“This is going to get complicated awfully quick,” I grumbled.
“No, it’s not,” Jorge said behind us. “Let me make it real simple. I brought a gun.” I turned and saw him reaching behind his back. He pulled his hand out and pointed two fingers at us, then started laughing.
Eventually, the rest of us joined in.
Even though I never saw the humor in it.
An easy and temporary consensus formed once everyone was up and had their things together. We decided we would walk toward the nearest tree, just to make sure that’s what they were. Several of us were curious to see one up close after having lived within sight of them for weeks. They were so unlike the trees from our training programs that they seemed alien to us, even though we’d never truly known anything else.
From the colony, they had appeared continuous, a jagged cliff of rising bark that encircled us completely. The width of each trunk was easily as big around as the perimeter of our entire base. Between the closest trees you could see darker trunks looming in the shadowy distance. They overlapped in a way that blocked out all else, creating the appearance of something solid and impenetrable. As we neared them, they appeared even broader and flatter, their curvature removed by our proximity.
We set off toward the nearest one, figuring that would have been Mica and Peter’s plan. We could make shelter along the wall of wood, affixing our various scraps of tarp to stay out of the rain, and maybe use our machetes to remove building material from the trunk.
Even with the pain in my hamstring, the walk was a pleasant one. The previous night, we had discovered that the surface of our planet wasn’t all packed dirt and mud; that was all we’d ever seen inside our fenced-in colony. Everything Colony prepared for us, out to a hundred yards or more, had the beat-down look of constantly roaming tractors and dozers.
Moving past Colony’s reach, we saw what the ground of our home normally looked like. It was mostly moss. A half dozen varieties covered the ground beneath the canopy. Some were soft, others stiff, but all were better than the hard soil that had calloused our feet over the past weeks. We soon learned the brown mosses and the really dark green were the most abrasive, so our line swayed to and fro as we picked over the most luxuriant paths.
We also quickly discovered the bombfruit hadn’t evolved to explode on impact. Out beyond the perimeter, they studded the ground like stones—half-buried, the pointy ends embedded in the moss. They looked like seeds pushed partway into the ground by a giant’s thumb. None of them seemed to be sprouting anything, however, and the near dearth of natural sunlight didn’t seem to bode well for their chances of growing into more trees.
Kelvin, with his training as a farmer, was the nearest we had to a biologist in the group. He seemed fascinated by the seeds. The rest of us were just glad to know we would starve to death no more rapidly out here than we would have inside the camp.
The only other curiosity we came across on our way to the tree was an odd geological formation: a hole, almost perfectly round, that gaped in the middle of the moss. Our path nearly took us right into it, causing us to stop and peer inside. The shaft seemed to go straight down, far deeper than my flashlight could penetrate. Karl, an electrician who had been shuffled between construction and payload duty a few times, took a bombfruit and threw it into the center. We all stood quietly until we heard a distant clatter, then marveled at what the depth of the thing must be.
We left the strange hole behind and resolved to no longer run through the night like madmen. Just in case. Tarsi hammered the point home when she spotted another of the holes in the distance and off to one side. Nobody spoke of the chances that Mica and Peter wouldn’t be found, but I couldn’t have been the only one thinking it.
It took half the day before we reached the trunk, the thing seeming to slide away from us one step for every two we took. The base of it was even more massive than we had imagined. Kelvin had overheard the canopy crew adjusting their missile the other night for a height of two thousand feet. It was hard to believe a living thing could grow to such proportions, but the evidence loomed before us.
We stopped several hundred feet away and made lunch out of raw bombfruit with a pinch of spice someone had brought along. Objectively, it was less palatable than the paste we normally ate, but we all agreed the novelty of the mixture made it somehow more enjoyable. Or perhaps it was just that the food and the time spent consuming it were ours.
Several people wondered aloud what the rest of the camp was doing right then, besides hating our guts. Those with intimate knowledge of the timetables told us precisely what each group would be doing and even what some of us were supposed to be up to. I sat facing the distant camp, the tops of the modules barely visible above the rise of the berm. A spot of raw sunlight beamed down from the new hole overhead and glimmering off the things we could no longer use. It all looked so small. So impossible. How was such a speck of humanity expected to tame an entire planet? And what did that make our little group? A mote ejected from the speck?
Halfway through the meal, rapid popping noises sounded in the direction of Colony. Even if the berm and fence weren’t there, we were too far away to see individual people moving around camp, leaving us to speculate.
“The propellant?”
“Sabotage,” Jorge said, almost with a hint of wishing.
“It’s a warning.”
A twinge in the back of my leg—a sudden jolt of pain—gave me the answer:
“Target practice,” I said.
We fell silent and the popping sounds did as well. We looked around at each other as the noise started back up a minute later. Those who had obsessed with timetables for three weeks murmured their disgust at the labor hours needed to replenish all those rounds of ammo.
Overall, the meal could not have been more bizarre. It was, in many ways, even stranger than the first one we’d had the morning after our birth. That one had been so consumed with depression and despair that no other emotion could gain purchase. This one had a tinge of accidental camaraderie, as fully three separate groups had made our break on the same night—all following in Mica’s and Peter’s footsteps. While we ate, Kelvin admitted that the three of us had dreamed of escaping a day earlier. Four of the others, including Vincent and Britny, had even discussed the idea before the enforcers formed up.
As a half-trained psychologist, I was fascinated by how quickly the group gelled. Many of my fears concerning shared resources faded as I spoke and joked with each person. Names and faces I knew in passing were now a part of my tribe, and over the course of a single morning I went from feeling wary of their presence to being willing to risk myself for them. And not just like the night before, where my primary concern had been for Kelvin and Tarsi, but really put myself in danger for any one of them. Whatever the cause of this magical transformation, I had not yet come to it in my studies of human behavior.
After we ate as much of the foul tasting fruit as we could and passed around our several rations of water, we rose as a group and approached the tree. The organism seemed to offer a hello—or possibly a warning—as a single bombfruit whistled out of the canopy and buried itself with a thud inside a nearby patch of light-green moss. We laughed at the timing and stepped around the embedded fruit as if it still contained some animating force. We spread out to explore the mountainous plant.
“It’s soft,” Samson said.