Proxima B II: Colony

Chapter One

The group that had gathered in the heart of the ship, just beneath the mezzanine-garden, was somber and uncannily quiet for such a large group--no huge surprise, Belle didn’t suppose, since everyone sensed the news was bad.

Or really bad.

The Artemis generational colony ship, sister ship of the Huntress, who’d left Earth two decades before they had, had slipped into orbit around their destination planet weeks previous.

They had been notified of their arrival and insertion into orbit around Proxima B and informed that they would be sending out drones for surveys before a decision was made regarding a landing date and site.

And then … nothing.

The silence choked the sharp mix of budding excitement and uncertainties of the colonists.

Because most of the first gen colonists had died and almost everyone on board had been born on the ship in route to their colony world. And, if anything, they were more unnerved at the prospect of living on a wild, untamed world, surrounded by raw nature, than thrilled.

Young enough, the majority, to be excited about the ‘adventure’, too, but …. It was a daunting task ahead of them even so.

Made more unnerving by the prolonged wait for news.

A stunning wave of shock and anger rolled over Belle with the first announcement by Captain Connor Carnegie.

“Contact was lost with the Huntress when they arrived at Proxima B. We had thought it was a failure of some of the equipment and that we would hear from them again at some point. However, we were not able to re-establish contact despite many attempts to do so while in route to the target world.

“It is with great sorrow that we must inform you that--as far as we can ascertain--the Huntress and all aboard were lost. We have not been able to contact any survivors since we arrived. We have not been able to find any evidence of an established settlement.

“We did, however, find indications of a cataclysmic event of what may have been the colony established by survivors of the Huntress. We have not been able to positively confirm that as fact, however. The ruins we found that appear to be fairly recent may or may not have been built by the colonists. There have also been ruins discovered of an older, most likely, native civilization.”

“The planet itself, however, has exceeded all hopes. It is flourishing. It is a veritable Eden.”

Belle wasn’t the only one that was stunned and outraged that they hadn’t been informed previously that the first colony had perished. Apparently everyone was and, although it took them some moments to recover sufficiently to react … bedlam ensued.

The captain attempted to bring order for a Q&A discussion. Finally, however, he lost patience and ordered the guardsmen out to disperse the unruly crowd. Those who refused to disperse--or were trapped and unable to run--were tased and hauled to the med center or the brig.

Belle, which came as no huge surprise to her, was among the trapped and ended up in the brig.

She couldn’t decide whether she was more pissed off with the captain for ordering everyone rounded up or the assholes that had created such a traffic-jam that she couldn’t escape the sweep.

But she mentally kicked her ass while she kicked her heals in lockup.

She hated crowds and the latest event was exactly why she avoided them.

But then everyone had been ‘commanded’ to attend by Captain Asshole.

And she didn’t want--or trust--secondhand news.

* * * *

Ryne signaled his padur, Torr, his hunting brother and companion, with the warbling-whistle they used to alert one another to danger and pointed to the object below them when Torr whipped his head in his direction.

He felt his belly tighten with anger and tension once he’d dropped low enough he could identify the strange thing he had spotted.

Identify what it was--even though it looked nothing like the tek he had seen before.

It was clearly nothing natural--a made thing of some sort flying low over the jungle below them.

After a moment’s indecision, the two of them followed the tek at a safe distance--or what they judged to be a safe distance--to see what it was up to.

It seemed significant--in terms of threat--that it went as directly to the destroyed city of the Ert invaders as it could go. And examined it so thoroughly Ryne could not help but wonder if they believed there were survivors and were looking for them.

Well, of a certainty there had been survivors.

But the city of the aliens had been destroyed nigh three annums previously and those who had made it out before it blew up had scattered in the time since.

Or perished in the unforgiving wilderness they were unprepared for.

In point of fact, that had happened so long ago, now, that everyone had begun to relax and believe they would see no more alien marauders and could take up the lives they had had before their world was invaded and virtually all that generations of their people had built had been destroyed by the people who came from the heavens.

Since the evil bastard’s empire had been destroyed, their people, the Izun, had begun to scatter themselves in the belief that they might take up lives of their own, find mates, have families, as their conviction grew that they had won the war with the aliens that had invaded their world.

Anger settled in Ryne’s belly and began to churn as he and Torr found a place to light and watch the thing as it zipped back and forth, dipped for a closer look at something that had caught its attention and rose again for a wider look.

“Clearly it is a spy thing as the other tek was and has been sent to discover what it can about us,” Torr said in a quiet voice after a little time had passed. “But it does not look like the things they had before. Do you think it is a thing of the Ert peoples? Or others?”

Ryne frowned thoughtfully. “I am not certain it will make any difference to us one way or another. Do you think it is not the Ert people who sent it?”

He considered that himself for some time, studying the thing. “I think, very likely, it will not matter. Whoever has sent it has come to take what is ours and we will have to make war on them.”

Torr nodded agreement. “Some have taken Ert females as their padra, their hearth woman, though, I have heard. They are strange looking, flightless, creatures, but I have heard it said that they are also beautiful.”

Ryne sent him a sour look. “Anything that is female and younger than the mothers and grandmothers would be beautiful to most of the warriors that I know. Or even older than the mothers if they could be persuaded to allow them to fuck,” he added with wry humor.

Torr shrugged. “If they are female and my cock does not mind if they are older than my mother then I will not mind. Very likely there would be no young either way and, even if we succeeded in breeding on one, if would only be half one of the people. We are thin in numbers already from the many we have lost.”

In spite of every effort to leaven his reaction to Torr’s comments, Ryne felt a heady surge of hopefulness in his blood at the mention of a possibility of a female for comfort that was hard to deny.

A padra would be very welcome to him, if came to that--even a female too old to interest his cock--because it would be someone to keep their hearth for them and that alone would be more comfort than they had now--or had had in most of his memory.

Not that he was even convinced a little bit.

They would be enemies, he was certain--probably see it that way on both sides--which meant it was unlikely they could coax an alien female to hand and he, for one, did not want a padra badly enough to risk getting stabbed in the back.

Or poisoned.

Even if they found one that was not scary ugly.

And he was convinced that was highly unlikely--whatever Torr had heard to the contrary. He could not even imagine what one might look like that had no wings. Very likely it would be difficult to impossible even to tell if it was female.

Their enemies, the sky people who had come before had certainly been ugly beasts.

* * * *

The bastards in charge took a vote while at least half of the colonists were either in lock up or confined for injuries.

It was Belle’s opinion that that circumstance didn’t even pay lip service to a democratic vote, but no one challenged it.

Because they knew the captain, Connor Carnegie, didn’t have to take a vote at all.

He held all of the power on the ship.

And beyond that nobody actually wanted to take a chance on the second choice/alternate planet. As unnerved as they were at the prospect of landing on the alien world to begin building their civilization, continuing their journey had even less appeal.

There might be a lot they didn’t know.

But there was a lot they did--most notably the fact that it was abundant with life and it was closer to ideal for the colonists than their home world, Earth, was when they’d left it.

That being the case, it seemed unlikely there would be a majority that voted to take a chance on the secondary target world even if everyone had gotten the chance to vote.

The ship’s officers chose the landing site/colony site based on the intel they gathered with the surveyor drones.

By the time Belle made it to the ground, at least half of the colonists had landed and were already neck deep in preparing their colony site.

Which had been cleared to the bare dirt.

Belle was pretty horrified by that circumstance.

Granted, she had no familiarity with construction, but conservation had been drummed into every colonist from the time they began their education and the clearing looked like a desecration of all that they had been ‘programmed’ to consider precious.

Captain Connor Carnegie had no tolerance for views that differed from his own, however.

When a handful managed to gather their courage to protest, he pointed out that it was done already and there was no point in complaining about it.

And, beyond that, they were building a colony.

They could not work around every blade of grass.

Or apparently, any of the mammoth trees that had been in that area either.

Thankfully, the senior colony administrator, second gen, stepped in before the soldiers could scrape up all of the debris from the trees they’d uprooted and burn them, and the trees were set aside to be processed for manufacturing into goods and products for the colonists.

Belle was still outdone about it.

They could have worked around a good bit of the natural vegetation and it would have beautified the colony. Now they were stuck with an ugly gouge and the structures were certainly not going to improve the view, for they were very basic and utilitarian.

Saving the trees from being totally wasted was certainly better than simply piling them up and burning them, but it was still a waste as far as Belle could see because it was unnecessary--certainly to remove all of them.

Granted, they hadn’t brought many ‘things’ with them.

As colonists they’d been expected and trained to subsist on a bare minimum for their comfort and well being for the sake of conserving critical resources for future citizens.

The trees were giants, though. They had no idea of how long it had taken them to grow so big, but it seemed likely to be a generation and they had enough plant fiber to provide all the needs of the colony for more than a single generation. Maybe more than two or three.

So it was still wasteful in that sense.

And also in the sense that, even considered as a resource, it went well beyond basic needs.

On the other hand, she didn’t want to fight--or debate the matter--with Connor Carnegie.

He was one of her designated genetic matches. As far as she’d been able to tell, though, he had no interest in her, had never even seemed aware of her at all--let alone as a vessel for his use upon his whim and she preferred to keep it that way.

Of course, he had other genetic matches--that he was apparently far more interested in.

She had mixed feelings about that.

He was by far the handsomest of her five ‘matches’.

But he was also the most unnerving of the group.

Maybe because he was the head authority aboard ship.

Possibly because he was military and very powerfully built on top of wielding most of the power on the colony vessel.

She didn’t know, but she was convinced she liked it better when he didn’t notice her at all.

And, really, she wasn’t especially thrilled about any of her matches.

Which was why she was in no huge rush to spawn young--well no rush at all.

In point of fact, she’d been leaning heavily toward ignoring and evading that particular requirement.

Not that she honestly thought that was possible.

They had absolutely had to be very careful about their population on the long voyage--too many people and it risked lives. Too few and they faced the risk of weakening their gene pool with inbreeding.

But every single colonist was part of the gene pool and expected to contribute.

It seemed almost inevitable that she had only to acknowledge that she’d spent most of her adult years ‘in hiding’ from her matches to discover herself suddenly on way too many radars.