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WHEN NIGHT FALLS
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
© copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, June 2004
cover art by Jenny Dixon
ISBN 1-58608-496-8
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
Chapter One
The planet below them looked surprisingly beautiful considering that it was a dead world. Dr. Tessa Bergin studied its surface with a mixture of frustration and disgust. Strictly speaking, it was not actually dead, but the civilization they had traveled so far to contact was.
Two years ago, when they had left Earth, she had been filled with excitement to be a part of the mission that would contact the advanced civilization their deep space probes had discovered. From all indications, it was at least their equal, and very likely even more medically and technologically advanced. She had expected to learn so much from them! She had been so thrilled to escape the abject boredom of the museum she worked in and the endless rounds of restoring and studying the same stale artifacts that never seemed to actually lead anywhere.
Finally, she would get the chance to discover things on her own! Finally, she would not have to do the drudge work of the more experienced scientists!
Half way out, they had woken from their fourth deep sleep cycle to the discovery that something had gone terribly wrong. While they had slept, an entire world of people had died, taking their civilization with them.
Instead of setting down and negotiating a working relationship with another race, they would be studying the remains of the civilization that had vanished, virtually overnight.
She would be fortunate if they even allowed her to set foot on the planet! Anthropology was her field, but there was certainly no urgency to study the civilization now—dead was dead. She could only dig and speculate and try to figure out what sort of civilization had been there, if she was allowed to go. She wouldn’t get the chance to study a working, vital, social structure that was completely different from their own.
Tessa frowned. Whatever it was that had devastated this world, it did not seem to have been war—which certainly supported the theory of an advanced race. They had not found traces of a geological disaster, either natural or the result of poor conservation. The atmosphere was clear—amazingly so actually considering the estimated size of the population that had once inhabited the world. But then, they had calculated that at least ten years and possibly as much as fifteen to twenty, Earth time, had passed since the disaster. If the devastation was the result of a global cataclysm, there had been plenty of time for the planet to stabilize.
It was the one thing about deep space travel that had unnerved her about volunteering to make the trip—the effect time travel had on time. Not that it made that much difference to her, she supposed. She’d left no one behind—no one on the mission had. It was one of the requisites, that they have no close family ties, and probably the only reason she’d been allowed to fill a slot. It was just too traumatic for those who took the deep space missions to return and discover so many years had passed in their absence, that their children had grown up, their parents died, their spouse had grown old—two years out and already ten to twenty years had passed on Earth, despite the speed they were traveling. By the time they got back, most everyone they’d known and worked with would have died.
Her irritation resurfaced. She’d given up the world she’d known just for the chance of discovery, and now it seemed she’d given it up for nothing!
She pushed the thought aside as Dr. Boyd came to stand beside her. He was a tall man but bent slightly now with age. Despite that, he had a kindly look about him and he wasn’t nearly as testy as most of his colleagues. "Were you picked for the first landing?"
"No," she said, trying not to sound sullen even though his obvious excitement exacerbated her feelings of ill usage.
He scrubbed his hands together almost gleefully. "I’ll be going."
Tessa resisted the urge to roll her eyes. As if she couldn’t have guessed! "No! Really? Well, congratulations, Dr. Boyd."
He turned to grin at her, as excited as kid, although he was probably sixty if he was a day, maybe older. He joined them from the CDC—his job, naturally enough, to make certain they didn’t pick up any deadly diseases to take home with them.
In fact, except for herself and Dr. Layla Lehman (or LayLeh as most everybody called her), who was only four years her senior, the majority of the scientists aboard the Meadowlark were middle aged or older.
It was one of the reasons, she knew, that her opinion wasn’t precisely respected, despite her degree, despite the years she’d spent paying her ‘dues’—she was still under thirty and not seasoned enough.
The other, of course, was because she hadn’t done any field work.
It began to seem unlikely that this was going to be her chance for it.
Shaking her irritation, Tessa left Dr. Boyd at the observation window and made her way down to the lab to study the read outs from the probes. The atmosphere was a reassuring balance of oxygen, hydrogen, etc., etc.—probably better than the air they breathed on Earth despite the numerous scrubbers that had been built to help to purify Earth’s air. She couldn’t see that the planet, dubbed PIM9162 after their probes had discovered it in the Claxton Galaxy—a galaxy previous believed to have no livable planets—had changed radically from the pre-disaster period.
The bacteria identified through earlier probes had not changed significantly either—certainly not enough to indicate that it might have had anything to do with the devastation, but, as far as they’d been able to determine, something had reduced the dominant species on the planet by approximately ninety percent ten to fifteen planet years earlier.
There were survivors, or at least there had been as far as they could tell, but very likely finding the scattered remains of the race would prove to be difficult, and what were the odds that, even if they did, it would turn out to be scientists?
She wasn’t interested in the mathematical probability anyway.
Despite her disappointment, and her envy of those who would be allowed to be among the first to land on the surface of the planet, Tessa found she couldn’t resist going down to the docking bay to see the landing crew off when they began preparing for the first launch.
Layleh was among those who would be going down. The two of them had become friends since they’d left Earth, despite the fact that they actually had very little in common. Layleh was a linguist. As intelligent as she was, she had the sort of sparkling personality that made her seem more of a social butterfly than a serious scientist—and it was that that had initially put Tessa off—that and the fact that she had a rapier wit and a tongue to match and could run circles around pretty much anyone who was unwise enough to match ‘swords’ with her—especially Tessa, who was more inclined to spill her guts the moment a thought occurred to her than to consider before she spoke.
She liked Layleh best when she was giving one of the other scientists onboard a hard time.
"Tessa!"
Tessa smiled as Layleh danced over to her and gave her a hug. Layleh’s eyes were twinkling when she pulled away. "I thought sure you’d be in your cabin enjoying your misery and refuse to see me off."
Tessa’s smile turned wry. "That obvious, huh?"
Layleh chuckled. "Don’t worry. Only to me. The others are like kids at Christmas ... and not terribly observant of others at the best of times." She sighed. "Self absorbed doesn’t even begin to describe this bunch. If it wasn’t ingrained habit with them to dress when they got out of bed, I suspect half of them would be walking around in the buff most of the time."
Tessa gave her a searching look. "You’re not … the least bit anxious?"
Layleh bit her lip wryly. "Scared shitless! But I’m excited, too. Of course fate—or the law of averages—being what it is, the chances are my services won’t even be necessary and I’ll be stuck watching the lander, or something equally boring, while everyone else runs around making exciting discoveries."
Tessa gave her a sympathetic look.
"Of course," Layleh said thoughtfully, "there’s always the possibility that I might be swept off my feet by some gorgeous alien male!"
Tessa couldn’t help but chuckle, even though she was more than a little horrified by Layleh’s preoccupation with the opposite sex. "You do realize we don’t know what the dominant species of this world is like—other than that they appear to be intellectually advanced? They could look like—lizards for all we know—or something even less appealing. And it’s very doubtful that we would be sexually compatible."
Layleh leaned close. "After two years on this tub with fifteen fifty to seventy year old men—scientists who probably weren’t even exciting when they were young, if they were ever young—if they’ve got the right kind of equipment down below, they’ll look good. And I’m willing to try anything at least once."
"Serious—oh, you’re joking!"
Layleh’s smile vanished. "Not altogether," she said wryly. "I hate to admit it, but even the droid crew is starting to look good to me. I’ve worn my toys out and what’re the odds, you think, that they’ll have more here? Anyway, I could always close my eyes and think good thoughts," she added, grinning.
Tessa felt a deep red blush climb all the way to her hairline. "Layleh! You can’t expect to be taken seriously as a scientist if all you ever think about is sex!"
Layleh’s brows rose, but her eyes twinkled with repressed laughter. "That’s not true! I think about other things."
"Like what?" Tessa asked suspiciously.
Layleh chuckled. "Men."
Tessa gaped at her. Layleh patted the bottom of her chin, lifting her sagging jaw, and then patted her cheek. "You take everything too seriously, Tessa! You’ve only got one life. Live it, for god’s sake! Enjoy what you can—and try to see if you can lose that guilt complex you carry around everywhere you go. You spend way too much time around moldy things."
Tessa smiled with an effort. "I was hoping I’d get the chance to study something a little ‘fresher’ on this trip."
Layleh hugged her again. "You will—see you in a few days."
She waved back when Layleh strode up the gang plank and paused to wave jauntily at her, but inwardly she didn’t feel the least bit unconcerned about the expedition. Layleh might be right. Maybe she did take things much too seriously, but Layleh didn’t seem to take anything seriously enough. There was no telling what sort of dangers they might be facing, and yet Layleh acted as if she was going on a … lark without a care in the world.
She didn’t see Layleh in a few day’s time. They had one communication from the group as they made several passes over the city they’d chosen, describing what they could see from the air. The group checked in as they reached the landing site and began their final landing preparations. After that, they heard nothing. The landing party ceased to communicate with the mother ship and all attempts to hail them resulted in nothing but dead air.
"They’re in trouble," Tessa said to the group that had gathered around the conference table two days after the group had left. "We need to organize a rescue party."
Sinclair, the head of the expedition, frowned thoughtfully. "We don’t know that they’re in trouble. Their communications are out. It could be anything—equipment malfunction, adverse weather conditions, interference of some kind on the ground…."
"Hostiles?"
Sinclair glared at Tessa. "We have no reason to believe that we would be met with hostility. This is a civilized world, very likely even more advanced than our own."
"Was," Tessa corrected. "Whatever happened here broke down the entire fabric of their civilization. If there are survivors—they are survivors, and that means they’ve almost certainly had to resort to survival by might. That also means we’re dealing with an extremely intelligent race that is, most likely, also barbaric now and considerably more dangerous than mere primitives would be. We should have considered the possibility that we might be met with a determination to take what we’ve got for their own survival, rather than a welcoming committee."
Sinclair looked around the table at the other scientists, his bushy white brows lifted questioningly. They seemed to be more or less equally divided. Half of them were considering her suggestions, the other half looked at her pretty much the way Sinclair usually did, with a mixture of condescension and amusement.
"Mathematically speaking, with a civilization as advanced as this one appears to have been, the percentile of survivors would almost certainly be made up of rational beings."
Tessa gave him a look. "Directly after the catastrophe—you’re probably right. As conditions grew worse from the break down, however, ‘rational’ could have boiled down to who had what they needed to survive and who didn’t and whether the ‘haves’ were strong enough to beat the ‘have nots’ off of it—look, I don’t really see a lot of point in sitting here, miles above the planet, debating whether or not our landing party met with hostile natives. We haven’t heard from them since the day they landed. They were due back yesterday. Anything could have happened to them, and I do mean anything. But we can’t help them from here. We’re going to have to go down and see if we can pull them out."
Sinclair glared at her. "We’re scientists, not soldiers. We came to learn. We’ve virtually no weapons, and none of us know how to use what we do have."
"How hard can it be to point and fire?" Tessa demanded in exasperation.
His lips thinned. "You’re suggesting we go down and attack anything that moves?"
"I’m not suggesting anything of the kind! I’m only saying we go armed. If it looks like the landing group was attacked and captured by hostile aliens, we do what we have to to get them back."
"Thank you for your input, Dr. Bergin," Sinclair said tightly. "We’ll take it under advisement. I’d like to hear from the rest of you what your views on this are, and whether or not we should delay the second landing…."
Tessa gaped at him in disbelief for several moments and finally stormed out of the room. It was all very well to say that they’d all known that there were risks involved in taking on such a mission, but she at least, had assumed that they would watch each other’s back since they couldn’t count on rescue from any other quarter. She’d thought that was why they’d taken the precaution of only sending part of the scientific team down. Now, instead of immediately going to check out the danger of the landing team, Dr. Sinclair had waited until they didn’t return as expected and then called a meeting.
She was waiting impatiently in front of the starboard viewing port when the meeting finally broke up and the men began to emerge. She turned to study their faces, trying to figure out what had been decided. Her stomach tightened when Sinclair emerged, glanced at her and then pointedly turned in the other direction and strode off toward his quarters. She realized then that few of the men had actually met her questioning gaze at all.
Lee Harris approached her. "They’ve agreed to do a fly over tomorrow."
Tessa blinked at him in shock. "Excuse me?"
He shrugged, gesturing out the viewing port. "It would be dark on the side where they landed before we could ready a lander to go down. We’ll go down tomorrow and see if we can tell anything about the condition of the other lander. If it looks like it was attacked, we won’t land—we’re just not prepared to launch an aggressive rescue, Tessa. I’m sorry. I know you were fond of Dr. Lehman."
A wave of nausea washed over her. Were—past tense. Apparently she’d been more convincing than she’d thought. They weren’t taking any chances that she might be right, but it had never occurred to her that she was convincing them not to go. She should’ve just kept her big mouth shut. "But … they could still be alive. We can’t just abandon them!"
"And they could be dead. Will it help them if we’re dead too?"
She went to her quarters when he’d left, too sick at heart to feel like looking at her fellow crew members. She wanted to try reasoning with them. She wanted to scream and curse and raise total hell, but she might just as well beat her head on the bulkhead for all the good it was likely to do.
She paced the room for a while and finally flung herself down on the bunk, staring up at the ceiling. She knew, in her heart, that if it was her down there, Layla would have managed to get a rescue team together. Layla was good with people. She could always manage to talk them into doing what she wanted them to do.
She also knew that if, when they went down, they saw that the lander had been attacked, Sinclair would scrub the mission right then and there and turn tail for Earth.
A totally insane thought drifted through her mind.
She dismissed it, but not only would it refuse to stay banished, each time it flitted through her mind again, it grew stronger.
What could she accomplish, alone? She asked herself.
What could you accomplish if you had that pack of spineless white meat at your back? Her inner self countered.
The answer seemed inarguable. She’d be no worse off, and no less likely to be successful if she went alone.
She was either going to have to find her spine and do what she knew she should do, or figure out how she was going to live with herself when she did nothing at all but tuck her tail between her legs and run with the rest of the craven pack.
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