His hand appears next to mine. Together we activate theportal. It sighs before it shudders open.
We keep our hands held.
On reflex, I turn on my headlamp. Then I turn it back off, because at that very moment a light blinks on inside the chamber.
“Look at that!” I say under its dim orange glow. A massive battery covers one wall of the storage chamber, its wires disappearing into the floor. “Auxiliary power!”
Kodiak lowers himself to examine one particularly large cable that leads to a nondescript box. “A generator. That appears to run on methane. Clever.”
“I’m going to assume, since mission control thought to design it that way, methane is a big part of what’s in these shallow lakes surrounding us.” Methane has no scent, and without power running to the ships, I haven’t yet been able to run tests to determine the composition of the atmosphere—except for the low oxygen and obviously spiked nitrogen. Mission control would have been able to select this planet based on spectroscopy: even from so many light-years away, they could have determined which colors of light were being absorbed on the planet, how much its atmospheric particles bent light, and how big they were, and thus have a pretty good idea of how hospitable to human life the environment would be. It’s no accident that this is where OS worked so hard to bring us.
Kodiak leans past the box, moving surprisingly agilely considering his splinted leg, and hands me a big black padded envelope.
I open it. Inside is a book. A real vintage book! Hard polycarb cover, printed on plasticine pages. There’s a title on the front:Surviving Sagittarion Bb.
“Now that sounds like a good read,” I say, and open to page one.
“We can make it a bedtime story?” Kodiak says. He laughs, but then the laugh stops and he’s looking at me and I’m looking at him.
“It’s midday,” I say, standing and holding out my hand. “But it might be bedtime on Earth.”
He stands up without taking my hand. His body looms over mine.
Staring into my eyes all the while, he wraps his heavy arms around me, presses me close against his chest. He smells like the planet—clean, a little loamy. I breathe the human scent, enjoy the sensation of his body warming mine.
“There are things I’ve told myself to learn about from you,” Kodiak whispers, chin resting on the top of my head. “Something about welcoming and donating?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling. “We have lots of time for lessons.”
I go quiet, clutching the black book to my chest as I stare out at the alien landscape. “Between those times, we will fight to live.”
Somehow, before two weeks have gone by, we’ve constructed a full-on compound. There’s nothing casual about the process—our very lives depend on getting this right, and we toil for twenty-five of the thirty-one Earth hours in each day.
We start by placing the generator near the shallow methane swamp, so we’ll have a virtually unlimited power source. TheEndeavor’s landing stash also came equipped with algae, which I’ve spent most of our time coaxing into a garden. It’s not just any algae, but bioengineered so that each strain produces a protein, a fat, or a carbohydrate. Granted, they’re not the tastiest proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, but together they’ll provide complete nutrition.
While Kodiak works on powering up our systems, I plant the individual algal strains under polycarb sheeting that’s engineered to intensify the low solar radiation of the exoplanet. There’s a lot I wish I could be doing—like getting a proper home constructed—but food is lower on our pyramid of needs.
One morning, Kodiak has rolled out of bed before me. I miss his warmth, which disappears so quickly into the polycarb. As I groggily get to my feet, wishing for some of the coffee my mind remembers but that my lips have never actually tasted, I hear Kodiak call my name.
He’s in front of the greenhouse, crouching beside what appears to be Rover. Or rather two Rovers that he’s combined to make a full sphere, with arms emerging from its equator. It’s very creepy and also very cute. “What have you done?” I ask Kodiak, giving him a quick kiss on the lips.
“Watch!” Kodiak says. “Rover, say hello to Ambrose.”
Rover rotates and rolls over the heath on the ground, until it’s right in front of me. The arms wave. “Hello, Ambrose,” OS says. “This is my form now. I’ve come to assist you and Kodiak.”
The sound of my mother’s voice on this foreign planet stops my breath. When it begins again, I’m wiping tears from my eyes. “Hi, OS.”
“I will be a better algae tender than either of you. Please let me take over those duties. I’m also happy to begin constructing roomier lodgings.”
“Kodiak,” I say. “This is amazing. OS ishere.”
Rover-sphere chatters on. “I will be careful to keep the algae strains from escaping the polycarb greenhouse. We don’t want any unexpected interactions with the exoplanet’s organisms. I can tinker with the quantities to alter your nutritional intake—and even produce an alternative jet fuel should you someday wish that I print us vehicles. There are many engineering designs in my storage.”
“I’m going to go eat breakfast,” I tell OS while it whirs through the greenhouse, tending and watering.
“Good thinking,” Kodiak says. “I’m starving.”
As we eat our algae soup, I read to him aloud from the black book that had been hidden away behind the gray portal: if mission control is right, Sagittarion Bb has decades of environmental stability, followed by seasons of slow-moving cyclones. We don’t know where in that cycle we’ve landed, but it’s relatively safe to assume that we won’t face those cyclones for a few Earth years. Maybe even decades. At some point, though, we’ll need to be able to rapidly evacuate to elsewhere on the planet. “I’ll get started studying the vehicle designs in OS’s storage,” I say. “We’re eventually going to need to make this whole base mobile.”
