“Cleared to land.” A new voice, no doubt one of the colonists with special training, wakened first and put to work as soon as she landed. Ofelia tried to picture the woman in her mind. Young, of course. Did she have children? She sounded earnest, someone very serious about her work. If she had children, their clothes would always be neat. Ofelia looked at the pattern of beads she was making, and decided to put another blue one between the greens. That meant sliding off a yellow and a green; she squinted at the thread. “We’ve got trouble,” she heard. The voice was trying to stay calm, and not succeeding. Ofelia looked up, half-expecting to see someone in the doorway talking to her. No. It was still in the gray box, happening somewhere else, whatever it was.
“What?” Bored, unworried response from the orbiting ship.
“There’s some kind of—it’s—there’s not supposed to be any intelligent life, but that’s—”
“Make sense, will you?”
“There’s about a hundred or so big . . . brownish animals. Moving toward us. In formation. Bright patterns on them, and some kind of—” A noise Ofelia did not recognize, though it sounded dangerous, a noise her body understood before her brain could analyze it. “—They’re trying to
She put down the beads and went into the control room. If these people were transmitting video as well as audio, she might be able to see them. She tried one channel after another, but found no images. She would have to listen.
Even her imagination could not make it clear. What the creatures were, no one seemed to know. More than one voice, in the next hours, said they were big. More than one exclaimed over their speed. How big was big? How fast was fast? Ofelia no more than those who actually saw them could guess if they were more like mammals or reptiles, how intelligent they were.
However intelligent, the creatures seemed determined to kill the colonists. Ofelia hunched over the speakers, listening to the now-familiar sounds: she had heard from the voices that this was an explosive, and that was the impact of stones hurled by some kind of machine. People were dead already, killed by the falling stones, the explosions. Only a few of the people had weapons. Some of them cowered in the shuttle presently on the ground; the pilot asked permission to return to space.
“You’re overloaded for return—unload your cargo—”
“—Can’t. They won’t go out—we can make it—”
“Marginal. You’ve got to—”
“If they blow a hole in the strip, we won’t have a chance; we have to go now—” No answer, but Ofelia heard the pilot mutter. “Damned idiots—c’mon Tig, get that booster primed, we’re going to need every bit of it—”
Then an explosion that hurt Ofelia’s ears even attenuated by distance and the speakers’ dampers. A few seconds of silence, then a call from the ship.
“—Come in—Carver, answer!”
“—Too late, you bastards—they got the shuttle and the strip!” That from one of the other local sources. Ofelia felt a pressure in her chest. The creatures had blown up a
“Three hours until another shuttle can make it.” A new voice from the ship, older, with more authority. “That will be after local sunset . . . they’ll need lights for landing. We’ve put every trained person aboard—”
“In three hours, we won’t be here to save!” the voice said. “Lights—how can we—Dammit, do something
Ofelia felt wetness on her face and tasted it. Tears. She was crying for them, for the hopeless, helpless colonists, waked from cryo to be killed on a planet they had not even met. It was far worse than her own fate, far worse than working forty years for nothing. She knew, as they would learn, that Company ships hanging safe in space never risked themselves down in the dirty atmosphere for mere colonists. Cheaper to lose a few colonists than a deep-space carrier.
“We don’t have any space-to-surface weapons,” the ship’s voice said. “Recommend you lay out a defensive perimeter—”
“With what?” The bitterness in that made Ofelia wince. “I’ll leave this on transmit, and you can get your precious record—tell whoever surveyed this place they were blind, deaf, and crazy—”
Ofelia hardly breathed as the distant sounds made clear what happened. The creatures overran the landing site; Ofelia could hear screaming, most of it incoherent, and sounds she supposed were made by the creatures themselves. The last sound transmitted was the thud, then crunch, of something knocking over and squashing the transmitter. Ofelia went outside; it was dusk, dusk of the same day. She heard a distant roar, then a crashing boom: a shuttle coming down fast, not on the course of the others.
