Chapter 13

Xi Pegasi
Colony One
August 10, 2057

Faith Ozawa opened her eyes as her comm chimed. She sat up abruptly and plucked her datapad from her desk. “This is Faith.”

“You’ve sounded better,” Geri Rogers said lightly, “but who hasn’t?”

Faith rubbed her face and checked her desk monitor. “It’s what, five o’clock?” She looked out the window. “And it’s dark out. I wish they’d do something about the timekeeping.”

“I know. Anything new?”

“Not a damn thing. You?”

“No.” Geri sighed. “It’d help if I could get down there.” After the shuttle crash, Tamako Ujimi had ordered the three remaining shuttles be decertified until the cause of the crash could be positively ascertained. It would take months to finish the first of three shuttles under construction. In the interim, the groundside colony sites were isolated from each other and from the space facilities.

“How about Dylan and Thomas?” Dylan Layson and Thomas Hunnicut were Faith’s peers at Colonies Two and Three, respectively.

“Nada.”

“Great.” Faith walked to the window. Moonlight filtered down through the high, thin clouds, illuminating the grassy field outside the hospital. She could just see the top of the administration dome over the trees a kilometer away. The colonists had carefully integrated their living spaces into the natural surroundings, spreading their buildings across an area that would have enclosed entire cities on Earth. “We know that the kids Lenna brought down with her didn’t make it. We also know that we haven’t had any reported pregnancies yet.”

“Yes, and the spermatozoa had a one hundred percent mortality rate, and the ova had a fifty-three percent mortality rate. I checked Lenna’s notes. She supervised the cryo procedure herself, and she had good cells across the board. The sperm motility wasn’t great, but she attributed that to the radiation the guys took.”

Faith sat down in her chair and bit her lip in thought. “Geri, I know we had to tell Kimmi and the others, but I think we need to keep this to ourselves. Devin and Lenna are still recovering, so I haven’t told them yet.”

The connection was silent for a moment. “Tamako needs to know. And Faith, we aren’t going to be able to keep this quiet for long. Too many people know.”

“I don’t know.” Faith rubbed her forehead irritably. “Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions. My people are still testing the ... cells, and the technicians are tearing the cryo unit apart to see if it failed somehow. Maybe it’s the radiation. We’ve only been groundside for three months now. Maybe it’s taking us a while to start producing good cells again.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Geri conceded. “We have to be careful, though. If there is a problem, we need to know. We are the only people here, or who will be here for a long time, or maybe ever.”

“Our numbers have been going the wrong way, too.”

“They have. Counting the shuttle crash, we’ve had twenty-one deaths so far. Another fourteen people are seriously injured, including Devin, Lenna and Sijay. Granted, they should all recover, and two-thirds of our losses were incurred on arrival, but it still scares hell out of me.”