Arrival: Chapter 16

  “I’m not happy.” Asari flatly told Wiremu as scientists and technicians went back and forth in front of them. 

  “No kidding…” the original captain responded ironically.  “I’ll tell you what Asari, why don’t you just think of the other shuttle as being rolled into our expected ten percent failure rate?”  He nodded to Blair as she floated past him, towing an armload of equipment behind her in a net as she swam through the micro gravity.

  “I’m sorry Asari, one second.  Blair what did your analysis of that insect turn up?”

  “Well,” the woman responded, “it does have a poisonous stinger.  It would hurt like hell if it stung one of us but it certainly wouldn’t be fatal or anything, not from any biochemical mechanism I could discern.”  She had wisely tied up her long curly black hair since she’d be dealing with micro gravity today and presumably didn’t want it floating all around her head.  “You prioritized the insect though, so they’re only now getting started on the other creature you brought up.”

  “Good.   And the atmosphere samples I brought back good?”  The woman pointed to a man named Nekheny as he approached before moving on herself.

  “Yessiree, the atmosphere’s clean as far as I can tell,” the man reported, “I couldn’t find any compounds, microbes, or viruses in the samples you brought back that look like they could be hazardous to humans.  We’re good to go!”  He didn’t seem to be making any effort to conceal his excitement.

  “Thank you,” Wiremu acknowledged.  The man nodded and continued on his way into the shuttle.  Wiremu looked back at Asari to find him positively scowling.  “Come on Asari, wouldn’t it make you happier to just pretend they’re all dead?  That they just died on entry?  The effect would seem to be pretty much the same; I mean they haven’t made any attempts to secure any more mission property.  So far their little rebellion has only cost us one shuttle.  That, in and of itself is an acceptable loss by the mission protocols, especially since we still have the full complement of landers.”

  “That’s not good enough!!” Asari answered quietly but severely.  His eyes darted around to see who could have heard his muted outburst.  “They, they deserve…”

  “Punishment?” In-Su asked, having overheard.

  Asari looked at the simulation of a middle aged East Asian man with contempt, but again it was muted.  He was clearly making an effort to show deference and subdue the obvious rage roiling under the surface.  “…no.”   He answered simply and unconvincingly.

  “They seem to have deliberately landed well away from our chosen colony site and they seem to have stolen as little equipment as possible to pull it off,” Neil offered.  “They could have completely fucked us, but they didn’t.  For now I’m afraid, we need to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

  “I know it’s not what anyone had in mind, but we did plan to eventually set up a second colony site once we were able to,” Sadhika added.  “This certainly accelerates that.”

  As Armina passed by with the laser rifle and four shotguns she’d been asked to bring on account of the scary looking jungle beasts the sims had run into, her and Neil exchanged knowing smiles, but this time Sadhika missed it.  Returning his attention to the situation at hand, Neil could feel the oppressing tension.  To break the awkward impasse, as he floated past them towards the shuttle airlock, he asked one of the crew: “have they finished inspecting the heat shield Nekheny?”

  “Yes,” he answered, “they just finished.  They say it’s still flawless and that we’ll be able to make several more descents before it’ll need to be fully resurfaced, though it may need some spot fixes along the way.  Nothing yet from your one trip down though.”

  “And the fuel?” Wiremu asked while they were on the topic.

  “They’ve finished purging all of the tanks and…” someone passing by handed him an opened scroll and he looked at it for a few moments.  His left eye winced a few times as he issued thought commands to navigate through the information on the screen.  “We’ve just finished loading all of our cargo and equipment.  We’re good to go.”

   “Thank you” Wiremu answered with a gesture towards the airlock, “go on ahead and we’ll join you in a few minutes.”  

  For several moments the four simulants floated alone in taciturnity with the matriarch and patriarch.  It was Wiremu who finally broke the deafening silence again.

  “Asari… do you understand that I am only refusing an attack because it would only put the mission at further risk than this incident already has?  I understand that you feel personally slighted and that you burn to respond.  Believe me, I really do get that… but in a command position you’ve got to be able to put the welfare and success of the mission over and above your personal feelings… you’ve seemed up to that so far and I believe you still are.”  Only his certainty was a lie; unfortunately he found the patriarch’s ability to keep his head only probable.  “I’m not going to suggest that we replace you, but I do think I should ask if you’d like to volunteer for a… for a temporary vacation from your command responsibilities.”

  Asari looked up at him with what could only be described as a hurt expression on his face at the suggestion that he might be incapable of carrying out his duties or would in any way shy away from them.  

  “Don’t worry,” Sadhika reassured him, “we can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done in getting us to this point already.  He’s just offering you an out in case you wanted it but didn’t feel like you had a right to ask.”

  “Thank you… but no.”  Asari’s expression actually seemed to lighten somewhat at their apparent deference and appreciation of the impossibility of his situation.  “No, I appreciate the offer, but I am still perfectly capable of performing my duties, so I feel honour-bound to continue with them.”  He took a deep breath, and let out a long sigh.   “Okay… we’ll do it your way.”  He extended his hand and Wiremu shook it.   Shaking hands as a greeting had fallen out of fashion well before they even left Earth, but honourable men and women sometimes still employed it to seal an informal but serious agreement.

   

  The four sims pushed and pulled their way past all of their passengers and towards the flight deck of the shuttle, but then looked back through the hatchway.  They saw the twenty eager scientists looking back at them.  Each and every one of them seemed so magically eager to fulfill the singular purpose of their entire existence.

  “Now you all behave or we’ll turn this thing right around, you hear me?!” Neil yelled with feigned anger.  The crew in the back laughed nervously, but they seemed happy to have their presence more personally acknowledged by one of the famous figures.

  With a thought, Wiremu closed the hatch to the rear section and started making his way to his seat.  He paused before proceeding though, and returned to the hatch and re-opened it.   The other three paused strapping themselves in as they watched him and wondered what he was up to.  Although there was seating for forty in the rear compartment, since this was their first landing of human personnel, as a precaution as well as just to make initial exploration more manageable, only a twenty person team had been assembled for this particular phase of the mission.

  “I want to acknowledge that you have all had something robbed from you…” he announced in address to all of the humans, “and for that I want to apologize.  In the original mission profile… you were all to be the first humans to ever set foot upon Haven.  I know that for most of you, the pure thrill of going down to a planet for the first time ever in your lives will be exciting enough, but… still.   It’s not fair what’s happened.  I wanted to acknowledge that and… well, apologize for it I guess.

  “Even so though, it’s a big day isn’t it?” he asked them.  They all nodded and murmured their excited agreement.  “I can’t imagine what it must be like for you… to have lived your whole lives on a small ship, and now about to go down to a planet for the very first time…  We,” he said as he gestured to himself and the other sims, “from our perspective we went to sleep after a life time on and around Earth, and only recently woke up here in orbit around Haven.  To us it’s just another planet but, but to you well… well, to you it’s the planet.”

  “Earth who?” Huli called out loudly from the crowd.  The other sims and the rest of the crew broke out laughing, and Wiremu pointed to him with a smile which acknowledged his sentiment and the spirit with which he’d articulated it.

  “Quiet right,” Wiremu offered, “alright, let’s get the hell out of here then,” he said as he closed the hatch, returned to his seat, and strapped himself in.  After conferring with Aset at mission control on the mothership’s bridge, he undocked the shuttle and began his descent sequence.

   

  Before the shuttle initiated its primary deceleration burn to fell itself from the sky, Sadhika had Wiremu wait as she put a communication request through to Halley’s Personal Area Network.  After a few moments without any response, with some quick thought commands Sadhika forced a line open so that whoever was on the other end would hear what she had to say whether they liked it or not.  As she did so, from the first seat to her left Wiremu opened up the satellite imagery of the second site, and brought it up on the heads up display which encompassed the whole interior of the main window out the front of the shuttle.   All four sims could see a group of people milling around the shuttle, and the way their behaviour changed to a frenzied attentiveness and moving about once Sadhika began speaking.

  “Halley…” she said thoughtfully, “It doesn’t have to be this way… you can still come home.   We only have the First Descent Module at the other site and yours is as good as ours… we could come down to your site instead right now.  We could still work together to build our first colony.  We could keep this crew together Halley, we could avoid anything else bad happening… we could put this family back together, the way it was always meant to be…”  There was no response, and everyone listened very intently to the lack of sound.

  “I recognize and… deeply appreciate the care that you’ve obviously taken to minimize your damage to the mission’s ultimate success.  A second site makes a lot of sense in terms of overall mission survivability… hell, that possibility is in part why we made everything in duplicate in the first place!”  

  She paused.   The futility of her efforts were becoming apparent to her.  “Halley we may even be able to negotiate sending you some of the industrial drones… but dammit, you have to talk to us!  We have to be in contact!  The silence, the mistrust, the, the ambiguity of your intentions, these are the things putting the mission at risk now!”

  Silence.

  “Dammit Halley I order you to respond right now!!”  She could be a kind, sweet, and warm woman, but she was also a shark.   Her progenitor had been the woman who had singlehandedly built Brahma Biotech, the largest and most successful biotechnology company on Earth at the time of their launch.  It was her profits from this original venture which had been the primary financing for the New Horizon mission in the first place.

  Silence.   

  The artificial woman sighed heavily, and with a not insignificant sense of defeat she closed the channel.  “Okay Wii… take us down.”