Remnant Population

“Local sunrise,” said another male voice. Ofelia wondered where they were; the sun would not rise here for another hour. East of her? Only the sea lay to the east, unless you traveled far to the north. She flicked on the weather screen, which generated a map of the continent, showing the dawnline. Somewhere along that line was the place they’d landed. It had to be over a thousand kilometers away. Perhaps they would never find her. They would be too busy. In all the forty years of this colony, none of them had ventured more than a few kilometers from the base. They had pla

“Eight-eight will drop the heavies in two.”

“On it.”

Ofelia spent that day hunched over the receiver, following the invasion — she could not help thinking of it like that — in the half-understood comments. She remembered enough of her own landing to know the necessary sequence. The first shuttles could land without prepared ground; they carried the mechbots that scraped out a shuttle field. Then the main cargo shuttles could land, with the construction crews that quickly set up the temporary structures for storage and surfaced the strip. Finally, the passenger shuttles, with the newly-wakened colonists, in order of specialty. She imagined another woman like her young self, waking from the cryo tank, trying to comfort her children as they were revived, trying to keep them calm as they were herded into a shuttle… they had landed in the rain, she remembered, and Barto had screamed and butted his hard round head into her breast.

But that would be later. Today, somewhere east and north, the hard shuttles were unloading mechbots, and the big construction machines were gouging the native plants — she wondered if it was forest or brush up there — to make a longer landing strip.

That night, she went back to her house to sleep, trusting that she would hear any shuttle landing at the nearby field. She didn’t turn any lights on — that would be stupid, as long as she knew a ship hung up there, watching. But it would leave, eventually, and the colonists would have hard work to do in their own place. Then she could turn the lights on. She began to be sure that they would not find her. She had heard them say that the tropical site had been a stupid choice; that should mean they wouldn’t want to explore that way. And by the time they did — in ten or twenty years, in thirty years or forty — she would be safely dead.

They might read the colony logs — her additions to them, as well. It made her grin, lying there in the

darkness, to think of them reading the truth, the stories of real people, instead of the official version, all

dates and names…•

“Pass six. On course.” Just like all the others, Ofelia thought. Five passenger shuttles had already landed; she had listened less tensely than before. Clearly no one was paying any attention to the site of an abandoned colony they had no use for. She had even left the center to tend the gardens, to cook and eat her meals, to sleep in her own comfortable bed. Although she had started to assemble a survival pack to take into the forest, she had not finished it. Now she relaxed in a chair in the sewing room, with the volume up high on the radio as she strung the beads she’d painted.

“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 — its — 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 kill—” Incredulity from that voice. Ofelia felt the same way. Something — some animals — trying to kill them? Ridiculous! Storms, yes, floods and droughts and fevers, but not animals. Nothing capable of real damage had attacked the original colony in forty years; the planet had been surveyed; they were crazy up there. 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 cha

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 shuttle? “Get us out of here!”

“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 now! These things are coming in — we can’t—” 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. She went back inside to listen. The shuttle crew was reporting to the orbiting ship. “Visible light, yes. Thermal profile suggests burning debris, not any civilized source of light. Lots of infrared — thousands, tens of thousands of whatever-they-are. Recording in all frequencies. Its — Gods, look at that! Get us UP, Shin!”