Trembling With Fear 11/28/21

Settlement One by Hayden Waller

It was all smiles when the first shuttle touched down. Dr. Tanya Abramov had been given the honor of first boots. She thrust the pole into the loamy soil and drew down on the halyard, hand over hand, until the company flag was flying at full mast. She turned back towards the shuttle and pumped her fist into the air, and her crew members, pressed against the circular window, returned the gesture. 

Back on the generation ship, the mood was pure elation. Bottles of champagne had been dredged up from the deep recesses of the storerooms and corks sailed through the air like little rockets as the grandchildren of those who began the journey celebrated its long awaited conclusion. There were a seemingly endless number of toasts dedicated to the first day of a beautiful new relationship.

The first round of colonists was ferried down to the surface to begin building their new lives on this desert moon, cradled gently in the colossal arms of Kanaloa, the orange and yellow gas giant that filled half the sky both day and night. The mission itself was meant to be a thumb in the eye of the Coalition, proof that it was possible to establish a healthy human settlement without an explicit hierarchy that was based on collectivism and freedom of purpose. On the forty-ninth day after their arrival, the construction team had finished erecting Settlement One on top of the wide mesa near the equatorial canyons. On the fiftieth, the first of the colonists disappeared. 

He was a mechanical engineer, no older than twenty-five. The investigative team later concluded that he was woken in the middle of the night by a notification on his work terminal; a leak in an oxygen converter that demanded his immediate attention. It required him to pull himself out of bed and venture outside to repair it. He never reported back in, and was never seen again. At first the whispers said that he had slipped and fallen off the mesa’s steep edge, but when no body was ever recovered, a different sort of whispering began.

A mere two nights later, the second colonist went missing. A teenager this time. Her parents reported that she had been complaining of insomnia, and their best guess as to how she ended up alone was that sometime in the night she had grown frustrated and wandered outside to stare at the rings of Kanaloa and get some fresh air. When she failed to return to her bed, the mood in Settlement One went from somber to tense. A consensus emerged: these had not been accidents. The rumor mill declared there was a killer in their midst. Someone suffering from a severe case of ship madness, stalking the mesa at night as their sanity retreated further and further into the recesses of their diseased mind. 

The colonists at Settlement One took a vote. By a narrow margin, they decided to instate a curfew. No one allowed outside their hab past dark. A great many of the colonists were saddened by the development, fearful that this vote was a harbinger, a sign that the free and open society they had wished to build had already begun to fold in on itself. 

When the third colonist disappeared, they voted again to begin fielding an armed patrol each night, and when one of the patrolmen disappeared three nights later, they voted to cancel the manned patrols and instead to retrofit some of the mining drones with surveillance equipment and small armaments. One night, Settlement One was awoken by the sound of gunfire as they opened up on a shadow slinking between habs. When the morning came and the investigation team surveyed the aftermath, they discovered the bullet-ridden, half-naked body of an unfaithful lover.

That was the moment that broke them. Everyone had a finger to point.
Some claimed it was the fault of the security team, others blamed the drone programmers. A few even went so far as to admonish the Romeo himself. They began to wonder how the killer could possibly have evaded detection after all this time. After this many disappearances, heads swelled and tempers flared, friends became suspicious of each other, happy marriages were brought to their knees. It  was not long until even the faintest semblance of colony unity had fully evaporated and Settlement One began breaking up into smaller and smaller factions. And so it went, the grand experiment failing spectacularly as the black fingers of anxiety slipped under the doors of every hab unit, slithering across the floor and into the minds of the people who slept inside them. That is, until the day they discovered the tapes.

After Dr. Abrimov disappeared, her faction members discovered a security drone locked in a steel box inside her hab. Upon closer inspection they found that a wireless receiver had been welded onto the memory core and that the receiver indicated it had been paired to an external device. Unfortunately the device appeared to be far enough away that the tether had been severed, but on the hard drive they discovered something interesting. A single video file. When they watched the playback, everything changed.

[The footage began with a view of Altamere’s western flatlands as Dr. Abrimov stands at the edge of the mesa, a head mounted camera recording her point of view as she looks out over the arid flatlands below. She turns her head to the left, and the camera focuses on the sun, hanging low in the sky as it prepares to dip below the horizon.]

“Tanya, you dumb bastard…” she muses under her breath.

[She sits; the camera moves down to her legs, dangling over the edge of the cliff, and then up to the horizon again as she finishes watching the sun set behind the horizon in silence. When it has gone down, she grunts as she pushes herself up and turns around. The hab units are little glowing points of light, hundreds of meters away, and she sighs before beginning a monologue.]

“Okay. Where do I start? We-, erm, I -” she struggles as she starts, trying to find the right words. She sighs, recollects, and continues. “I hope that something I do tonight helps put an end to all of this nonsense. I’m tired of watching this colony die before it ever had a chance to live like a baby, strangled in its crib. Our ancestors left Earth dreaming of a new world. A better world. And this is what we give them? This is how we live? Cowering like rabbits in our dens as some big bad wolf hunts us in the darkness? No. I refuse to let it happen like this. One way or another, the terror ends tonight.”

[The camera pans down and we see a revolver in her hand. There is a gentle blush of blue from the ionized rounds sitting inside the cylinder. She turns it over in her hands, inspecting it, before looking back up at the glowing hab units.]

“I hoped I would never need to use this. Not for this reason, anyway.”

[Then silence. The camera pans up to the stars, hovering there for a while, and then we hear another sigh before she begins walking slowly towards Settlement One.]

“I’m prepared to kill tonight, and if I do, I expect no special treatment under the law. I’m also prepared to die, and if I do, I hope this recording will at least help identify our big bad wolf.”

[She hasn’t taken more than a dozen steps before we hear the sound of falling rocks behind her and she stops in her tracks. Her breathing audibly increases as she turns cautiously around, halfway raising the revolver. The camera darts from side to side, scanning the cliff’s edge for the source of the sound. Then there is a flash of movement. The camera zeroes in on the spot, and gradually… terrifyingly… four spindly fingers slither into view and curl over the top of the mesa. Her breathing stops entirely, and a moment later four more fingers appear beside them. The intensity of her breathing increases again, and she raises the gun to chest level. She watches in stunned silence as the creature pulls itself up, digging its hands into the ground as the first of its thin, wiry legs comes into view. She turns around, looking at Settlement One, and when she turns back, a creature is standing before her in full view. A pair of ochre eyes sit like glowing embers in an otherwise featureless face that tilts to the side as it inspects her. She is shaking, her breath coming in ragged bursts.]

“I… I can’t move!” she says, her arms still extended out in front of her, hands locked around the grip of the revolver.

[The creature slinks closer, its slender, silver frame gliding across the ground as if it were made of air. It stops when it is inches from her face, and then reaches out and touches her chest with one of its spindly fingers.]

“It’s… speaking to me!” she struggles, her voice quivering. “I can hear it… in my head. It’s saying… it does not want us here. That… we are unwelcome.”

[There is a surprised gasp from Dr. Abrimov, and then the camera pans down to her chest. The finger is lodged inside her, a circle of blood starting to radiate away from it across the fabric on her torso. The creature makes a strange clicking noise, wraps its arms around her body, and then gallops towards the cliff’s edge with unimaginable speed, leaps off into the night. The video ends.]

Before sunset on the next day, Settlement One had been fully abandoned, and the colonists had returned to the generation ship. Historians are torn as to what became of them. Some say that they traveled to a new system on the outer rim and that their grandchildren were finally able to build the society their grandparents and their grandparents’ grandparents had dreamt of building on Altamere. Others say the natives never let them leave, finding their way up to the generation ship and slaughtering the colonists one by one until none were left alive. These historians say the ship is still in orbit around the gas giant Kanaloa, floating endlessly. An infinite tomb. The truth? It is far from certain. For every ghost world has its ghost stories.