Exigency Page 10

  She returned to the pod’s front and peered into the open pod hatch. Apparently unconcerned with power conservation, Ish had left everything on.

  Minnie felt nervous excitement tremble in her sternum as she climbed in and connected her fone to the EV’s wireless.

  ALERTS: ID mismatch.

  She enabled security? Wow.

  Minnie grunted smugly and connected as a root level account.

  ALERTS: ID disabled.

  What? Bitch!

  Minnie clenched her jaw, her hatred of Ish soaring to a previously uncharted realm. The system had to have been completely wiped and replaced to disable root access. And there was no way that happened down here. Minnie was at a loss. The pod could have received hundreds of new messages from the BH or elsewhere and she’d have no idea without system access.

  Well, I don’t need access to steal your damned comms.

  Minnie plunked down into one of the seats and bent over to access a panel. Behind the sheet, she found the laser comms unit, flipped the four mounts out of the way, and pulled the handle. The unit slid out with a satisfying shink.

  She had to remove the bottom of the other seat to access the primary comms unit—about ten minutes of work—and soon found herself standing outside the pod with a cache of gear and supplies to take back to John. Thankfully, her body wouldn’t have to bear the weight all the way to their hidey hole. The real gem of her find was still parked in its bay. And she decided to strut her way back to it.

  Reaching up, Minnie twisted the skimmer release knob three times counterclockwise, pressed it inward, and sighed with satisfaction as muffled machinations hummed and whirred, and the transport emerged smoothly from its home. The warning beeps were strangely soothing, grounding—the emblematic call of all the magnificent technology that defined her species. And though she hadn’t designed the thing herself, she watched with pride as the mounting arm continued outward, fully extending, while the skimmer blossomed like a smooth, white flower.

  Fully deployed, the skimmer pad looked like a shiny white disk, flat on the top, and with a convex underside, like a shallow saucer. Noting she could fit her helmet in the space between the pad’s outer edge and the ground, Minnie squatted for a peek below. Like an EV, retractable stabilizer legs around the perimeter kept the unit from teetering on its rounded center.

  Minnie peered up at the skimmer’s curved console, rising from one side of an otherwise wide-open platform. The power supply was fully charged, system checks had come back optimal, and a big blue “READY” shone on the screen. Minnie stood and pressed the release button on the EV. Two claws disengaged and the arm slowly retracted into the empty skimmer bay.

  She stepped up onto the pad and ran her gloved fingers across the dashboard’s screens. At waist height, just beneath the screens, three extendable safety lines sat in individual chrome recesses. And below them, a row of panel walls concealed the control console’s inner workings. Above the dashboard, a short transparent windshield rose just a hand’s length higher. Probably the perfect height for Minnie, but maybe a bit low for those of “normal” stature.

  Tour complete, Minnie got busy loading Ish’s treasure trove of supplies.

  Moments later, with all the gear strapped to the pad or secured inside the skimmer’s in-floor storage bin, Minnie clipped the safety lines to her suit, and activated flight controls.

  On Earth, skimmers had grown more common than cars and cycles for short-distance personal transport, along with other vehicles both open and enclosed, broadly referred to as threebs—an odd simplification of “Below 3000,” for their flight zone. Legally, you had to be 16 and licensed to fly a threeb. Minnie had just turned 16 when she entered mission training, and besides a short-lived joyride on a homemade rig, she’d only been able to operate a skimmer during a few obligatory exigency classes. The training center’s vehicles had all sorts of limiters and could be remotely controlled by instructors. No opportunities to “open them up,” as they say.

  Minnie wrapped her fingers around the thick, cushioned handle grips, testing the steering devices’ ranges of motion. She could twist both grips like throttles, rotate the whole assembly like a steering wheel, and move it back or forth a few centimeters. There was, of course, no ID scanner on the dashboard, so Minnie simply activated flight with a tap on the screen, and twisted the altitude grip toward her. The ionic drive engaged with ghostly silence, lifting the skimmer slowly off the ground. She twisted harder, then engaged forward propulsion.

  Within seconds, cool wind stung her unprotected eyes and blared in her ears. She quickly locked the altitude to free her left hand and slapped her visor shut.

  Much better.

  In the starlight, the skimmer whizzed noiselessly over the plain and the river and the epsequoia forest. Minnie’s head was a rush of pleasure and guilt. Her mission had been a major success—a first taste of things actually working out as planned (and more!), yet the stars above haunted her.

  Tiny white dots in space.

  It didn’t feel right to celebrate anything. To enjoy seemed offensive.

  But she couldn’t help it. As she neared the spire and sinkhole, slowing and descending for landing less than two minutes from leaving Ish’s pod, Minnie decided she’d just have to take the pleasure with a side of shame. She’d made it up the rope, nourished her lungs with energizing fresh air, they had a skimmer now, they could leave the damned worm cave, and they had comms. She remembered she even had a dead bunny hanging at her thigh, its chickenality level yet to be established.

  Perhaps, every now and then, it was okay to have a good day.

  1.8

  John wouldn’t wake up. Water dripped from Minnie’s suit onto his face and he didn’t even blink. At first she stifled panic, stripping away his survival bag and checking his body for new parasites, then scanned the inside of the tent. But none were present. They didn’t have to be, though, did they? The damage had already been done.

  Minnie’s multisensor showed the same readings it had earlier: John’s circulation was poor, blood pressure low, but normal temp, electrolytes, and brain activity. She’d repeatedly sprayed down his wounds with antiseptic before applying organic wound sealant. The goop worked on large gashes, acting as a temporary skin while stem cells regrew flesh at an accelerated rate. She’d watched vids on managing similar-but-lessor wounds and precisely followed the instructions. He hadn’t gone into shock, and fever never arrived, so she thought she’d done everything perfectly. It’d simply take time for him to get better. And now that they had a skimmer, they wouldn’t be anchored by his inability to walk.

  If only he’d wake up.

  “John.” She patted his cheek. “Come on now, wake up. I’ve got good news.” She flicked his forehead and he uttered a pained groan. “John? Wake up now! Hey! Rise and shine! I found Ish’s EV! And we’re going to have us a bunnyque for dinner!” He let out an extended whine, as if trapped in a nightmare. She hushed and stopped touching him and he seemed to calm.

  She sealed the tent door behind her, rolled back to sit on her empty survival bag, and held her face in her palms.

  She whispered, “Please don’t leave me ... Don’t leave me here alone.”

  She sniffed and gazed at him through blurring tears. A quick swipe with the back of her wrist. He looked best through biomag at its lowest intensity. His unnerving jaw and neck wounds disappeared behind a contrived flesh tone. An illusion of perfect health. His usually close-buzzed hair had grown out a bit and was painted a solid black. The simplified features and estimated colors evoked a doll or action figure and Minnie heard Superhero in her head, but the voice had been drained of humor.

  “John?” It hardly left her mouth. Even if he was awake, he wouldn’t have heard her. “I’m sorry.”

  She touched his hand through the survival bag. He emitted a standard sleep sigh, as if he’d just rolled from one side to the next in a regular old bed in a house at two in the morning.

  Sleep was good for him. Why was she even
trying to wake him up? Let him be. Not moving sped healing, right? He’d wake as usual in the morning, right?

  Well, what if he didn’t? This wasn’t normal. She’d always been able to rouse him before. She hadn’t changed his pain meds dosage. If he didn’t wake up in the next 24 hours, he’d obviously need water. There were, no doubt, hundreds of walk-throughs on setting up an IV drip—she growled suddenly and flushed such thoughts from her mind. Premature. Unnecessary. Unhelpful. Let him be.

  She had comms to set up.

  Maybe after a quick nap. It’d been a long day. A prosperous day. She deserved a break. It was warm inside the tent. She could curl up next to John and pretend he was Aether.

  She shook out her head, her cheeks flapping like a hound’s. Pretend he was Aether? Cave fatigue was setting in again.

  No … you can sleep any time! You have comms gear outside! There could be messages waiting! This could be last chance to say goodb—

  No need to go there either. She just needed to set the damned things up. One thing at a time. More fresh air would be nice, anyway.

  She stepped out, zipped the tent shut, and decided to rouse him tomorrow morning.

  Back outside, Minnie pulled the Primary Comms Unit out of the skimmer and rigged a probably-unsafe hookup to the heater for power. Separating the laser emitter from its unit proved incredibly easy, and she plugged it into a universal port on the PCU. With the emitter propped up on the flattest section of rock, she enabled autotracking, and let the PCU run through signal establishment protocols.

  The little screen scrolled through a series of targets, even listing Earth as an option.

  That’s interesting.

  Could she send a message to Earth from the surface? Even if aimed absolutely precisely, would the beam maintain cohesion on the way out of the atmosphere? Its intensity couldn’t possibly be strong enough. The comms tower on the station, the one used to exchange data with Earth, was 50 times more powerful than this little laser.

  The lime-green beam turned on, streaking past her and into the sky. Start-up GPS instantly failed, so it proceeded on to constellation ID for its current position, then began searching for orbiting supply pods. The beam ticked side to side like a high-speed metronome, rapidly scanning 10 million cubic kilometers of the planet’s exosphere over the course of a few minutes.

  NO COMM SOURCES DETECTED

  Awesome.

  Minnie set it to rescan every 20 minutes and sat down on the skimmer platform. She searched through the flops of instructionals in her fone’s archive and came upon a relevant vid. Munching on a calorie bar, she watched this brilliant old bearded guy in Australia outline a process for using a ground-based PCU to communicate beyond local orbit. He even had an earlier model of the very unit sitting at Minnie’s feet, the critical components all essentially the same. But she appreciated something else about the vid.

  Instead of using a fone, the man wore a head-mounted camera and had happened to record his vid on a sunny Australian day, forty-seven years ago. He had a bunch of tools and gear laid out on a table, and the table pushed up against a wall with a wide mirror. He intermittently looked up at himself in the mirror when addressing the viewer. Behind him was a window to a yard, and in that yard Minnie could see a pair of little girls playing. Sometimes, when he looked up, they were not visible outside, but most of the time they were there, aiming a hose or running through a sprinkler. The man’s mic picked up their giggles and shouts, and once or twice, to Minnie’s alarm, he appeared to be annoyed and considering whether to stop their play. To Minnie’s pleasure, he did not.

  She’d participated in such antics when she was very small—before she’d become overly bookish, reclusive, and crazy—but she recalled fondly that freedom and unreserved joy.

  Cold wind whistled over the skimmer platform and across Minnie’s exposed neck. A fresh whiff of mold and decay she was surprised to find herself enjoying.

  She composed herself and skipped the vid back several minutes as she realized she’d missed everything the man had said about actually enhancing an emitter.

  What time was it? She was cold and tired but didn’t want to go to sleep. It was dangerous to be out this late at night. She peered at the sweeping beam of green light shooting up in the sky and wondered if any Hynka would see it from afar. They’d certainly all seen the EV during reentry. Knowing now that the kidney-shaped valley in which they’d landed was not all that popular with the natives, it was amazing how quickly the horde had converged on the EV. Most likely the bad luck of dropping in while a hunting party happened to be passing through, combined with a blazing parachute. But what if someone spotted this beam from, say, 5K, how long would it take for it to run through the forest to her?

  Minnie ran a therm scan of the valley, indeed spotting several wandering Hynka scattered about. They seemed to favor groups of 2-4. None appeared to be headed her way. A mental note to re-verify this fact in another 30 seconds.

  Halfway through the vid, the PCU on the ground before her sounded an inspiring tone. She spun and dropped to her knees and read the blue strip of screen.

  COMM SOURCE DETECTED

  LINKING…

  LINKING…

  COMMS READY

  “Yes!” Minnie blurted, then cupped her mouth and resurveyed the panorama. The closest she could see was a glob of indeterminate numbers about 8K away, just beyond Duck Rock Mountain.

  Back to the PCU, she held her breath and opened the homepage. This was the first thing anyone connecting to the pod network saw. This was where anyone with half a brain would leave a message for others.

  WELCOME TO SP004!!

  VER: 14F.01.2D3

  POD NETWORK STATUS: SUBOPT

  UP: 15 ~ DOWN: 2

  HAB LINK: DOWN

  BH: DOWN

  Default crap, albeit enlightening.

  As she suspected, no Backup Habitat. Interesting that two pods were dead. Probably taken out by the station’s debris field. Minnie navigated the menu and initiated an unfiltered search, sorting by date to find recently uploaded code. She was certain that the pods would at the very least track changes. They had plenty of onboard storage and, even though no coder ever expected the system to be used this way, it would make no sense for existing code changes to be overwritten without something logging the actions.

  There was indeed tracking, but the most recent code change was a firmware update dated three years ago. If this was truly the case, it meant that no one—not a single evacuee—had connected to the only available network that others on the surface or in orbit could access. The only place where anyone could leave a message. And like any perfectly dumb network, changes were instantly synced across all other nodes, so even if she checked every pod she’d see the same thing.

  No one had left a message. Over 300 hours had passed since landing on Epsy.

  No one had left a message because everyone was dead. Why was she surprised? She’d said all along that none but EV5 and 6 could have survived. Why would there be something new to find here?

  Because denial said so. She’d performed a convincing show of certain pessimism, all the while holding out hope to find a surprise message—from Aether, of course—saying how they’d made it back to the BH, everyone was good and safe but worried about her and John, and Qin and Zisa were rigging up some kind of lander that would go down and pick them up so everyone could live happily ever after, though, sadly, in the BH’s more confined space. Right. She’d known the truth from the start: EVs launching away from the atmosphere would not be able to reestablish a proper trajectory, regardless of piloting skill. It was the equivalent of shooting a person into space with only a pressurized fire extinguisher in hand, and expecting them to make their way back. That was the stuff of lazy science fiction, not reality.

  Fortunately, Minnie hadn’t wasted too much actual work time on this ridiculous fantasy. If she and John were to survive, those people must be banished from her head. All of them.

  Minnie rolled her shoulders
and moved on to accessing the pod’s homepage source file.

  ROOT ACCESS REQUIRED

  She tapped in the passcode and the file unlocked. The homepage reappeared in edit mode. As it had been for her, it would now be the cold, insentient purveyor of bad news to unknown others. Syncing across all the orbiting pods, it would forever remain—the last digital communication from one of the disaster’s only survivors. If another mission came to this place 50 years from now, they’d know that at least a few people surface evac’d. Maybe their remains could be returned to Earth, as if she gave a crap about that.

  She appended the beginning of the homepage, pushing down the oddly cheerful welcome message and status links.

  She wrote: Post-station evac, EV6 landed Hynka country 39S112,95E908. Survivors Minerva Sotiras and John Li (level 8 injury post-landing). EV5 discovered today, sans sabotage suspect Ishtab Soleymani. EV6 planning to leave hostile territory for west coast 50N when able.

  She read it over once and saved it, initiating a system reboot to force a network sync. A 10-minute countdown clock began—some sort of grace period.

  Leaning forward onto her knees to disconnect the rig, Minnie paused, considered, a dry swallow, another safety scan of the landscape. She rolled back onto her rear and reopened the file.

  Why? Not sure. She didn’t want to think about it—just do. Words—stream of consciousness, no hesitation, no edits—filled the screen before her.

  Zisa: You are so quick, so brilliant, and with so much heart you almost make up for those of us who are more like robots than people. You live on another emotional plane. I suck for every time I tried to knock you down from way up there.

  Tom: An inextinguishable light of positivity. If anyone was keeping score, you’re surely responsible for more laughs bursting from my mouth than any single person ever. You’re a hundred times smarter and more capable than you give yourself credit for. Lucky to have known you.

  Qin: I loved our every argument. And even though I clearly won 98% of the time (OK, fine, 96%), I’ll now confess that you often got in my head, continuing to present your cases long after I’d ever admit. I may have actually been swayed once or twice, or once. I’ll also, painfully, concede that you’re smarter than me … in a couple of trivial areas. Wink.