Colonization (7 page)

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Nonsense. You’ve had too much going on, that’s all. We all have, and it makes us see crazy things.” He dismissed my apology as though he wanted the incident behind us as soon as possible, so I let my doubts go and followed him to our family unit on Deck Fourteen in silence.

As we entered the privacy of the elevator, he spoke in a hushed tone. “Listen, I know you saw your mom slip that laser knife in her pocket, but we’re all safe here on Paradise 21. Scout satellites have explored the environment for years. Besides, after we brought you back to the ship, Grandpapa had teams comb the jungle around the shore. They looked for miles into the dense growth and found nothing.”

Grandpapa involved several teams? Now I really
was
embarrassed. All of those people wasted their time because of me.

Dad must have seen my horrific expression. The elevator beeped and he pressed the door jam button, buying us time. “You have a lot to digest with the life assignments and the landing. You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

“Sure, Dad.” I squirmed under his attention. “But I don’t need to talk. I’m fine.”

The portal finally dematerialized and I took off into the hall. He wouldn’t understand my situation. He loved Mom, and they were perfectly paired. Sometimes the stupid computers got it right.

Just as I assumed the day couldn’t get worse, I turned the corner and Corvus sat in the hall next to my family’s unit. He rose instantly, straightening his uniform across his large chest.

“Andromeda.”

“Corvus.”

Dad mumbled, fumbling with the panel to open the portal. “I’ll let you guys talk, okay? Andromeda, I’ll be in here if you need me. Dinner’s in an hour.”

I pleaded with my eyes. “Don’t you need me to help?”

His eyes moved to Corvus, then back to me. “Mom’s got it covered. You two have some catching up to do.”

We were destined to be married, after all.

Corvus bowed as Dad entered our family unit. “Nice to see you, sir.”

“You too, Corvus.” With a swish of air the portal re-materialized, and Dad was gone.

This time I didn’t think about being polite. I waltzed right up to Corvus and pointed my finger in the air. “What are you doing waiting outside my family unit?”
Just a little
stalker-ish.

Corvus shifted from one foot to another. I could tell he was nervous. “They wouldn’t let me come into your medical cell since we’re not, you know, not yet…”

My courage balled up inside me. “When did you find out?”

“Find out you were taken to the medical bay?”

“No.” I wanted to roll my eyes. “Find out about us.”

“Oh.” His face turned as red as a dying sun. I wondered if he’d shrivel up and walk away, but he stood his ground and looked me straight in the eye. “The day the assignments were made. The message popped up on my computer, and I read it right away.”

“Why didn’t you say something to me when you saw me in the hallway?”

“I planned to, but when I caught you, you were in a hurry. Besides, I didn’t know what to say.”

I stood there gawking at him.

“I came today to see if you were all right. When I heard that something attacked you in the forest and you were taken to the medical bay, I wanted to come see you right away. I knew they wouldn’t let me in, not being a family member…yet.”

It would have been sweet had it not been Corvus. My tone softened a bit. “I wasn’t attacked. I thought I saw something.” I looked away, slightly embarrassed even though I really didn’t care what he thought of me.

“Oh.”

Corvus didn’t press me. I guess he assumed it wasn’t his place. Yet.

Instead, he started to ramble on about his experience. “There’s some pretty weird stuff out there. I saw a few crazy things too.” He took a hesitant step toward me and whispered, “After I moved all of that equipment, I went into the jungle in the place where you disappeared.”

I leaned forward. Maybe he’d seen the same thing. “And?”

“This vine wrapped itself around my leg. It just shot up from the ground and began winding. I took out my wire cutter and slashed it, but a part of it still clung to my leg. I had to pry it off.”

“Wow.” Although it wasn’t as traumatizing as meeting an alien, I was surprised he’d shared his experience with me. I looked down at his leg. His uniform was torn, a big gouge taken out of it. “Are you okay?”

“Oh yeah, I’m fine. I was worried about you.”

Although his eyes were a cold blue, his tone convinced me he felt something. A moment of weakness broke my composure. My encounter in the forest had built up inside me like an infection, and I had to tell someone. Maybe it would stop the image of the alien face from flashing in my mind.

“I thought I saw an alien, a humanoid.” There, I’d said it out loud. I thought I’d be horrified that he knew, but instead it filled me with relief.

Corvus’s eyes widened. “Really?”

I shrugged. “It was probably some hallucination from all the pollen, or from the stress of the landing and all this…change.” I thought it wise
not
to mention seeing Sirius and Nova together.

“What if you did see something?”

“I don’t know. Everyone I’ve talked to says I’m stressed. They think it was a hallucination.”

“Listen, whatever it was you saw out there, I believe you. They want us to think they have everything under control; their super-successful satellites recorded everything there was to find on this planet before we even chose it to colonize. But what if they’re wrong? What if there’s something out there they missed?”

Corvus’s words surprised me. I’d always thought he was Mr. Follow-the-Rules, the ideal military recruit, always obeying orders and performing his job with no questions asked. I didn’t know he questioned stuff about Paradise 21. I stood there like a wall hanging, not knowing what to say.

“Just be careful when you go out there and work on the crops with your mom, okay?”

I scratched the back of my neck, uncomfortable. If there were intelligent aliens living on Paradise 21 able to glide above the turf and fly, then none of us stood a chance. “I’ll try.”

Corvus leaned forward and my body tensed. Was he bending down to kiss me?

To my great relief, he reached in his pocket and brought out his wire cutter. “I want you to have this.”

I took it, my hand brushing his. His thumb rubbed the back of my hand before I pulled away. Somehow, in the heat of the moment, I found his touch comforting. I ran my fingers over his initials engraved in the hilt. “This is yours. I can’t. You’ll need it for—”

“I have another one. Go on. It’ll keep you safe.”

I couldn’t give it back, so I stuffed it into my shirt pocket. I was more likely to cut myself with it than harm any space aliens, but the weight pressing against my chest reassured me. “Thank you.”

“Thank
you
for talking to me, Andromeda.” It was almost as if he were saying
thank you for giving me a chance
. I wasn’t sure I’d given him anything but false hope, but his gesture was sweet. I should give him something in return.

“Annie.” I thought his nose didn’t seem quite as big as I remembered. It was still nothing compared to Sirius’s gorgeous face. “Call me Annie.”

Corvus bowed his head like a knight from medieval Old Earth. “Whatever you like.”

***

The next day I took Corvus’s advice. As the first expedition teams left the
New Dawn
, Mom and I scouted the best place for the new greenhouses. She brought the laser knife and I brought along Corvus’s wire cutter. We picked our way through the jungle, looking for a clearing, but the black crystal shoreline was the only place the vegetation refused to grow.

The vines rose over a ridge on the far left. At least it was different from the flatlands of the turf.

“What about over there?”

Mom checked her digital topograph. “It’s a deep valley, formed by a crystal gorge.”

I sighed, feeling boxed in by jungle on all sides. “Then where are we going to build our gardening facility?”

I wanted to suggest we go back and live on the
New Dawn
, but Mom wouldn’t hear of it. Our mission was colonization, not vacationing. As much as I denied it, we were here to stay.

“I’ll have to order a section of jungle cut down by a bio team.” Mom charted the terrain with the topograph. “The jungle goes on for miles in every direction.”

I peered up past the canopy of vines. Although it was early in the morning, the entire sky simmered into a faded purple, the same color as my nightshirt after it went through the cleaning cycle thirty times. Because of the clouds of cosmic dust surrounding Paradise 21, the sky would never be blue, and the sun never gold. The teachers had explained in science class how this particular sun was larger and stronger than Old Earth’s, so we were lucky to have the extra protection. Still, I would have liked to have seen a gold sun in a blue sky.

As I followed Mom deeper into the jungle, I wondered about the other paradise planets. What was Paradise 20 like? Or Paradise 19? Maybe the
New Dawn
was stuck with the worst one. I stepped on a dead flower and it crunched under my feet, making me squirm.

“Why were we the ones given Paradise 21? Why couldn’t we get a normal planet like Old Earth?”

“Honey, you know there’s never going to be another Earth. Each paradise planet has its own advantages and disadvantages. We were lucky enough to get a planet with a perfect atmosphere and no humanoid indigenous species or other threatening predators. The colonists traveling to Paradise 6 will have to deal with two years of darkness for every five years of light, and Paradise 12 is a low-oxygen environment so the colonists there have to wear space suits until their machines terraform the atmosphere. Compared to them, a purple sky and giant flowers don’t seem so bad.”

I laughed, surprising myself. “I guess you’re right.”

“Come on, you need to help me find this plant.” She showed me a picture of a white flower on top of spindly sticks. “Its root system is supposedly connected to onion-like bulbs that might be edible. Let’s take a few back to the
New Dawn
to study.”

New species integration was, after all, my job assignment, and Mom had me get right to it. I pushed my way through a thicket where the vines used each other to clump together, forming pillars reaching up to the canopy. My legs ached and I thought of the alien, but I wanted to succeed at my new life assignment so I forced myself on.

An hour later, I stumbled upon speckles of white beneath a crystal outcropping. I lunged, my knees sinking in the turf, and plucked a small white flower. It had six round petals and a sprinkling of yellow in the center. This had to be it.

“Mom!” I reached down at the root system to yank it up. “I found it!”

Her boots crunched through the turf as she caught up with me. She broke through a veil of vines and stared, openmouthed. The tone of her voice was far from proud. “Andromeda, don’t move.”

“But I—”

I froze in mid-pull, stringy roots refusing to let go. She pulled out her communicator and typed a distress call.

“What is it?”

She cringed as though she couldn’t decide if it would be worse to tell me or leave me hanging. Finally she pointed up above my head.

I craned my head with the slightest movement. A grove of violet flowers as large as Landrovers were rooted on the crystal above. White tentacles drooped over my head like tongues, waiting to yank me in.

“Trillium Bisonate,” Mom croaked. “They’re provoked by movement. Don’t run.”

My whole body began to shake, and I remembered Corvus’s wire cutter in my pocket. If one of them pulled me into its stomach, would I be able to cut my way out?

Her communicator beeped and she flicked her eyes down. “A bio team is on their way. Just stay put.”

I held my breath until I feared my lungs would burst and then exhaled slowly, trying not to rustle the vines surrounding me. A white tentacle moved aimlessly, reminding me of an arm twitching while someone slept. It dangled a foot above my head, and I contemplated how much movement it would take to reach in my pocket and slash it with the wire cutter.

Mom’s face curled up in agony as she watched, helpless. “I shouldn’t have let you go out so far on your own.”

“Mom, I’m seventeen, not nine,” I whispered in a hiss. “It’s my fault. I wasn’t watching the sky.”

She bent down and grabbed a sharp shard of crystal, and I widened my eyes in warning. “Don’t do it, Mom. Don’t come over here.”

“If it moves, I’ll throw this to the left and you run to the right, okay?”

“Sure.” My voice didn’t sound so certain. Above me, the tentacles moved listlessly in the breeze. There were tiny suction cups on the tips, and I shuddered at the thought of the membranes sticking to my skin. A drop of nectar fell on my shoulder and a tiny insect landed next to it. The multi-legged bug crawled toward the drop and extended a long black tongue, sucking up the nectar.

I clenched my teeth and resisted the urge to swipe it away. Goose bumps prickled the back of my neck, and I thought this moment would last forever: Mom gawking, me crouching, and the insect feasting.

Stray wisps of my hair blew in the breeze, coming dangerously close to the end of a tentacle. A blond strand brushed the suction cup, and it stuck to the wet membrane. My instinct told me to jerk my head away, but I stayed put.

A blur of movement caught my attention from the edge of my sight. Laser blasts erupted over my head. My mom screamed, “Annie, move! Now!”

I scurried away as the sky rained petals. Mom reached out and pulled me behind the bio team. They fired until the violet flowers were nothing but mush and an ugly hole penetrated the canopy of vines. Although the flowers could have killed me, guilt trickled through me as I stared at the remains. It seemed wrong to trespass and destroy everything in our path. We were just as bad as Christopher Columbus.

“They’ll make sure that species grows nowhere near here, okay, honey?” Mom gripped me as if I’d come back from the grave. Although she meant it to be reassuring, the vengeful thought stirred up a strange mix of love for Mom for wanting to keep me safe and remorse for the planet that had no idea we planned to conquer it.