UnEarthed

Red Means You’re Dead-1

Red Means You’re Dead

The guy had been right. Jodi woke without the hangover most long sleeps leave behind. Rather, she felt refreshed and unnaturally optimistic. Happy had been an alien sensation since her mother had announced her decision to leave. Jodi smiled. No matter how unexpected, this was a happy feeling. Happy and hairy. Amazing what something as simple as survival will do for a person.

“Jumping Jehosephat, it’s like Planet of the Apes in here!” A petite brunette bounced up beside her in the shower queue. “Did you know a body could grow so much hair in four months?”

Jodi grinned. “I had no idea. Thank god for fast orbit transfers, huh? Imagine if we’d slept twice as long.” The fact that she was wrapped in a bath towel, sporting more leg and armpit hair than she’d ever thought possible, did not dim her mood. That didn’t happen until she’d waited half a lifetime to get to the front of the line. By then, she was just cranky enough that she didn’t care how long anyone else had to wait for her to finish. A girl had to do what a girl had to do.

Much cream, three showers, some tweezing and oceans of shampoo later, Jodi was at least physically clean. She wondered as she brushed her teeth how the craft’s storage tanks were coping with all the suds.

The little brunette reappeared beside her in the long mirror over the hand basins. “From Planet of the Apes to the missing link.” The woman examined her still furry eyebrows. “Millions of years of evolution in only two showers. Not bad progress, eh?”

Jodi smiled. “You too, huh?” It had taken her three showers to get sorted because she’d kept finding missed hairy pieces on her legs. Surely every other woman on the flight would have the same issue.

The woman nodded, winced, and started plucking.

“On the upside, I’ve got a lot more hair on my head, and my fingernails are amazing. I actually thought they’d refuse to grow, just out of fear.” Most times, Jodi was a nail chewer. Correction: unless she was sleeping, which she’d been doing for quite some time now, Jodi chewed her nails.

The woman handed her a nail file. “Here, it’ll help keep you from reverting to form.”

“Thanks.” Jodi took the gift and moved out of the way so others could see themselves for the first time in an age.

Once the accrued grime had gone down the drain, there was only the dirty, creepy feeling left to lose. While she had slept, people had scanned her, tested her blood and monitored her vitals. Quarantine was important and much, much easier when travellers were asleep.

Jodi ran the nail file across the rough edges of her new nails. Staff on the good ship Homeros worked in shifts, so there was at least two of them who knew what she looked like inside and out. That seemed like much more than complete strangers had a right to know. Sure, she’d signed permission forms and stuff, but still … . She shuddered. Gross.

Dressed in a new, clean travel suit, it was time to play tourist. Marilyn was still standing in the communal space, looking and frowning at a mirror while trying to make her eyebrows even and her lips more plump. Taking her window seat, therefore, seemed the best and most obvious thing to do. She zipped past her mum, with a quick salute to her in the mirror, then dodged her way down the aisle to nab the best view in the row.

Jodi strapped herself into the Formafoam seat and waited while the material puffed and squidged itself around her, slowly reforming from her mother’s shape to her own. Only then did she turn her attention to the space around Mars.

Passengers, tourists and immigrants alike were all woken early enough that they got a good sample of space, but not so early that they could be bored or get fidgety in their seats. That also meant that they wouldn’t pester staff who, while they were happy to deliver coffees and meals, were to a large extent trained more for technical and medical purposes than customer service. You could tell that by the lack of fake smiles and the appraising way they looked a person up and down. Much like they’d just seen you naked. Again, so gross. Jodi shivered.

In the window, her face was silhouetted against the darkness outside. With so long asleep, no matter how she tried observing space, her eyes were more interested in her reflection. She was a stranger to herself and weirdly attracted to the process of rediscovery.

Her dark olive skin barely showed up in the reflective surface, but light from inside the cabin glanced off the edges of her features. Even as only a semi-dark face shape, Jodi could tell she had a leaner, narrower face shape than before she went to sleep. She pressed her fingertips to the window, traced the gleaming edges of her reflection, and smiled. No more puppy fat for this sixteen-year-old. A solid diet of nutrient mixtures had whittled her down to her fighting weight.

Her white-blonde hair, all newly washed and combed back out of her face, also reflected the interior lights. Beneath that cap of white, her face looked a bit like an eyeless skull. Too much of a contrast between hair and skin tones, too many angles for a soft, pretty look. Jodi frowned at her dark self. How completely unsurprising: even with a lot of shaving and a little weight loss, space wasn’t a good look on her.

Luckily other, more heavenly bodies beckoned and offered themselves as burning, glittering distractions. Outside the window, beyond her reflection, the blackness was immense. Not night black, this was space black … a deep, scary kind of darkness that came with emptiness.

Night is somethingness. It’s atmosphere and dust and reflected light. It’s the period between sunset and sunrise. There is always an end to night black.

Space is nothingness. It’s a dark that is endless and eternal. Sort of like death, only with planets and stars. Space is a place where things remain unknown, where they hide, far out of sight in the cold.

On Earth the night sky had always felt familiar, a comforting blanket thrown over her world. Some nights, she and her mum had located Mars in the sky, and wondered about what her dad was doing right then. In space, nothing was familiar. She could have studied the books and vodcasts for a thousand years and none of this would have looked like she expected.

What if some stupid piece of junk hit the shuttle? What about the tails of asteroids? Were the heatproof shields designed for that? She really should have paid more attention in the training course. She should have listened when her mother prattled on about Mars and moving. She should have done her own research. She should have believed it would happen. At least then it would have felt known, if not familiar.

Yeah, yeah, yeah … shoulda, coulda, woulda – but didn’t!

Instead she’d done nothing. Actually, she hadn’t done exactly nothing. The one thing she’d done a great deal of was hoping. Well, she’d done two things really, moaning and hoping. She’d moaned every day about the unfairness of the move and she’d simultaneously hoped not to move. Hoped she’d get to stay on Earth with Ellie’s family. Hoped her dad got fired. Hoped the migration shuttle would break down. In fact, she’d hoped for a gazillion different things, anything at all that would keep her from having to move.

Moaning had done nothing except make her feel a bit better. Hope had failed completely. Now there was nothing to do but sit here, watch Mars loom closer, examine the surface of the moon Phobos, and chew thin edges off her newly grown fingernails.

A freaky looking conveyer belt with pods hanging beneath it snaked down through space in a pale slither that ran almost parallel with their own path. It was something to do with carrying minerals from this moon to Mars. She knew that much from science classes at school. Another time, she might have been a fascinated tourist.

Right now, she was a sixteen-year-old Earth girl, squished into a thermo-regulation-hyperspeed-resistant-heat-fire-and-everything-else-proof suit, surrounded by a Foamaform shock absorbing seat, about to land on Mars.

And live there!

She wriggled against the restraints of her seat.

“Stop fidgeting.” Her mum had snuck up and settled herself, without comment, into the aisle seat. Her face was perfectly made up, but from the stillness of her features, Jodi figured her mother was almost as nervous as she about landing. Finally! It was about time the woman showed some kind of concern over this whole ludicrous plan. If only she’d cottoned on sooner, they wouldn’t be here now. If only she’d listened to Ellie’s dad.

Jodi’s BFF was Ellie. Ellie’s dad was a pilot. One night on one of their many sleepovers, she and Ellie had both giggled at the dinner table while Renfield Wu had described being an airline pilot for some of his guests.

“It’s hours of mind-numbing boredom sandwiched between ten minutes of brain-frying terror either end.” He didn’t actually say ‘brain-frying’. He’d actually used a better ‘F’ word; the one that Jodi hardly ever even thought.

From a man who rarely swore, much less in front of children, Mr Wu’s statement had made quite an impact. The guests had nearly choked on their food. Ellie’s mum had gasped and playfully smacked her husband’s arm. Ellie and Jodi had sent secret, admiring non-verbal messages to each other. Brain-frying would officially become part of their vocabulary. Obviously, her mother hadn’t been listening back then or she would have multiplied air travel by, oh, a gajillion times, to arrive at space travel. What exactly was a gajillion times a brain-fry?

This whole move was her father’s plan of course. David Scarfield had been offered the opportunity to manufacture and grow crops in the Anphobos greenhouses. What botanist wouldn’t leap at that kind of chance? That had been his question. There had been no appropriate answer. Botanists had a history of stupid behaviour, and David Scarfield was continuing a fine tradition. That he screwed over his family in the meantime was, apparently, not important.

Jodi kept scraping the little rough edges off her nails. It wasn’t chewing really, so much as trimming.

Martian kids were a pack of self-important psylocrats. The ones she’d met on Earth barely spoke to other kids at school. They treated Earth technology as though it was backward and annoying, and they made constant comparisons between Earth and Mars, as though Earth could never hope to compete. Jodi felt her hackles rise just at the thought. Admittedly – and considering her latest exploits – she wasn’t the globe’s greatest patriot, but she wasn’t stupid either.

Everyone knew Martian and Earthen technology were the same. Anphobos was an Earthen colony, for crying out loud. Mars couldn’t do anything without Earth monitoring and approving of it. Even Martian inhabitants were screened by Earth’s health and quarantine officers. The whole red planet colony would barely exist if it weren’t for Earth. So who were these ego-inflated, technogeeks kidding when they poured on their attitudes? It was ridiculous, really. Or it would have been, if she weren’t about to join a school – nay a whole frying colony – full of them.

The shuttle whooshed and slid just the way it was supposed to. Mars, with its red dust, mountains, craters and unearthly land forms, grew closer and closer by the second. Then the colony came into view. Vast by comparison with what she’d imagined, Anphobos was shaped like a giant wheel. Concentric circles, joined by spokes, glowed white and silver against a blood-red planet. Nestled at the curve of Cydonia’s throat, her new home stood like a jewel on the surface of the planet.

As if the face-shaped mountain wasn’t enough of a threatening protector for the colony of Anphobos, this jewel also belonged to Mars, an angry and warlike god. If she let her imagination run too far, Jodi could almost feel Mars resenting their arrival. This god who lent his name was hoarding and hungry. Panic fluttered fast in her chest. She was going to be trapped here, just like all the other people inside that synthetic dome. Once you were in, you couldn’t get out. Mars wouldn’t allow it. There wouldn’t be any nice picnicking day trips across to the craters. Mars never needed day trippers. Mars had always been one for sacrifices.