Planet 42 Alpha 

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.  “Two 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 preprogrammed 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 nonearthlike. 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 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