“What did the men want, Mama?”
From the observation deck window in the canteen, Merrilyn Hambleton watched the shape of the departing ship disappear into the relentless, raging storm. Her daughter’s hand was held tightly in her own.
“I don’t know, Little Flower,” she said, watching until the vessel was completely gone from sight. She glanced down at Therese, only five years old, her Pinky Ponk dangling from her hand. The soft toy was filthy with grime and oil stains. Everything on this planet was filthy with grime and oil, but Merrilyn had to try to stem the rising tide of filth. To not try was to surrender. She would put Pinky Ponk through the wash. “And speak in French, now the men have gone.”
“Yes, Mama,” Therese said, switching back to her native tongue. She paused and said, “I wish I could go with the men. I don’t like it here very much.”
It broke Merrilyn’s heart to hear that, but it was true. LV-187 was no place to bring up a child. It was so small nobody had even bothered to give it a name. A storm raged perpetually, days pale and pitiful, with the light from the wan sun barely penetrating the thick, roiling clouds that unleashed rain, hail, and sometimes shards of ice like knife-blades. Yet what LV-187 lacked in comfort and pleasantness it made up in something else: oil.
The Independent Core Systems Colonies had been on an aggressive oil hunt for decades, and that had been only accelerated by the Oil Wars. Thank God, LV-187’s supplies had not been tainted by the sabotage she had heard about on other colony worlds, where entire stocks had been destroyed by a bacterial agent that broke down the petroleum’s composition. And now the Oil Wars were effectively over. With the ICSC brokering major trade deals in return for plentiful supplies, her work here was more important than ever.
TotalEnergies had been one of the first Big Oil corporations to invest heavily in off-world mining, and as one of their leading petroleum geologists Merrilyn had known it was only a matter of time before she was asked to head up a colony operation. She’d have liked her first major posting to be a little more hospitable than LV-187, but it was only for a year. And at least she could bring Therese.
“Where did you get the lollipop?” Merrilyn said suddenly, noticing for the first time the candy in her daughter’s hand.
“The man gave it to me,” Therese said. “He was nice.”
“You shouldn’t take things from strangers without asking Mama first,” Merrilyn chided, but the visitors had been pleasant. An ad hoc trade mission, on their way to somewhere else, calling at LV-187 to take a little bit of rest time and to inquire about the chances of some business between their colonies. This was not uncommon these days on oil-producing worlds. Plenty of smaller settlements wanted to strike under-the-counter deals to get them the oil they needed.
But the mission had been told to go through the proper channels and contact the ICSC. They had taken it in good humor and left. Even such a small kindness as a lollipop for a child was something to cling to in these dark days.
* * *
Merrilyn turned from the window, the memory of that day—the last day—aching in her chest. Now the canteen was empty, no drilling crews just come off their shift enjoying steak and frites. No hubbub of conversation, no clanging of cutlery, no music.
No Therese.
She looked down at Pinky Ponk in her hands. She always brought the toy out on a foraging mission. It gave her luck. She’d secured the canteen three days ago, and in that time there had been no incursions. But the supplies were running low, even though she’d been eking them out as best she could. Power systems were on minimal, the canteen—the entire colony—dark but for emergency strip-lights. The big freezers had failed and the food spoiled, though the smaller refrigerators were still working.
With a churning gut, Merrilyn knew that soon she was going to have to venture out of the safety of the canteen and her little hideaway in the store cupboard, not just for food but to get to the comms center and send out an SOS. The next supply vessel wasn’t due for a month. She would not last that long, and not just through lack of food.
Merrilyn turned back to the window. The last time she’d been here she’d been watching that ship leave, with Therese. Now she was alone, scanning the storm-ravaged sky for a sign of a vessel, someone coming to help. Surely by now someone must have noticed that there had been no contact from LV-187.
Surely help was on its way, even without a formal distress call.
* * *
The worst thing was the silence.
Well, not the worst thing, obviously, but after the colony had been so alive with people, so full of noise and chatter and the clanking of the wells and the music and laughter—because the French could make any place vibrant and vital, even such a cold, barren rock as this—the quiet gloom was eerie. Conducive to nightmares, both sleeping and waking.
More than once Merrilyn had stopped dead, certain she’d heard a skittering or scrabbling of claws above or below her, and she’d stood statue-still for long seconds, stretching into minutes, until she was sure the sound had either been in her imagination, or the source of it had moved on.
She didn’t know still what put her in danger. Sound? Movement? Scent? Just the act of being alive, and therefore in danger of being dead? Once, while rifling through the kitchens, she’d simultaneously thought she heard something in the roof space above and dropped a big Le Creuset pot, which smashed to the tiles and sent a reverberating, discordant note echoing around the space. Yet nothing came for her. So, she had started to risk making a little bit of noise, specifically by using one of the big video screens in the canteen to access the security camera feeds.
It took a lot of juice and she didn’t know when it would run out for good. But she told herself that it was necessary, to keep a close eye on the rest of the colony’s hub. Most of the time she saw nothing. Sometimes there’d be a darting shadow or a swift movement too fast for the eye to catch, and when she’d swept the remaining working cameras, she often scrolled back to watch some archive footage.
Which, she knew, was the real reason she was sitting there now, eating from a can of cold soup, surprised still at the time-stamp on the shot of an empty corridor. It was dated just seven days earlier. Was that all it had been? It felt like a lifetime.
The footage wasn’t empty for long. A figure moved into the shot, and the camera started tracking. Small, swaddled in a big coat and woolly hat. As the camera swiveled to follow the figure—who had absolutely no right to be in this service corridor on the east flank of the colony—something else came into view in the bottom left corner.
Merrilyn could only think of it as an egg, but this was soft and pliable, pulsating almost imperceptibly, as if it was breathing through the vaguely obscene puckered opening on its top.
There was a sound coming from the figure as it moved inexorably toward the egg, which was about the height of an adult’s waist. A tuneless, high-pitched singing. An old tune that was imprinted on Merrilyn’s cortex, the mother of all earworms. “Joe Le Taxi.” She’d always found it hilarious how Therese had sung the song, got her to stand up on the table in the canteen once and perform it to the raucous cheers and roaring applause of the drillers joyfully drunk on pastis.
Now it turned her stomach and chilled her heart. “Joe Le Taxi.” Prelude to apocalypse. The song cut off as Therese, on the screen, stopped dead, suddenly seeing the egg thing for the first time. She pulled off her hat as though to see it better, frowning as she peered at it.
“Hello,” she said clearly on the tape. “What are you? Are you lost?”
Merrilyn’s chest fluttered. So caring, that girl. So thoughtful. She knew what was coming next, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away as Therese dropped her hat on to the floor and walked cautiously over to the egg.
“Don’t do it, Little Flower,” Merrilyn whispered again, as if she could reach back in time through the video screen by some act of magic, and alter the course of events, like when she used to pile rocks in the stream near her home on the hillside of Ramatuelle and divert the flow of the water. But time was not water. It could not be dammed or diverted, stopped or frozen or boiled. It simply went on, and left in its wake things that could never be changed.
On the screen, Therese was standing by the egg, almost as tall as her. She was concentrating hard, Merrilyn knew, trying to work out if she knew what this thing was. She was pulling her thinking face, with her eyes screwed up and her tongue stuck out and her top teeth exposed like a rabbit. You can sometimes be very ugly for a pretty girl, Merrilyn used to say to her, which always made her laugh.
She found she was gripping her seat as the puckered lips of the egg started to quiver and open when Therese leaned in for a closer look, her face illuminated by the faintest of sickly, pallid glows emerging from inside the object.
There was a frozen moment then, Therese looking into the egg with a curious, perplexed expression, and the egg—pod?—seeming to shiver slightly.
Then it happened.
And Merrilyn killed the feed.
* * *
After that, things had happened pretty quickly. The first day, people started to be reported absent from their stations or not returning to their quarters after their shifts. Just two or three at first, then more and more over the next two days, an exponential growth until the missing started to outnumber those left. And then…
Hell was visited upon LV-187.
By accident or design, the comms tower seemed to be the source of a major… infestation, Merrilyn supposed was the right word. She didn’t know if a m’aidez call had been put out. Even if it had been, a week may have been too little time to expect help. If an SOS hadn’t been sent… then it was a long time until the next supply run. LV-187 was quite literally off anyone’s radar. So long as it continued producing oil, no one gave them much thought. Maybe when the ICSC didn’t get their next shipment of black gold as expected, they might investigate.
She was certain she wouldn’t survive that long.
Merrilyn went back into the kitchens to get some bottled water for her inner sanctum and to use the toilet. She sat down in the end stall, listening for any tell-tale scratching in the spaces above and below. There was nothing, but she frowned. She couldn’t see anything or hear anything, or smell anything. Early on they’d discovered that while the things could be hurt, even in death they were deadly, with acrid, violent blood that stank and burned through anything and everything
Something hovered on the periphery of her non-physical senses. As though she wasn’t alone in the bathroom stall. It had to be her imagination. She’d bolted the door to the bathroom, and all the ceiling and floor panels were intact. She’d done a sweep of all the other stalls.
There was nothing—
Outside the stall, one of the bottles of water slapped to the tiled floor and rolled across the gap of the open door. She jumped, then leapt up, dragging up her fatigues, and was just about to pull the serrated kitchen knife from her belt when something closed around her ankle, and she screamed.
* * *
“Little Flower!” Merrilyn said sternly. “How many times have I told you not to go wandering on your own! I thought we were beyond this by now.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.” Therese held her hands behind her back, staring at her feet and the floor of the canteen. “I woke up and I didn’t know where you were and I wanted Pinky Ponk.”
Merrilyn sighed and handed over the toy. “I suppose you thought it was funny, sneaking your hand under the bathroom stall and grabbing me like that?” Therese smiled her little girl smile, the one that melted everyone’s heart.
“Did you think it was a—”
“Hush.” Merrilyn marveled at the child’s ability to take all this… this horror in her stride. The adaptability of the young never failed to astound her. Therese had blindly accepted Merrilyn’s instructions that they had to leave their comfortable—by LV-187 standards—quarters and now had to sleep in a nest of blankets inside a storeroom just off the canteen. The girl was basically programmed to trust her mother, which made Merrilyn’s insides turn to water. How long could she protect her? What would happen to her if Merrilyn was taken?
“Yes, Little Flower?”
“I had a dream. About the egg.”
Merrilyn grunted noncommittally and started to stack the water bottles in a plastic carry-box. She didn’t like the girl dwelling on that too much.
“Mama, if I hadn’t found the egg, would everyone else still be here?”
Therese was learning guilt. Merrilyn didn’t want that to happen. She wanted her daughter to realize that actions had consequences, but not to have regrets. It was true that the service corridor into which Therese had wandered was pretty much unused most of the time, and if she hadn’t found the egg, then reported it to Merrilyn who sent a maintenance team to investigate… well, things might perhaps have been different. But only if that egg had been the only one on the colony.
As it turned out, it wasn’t. It was just the one that had been found first. What had happened on LV-187 was inevitable.
“Therese, don’t think like that.” Merrilyn squatted down in front of her. “You did exactly the right thing by coming to your mama about the egg. You were very clever and very brave, and that’s why you’re still here with your mama today. OK? Now what shall we have for dinner?”
“Trout!”
“No trout.”
“Steak!”
“Ham!”
“No ham.”
Therese smiled slyly. “Elephant!”
It was a game they played every mealtime, with Therese finishing off with whatever exotic or extinct Earth creature she could think of. Merrilyn said, “Elephant it is.”
“You mean canned beans again, don’t you?” Therese giggled.
“I do,” Merrilyn replied. “Now you go and stand by the big window while I get our canned elephant and some more gas for the cooker. I’ll be two minutes. Have some water.”
She hadn’t even got to the swinging kitchen doors when Therese called her frantically. Merrilyn had the knife drawn from her belt before she had spun round, but it wasn’t her worst fear. Instead, Therese was jumping up and down and pointing out of the observation window, shouting.
“Mama! Mama! Mama!”
Merrilyn joined her and peered through the clouds, thick with rain and marbled with lightning. Then she saw what Therese’s keen eyes had already discerned, breaking through the storm.
“It’s a ship, Mama!”
Merrilyn felt the strength sap out of her, as though she was suddenly as weak and pliable as Pinky Ponk. Therese was right.
It was a ship.