Queen
J.S. Fields © 2022
All Rights Reserved
Mornings on Queen always looked like blood. Ember stood at the edge of the habitable zone of the tidally locked planetoid. She scanned the crimson and rust horizon all the way to the perpetual sunrise. Her wife’s body was out here somewhere, buried in the coarse red sand. Desiccated, mummified, likely stripped naked by the roaming packs of sand pirates Ember was out here to track.
Well… Track. Kill. The line was blurry when it involved a spouse, and it wasn’t like the presidium—the administrative body of Queen—really cared one way or the other. Ember had cared, once, but she was on day seventeen of perimeter duty, and her whole plan of dealing with Taraniel’s death by shooting grave robbers was starting to look a little thin.
A rabbit shot across her field of vision, registering in a halo of blue inside the face shield of her envirosuit. TOPA—the suit’s AI—scrolled data across the screen, but Ember ignored it. Without thinking, she yanked one of the wide, flat stones from her exterior right thigh pocket (they were supposed to keep her calm, according to Nadia) and threw it at the flash of white, fluffy tail with precision honed from years of dealing with Queen’s nuisance rabbit population.
The rabbit’s hind legs skittered out from beneath it as it slipped on the sand. Ember wrapped her fingers around another stone, preparing to hit the head this time, when the damn thing started digging with its front feet, sand funneling around it, so that Ember lost her clean shot.
She stepped forward, grinding her teeth with an adrenaline surge that would again see no release if the little shit got away. She wiped sand from her face shield with a gloved hand, smearing red across her vision.
The area where the rabbit had dug settled flat with a slight pock. Tiny fans on the outside of Ember’s face shield blew the particulate from her vision.
The rabbit was gone and her stone along with it.
Ember cursed, the words bouncing around the inside of her rabbit-hide envirosuit, wasted on recycled air and a generic TOPA. Queen didn’t have stones like that—perfect for skipping over lakes that didn’t exist on the barren planetoid. Those she carried in her pocket were some of her last reminders of Earth. And the rabbit… Ember knelt at the soft indent in the sand. It’d descended into one of Queen’s giant beetle galleries. Of course, it had.
TOPA pinged as she reached a gloved hand into the depression. Ember debated the possibility of Queen’s native beetles—approximately the height of a small school bus and twice the length—grabbing her wrist and pulling her down in pulp-era sci-fi fashion. She dismissed the idea. If beetles hadn’t accosted her yet at this site, it meant the gallery was abandoned and being used by the feral European domestic rabbit population. They’d been brought over as food stock on the colony ships. Some had escaped. Big surprise.
Please read your notes, scrolled across the interior of Ember’s face shield, in lettering so large it blocked most of the landscape from view.
“The rabbit got away. I was stupid for throwing a rock that can’t be replaced. I wasted oxygen on the exertion. That about cover it?”
TOPA didn’t respond directly, but it did fire up a series of reports.
Landmass stability: within ten meters radius: moderate.
Sand for at least three meters below the surface with scattered hollow tunnels reinforced with clay from the temperate zone. Sand transitioning to silt loam noted in geographic surveys, with increasing occurrence toward the colony dome.
Silica content of the air: unbreathable.
UV index: ten point five.
Ember snorted. That did explain the suit smell.
She balled her hands as tightly as she could in the double-layered leather of her gloves wishing, not for the first time that day, that Gore-Tex was still a thing. Leather didn’t breathe, though both the buffer and the electrical linings of the suit were supposed to. Nothing from Earth breathed outside the habitable zone, and as much as the filters of her suit tried, they couldn’t filter out the smell of human, slowly marinating in her own sweat.
Awaiting input. Continue scan?
“Yeah. Sure. Why not?”
Ember stood, swallowing the dry air the suit pushed at her. The AI had a newly installed personality patch, but Ember would need to get a lot more bored before she turned it on. Instead, she pivoted on her right foot, keeping level with as much of the horizon as she could see, and let the suit feed data into the AI. Dunes and small valleys surrounded her, and TOPA disassembled each for content.
Silica: 100%
Silica: 97%, Chitin: 3%
Silica: 78%, Cellulose: 10%, Lignin: 10%, Chitin: 2%
Suggest moving 1.7 chains northeast for better visibility.
“Picturesque view?” Ember asked TOPA. Maybe a body?
“Hey, Ember!”
The red dunes faded into a semitransparent image of her sister, Nadia, displayed on the interior of the face shield. Ember clicked her right canines together to increase volume. The winds were too fierce outside the colony dome to hear much of anything without enhancement, even when the sound came from inside the suit. That wind was the same reason the damn rabbits tended to stay in the beetle galleries. Wind screwed with everything out here.
Nadia’s transmission showed her just outside the dome, her image picked up by one of her suit’s sleeve cameras. Sand licked her calves. Her goggles were up but her face shield down, and red soil caked her envirosuit. The only parts of her skin visible were her lips, chapped but grinning as she tapped the front of her shield and instructions scrolled across the inside of Ember’s own face shield. At the bottom of the message was a clear add-on from Nadia.
Your sentry duties now extend to Outpost Eight. Leave immediately.
–Dr. Narkhirunkanok
Hope you enjoy the sand. I’ll make you dune-nuts when you get home. Extra sprinkles. Served on a tablecloth of rabbit hide since you love the little shits so much.
Ember read the short message and scowled—a facial contortion Nadia would see in detail from the camera inside Ember’s suit. Puns and throwaway comments about the excess rabbit population had no place on an official director request. If Nadia was willing to deface government messages, it meant she was worried. But she wouldn’t say she was worried because, historically, the sisters’ ability to communicate was right around “bug and speeding windshield.”
“Leave for Outpost Eight? I’m supposed to be here for another three days.” Ember cinched her mouth into a caricature of a frown. “TOPA will be heartbroken. It hasn’t cataloged every dune within a one hundred-chain radius.”
“There’s been a change. Director Narkhirunkanok thinks the mella pirates are going to hit one of our storage units, the one where we keep sticking all the glassware we probably don’t need but can’t get rid of. We need a sentry. You’re the closest.” The wind whipped her words away, but the auditory sensors on Nadia’s suit caught them anyway.
This time, Ember did frown. It was one thing to watch for the mella and daydream about shooting one so you could avenge your wife, who didn’t actually need avenging because she’d been about to die from cancer and had chosen to walk into a sand dune. Chasing the mella to one of their targets, even if only to spy on them, so they could shoot you, was something entirely different. She didn’t have a death wish, just a need to see her wife’s body and maybe punch someone.
The solitude came as a bonus though. You didn’t get a lot of it living in a pimple of a dome on an all-woman planet, especially if your wife had recently died. At the very least, out here, Ember didn’t have to unwind spools of hair from the shower drain and had half a moment to remember her wife the way she wanted to, not the way everyone else demanded.
“It’s a two-day ride and a four-day walk,” Ember said. “They’ll get there before I do. They have beetles. I don’t even have a flyer. The director turned down my requisition request.”
“That’s because, first, it’s the presidium that approves those, not the director, and second, you suck at flying. You are terrified of flying. You’re terrified of ships, even those that don’t leave the atmosphere. Which, I get; yours almost didn’t make it to Queen, but still. This is a big group of mella. They’re not moving fast, and they’re still at Outpost Two. You’ll make it. Move like a beetle. You kind of look like one in that suit when you have the antennae out.”
Nadia leaned into her video feed until her eyes consumed the whole screen. Ember could see through her goggles, to the rich brown laughing eyes behind them. Nadia always had a smile, even when Ember thought the dunes might as well sweep her to the cold side of the planet, where her bones would crack and her marrow freeze, or to the hot side, where her skin would turn to leather in a day without the envirosuit, two days with it. Her sister smiled because she didn’t remember Earth, not in color anyway. Not in sound, or smell, the way spring daisies gave way to buttercups in fields wafting a perfume of silage. Nadia had never seen redwoods touch clouds, had never slipped on moss-covered stones in streams alive with nutria and frogs and ducks and migrating geese.
Nadia been ten years Ember’s junior at the Collapse, but they’d been put on different ships. She’d been too young to go into stasis, at eighteen, but she’d made it here, eventually. They’d been in transit nineteen years, Earth time. Their time here on Queen, only five years, felt like an eternity.
Now Nadia was older than Ember. Older visibly, in the silver of her hair and crinkles around her eyes, and in the way she kept rotating her wrist to ease some unspoken pressure. They had the same skin though, a pale tan that flushed too easily. Nadia still smiled and joked as if Queen wasn’t a desolate, isolated colony planet. As if Earth’s memory didn’t oppress them, hundreds of light-years away. She joked because she didn’t want to leave. Queen was her home, even if they had no family here and precious few friends.
For Ember, it was a way station. A bad aftertaste. A future gone horribly wrong. “Botanists are not good with sand.”
“Well, you know what they say about sand, sis.” Nadia smirked. “Dune’t forget your—”
Ember shook her head but couldn’t help smiling. “You’ve used up all the world’s puns. Please don’t invent more.”
Nadia’s eyes relaxed. The crinkles smoothed. A somberness took over, and it looked wholly alien on this sister she’d never seen grow up. “We’re just trying to give you what you want.”
“If I wanted to look for Taraniel, I wouldn’t have waited two months to do so.”
The name burned Ember’s mouth, and she sucked in her lips as an explosion of pain shattered her insides. Only sisters could make you hurt like this. Only sisters could dig up your most painful memories and talk about them as you would the weather at Sunday brunch.
“Doesn’t matter. You have to go.” Nadia’s voice held no laughter now; no light shone in her eyes. “Maybe after, you’ll finally want to come home. You’re no good to yourself like this. You’re a botanist. Finish your task so you can get back here and into the lab where you belong. Enough with your funk. The mella are done. There are two troupes left, and then it’s just the outliers in their outpost, wherever that is. We’ve got a satellite reading that looks promising. We think it’s the same group that raided the hospital last month. Find this group and send the coordinates to Dr. Narkhirunkanok. She’ll send them to the presidium, and they will send out the flyers. One of these times, one of the mella will have a GPS on them, and our satellites will function correctly, and we’ll finally track them back to their main base.”
“The plan sounds about as well cooked as most of the presidium’s brains.”
“Oh, for fuck sake’s, Ember. Just take the job. We’ll get the coordinates to their home; the presidium will take it out.”
Ember kicked the side of a dune, then squatted and crossed her arms. She kept talking, because poking the presidium would only get one of her minor research grants revoked, but poking Nadia got her much-needed human interaction. “Yes, but then I’d be out of a job.”
“Lab.” Nadia pointed back toward the dome. “Baby trees and whatever else you have growing in your greenhouse that won’t survive two days once you plant it outside the dome. Science pays way better than this, and you’ve got tenure coming in, what, a year? Get a raise. You need a hell of a lot more money than you’ve got if you want to leave Queen. Leave us. I know what you and Taraniel talked about at night. Your voices carried through the walls.”
Nadia’s voice turned sour. “Aside from that, think about your future, Ember. Not this shit. Come home. Taraniel may be gone, but visit your bestie Dr. Sinha, at least. Call Taraniel’s mother on Europa. Talk to her about her daughter.”
“Stop talking about her, Nadia. Please.”
“Why? Someone has to.”
Ember wouldn’t let the tears fall. She’d never be able to wipe them away. Instead, she slapped the dried red blood of the barren planet and watched the sand spray into oblivion.
“I’m going to record that as your verbal consent.” Nadia sounded smug. “You leave immediately. Should just be you and the grit the whole way. Enjoy.”
Nadia’s image clicked off. Ember’s viewscreen reverted to the red landscape, where a wall of sand rose with the wind. The world turned russet for several moments, and Ember’s respirator whirred into high gear, filtering the air it brought in. It smelled of crisp nothing. It smelled of heat. It smelled of loss.
Ember stood at the base of the dune and waited for the small storm to subside. Nadia’s words stripped her mind of every other thought, and she gasped mouthfuls of hot, processed air.
Taraniel. It had been two months now, give or take a few days, and Ember still expected to see her around every dune. Hoped for a mistake. Hoped the doctors had been wrong.
Cancer.
Earth’s legacy, the one enduring gift that had come with the immigrants that nothing could kill. Taraniel had preferred to meet death on her own terms. She’d taken no respirator, only clothes and things that entwined with her memories, and left Ember with no body. No closure. No peace.
The wind died to a low rush. Ember turned and started the slow, plodding walk back to Outpost Seven, where she could recharge her envirosuit before going out again. Sand slicked under her feet. TOPA told her that giant beetles scuttled along the parallel dunes, just out of sight, knowing better than to attack while she still moved. A sand funnel swirled. Her face shield registered the distance in the logging unit of chains, but the landscape remained fundamentally unchanged aside from the occasional dotting of twisted trees—Ember’s work as part of the terraforming project. These trees were the farthest ones out from the dome. After here, nothing grew in the sand, not even small plants, no matter how many genes Ember edited and how much irrigation Nadia installed. They were two scientists with futile science, although their PhDs had gotten them quick acceptance onto Earth’s newest outpost. Well, PhDs had helped, and their anatomy had sealed the deal. Vulvas got you onto Queen. Nothing could get you off. A pun worthy of Nadia.
Ember looked out at the patchwork desert forest she’d grown from Petri plates. The trees were maples mostly, reds and silvers, but a few white aspens took the genetic modifications well too. They couldn’t grow upright with the winds, so they branched more like bushes, staying low to the ground and fanning out their crowns to make the best of the perpetual morning. They caught sand and died when their leaves became too covered for photosynthesis. But, well, that was job security if nothing else.
TOPA chirped. Another tooth click brought up a readout.
Wind dropped to 14 knots.
Funnel increasing in diameter by 0.35 meters per 5 seconds. Shape unstable and likely due to animal interaction.
Probability of human origin: 95%
“Well, yes, noting the data, that would be the obvious conclusion, wouldn’t it?” Ember muttered to herself. The adrenaline hit like a punch anyway, snapping her body to attention. She stopped walking and watched the funnel continue to bloat across the horizon like a wave on a long-dead ocean. The wind wasn’t strong enough to kick up that much sand, but giant beetles definitely were.
“TOPA, can you get a heat signature?”
The face shield blanked momentarily before a heat diagram splayed across it. Human signatures weren’t discernable from the sand, but the five-legged beetles native to Queen ran colder than their surroundings due to a quirk of planetary genetics Ember didn’t understand, likely because she’d managed to completely avoid entomology in her undergrad.
Beetles: two.
Her face shield blinked the words, and Ember pivoted. The beetles swarmed, were seldom solitary or in pairs in the wild. Her suit’s artificial intelligence quickly confirmed her suspicion.
No ID sent. Not of the colony. Strong possibility of mella attack. Retreat or find cover.
Two riders on beetleback exploded from the sand.
Shit.
Ember ran.
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