Operation Starseed

Part 3-6

Eight files. Shanley prints out hard copies

and hands them around to the five of us gathered on the nav

deck—Dylan’s still in the cockpit and the two fighters still flank

the carrier, but they’re connected to us with an open intercom so

they hear everything we say. “He said these were random colonists?”

Shanley asks, handing me two of the files.

I glance at the names. Conlan, Jeremy

S., the first one reads, and I wonder just how random the

selection process was. “That’s what he said,” I tell him, flipping

to the next file. Thomas, Marie J. “I have Conlan and a

girl, Marie.”

From the seat beside mine, Vallery says, “I

have that Ellington dude. He’s kind of cute.” She holds up the file

for me to look at the blurry, pixilated image that might be

something vaguely resembling a human, but I’m not sure. It might

also be just a bunch of ASCII letters clumped together on the page.

“You sort of have to squint,” she explains.

They’ve sent us five men, three women, the

same makeup as our crew. Two of the women are with child— “Her

third pregnancy,” Johnson reads from his file. Turning over the

paper in his hand, he frowns and adds, “Doesn’t say anything about

the kids, though. Just that she’s expecting another one. At

twenty-five! Damn, these girls are young.”

“They’re all young,” Shanley points

out. Then he reads off the names, the ages, what he’s been

scribbling down while we leafed through the files. “Conlan, male,

twenty-five. Maclin, male, twenty-four. Thomas, female, pregnant,

twenty-eight. Ellington, male, thirty—he’s the oldest so far.

Walker, female, pregnant, twenty-five. Corey, male, twenty. Martin,

male, nineteen. Mayes, female, eighteen. They’re all so young.” He

glances at the files in Leena’s hands and says, “Most of the

pertinent information has been edited out of these. We have birth

records for the ones born in the colony, and hospital scans for the

rest, but there’s nothing here about their formative years. They go

from infants to adults, nothing in between. No colds, no broken

bones, nothing.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to report,” I

suggest.

But Shanley shakes his head. “This is a

colony, Neal,” he reminds me. “They’re starting over again, doing

it all for the first time. This is all completely new to them, so

they’d want to keep extensive records on every single

person. The tiniest scrape, a toothache, irregular menstruation

cycles, it’d all be written down.”

“What about the children?” Leena asks.

When we turn to look at her, she shrugs, explains, “The kids. These

two women are pregnant and it’s not their first time, neither of

them. This is one girl’s second and the other’s what, on her

third?” Johnson and I glance at each other and nod. We have those

files. “So what happened to their other kids? I don’t think there

are any others.”

“What?” Vallery asks, and I shake my

head, hold up the file in my hand, point to it and remind her, “It

says this is her second one—”

“Second pregnancy,” Leena

points out. Crossing the deck, she takes the file from me and scans

it quickly. Then she taps the paper and says, “See? Right here,

second pregnancy. Not second child.” As she hands the file back,

she asks, “What happened to the first one? There’s nothing in this

about the first pregnancy, is there?”

She’s right, there’s not. The file should be

thick, full of ultrasound results and the baby’s statistics and the

mother’s vitals, and none of that’s here. Apparently Johnson’s

file’s the same way, because he starts tearing through it, almost

angry, looking for anything about the previous two pregnancies,

anything at all. “f**k,” he mutters. He throws the file down in

disgust and the papers flutter to the floor by his feet. Kicking at

them, he glares at Shanley like this is all his fault. “What the

hell is this s**t? This… this censorship? Is this some kind

of game for them?”

Over the intercom, Dylan says, “We’re their

first contact, Johnson. Some of those kids down there were born in

the colony, weren’t they? We’ll be the first people outside S410

that they’ve ever seen. Of course they’re going to be

cautious.”

Johnson doesn’t respond. In an effort to

diffuse the situation, Shanley hands him the last file, the one

full of planetary statistics. “Take a look at this,” he says

softly. “Let me know what you think.”

What he thinks should be of no

consequence—he’s the radio tech, not a navigator, but I don’t say

that, I know Shanley’s only trying to calm the kid down.

Kid, as if he’s not the same age as my lover, but he acts so

damn childish sometimes, worse than Dylan in full pouting glory.

Glancing over the file, Johnson shrugs, noncommittal. “I’m not even

really sure what I’m looking at here,” he admits grudgingly.

I hold out a hand for the file, and I’m

surprised when he actually gives it to me. It’s about what I

expect, really—mostly hard clay, which makes the planet look red

from this height. Stunted grass, some shallow riverbeds, an almost

continuous rainy season, sixteen hour day/night cycle— “Sixteen

hours?” I say with a grin. “That’s going to take some getting used

to.”

Shanley nods at the file in my hands. “What

do you think?”

“I think it’s probably not going to

make a list of the best vacation spots in the galaxy,” I tell him,

and Vallery laughs. “Lots of clay, always rainy, probably not very

good for crops, if they’ve managed to grow any.” Browsing through

the file, I find a section about their original spacecraft, and I

read it out loud. “The S410, one of twelve colony ships in

Operation Starseed—”

“Whoo!” Vallery cries, surging to her

feet. She catches Johnson’s arms and twirls around him, wiggling

her hips as she dances. “What did I tell you, Neal?” she asks. When

Johnson doesn’t fall into step with her, she turns to Leena, who

dances up on her, the two of them twisting to an imaginary beat. “I

told you so,” she sings. “I told you so—”

“Vallery, please,” I say, but it’s

hard to watch her and Leena dance and maintain a straight face,

they’re so cute, so happy. “Don’t—”

“I told you so,” she says

again.

I laugh and tell her, “Yeah, you did. Sit

down already, will you? You’re making me nervous.” She sticks her

tongue out at me but sinks back into her chair, Leena sitting on

the armrest. “Can I finish reading this?” I ask.

“Go ahead,” Vallery concedes. Under

her breath, she mumbles, “I told you so.”

Ignoring that, I turn back to the file. “The

S410 was badly damaged in a meteor shower,” I tell them,

paraphrasing the text. The last thing I want is another little bump

and grind because this really is one of the Starseed ships out

there. “It was programmed for a course closer to Sol, which would

have put them back near Earth, but the interference from the shower

threw them off course.”

“Pretty far off course, if you ask

me,” Johnson mutters.

No one did, I think, but I hold my

tongue. “The damage took out one wing of the ship, killing fifteen

colonists instantly. The navigation system was also shot—their

shields, radar, all gone. They thought maybe they’d turn around,

head back for the station outside of Orion, but they got lost and

wound up here, in the Epsilon system. Something happened…” I frown

at the file in my hands—this doesn’t make sense. We picked up

the planetoid on our vidscreens, the text reads, and landed

with difficulties resulting from the meteor damage. Early efforts

at terraforming proved fruitless, but the ship was inhabitable and

the survivors— ”Of what?” I ask out loud. Looking around at the

crew, my gaze falls on Shanley, who watches me closely. “The

survivors decided to maintain a colony aboard the ship, but the

survivors of what?”

“The meteor shower?” Leena

suggested.

“Only fifteen people died in that,” I

remind her. “I don’t think that’s enough to classify everyone else

as survivors, do you?”

She shrugs and leans back against Vallery,

who shrugs, as well. “We weren’t there,” she points out. “Maybe to

them it was survival.”

I’m not buying that. “To me it suggests

something else happened,” I tell her. “They had a hundred people,

lost fifteen, and now are down to forty-two? In twenty years, and

the women are fertile—two of the ones pregnant now, this isn’t

their first time. It just doesn’t add up for me. Don’t tell me you

guys are okay with this.” Vallery shrugs again and Leena looks

away, doesn’t meet my eyes. Johnson stares at the floor and frowns,

I know he’s thinking the same things I’m thinking, I know this

bothers him, too.

Shanley starts to gather the files together.

When he gets to me, I hold onto the file, force him to look at me,

at me, and he sighs. “We’ll just have to ask them when we

get there,” he tells me. “We’re in a delicate situation here, Neal.

They don’t trust us as it is. If we press them too far, they may

deny us landing clearance altogether.”

“How?” I counter. I’m just playing the

other side here, I tell myself. I know Shanley’s right, but

Johnson’s right, too, and that bothers me. These files, they don’t

tell us anything more than what we already knew, which wasn’t a

whole hell of a lot to begin with. The only thing we’ve learned for

certain is that they are one of the Starseed ships, that’s

it, and we suspected that all along. “If they’re defenseless like

they keep saying they are, how will they keep us from landing? That

doesn’t make any sense.”

Taking a deep breath, Shanley says, “We’re

not out to make enemies here, Neal. Another thirty minutes and

we’ll be able to ask them these things in person.”

I nod and let him have the files. He’s

right. We’ll be down there soon enough.

* * * *

In the end we decide that only four of us

should go down, that’s it. Dylan, because he’s the captain and he

wants to go— ”You can’t keep me from this,” he tells us as

Vallery configures the landing system. He leans back against the

control panel, one foot propped up on my chair by my thigh, his

arms folded across his chest. “I earned this. It’s my signal, they

spoke to me first, I deserve to go down there.”

“Fine,” Johnson says. “You go. I

ain’t.” He looks around at the rest of us as if defying someone to

challenge him. “I’m going to see if I can set up a long-range

transmission from this carrier. Dixon needs to know what’s going

on.”

“Fine,” Dylan says. “You do that. I’m

going down there.”

I touch his ankle, a quick gesture no one

else sees. “You said that. Who else?”

“One of the fighters,” Leena says, and

over the intercom, Milano interrupts, “Not me. I’m gonna stay up

here and keep my finger on the trigger, if you know what I mean.

Take Parker.”

From the other fighter, Parker sighs. “Can I

fly my bird down there?”

“And give them all heart failure?”

Dylan asks. “We’ll take the Semper Fi. It’s less

intimidating.”

“It’s unarmed,” Parker points

out.

Dylan ignores him. “Me and Parker, who else?

We need a navigator…” He nudges me with his foot. “You don’t want

to go down there, do you, Val? I mean, not really,

right?”

Vallery laughs. “Take your boy,” she tells

him, winking at me.

“You don’t want to go?” I ask her. Me,

I want to go down there, check out the land and these

colonists and the ship, see what’s kept them planet-bound for the

last twenty years, get answers to the plethora of questions tearing

through my mind right now. But if she has her heart set on going,

I’ll give up my seat. If I have to.

But she shakes her head. “I can stay here,”

she says. “Honest.”

“Maybe we can go in shifts,” I

suggest. “Four the first time, four the next. If you

want—”

“Maybe we can just send one party and

get this over with, okay?” Johnson mutters, and Dylan stiffens

beside me. He’s so protective at times, and right now he doesn’t

need to get into another argument. I cover his boot with my hand,

shake my head, not now.

Johnson continues. “We’re just here to check

out the signal, remember, people? Ask them to turn it off or maybe

get the frequency on file, we’re mapping for a stellar bypass

nearby—can’t have that blip of theirs pulling anyone out of

hyperdrive now, can we? This isn’t a f*****g vacation, you

know.”

“I’d like to go,” Shanley says, and

thank God he’s here, his soft speech and quiet manners easily

diffuse Johnson’s bristly demeanor. “If no one objects—”

Leena shakes her head. “You should

go, you know what questions to ask about all this.” With a grin,

she elbows Johnson and says, “It’s just you and us girls, boy.

Isn’t this going to be fun?”

The way he rolls his eyes and grunts

suggests he thinks she has a warped idea of what fun really is.

* * * *

So it’s just Dylan and me in the airlock,

waiting for Shanley. Parker is already out by the Semper

Fi—he landed his bird in the hangar and didn’t bother going

through the decon procedures, not to enter the ship when he’s just

going out there again anyway. I lean back against one of the cold,

white walls of the airlock, and I can feel the steel bite through

the thick jacket I wear over my jumpsuit. I toy with the zipper and

then stop myself, I’m not nervous, I’m not. These are

humans, just like us. If anything, they’re probably terrified—who

knows what they’re expecting? Some of them have never even

seen another living creature outside of their tiny little

planet, we’re their first contact with anyone else. If anyone

should be nervous, it’s them, not us. Not me.

Dylan closes the airlock door and sighs.

“What the hell’s taking him so long?” he mutters, but I don’t know

so I don’t answer. He walks over to where I stand and steps in

front of me, presses his lips to my forehead, murmurs against my

skin, “I love you, babe.”

My arms find their way around his waist and

I hug him tight. “Love you, too,” I breathe against his neck. “What

do you think we’re getting into here?”

He shrugs, a gesture that settles his body

closer into mine, and his arms wrap around my shoulders, pull me to

him, hold me close. “I’m not sure,” he admits. His lips are soft

against my temple, and when he kisses me again, I close my eyes and

savor the touch. “Mike’s right, we’re not staying long. Just a few

days, I’m guessing. Just long enough for the novelty to wear off.”

I laugh at that, and I feel his mouth pull into a grin. “Dixon will

want info but just enough to pass on to the Worlds Council. I don’t

think there’s anything else he can really do, anything he’ll

want to do. He’s all about mapping this region, that’s

it.”

“He’s not getting paid to waste time

with this little colony,” I point out.

Dylan laughs, breathless against my ear, and

then kisses my neck. “Exactly,” he purrs. His fingers pick at my

jumpsuit’s zipper, pulling it down slightly, tickling beneath the

separated fabric, tracing the curve of my collarbone, the hollow of

my throat. So soft, that touch. So amazingly gentle. “If Shanley’s

going to be awhile,” he starts, kissing my jaw.

The door slides open and Shanley steps out

into the airlock. “I’m right here,” he says. On the vidscreen

behind him, I can see Vallery setting the DAQ system up for the

decon. “If you guys don’t mind,” he adds, the hint of a smile on

his face, “maybe you could wait until later tonight to do… whatever

it is you’re about to do?”

I laugh and push Dylan away, but he manages

one last quick kiss and then the light above the outer door buzzes

green and the door slides away to reveal the hangar and Parker,

already waiting for us. “Later, then,” Dylan promises as he leads

the way to the Semper Fi.