Forty-One

The two sides have divided Rabbah. They began taking hostages just yesterday. I think this will be my last transmission.

Chloe took Abbas back. She and Suharto and Guo came and dragged him out of the water filtration area while we changed filters. She grabbed me and held my arms behind me while they hit him across the skull, knocking him out and causing who knows what kind of brain damage, and dragged him out of the room. Chloe threw me against a wall. I did not black out, but I wish that I had. My jaw has a lump in it almost as big as my fist.

In retaliation, Rusul and Fletcher grabbed Ghadir from the common room while she was trying to plan our meal schedules.

Dagon and Suharto grabbed Vivien at some point during the day; then Payam and Haven nabbed Ihsan, while Rusul and Fletcher grabbed Bulus; and Chloe and Guo grabbed Natsuki. Yvain gave himself up to the anti-unionizers. I have holed myself up in the computer room to write this last communication. I doubt, after all the violence, I will have access to this room again.

We have managed to clean all the dead plants – some of them had survived, amazingly, and we relished every morsel of the strawberries and tiny new lettuce leaves. Over fresh food, Natsuki and Ihsan and I had talked about how we would negotiate this civil war that has been brewing for so long. Natsuki believed we would have to choose sides at some point, but none of us could foresee that we would be forced to choose like this.

The octopuses floated dead into our bay as well. They were discolored and mottled in ways they shouldn’t have been. Vivien thought they had been floating in the still water and bloating, like dead bodies apparently do (I have never seen a dead body other than Vahan, and then not for long), but it could also have been radiation.

I am trying to decide if I regret anything about this voyage. I am sorry, so sorry for the failure, but I would not have made a choice to stay on Earth if I were invited. But I no longer think that we can walk away from our training, or enforced social contracts, so easily. I wanted us to, I had so hoped that we could. Maybe we do deserve to die, because we couldn’t get past our anger at Earth and just survive long enough to create a new way of life.

They are banging on the door. I don’t know who they are, but none of us will be alive for much longer, no matter what Kailash says. I do not regret that I never gave in.  
 

Forty

Everything has been sabotaged.

The bivalves outside of Rabbah have been destroyed, released to the hungry mouths of the octopuses, which are also beginning to show signs of weakness from the radiation. Our kelp and seaweed were found shredded and spread across the rest of our garden, soaking salt into the soil and weighing down the delicate greenery. Lettuce strewn across the floor, dead fish and the tubes full of eggs scattered everywhere. Water and slime spread sickly reeking across the floor.

Our attempt to recycle filters for printer material was also smashed. The resin and carbon were in a chunky, melted heap on the floor and the printer ripped, as best I can describe it, in three places.

The air is thick with the stench of bodies and the weight of carbon dioxide. I have not crawled back into the vent system yet, but I can only imagine the rancid soup of dying algae rusting through the metal into spaces below – leeching holes to allow Europa’s oceans, slowly, to reclaim Rabbah.

The city of waters it shall be, indeed.

What remains untouched? Only what our demented saboteur assumed we would need – the remaining unused filters, the nutritional loaf stores, and the computer. Perhaps they allowed the octopuses to live because they can use them as a bargaining tool? We still have the ability to mine the water, but we can’t until the company shows a serious investment in our future. Something like that.

Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher were furious. They locked all of us, even Haven and Budur, in the common room for a full day while they wrote long missives to their military cronies on Earth, trying to figure out what to do. Yuda and Guo eventually showed us how to crawl through the air filtration system to get out of the common room, and we escaped to our respective rooms only choking a little on the salty, rotting fog.

I don’t know if those three men care. It has been several days, and Durada, Ihsan, and I have already spent most of our time in plain sight, cleaning. I haven’t seen many of the rest of the group. I think Yuda and Bulus are focusing on filter changes, although it seems useless now without anything producing oxygen. We’re just recycling the same particles in and out of our lungs. I’ve developed a wheezing cough that rattles right next to my heart, and I imagine a layer of black dust collecting in the bottom of my lungs, soaking up moisture from my body and oozing up the sides, coating each bronchial branch with a little more tar each day.

I can guess who the lead saboteur is, but I don’t know how many of the other unionizers were involved, and why they thought this might work. Vivien and Abbas were for certain not part of it. Chloe had to be the ringleader. Yuda has less interest in the movement lately than Guo, but they are rarely apart so I am not sure. I can’t imagine Samira or Cyril getting their hands dirty – they’ve made pretty speeches about the responsibility of the upper classes to the lower classes and how that’s failed, but it seems to me that Chloe and whoever else helped her are violating that social obligation just as badly as the Hou CEOs of Breathe Easy.

I still have not told anyone about the communication we received from Breathe Easy, and I suppose that Kailash has not either. Why should he, when he can maintain a semblance of control this way, as though everything were going according to his group’s plan?

I sneak in and read the communications back and forth with the military officers. They are getting more violent in each exchange. Some recommend tying us up and blindfolding us. Some think we should be drugged until a solution has been reached with Breathe Easy. Some think we should be beaten, or outright killed, because no solution is forthcoming. Some gently think we should go to trial back on Earth for our continued bad behavior, because Earth would certainly sentence us to death or asteroid mining – as though we were not de facto sentenced outside of a court to a hard life/death far away from civilization anyway.

Being part of civilization has never done anything for me. That’s why I genuinely wanted to leave it.

It seems as though we have, for now, been set free while Kailash, Rusul, and Fletcher decide what sort of punishment we should receive. They seem to lump those of us who are neutral – who just want to work – in with the unionizers. I guess if we aren’t with them, then we must be against them.  And now someone has destroyed the only thing keeping us neutral, and that was our chance at survival.

We have a month or two in food stores, but I’m sure we have less than that before our air and water filters completely go. Then we’ll find out if we have a few days of air, or if we’ll die of dehydration first. I read once that you can live for between 2 and 5 days before you die of dehydration, while it takes weeks to die of starvation. I suppose in a strange way I’m glad for the quicker death.

I will have to ask Ihsan if we have any poisonous plants left in the garden. I’m not sure about an overdose of coffee senna.

Thirty-Nine

I hardly focused this week on my necessary duties – the garden has become self-sufficient for now, Bulus and Ihsan are back changing air filters instead of Suharto – and instead spent many late nights digging through Kailash’s communications with Earth. He has not spoken much with his previous correspondents, but I reread many of the messages, fitting them into the pattern Yvain suggested. I had Yvain join me, and he nodded along with the recommendations, but after a few days begged off the task. It was too much like his previous life, he said.

But finally, after four weeks, a message from Breathe Easy has arrived. They received our water, but the organic pollutants throughout make it harder and harder to filter. I wanted to scream at the screen that of course we have more organic pollutants – we have introduced fish and octopuses and shellfish and kelp and seaweed to the water when there was no other life on the planet, as we were instructed to do. Eight octopuses died in the water, and Breathe Easy could have easily seen it coming. We have known since before the revolution that Europa’s waters were exposed to radiation from space, so of course our animals would be susceptible and die. And of course their bodies would taint the water.

Although we completed our mission, we have been denied more supplies. Between that and the recent troubles with union talk, we are a liability and they said that the men must put us in order before they would send anything more. They might send us our own material for a filtration system, but they would not send us anything else to keep our colony running. If we were not mostly on our own by this point, they said, then we would have to be a financial loss.

Our lives are a financial loss.

Our conflicts are our own fault.

I waited through the night for Kailash to come into the computer room. He was surprised to see me, eyes squinting, stopping in his tracks.

I told him about the message. He sat heavily on a crate.

“Why,” was all he could manage, after several minutes.

“Because we’re a group of convicts who couldn’t see our common cause and killed ourselves,” I replied.

He stared up at me for a long time. “Do you really think we are dead?”

I shrugged. “We could probably manage on food, but the air, the water … our filters are not enough.”

“We can make new filters …”

“No, we have no more printer material. We’ve melted down some old filters but it just doesn’t print properly. We have the next round lined up to be printed today, and then we’ll run out of air in a few weeks.”

Kailash nodded. He saw his own vision of the future spread out before him, eyes dancing across the scene in his head, then he pushed me out of the way. “I can explain this to them,” he said. “Cleaning up after us, for the next round of colonists, is also an expensive prospect.”

“Our water is too dirty,” I said. “I don’t know if they want the Europan oceans anymore.”

But Kailash was already tapping away at the console, composing his plea for silk and carbon fibers so his life would be spared. Praying to his false idols. Failing to rely on his instincts. Maybe he thought the recent take-over by the small group of anti-unionists would be enough to convince Breathe Easy to save us, as though an elite minority would be able to control the majority here, with nothing to offer.

I decided I had to break the news to the group, but I have not yet as of this writing. Kailash won’t – he’ll hold out until we hear from them again, and I can’t imagine that we will.

Sometimes, while I sit at this console, I imagine myself walking out of the airlock and swimming through Europa’s frigid waters and screaming into the black.