The ranger, not caring at all about names nor needing any guidance on when to apply violence, has already started up the hill. I follow, and behind me Cleve advises Redd about the expedient use of shortened names during tense situations. Child of Chiron is too much to shout out quickly, and shortening it to C-O-C doesn’t gain much. I’m glad to hear he’s fully onboard with just calling me Mariah now himself.
We’ll reach the crashed colony pod well before the cliff edge. The hillside slopes gently upwards, and the footing isn’t too bad. There’s much less vegetation here than I had expected, as well as more signs of human activity. Another more recently used cookfire, more litter—small bits of scrap metal this time. I’m not sure if they are the remains of a smashed up Morgan boat or just pieces of Unity debris. Whatever they are, the junk is in piles, so someone has been gathering it. The higher we go, the thinner the vegetation gets. The colony pod up ahead is covered in vines, but there’s not that much actual dirt beneath our feet. We’re treading on bare rock at times, and it is quite, quite white.
I pause. “Is this actually… bone?” I ask, crouching down to run a hand over the hard, bleached surface. I stand back up and look around, spinning slowly to take in everything about this island: its shape, its color, its… size. “I think this was a Shadow of the Deep!”
“So it beached itself on here and then it died, maybe?” Cleve suggests.
“No, no. This,” I gesture at everything around us, “is just the part of the skeleton that’s out of the water.” I have senses he doesn’t, and I’ve felt one of these creatures before. Now that I’m looking for it, the whole place radiates some familiar signature. “This is all one bone, this hill—the skull. Those cliffs, they’re the teeth. Or maybe more like baleen.”
The ranger has enough interest in this discussion to stop and share their perspective. They’ve spent a lot more time in the wilds of Chiron than we have, and they estimate there are only a few decades of growth around us. Cleve nods; that all makes sense to him. Some of the vegetation here could have been seeded from xenodragon droppings, but other plants here are amphibious, like some forms of xenofungus. Those would’ve just washed up and taken hold in whatever sediment the tides brought in.
“Picture this,” I say. “A Shadow of the Deep is floating along. Unity breaks up, and a colony pod crashes into the Shadow of the Deep, killing it. And then the corpse got caught against some shoal below, and here we are: a new island just thirty years old. Might need to reconsider the name Cliff Island. Maybe it should be,” I drop my voice to a theatrical whisper, “Skull Island!”
The ranger’s voice modulator clicks a few times as if they are about to speak but then reconsider. Or maybe they just can’t think of how to react to the picture I’ve painted.
“So then what are they digging for?” Cleve asks.
That, the ranger can address. “The material this bone is made from is highly dense in minerals.”
“Is it magnetic at all?” I ask. “Our little module from the ship got pulled away from the rest of the wreckage of its colony pod because the Progenitor prison was strongly magnetic.” I tap my right foot on a bare patch of rock, but I don’t feel any tug to the brace in that boot, not like I did in that first Progenitor structure. “If there’s some natural magnetism to the Shadow of the Deep, maybe it wasn’t just bad luck that brought the colony pod down on it.”
Cleve pulls out a compass. He generally doesn’t have much use for it here on Chiron, since there isn’t the same kind of magnetic field as on Earth. But right now it comes in handy, as when he brings it close to the bone ground, it does wobble a bit. “Some kind of local effect,” he reports after moving it around some. “Not all the bone.”
He straightens up and slips the compass back into one of the side pockets on his backpack. “Well, if the cryopods opened up already, they’d’ve been living on a carcass,” he says. “But it was fresh,” he adds positively. “Could they eat it?” Right, right, Cleve’s not squeamish; he’s thinking about food sources as usual.
Regarding the here and now, though, I say, “If the cryopods did open and people are somehow still alive here, then we should help them get to whatever safer and more stable environment we can. If they have somehow worked out a way for this to be a safe and stable environment, that’s fine. There’s no reason for us to interfere with them in that case.” I consider a moment. “Although, if Morgan people are mining here and interfering with the people who were already living, then maybe they would want our help. But until we get close enough to see an actual human and talk with them, we don’t know what the factions present are.”
Cleve gives a shake of his head. His mind was still elsewhere. I look at him quizzically. “Imagine, you come out of your cryopod and now you’re on a carcass. Wolf beetle nest suddenly seems a little less challenging,” he says.
I chuckle at the comparison and then throw my arms out wide, gesturing at the whole island. “Look at this! Now you can all understand how huge the creature I sensed was. And this was just the size of its head. See? This is what we had to turn away from going to Garden Bay.” I feel vindicated. Not that anyone had confronted me with doubts, but now it’s not just my word about what’s out there.
Even though vegetation is sparse, the path grows more obvious the closer we get to the crashed colony pod. It’s clear people have been dragging stuff in and out of a specific entrance. Although a lot of the wreck is crumpled and collapsed, there’s an obvious door there. This place is definitely not in as good a shape as Data Haven. Parts of it look to be walls with no roof, though it certainly has some enclosed rooms. Occasionally we hear the sound of a loud clang within.
Cleve gets a distant look, like he’s worrying about something he doesn’t want to voice, but then he speaks. “Bella says that there’s a cove with a small ship in it. It’s tucked away in a cove that Good Fortune is too big to fit in. Even if Xiao had completed his circuit of the island, it would have been hidden from view.”
My eyebrows shoot up. This is new as far as I know, Bella communicating with Cleve in some form other than an exchange of presents. “Did she see enough to tell if there’s an association with Morgan or the University?” I ask.
Cleve shakes his head. “But it’s a relatively small craft. We’re talking five people, maybe as much as ten if they crammed themselves in.”
“Bootlegging metal scavengers?” I suggest, only partly in jest.
“Or maybe somebody who lived here for thirty years and has finally scraped together enough to build a small vessel,” Cleve counters.
“So how do you want to proceed?” I ask him. “We could just knock on the front door here and say that we came across the island and just want to know if they’re all right or need help. Or we could quietly go in and sneak around, but people might take that the wrong way.”
Cleve lets out a long breath, considering the options. His eyes flick over to the ranger and then to the ensign. “I think we knock,” he says at last, not voicing any of the concerns bouncing around in his head. He gestures me onwards, and it’s clear this is my show now.
I take the lead, and as I approach the door, I shift my grip on my cane. Holding it mid-shaft, I reach it forward to rap alongside the door. At the very first tap, long before anyone could be expected to respond, the door flies open.