Alluvium by Nolan Oreno Read Free Book Online Page A

written on different days with different seedling batches, but each one of them ended with the same words: Cancel batch . Start over . The words burned into his brain like a brand that would never go away. Two-hundred and fourteen trials. Thousands of hours of research. Two years on another world away from his old life. All of it, only so that those words would be printed at the end of a single sheet of paper. Start over . He could not create the world for his colony, as he had promised, and now, he had nothing more to show for his dream than a dusty room full of papers- papers made from Earth’s dead trees.
    Welcome to Outlook Station Seven, Unknown Identity. It has been 9 hours since your last visit, declared the station’s speaker system.
    Hollis stopped everything. He did not move or make a sound. Someone had activated the entrance scanner of the compound. Whoever had entered was unknown by the computer system, which recognized all the logged identities of the colonists of Mars. There could be no ‘unknown identities’ on a planet with only twenty-two people.
    Cold blood seeped through Hollis’ veins as he spoke aloud. “Hello?" he called. “Who’s there?"
    Nothing but the fluttering of paper in the desert breeze. The door had most certainly been opened and the station was decompressed, but thankfully Hollis kept his helmet secured so that the contaminated air would not harm him. He coiled around the curling passageway as all his senses began to heighten to the coming threat.
    “Hello?" he called again.
    A disembodied voice echoed back down the hall in response.
    Because the rain is warm , it said.
    “What did you say?" Hollis shuddered, rounding his way towards the entrance. “Who
    are you? How do you know about that?!"
    As Hollis neared the origin of the voice, the halls began to hum with the pounding of a rainstorm outside its walls. The sound became deafening, so much so that Hollis had to grab hold of his head to fight back the piercing pattering of rain that penetrated his mind.
    “That’s impossible," Hollis gasped as the sound of rain grew heavier in his mind and booming thunderclaps shook the station.
    Hollis propelled himself off a wall and sprinted towards the entrance of the station. He could not believe it. Was this actually rain on Mars? Had his research worked after all? Perhaps one of the seedlings survived, unknown to him, and matured on its own, building a forest without his knowledge, deep in the valley. Plums of sand sprayed into Hollis’ visor as he burst through the open doorway and into the sunlight. He was lost for a moment, unknowing of which way was up and which was down. When the dust settled Hollis was in the barren desert again, and he waited in expectation for the raindrops to shower over him. But there was no rain, only the dry and clear skies of before.
    Because the rain is warm
    There was the voice again. Hollis’ sudden excitement overpowered his disappointment of the lost storm. He spun around to catch a shadow curl around the corner of the station carrying the mysterious voice with it. As fast as he could, Hollis hurled himself after the elusive specter.
    “Wait!" he yelled.
    He stumbled over the rising plateau beyond the outlook station. The rock cracked beneath his boots and cascaded down the cliff face. He tried to keep up with the ghost, but the exosuit was cumbersome and ill-fitting. Still, he persisted. He scrambled like a dog after a bone, bounding over the complex terrain, nearing the valley’s precipice.
    And then he saw it, standing there at the edge, unlike anything he had ever seen before. It looked like one of the figures in the stain-glass windows of the abandoned church of his childhood. It stood strong, with its back towards him, gazing across the endless canyon system that was the Valles Marineris. From the creature’s back thick luminescent wings protruded and fluttered in the breeze. The creature itself almost resembled a human, but in its presence