The fences are made from Atlas trees. That’s what everybody calls them. The scientific name has too many syllables, but it mostly means the same thing: “Holy crap! Can a tree really grow that tall?”
On Hella, it can. A fully grown Atlas tree can be three thousand years old (Hella-years) and easily 150 meters high. There are even older and taller trees in some of the eastern reaches, but aside from the drones and robots and satellite scans, we haven’t explored anywhere near as much beyond our range as we’d like to. There’s just too much planet.
At its base, an Atlas trunk is so thick you could carve out a house inside. A large house. How safe it would be with all that unsupported weight above, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t sleep comfortable. It can take more than a month to bring down an Atlas tree. A year is eighteen months, a month is thirty-six thirty-six-hour days. So that should give some idea how big a job it is. In the history of the colony, we’ve only done it twice. And probably never again. We still haven’t used up all the wood from the first felling and most of the second felling is still in the forest. It’s a formidable barrier all by itself. That was the original plan—to make a wall by putting sections of trunk all around the Summerland Station, but the logistics of carving a road and dragging the pieces were impossible. Well, not impossible, but ultimately impractical. It’s another thing that isn’t “cost-effective.” We don’t have the heavy machinery for the job. We’d have to fabricate two or three new fabricators just to print all the pieces we’d need. It’s too ambitious. We had an easier solution.
An Atlas tree has the right size branches. We can send a crew up top and they can find exactly the size and length desired. We never take more than one or two from any tree. We don’t know how much injury a tree can take, and we can’t risk killing a whole slice of forest. We don’t know what consequences there might be, probably none of them good.
Two scooters can pull a branch, but even a small branch can be as big as an Earth sequoia. You get enough of them, and you can build a pretty sturdy fence. You put up anchor-towers every thirty or forty meters, you stack your branches like crossbeams with enough space between them for a person to scramble through, but you couldn’t if you wanted to, there are carbon-fiber nets on the fences to keep the smaller creatures out, and you send out scuttlebots to patrol the spaces between, checking for breaks or intrusions. It mostly works. And afterward, you tell yourself it seemed like a good idea at the time. Because anytime we forget, the planet is quick to remind us how the laws of physics work on a Hella scale.
It’s not just that everything is bigger—it’s that big moves differently than little. It’s not about size, it’s about mass. And if enough mass leans on a fence, you find out the hard way that you’ve got to have lateral shoring too. That’s why the fences now have a triangular cross-section. And maybe this time they’ll hold.
We still have to work to stop the littler creatures, the mice-like things and the lizard-like things. The scuttlebots help, but every so often we still have to shut everything down for a sterilization. We’re still working on the problem.
Anyway. We rolled out early.
First we launched the drones, “the umbrella.” As soon as they were up and confident, the trucks powered up. We exited through a gated tunnel. Like the fence itself, it’s made of giant horizontally spaced logs. The three gates work like a kind of double airlock, so nothing unwanted can get in easily. But it takes time to get through them, because they’re heavy and slow to move. And it takes a while to cycle five trucks through. We didn’t always send this many trucks out a time, but this was a shakedown cruise for the newest one and practice for the seasonal migration when most of us would be moving to Winterland.
We rolled out past the final gate and down the slope and out toward the plain and the view opened up before me—and for a moment I felt very uncomfortable. I’d never been out here before, only in simulations. In the sims, I know I’m safe, no matter how scary the situation. But here, I suddenly felt naked and unprotected, as if just rolling out the gate would attract a dozen hungries.
But there’s this thing I do. I go to the noise and it calms me down. It sends a signal back that everything is all right. That wouldn’t be the best response to a dangerous situation, but it’s the best response to irrational fear. That’s what Mom says anyway.
Captain Skyler was down in the bridge. I was topside in an observation turret, but he must have been monitoring me on his display. He said, “You made it. You are now a candidate for Class 3,” and that made everything all right. Now I could get my seventh.
Outside the truck, Hella looks empty. The biggest trucks are called Rollagons. The Rollagons have huge honeycomb tires, three times as tall as the tallest man on Hella and more than a man-length wide. During migrations and storms they have chain tracks, and sometimes just because the Captain thinks it’s a good idea. Like always.
We have two dozen at Summerland and another two dozen at Winterland, they convoy back and forth all year—except during storms. The Rollagons are tall, five or six stories, depending on how they’re outfitted, and big enough that you could play tennis on the lifter deck on top. The bridge was just forward of the lifter deck and there were six turrets spaced around the edges, so everybody on shift always had a good view.
Tall summer stiffgrass surrounded us on all sides, making visibility across the plain an interesting challenge. It was like an ocean of rippling yellow. Captain Skyler said the stalks were high enough to hide an elephant—he’d seen elephants on Earth, I’d only seen pictures, but they’re big. Not as big as Hella-critters, but still big. The grass was hardening, getting stiffer every day. If it weren’t for the autumn fires and even our own regular burnoffs, Summerland Station would be lost inside a forest of things like bamboo.
Ahead, in the distance, scattered clusters of pink-trees waved in the wind. They stuck out of the yellow sea, towering thirty or forty meters high. The pink-trees are very thin, they don’t have any low branches, only high ones with broad leaves of orange and red, sometimes shading all the way to deep purple, sometimes so dark they look black. But their long necks are mostly pink, so that’s why they’re called pink-trees.
They aren’t really trees. Even though they’re rooted, they’re part animal, and instead of bark they have layers of pale skin, thin as paper, that peel away in long strips in molting season. They all grow from a common root system, so they only occur in thick clusters that we call families, but they’re so very tall, and they have such broad leaves, that we called them trees anyway. Someday we’ll figure out a better term for what they really are. Anyway, they wave gently whether there’s wind or not.
The very tallest pink-trees in this family had leaves ten or more meters across, stark red with white veins outlining and highlighting them. Maybe they were the daddy-trees, that’s what some people thought, but nobody was sure yet. It was the trees that huddled beneath them that had the darker foliage, all the way from red to purple, maybe those were the mommy-trees. But the very smallest trees at the edges of the cluster sparkled with leaves so pink and pale they were almost white. Right now we think that the colors reveal their separate genders—males and females, but nobody knows yet what the pale colors mean. Maybe those are the children? Nobody is sure. Life on Hella is on a different evolutionary path.