Outpost Page 2

  After a long while, Saphare finally stepped away from the hole. He turned towards Dece, ready to drive back to the Base before the monsters erupted. Saphare believed in caution at all times. He always tried to work out where a disaster could occur. That’s what was so unfair.

  He smiled at Dece briefly, and then both of them felt the ground shift. Saphare’s smile disappeared.

  Nobody believed the monsters were ghosts; Seps didn’t really believe they were monsters. Everybody knew that everything depended on Ord’s rotations. Whenever Ord turned towards the immense Cotal, things happened. Deep inside Ord, solid rock shivered, as if terrified. This reaction heated the rock and melted the deep ice. Saphare was convinced there would be life in that water. As Cotal moved over the Dreaming Sea, the rock ground together. The hot water became steam, and rushed to the surface. As it thundered through Ord, the steam turned into vapour and icy particles, and that was what caused the ice geysers, Seps’ monsters, that leapt towards Cotal.

  That was why Saphare worked outside while Cotal was on the other side of Ord: everybody knew things were quiet when Ord’s Dreaming Sea was facing the stars. Every body knew, except Ord.

  Dece would see Saphare’s face always, not a look of fear, but of annoyance. As if he should have realised this would happen.

  A massive rock hurtled from the ridge behind Saphare as the ice geyser came up from under it. The geyser shot out at an angle and hit Saphare so hard that he disappeared. All of them searched after the geyser was gone, but there was nothing to see apart from a smear on a boulder.

  Boss said the geyser must have been cocked, ready to go. Cotal was on the other side of Ord, but it was still heating the rock deep down and that’s what must have fired the geyser. Boss said, ‘Now he may be orbiting Ord.’ For Dece that was a better thought, instead of the real image he was left with.

  Seps had looked into Dece’s eyes that day and for a while said nothing. But eventually she said, ‘They are monsters.’

  Cap just killed the electronic wall-picture of the geysers and Cotal in the Base and replaced it with a water scene from Home. As though to wipe away Ord and Saphare.

  Dece thought, I wish that geyser had pick–

  No! He shook his head violently.

  He had this.

  Dece watched the seven ice geysers leaping, climbing high to drift away. One of them looked like it was about to reach Cotal. Now Cotal had blocked his view of the stars and he watched the clouds ringing the planet roll past, grey, white, brown, yellow clouds and the red storm. The red storm had been twisting between the brown and yellow clouds that had been there ever since Dece and the others had arrived on Ord. At the heart of Cotal the atmospheric pressure grew in depth and turned hydrogen to liquid and metallic states, and that gave Cotal enough gravity to pull the clouds and Ord into its orbit. Dece looked at the rings’ shadows. The shadows made the rings look huge, and now they looked like a sliver, cutting Cotal in two …

  There was something in the rings.

  Dece had spotted it earlier, on the way to the Peak, but he’d forgotten about it because of having to deal with the boulder. It was a bump; probably caused by the storms from Cotal. And so what?

  4.

  The Peak

  DECE shrugged and pressed a button in the rock wall of the shelter. A hatch in the ground opened and he moved into the space below. The hatch closed behind him, the ground shivered a little under his boots, and Dece was lowered to a small bank of computers that flashed at him as soon as he arrived, almost in annoyance.

  All right, he thought, I am here. Shut up.

  But the flickering computers wouldn’t, so he ignored them. He knew where the trouble was; he opened a narrow service door, pulled a lever, and a large cylinder slid from the rocks above. On the cylinder sat a small disk that shouldn’t have been there. The disk should have closed once the work was finished and slid into the cylinder, but a small pebble had jammed between two of its wings. There was a micro-robot heaving at the pebble, like a bug pushing at a piece of dung, but it didn’t have the muscle to do the job.

  ‘Go away,’ Dece said.

  The tiny robot blinked a green spark, and scuttled away.

  Dece carefully took hold of the pebble and tugged gently. The pebble scraped away from the wings. Dece dropped it on the ground, tapped the wing and saw a small scar where the pebble had been, but that was it.

  ‘All right.’ Dece moved away.

  The microrobot returned. It cleaned and polished the wings before they folded.

  The disk slid into its cylinder and Dece sighed. He was just a sidekick for small robots. He pushed a button and the cylinder slid into place. The computers stopped flashing and began to run a pattern of twinkling lights. Dece didn’t know what the pattern meant – not even Cap understood that – but he knew what the computers were doing. They were using a sensor to measure the geysers. If the geysers were moderate they would send back the disk. The disk would open like a clam to listen and talk. It would deliver news, information and homework – no escape from that for him and Seps – from Home. It would gather anything from the family, and then it would scan Ord, Cotal, the other five moons and the sun for any change. Then the disk would turn to face the empty stars, finding the lone peep in the roar of the universe.

  The Peak screen flickered and the image of Cotal filled it. Dece had seen this sight many times before, but his neck tingled. The jagged point of the Peak and the shelter were set against Cotal’s rolling clouds and rings, like cold rock against the unbelievable. Cotal’s many coloured clouds were now Ord’s clouds.

  When Cotal slid away the stars would come back into view, the stars that had been visited by probes and ships, the stars where people lived – although there were not many inhabited stars: there was Home, two colonies in the solar system and three colonies on other stars, including Dur, the place where he and Seps were born. All these stars were on the other side of Cotal.

  Ord was not a colony. No, Ord was an outpost, a wild frontier. It sounded heroic.

  Until you got there.

  When Dece turned the disk back to the crowded planets the noise was deafening. One colony was busy threatening another with war over an iron mine, a racketeer was caught illegally running a planet, a freighter had broken down somewhere, someone was singing. But when Dece turned the disk towards the empty stars there was nothing.

  Oh, there were the novas, spinning stars, the hissing and boiling. But the disk was listening for someone faintly talking. And there was nothing.

  Saphare used to say, Somebody has been looking for something ever since a lonely creature climbed a giant fern and reached for a star.

  With their funny telescopes, people had tried to find a planet like their own, and they had begun to listen to the galaxy, and to other remote galaxies, and they’d left Home for other planets and moons. Always looking, but there was nothing. Not even bacteria, or a patch of moss.

  And Saphare had died looking for a bug on this lonely moon, but there was nothing in the rock, the ice, the geysers. There was no life on Ord.

  So now they spent their time doing petty jobs at the Ord Base. Like this: Seps read all about everything on the Base, including the Tug – as if Cap would ever allow her to fly it. And Boss kept monitoring Ord and the frontier stars as if she might see or hear something.

  But Cap was the problem. Seps reckoned Cap felt ignored, like he had been dumped on this dead moon for ever and didn’t really matter. So he stomped around, muttered like a volcano and picked on everyone, usually Dece.

  Dece’s helmet flicked on. ‘How’s it going?’ Cap said.

  Dece coughed. He hadn’t been thinking aloud, had he? ‘Ah, fine. It was a small pebble. I’m just checking.’

  ‘Good. Boss forced me to ask you.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘You know not to come back until Cotal sets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right.’ And the helmet flicked off.

  Dece moved slo
wly towards the computers and the fish.

  It wasn’t a real fish, but it looked like one as it floated in the air. It had a fat black square at one end and a tail at the other. There was a bigger fish at the Base. The black square always pointed towards Home. It didn’t matter if they were on the other side of the sun, if there was black cloud dust in the way, or if Ord was on the other side of Cotal – those fish were swimming Homewards.

  Once, Dece saw Home from the Ord Base. It was a big moment. Only Cap could picture what Home was like. Boss was born on Home like Cap was, but she couldn’t remember anything before she went to Dur, which was where she and Cap had met. Cap had promised to take them to Home but none of them – not even Seps – ever believed he would. But one time all of them were staring at the big screen and there was nothing in the way. Cap pressed the zoom button. Dece felt like the whole of Ord was hurtling through space, passing a giant star, a nova, a black hole sucking a solar system, a dead star, a normal star … And then they stopped. Cap said, ‘That’s it. We can’t zoom in any closer.’

  Dece remembered looking at a small planet, not much more than a drifting moon. But Cap had shaken his head.

  ‘No, not that one. See it? There. In front of the sun.’

  Dece could see something moving across the sun. A speck, a mite, but he was looking at Home. For a moment. Then a star blocked the planet and the sun. In the old days that planet was called something like Dirt or Sand, but now the colonists only ever called it Home.

  Most of them would never get there. It was too far away. But Dece had seen Home with his own eyes, and that was something.

  He waved the fish away and focused on the computers at the Peak. They seemed to have gone back to normal – the patterns of lights were slowing – but he still had to check. He passed his arm in front of one of the computers. It lit up and the three screens flickered. Two of them spoke in figures and codes, which he didn’t understand, but he understood the third screen. Now it was showing a part of Cotal and the type of gases there.

  Dece clicked his tongue and put his right claw at the screen and said, ‘Move down.’

  The screen slid over the turbid image of Cotal.

  Any minute now he could go back to the Base …

  The rings coasted into view.

  Ah, there was that thing in one of the rings. He had forgotten again. ‘Zoom out. Stop.’

  Yes, there was something, but it was about to go into shadow. ‘Ninety-eight, zoom on. Ninety-nine. Stop.’

  Dece swallowed and stared at the screen.

  The second ring was made up of all different-sized ice formations, but in that floating confusion something else was there. Something big. Bigger than any of the boulders of ice, bigger than the Tug, maybe bigger than the Base. But he could not see it properly through the mess of ice.

  He hesitated for a moment then clicked. ‘Cap, Cap, there is – ’

  ‘Cap is not here,’ Seps said, ‘he’s fiddling with the fridge.’

  ‘Can you get him?’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Dece paused, then said, ‘Yes, I am.’

  Seps disappeared and for a long period Dece was alone with the big lump. He wished he hadn’t called Cap.

  ‘Yes?’ Cap was angry, either with the fridge or him.

  ‘I can see something in the Cotal rings.’

  ‘Yes, I know, filthy ice.’

  ‘Besides that.’

  ‘What then?’

  Dece took a breath. ‘It could be an asteroid …’

  ‘But you think it’s not.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  No response for a while.

  Finally, Cap said, ‘I’ll look at it.’

  5.

  The Lump

  AFTER Cotal had dropped to Ord’s jagged horizon and the geysers of the Dreaming Sea had died Dece came out from the Peak. Like a dung bug, he thought.

  Only once Telp was back in the hangar did Dece relax. He wobbled from Telp to the airlock, and while he was waiting for the air to stabilise he watched the big screen in the lounge.

  Cap had picked up the image of the lump before the rings slid away, and was studying it. Boss was staring at a computer screen and Seps was dancing with her hologram friend. Dece moved out of the airlock onto the Base, which looked how it usually did: four floating seats around a table, a dancing hologram, a kitchen, the fish, and Cap’s panorama sea from Home embedded in the rock wall.

  Dece and Boss and even Seps would have preferred to see the image of Ord and Cotal with its rings on that wall, but Cap liked the waves, and that was that. Dece, Seps and Boss had never seen water like it – Dur was only desert and ice – but Cap said that was how the Dreaming Sea would be if Ord was closer to the Sun. Well, it was all right. Nobody – not even Boss – wanted Dur on the wall. What would they have put there? The thick yellow dust cloud every day, every year? The red ball that kept the dust from the town? Under the desert sand was a silvery-white metal, an important element in computers, and that had changed everything for Dur. Before, ships had used Dur as a stop on the way to somewhere else, but now there was a palladium mine and flats, food areas, schools, a museum, botanic garden, aquarium – things that reminded people where they’d started from. Home. Some things, like the bugs, could live outside the red ball area, but no one could go out without a machine. No, Dur was better staying in Dur.

  Dece started to take off his suit, but it was hard work. Boss said watching Cap get out of a suit was like watching a bug wriggle out of its cocoon, and that was probably a close description of Dece right then. But he finally got it off, and Seps stopped dancing to come over to him.

  ‘It’s a ship,’ she said.

  Dece put his helmet in the slot and looked at her. Seps often said what nobody else would say in case they hexed things. Even Saphare would only say he was fishing when he was sending down a probe.

  ‘Cap said that?’

  Seps shrugged. ‘He never says anything, but it is.’

  ‘You thought one of Cotal’s moons was a ship.’

  ‘Well, it was so small.’ Seps glared at Dece. ‘Are you excited?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Or frightened?’

  ‘What’s there to be frightened of?’ He moved away before she could say something else, and joined Cap in front of the screen.

  The lump was almost as big as the screen, but large chunks of ice were still in the way. It seemed to have lines running the length of it, though they could have been shadows or scrapes from the ice.

  Cap looked at Dece. ‘I don’t know what you have found.’

  ‘We need Saphare.’

  ‘He wouldn’t help,’ Cap said, annoyed. ‘Maybe it was already there when we first came to Ord. Maybe the computers were working from a view of the rings when the thing was on the other side and then decided to concentrate on the clouds.’

  ‘Lazy computers,’ said Seps.

  ‘Seps sees a ship in everything, like she sees monsters in geysers.’ Dece regretted the words the moment they had left his mouth, but Seps stopped him from feeling any guilt.

  She hit him.

  Cap scratched his head. ‘Well …’

  Boss looked at Cap.

  ‘I was looking for an engine, or an antenna, but there is nothing. We may see something the next time.’

  Boss’s eyes settled on Cap’s face.

  Cap turned away. ‘Do you see anything in your data?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Nothing on lost ships?’

  ‘Well, the computer said …’ Boss stopped.

  Cap looked back. ‘Yes?’

  ‘There was an old shuttle that went missing near a moon, but that’s all the computer came up with.’

  ‘All right.’

  Boss nodded. ‘I tried to contact the thing, whatever it is, before Cotal left with its rings. But I got no response at all, not even static.’

  ‘Well,’ Cap said, ‘I did get something. I couldn’t get a separate reading on
the thing because of the rings around it, but we know that the rings are basically just ice, water, dust and some chemicals. These codes indicate iron, gold, copper, aluminium. That’s a rich asteroid. But if it’s an asteroid then maybe we should pull it from the rings before the ice-rocks chop it up.’

  Seps was impatient. ‘It’s – ’

  ‘Hush,’ Boss said.

  Dece shivered slightly as he realised his lump was being seriously considered.

  ‘But if it is our ship, then why haven’t they contacted us?’ Boss said.

  ‘Because they can’t?’ said Dece.

  Boss looked at him for a long moment. ‘I’ll try to contact it again when it comes back into view.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ said Cap. ‘Cotal and the rings are revolving; we won’t see the thing again for four days.’

  ‘I forgot.’

  ‘Can you ask Control if there is a ship around here?’ Cap paused. ‘And maybe ask if there are any missing ships – anything. It is possible that our computers have old data. They forget we’re here.’

  ‘It’s going to take a while for them to respond.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Cap flashed his teeth. ‘Send them the codes from that thing. We’ll see if we are going to be forgotten.’

  Dece thought, All right, they won’t talk about it, but they are slowly ticking off the list of possible things the lump could be. It could be an asteroid, but it seems to contain several rich metals – so rich that Cap is thinking of using the Tug to pull it into Ord’s orbit.

  Or it could be a ship.

  And that was serious. If it was a ship, why hadn’t it contacted them, and why was it floating on the Cotal rings? Dece shuddered.

  Boss nodded as she swiped her computer screen and Dece knew she had sent her message to the Peak. From there it would go to one of two satellites around Ord, then to one satellite around Cotal, then on the long voyage to a lonely floating buoy, and from there to an asteroid, a moon, a distant space station. One day the message would get to Home, but in the short term the space station – Control – would do.