’re friendly, you can carry even more. If you replace half the cargo bays with living quarters, like we do with migrations, you can carry a few hundred. And it’s possible to triple or quadruple stack additional life support modules in case of emergency evacuation.

  Just above the bridge are two lookout turrets with 360-degree coverage. The turrets can focus all kinds of sensors, but they also control industrial lasers, plasma beams, flamethrowers, railguns, and missile launchers, enough weaponry to fight a small war. Because that’s how bad some of the predators can be. It doesn’t happen very often, but after the first time, the First Hundred decided there wouldn’t be a second time.

  I rode in the port side turret, just above and behind Captain Skyler. It was a great view, more than six stories up—high enough that I could see distant furrows in the grass where previous vehicles had cut wide swaths and the grass still hadn’t recovered. At least, I hoped those channels had been made by Rollagons. The grass recovers fast, so most lines begin to disappear within a few days, and these looked fairly recent. Whatever had cut those paths, I still wouldn’t want to be down in that grass alone. Even a startled hopper can be dangerous. I would rather be up here, where it’s safer.

  The cabin is pressurized and filtered and temp-controlled, so I didn’t need to wear my helmet or rebreather, and my suit could keep itself plugged in and charged and monitored. The displays in front of me echoed all the ones on the bridge, so I could see everything that Captain Skyler saw. In an emergency one person could control the entire vehicle from any turret. I was just thinking about that when Captain Skyler called up, “Yo, newboy? You want to drive?”

  “Sir?”

  “You want to drive?”

  “Uh. Yes, sir.”

  “Take the controls then.”

  “Taking control.” My display flashed green, and I reviewed all the controls in order: speed, terrain, location, orientation, path, and environment both internal and external. We were already on autopilot, so there really wasn’t anything for me to do except watch the displays. They were all green. Confidence was high.

  The lead truck would automatically locate and steer around any hidden obstacles. All we had to do was follow. Still, I was now responsible for the vehicle and if I felt bold enough, I could even have gone off autopilot and steered myself. I didn’t feel that bold.

  I could see my reflection in one of the screens in front of me. I was smiling, something I don’t do very often. Jamie would have noticed though. I noticed it from the inside too. Not just a smile, a big grin. If the folks at home could see me now—then I realized that they could, they would be watching on the mission monitors and the mission simulators. Marley must be steaming. Not that it mattered what she thought. In addition to the Certification, this qualified me for the next grade of Field Service.

  After a bit, I realized that Captain Skyler had done this on purpose. He was making a point. Not just to me, but to other people as well. Maybe Mom would explain when we got back. Otherwise, I’d have to listen to Jubilee’s version.

  The first half hour, there wasn’t much for me to do except stare at the monitors and the billowing grass, so Captain Skyler ran readiness checks and drills. It didn’t matter that the ground crew had already certified the cruisers. Every good commander does his own system checks. And sometimes drills.

  I suppose that all the continual maintenance and checking looks boring to anyone watching from behind the fence—at least, until you realize how important it is to have everything green-boarded at the highest confidence. Maybe in the story videos, adventure is always kicking in the front door, but in the real world you do everything you can to keep that door locked. Adventures don’t always have happy endings. Jamie says that if people don’t get hurt or die, it isn’t an adventure.

  When we reached Big Nothing, Captain Skyler passed control to Sergeant Jackle and acknowledged me with a simple, “Well done. You didn’t drive us into a ditch.” That was a weird kind of compliment. I never had personal control of the vehicle, but I guess knowing when to keep your hands to yourself is just as important as knowing when to get hands-on, so I took it as the right kind of compliment.

  After another hour, the Captain put me on galley duty, and I made sandwiches and coffee for everyone. Mango slices and lettuce on sweetbread. Greenradish mustard on the side in case anyone wanted extra tang. Fizzy limonade to drink. There were no complaints from anyone. It was the same menu we’d have had at Summerland Station. Breakfast at the caf is usually fruit and cereal. Lunch is salad and noodles and assorted cooked veggies, and almost always a lot of rice and beans. Dinner is the heavy protein, tank-grown meat, potatoes, more rice and beans, and always more veggies. Sometimes lunch and dinner are swapped, depending on the work load and the energy and diet requirements. Variety is still limited. We’re not up to what Mom calls Luna Standard menu, but nobody’s starving. We’re installing new tanks this year, so we’re close to getting there. If we don’t have another Big Break-In. It’s all about work and patience and service. That’s what Mom says. She says it almost every day. I think she says it to remind herself more than remind any
one else.

  Some people don’t like having to do service chores. They think it’s demeaning to wait on other people, but I like it. I’m not good at talking to people, so service gives me something to do. I’m a good listener, even when people think I’m not listening or when they think I don’t understand, so I know stuff, a lot of stuff, sometimes a lot more than I’m supposed to know. I know what a lot of people think about a lot of other people, and sometimes that can be really useful. That is, if I can figure it out. Sometimes it takes a while, a week, a month, or maybe even a year. And some stuff never makes sense. Not to me, anyway. Not even with the noise.

  The noise is good for a lot of things, but there are some things it can’t do.

  * * *

  —

  The scenery changes fast on Hella. And there are a lot of things that require hands-on and eyes-on. We could send bots outside the fences, but we can’t replace them as fast as we would lose them, so we have to keep our maps up-to-date.

  There’s this general feeling in the Hella Colony that we’ll never conquer the planet if we hide behind the fences of Summerland Station. So we have to go out ourselves, smell the air and taste the world. We have to feel the dirt between our fingers. If we are ever going to make this planet ours, we have to give up our fear of it and get into a genuinely courageous relationship. That’s what Captain Skyler says.

  But that doesn’t mean we have to be foolish about it. Captain Skyler doesn’t take chances. After the Big Break-In, he set up a lot of very strict security procedures that everyone has to follow. While most of the records of his missions are publicly available, some are not. The reasons vary. Mom says it’s because there’s a lot of stuff that would be embarrassing or painful to others. So those files are locked for twenty years or more. You have to have special clearance to view them, and you have to promise not to tell what you’ve seen. Mom has had access to some of the stuff about the Big Break-In, because that’s when my dad was killed. But she won’t talk about it. Not to me anyway.

  After lunch, Captain Skyler put me on weather watch. We had a mild storm front moving in from high in the northeast, but it was still a week away. If it got here at all. Probably not. It was too early for tornadoes anyway. But just the same, Hella could be unpredictable. Hellacious has a whole other meaning here.

  We arrived at First Marker at 1430. We were now officially on the savannah. We paused for twenty minutes to calibrate, upload, download, synchronize, and all the other stuff you do at First Marker. It’s also the first bathroom break. Not that you have to wait if you really have to go, it’s just that there are procedures and rules about keeping every position crewed and green, so it’s one more thing we have to manage. Timing. It’s about timing.

  There’s also an experimental plot at First Marker. A few years ago, they cleared a couple of acres, burned it free of local life, then seeded it with various Terran species. Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, rye, barley, grapes, and even a few citrus trees. There are a dozen cameras and a couple of little-bots watching the plot, but from time to time, Ag Lab asks a team to bring back samples for testing. And tasting—after irradiation, of course. Mostly the Earth plants behave in the wild the same way they do in the greenhouses. They get taller. Outside though, the leaves get a lot bigger and so do the roots and fruits. Sometimes the leaves change color and even get narrower because the sunlight is so bright.

  Jamie says the different spectrum of the primary has a weird effect on plants grown outside. The plants get different colors of light than they do in the greenhouses. And there are mutations too. We can’t really keep up with all the raw data we’re collecting. We just gather the information and send it back to Earth with every return voyage of the Cascade. Supposedly, they turn it over to the data-diddlers crowd-crunching, which is like crowd-sourcing only more so.

  Everybody knows about the test plot, but it’s one thing to see it on a big 3D wall and it’s a whole other thing to see it in real life. So when Captain Skyler told me to suit up and grab a collecting kit, I got excited. Outside! I jammed on my helmet and scrambled for the airlock. But when I slid down the ladder, I saw he wasn’t wearing his helmet.

  “Do you have all your vaccinations?”

  “You know I do.”

  He thumped the top of my head and said, “Well, then take off the brain bucket. You need to smell this with your own nose.”

  Take off the helmet—?

  He saw me hesitate. We weren’t supposed to do that out here, were we?

  “It’s okay, Kyle. It’s only air. You breathe it all the time. It’s the same air we have at home.”

  I wasn’t sure about that, but I trust Captain Skyler. So I unclipped the safety strap and lifted it slowly off my head—

  The day was bright. Too bright. And hot! I blinked in the harsh sunlight, it seemed to give everything a sharp blue edge. It made my eyes water. “Ouch!”

  “Yes. That’s one reaction. When you’re ready, open your eyes again. Take a deep breath. Tell me what you smell.”

  I sniffed. A little at first. Then a little more. “I’m not sure,” I said. I inhaled again. “Something sweet. Is that the grass? Something else too.” I looked up at him. “Does blue have a smell?”

  “That’s what air smells like when it doesn’t come from a can. That’s air so fresh it’s never been breathed before. Not by anyone from Earth.”

  I started to take another deep breath, but he stopped me. “Uh-uh. You know better than that. You’ll get dizzy. Slow shallow breaths. Remember? Or put on your rebreather.”

  I didn’t want to, but it was probably safer. If I put on the rebreather I wouldn’t have to worry about my oxygen levels, so this was probably another test to see if I would be reckless or careful.

  Captain Skyler pointed me toward a row of tomato vines. “See how the leaves have frayed edges? Something’s been chewing on them, tasting to see if they’re any good. Collect a few leaves for the lab. But more important, look for droppings. They might look like little black raisins. Or even big black raisins. Anything you’re not sure of, photograph and bag it. Oh, and grab a couple of the tomatoes too.”

  “They’re not ripe yet—”

  “Not for eating. For the lab.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I went down the row, taking care where I stepped, photographing everything. Maybe if I found some interesting new species, they’d name it after me. There is no shortage of undiscovered plants and animals on Hella, so I collected samples of everything that looked unusual, which was pretty much everything.

  After twenty minutes, Captain Skyler called me back. Despite the air conditioning in Jamie’s suit—my suit now—I still felt sweaty.

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  I held up a box of collection vials. “Lotsa raisins.”

  He peered close. “Yeah, that looks like the same little munchers. Nothing new. But the lab will be interested to see if they’re digesting Terran cellulose any better. This many generations in, we should start seeing some adaptation. Good job.” He touched his com-set. “Everybody up. We roll in five.”

  Back in the trucks, we headed as straight across the plain as the terrain would allow. The grass was taller here and a lot stiffer. It crunched beneath the tires of the trucks. Here and there, we crossed furrows cut by things that were not Rollagons. We didn’t see any animals. Not during the heat of the day. They’d be seeking their own shelter.

  But Captain Skyler had us all watching out anyway, not just the scanner displays, but the eyeball view as well. Plus we had an umbrella of six drones, three orbiting close and three more circling at a distance. We stopped every ten or fifteen minutes to look and listen and sniff. Sometimes we got out of the truck to gather samples of dirt and grass. A few times we sank monitors into the ground. And whenever we crossed a furrow cut through the grass, two or three of us would get out and follow it in one direction and two o
r three would follow it in the other, all of us looking for footprints and droppings. This time we wore our helmets. I was “the mouse.”

  Let me explain that.

  Everyone else wore battle helmets, which have integrated weapon displays. I did not. I wore a special helmet with two big parabolic receivers, mounted at ten and two o’clock positions. It also had a conical snout for sniffing the air. And it had two saucer-sized lenses for the primary eyes. The whole thing looked like a famous Earth mouse, so that was why they called whoever wore the helmet “the mouse.”

  But it’s very practical.

  The big eyes record everything in ultra-high resolution stereoscopy, other cameras spaced around the helmet pick up a 360-degree view, enough for a complete holographic recreation for mission control. They almost always watch in real time, sometimes in VR sets. The battle helmets do the same, but they don’t have all the scientific sensors.

  The interior display of the mouse compresses the spectrum so that the wearer sees a wider representation of frequencies—all the way from the darkest ultraviolet to the deepest infrared. The parabolic dishes are ultra-sensitive ears. They scan for all kinds of auditory signals, and they compress that spectrum as well. So the wearer can hear the ultra-high frequency shrieks of bat-things as well as the very low frequency subsonic rumbles produced by the saurs. It’s possible to hear their footsteps from as far away as ten or fifteen kilometers, depending on the local geology. If you wait until you can feel the ground shaking, it’s probably too late.

  The conical rebreather on the front of the helmet adds enough carbon dioxide to every breath so that the wearer doesn’t accidentally go hyper-toxic from too much oxygen, but more important it also sniffs the air for all kinds of particles—it’s an electronic super-nose. The helmet integrates all this information and superimposes the augmented data onto the display. It even includes a visual representation of all the various smells and odors and scents it can recognize. It shows us which way the scents are blowing and that helps us know from which direction any carnivores are most likely to approach.