Culpepper watched out the window as Guerrero brought the vehicle to a hover over a large clearing. The sun was just beginning to peek over the treetops to the east. In the dim light of dawn, she could see orange and green fruits covering the trees beyond the clearing.

I hope today’s results are better than yesterday’s.

They had visited four locations in the last six days. Two of those had yielded nothing useful. Perhaps a month earlier or a month later, things might have been different, but nothing that was ripe now and suitable for human consumption. They’d found good options at the other two stops, and in each case had stayed an extra day to harvest what they could. But there were still critical nutrients they had to find if they were going to survive the winter. So they kept moving.

A survey drone hovered a hundred feet to their north over another patch of the same clearing. That would mark where Swenson wanted the transponder set for the portal. They had been through the same drill yesterday and the day before: touch down at sunrise; collect as many different samples of fruit and vegetation as they could before Mabel passed overhead and the communication window opened; set the transponder and pack their produce tightly around it; say the word and watch it disappear, leaving a divot ten feet in diameter and two feet deep in the turf.

Swenson, the team’s civilian engineer, would lock onto the transponder as a location reference and use the portal at the base camp to transport the cargo—which included the transponder itself. The rest of the team would then unload the portal as quickly as they could and Swenson would send the transponder, and the divot, back. Using the portal this way was risky, but it was the only practical way to move a significant volume of produce six thousand miles.

The chief problem was that they had no reliable location reference for the reverse transport. It wasn’t as simple as just sending it back where it came from. The spatial relationship between the two endpoints hadn’t changed much, but in the time that had elapsed the planet had rotated around its axis and its sun, and both moons had rotated around the planet. These celestial motions resulted in distortions of the gravity field in the region between the two endpoints. The impact on the portal technology was not insignificant.

The transit portal leveraged a novel understanding of physics that translated a spherical volume, in zero time, from one place to another. The amount of power required was proportional to the volume of the transfer and the square of the distance between the endpoints. They had a portal, but only a small fraction of the power that would be necessary to send themselves back across fifty-seven light-years to Earth. The portal there, with its much larger power source, would have to initiate that transaction. But moving things around on the planet wasn’t so much a problem of power as of precision.

It is a common misconception that no two objects can occupy the same space at the same time. This is not so much a law of physics as it is a natural consequence of other principles. Reality is that whether you look at how atoms fit together to make molecules, or how subatomic particles fit together to make atoms, or how quarks fit together to make subatomic particles, the empty spaces are many orders of magnitude larger than the constituent objects. You really could interleave the particles of one rock into the space occupied by another.

In the next instant, however, mayhem would ensue. The original rock had achieved a delicate balance between the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The sudden introduction of a large number of new particles within the same space would dramatically upend that balance, with unpredictable consequences.

The portal’s solution to this dilemma was to preamble the transfer with a rapidly expanding void that would push out whatever matter currently occupied the destination. This still has significant consequences for anything currently occupying that space, but if mostly air, the implications are trivial.

In the two iterations they had executed the day before, the first return transport had been off by nearly three inches and the second by more than two in the opposite direction. This left an arc-shaped gap on one side of the divot, and packed and mounded soil on the other side where the portal had pushed away whatever was in the space to make room for the incoming sphere.

Swenson and Sakhr seemed to think this would be okay so long as they were working in soft soils, but they couldn’t be sure what would happen if they got into hard rock where pushing it away had potentially seismic consequences. That was why Swenson had sent the drone ahead and marked the spot where he wanted the transponder.

Guerrero set the four-wheeler down. Grass covered the floor of the clearing. As Culpepper saw it up close she realized animals had grazed here, and fairly recently. Memories of growing up on the farm and racing through the cow pasture crept up unbidden from somewhere in her mind. She quickly shoved them back into their closet and barred the door.

“Watch your step. There are landmines everywhere.”

Guerrero had been about to step out of the vehicle, but jerked back and spun around to look at her.

She smiled and pointed through the windshield at the ground in front of the vehicle where the grazers had left behind the byproducts of their craft.

Guerrero shook his head, then climbed out. He grabbed the transponder from the back of the four-wheeler and walked toward the drone. She watched him go for a few steps before he stopped and turned around.

“Are you coming?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. We’ve been through this. We don’t need to do it again.”

We’re wasting time, She thought. You don’t need my help to set up the transponder, and I don’t need your help to start assessing vegetation. But she said, “Right behind you.” She got out of the vehicle, grabbed her pack, and followed after Guerrero.

The transponder sat atop a tripod. Guerrero set it up directly below the hovering drone and adjusted the height to position it five feet off the ground.

He looked at his watch. “We have an hour and twenty minutes until the communication window opens. Where to?”

Culpepper hitched up her pack and started walking toward the treeline. Guerrero followed, and the drone drifted up above the treetops and shadowed them. Swenson had programmed it to track them and monitor their perimeter for potential threats.

The drone didn’t bother her. She knew the threat of aggressive wildlife was real, and having advance warning of potential predators made her feel a lot more comfortable. That was part of why she didn’t feel the need to put up with Guerrero and all his paranoid rules.

For the next hour, they collected samples of everything they could find that might have nutritional value. Culpepper tagged and cataloged them so if anything proved promising they could find more of it. Finally, Guerrero said, “We’d better get what we have back to the staging area. They’ll make radio contact in about five minutes. We need to be ready to transport.”

Culpepper piled the last of what she was looking at onto the sled that Guerrero had fashioned from an animal skin and tree branches. He started dragging it back toward the clearing.

She followed but began lagging further and further behind. When Guerrero got far enough ahead that she didn’t think he could hear her footfalls, she slowed to a stop. When he kept going, she turned and headed off in another direction.

Now we stop wasting time. Meathead can deal with the transport. I’ll get started surveying the next quadrant around the clearing.

Photo by Deglee Degi on Unsplash

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 5: REGULATIONS appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Yes Ma’am. Set it down now.

Alex Guerrero took the four-wheeler off autopilot and nosed down toward the ground. The scrub trees were sparse enough that, in a pinch, he could set down almost anywhere. But, whether Culpepper liked it or not, that wasn’t the way this worked. They were more than four thousand miles from their base camp, in a part of the world they’d never explored, on a planet they’d been on for less than three months, and with no drones to monitor their perimeter.

These stops were necessary, but the riskiest part of the mission. In the air, they had almost unlimited visibility and were out of reach of anything that could do them harm. There were still too many unknowns on the ground, especially now that they’d moved well away from their base camp.

He spotted a small clearing up ahead and angled toward it. Slowing his approach, he made a broad circle around the perimeter to give the four-wheeler’s cameras a good look at their surroundings.

“Horses!” she said.

The computer watched for anything in motion. Culpepper’s job on approach was to assess anything it flagged while Guerrero concentrated on navigation.

He centered up over the clearing but didn’t land. “Where?”

Culpepper pointed past him out the left window. “There!”

He spotted about two dozen animals that looked like Earth horses scattered about among the trees. Most were grazing, but several had turned to look up at them as they hovered twenty feet off the ground.

Big. Fast. We’re outnumbered and on their turf. Guerrero took the controls and started pulling out.

“Set it down. Horses are herbivores, they’re not territorial, and rarely aggressive unless threatened. If there were any real threats here, they wouldn’t be here.”

He looked at her. Makes sense. But then, these are not Earth horses. He looked back over his shoulder at the herd. When the four-wheeler pulled out, most of them had returned to grazing.

Guerrero turned the vehicle around and brought it in for a landing, being careful to take a slow approach from a direction that would minimize the perception of threat to the animals.

He looked out his window. “Let’s take this slow. Give them a chance—”

The sound of Culpepper’s door opening interrupted him. He spun his head around and saw her jump out of the vehicle, sling her pack over her shoulder, and take off at a trot toward the tree line in the direction opposite the herd.

“Where are you going!”

“The ladies’ room,” she shouted. “The little boy’s room is over there.” She pointed back over her shoulder in the direction of the horses. Most of whom, he noted, were now looking directly at him.

Stretch your legs. Sure.

On to Chapter 5

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by James Eades on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 4: RESPITE appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Culpepper stared out the window of the vehicle as they cruised a thousand feet above the crests of the canyons. The view was spectacular. Steep canyon walls striped in varied earth tones with a mostly dry streambed in the bottom. Small patches of several different types of cactus sparsely dotted the landscape. Beautiful, but useless. Nothing in sight that would help them survive. No good reason to land the four-wheeler here.

Their conveyance was somewhat paradoxical. They had begun referring to it as a four-wheeler not because it had four wheels but because it could go anywhere. Almost literally. It looked like someone had taken an extended-cab short-bed pickup truck from the assembly line before the powertrain was added. It had wheel-wells, but no wheels; an engine compartment, but no engine—at least not in the traditional sense. These had been replaced by a power source and propulsion system invented by the same man who had created the transit portal that brought them to this planet. No one here knew how either technology worked. Nor did they understand why the transit portal had stopped working, leaving them stranded fifty-seven light-years from Earth.

This was a bad idea. I told them this was a bad idea. Did they listen to me? Noooo. “You’ll make a good team.” Good team. Right. The botanist and the meathead.

A metallic click broke her reverie. “Are you cleaning that gun again! You just cleaned it yesterday. And the day before that.”

“And the day before that, and the day before that,” Guerrero said. “A craftsman treats his tools with respect. On the subject of which, that tablet will serve you longer if you’ll stop smacking it against the dashboard.”

“I can’t concentrate when you’re doing …” She waved her tablet at his disassembled rifle “ … that.”

“You can always find a distraction when you’re looking for one.”

She shifted in the seat to glare at him. “What, exactly, is that supposed to mean.”

He snapped the barrel of his rifle back into place. “It means you’ve been cooped up in the cab of a pickup truck for three days with nothing to do but stare at snow-covered mountains and desert plains as we sail over them at a thousand feet.”

“I’m trying to review these nutritional analyses.”

Guerrero put his reassembled rifle to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel as he pointed it at the floor between his feet. “Dr. Tornquist has already reviewed that data and didn’t find anything useful. Granted, you’re the expert. But you know she knows what she’s doing. If there were any prospect of anything good, she would’ve flagged it. You’re looking for a distraction. So am I. That’s why I’m cleaning my rifle. Again. It relaxes me—helps me think.”

“Hmph. Don’t strain yourself.” Culpepper shifted back around in her seat, looking again at her tablet. “Stick to your strengths.”

He cycled the action on his rifle. “That’s why I’m here.”

Is there a way for you to not be here?

She was just beginning to get back in the zone when Decker’s voice came over the radio.

“Forager, this is Beachhead. How do you hear?”

Her focus lost yet again, she rapped her tablet against her forehead. Can you not at least talk in complete sentences?

Guerrero responded, “Beachhead, Forager. Loud and clear.”

“How’s your progress?”

He consulted the autopilot display. “We’re a few miles ahead of schedule. Probably had a tailwind last night. Power consumption is right on target. We should arrive at the first objective early tomorrow morning.”

“Roger. The drone should be on location by now. Our communication window with it will open in a few minutes. We won’t have time to do much analysis before our window with you closes in the next hour, but we should have good data for you by this evening. Swenson is recommending you slow your approach to conserve power. There’s no point in rushing to get there before sunrise.”

“Wilco. Over.”

“Beachhead out.”

Culpepper looked out the window again as the terrain zipped by below them.

Another day yet. At least I’ll have something to do once we get there. And then the trip back. Ugh.

Rolling savanna gradually replaced the canyons.

Maybe I can walk back. I wonder how long it would take to walk six thousand miles? Might be worth it.

“Find a place to set down,” she said.

He looked at the terrain map. “Here? Let’s keep going. We’re making good time. We can stop in another hour or so.”

“Now! I need to stretch my legs. Decker said we needed to slow down anyway. It’s not going to make us late to stop here for a few minutes.”

On to Chapter 4

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Quinn Nietfeld on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 3: RETHINK appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Alex Guerrero wouldn’t admit it, but he was cold. Working outside for more than four hours in blizzard conditions had chilled him to the bone.

Not having the right equipment didn’t help. They hadn’t come prepared for this kind of weather. He was wearing a light jacket and thin Kevlar gloves, with a towel wrapped around his head and face, leaving a narrow slit so he could see. But he had endured far worse conditions on other deployments.

And he finished the job. It would never occur to him that there might be another option.

“Close that door!” Culpepper shouted. “What, were you raised in a barn?”

Guerrero closed the door and shook the last of the snow from his jacket and gloves. “Ahhh. Nothing like a light workout and a little fresh air to get your day started on the right foot.”

Steadman, who had already started taking off his own snow-covered outer garments, gave Guerrero a warning glare. Commander Chris Steadman was Alex’s commanding officer and the other Navy SEAL assigned to the team for force protection. Most of the rest, like Culpepper, were scientists.

Teri Culpepper huddled her athletic frame in front of the heater vent, still trying to get warm after her own short effort. The rest of the team sat on chairs or beds arrayed around the perimeter of the room.

The medical lab had become their de facto gathering place. The two crew quarters buildings were partitioned in a way that didn’t facilitate having everyone in the same room. The storage building was packed full of supplies and kept cold to preserve the food they had put away to get them through winter. The science lab was home to too much active research to accommodate interlopers.

“Status?” asked Decker, the mission commander. He was career navy, the last five years as the captain of a reconnaissance submarine.

“I just finished reviewing the latest satellite data from Mabel,” said Swenson, the team’s civilian engineer. “The storm has passed, and we’re covered in snow. In case anyone didn’t already know that. It does look like we shouldn’t have any more big storms, at least for the next few days.”

Culpepper shivered.

Steadman glanced at her and shook his head. “The greenhouse is gone,” he said. “Everything we can find has been collected and stored. Unfortunately, that’s not much. More than half of the wood used for framing is not much better than firewood now. What plastic sheeting didn’t blow away is shredded in pieces too small to be useful. We collected what plants we could and put them in the portal where they can be kept warm. Dr. Culpepper will have to assess the damage there.”

Decker looked at Culpepper. “Doctor?”

Over the course of the three months they had been stranded here together much of the formality in their relationships had fallen aside. Dr. Culpepper was the lone exception. She still insisted on being addressed by her title.

She turned around to face the rest of the team, sitting on the floor in front of the vent—and blocking its warmth from everyone else. “It’s a total loss. I might be able to nurse a few plants back to health, but any hope of them producing useful quantities of food during the next few months is gone. We’re in for a rough winter.”

“Grace?”

Dr. Grace Tornquist, the team’s medical doctor, looked around the room at the others. “It’s not good, but we’ll survive. We have enough in stores that the next few weeks won’t be a problem. There’s still plenty of wild game in the area to provide protein and fat. We’ll run out of carbohydrates, but we should be able to compensate with an increased protein intake. Vitamins are the big problem. General health will begin to deteriorate once our supply of fruits and vegetables runs out. We’ll be more susceptible to illness, less able to recover from injury or exertion.”

“Rationing?” Decker asked.

Tornquist shook her head. “I still have work to do to finish updating the plan, but what I just laid out already assumes optimal stretching of our remaining reserves. I should also point out that this assumes a lot of things we don’t know. We have two months of supplies at minimally acceptable nutritional intake levels. We guess that we still have three months of winter, and then at least a couple of months after that before spring produces enough of the right vegetation to fill those gaps. Dr. Culpepper thinks it could take much longer before some of the fruits we need produce.”

Decker looked around at his team. “Options?”

“I’m continuing to work through the backlog of nutritional analyses,” Culpepper said. “There’s nothing left out there that we’d normally think of as food, but we might get lucky. It’s a longshot.”

Guerrero looked around the room. Eight people huddled in a box trying to keep out the cold. This wasn’t the plan. His job was to keep everyone safe, to make sure they all made it home alive. They had been ten; now they were eight. That was on him. This was on him. Setting all the positive attitude aside, not everyone would survive the winter ahead if they stayed on this path. There had to be another way.

He looked at Culpepper. “What about the southern hemisphere?”

On to Chapter 3

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Fabrizio Conti on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 2: RESET appeared first on Steve Swaringen.

Mabel watched as the alien sun rose above the horizon of the planet below. Morning light reflected from dense clouds as a winter storm moved slowly over the continent. It was difficult to see where the tempest ended as white clouds gave way to white snowpack.

The people below would have said the view was breathtaking. For Mabel, it was just a job—a job she’d been doing twenty-four-and-a-half hours a day for more than four months.

She switched to infrared wavelengths where she could more easily distinguish the clouds. The storm had moved beyond their encampment. They would want to see this.

An incoming message interrupted her task for a tiny fraction of a second. As she acknowledged the request, she resumed surveying the planet’s surface and began uploading the last eight hours of recorded data.

It never occurred to Mabel to wonder what it was like for the people below. How would it feel to wake up with two feet of snow covering your camp? To hear blizzard-force winds howling in the darkness the night before? To watch as structures and equipment critical to your survival were destroyed by the gale? To be eight people marooned on an alien world with no way to get home and no way of knowing when—or even if—home would be coming back for you?

How would it feel to be human?

Mabel would never know. Mabel would never wonder.

On to Chapter 2

( Story copyright by Steve Swaringen. Photo by Adem Gül on Unsplash )

The post FORAGER CHAPTER 1: DAWN appeared first on Steve Swaringen.