Shadowfall by Jana Williams

Author:Jana Williams [Williams, Jana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jana Williams
Published: 2020-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

How quiet Amalie Noether was; how dark. In fact, without a moon she was bathed only in starlight. And the quiet was without end for thousands of kilometers in every direction. Quiet that remained unbroken until the dawn brought a morning breeze that shifted sand across the hardpan with a skittering sound that might give a person the creeps if they didn’t keep their mind firmly anchored in science.

Serge reminded himself there was no fauna on this planet except him and the colonists who had landed there. As he sat with his back braced against the wall of the earthen bowl holding the trekkers’ camp, he had never felt more alone. He had never felt more adrift, or without direction.

He realized with a jolt that there was no rage surging inside him at this moment. No rage driving him to act, to spew or to vent; there was only a great sense of dislocation. His gaze kept drifting back to the motionless, sleeping forms just barely visible around him in the night. Each time his eyes drifted in that direction, he pulled his attention back to the sky, the darkness, and the lack of sound. These things were easier to contemplate than the motionless forms surrounding him.

When Elle had fallen silent, Serge had continued to shake her gently, but could not rouse her again. Concerned, he had checked the carotid pulse on her neck. The beat of her heart was slow but steady beneath his fingertips. When he felt her ribcage, it expanded and contracted with each slow breath. Elle was alive. She just was not responding.

He had gotten up on his hands and knees and crawled over to the next trekker, who lay curled on his moss mat. Vihaan too exhibited signs of life but could not be roused. It was the same with Ashok and Achebe, Dov, Kisi, and every single one of the nearly eighty trekkers. When Serge stopped in front of Ang-lee he reached to touch her to begin his medical assessment, but found that he could not. Instead he gently lifted a loose corner of her moss bedding and pulled it up over her shoulders.

Serge resettled himself, gazing in turn at each sleeping colonist—trying to stay alert for any sign of movement or discomfort. He shook his head in disbelief that the shadowed forms had only hours before been moving, talking, laughing individuals. He realized as he gazed at the somnambulant colonists why Elle had put up with him, his vitriol, his bad moods, his aggressiveness.

Elle had intuited that they might need him. She had gambled everything on his stubbornness about the moss—and his not deserting them in their hour of need. It was utterly eerie, sitting here now with all of them arrayed before him as if in their graves, with only the vast display of stars overhead for counsel. Serge slowly craned his neck upward to take in the sky overhead. How could she have known it would work? How could she have

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