Walk The Plank

[sawyl]

It's Tuesday, so it must be time for the next episode of John Scalzi's The Human Division. This week, it's a short story called Walk The Plank that takes the form of series of transcribed conversations.

A group of wildcat colonists find an injured man who claims to be from the supply ship Erie Morningstar. On the edge of survival and desperate for supplies, the colony administrator and its doctor quiz the man, Malik Damanis, to try to find out what happened to him. The soon discover that the supply ship Erie Morningstar has been boarded and its crew marooned, but the colony's administrator seems more interested in finding out whether there is anything he can salvage from the downed cargo crates that might help keep his struggling settlement going.

Despite its brevity — I read it while I was waiting to see the dentist — Walk The Plank works extremely well and sets up some interesting questions for future episodes to resolve.

By structuring the story as a set of transcripts that include accidentally (or not) asides from the colonists, Scalzi quickly establishes his world: we soon know that the planet's flora & fauna are largely hostile to human life; the colony is running dangerously short of food and pharmaceuticals; that administrator Chenzira El-Masri is pretty ruthless when it come to maximising the survival of his people; and the doctor is under pressure to euthenise Malik. The inclusion of the side comments suggests that some members of colony don't agree with the leadership's brutal logic and might be looking to provide themselves with a bit of insurance.

From Malik's account it is clear that the people who boarded the Erie Morningstar were after the ship and not its cargo or crew, but the motive for this isn't obvious. It's also not clear who the boarders might have been. When El-Masri asks him whether the boarders might have been Colonial Defence Force, Malik notes that they weren't wearing CDF uniforms but big bulky space suits which covered their faces. He thinks this makes sense because they were coming in from space, but he also notes that the ship didn't decompress because the boarders must have set up a temporary airlock before cutting into the hull.

Does this mean the suits were purely intended to prevent the crew from identifying the intruders? Possibly, but at the same time, the boarders killed or marooned all crew except for the captain and the helm. So perhaps the suits were meant to camouflage the involvement of a group of aliens or maybe even to protect them from the to-them-hostile environment of the ship? I guess we'll just have to wait and see...