Space Colony One Books 4 - 6

Interstellar Mission-6

THE PROBLEM OF THE Scythian hunting spiders had been bothering Wilder for ages. Since early that morning, she’d been studying one of the devices that she’d ‘borrowed’. But time was getting on. Her appointment with the Leader was soon and before the meeting she wanted to take some vids of her little hamlet to show him.

Wilder put down the spider, its sharp claws bound in rags, and piled more rags over it. Then she searched for her interface, mulling over the hidden Scythian device.

After the colonists had carefully cleared them from the underground settlement and emerged onto the surface, the sheer numbers of the devices the Scythians had dropped became apparent. They littered the forest floor, creating a bizarre carpet of silvery, angular, razor sharp undergrowth.

From the drop site to the forest, tens of thousands of the lethal devices lay motionless, frozen when their creators deactivated them. At the original settlement, the pattern of silver sprayed out to all sides where the spiders had traced the scent of humans.

It had taken weeks, but eventually all the devices had been found and piled in eight massive heaps, surrounded by fences made from whatever materials the settlers could gather. Meanwhile, the scientists had started work, trying to identify what the spiders were made from and how they operated. But all their scientific equipment had been destroyed, whether it had been at the first settlement or aboard the Nova Fortuna. The scientists concluded with some certainty that the spiders were constructed from a metal alloy—feather-light and extremely tough—but what type of alloy it was, none could say. The properties of the material were unlike anything they had previously encountered.

No tools they possessed could penetrate the smooth, seamless exterior shell of the spiders, and consequently they couldn’t study the workings of the devices. With a great deal of effort, they built a forge to heat a spider to a temperature high enough to melt titanium, but it had no effect. Finally, after thousands of hours of work, the spiders had been designated useless trash.

Yet they were also highly dangerous. If the Scythians returned and changed their minds about sparing humanity, all they had to do was to reactivate the devices. The colonists had not been able to halt the spiders’ dreadful work previously and would not be able to do so in the future. When time could be spared, giant pits would be dug to bury them, a temporary stopgap to keep them out of immediate harm’s way.

It was a great shame, Wilder had thought, when the colony was in such desperate need of construction materials. The materials the Fila gave them dried out and cracked after a few days’ exposure to air. Until mining operations were underway and smelting and manufacturing plants had been built, the settlers had no source of metal other than what had been scrounged from the Nova. Now all that remained of the ship was wreckage that could be gleaned from the ocean.

The scientists might have given up on the idea of putting the Scythian spiders to good use, but Wilder had not. She’d taken a spider from one of the heaps and brought it to her tree platform, delighted to finally have the privacy and freedom to work on it. She was determined to unlock its secrets.

She’d first tested one of the spider’s blades on a dead sluglimpet she’d found. The creature’s tough carapace had parted like the soft, pale fungi that grew on the forest floor. When she’d dipped the blade into the sticky, corrosive acid that spilled from the innards, the mucusy liquid had no effect on the Scythian material.

Wilder’s fingers touched a hard surface under her pillow. She pulled out her interface. The cracked surface was dusty, so she carefully wiped the tiny lens.

She started to record, focusing first on the platform where she stood. She pointed the interface at the floor and swept it up toward the roof, which was made from fallen tree fronds. The forest canopy kept most of the rain out, but later on in the year heavier rains would arrive, and Wilder wanted to be prepared.

Next, she lay down on her stomach and stuck her head and shoulders over the edge of the platform, angling the interface toward the downward-facing cone she had constructed around the tree’s trunk.

Sluglimpets could climb and would sense and attack anything edible they could reach, but Wilder had thought up a solution to the problem. The predators were long and flat, and their rigid shells made it impossible for them to bend very much. They could climb vertical surfaces, but they could not navigate something pointing outward and downward. If a sluglimpet climbed a tree that had a cone encircling its trunk, the creature would try to crawl along the inside of the cone, tip backward, lose its grip, and fall off. Wilder had cut off branches that touched other trees, isolating the ones in her village so that the predators couldn’t reach them from other trees.

She also filmed the sluglimpet barriers around the other tree trunks, and the hoists she had constructed to lift people up into the trees. She had plenty more ideas about what could be done to the platforms, but she figured she’d done enough to show the Leader the viability and potential of the site.

Wilder checked the time. She’d taken too long. She only had a few minutes before her appointment. If she missed it, she would have to wait weeks for another, assuming she was given one at all. The man who was responsible for giving them out had argued with her that she was just a kid and had no good reason to see the Leader. Wilder had been forced to point out to him that there was nothing in the Manual that forbade young colonists from meeting with the Leader if they wanted to. It was everyone’s right, young, old, and in between.

She slipped the interface into a bag, slung it over her shoulder, and climbed into a cradle at the edge of the platform. The cradle hung from a rope attached to a pulley. She lowered herself to the forest floor. As soon as her feet touched dirt, she jumped out of the cradle and ran to the entrance of the underground settlement.

The opening had been reconstructed since the Scythian attack. The destroyed thick, metal doors had been replaced with simple ones made from plastiwood, and they stood open. Wilder ran through the doorway and down the stairs. The familiar smell of the place hit her. Damp, mold, and human sweat assaulted her nostrils, and the ceilings and walls seemed to close in. Fighting down the feelings of disgust and unease that Shithole sparked in her, Wilder ran on.

She arrived at the Leader’s office. The man who arranged the appointments looked up sternly as she ran in, and his frown deepened as he said, “You’re late. You’ll have to reschedule.”

“No,” said Wilder, “I can’t. I’ve waited so long already. It’s only a few minutes.”

“I can’t help that. The Leader’s a very busy man.”

The door to the inner office opened, and the Leader looked out. “Verney...” He spotted Wilder. “Oh. Are you my next appointment? You can come in.”

“Leader,” Verney said, “you have another appointment in eight minutes.”

“I’m sure this won’t take long, right?” the Leader asked Wilder.

“No, sir. Not long.”

“Good. Come inside.”

Wilder followed the Leader into his room.

“Take a seat,” said the Leader as he closed the door. He gestured toward a chair.

He sat down and waited expectantly. Wilder suddenly became aware that though she had thoroughly prepared her little hamlet to be ready for this meeting, she had entirely failed to prepare herself. Her mouth turned dry as she struggled to think of what to say. She wondered what she looked like. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d washed or brushed her hair.

She coughed to clear her throat and calm her nerves. “Thanks for seeing me, Leader,” she said. “I’ll be as quick as I can. I want to ask your permission to start a new settlement.”

The Leader’s eyebrows rose. “A new settlement?”

Wilder looked down at the backs of her hands. They were grimy and her nails were black with dirt. How could she have forgotten to wash before meeting the most important person in the colony?

“Does this have to do with your activities in the forest?” asked the Leader.

Wilder gaped. “You know about that?”

“I do.”

“I’ve been building some living areas among the trees. I’ve finished them now. They’re entirely safe.”

The Leader leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk. “It’s Wilder, right? Wilder, I know living conditions down here aren’t great at the moment, but I’m not prepared to allow you to put yourself at risk. It isn’t safe above ground right now. As soon as the new residences out at the farms are finished, I promise you’ll be one of the first to move out there.”

“I don’t want to move out to the farms. I need to be near the spiders’ dump.” Wilder stopped short. She hadn’t meant to mention that part of her plan to the Leader. But now she’d let out her secret, she figured she might as well tell him the rest. “I’ve been working on understanding their tech and I think I’m near a breakthrough, but I can’t work on them down here. It’s too cramped, noisy, and distracting. When I live here I’m tired all the time from babies waking me up. I can’t think properly.”

Ever since the babies from the Nova had arrived, Wilder’s difficult life in the settlement had become nearly unbearable. She didn’t have anything against babies per se, but hundreds of them all at once, plus the babies born naturally to the colonists, had been torture to her. She needed quiet to work on her various projects.

“I understand,” said the Leader. “It isn’t easy for any of us, but you know we’re doing our best to minimize the disturbance.”

“At least let me show you what I’ve done,” said Wilder. She pulled the interface out of her bag and showed the Leader the vid she’d recorded.

Wilder watched the man as he studied the recording. How old was the Leader? Wilder didn’t know, but he had gray in his hair and beard, so he had to be pretty old. Maybe too old to remember what it was like to be young and wanting to live your life without everyone telling you what to do.

The vid ended and the Leader returned his attention to Wilder. “Very impressive. Those cones are to deter sluglimpets?”

“Yes, and they work.”

“They do? How come you’re so sure?”

Wilder didn’t answer. The backs of her hands suddenly became extremely interesting.

“You know that spending the night outside the settlement is strictly prohibited?” the Leader asked.

When Wilder remained silent, the Leader continued, “You’re fourteen, right?”

“Yes, Leader.”

“When I saw you were coming to see me, I looked up your details. There’s no record of your education after the age of nine.”

Shit. How did he know that? Wilder thought the Guardians had wiped the colony’s unimportant records when they dumped tonnes of data into the system before they crashed their ship.

“I’d worked through the entire schooling scheme by then,” she replied. “There was nothing else to learn, so school got really boring for me. I didn’t see any point in attending.”

“And no one followed up with you?”

Wilder looked downward again.

The Leader laughed. “Don’t worry. I didn’t like school either, though for a different reason. I guess you managed to avoid the chasers.”

“Yeah, I did,” Wilder mumbled. The meeting was not going as well as she’d hoped. She certainly hadn’t expected the conversation would turn to her truancy. What difference did that make?

“Another thing I discovered,” the Leader said, “was that the couple who took you in haven’t seen you in weeks.”

Wilder sighed. “They’re good people, but I don’t need parents. I don’t need a mom or dad telling me what to do all the time. And they took in three of the babies from the Nova. I just couldn’t stand it. There’s so much I have to do, so much I want to do, but I’m not going to get anything done until I have the freedom and quiet to do it.”

A voice came from the Leader’s interface, saying, “Your next appointment is here, Leader.”

“I’ll be finished soon, Verney. Please ask them to wait.”

Wilder took a breath. She only had a few moments before the Leader would refuse the permission she sought and kick her out. “Leader, Sidhe is heavily overcrowded. There are simply too many of us to live comfortably here. And when the crops are harvested, where are you planning to store all that food? The only option right now is to force more people to live in even less room. I’m suggesting a viable alternative. If five or ten young people like me live outside, it will give everyone a little more breathing room. Then, if the experiment is successful, we can build more platforms. The forest is large. I figure it could easily provide dwellings for five or six hundred people. I’m sorry for playing hooky and leaving my family. But, please, can you give me this chance?”

The Leader’s interface spoke to him again. “Your next appointment is asking if she should reschedule, Leader.”

“One more minute, Verney.”

The Leader rubbed his beard and gazed thoughtfully at the frozen image on Wilder’s screen. The man looked tired. Shadows haunted his eyes and cheekbones.

Finally he said, “I’m not too concerned about your misdemeanors. This colony wasn’t built on everyone following the rules. We’re all learning as we go along. But it’s my responsibility to keep you safe. I want to see what you’ve built with my own eyes. I’ll come over there later on today when I have a bit of free time. Then, if it all seems okay, we can talk some more about moving ahead with your plan.”

“We can? Thank you!”

The Leader lifted a finger. “But first I would want to post two or three door guards to spend a few nights out there, just in case it isn’t as safe as you imagine.”

“That’s fine. Thank you so much. You won’t regret it.”

Chapter Six

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