Blight

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

No, wait – the exact phrasing on the Alien poster cheekily displayed in the Exobiology Lab was, “In space no one can hear you scream”. Which of course is highly contextual, since you obviously needed air to be able to scream, and anyone sharing your airspace would hear that scream. Then there were electronic communications systems. In this case, the communications system that had broadcast Hannah Sudha’s scream to the dozens of crewmembers in the Lander Command Module and hundreds more watching from the ship orbiting above. All of this tumbled through her mind in a wave of mortification.

When Safety Officer Atieno’s voice responded over the com, riffles of laughter were clearly audible in the background. “Yeah, that was an Azure Hopper, Sudha. Not dangerous.”

“I know,” she responded tersely. Adding, “It startled me.” Quite unnecessarily, as everyone had seen the waist-high feathered creature leap out from the lacefrond thicket over the video feed. Heard her scream just as they saw that endearing face, with wide mouth full of translucent tooth nubbins and tiny eyes, then watched it bound away.

“Startled me, too.” Sean said, attempting to pat her shoulder reassuringly. This became more of an annoyingly aggressive thumping to reach her through her oversized spacesuit. Finally wearing a spacesuit on an actual alien planet and she was waddling like a clown in one two sizes too big thanks to the need to accommodate her pregnant belly. Sean jumped ahead of her, pointing at a rising fleck standing out red in front of the yellow-green weeping chime trees. “Oh, there’s a flutterer – let’s see if we can net it!”

She reached back for the stout net handle on her magnapack, flicking it briskly out over her shoulder to extend the rod and pop the net open before her in one smooth motion. Now where was that flutterer?

She searched against the turquoise sky. From movies, she knew this was a slightly greener hue than the skies of Earth. That the sharp white ridges looming over this plain spoke of a younger landscape, early in the process of yielding to the soft but relentless forces of wind, rain, and gravity, yet to be colonized by plants hardy enough to sustain themselves on those bare surfaces. A grey-green band along their bases showed the rising tide of plants crawling upwards through generations’ work of wearing rock to soil. The Magellan was up above that turquoise sky, similarly engaged in the multigenerational work of colonizing a new homeland. Just faster.

Hopefully.

Here on the plain left by a receding sea, the fern-like lacefronds were the current era’s evolutionary front runners. This class of plants dominated the vegetated patches of the plains in variations from ankle-high olive webby tufts to a type with a core of huge single-stemmed lacy leaves surrounded by a halo of agave-like spikes that grew to shoulder height. The botanists were working to sort them into species on a phylogenetic tree with manic intensity, well aware that most of the botanist who had taught them had died without ever having had such an opportunity.

Hannah’s interest in botany extended primarily to sticking to the avenues of gray-green mosses between the thickets to avoid any chance of compromising her suit against leaves of one of the sharper lacefrond species. The soils and plants here were very high in silica, a substance lending itself well to producing knife-like leaf edges. And weeping chime trees.

These were “trees” by virtue of being the tallest species they had documented on this island continent, at about 9 meters high. But instead of wood, they had green hollow jointed stems like bamboo and sprays of thin dangling branches. At the end of each of these a translucent yellow tube made of a something like strong glass hung on a flexible stem. With every breeze a mad tinkling cacophony swelled through the chime tree stands.

She could hear them now, in the strange duality of muffled sound transmitted naturally through the helmet forming a cottony layer under the clearer version relayed through the speakers. She loved the sound of those trees. Once they were through this long safety testing phase, it was going to be amazing to take off the helmets and hear the trees, breathe this air, for real.

There it was - the flutterer! A creature as strangely simple as the jellyfish. Or more like the little transparent “purple sails” found washed up on beaches on Earth, flutterers being a tiny paper thin disc with enough of a nervous system in the thickened central ridge to ‘fly’ in the gusts and updrafts and carry out all of the functions of a living being. But enough of a nervous system to fit into Earth expats’ definition of an animal rather than a plant? Did they take in carbon through ingestion or photosynthesis? That all remained to be seen. Entirely new classifications may prove necessary here.

She tracked the flutterer’s erratic movement carefully, adjusting left then right as she jogged forward into denser and denser low lacefronds. She was holding the net high and tensing to jump when it happened.

A hard impact on her right side then harder impact on her left as she hit the ground. A blur of glassy fangs against yellow and green stripes that abruptly jerked and fell away.

There were too many people yelling at once. She tapped twice by her ear to filter out all but short local as she rose to her feet. Sean was there helping to steady her, as his voice cut through. “-all right, Hannah?” She assured him she was fine with a growing sense of dread, glimpsing first the pellet gun in his hand, then the creature lying before them.

It was an Imňa Kyuktuk. A formidable creature, it had been named with more reverence than most. The name was drawn from the northern Alaska Inupiat language, meaning fox, in a remote place. Fox-like in its long, thin limbs – front legs nearly as tall as her own, back legs a little shorter. Its slender body and long narrow head tapering from triangular ears might also remind one vaguely of a fox. The short feathery scales sporting the green and yellow striping, whip-like tail, mouth full of nearly clear fangs under wide dark eye slits wrapping from the sides of its head to nearly meet in the front…. Decidedly unfoxlike.

And now those unfoxlike eyes were opening, swinging towards them. The Imňa Kyuktuk furled up onto its feet and leapt into the dense vegetation before they knew what was happening. Hannah caught a glimpse of red on its left side before it vanished. Blood stained the mosses and low webby lacefronds where it had fallen.

The voice of Ground Operations Lead Cuevas erupted in her helmet – she had overridden Hannah’s comm settings. “Get after it!! Do NOT let it escape wounded!”

They did so, with Sean taking off after it into the thicket while Hannah ran out and around the left edge in case it broke out into the mossy plain. She had her own pellet gun in her right hand now, and the net in her left, attesting to some far-fetched hope of being able to capture it alive, and of this undersized net proving at all useful in such a scenario. She tried to stay ahead of Sean, whose location was easily tracked by the jingling of chimes as he crashed through the stand. But her stamina wasn’t what it was pre-pregnancy, and she was soon panting and trotting, then walking. Sean emerged ahead of her, shaking his head.

“Yeah, sorry, it’s long gone now” he reported. He was breathing heavily himself.

There was a long pause before Cuevas snapped, “All right, return to Base.”

As they trudged back, Hannah switched her WideConvo feed on. Predictably, text scrolled so rapidly in the left side of her field of view she could catch only parts of each message.

-complete lack of discipline-

-expect when you send a man with his PREGNANT partner?? Inevitable –

-not be a bad idea for predators to learn to fear-

-neurologists need to work out tranquilizers for this sp. ASAP-

-not fair to judge from a lounge chair 1000 km up-

-sad but frankly one less Remote Fox isn’t going to-

She switched it off. She could generate enough to worry about on her own. When she finally entered the outer lock she worked through the protocols distracted – unclipping a collection vial to transfer the flutterer into a containment tube on the wall before remembering that she hadn’t captured it. She forced herself to focus and stand perfectly still in wide Vitruvian Man pose while the scanners inspected her suit for points of compromise, breathing a sigh of relief at the reassuring hiss of the decontamination sprayers activating. She hadn’t even realized how worried she was that her suit had been ripped or cracked.

The debriefing didn’t go as badly as she was anticipating. Atieno was certainly in more trouble than they were. He reiterated what they all knew about the high silica content in both plants and animals complicating the calibration of scanners to detect approaching animals. Cuevas pointed out that a team being surprised twice in ten minutes by creatures that should have been well within detection parameters suggested that recent adjustments had worsened rather than improved the system’s effectiveness. Although chagrined, Atieno was quick to agree and sincerely apologetic.

The main message Cuevas had for Sean and Hannah was that she wanted the Imňa Kyuktuk. Capture of a live Remote Fox wasn’t scheduled as a mission for at least a month out, when the exobiologists estimated they would be ready with a holding area and collection of potentially suitable prey. Now with one injured, they were racing to prep an area to bring it in to study and hopefully help it to recover. Or they would capitalize on the chance to study one dead.

Sean and Hannah protested that being shot with a 4mm wide pellet was a mere warning to an animal the size of an Imňa Kyuktuk. Surely no one expected it to be killed by such a wound? Cuevas’s maddening reply was simply that Akers and Nguyen were out there now, methodically following the blood trail. If they had no luck, Hannah and Sean would resume the search at dawn.

Back at their quarters, Liam awaited them with kisses, a hot meal, cold beers, and an openness to allowing the conversation to go in whatever direction they needed it to go. He listened with rapt attention to a recap of what had happened, but allowed them to drop the topic and shifted to answering polite inquiries on his own work on the possible nutritional value of various plants, then shifted to his favorite topic of prepping for the impending arrival of baby Stella. They played a few rounds of Queen of Hearts before turning in early. As was often the case lately, Hannah opted for the glorious comfort of a bed of her own in the nursery and spared the fellows from the tossing and turning of a perpetually uncomfortable bed partner in the main bedroom. They all thought of it as banking good sleep before the baby came, as if these hours could be drawn upon for fortification months from now.

****

There was a movie she watched as a child – she couldn’t even remember the name - just that it was about a girl with a horse. What absolutely captivated her was a bit where the girl first met the horse and an old man showed her how to feed it little bits of carrot on a perfectly flat hand. The horse’s smooth brown fur graded into black and whiskery around its mouth and enormous nostrils and young Hannah had shrunk back and emitted a heartfelt “Eeewwww!” at the notion of letting that thing touch your hand. But as the camera zoomed way in on the horse’s mouth with lips working in complicated ways to pick up the carrots, the girl laughed at how the whiskers tickled then gasped at how soft and velvety it felt and you could see that now – how amazingly soft the horse’s snout must feel under the girl’s hand as she petted it. For the longest time she thought about how it would feel to touch a horse’s velvety snout. Feel the rumble and powerful huff of breath when it snorted.

For some reason her mind drifted back to that again as she fell asleep. She drifted seamlessly into a dream of Stella, a pre-schooler with long brown hair and dark eyes, stroking the feathery sides of an Azure Hopper and giggling as its fat lips plucked carrots from her hand. Stella’s hair blew in a gust of wind and her giggling rose and blended with the chimes ringing on the trees all around.

She and Sean were back out before dawn. Akers and Nguyen had failed to find the Imňa Kyuktu, so today they would pick up the hunt from the point that team had marked as the furthest they had found sign. They were better equipped this time, with sturdy noose poles and a net gun.

Sean focused on navigating toward the glowing green dot on his GPS, so Hannah was charged with observing their surroundings and guiding them through the most open vegetation until they got close. She loved it out here before sunrise.

At night, the chimes littering the ground glowed from within. When they fell, they were quickly occupied by Glowbugs. Tiny creatures with armored and legged front ends like Earth’s pillbugs, but the exoskeleton tapered to a point and dove down behind the head to become an internal spine in the legless tail. If you held the capsule-sized creature close to your eye in the dark, you could just make out the shadowy shapes of the little jointed segments within the glowing flesh of the rear. She grinned at glimpses of the natural glowsticks on the ground as they walked.

As planned, they reached the waypoint as the sky was beginning to lighten. Their blue lights helped pick out a drop of blood on a leaf and a bent frond on the edge of a mossy opening. The Imňa Kyuktu would most likely want to stay in its preferred habitat of taller vegetation, so they concentrated on scanning along the edge of the chime tree stand right across this gap until Hannah’s light caught a smear of blood on broken fronds.

It felt heavy-handed, but Sean led with a laseredge machete, pausing to confirm sign then slashing vegetation out of the way in hopes of gaining on it. Twilight was rapidly ceded to full day when they found it.

Imňa Kyuktu, Remote Fox, cold, still heap of feathered scales.

“Well, shit,” mumbled Sean.

Hannah was not in a state to comment. She focused on the task at hand, efficiently holstering her blue light, collapsing her noose pole, swinging her pack to the ground and unfurling the collection bag. She snapped photos from all angles while Sean let Cuevas know what they had found and logged the location. They smoothed the bag flat next to the animal. Sean gripped the front legs while she gripped the rear, but just as they were going to swing it over onto the plastic Sean hesitated.

“Hannah!” he snapped, as she tried to hoist her end. “Hey! Hannah, hold up! Why is it so decayed?”

He had a point. With the legs up they could see the left side where the pellet had hit, and the wound had spread to be unexpectedly wide and deep. There were patches of bare flesh scattered across the entire side, with clumps of feathery scales left on the ground. Its whole body seemed shrunken within its shell somehow.

“I don’t know, maybe that’s just how it works here?” Even as she said it, she realized the extent of her ignorance. It wasn’t like she had been afforded the opportunity to watch an animal rot. “I mean, how fast do animals decay anywhere?”

“Huh. Yeah, I’m not sure,” he admitted. “It just seems… awfully fast.” Then, “But look - should the plants under it be dead, too?” Sure enough, there was a black mat of now unidentifiable vegetation under the feathery clumps where they had rolled the animal away. They exchanged a puzzled look then went ahead and hoisted it together into the bag. While Sean zipped it up and activated the vacuum sealer, Hannah examined the ground where it had lain.

A black oval marked where the core of the body had been. She snipped some plant samples into a collection tube while Sean took photos. After a moment’s reflection, she clipped some healthy plant samples from a few feet away into another tube, then took a soil knife and dug a sample of the nearby healthy mossy plants with roots intact. The exobiologists could run some tests to see how these plants reacted to Imňa Kyuktu blood.

***

As they arrived for the next day’s shift, Cuevas gave them the news. Akers and Nguyen had stopped by the site where the Remote Fox fell. She brought up the images: they showed blackened vegetation in a circle 3 meters across.

“How is this possible?” Sean sputtered.

“Hang on. Could this be just the normal decay process here?” asked Hannah.

Cuevas responded, “Lernmark’s lab has found that the Remote Fox’s blood and tissues do indeed have a rapidly toxic effect on all vegetation tested. Samples from the various hoppers we’ve collected does not. Aerial surveys have never picked up a dead spot like this before. We are treating this as a breach.”

Sean leaned slowly forward, forehead resting on his palms. “It was the pellet. The pellet wasn’t sanitized properly, was it?”

Hannah rested a hand on Sean’s back as Cuevas answered, “We’ve reviewed procedures and that appears to be the case.”

Sean groaned. “FuckfuckfuckfuckFUCK! Who the fuck-”

Cuevas continued evenly over him. “Containment panels are being printed now. They will extend 2 meters above ground and 1 meter below. Solid sealant is being applied over the affected area. You’ll be joining the installation crew once that has cooled sufficiently. Gives you maybe an hour to review trencher operation if that’s how Nguyen wants to assign you. Check in with him in the equipment bay.”

Hannah and Sean made their way to the bay in silence. They both knew that Sean should logically have been assigned lead of the containment hasty team, not Nguyen. But Cuevas had enough latitude in that choice that it might or might not indicate Sean was being held to blame for what had happened.

***

At the site, the seal looked like a pool of thick red wax about 6 meters across, and the containment area would be a 20-meter diameter circle. They had 4 of their 2-person Initial Field Ops crews working together to operate the laser trencher and install the heavy plastic barrier sheets, but the day was still long and difficult. It was particularly exhausting to maintain the constant discipline to avoid stepping even slightly outside of the perimeter while using hand tools to cut and rake vegetation inward all along the line ahead of the trencher, and while struggling to drop the heavy sheets into place and slot them together. Hannah held a constant mental picture of her boots as dripping with toxic bacteria to make it instinctual to keep it within the perimeter.

There was some chatter among the workers over the short local, but the portion directed at Sean and Hannah extended to the bare minimum to get the work done. They both became increasingly foul tempered as the day wore on. Half of what Sean grumbled over their private frequency suggested that he was reacting out loud to following the traffic on WideConvo as he worked. She reminded him of what a terrible idea this was for both work focus and mental health, then finally switched their link off.

At the end of the day the final step was to proceed single file through the mobile scrub and UV stations at the last gap left in the perimeter barrier. Hannah was the last one through, and as she worked with Sean to wrestle the last panel into place behind her, she found herself feeling guilty about walling the decontamination equipment inside. How silly – to worry about mere tools left behind.

***

The first breach was a week later.

The mood was already bleak as realization dawned that Earth expats were incompatible with life on this planet. The infection was caused by an absurdly common Earth bacteria – they could never eradicate it to integrate with life here. Some expressed gratitude that that truth had been exposed before they wasted more time here. Analyses of the largest moon of the ringed gas giant planet in this very solar system were finding conditions more and more promising.

There had been no official announcement, but surface missions had been halted, and work had shifted to operation of drones equipped with cameras and collection equipment.

Hannah’s drone spotted it first – black spilling out beyond the perimeter of the barrier, oozing in a long band down the valley slope. Nobody knew who had stepped outside. If anyone had stepped outside at all. For all they knew the infection could pass between or under the panels. A flutterer could alight inside then carry the infection out with it. Who knew?

A new seal was applied. A hasty team expanded the perimeter, pulling up the segments that would become superfluous and field decontaminating them to reuse on the expanded edge.

***

Three weeks later the predictable announcement had been made and they were in full decommissioning mode, all hands devoted primarily to dismantling an entire field station back into pods to be shuttled back to the ship. Nguyen skipped his lunch break to run the drone check that found the second breach.

The briefing room was packed but quiet as everyone available assembled to review the footage. The dead zone was massive. It was like the valley was blotting paper sucking the ink out of the containment area. A chime tree stand was collapsing into a tangle of mottled green and black broken stems over jackstrawed pipes and high mounds of decaying lacefronds.

No one was truly surprised when Cuevas informed them that they simply did not have the capacity to attempt another containment. But after an hour of debate an outraged crew convinced her of a plan – an attempt to do SOMETHING – to contain the damage they had caused.

The affected area would be cauterized. The outer perimeter would further be covered with a ring of sealant 20 meters wide. That was the best they could do. If they failed, the only hope was that the infection would be contained to this island continent, and the hundreds of others would be spared.

***

Stella was born as the cleansing fires burned and the first run of shuttles lifted into the sky. She had deep brown eyes, a dusting of black hair, and a fierce wail.

“Little Banshee,” Liam chided as he finished patting her dry and laid her back against Hannah’s skin.

Sean looked at her half wrapped in her little yellow blanket, touching a perfect tiny ear. “No, Little Glowbug.”