Half Way Home

“The gods hath more need of him than we,” he said, the barest of smiles on his lips.

“Not now,” I told Oliver. I approached the two arguing colonists. They were both males—large, like members of the working class. “Which of you saw what happened?” I asked.

“We both did, I guess.”

“I was on the rise,” one of them said. “I was over there, diverting the water. I heard gears grinding and looked up. Stevens was in the air. Hickson was leaning out over the landing with his arms out. The tractor was moving forward and—”

“That was after,” the other boy said, shaking his head. “I saw the whole thing. Hickson was reaching out to grab him, to help him. The tractor just lurched. I swear, it was an accident.”

“No way was that an accident,” the first boy said. “You saw them this morning, and who’s gonna be in charge now?”

“You can’t go making those claims,” the other boy said, his voice rising. “Especially if you didn’t see—”

“Calm down,” I told them. “None of this is going to help. We don’t need to spread divisive rumors, okay?”

One of the boys nodded. The other shook his head, but it seemed to be more out of an unwillingness to accept the coincidence than anything else. He let the matter go and the two turned away from each other, going back to their duties, probably with a mind of seeding their individual version of events among the other colonists.

When I turned back, I saw Tarsi and Kelvin clinging to one another, both looking to the tarp. We had already begun burying the more than four hundred dead from the previous day, but this one would be different. This would be someone we knew, however briefly. More chilling was that with Stevens’s passing, we would be reducing our number by one.

And burying a bit of our hope along with him.

• 5 • Funeral

Oliver insisted his profession made him the expert on funerals, but none of what he said at the service made sense to me. He recited memorized passages with an odd syntax, his voice rising and falling theatrically. There was a lot of thanking and rejoicing and talk of Stevens living on in another place. It made for an uncomfortable scene, especially with most of us fidgeting in our new wardrobe.

The supply group had stitched together pants and tops from the headliners of the tractors and the sound- dampening fabric stapled to the engine compartments. While the material was more pliable than the tarps, it was also itchy and abrasive. I scratched my thigh while one of the dozers pushed dirt over the hole we had lowered Stevens into, a hole apart from the nearby pits of ash and bone. The machine roared noticeably louder than it had the day before, what with us wearing the fabric that once lined its hood. It was almost loud enough to drown out the sniffles from the crowd and Myra’s heart-wrenching sobs.

I watched Hickson as the hole gradually became a mound. He seemed distraught enough until I followed his gaze and realized his dour expression was aimed at Myra, and not the grave before her.

After the funeral, we ate the same thing we’d had for lunch: a paste made from the green fruits that fell from the canopy above, washed down with bowls of boiled water. It was hard to judge the taste of the fruit, having never really eaten anything else in my life, but the fact that I only looked forward to sating the grumbling in my stomach surely said something. We ate out of necessity rather than desire, which was not what I knew of hunger.

There was talk of venturing out in the coming days to search for meat, but Colony was being extremely secretive about what we might find. And with the vat module half-ruined and scavenged for supplies, it would be a very long time before we could raise what few Earth animal blastocysts had survived the fires.

“I don’t think Myra wants the job of leading us,” I heard Tarsi tell Kelvin between bites of paste. I pushed the rest of mine away and drank from one of the many gold bowls the construction crew had stamped out. We were arranged in several clusters, each group sitting around raised sheets of gold alloy that served as tables.

“I don’t think she should have to lead us,” Kelvin said. “Not if she doesn’t want to.”

“We should vote on it,” another at our table said.

“Colony is in charge,” someone reminded us. “Let it decide who’s next in line.”

Kelvin reached across and rapped his knuckles on the bright surface in front of me. When I looked up, he asked me, quietly: “What are our chances?”

“For what?” I asked.

He looked around. Our entire table had fallen silent. Everyone shifted their gazes back and forth between us. Amid all the noisy banter, a whisper had somehow caught everyone’s attention.

“For surviving,” Kelvin said. “For making it long-term. For not ending up like Stevens.”

We all end up like Stevens, I thought to myself. I looked around the table and considered taking another sip of my water, but knew how indecisive that would seem.

“It depends on us,” I said. “It depends mostly on how well we work together. We have enough of a mix of people—both for skills and producing offspring—that I can see us making it.”

I tried to say it like I really believed it, but the truth was: only Colony knew. The most damning evidence was the half-melted remains of so many of our modules, some of them still smoking slightly. The AI wouldn’t have made that decision lightly. Deep down, I couldn’t help but feel we were just playing a game, hoping to survive long enough to discover why this planet had been found unviable.

“It’s the minerals,” Mica said from the end of the table, almost as if reading my mind.

I looked down the length of the table, past all the somber faces, at her. She held my gaze as the chatter among the diners resumed, everyone drowning each other out. Her eyes fell down to her hands.

“What do you mean?” I asked her, raising my voice to be heard.

She glanced up at me, then peered down into her bowl, which she gently cradled in both hands. “This metal is too soft,” she said, holding the bowl up for emphasis. “You don’t build stuff out of this unless there’s nothing else.”

We stared at each other while those between us continued to argue over our chances of survival.

“Two weeks, max,” I heard someone say.

Mica and I continued to stare at one another. Her face was expressionless, none of the worry and crinkled brow everyone else wore. She looked very matter-of-fact.

I fought to remember what her profession was; she had mentioned it earlier that morning.

“I give the rocket even worse odds,” someone said.

I saw Mica frown. Then I remembered: hadn’t she introduced herself as a geologist?

• 6 • The Rocket

The rocket grew right on the landing pad, as if planted there by a seed. A giant cylinder of steel rose up amid a lattice of scaffolding. Tanks from the fuel depot had been converted into the body. They were split open, some of their plates had been removed, and then the rest was welded back into a tighter cylinder. Several of the other tanks had been converted to store the liquid oxygen and hydrogen that would propel the thing into orbit. These propellant tanks had been buried to help insulate them and were lined with refrigerant pipes.

Over the next week, I learned more engineering science over meals of green paste than I figured could be crammed into a month of training modules. Still, as I watched sparks fly from cutting torches, and the column grew