Shades of Earth

I’m not at the space station.



Beep, beep-beep! My wi-com jumps to life just as I’m pondering whether I’ll be able to connect to the hatch inside the koi pond. I touch my neck. I’m close enough now to pick up the signal directly from the ship, just as I’d hoped.



“Com link req: Bartie,” I say.



I wait, a silly grin plastered on my face.



“Elder?!” a voice—Bartie’s voice—says into my ear.



“Hey, Bartie,” I say.



“The frex! Elder! What? How?!”



I’m so happy I laugh out loud. Bartie’s not just the rebel who took control of the ship after me. He’s my friend, the one who used to chase rocking chairs with me across the porch of the Recorder Hall.



“Doesn’t matter how,” I say. “I just wanted to see if the new leader of Godspeed would be willing to let the old one back on the ship.”



After a moment’s pause, Bartie barks with laughter. “Good one! Tell you what, you figure out how to get up here, and we’ll throw you a party.”



“Start baking a cake,” I say, grinning widely. “Because I’m already here.”



55: AMY



Dad keeps us close to the trees as he escorts us back to the colony. Part of me wants to fight him on this point, stay in the communication room. What if Elder needs us? He’s farther away from me now than he’s ever been before—the least I could do is keep the communication link open. But Dad leaves one of his military guards there and the rest of us return to the ruins.



I wish we could take the quick way, straight through the meadow and up to the buildings. But it feels so exposed going that way, and while the trees are dark and dangerous, they give us the illusion of safety. I keep my eyes cast down. Every shadow reminds me of Elder, each warm breeze that brushes against my skin makes me wish I could fly up to him.



A light spritzing of rain starts to fall.



“Be careful of the flowers,” Dad whispers to me. I’d almost forgotten about the purple string flowers. I watch them out of the corner of my eye. As soon as water touches the delicate petals, the flowers unwind in an elegant twirl, blossoming into a beautiful, nearly transparent bloom. So beautiful . . . but I remember the way they made my mind go numb, the way I couldn’t move my body. One of the flowers hangs low, nearly at the level of my face. I grab it and crush it in my hand, the purple petals sticking to my skin.



We creep back to the ruins. Everything is silent. The air is pregnant with expectation, as if the silence is just an indicator of something worse to come.



Dad doesn’t speak to me again until we’re in the building, safe from the pteros and the aliens who must control them somehow through the gen mod material. Chris follows us inside. Dad starts to object but then gives up, collapsing into the same chair he sat in just this morning, dunking a cracker-biscuit in his “coffee” as if everything was normal.



And I guess that in a way, everything was. We still had Mom.



And I still had Elder.



My eyes burn. I look away. I cannot let myself crack.



“We’ll have to go into hiding,” Dad says heavily.



I look up at him.



“If we’re waiting to detonate the weapon, we’ll have to go into hiding. Only for a few days, a week maybe. Until the aid from Earth comes.”



“What’s wrong with the buildings?” I ask.



Dad shakes his head. “The aliens know we’re here. They can attack us anytime. The only weapons we have are the ones my men carried with them—and once the ammo runs out, there will be nothing left.” Once he lets his words sink in, Dad adds, “Got any ideas?” I look up—but Dad’s asking Chris, not me.



Chris shakes his head. I look down at my hand, stained purple from the flower I crushed earlier. “The flowers,” I say.



They both turn to me.



“The purple string flowers,” I repeat, excitement growing in my voice. “Dad, what if we made a weapon using those? They knocked me out immediately! We could use them to make the aliens pass out if they get near the colony.”



“How?” Dad asks, clearly frustrated with me. “Even if we got the flowers, they only bloom when wet. And even if we made them bloom, how could we force the aliens to sniff them?”



I pick the petals stuck to my hand off my skin, setting them in a little pile on my knee. “We could grind them up,” I say, thinking aloud. “Throw the dust in their faces.”



“While they shoot at us with exploding bullets,” Dad says.



“We could hang them nearby, keep them wet with the water pipe from the lake. . . . ”



“And they’ll see them and hold their breath,” Dad shoots back. “Or just attack us from a distance. We don’t have time for this, Amy. We have to come up with a real plan.”



“You could smoke them,” Chris says.



For a moment, I have an image of rolling the string flowers into cigarette paper and lighting them up.



“I mean, we can use the smoke as our weapon,” Chris says. “Not that we would literally smoke the flowers, but that we could blow the smoke on the aliens. They’d be forced to breathe at least some of the air, and hopefully the properties of the flower would still exist—perhaps even be stronger—in a smoke form.”



“But you can’t control smoke,” Dad protests. “It can just as easily knock us out as the aliens. And we still don’t know if the creatures—whatever they are—are affected by the neurotoxins in the flower.”



But he’s thinking about this plan, I can tell. He jumps from the chair and starts pacing. He pauses when he notices me watching, then looks straight into my eyes—the same jade green as Mom’s—and says, “Your mother would like this plan.”



“It could work,” I say, hopeful.



Dad’s voice is filled with doubt. “Your mother would know how to test the flowers and smoke, figure out the effects of it on the aliens. If she were here . . . ”



“It’s a better plan than trying to run,” Chris says quietly. “Think about the way the aliens have been attacking us. They know what makes us weak—which means they probably share the same kinds of weaknesses.”



It’s not hard to be weak compared to an attacking ptero, but the aliens’ interest in Phydus does make me think that Chris is right.



“I don’t know. . . . ” Dad starts to pace again.



“You don’t think the aliens are watching us?” Chris says angrily. “They are. They’re just toying with us at this point. Waiting. If we try to run, they’ll mow us down. Our best bet is to be aggressive—they won’t expect that. Do something, anything, to buy us time.”



Dad glowers at Chris. I don’t think he’s used to having someone younger boss him around, especially not someone under his command. But whatever Chris has said is starting to crack through Dad’s doubts.



“I think we should stay too,” I add. “We’ve got a mountain to one side—probably not going to be attacked from that angle. They’ll come from the front, and at least here we have stone walls to protect us.”



“Against weapons that can explode a steel shuttle,” Dad points out, but he’s softening to the idea.



“Better than nothing,” I counter. “Look, they hate us. They want to kill us. There’re more of them, they have more supplies, and we have nothing. I’ve got five bullets in my gun. How many do you have?”



Dad frowns, and I know I’ve hit on his biggest worry. If we run, we can’t defend ourselves. We just have to hope we can outrun them.



“We can’t fight. We can’t run, not really. We have to hole up here, where we at least have access to fresh water and the possibility of surviving an attack.”



Dad snorts, a bitter facsimile of a laugh. “Survive?” He looks around at the old, dusty, yellow stones of the building. “That worked out well for the first colony.”



Chris looks grim, and for a moment my father almost seems to regret what he’s said.



I brush the little pile of torn purple petals into the palm of my hand. “This is the best chance we have,” I say. “It’s our only chance.”



56: ELDER



“What?” Bartie says so loudly that it hurts my ear.



“I’m in a shuttle—not the same one we launched from Godspeed, a shuttle from Centauri-Earth—”



“How the frex did a shuttle get on Centauri-Earth?”



“Look, it’s a long story, but—”



“What the frex are you talking about?!”



“Bartie! Calm down!”



“The frex ever! You’re in a frexing shuttle? And you’re here?!”



I grin. “Technically, yes.”



“Technically? The frex is going on?!”



“Bartie, listen. I took a shuttle from Centauri-Earth—never mind how I got one, just listen—and I came up here. I’m right outside. I can see Godspeed. I’m almost close enough to nudge it.”



“Frex!” Bartie exclaims. I would give anything to see his face right now.



“Now here’s the tricky part,” I continue. “I have a sort of tube thing that I need to connect to the ship. It’s not exactly designed to go to Godspeed, but I think I can make it work.”



“How . . . ? Elder, are you serious?” Bartie’s voice is filled with incredulity.



“Very,” I say. “You make sure the area around the hatch at the pond is clear. I’m going to see about the tube.”



I disconnect the wi-com link and make my way from the bridge to the boarding chamber, which, according to the maps and diagrams on the wall, should have an automated connector I can use to get to Godspeed. My feet echo down the hall, and I feel very alone here.



For a moment, I wish I could have Amy with me now. The auto-shuttle is so massive and, after sending the dead to the stars, so empty. But I also know that this is something I have to do by myself—Godspeed is my responsibility, not hers—and she is the only one who could pacify the rage in her father’s heart enough to quiet his desire for immediate revenge. That weapon from the FRX makes me nervous. We don’t know what it is; all Colonel Martin’s said is that it can be detonated remotely and it will wipe out the alien population. I half believe the FRX would be willing to wipe us out too, just to cut down on complaints.



The boarding chamber is just behind the bridge, just as the little map on the wall by the door indicated. The door has a seal lock, but it opens with a press of a button. On the wall to the right is a small cabinet filled with emergency oxygen tanks. To the left is a control panel. And directly across the door is my ticket off this shuttle.



I step inside. The boarding chamber is small, with a round porthole sealed with metal flaps taking up nearly the whole wall. A chart beside the large porthole illustrates how a tube made of some sort of metallic fabric will shoot out from the porthole into space and lock onto the side of the space station with magnetic-seal locks.



But I’m not trying to get to the space station. And Godspeed wasn’t designed to work with the auto-shuttle.