Authors: Eric Brown
Hendry
reached up and felt the fluid coating his chest. It was coagulating in the
intense cold. He lifted the same hand, towards the source of the drip, and came
up against the underside of the pilot’s sling, split like the rind of a ripe
fruit.
Kaluchek
succeeded in rigging up the emergency lighting. Actinic brightness flickered,
blinding Hendry and filling the unit with a harsh glare that picked out the
wreckage in stark detail.
A
jagged section of the ship’s outer skin had imploded, slicing the co-pilot’s
sling in two and with it Greg Cartwright. Hendry looked away, his stomach
turning. It wasn’t only blood that had leaked. He scraped the mess off his
chest, retching.
Lisa
Xiang was staring at Cartwright. “He brought us down. Without him I wouldn’t
have been able...”
Hendry
gripped her hand, silencing her. Through the rip in the nose-cone of the ship
he made out darkness, and distant stars, and what looked like a plain of ice
glittering silver in the spill of the emergency lighting.
He
looked back along the length of the unit and saw Olembe and Kaluchek, just
staring in silence at the remains of their dead colleague. He found the
expression on their faces oddly more moving than the lifeless body in the
bisected sling.
Olembe
was the first to react. “Okay, let’s move it!” He hoisted himself out of his
station and helped Kaluchek drag the unconscious Carrelli from the unit.
Shivering,
suddenly aware of the intense cold, Hendry upped the temperature of his
atmosphere suit and extricated himself from the tangled wreckage, following
Xiang out of the unit and along the twisted corridor. They passed through the
cryo-hive and into an elevator, then rode up to the crew lounge situated on the
brow of the starship. Sunken sofa bunkers dotted the floor, and on three sides
rectangular viewscreens would have looked out over the ice plain, but for the
titanium shutters that had maintained the chamber’s structural integrity during
the voyage.
Olembe
powered up the lighting and Hendry crossed to the forward viewscreen, leaning
back to compensate for the pitch of the floor. He palmed the controls and to
his surprise the shutters inched open, revealing an inky darkness relieved by a
sparse pointillism of scattered stars.
He
stood and stared. Something about the arrangement of the distant points of
light, the unfamiliarity of the constellations, brought home to him the fact of
their isolation.
He
peered down the brow of the ship. From this vantage point, little of the
destruction of the
Lovelock
could be seen. He tried not to think of the
hangars which contained Chrissie and the other colonists.
While
Kaluchek broke out a medikit and attended to Carrelli, Olembe swung himself
into a workstation to assess the extent of the AIs’ failure. Hendry slipped
into the station next to the African and attached the leads to his skull. He
closed his eyes. At a quick guess, ninety-five per cent of the ship’s smartware
was down, and the rest was firing fitfully.
He
tried to assess the damage to the hangars. The program routed to the cryogenic
system was inoperable.
He
looked across at the African.
“My
guess is the fault’s in the relay,” Hendry said. “If we can reconnect the
matrix, maybe we can get something worthwhile up and running.”
Kaluchek
looked up from where she was applying a bandage to Carrelli’s head. “You really
think we can survive in this place?”
Hendry
let a second elapse, then said, “You saw outside?”
The
Inuit nodded, and with a wry grin said, “Reminded me of home, and I left home
at sixteen, swore I’d never go back.”
Olembe
grunted. “Didn’t remind me of home. Never saw snow before Berne.”
Lisa
Xiang knelt beside Carrelli and stroked the unconscious medic’s cheek. She
looked up. “Winters were bad in Taipei. We survived minus twenty for months and
months.”
Olembe
glanced back at the screen. “What little telemetry we have says it’s minus
forty
out there, and falling fast.”
“What
about atmosphere?” Xiang asked.
Olembe
concentrated. “It’s breathable. Almost Earth-norm. A little oxygen rich, a
touch more nitrogen and argon.”
Brightening,
Lisa Xiang said, “A breathable atmosphere is a start.”
“A
start,” Olembe said. “But where do we go from here? When I was picked for this
mission I expected some kind of Eden, man. We sure as hell can’t get this crate
up and running again. We’re stranded here. You’re saying we can colonise this
ice cube?”
Hendry
said, “We might have come down in the planet’s polar region, Friday.”
Olembe
was shaking his head. “I don’t think so... Hendry, access the back-up file
coded 11-72-23.”
Hendry
touched in the code and watched the figures slide down the screen.
“What
is it?” Kaluchek asked.
Hendry
said, “A scan program got a little of the planet as we came down. Not much, but
enough to tell us where we landed. And it isn’t a polar region.”
Kaluchek
opened her mouth to speak, but instead just shook her head.
Xiang,
still caressing Carrelli’s pale cheek, closed her eyes as if in silent prayer.
Olembe
snorted. “If you want to know the truth, we came down smack on the planet’s
equator.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s as warm as it gets out
there, sweethearts.”
Hendry
turned to the screen, going through what little remained intact of the ship’s
smartware matrix.
Xiang
looked from Olembe to Hendry, something piteous in the size of her sloping
eyes. “So... what do we do?”
“We
do the best we can,” Hendry said without taking his gaze from the screen.
“Which
is?” Olembe said.
He
thought about it. “We assess the damage. We go out there and see what’s left.
With luck, if the power plants are still functioning, and if the engineering
stores are intact... maybe we can set up a colony, of sorts.”
“That’s
a lot of ifs,” Olembe said.
Kaluchek
said, “Just two,” and smiled across at Hendry.
“I’m
a realist,” Olembe said. “The way we came down, my guess is there’s jack shit
left back there.”
“The
first thing we need to do is assess the damage to the hangars,” Hendry said,
thinking about Chrissie. “Our most useful assets now are the colonists.”
Olembe
laughed. “They might be a liability, man. You thought of that? I mean, how easy
will it be to survive out there? It’ll be hard enough for the five of us, never
mind another four thousand.”
Hendry
stared at the African. “I’m confident we can build some kind of viable colony,
no matter what the conditions.” Even as he said the words, a small, treacherous
voice was nagging away at the back of his mind, suggesting he was talking
bullshit.
Kaluchek
said, “So what next?”
Olembe
shrugged. “It’s over to you, boss,” he said, smiling across at Lisa Xiang.
She
was sitting next to Carrelli, stroking the Italian’s cheek. She looked fearful,
then, like a frightened animal. “I don’t know. I think Joe’s right. We can’t
give in. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it seems.”
Olembe
sneered. “So much for your leadership qualities.” He looked across at Hendry.
“You’re the senior party here. How do you feel about taking on the
responsibility?” Was there a hint of a challenge in Olembe’s question?
He
felt three pairs of eyes on him, waiting for his reply. He wasn’t a man of
action, still less a leader. “We all take the responsibility. We assess each
situation as it comes, talk it through and then come to some consensus
decision, okay?” He looked across at Lisa Xiang. “Does that suit you, Lisa?”
She
nodded, looking relieved.
Olembe
nodded. “Sounds fine by me.”
Kaluchek
nodded in tacit agreement. “Fine, Joe.”
“So
first,” Hendry said, “how about we try to assess the damage to the
cryo-hangars?”
Hendry, Olembe and
Xiang upped the temperature of their atmosphere suits, broke out strap-on
illuminators from stores and set off through the maze of fractured corridors
towards the cargo holds, which stretched the length of the
Lovelock.
Kaluchek stayed behind with the still unconscious Carrelli.
Hendry
led the way along the first lateral corridor, viciously bent out of true by the
impact. As he made his cautious way forward, his headlight picking out buckled
corridor floors and walls, it came to him that Chrissie was dead, along with
who knew how many other colonists.
The
disc of his headlight played over a sheared section of decking and a truncated
section of corridor wall. He felt a wave of something ice-cold against the
chest panel of his atmosphere suit and realised it was the wind from outside.
This
was as far as the lateral corridor went. The rest of it was gone, sheared off
in the crash-landing. He came to a halt on the threshold of the alien world a
couple of feet beneath him, and waited for the others to catch up with him.
Olembe
established radio contact and said, “There’s no other way to get to the
hangars. We’ll have to cross the ice.”
Hendry
turned his head forward, playing the beam across a mess of mangled metal, much
of it smouldering and glowing in the aftermath of the impact. The ice stretched
beyond, pocked with dark gouges and blackened sections of what had been the
Lovelock.
His
heart thumped as he stepped down awkwardly and looked for the cryo-hangars. His
boots crunched ice, the sharps cracks reminding him that he was the first human
ever to set foot on extra-solar territory. If only the occasion had been a
little more auspicious...
Olembe
pointed to the starboard sponson, or rather to what remained of it. Far to the
right was a snapped spar, ending in a fused mass of metal. Hendry turned,
looking for the port sponson. It too had been sheared off. The sponsons had
held the main drives, and he knew that with their loss went any hope of
establishing the cause of the accident.
A
thought occurred to him. “What were the chances of losing both sponsons?” he
asked the engineer.
Olembe
nodded. “Saboteurs could have got at both drives—but then again we might have
lost one to a blow out in space, and the other during entry. There’s no way of
knowing.” His voice sounded tinny, distant in Hendry’s earpiece.
“Wouldn’t
saboteurs have bombed the
Lovelock
before take-off, to satisfy
themselves that they’d wrecked the mission?”
Olembe
shrugged. “One group did try, but security caught the bastards. Maybe this was
their back-up plan.”
Hendry
thought about it. “But what were the chances of the bomb or bombs detonating
just as we arrived here?”
Olembe
said, “Pretty good, if the bomb was set up to be triggered by the activation of
the AIs when they came online approaching the destination system. It’s
possible.”
Accident
or sabotage, Hendry thought. He’d rather it be the former—the alternative, that
the mission had been thwarted by jealous protestors, filled him with futile
anger.
Olembe
set off, picking his way through the debris. Hendry and Xiang followed.
He
thought he saw something a hundred metres ahead, where the first of the hangars
should have been. He stumbled, cursing the tight beam of his headlight. The
only illumination, other than the three bobbing discs, was from the scant stars
overhead.
But
he could see enough to tell him that the hangar was intact, if dented in either
the initial explosion or the subsequent crash-landing.
They
came to a stop together, dwarfed by the flank of the cryo-hangar. A vast
painted numeral told Hendry that this was Hangar Two, and something withered
within him. Chrissie was in Hangar Three.
“Lisa,”
Olembe said, indicating the hatch. “Get in there. Run a systems check.”
The
pilot nodded, cycled herself through the hatch and moved into the hangar,
disappearing from sight. Olembe signalled Hendry to follow him.
It
was obvious that the metalwork holding the hangars together had not survived
the crash-landing. The spars had snapped and buckled on impact, sending the
cryo-hangars and cargo holds tumbling across the ice like so many casually
scattered dice. A hundred metres beyond Hangar Two, the broad monolith of
Hangar One squatted in the darkness.
They
hurried towards it. Olembe entered the code into a panel beside the hatch and
seconds later it sighed open. They stepped inside and automatic lighting sensed
their entry and flashed on, dazzling them.
They
were standing on a raised platform above the floor of the hangar. Below them, a
thousand catafalques lined the aisles with reassuring, geometrical precision.
Olembe was tapping at a touchpad set into the padded gallery rail.
He
scanned the screen and turned to Hendry. Even behind the faceplate, Hendry
could see that the African was smiling. “They’re okay, Joe. They survived.”