Anne loomed over him. Daisuke rotated into position below her, between her and the shattered window and the rushing purple ground.
Anne fell.
Chapter Four
Food, Water, and Shelter
Daisuke awoke in the arms of a beautiful woman. Or at least with her knees pressing painfully against his hips and her elbows wedged against his ribs.
There was something warm and wet on his neck. Daisuke’s throat tightened.
“Anne?” he whispered.
A hard, round weight moved against his shoulder, and Daisuke’s face was enveloped in a cloud of curly blonde hair. It smelled like sweat and detergent, and not at all like blood.
Anne slurped the drool back into her mouth and said, “Gwuh?”
Daisuke allowed himself to breathe out. He could feel the bruise spreading from where the seat belt cut into his torso. “Anne,” he said, “are you okay?”
“Whuh?” She shook her head, scrubbing Daisuke with the mop of her hair. “What happened?”
“You fell on me,” Daisuke said. “You fell on me when the plane….”
He slowly turned his head and looked down through his badly scratched window. It was possible to make out multicolored objects on the other side, squiggling around like fish in an aquarium.
“Out! Out, everybody!” Daisuke and Anne jolted as one at the sound of Colonel Pearson’s voice. “Don’t panic, but this is a downed aircraft and it is full of fuel. So get a move on!”
Anne floundered against him like one of the fish-things on the other side of Daisuke’s window. Her arms unfolded and braced against the edge of his seat. Her weight left Daisuke, who felt suddenly cold and exposed.
Daisuke’s hands scrabbled at the buckle of his seat belt. The plastic strap slid across the bruise on his chest with breathtaking agony, but none of his limbs seemed to be broken.
“Is everyone all right?” he called. “Please answer with your name. I’m Daisuke. I’m all right.”
He counted eight affirmative grunts from the others before Pearson pulled Anne off him and into the aisle. She scrambled down the corridor ceiling formed by the sides of the chairs, and Daisuke followed as if navigating a mangrove forest. And would he have to worry about crocodiles here too?
Daisuke clambered up the plane’s fuselage, slowly so as not to tip the machine over, and looked down.
Sulfurous steam rose from shallow, purplish mud, all rimmed about by jagged translucent shards of…ice? Mobile objects – Daisuke was forced to classify them as animals – slid and squirmed through that mud and across those shards. From here, the animals were formless blobs of shifting color, but none was larger than a cat. No crocodiles. At least, none that Daisuke could see.
“It looks safe,” he called into the hatch, and slid off the plane. His boots thudded dully on what must not be ice, but textured glass. A few moments later Anne and Pearson joined him on the ground.
“You might have stayed inside,” complained Hariyadi’s voice from within the fuselage, “and helped with the enormous Russian.”
“It’s the delicious Indonesian cuisine,” Misha said, breaching the hatch like a walrus. “You must blame your people, my friend.”
Hariyadi made no reply as he came down after Misha. Rahman boosted Nurul out, then slid to the ground himself, clutching his camera.
Tyaney extracted himself, yelling in Indonesian. Probably something along the lines of “Where the hell are we? How are we going to get home?”
Hariyadi snapped something at the Nun man, and Tyaney snapped back. Misha said, “Where’s Sing?”
Tyaney made a puffing noise with his lips, a clear intercultural signal for ‘I don’t give a damn.’
Daisuke turned around and pointed to where Sing was climbing out of the hatch. “There.”
“I get her,” Misha said, and lumbered toward the plane, growling about “careless husband” and “respect for wife”.
He caught Sing as she slid out of the hatch, then the whole party put some distance between themselves and the plane.
“All right,” said Pearson, after they had milled around in shock for several minutes and experienced no explosion. “Is everyone all right?”
Daisuke focused his attention on his own body. He felt bruises, yes, but no blood, no concussion, no broken bones or dislocated joints. He was just chilly. The same seemed true of everyone else. They would all be sore in the morning, but there were no injuries that required care.
Which was good, because the nearest hospital was who knew how many light-years away. Daisuke rubbed his arms and looked at the sun, now past the midline of the southern horizon. “We will need shelter,” he said. “Before dark.”
Anne nodded. “Good thinking. Um.” She looked at Misha. “Do we have any wilderness survival stuff?”
“Da,” said the pilot. “Survival.” He was staring at his downed plane, jaw working under his fleshy cheek. The shadow of the wing in the light cast a slash of darkness across his face. At that moment, narrated Daisuke to himself, our pilot looked like an ancient god. A trickster, full of both laughter and murder.
“There are warm clothes and food and an emergency radio in the plane,” Pearson was saying. He stood with feet planted firmly on the glassy ground, as if claiming it for himself, or as if afraid of slipping. “All the standard survival equipment. I saw it loaded myself.”
“A lot of good it will do us if my plane explodes,” grumbled Misha.
Sing said something. Of all of them, the native woman looked the least like she’d just dropped from the sky. Her grass cloak was no more ruffled than usual. Her shaved head gleamed as if oiled as she held her hat in one hand and pointed at the plane with the other. She spoke again, and Tyaney translated. This started an argument between him, Hariyadi, Nurul, Rahman, and Anne.
Daisuke found himself sharing a look with Pearson. There in the wilderness, he thought, civilization soon began to wear away to reveal the tribalism beneath. With a common language, the American soldier became my brother. Without one, the Indonesians started to look like enemies.
“They are arguing,” Misha said. “Something about being a hero. Who’s going to go into my plane and get the equipment and risk getting blown up. The black man says he will do it. You know what that means.”
Daisuke wasn’t sure what it meant. In any case, the only person against the idea seemed to be Anne, who was powerless to stop Tyaney from sprinting across the glass and climbing up and into the plane.
An olive-green duffel bag sailed out the hatch and crashed to the ground.
“Shit,” said Pearson. “He’s going to break everything. Come on, Alekseyev, help me catch stuff.”
Daisuke wasn’t invited, but followed anyway, putting himself into position to take the bags and hard-shell boxes caught by Misha and Pearson, and hand them off to Hariyadi and Rahman. The women found themselves at the end of the line, depositing the supplies as far from the plane as possible.
Eventually, Tyaney started throwing down ripped-up seat cushions and Hariyadi yelled at him to stop. The rest of the group pushed their pile of goodies farther away, although worrying about the plane seemed increasingly silly.
“It’s not exploding.” Nurul sounded almost disappointed.
“Good,” growled Hariyadi. “We can examine it. Find out exactly what happened.”
“What happened?” repeated Misha. “We crashed!”
“But why did we crash?” said Nurul. “Was it accident? Pilot error? Sabotage?” She was smiling pleasantly up at the Russian, but her eyes flicked to her husband, and her palm turned up in a subtle lifting gesture.
No stranger to the Tribe of Journalists, Daisuke was entirely unsurprised to see Rahman swing his camera up. He could almost hear his voiceover: Once we were all sure of our immediate safety, tensions began to mount.
“Pilot error?” Misha sa
id. “Only pilot error is error of being here!” He flung his arms toward the plane. “With plane cut up, sent to space-hole, put back together. With crazy plans of crazy soldiers.”
Pearson squinted at him. “Cool it with the crazy Russian act, Alekseyev.”
“Oh, is my English suboptimal for you?” Misha swept an elaborately sarcastic bow in the soldier’s direction. “Excuse me, please. I am stressed with crazy biologist and natives and journalist who think to play detective when we are lost on great glass nothing with no wood to burn or food to eat.” He looked up. “And sun is setting.”
“But what happened to the plane?” Nurul insisted.
“I say I don’t know. Engine stops working, superlative pilot lands without killing even one stupid passenger,” said Misha. “What, you want me to do forensic analysis on big pile of wreckage?”
That pile of wreckage now stood like a statue on a gently rippling, glassy plane. Hexagonal tiles stretched to the mountains on the northern horizon, dotted here and there with clusters of objects that looked less like trees and bushes and more like pieces on a surreal chessboard.
During the crash, the plane had slid, hit one of these things, slewed in a circle, hit another, and tipped sideways. A trail of metallic debris arced from the plane, describing the physics of its abruptly halted inertia. Much of that scrap was caught in a furrow of shattered glass that ended in two piles of gooey crystalline wreckage.
“Yes,” said Hariyadi. “We must find the cause of this calamity. Because if it was sabotage –”
Pearson spoke over him. “This can wait until—”
Hariyadi kept talking. “– the saboteur might be one of us.”
“Enough!” Anne said. “What a stupid thing that was to say. Why did you even say that?”
Hariyadi made a visible effort to pull himself together, reassembling his cracked mask, the liar. “Excuse me?”
“What makes you think the saboteur would be here with us now?” Anne asked. “It would be pretty bloody stupid to strand yourself in the middle of nowhere.”
Daisuke opened his mouth to defend Anne, but, weirdly, Pearson beat him to it. “Exactly. What we need is to trust each other. Let’s not play the blame game.”
“Be that as it may,” said Hariyadi, “we must still determine—”
Anne thrust a finger at him. “Did you sabotage the plane?”
Hariyadi grimaced at Anne’s pointer finger as if it was made of rotten meat. “Of course not! Why would—”
“Do you plan to murder any of us?”
“Not presently, Ms. Houlihan,” said Hariyadi.
Anne spun, pointing at Pearson. “How about you, Colonel? Planning to murder any of us?”
Pearson folded his arms. “I am not. It is my mission to keep us all safe.”
So the American soldier had finally decided to play along with Anne. Good. They all needed to pull together in order to survive.
“How about you, Misha? Daisuke?” She pointed at each in turn. “Sing? Tyaney? Nurul? Rahman? No murderers here? Okay. So we’ve eliminated malice as a potential cause for death out here. That just leaves stupidity. And out here in an alien wilderness where we know literally nothing, it would be very, very stupid to stop trusting each other, okay?”
Her honey-colored eyes burned. Steam literally rose from her purple-splashed boots, planted powerfully in the shattered glass. Anne looked like she might ascend to next power-level at any moment. Even more impressive, Daisuke knew Anne was such a terrible actress, this harangue had to all be genuine and off-the-cuff.
“She is right,” Daisuke said. “We must survive together.”
Hariyadi nodded sharply. “Yes. Besides, we’ll have time to go over the engine while we wait for rescue.”
“Wait for how long?” asked Daisuke.
“We filed a flight plan, and we didn’t deviate from it even as we crashed,” Pearson said. “The crash site will be easily visible from the air. It should only be a matter of getting another plane moved through the wormhole and reassembled.”
“Except the last time your people rushed a plane through the wormhole, it crashed.” Hariyadi slashed his bladed hand toward the wreck. “Even assuming anyone can land safely on this glass and we don’t have to wait for a helicopter. We will be here for an unacceptably long time.”
“Why don’t we walk back to Imsame?” asked Nurul. “That shouldn’t take more than four days.”
“We travel fifteen kilometers of deadly wilderness with alien beasts thirsty for blood?” Misha laughed. “Crazy!”
“I am trained for survival in hostile environments,” said Hariyadi. “And we have expert guides. Sing is a native, Ms. Houlihan a biologist, and Mr. Matsumori an explorer.”
Pearson cut the air with his hand. “Sing has never been to this part of this planet, everything Ms. Houlihan says is conjecture, and Mr. Matsumori only plays an explorer on TV. Our chances of survival if we try to walk home are minuscule.”
“And if we stay here?” Hariyadi asked. “We have no food or water.”
“Actually, we have ten days’ worth of food,” said Misha. “Military rations in storage compartments in place of booze and drugs.”
Anne let out a breath. “That’s very good. We can’t assume we’ll be able to live off the land.”
“So,” said Pearson. “We have plenty of food we can eat while we wait to be picked up.”
Hariyadi drew breath to argue, but Anne beat him to it. “By the dipshits who already got us stranded out here? No way. What we have plenty of food for is a hike back to the Deep Sky Country. We should be fine if we leave immediately.”
Misha shook his head. “No packs to carry food.”
“Help is coming,” Pearson insisted. “We just have to stay by the plane so they can find us.”
“And if by day nine nobody has shown up yet?” said Anne.
“By day nine we are all dead of hypothermia,” Misha said.
A muscle jumped in Pearson’s jaw. “You two think you’re being funny? You are not helping. We have to stay here because otherwise our rescuers will have no idea where we are, not to mention the insanity of hiking through alien wilderness we know nothing about.”
Anne responded, “What about the insanity of staying put in the alien wilderness?”
This scene needed direction, and Nurul was busy talking with Hariyadi, attended by the anxious Rahman and Tyaney.
“The colonel is right,” Daisuke told the arguing people. “Now we have no choice but to find warmth. And water. We can worry about everything else tomorrow.”
“All right,” said Misha. “So where is water? Where is wood for fuel?” His boot thunked on the ground. “Out here on the glasslands?”
“Hm,” Anne said. “There should be water, at least.”
“‘Should be’?” repeated Pearson. “In other words, you don’t know?” He rubbed his chin, looking off toward the eastern horizon. “Damn, but I wish we’d brought a specialist on this jaunt.”
Anne stomped her foot. “Oh, that is bullshit. There aren’t any specialists. We’re on an undiscovered planet and I’m the only person here who knows enough to even begin to theorize about how to keep us alive.”
“Good,” said Pearson. “So theorize, Ms. Houlihan, while you go through our supplies with Ms. Astarina. Figure out what sort of food and water we have.”
“Why don’t you play housewife?” Anne said, but the colonel had already spun to address Misha.
“Alekseyev! You’re on first watch. You and Hariyadi. Circle our camp and keep an eye out for danger.”
“You are giving many orders.” In contrast to Pearson in his rolled-up sleeves and unbuttoned jacket, Hariyadi seemed to have become neater since the crash, if that were possible. His collar creaked under his chin as he nodded at Nurul. “I will go to the aircraft so I can inspect its radio.”
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br /> “You’ll have time for that tomorrow,” said Pearson. “Right now, night’s falling and we need you watching our perimeter. Unless you want to give your gun to Alekseyev?”
Hariyadi’s eyes narrowed and Daisuke held his breath. But neither soldier whipped out his weapon and tried to shoot the other. Instead, Pearson jerked his head up in an approximation of a nod. “Very well. We shall inspect the aircraft tomorrow first thing.”Co-operation, thought Daisuke. We may just get out of this situation without killing each other.
But it would look bad if Daisuke did nothing while his comrades worked. “What should I do, sir?” he asked.
“Oh, right.” Pearson turned to him. “You and Rahman and Tyaney. Got to keep the boys busy.”
The cameraman’s head popped up at the mention of his name. “Ya?” Tyaney said nothing, but he turned to regard them with his deep-set, unreadable eyes.
Pearson smiled. “Any of you boys ever dug a latrine?”
* * *
“What ‘latrine’ mean?” asked Rahman, handing a collapsible shovel to Daisuke.
“Outdoor toilet,” Daisuke said, wondering if either of their language skills would be up for this. “In my career, I have dug many.”
The site they’d selected was south-west and downwind of the camp, close enough to afford protection, far enough away not to stink the place up.
“Are you ready to dig?” asked Daisuke.
“Ya!” Rahman said, and brandished his collapsible shovel. Daisuke made a mental note to keep his shovel after this job was over. Only two people in their party had guns, and Daisuke might need a weapon of his own.
Tyaney walked up to them and drawled something in Indonesian that made Rahman frown. “He says he has to…use bathroom.”
“Tell him to help dig,” said Daisuke.
Tyaney scowled at the shovel Rahman offered him, but took it.
It was not easy to keep up my own spirits, Daisuke would narrate this footage if he was ever so unlucky as to see it aired. However, the spirit of the party was of more importance.
“So let’s dig fast!” Daisuke braced his feet, held his shovel over his head, gave out a cry to gather his energy and plunged the steel blade down with all his strength.
Junction Page 6
