The Silence of Alium [On Hiatus]

Chapter 9 - First Engagement - Part 2

She stood, brushing off her knees, scooping up a smoothed stone as she did, and resumed her scan of the horizon. Still, only stretches of nothingness greeted her. She cast the stone out, as if skipping it across a great lake. As it skidded over a light crest and into the hollow beyond, a strange and quavering cry rose up splitting the nothing in twain. Instinctively, Fahima's hand flew over her shoulder to the thunder rifle strapped to her back.

She knew of no creature upon Alium that could make such a cry, and yet she knew far less about Alium than she liked. The planet was under strict quarantine, human influence confined within the dome and primarily within the immediate vicinity of Lacroix station. The pseudo-flora of the planet lacked the capability for audible vocalizations, and even the few more earth-like predators of which she was aware did not match with what she had heard.

Yet the station had gone silent over a year past. What had transpired within that stretch of silence she could not say.

Her thunder rifle hummed to life, its steady vibrations soothing her as Fahima eyed her surroundings through the rifle's scope. The world played out in an irised spectacle, as if an ancient film of the silent era. At first the dark hillocks of soil dominated the totality of her view.  Then, shifting in response to a second undulating cry, Fahima caught sight of movement. The creature darted by low to the ground disappearing into another hollow in a flash of knotted and coarse fur.  Only, as best as Fahima could recall, all the creatures of Alium lacked hair..

She inched closer, lowering her rifle and raising her gaze from its scope, taking in a more complete picture of the scene. Below her, bounding between the empty hollows, Fahima spotted a goat. It chewed at the empty soil, attempting to graze but finding nothing but barren earth. Dirt and pebbles dripped from its mouth, its jaw still clamping as it steadily gnashed upon its ruddy and ultimately worthless meal, even as the rest of the beast froze, its eyes locked upon Fahima and her rifle.

Fahima stared back at it, equally frozen and just as shocked. There should have been no Earth species upon Alium other than the researchers themselves. That was an inherent fact of the quarantine. Life-bearing planets could not be compromised.

***

"The glass must be whole." her grandfather said. "Some artisans meld multiple gathers to craft their work, but there is something beautiful in the simplicity of one gather, unfractured and with no joins. Uncompromised. Do you understand?" He pinched the glass two-thirds of the way up from its connection to the putney, as he spun the rod between two rails. The gentle press of his blades as the gather spun slowly separated the mass into two conjoined ovals. He lifted his tongs and began pressing in on the smaller oval, bending and smoothing it until a small head with an elongated snout began to take shape.

"Not really," Fahima said. "You're sculpting another mole aren't you?" This latter part came out loaded with disdain. Fahima had a shelf full of glass moles back in the family home - a stone and soil dugout, its foundation dug into the hard Talisian earth. The moles hovered over her as she slept and often she found herself wishing that an earthquake would rock the house and send the little glass army crashing to the floor.

"Perhaps," Aabdar said, a mischievous smile creeping up his otherwise stern face, cracking that leathered mask.

"Grandpa." Fahima scrunched her nose and eyes as if sucking on a sour tart. "They're so ugly, with their beady little eyes and that hideous nose."

Aabdar shifted from his blades to a small wooden block, which he used to flatten out the glass nose in progress. Casting that aside, he then began to pluck at the the flattened nose with a pair of tweezers, swiftly plucking the strange, worm-like appendages of the mole's nose into existence. "I think it's beautiful," he said.

"I think you're senile."

Aabdar laughed, a robust, full-hearted bellow that could have stoked the flames of the surrounding furnaces. "Be that as it may." He continued in the delicate task - the vaguely star-like tuberances taking shape around the protruding nose, like the many digits of some grotesque hand bursting forth from the creature's face.

"I'm not a mole you know. I'm a bear. Or a shark. You could call me your shark. Then I could have an army of glass sharks and they could devour the moles. Or a lion. That'd be even better. What do you think, a lion or a shark?" Fahima had looked back at her grandfather still tenderly plucking at the glass, his sculpture gently emerging from the gather. She'd hoped he'd grant her wish. Grandpa, however, rarely met her expectations.

"No, mole, I'm afraid that's not how this works." He moved on from its hideous nose and began carefully creating its eye cavities, then plucking up its beady eyes from those hollows.

"Stupid moles." Fahima huffed, crossed her arms and plopped into an empty chair at the nearest workstation, her back to her grandfather.

"They're blind, you know."

"Yeah, I know. I'm named after a blind rodent. Fun nickname, grandpa."

"Yet they can see," he continued. "Better than normal moles. Its that nose that you hate. That beautiful nose. It feels its surroundings with that wonderful adaptation, more sensitive than even our own hands, and it sees the world even in the darkest dark."

"That's great."

"It sees even when all others are blind, mole. It's special."

Even then, she knew what he meant, knew he was speaking of her and not the mole, but her grandpa was too soft. At least that's what she had thought, so she couldn't let him know how much she had appreciated the compliment.  "Still hideous, though."

***

Hideous little beasts that could "see" in the darkest dark. That could see what all others missed. Like her.

The goat was a problem, something for which the colonists would have to be taken to task, but it was not the problem. That loomed in a flittering swarm just barely emerging from the distant fog. If one blinked they would miss it, seeing nothing more than a dark shape, a black cloud within the larger mist. That person would be wrong. Fahima saw it. She knew what was coming.

Pinwheels.