CHAPTER TEN

A soft whoosh sounded behind Mike. From it he knew the prison ship was gone. He didn’t look back. What was the point? He took a breath of unfiltered air. It smelt of burnt garlic and burned his lungs as they had predicted. The atmosphere wasn’t deadly, but it wasn’t healthy. After two years of terraforming it was supposed to be normal.

Or so they said.

Cleaning the atmosphere was one of their prime goals.

Mike tripped after his first few steps. He was moving faster than he thought. Then he remembered another bit of information. The gravity here was a trifle less dense than Earth so moving would be easier. He had no idea how significant that was, or if it was at all.

The bright sun shone straight overhead. They’d landed just before noon. The heat felt like the middle of the day in high summer in the Mojave Desert. A heat that took your breath away with an arid breeze that gave no relief but added another layer of misery.

Mike and Joe stood in the center of a mesa on which several large space craft could land. Half of it was covered in a mammoth hanger-like dome with moat-like ditches around it. Mike had read that this was necessary for landings in the rainy season. The mesa had been created by some previous expedition leveling a foothill. Small bridges spanned the moat from hangar to mesa.

On the far side of the mesa, near the back of the hangar, was what looked like a two-car garage. The entrance to a stairway that went down through the mesa was inside it. Those stairs led to a tunnel under the plain, which came up just inside the entrance to what would be the colony’s city. The underground path could be used in the rainy season instead of dragging supplies over the bridge in the deluges that poured from the skies.

An immense freestanding span led to the actual colony entrance. The bridge was as wide a three lane freeway, as long as a football field, and arched to a height of four hundred feet over the plain. Mike didn’t know the physics or thermodynamics of how a thing could freely stand over such a chasm, but he figured the people of Hrrrm with a hundred thousand years of written history and advancements in science far beyond that of Earth, would have figured out how to build such a wonder.

The far end of the bridge ended with a series of ramps worthy of a southern California interchange in downtown Los Angeles. One lane went left twenty feet and ended at the beginning of a road that led down to the plain fifty feet below. The center lane continued for twenty feet then spread onto a flat space the size of a mini-mall parking lot. The lane to the right rose in a gentle slope thirty feet but ended smack against the side of the mountain. Mike couldn’t tell if it was a failed road higher into the mountains or was supposed to have been a possible second entrance to the colony.

The actual entry way was on the far side of the forty-feet by fifty-feet parking-lot-ish area.

The mountains towered far into the distance in each direction. He turned his back on them and looked out from the hangar to his left, right, and dead ahead. The plain spread for miles of total flatness.

Mike and Joe walked to the edge of the mesa. They looked down the vast slope and then gazed out beyond it at their new world. The slope looked as if when they had shaved the mountain to create the mesa, the builders had dumped the excess dirt over the side. The slope before them was scarred with deep rivulets.

The two men stared onto the plain. Nothing moved. Not a tree, plant, or critter, a desert at high noon.

There were no fences or barriers of any kind. The prisoners could walk into the nothingness and keep walking until they died. Any colonists could sit down right here and never move and die of starvation.

Mike and Joe put down their packs. Mike put his right arm around Joe who put his left around Mike. Together they let their eyes roam over the terrain.

Mike said, “It’s a good thing neither of us is given to freaking out at dramatic, emotional moments.”

Joe said, “We’d need Meganvilia to set a level of proper hysteria for this.”

Meganvilia was a drag queen with a flair for the wildly dramatic who they knew on Earth.

Mike snorted. “Meganvilia? He’d have opened a bar, held a fundraiser, and led a protest march in the time we’ve been here. He was a loaves and fishes kind of guy.”

Joe said, “I’m not feeling hysterical or freaked out. Worried, concerned, fed up, angry.” He leaned over and gave Mike a peck on the cheek. “And in love with you.”

Mike clutched him more tightly with his arm. “It’s more of a mix of fears and freedom. No Bex. No Captain Zmond. No guards. And we’re likely to die if we can’t make this work. As Gimli said in the Lord of the Rings movie when they’re about to embark for Mordor for the last battle, “Certainty of death, small chance of success. What are we waiting for?”

They both turned and faced the mountains that were to be their home. Mike had to crane his neck to see the tops of the towering black, gray, and white peaks and crags stretching beyond sight north and south. Huge thunderheads hid the highest peaks. Mike could see streaks of lightning, but the storm was too far away to hear the thunder.

Inside the mountains space for their one hundred had been prepared. They had little time to dig out rooms for thousands more.

Mike lowered his gaze to the mesa top where the men were fanned out behind them shuffling and staring. He wondered what the others thought. Mike hoped any incipient freak outs could be nipped in the bud. No doubt they were entitled to any upset they wished, but hysteria would not help. They’d already had Krim’s attempted suicide on the ship. In tough, tense situations Mike preferred the James Bond approach as opposed to the Barney Fife reaction. He hoped he could manage the first.

Mike and Joe picked up their galaxy-class, combo backpack and duffel bags. They strode purposefully toward the mountains. Mike found himself humming.

As they neared the bridge, Mike paused and said, “I’m going to beat this place.”

“Good,” Joe said.

“But it’s more than that, Joe, it’s,” he paused and gazed at the surrounding desolation. He saw the black shadows of the barren valleys contrasted with the sun glowing starkly on the ash-gray mountains. He turned and looked over the plain, saw the hard sun-baked sand, the essential desolation, and he knew why he felt light-hearted. “Because I am free at last. They can’t do anything more to me. This is the worst, and in this place there is no one, no human who hates me because of what I am. I no longer have to live in fear. They have done their worst, and I’ve survived.” Mike’s eyes gleamed as Joe caught his gaze.

Joe said, “I understand. I feel the same way.”

As they neared the others, they stopped. The men clustered in a semi-circle in front of them. Mike knew no speech adequate to the moment. He said, “We’ve got work to do.”

Mike and Joe, hand in hand, led the group across the bridge. The breeze at the apex of the span was strong but still gave no relief.

As they began their descent on the other side, Mike saw several dilapidated structures to the left of the entrance. Mike knew they were the old sheds that had held communications equipment for the most recent colony. They looked like they’d fall over in the next high wind.

Once on the other side of the bridge, they walked fifty feet and stepped through a twenty-foot-wide entrance. The tunnel was windowless, the walls unadorned. Out of the sun, it was dim and at least fifteen degrees cooler. With his first steps Mike looked down. Mike was not a clean freak, but even in this dim light he could see this wasn’t dust bunnies lining the floors. These were dust elephants. His shoes gritted on the interior roadway.

“There’s got to be lights,” Mike said. “Where’s some of the electric power people?”

“Here,” Cak said.

“Check the electricity room. See if you can get the power to full strength.”

Cak left with two men.

With the rest of the men, Mike and Joe started down the ramp that greeted them and led to the interior. They’d gone less than a minute when the tunnel began to curve and the outside light began to dim. The walls now had the glow similar to his cell on the ship on the way to Hrrrm except dimmer. After about five more minutes and two more sweeping curves, they came to the bottom of the ramp.

They were using their communicators as people would cell phones on Earth to help them peer into the darkness. About thirty seconds later the lights switched to slightly brighter than they had been on the ship on the way to Hrrrm.

Before they could inspect further, one of the men came hustling up from behind.

“Cak sent me,” he said. “He told me to tell you that the electricity is on as high as it will go. All he had to do was press the ‘on’ control.”

Joe said, “I hope everything is that simple.”

“How far down are we?” Krim asked.

Mike looked back up the ramp they’d descended. He could see as far as the first curve. He said, “About one hundred feet.”

They turned to the space in front of them. Mike said, “From the schematics I saw, this is one of the largest rooms earlier colonists built. All of our supplies are here.”

“Or are supposed to be,” Karsh said.

Mike could see neither the roof nor the extent of the walls as they faded into the distance. Mike was reminded most of the inside of the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit movies or Moria in the Lord of the Rings except this didn’t have any of the gothic-y ornamentation or flourishes that Peter Jackson had given to those places in the films. It had the massive heaviness of carven underground stone but without the mounds of gold.

Even if the far wall was visible, materials were stacked up three times the height of an average man. Numerous aisles led off between them.

One of the first colonies had built this as a marketplace for their hoped to be underground city.

The air smelled and felt the same as outdoors. Mike knew the ventilation, digging, and gravity-flow debris systems worked in conjunction. It made coal mines on Earth look like worm holes.

Joe said, “I remember reading about and seeing diagrams on the ship of the remnants of the last attempt at a colony here. It was about 250 years ago. The ceiling stretched hundreds of feet back toward the surface. It also goes into the mountain for half a mile.”

“Wow,” Krim said.

Mike remembered that in this part of the mountains from this room numerous halls and ramps led further directly in as well as up and down. At the moment, they could only see the one entrance. Mike wanted them to concentrate on opening or reopening other entrances back up to the surface from numerous points here below.

Mike touched the nearest box. It felt like tinfoil but with the consistency of cardboard. This moment was one of many they’d trained for. Each sector, food, energy, mining, all were set to find, consolidate, and make ready for use their particular supplies for their specialty.

Krim followed Mike and Joe as the others moved out.

The boy sidled up to Mike. “I’m scared,” the kid whispered.

“We’ll be all right.”

Krim fumbled after Mike, once tripping and falling into him. When he caught him, Mike thought the boy clung a little longer than necessary to the helping hand Mike lent him. Spare me from teenage crushes Mike thought. The boy stayed close, rejecting Mike’s suggestion that splitting up might be more helpful.

His eyes more used to the dimness, Mike stopped to evaluate his progress. He judged himself to be about a quarter of the way into the room. Starting out, he’d tried to keep in a straight line.

“Incredible,” Mike said. He looked at the labels nearest to him, washroom facilities. These would be among the first things they set up. Mike had come to think of them as being like inter-galactic Port-a-Potties with the most significant difference being there was no stink of shit.

Joe and Mike, with Krim in tow, and five other men assigned to housing made their way toward the living quarters. Exactly opposite the exit to the ramp to the surface, they stepped through the wide entrance to what would be their homes. The corridor was as dim as everywhere else. The walls were rough-hewn, bare rock.

Mike, Joe, and the others walked into the first room. It was so small, that with all of them squeezed together, the last man was half out the doorway.

On one side of the room was a flat slab. That was the bed. At the end opposite the door was a much smaller but slightly higher slab than the bed. This was the chair. The ceiling was low, maybe an inch above Joe’s six foot height.

Mike stretched his arms the width of the room. Three of the men had to be almost in each other’s laps for him to do this. His fingertips were inches from the sides. He asked, “Are you sure there are gay people in this part of the galaxy?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“There are no decorations, nothing personal. I don’t want Victorian kitsch, but...” He shrugged. “It just all feels kind of sterile.” Mike shook his head. He touched a hand to the bed-like structure. He looked at his fingertips. “More dust.”

Joe said, “Centuries of it. We’re the first people here in hundreds of years.”

They returned to the corridor. They explored down it. All the rooms were the same.

At regular intervals on each side of the hall there were empty squares. Mike knew these indentations indicated where future halls would radiate from this central core. He remembered Zmond’s numbers of expected thousands to come soon and millions and millions thereafter. He wondered how they’d build them fast enough. He and Joe had discussed it and tried to get answers from their keepers but had no luck.

They followed the corridor to the end, a blank wall of granite. Mike thought the corridor might have been half a mile long. Dark, dim, the cold of the surrounding mountains penetrated their consciousness. Mike shivered. He turned at the end of the hall.

They left the others to assign rooms. He and Joe strode back through the way they’d come and onto the surface.

“I want everybody here for a meeting.” He sent several men to get the agriculturalists, others to the power station as well as using his communicator to send the message.

He waited for the men to assemble. Wind blew steadily from the south. Heat blasted from the sun overhead and shimmered off the sands of the plain. It had to be over one hundred degrees.

After fifteen minutes all the men were present. In the shade of the hangar they formed a semi-circle around him. They all wore the beige tunic and loose pants of prisoners, as he did.

Mike began, “We have incredible work ahead of us, as you all know. But this is our world now. We’re all aware of what each of our tasks is, but there are going to be some modifications. I don’t intend to live here lake a rat in a hole. We can’t do a lot with the design of the city, but we’re going to try. First of all, shafts to the surface from underground to let in some natural light, and the rooms we live in must be larger. Those are two changes to start.”

Karsh spoke up from near the back. “We can’t alter the plans we’ve been given. We have a rigid time schedule. Even working ten or twelve hours a day, we can barely meet it now.”

Mike wanted to kill the old bastard. Karsh was a tall thin, balding man in his late 60s. He’d been a lawyer on Cetianus III.

Mike ignored him. “I’m willing to work twenty hours a day to make this planet more than a prison.”

He saw most of the men nodding in agreement. Krim called out, “Yeah.”

Karsh objected. “We don’t have the skill to redesign the whole complex. We’re likely to bring the whole mountain range down on our heads.”

Mike smiled to himself. “The designs are already complete. While in the camp and on the ship, I had Joj and Ams redo them. They used to design global cities before the collections. It can be easily done. It will only take a few hours to retrain the diggers and reprogram the electronics.”

Karsh said, “Aren’t they supposed to be doing the work assigned to them?”

“It was assigned to them. By me.” Mike looked out over the others. “Any other concerns?”

Karsh looked like he wanted to say more, but he subsided.

“How bad is it down below?” Brux asked.

Mike said, “It’s not as warm. Dust is everywhere. Those of you who wish to leave, the out-bound afternoon shuttle arrives in a thousand years.”

A few of the men smiled.

Mike looked at their faces. He saw mostly lean tough men of all ages. More willing to get to work than frightened at the moment. Schooled to hard reality and disappointment, yet they were ready to build a world. He hoped.

Ams, the head of food, said, “We found the supply of energy balls. Enough for millions for years. They never go bad.”

There wasn’t going to be a lot of variety until their own plants grew.

“Can anything be done about the amount of power?” Mike asked.

Cak shook his head. “I don’t see how. It’s carefully designed. We get full power for the circuits for the diggers, little else.”

Mike asked, “Can’t we develop alternate sources of energy?”

“I’ll work on it,” Brux volunteered. “The communications sector isn’t that complicated.” Brux was tall and thin with a hawk-like nose and more haughtiness than a convention of drag queens. When he looked down his long nose at you there was a long way to look. He made every instant of his examination of you feel like an hour. Meganvilia would have been proud that Mike had his own Very Efficient Queen handy although he was light years from Earth. Having a very efficient queen was like having two nucleo computers, only the VEQ worked faster, organized better, with a sense of humor.

Mike said, “I wanted the communications set as quickly as possible. We need to be able to know if someone is going to attack us.”

“Won’t your blue protection shield go off?”

“Not if they’re attacking other men or coming from the other side of the planet. I’d like an electronic security ring around our whole place.”

Karsh interrupted. “But won’t that also be a monitor on ourselves? Aren’t we putting ourselves in our own jail? We’d have a security fence around ourselves.”

“Great,” Mike said, “You work on making a fence that will keep people from getting in but will let people out.”

“I’m just raising objections.”

“You got a problem,” Mike said. “You do the work.” Mike had worked on enough gay organizations on Earth where there were always a lot of people who knew something was wrong and spoke about it a great length. The smartest organization chairs he’d ever seen always appointed that person in charge of a new committee to deal with that problem. Shut up a lot of people very fast.

Brux said, “In the communications shed, I’ve already turned off all the hidden sensors, monitors, and cameras, at least the easy ones or the ones they wanted us to find. I think we have to assume there are hidden ones. We’ve seen how some of the things they’ve set up have been slapdash and haphazard. Who knows if they did their surveillance system state of the art perfection or just crap like so much of what they’ve done.”

Mike had said, “I’m glad you’re doing that, but really, so what if they are there?”

Brux had given him a lascivious grin. “We could do live sex shows and hope Religionists are watching and are aghast.”

One of Mike’s other worries, besides despair among the men, was that one, some, or all of them, might take being on the planet as an excuse for wild licentiousness. Mike didn’t care if they all fucked their brains out, as long as their work got done. The work was to make a safe place for themselves and where the millions to follow could live. No work done, and millions could land and die soon after.

“Are you supposed to destroy them?” Karsh asked.

“Nobody here to stop me,” Brux said.

Mike said, “There wouldn’t be monitors in the new sections we dig.”

“Unless they have a spy or spies among us.”

“Whoever it is would have to pretend to be gay.”

Brux said, “If I was the evil government working at highest efficiency, I’d have spies down here.”

Karsh asked, “But why would they want to spy on us?”

Brux said, “Because they can?”

“Why bother?” Karsh asked. “We can’t go anywhere and have no transportation to get there. What could they learn from us?”

Brux shrugged, “The secrets of the universe.”

Mike said, “It’s another way to show they have power over us.”

Karsh drew a deep breath. “Mostly, I’m sure it’s to monitor you. You’re the reason we’re here.”

Several men gasped. Joe marched to Karsh and stood nose to nose with him.

Karsh was undaunted. “And you’re another reason.”

Mike spoke from behind them. “We’re here because of the unreasonable prejudice of the universe. Hatred-driven madness that is causing misery, death, and destruction.”

Karsh sneered, “Try and be philosophical.”

Brux inserted himself between Joe and Karsh. Brux glared at Karsh and said, “Try to shut up.”

Karsh opened his mouth to speak. Brux held up a warning finger. The two stared at each other until Karsh looked away. He subsided.

Sry, their mining expert and head of the diggers, had good news. “We got fifty, not five state-of-the-art diggers.”

Mike knew that one man wielding one of the diggers could accomplish more in a day than one hundred coal miners in a month on Earth. The residue from the digging of new living quarters would be reverse-gravity flowed to the surface, onto the plain, and used to create a network of dikes and dams to protect and water their crops.

They broke for lunch. Ingesting an energy ball didn’t take more than a few seconds, but they sat and talked in small groups in the shade of the hangar.

Mike sat with Joe. Mike feared for their efforts, their sanity, and their lives. Terraforming was a monumental task when colonial planners set about it with their massive machines. They had none of those. They had two and a half months before the first storm season set in.

Mike noticed Krim hovering nearby. He breathed a sigh of relief when the boy moved off, called by his sector leader to join a work crew.