They walked, hand in hand, around the side of the
Pioneer
and as soon as they’d navigated the corner and were out of the smoke and most of the wind, there they all were. And at first, she thought it wasn’t that bad. People were screaming, crying, and hysterical, sure, but there were a lot of them. They’d survived. That had to count for something, right?
Her relief at seeing so many survivors was a kind of second shock, and its bolstering effects wore off much more quickly. Even as she was taking that first reassuring look at the crowds, her vision seemed to double, and suddenly the hundreds of people before her shrank back into the miniscule fraction of
fifty thousand colonists and crewmen that it really was. She staggered on her feet a little and then turned slowly around and looked at the ship.
This time, she really saw it.
The
Pioneer
had scraped over the skin of this alien world for miles, sharpening itself like a knife; family housing and the rest of the forward compartments were gone, rubbed away, and the pointed tip of what was left had ultimately struck something unyielding in the ground and stabbed itself in. This was what had created the steep angle of the ship’s final position, which had in turn created the awful weight that had caused not just Mod A but also Mods B and C to break away and fall. All the women’s dorms were gone. The men’s mods were still there, jutting crazily into the sky and spewing fire from every opening. Virtually everyone was dead.
The world got oddly lighter. This time, it wasn’t the clouds. Amber realized with a start that she was trying to faint and so she sat down and leaned forward to put her head between her knees as far as her bodily dimensions made possible. She really didn’t want to faint. Whatever was going to happen next, she wanted to be awake when it happened. Bo Peep’s little girl was not about to die with her eyes closed.
The warmth and soft press of a body beside her told her Nicci had sat down too. Amber raised her head a little and looked at the
Pioneer
some more. This was what she’d spent six days bullying her baby sister into. This was what she’d lost her apartment, her job, and sixty pounds for. This was it.
She leaned forward again and opened her mouth, but apart from a groggy belch, nothing came out. She hadn’t had anything in her stomach for years, after
all. Maybe a lot of years. Like…hundreds.
That made her want to throw up again, but since that was just futility, Amber made herself look around some more instead. She
could see a cluster of uniforms standing apart from the rest, close to the biggest gash in the smoking side of the ship, and a little ways from them stood just two—one crimson and gold Manifestor and one military grey Fleetman, close together, deep in conversation.
She stood up.
Nicci caught at once at her hand. “Where are you going?”
The last thing Amber wanted was to start a mob. She bent over to speak softly against Nicci’s ear. “To see if I can’t find out what’s going to happen next.”
“Next?” Nicci’s hand tightened painfully. She didn’t seem aware of it. Her eyes were huge, glazed, pleading. “We’re…Someone’s going to come, right? Someone’s going to come from Earth and rescue us? We’re going home now, right?”
A few people looked their way. Amber made a point of patting Nicci’s hand, trying to look as if she were comforting someone. She wasn’t sure if people really patted other people’s hands for comfort or if that was just in books, but no one paid them too much attention, so she guessed that was all right.
“Keep your voice down,” she said, once she was fairly confident they had privacy again. “And don’t freak yourself out. Panicking can’t help anyone.”
“Amber…” Nicci’s staring eyes became a wondering, glassy gape. “Amber, the ship crashed! We crashed here! People are dead!”
“I mean it, Nicci, calm down.”
But Nicci either wouldn’t or couldn
’t obey. Her voice kept rising, sending shards of panic through every quavery word. “We crashed here! Half the ship is gone! Amber, the ship is broken! We have to be rescued!
We have to be rescued right now
!”
Amber grabbed a fistful of Nicci’s shirt and yanked her to her feet, thrusting her face right up
close. She hissed, “Shut up or I’ll slap the shit out of you and I guaran-goddamn-tee I’ll be better at that than you are! Shut! Up!”
Nicci did, trembling. She blinked and tears came bubbling out of her, but they were silent tears for now. Her lips pressed together, turned downwards in a clownish exaggeration of sorrow.
“If you panic, other people are going to panic and once that starts, we are not going to be able to stop it, so you take deep breaths or do whatever you have to do, but you keep quiet, do you hear me?”
Nicci nodded. The action tipped a few more tears out of her. They trickled sideways across her cheeks, blown off-kilter by the wind, and fell into her
hair. “I’m scared,” she said. Little Nicci, like she was all of six years old again.
“Go ahead and be scared all you want,” said Amber, releasin
g her. “Just do it quietly.” She looked back at the uniforms. They were still talking. She took Nicci’s hand (
cold jesus how cold is it going to get when the sun goes down i don’t see any animals no birds not even bugs maybe it gets like a hundred below and nothing can live here
) and started walking, trying to look aimless so she wouldn’t get too much attention, but movement has a way of attracting the eye and people were staring.
Halfway there, Nicci started bawling. That helped. There was enough misery around here that no one wanted to see any more of it. The people who had been dully watching her found other places to send their thousand-yard stare.
Nicci…
Amber dropped back a little and put her arm around her sister’s shoulders. Nicci hugged on her like a child wanting to be carried and cried the same way, loud and graceless, soaking heat and wetness into Amber’s shirt.
“It’s okay,” she heard herself say inanely. She rubbed at Nicci’s shaking back and watched smoke fly away in wind-blown stripes from the ship. So much smoke. “It’s okay, we’ll be okay.”
“I didn’t want to be here!” Nicci brayed. “I didn’t want to do this!”
Guilt knotted at her heart and sank all the way down into her stomach. “I know.”
“You made me! Why did you
make
me?”
“Nicci…please, it’ll be okay.”
“I want to go home!”
“I’m sorry, Nicci. I am. Come on.”
The two men who seemed to be doing the deep talking stopped as Amber approached them. She recognized the Manifestor up close—Crewman Everly Scott, who she’d made such a great impression on at boarding—but not the Fleetman he was with. If she knew how to read pips, she’d know his rank at least, but all Amber could see was an older black man of distinctly military bearing, with a worried face and smudges of soot along the left side of his mostly-hairless head. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked, once it must have been obvious that she was really coming to talk to them.
“I can’t think of how,” Amber replied honestly enough. She rubbed Nicci’s back some more, trying to quiet her so that they could talk without shouting too hard. The wind made that difficult enough. “I’m not trying to put you on the spot or anything, but if you guys ar
e talking about plans, I’d like to hear them.”
“Go sit down,” s
aid Scott firmly. “As soon as we’ve debriefed ourselves on proper procedure—”
“No offense,” Amber said, looking at him. “But I don’t believe for a second you actually have a procedure that covers something like this. I am all for postponing the main panic, but
we all need to know what happens next.”
“Go find a seat,”
Scott began again, but the soldier stopped him there.
“At this point, ma’am,” he said, “all we’re doing is talking out the situation.”
“But we’re going to get rescued, right?” Nicci reached out to grab at his uniform. He gave her hand a pat. He did it a lot better than Amber had, using the gesture not only to pry her off, but also to sit her down on the ground.
“If you’ve got any ideas
,” the soldier went on, taking off his jacket to drape around Nicci’s shaking shoulders, “I’m willing to hear you out. But if I can be as blunt with you as you’ve been with us, if you haven’t got something to say, you need to move on and let us try to do our job.”
“You can tell us how you’re going to sue us later,”
Scott added derisively.
Amber shot him an
angry glance, then redirected herself to the other man. “I feel like I need to get the stupid questions out first, just so we’re all on one page, okay?”
“Fair enough.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“More or less. We were hit by some sort of unmapped interstellar traffic…an asteroid field or maybe we passed through the tail of a comet or something. The shields are supposed to be able to
repel collision, but…the hull was penetrated in a number of places…a lot of systems took heavy damage. There was massive explosive decompression. None of the active crew appear to have survived it.”
“Is this…all of us?”
“I don’t know.” The Fleetman’s gaze skewed away to stare at the ship, at the men’s dorms in particular, burning so hard they could actually hear it, even over the wind. “The military mods survived the crash more or less, but the asteroids…or whatever they were…” He trailed off, then shook his head and looked at her. “Most of the Sleepers I saw in my unit looked like Swiss cheese, ma’am. So did the people inside them. People I knew.”
“
I…I’m sorry.” The smallness of that sympathy could not stand against the present horror. Amber groped for something better, then gave up and simply said, “So we’re it?”
“There could be others. I just don’t know. The mods sealed themselves as part of the emergency lockdown. None of the communication stations appear to be working. I have no idea what the situation is…underground. For all I know, parts of the ship could still be intact, but it’s…not likely. I’ve got some men trying to organize a search and rescue operation, but it’s been…slow starting.”
Amber nodded. “How long have we been flying blind?”
“I don’t know how long, but we can’t have been entirely blind
or we wouldn’t be breathing this atmosphere, we’d be melting in it.” He broke off there, ran one hand over the side of his smooth head and started again, more calmly. “The ship has several emergency failsafes in place. Locating an Earth-class planet and landing was one of them, but…I don’t even know off the top of my head how many others had to fail for that one to engage. In the event of any major incident, the ship was supposed to take us home.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“No, although the guidance system itself has to be functioning or we never would have made it here. This planet is very Earth-like. And before you ask me which world it is, understand that there are over seven thousand Earth-like planets in the Fleet’s database, and we’ve mapped less than one percent of one percent of this galaxy. Without a working guidance system’s interface, we have no way of discovering where we are.”
“Can
anyone repair it?”
He spread his hands
, his expression pained. “With what?”
“All right. I have to ask. Is there an emergency beacon or any way to send a transmission of any kind
back home?”
The
Fleetman nodded back in the direction of the fractured ship while still holding her eyes. “At the very best, we have lost thirty percent of the ship’s structure, including the entire command center, and the primary and tertiary lifeboat launching bays. That number could be as high as seventy-five percent if none of the structure below the surface has survived impact. Even if the halls have collapsed, the skeleton could be intact. Right now, I have to hope that it is, because only if we can tunnel our way in to certain engineering portals do we have any hope of making the necessary repairs to the guidance system.”
“
You said the primary and the tertiary bays were out. What about the secondary lifeboats?” Amber asked. “Is there a beacon or anything with them?”
“There is.
And that—” The Fleetman pointed up at the extreme tip of the blazing men’s dorm. “—is the bay where it is located. It looks like it might be intact and if it’s locked down like the rest of the compartment doors, it might not even be burning. Getting to it is going to be a process, but I have to tell you, ma’am—”
“Amber. Amber Bierce.”
“Amber.” His brows furrowed slightly. “Jonah Lamarc, Lieutenant Junior-Grade.”
T
hat was a lot further down the authority ladder than she’d been hoping to hear, and by the look on his face, he knew it. But he struck her as a thoughtful man and definitely not prone to panic. She put out her hand impulsively.
H
e shook it while Crewman Scott watched.
“It’s going t
o be a process?” Amber prompted.
“But I believe it can be done,
once the fire burns itself out,” he finished, and then gave his head a grim shake. “Miss Bierce, I don’t think I’d say this to anyone else out there, but you seem to have a level head and I want to be honest with you.”