Dawn Comes, But Darkly

 

    When Martha woke, she didn’t know where she was for a long fearsome moment or two. Where she came from at the girls’ facility, the lights were never completely darkened. It was still dark in room 205, because it was still before dawn. Her window on the second floor was just a black rectangle.
    When memory returned, she rose and went to the window. She could hear voices raised in distress. People were moving around outside her building. She opened the window to hear them better. The white curtains floated like ghosts in the breeze. People seemed to be convening a search party. There were at least 20 young men and women gathering on the grass. She heard the name Delores mentioned a few times.
    For the sake of speed, she slipped into her powder blue overall from Earth, thinking to experiment with her new clothing later. She remembered to put her door key in her pocket, went out of her door and slipped down the stairway, past the building office and out. If she thought anything about this morning at this point it was that whatever she thought might happen on her second day on Athena, this was not it.
    “I’ve never seen it this dark, Bob,” the girl from the dining room was speaking to Bob, the head cook. She folded her arms around herself as if it were also cold. In the dim light from the first floor windows, she looked afraid, hollow eyed. Both of them were still in their night clothing. Evidently there was some terrible urgency to this meeting. Martha hung around the outer perimeter of the crowd trying to understand what the emergency was.
    “I’ve been here since ’43 and I’ve never seen the sky this black at night before. It’s been starry every blinking night since then. And now this, and Delores is just flat gone,” Bob answered the girl, whose name Martha didn’t know yet. “They can’t be related, but it sure is creepy,” the girl said.
    Martha turned to the girl and introduced herself, saying, “Hi, I’m Martha. I just got here yesterday. I wish I knew your name, and I wish somebody would tell me what’s wrong this morning.”
    “Hey, Martha. I’m Evie. What’s wrong is that Delores never went to her room last night. Her boyfriend went to her room early this morning to talk to her because he hadn’t seen her last night before bed, and she wasn’t there. Her bed had not been slept in either. He was totally confused and scared, and he started waking up their friends to see if anyone knew where she was. But no one had seen her since late afternoon yesterday and no one could figure out where she was at all!” Evie shivered.
    “We’re all pretty close here,” she added.
    Martha wished she had awakened James. He was the closest thing she had to a friend now and she missed him badly all at once.
    Bob the cook seemed to be taking charge of the search. Maybe because he was the tallest and had the loudest voice or was just used to bossing people around. He divided the group into two companies. One he sent to search around the margins of the housing development and one he sent to look in the garden areas and all around them. It was a hard time to search well because it was so very dark. Martha couldn’t imagine how they could hope to find anyone in these conditions.
    It seemed like the sun would never rise. The clouds thickened. A wind began to blow bits of dust and plant matter over the surface of the ground. It even smelled strange. Martha and Evie were the only ones not out searching for Delores. Bob had asked them to stick around just in case Delores came home or something.     However, Delores did not appear. Morning came, darkly. The clouds lowered.
    The first party returned without Delores. They were frankly dispirited and frightened. The sky was really getting to them. No one they spoke with knew anything. They clustered together considering other searches and discussing whether they were experiencing some kind of rare storm on Athena. Some of them drifted off to get dressed and eat, promising to come back and continue searching.
    Delores’ boyfriend went with the second group. They were still out walking down garden rows and further afield. He was getting more volubly upset as time went on. Martha could hear him calling Delores’ name all the way from the back of the garden area.
    Someone who was looking up instead on down said, “what the hell is that……?” Martha heard gasps and soft cries then a pregnant silence. She looked at the sky.
    In the belly of the low black clouds, glowing menacingly, was a wide round red light, partly obscured by the stuff of the cloud. There was no sound. It pulsed slightly, like a terrible dreaming vision of some kind.

    The strange red light spun around; rays of that red light shot off in all directions. A low moaning noise began in the area of the Athena end of the Slip Chute. Weird vibrations and hums finished with a mighty sucking crash and the gate was no more. It fell into itself completely until nothing was left but the wooden platform it had set upon, and some broken metal material lying there.

They were cutoff from Earth on planet Athena.

James and Martha.docx