Shades of Earth

Page 25

We move slowly, careful to keep checking behind us to make sure we don’t wander so far away that we get lost, especially as we near the forest edge and the trees obscure our path. The forest itself curves out and then back in. I try to make a mental map of where we are—the shuttle to my left, the lake to my right, the ruins we now live in behind me. And something straight ahead.
“Look at the way the land is so flat there,” Amy says, pointing. Her voice is still quiet, even though we haven’t seen anyone this far out.
Long stalks of some sort of grain or grass ripple in the breeze like cloth. But where Amy is pointing, there is no grain. No trees. No nothing. Something black and starless and manmade amid the sea of nature, dotted with low-roofed buildings standing up in straight edges that are in stark contrast to the swishing grass and twisting trees.
“Come on,” Amy says, tugging my hand.
We race across the open meadow, and I keep thinking about how Amy said we were exposed. My muscles are tense, waiting for the outline of a ptero against the too-bright stars.
We stop short of the area where the tall grass ends.
“What is this place?” I say, my voice so quiet that even I barely hear it.
Amy steps forward, her footsteps louder as she walks across asphalt, not sandy soil. I follow after her, staring with wide eyes at a cluster of small buildings dotting the horizon on the other side. “It’s some sort of compound,” she whispers, “built around the probe.”
I trip over a thin ridge in the pavement, and Amy and I both crouch to inspect the gleaming band of metal—a large rectangle embedded into the asphalt. There’s something under the asphalt, some panel or room that can open up if we could only figure out how to trigger it.
“Look at the lines painted on the ground,” Amy whispers in my ear.
Bright white lines, marking distances, with more markers embedded into the asphalt.
“It’s a runway,” Amy gasps. “And underneath it are airplanes. Jets. Something.”
Now that she says it, it makes sense. Jets must be stored in the rectangular areas sunken into the ground so that whoever controls this compound can lift them up to ground level, position them, and use this asphalt as a runway.
“But who put it here?” Amy’s voice comes out in a squeak.
I have no answer for her. This is nothing like the ruins we discovered earlier. The ruins were dusty buildings, long abandoned and derelict. But this runway smells faintly of oil and burnt rubber; it’s been used, and recently.
I motion for Amy to follow me to one of the small buildings—not stony relics, but modern, single-storied glass and steel offices. She hesitates. Whoever made this compound has technology far more advanced than we could have guessed from seeing the ruins.
“Look.” I point through the window of the closest building. “A communication system.”
The room houses a control panel not that much different from the one we used on the bridge when we landed the shuttle—which is to say, it’s equally confusing. But I think I can figure it out.
“Locked,” Amy says as she tries the doorknob. I nod to a small square at eye level by the door. It’s not unlike the biometric scanners on Godspeed, but there’s a small thumb pad rather than a roll bar.
“Can’t hurt to try,” Amy says, pushing her thumb against the pad. A moment later, the thumb pad flashes a message once—HUMAN—and then the door opens.
“This door was built to only let humans enter?” I ask as we step inside the room.
Amy shoots me a worried look. If the scanner detects humanity, then that means there must be something other than humans it’s designed to keep out.
29: AMY
Once inside, my first instinct is to reach for the lights, and even though my hand touches the wall where a light switch would normally be, my fingers find nothing, slipping over the smooth paint. Of course not. Stupid of me to think that. Whoever built this might not have electricity like we do. . . . Still, they have something. As soon as Elder closes the door behind us, a small panel opens up in the ceiling, exposing a softly glowing square—something like an automatic, flat lightbulb that brightens the room as efficiently as a fluorescent bulb—but with no hum of electricity or power. I blink in the unnaturally bright light.
“Do you really think Dad knew all this was here?” I ask in a hushed voice. Elder doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. Of course Dad knew about this building, the whole compound. Otherwise, what reason would he have had to stop us from coming here?
A flag hangs over the door. Two white circles, one larger than the other, are sewn into a field of sky blue. The larger circle is slightly off center, and the smaller one is just to the right, below it. I’ve never seen a flag with this design before.
“Look,” Elder breathes.
And there, engraved on a plaque at the top of the control panel in the little building, is a symbol we both recognize.
“This was made by the FRX,” I say, forgetting to whisper.
Elder leans over, inspecting it. He reads the tiny words engraved below the symbol. “On this site was discovered the first probe sent by the first interstellar mission from Earth in 2310 CE, providing the information needed to develop the first successful extra-solar colony, Explorer, 2327 CE,” Elder reads. “This plaque is a memorial to those lost on Godspeed. 2036–2336 CE.”
“They think we died out,” I say.
I point to the end date—2336. That’s when Godspeed was supposed to land.
But we didn’t land.
“They found the probe,” Elder says in a low voice. “But not us.”
I think about the grav tube and the floppies on the ship—technology made while I slept. “Technology increases at an exponential rate,” I say. “My grandparents paid thousands of dollars for a computer that was bigger than my television and had a fraction of the memory space of my freaking cell phone.” I’m babbling, but I can’t seem to keep my voice under control. “My grandparents used CDs to listen to music instead of downloading it, my great-grandparents used tapes, my great-great-grandparents used records.”
Elder’s eyes are wide and scared; he’s getting what I’m trying to say. “The first airplane was made at the start of the 1900s; the first man landed on the moon in the 1950s.”
I gulp. “In 2029, my grandmother took a vacation on the lunar resort, and by 2036, my parents and I were packed in ice and thrown across the universe.”
Technology moves faster and faster and faster.
I look around this very modern, very well-kept communication bay.
We weren’t the first colony from Earth to land here.
“We were late to our own landing,” Elder says hollowly. He touches a small blinking light under the plaque. “A homing device. The same kind on the probes. This is why the shuttle landed here.”
Right in the middle of a world that’s already outpaced us.
The first probe was sent twenty years before Godspeed landed. The FRX must have liked the data it relayed and sent a faster ship to colonize before we arrived. The ruins are the perfect size for humans not because there were creatures born on Centauri-Earth that coincidentally were the same size and had the same needs as us . . . it’s because humans made the ruins. The first colony—the real first colony, the colony that landed before us—settled there.
It happened so long ago that now the buildings are derelict and abandoned.
And in the meantime? The first colony progressed to a high-tech modern society, leaving the dusty buildings behind.
I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s not like they quit designing ships and rockets just because Godspeed left. They’d developed something better by then, and when they looked at the probe information and realized that there was something here they wanted, they sent another colony.
Why wait for us to land when this planet has resources Earth could use?
“Our whole mission . . . it was pointless,” I say. “Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve sacrificed—it was all for nothing. Earth already conquered this planet. They came, they saw, they left. And now we’re here. Alone. This whole damn thing was for nothing!” I spit the word out. “What a stupid, pointless mission. Of course a faster ship was invented in the centuries while we traveled. Five hundred years before the ship launched? That was freaking Shakespearean times! We’re as ancient to Earth now as effing Shakespeare! Our ship is the equivalent of a horse-drawn carriage!”
Elder grabs my hands, and it’s only then that I realize I’ve been waving them about maniacally.
“They couldn’t communicate with us,” I say. “Communication links were broken before the ship even got here. They probably saw us arrive, but since they couldn’t talk to us and we never landed, they must have thought we were all dead.” I’m crying now. I don’t know why, but I’m crying. “If you’re silent for five hundred years, they think you’re dead.” Even if we’re not.
I remember then, as vividly as if I’d just woken up, the feeling of being frozen. My mind had blocked the memories as effectively as if they’d been nothing but dreams, but now, here, under a sky with stars that sparkle like eyes, all I can think about is how it felt to be frozen in ice, alive but immobile. I think about the silence of it, the way nothing could touch me. I think about how trapped it felt to be aware but unable to move so much as an eyelash.
I think about how all of that was worth nothing.
For the first time since leaving the ship, I feel trapped.
“The question we need to be asking ourselves is, where are they now?” Elder says. He looks through the windows as if expecting to see a modern city on the other side of the glass. “If there were people from a colony,” he continues slowly, thinking aloud, “they would have tried to contact us. They had to have seen us land, this close to the compound. If they’re human, if they made this plaque”—he points to the memorial embedded above the communication bay—“they would want to help us.”
But no one’s come.
30: ELDER
Amy is white—not pale, but white. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“My dad,” Amy whispers.
I stop dead, waiting for her to continue.
“He knew. He’s kept all of this from us. The original colony. This compound. This is what he was trying to hide from you. From all of us.” She takes a deep, shaky breath. “From me.”
I don’t know what to say to her. She’s right—she can see for herself that her father’s been hiding the truth from her.
“Why?” she chokes out.
I step in front of her, capturing her wandering gaze. “I don’t know. He must have had a reason.”
She looks at me bitterly. “Orion had a reason. Eldest had a reason.”
“Colonel Martin is a lot of things, but he’s not Orion or Eldest.” As I say the words, I know that I don’t believe them, not entirely. He’s proven already that he’s willing to coerce us with lies and hidden truths.
Amy spins away from me, the red curtain of her hair hiding her face. “Do you think the colony that came before us—did the pteros kill them off?”