Planet
42
by
Lisa Shapter
“Colony world 12867." I said again, tapping
my fingers on the Shoebill’s piloting console.
“Colony world 12867, this is Magistrate Gestae of the
Pisces 2174, nicknamed the Shoebill, doing a
nav courtesy check." I held my breath, a silence could
mean as little as someone nailing a loose shingle on a
roof or fixing the alignment of a ten meter
communications tower; it could mean everyone was dead
from some local illness.
Someone activated a ship’s intercom pressure
switch, the first noise I heard was his palm hitting
the wall beside the pickup. I tensed with worry, but
the voice was flustered and happy.
“Shoebill, this is Colony world 12867,
Coy’s World. Everyone here is fine .... Our daughter,
uh, our cloned daughter is just in the ship’s medlab
for a routine checkup. Everything’s well and on
schedule here, everyone’s healthy. Do you need any
aid, Shoebill?”
The man’s voice slid from all but shouting
his parthenogenic daughter was self-pregnant with her
second child, which must have been the reason for the
trip to the medlab, to crisp, standard nav courtesies.
I was briefly angry. I could be an Exploratory Corps
secrecy enforcement officer, and that stumble over
“our cloned daughter” when it should be “our clone”
could be enough to make a grunt or a civilian
contractor wonder about the Corps’ secrets. At the
moment those secrets made me angry, but I was not in
this solar system to visit Coy’s World; this was
simply a check to be certain all was well. I was due
an update from base, but according to Corps records I
was the second ship to pass by this world in the eight
years since the planet’s founding.
“Captain Philips?" I asked cooly.
“He’s ...." The speaker turned his head away
from the wall pickup, then I heard the indistinct
voice of another man. “I’ll take this up front." A
transfer tone and several moments of silence as the
pickup in the ship’s forward piloting console came on.
I listened to the man’s boots pounding up the ship’s
central corridor. He ran like a grunt. Then the
clatter of someone hitting the seat and checking the
pickup.
“This is First Lieutenant Vester Coy, team
Geologist of colonial planet #12867. Do you need any
aid, Shoebill – Magistrate Gestae?" The man’s
voice was as sharp as a newly unpacked uniform, and he
probably had my personnel record and the ship’s record
on screen before his sentence was finished.
I wanted to ask about the daughter’s
pregnancy. I could not by farspace law. Lt. Coy’s
‘we’re all well’ would have to cover himself, his
commander, their two parthenogenic children, and their
two parthenogenic grandchildren, who were not yet
school aged.
“I’m fine,” I replied. “The Shoebill
is just passing through 12867's orbit on the way to an
assigned stop at 12862, five orbits in.”
“Your party’s there to meet you,” Lt. Coy
said in almost a neutral voice: he must have read
enough of my record to know this would be an awful
meeting. “2 is a Venus-like, Magistrate, and 3 through
6 would be moons if they didn’t have their own orbits.
They probably started out as moons. Fly carefully.”
###
The ship found her way steadily through weak
but complex gravities, avoiding several small bodies
whose trajectories might or might not have earned them
classification as natural impact debris, meteoroids,
or asteroids. All I cared about was damage to the Shoebill’s
hull, and she got through clean.
I set down on planet #12862, a Venus-like,
confirmed that I would suffocate before I roasted in
the outer atmosphere, double-checked my ‘suit, and
stepped through the fields, which separated ship’s air
from atmosphere. I spent a moment adjusting the
‘suit’s controls so a scroll of chemistry data stopped
passing over the lower-left faceplate of my helmet. I
told the ‘suit to tell me if it began to corrode or
otherwise became compromised. I looked up to see one
‘suited figure at the base of my ship’s landing ramp.
It should be four by personnel records.
“This is a colony world?” I asked. Visibility
was a variable 1-2 meters; through the fog the
landscape was made up of the sort of blobby formations
one sees in a wet cave.
“This is a colony world.” A man’s voice
replied over my suit’s intercom. The Exploratory Corps
gave up on terraforming years ago: the success rate
was low. The cost of shipping barges of equipment and
large teams of specialists was, well astronomical,
even for earth’s last military and only space agency.
“And you’re trying to... what?” I asked,
perhaps there were edible life forms to domesticate,
but no earth crops would grow here outside of
artificial, greenhouse conditions.
“Found a colony.” The man said with a sigh.
“The expense isn’t much greater on a marginal world
than on a habitable one. The resource profile makes it
worth it. Or it will to our great-great
grandchildren.” I guessed something from the way he
said ‘our’ but waited. He put out his hand. “Captain
Marbeck Quétif, I owe all the children I bore on this
world to you, Magistrate Gestae.”
I stepped on to ground; a soft ground, which
made the ‘suit flash a warning across my faceplate
about watching my footing. I was close enough to see
the other man -- or woman’s -- face; hormonal changes
don’t alter bone structure, not in a grown person’s.
No way of telling if this was the world’s mother or
one of my perpetrators.
She smiled at my suspicious look.
“I should have put red stripes on this ‘suit.
We use them so often, interchangeably that it makes no
sense to mark one ‘Mission Commander’. I passed all my
tests after the year of changes on base, Magistrate
Gestae; but once I got out here, I couldn’t conceive
from any man’s sample in our ship’s library. As the
donor mother of our three children I owe you thanks.”
A tone, dryly bitter, in her tenor voice. I knew she
would not say more over a pickup, which both of our
ships were recording.
I had spoken to many women who could not
conceive planetside for a hundred local reasons: the
procedure is experimental, and every 28 days there is
a chance for something new to go wrong. No way to tell
what some new world will do to a mother’s (or a
father’s) health. A clean ship’s medical lab isn’t the
same as a sterile hospital room with techs and
specialists. According to her ship’s records this
woman had reported to the ship’s lab once a month
throughout the required window, taken every precaution
with herself and the library of samples, and had never
gotten pregnant. Talking to her now, I was certain she
had forged something: a dab of sealant on the end of
the medical probe, soaking one’s hands in hot water
after backing the external constructed womb away and
holding the fertilizing probe between two palms so the
DNA and temperature readings check out. I have heard
of all kinds of ways to fool a ship’s rudimentary
medical computer into recording an attempt at
conception when none is possible. Her teammates’
desperation to sustain this mission and their colony
had made them commit crimes against me. They had kept
her in a place she did not like raising the children
of men she had not wanted to be fathers.
“I’m sorry.” I said.
“I’m supposed to say that to you, Magistrate
Gestae.” Her voice took on the tone of shrugged
shoulders. “It’s not so bad.”
I made the normal, polite enquiries after her
team and their children’s health.
###
I
walked through their greenhouses, their algae
outcrops, and ‘aquaculture’ facilities (empty except
for a native edible fish-analogue).
Then the first of my perpetrators, Second
Lieutenant Gérin Nunquam sat across from me in the
mess hall, took off his ‘suit helmet, and stared at
me. He had seen my face before. (He snapped his
fingers in front of my drugged face, but I never saw
him.) He seemed shocked, that I existed, or that I was
not mute and paralyzed, or that I had returned. He
stared at me. He put his face in his hands. I was not
sure I could count that as an apology. He left the
room.
Second Lieutenant Troxell Siddals took his
place. He was one of those who cannot bear what he has
done, so he blamed me: shackled flat on my back and
helpless I had somehow made him do this. Commander
Quétif sent him out before he got through the first
sentence. She followed him and spoke to him, but he
did not return.
I met our children, they were certainly mine.
Commander Quétif and I talked about the shared custody
the law requires. Putting it into practice without
Siddals’ and Nunquam’s consents made the legal
requirement theoretical. Her men had lied to her about
where they went and what they had done on my pimp’s
ship. Yet the Commander knew perfectly well her
pseudoeggs had not produced these three embryos in
their three medical storage cubes. She had always told
her children she had carried and nursed them; but when
another Magistrate had arrived to investigate the
charges, they did understand that the eggs that grew
inside Mommy had been stolen. (They were too young to
know exactly how.)
I learned of a third perpetrator, the team’s
Biologist. Their ship’s medical records gave me no
reason to label his death ‘suspicious’. His final
months of illness and the scar his loss left on this
team and their small children would be too difficult
to fake. I scanned so little terran organic matter
here that he had been, well what they did with the
dead in that novel about Mars (and on some actual
terraformed worlds). He was mulched. He had been
broken down into organic compounds first so nothing to
run a forensic scan on.
I took off my ‘suit, stowed it in the mess
hall’s doorside locker, and sat down in thermals and
booties across from Commander Quétif. She picked up
her helmet and said something into it; some
pre-programmed command to shut off recording. I
preferred to put my helmet out of pickup range. It is
too easy for base to program a ship’s computer to
ignore certain orders in the field, even from a
mission commander.
“Do you think we murdered our Biologist?” She
said with a quirky smile. “He was happy here.
Climatologist Nunquam is thrilled to be posted to a
non-earthlike. Astronomer Siddals can study the
formation of this solar system and the history of this
nav region until the sun goes nova. As a Forestry
Scientist I have to magnify algae and pretend they’re
very simple trees with no leaves or bark.” She turned
her head, and the shoulders of her suit moved a
little, a gesture, which even years ‘suited had not
broken.
“I can get you out of here,” I said.
She looked at me, studying my face.
“Why?” She began to smile a little, “am I
that handsome? What on earth could you want me for?”
“I need staff to help raise my children. You
could bring ....”
“I’d rather not bring anything,” she said
softly. She stood, went and picked up her helmet, then
stood at attention before me. “Magistrate, I have no
kit, but I will serve the Pisces #2174, the Shoebill,
faithfully.”
“As a Magistrate I can’t be your CO. We’re
outside the normal Command structure.” I said, “but I
can send some paperwork to base ahead of us, request
transfer to my world, put some urgent legal reasons
behind it.”
She followed me without hesitation, making no
sign of pausing for any possessions, taking any of the
children, or saying goodbye to anyone on this world.
She helped me into my ‘suit. I checked it as she put
on and tested her helmet, and I followed my ‘suit’s
directions on how to get back to the Shoebill
without tripping or getting mired in soft ground.
“How long have you been here?”
“Seven years,” she said. It had the tone of a
gently ironic ‘seven happy years’.
“Thank you for walking me to my ship. Usually
it’s only a courtesy, but in this environment you
could almost lose a 20-man ship.”
“I have on bad days. As I said, Climatologist
Nunquam is very happy with his assignment here.”
“What are you currently working on?”
“Oh, just maintenance really. We’ve got five
types of algae growing in what I suppose you could
call ‘agricultural conditions’. It’s more finding wild
colonies and tending and expanding them. As with any
alien species there’s a lot of trial and error and few
of the kinds of problems -- and little of the kind of
work -- I hoped to be doing here. We scanned some
tree-analogues in the other hemisphere. I go to study
them when I can, but they’re on a long cycle that
wasn’t dormant when the first scouts were here. Now I
just go check on equipment, watch readings from my
desk, and hope someone in 200 years will find all of
this interesting or helpful when they do come into
flower. They aren’t flowers, actually....” She
stopped, “it doesn’t matter, now.”
“No, it doesn’t.” I said quietly.
We got to the ship, I went onboard to run the
internal checklist while the Commander went to do the
external inspection; making sure none of the landing
legs were mired and that nothing had damaged the ship
in my absence.
“No sign of tampering,” she said, her helmet
pickup routed to the ship’s internal intercom. Her
voice sounded lackadaisical but tense.
“Commander
Quétif?”
I could not tell if I was listening to an
open pickup of anxious breathing or local interference
this close to the planet’s sun. I waited a moment and
had the ship check: the Shoebill reported no
one within the liftoff blast radius. I put my ‘suit
back on and went outside with a pistol. I made a long
careful scan of the fog by instruments and my own
senses, but I saw no one. Returning to the ship’s
temperate environment, the back of my thermal shirt
clung damp and cold against my back. At my demands
that I would not leave without an assurance of the
Commander’s welfare, a ‘suited figure came out of a
distant workbuilding and waved, saying nothing. I
began to pick my way across the terrain but I got
knocked on my back by pistol fire: a hand weapon could
not defeat the ‘suit’s fields with one shot. A lucky
shot or repeated hits might. I rolled and crawled,
hoping the muck and fog would camouflage the suit’s
reflective outer skin. I stayed low to present less of
a target. Basic training took over fear. I kept moving
and looking, keeping to fog and cover as best I could.
I got to the base of the landing ramp. I made the best
check I could of whether I was being followed or
targeted. Visibility had dropped to .5-1 meter. I ran
up the landing ramp, got into the safety of the ship’s
fields, and felt its automated systems doing the best
they could with the chemical mud on my ‘suit. I
stuffed the thing into processing as soon as I had
clearance two steps into the corridor.
I made preparations for a quick spacerise,
made sure no one was near the ship, did not go through
nav courtesies. I checked one last time that no one
had come out to fly away with me; then I left the
piloting console once autopilot pulled out of orbit to
to sit down in my office and charge Commander Quétif’s
teammates with attempted murder, unlawful detention,
and every applicable crime I could think of.
As I drew up probable causes, I knew I could
not be sure she was dead; but she had not simply
fainted during the outside check. The Shoebill
could not pick up her ‘suit beacon. If she had changed
her mind about leaving she would have said something.
I hoped her teammates had only knocked her out; but
the silence and utter lack of signs of a soldier in
distress made me believe she was dead.
Five
hundred
clicks past the planet’s gravity
well
something
thudded into my ship knocking the stylus out of my
hand: one isn’t supposed to feel anything in open
space. I began to go aft, it seemed to be where the
impact was. Perhaps Quétif had lived and had somehow
gotten into a scout craft and followed me up. If she
had to keep transmission silence, then a tap on my
hull would be the only way to tell me I ought to let
her dock in the craft bay. It was an awfully hard tap.
I felt the ship yaw before the inertial dampeners
caught up with the motion.
Another blow: the ship was doing her
automated best in the system’s asteroid belt. I had
not taken the time to ask her to route a safe path
back out, and everything had, of course, moved since
the path that took us in was wide open. I should have
been up front at the piloting console; although it was
not impossible that one of Commander Quétif’s
teammates had sabotaged this ship during the tour or
after our talk.
The floor flew away from my feet. I hit the
corridor’s ceiling dazingly hard. I was not really
worried as the ship’s floor came back at me at some
uncontrolled speed. Automated metal arms would pull me
into the medical lab and mend any injuries I received.
As soon as I got into communications range Coy and
Philips on the farther inhabited world in this system
would do a nav check.
If the Shoebill
reported damage and I did not reply, they would be out
here as fast as they could light their own craft. If
they somehow neglected this duty, the Shoebill
would pilot herself to base while the ship’s medical
computer kept me unconscious and stable. If I did not
die on impact and if the ship kept hull integrity, I’d
be fine; but the floor sure would hurt.
END