by Ginger Booth
She nodded. From there, the bio-lock climbed up the ship’s ramp to affix to the cargo lock door. She pulled another camera window closer to her, to look at the bare ground. Nothing. “Have you checked container integrity?”
“Oh, hell.” Darren hadn’t, and did so now. One of the four lower containers had been compromised so far. Those pressurized space-going containers were a whole lot sturdier than a geodesic tent floor. “We could lift –”
“No,” Sass overrode him. “Not when there’s survivors on the ground. We’d lose the bio-lock.” She hesitated a moment, then shook her head. “Bamboo shoots?”
Darren looked blank. “What?”
Tikki Cook finished delivering his drum of water, and pulled on his pressure suit. She hadn’t even thought to suit up the geisha. But he’d lived on Mahina Orbital for years. And those hunters were his people out there. She gave him a firm nod.
“Bamboo shoots were a torture on Earth,” the housekeeper volunteered. “They’d stake a person to the ground over bamboo. It grew up fast and sharp enough to impale them. Maybe just a story.”
“No, they really grow that fast.” But Nico was waving her over to go. “Mr. Markley. Your ship indoors.”
She didn’t wait for a reply, just ran for the trap-lock and hopped in. Eli automatically patched her into the team channel as the floor irised shut above them. “Everyone has a grav generator on the outside of their suit?” This was the step people always forgot under stress. Zelda had forgotten, so Sass grabbed hold of her. Floki didn’t wear a grav generator, so Nico held him.
“Zero point two down to the surface,” Eli decreed. “Then Sylvan normal. Nico, dilate when ready.”
And they were out, falling gently to the surface. “Eli, get a sample of what’s stabbing our tents. Some kind of Sylvan bamboo shoot is my guess.”
Eli groaned. “Will do. Everyone, do not damage those tents any further. Whatever Earth-mix nitrox is still inside, is the only thing keeping them alive. Go!” He deftly switched channels on the hoof to advise Pedo they were coming. At the next opportunity, he should switch to carting wounded to the bio-lock.
But these statements only confused Pedo. An avid runner, adrenaline tanked, Sass reached his tent before anyone else. She wriggled through the igloo-like airlock on knees and elbows, and in. These tent locks cycled fast by virtue of a tight fit, mostly taken up by a human in a bulky suit. Tonight they risked the biologics, with only air integrity ensured by the lock. The tent was partially deflated overhead. She squat-walked to Pedo and checked the vitals on the suit he was trying to close, then double-checked the pulse points. Dead. “Pedo, she’s gone,” she told him gently.
“NO!” The man started pummeling the woman’s chest.
Sass intended to make him exit the tent with the dead body. But on second thought she left him to whatever grieving process that was. Three more figures sprawled on the floor. One, suited, was alive and in rough shape. One, unsuited, dead. But the other unsuited figure had clawed his way to a helmet and managed to rig an air feed. Unconscious now, he was in horrible shape from oxygen exposure and less-than-sealed helmet base. But he might make it. She started pulling the rest of his pressure suit onto him.
“Pedo, the woman to my left,” Sass pleaded. “Get her outside. She can survive. And so can this one. The other two are gone.”
But Pedo dragged his dead woman into the lock, not the one she requested. She switched back to her party channel. “Be advised, Pedo is now exiting tent. Mental state rocky. Maybe he’s carrying a dead girlfriend. I’ve got two alive in here. Getting second into a suit. One more dead.”
“Acknowledged,” Eli replied. “Bio-lock at capacity. If a pressure suit supports cryo on a casualty, use it.”
Sass checked the suit at hand, but no, it was a cheaper model. Then she kicked herself, realizing she could have started with a Saggy bubble and her suit air to get her victim out of the caustic air quicker. But she was half-done with the pressure suit at this point. No, good air first. She inflated a bubble around the two of them, and pulled off his helmet. He seemed to breathe a little easier, and his frantic heart rate slowed. Then she resumed awkwardly slipping the suit onto him.
Wrong suit. This wouldn’t reach around his broad shoulders and barrel chest at all. She flashed her helmet light around the interior of the semi-deflated tent dome, but none of the remaining scrambled suits looked any larger. Someone else took his.
She could use the bubble stuff to keep him breathing, but he wouldn’t get out through the igloo passage that way. “Eli, I have a man who won’t fit into available suits. About Kaol’s size around the chest. Got any spare extra large? Otherwise, I’ll need to cut my way out, and carry him in a bubble for air.”
“Confirm he is breathing now.”
“Confirmed, seems stable. I can bring out another suited. No cryo.”
“Proceed. I’ll get back to you on the suit.”
Sass blew herself another bubble as an airlock out of her man’s airspace. Then she wriggled herself and the suited woman out of the tent. As soon as she emerged, Eli knelt beside them and checked the woman’s vitals. “She can wait. Kaol, take her.” The hunter jogged to them and scooped her up, to run her to the bio-lock.
Meanwhile Sass’s eyes fell on the generator. It was tilting. She stood and trained her helmet light on the latrine fifty meters away. That was deflating. “Eli, I need to swap out of your team. Don’t forget the big guy in here, will you?”
“Aye, sar. We’ll use Kaol’s suit for him if we have to.”
Eli and Nico’s team seemed to have the lifesaving problem well in hand. But the colony could fail on destroyed equipment, too. Including the tents. She stepped over and verified that the power generator was being tipped by more of the stake-like shoots emerging beneath it. Warmth accelerates their growth? The hunters posted sentries outside. But the threat came silently from below.
She confirmed that no one needed power out here at the moment, and turned the generator off. Then she walked the heavy box aside to cool on a bare plot of ground.
The shoots, released from the weight, sprang up past her ankles by the time she finished shifting the generator. The water purifier and air remixer weren’t tipping yet, but she chose to shift them, as well, and set the water tank to drain. She jogged over to the other generator, near the skewered container, and shifted that one, too. She wasn’t familiar with the latrine’s plumbing, so she settled for powering it off.
The rest would keep until daylight, she hoped, except the tents. She wriggled back into the first one she’d entered, relieved to find her barrel-chested guy in the bubble was already gone. She pulled out the remaining body, and all the belongings. Then she opened the rapid-deflate valve to collapse the dome the rest of the way.
Porter and Zelda, her agronomist and atmosphere specialist, wandered over to ask if they could help. Zelda knelt to respectfully strip the pressure suit from the one corpse. The hunters had expressed a preference that their fallen be treated equally, and left outside. The scientists finished depositing him in the tidy row of the dead, now over a dozen. Meanwhile Sass cleared out and deflated another tent. This one they helped her fold neatly. With three of them working together, they made quick work of the remaining two tents. The first, only roughly folded once, served as a ground cloth for the equipment pile.
Then they wadded it all together. Zan in the shuttle transferred it to the end of the dwindling line waiting for entry to the bio-lock. By now Cope had restored the first chamber to service, propped a half meter off the ground. The injured flowed much more quickly into the interior. Eli and most of the crew who’d come outdoors were inside there now, helping the stricken through the decontamination phases. Sass released her brace of scientists into that flow.
And then there was Floki. The emu stood at loose ends, unable to pass into the bio-lock for fear of what it would do to him. “Keep me company,” Sass invited him. “Let’s take a pass around the perimeter.”
She’d m
eant this stroll as a simple reassurance, sort of like checking the air-locks before bed. Alas, that was not to be. The sonic stakes seemed to excite the shoots, not as badly as warm bodies and the generator, but plants were poking out of the ground. A couple of the sonic generators already tilted. Over a comm channel, Zan and Kaol talked them through the steps of how to move a stake and then restore its synchronization with its neighbors to either side. The force field layer of defenses seemed sound for now. But all of this would need to be rethought.
At last Sass ran out of yard chores, and only the two of them remained outside.
9
“Cope, got a sec?” Sass hailed.
“Aye, cap, what’s up?”
“Any more thoughts on how we get Floki inside?”
“Yeah, actually. Let’s try washing him, then a pure nitrogen atmosphere. When the last person is through the lock.”
“Negative. I will be the last person to board the ship. Hadron would have had that honor. Is he…?”
“Breathing,” Cope reported. “I’ll be right out. Through the bio-lock.”
Between the two of them, they returned through the bio-lock with their robot-borne AI crewman. In the first shower compartment, they sudsed him off thoroughly, then blew him dry, Floki mortified but deeply grateful. The AI had been afraid they’d leave him outside alone. The fact that Sass wouldn’t board the ship without him won her another notch of hero worship in his emu eyes.
Then Cope opened his access panels. Captain and engineer remained safe in their pressure suits while they flooded the chamber with pure nitrogen. They picked up the emu and rotated him in front of the blowers to get thorough coverage of Floki’s innards.
According to Cope’s bio-sensors, that seemed to do the trick. No life signs, no contaminants.
“Wouldn’t work so well if you were biological, Floki. But that’s easy enough. Head on through. Sass and I need more sluicing. What?”
Floki captured Cope around his shoulder with his long emu neck, and squeezed lightly. “Thank you, Nico’s dad.” Cope patted him back, then gave in and returned the hug in earnest. Floki repeated the bird hug – robot claws retracted – on Sass before scampering ahead.
At last, the captain emerged into her hold, once again full of hunters. Though now only 26 remained, not counting the sad collection of bodies which failed after reaching this point.
Sass was tempted to turn around and carry them out. But a quick consult with Kassidy confirmed that the four waiting to join their brethren on the field outside would not be the last. They’d keep til morning.
She hung poised at the threshold, just outside med bay. Kassidy had three patients squeezed in there with her, while Tikka waded through the injured. Most of Sass’s crew, plus the ambulatory hunters, acted as nurses. Sass spotted the burly man she couldn’t get into a suit. The geisha housekeeper Tikki wedged him up to drink something up on the catwalk. The distraught hunter Pedo lay near Hadron across the hold, both motionless.
Do what only you can do. Nursing didn’t qualify – her crew had it under control. She should call Tarana. We certainly failed fast. Her primary responsibility was to protect her ship, and her crew, and through them, the lives of others.
Tarana could wait.
“Cope, Darren.” She joined them at the engineering podium, where Cope naturally drifted once they were inside. Unlike her, he’d already unpeeled the top of his suit to dangle from his belt. She’d only removed her helmet, racked on her shoulder. “I’d sleep better with Thrive off the ground. And that equipment protected. I can’t stop thinking of what Tikki said.” She cast a guilty glance up at the catwalk, then turned her back to the crowded hold, and lowered her voice. “How much those generators and pressure suits cost, compared to what they earn.”
Cope nodded lightly. “Those generators cost more than Tikki’s earned in his life. But cap, should we solve their problems for them? Not the same, but when I helped my kids too much, Ben and his dad used to crucify me. No favor to protect them from learning their lesson.”
Darren shook his head. “We were the science and tech crew. We cleared them to spend tonight outdoors.”
“Yeah, this group wasn’t qualified to do those things.” Sass nodded. “So am I being paranoid?”
“You’re not wrong,” was Darren’s verdict.
Cope scrubbed his tired face. “Simple fixes. We detach the last chamber of the bio-lock. Tie it onto the ramp. Then lift with the ramp open. Go slow.”
Darren nodded. “Build a platform for the other gear. Use grav grapples to place the equipment on top. Foamcrete on pylons?”
They brainstormed a while longer, but couldn’t think of a better solution. Further, if they decided to find another colony site, they could reuse the platform to tote the equipment along. The pressure suits could simply be cleaned and brought aboard again – the hunters could handle that. But cleaning and re-crating the bigger machines would cost the engineers man-days to stow them, plus the effort to set them up again. Building a platform from foamcrete was easier. Then the shuttle could simply pluck up the equipment and place it on top out of harm’s way.
Provided the shoots didn’t grow too fast. But from the growth pattern she observed, Sass expected warmth was the catalyst. Of course, she’d laser off any shoots already emerging underneath the high table.
Hours later, when all this was accomplished, Sass and Cope sat and dangled their legs a moment, four meters above the abandoned camp. The three-quarter Sylvan moon lit the scene, antique rose in color and smaller than Earth’s moon, but close. The forests marched black toward snowcapped peaks and the high glacier wall, glowing dimly in pink. The brilliant stars looked close enough to catch in a jar like lightning bugs.
“Not a failure,” Cope mused. “A minor setback compared to a thousand things gone wrong on Mahina, right?”
“Denali too, I imagine,” Sass agreed. “Mm, no. I bet things went a whole lot worse on Denali.” They laughed. “How many landing sites you think they tried?” Judging from Denali Prime, the colonists’ forebears failed to find a single safe spot anywhere on their planet.
“These other worlds,” Cope shared. “Each one I visit makes me appreciate old Mahina more. Pono taking up half the sky, with its silver rings. Our home ain’t so bad.”
“It’s come a long way,” Sass agreed.
“It could go a lot further with the Denali on board. They got drive and talent. Bet they could make that rego moon bloom.”
Sass sighed, drinking in the beauty. “And abandon Sylvan? Break time is over.”
On their grav generators, they hopped down to the ground and boarded Thrive. Then Sass lifted 200 meters up and set the ship to hover while she got some sleep. She could report their misadventure to Tarana in the morning.
10
Six faces from orbit stretched across Sass’s dining room display. Ben Acosta, captain and husband to Copeland by her side, was the sole representative from Merchant Thrive. They chatted while the Sardine contingent – Hopeful Thrive – got their act together. For the moment, Ben’s skeleton-crew ship was locked to Hopeful. He allowed in batches of twenty colonists at a time for a chance to stretch their legs and grab a shower. Ben’s Denali housekeeper Quire alternated between feeding them and hiding.
On her end, Sass included the physicist Teke and Zan, sometime captain of Hopeful, but presently acting as Thrive’s first mate. Sass’s real first mate, her partner Clay, filled Zan’s billet on Hopeful. Clay also attended via the big screen with an air that suggested he intended to keep his mouth shut.
Tikki Cook wasn’t party to the meeting. But he perched in a chair guarding the galley doorway, armed with bowls of Thrive-grown fruit and fresh-baked rolls by way of warding off hungry visitors.
Tarana’s gaze began to acquire a fixed quality as the appointed start time for the meeting arrived. She was an athletic woman in her thirties, with regular girl-next-door features. Sass placed a hand on Cope’s shoulder to suggest he wrap up with his husband.
“Time.” Sass nodded to Tarana to begin. “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Tarana interrupted. “Where is Hadron?” Her team in this meeting included Aurora, her predecessor as Denali Envoy to Mahina, plus her fellow ‘Selectmen’ for the colony, Benek the farmer and Sofi the academic. On Denali, the Selectmen would co-rule a city of up to half the population of the planet. But they used the same model no matter what size the community. Each guild rated a Selectman. Tarana herself spoke for the cosmos.
Aurora mostly represented her own point of view. Hers was the driving zealotry behind settling Sylvan. She’d raised much of the cash for the equipment. Yet the leaders back home didn’t trust her after so many years off-world. Instead they appointed Tarana to head the mission.
Sass answered softly, “Hadron isn’t coming. We had a bad night last night.” She launched into her report of skewering tree sprouts, and the casualties. Ben and Clay looked increasingly grim, Aurora mulish. Tarana was harder to read. Sass didn’t know her well.
“Bottom line,” Sass summed up, “sixteen dead. Twelve hunters fully effective, the remaining dozen somewhere in between. We managed to save the equipment.” She and Cope nodded to each other. “Some needs repair. My chief engineer is teaching the hunters to do that now. Hadron…”
She paused and pursed her lips. She’d invited the hunter Selectman to this meeting. He was conscious. But he turned his head away without speaking.
“Disgraced,” Zan offered, face hard.
Teke tilted his head back and forth. “Is he? Is it a disgrace to be injured in your sleep, unable to contribute?”
Zan, the only hunter present, clarified the point. “Yes.”
Tarana seemed to accept his verdict. “Are you claiming his role, Zan?”
“No.”
“Has anyone claimed Hadron’s role as Selectman?”
“Not yet,” Sass answered. “Late start this morning.”
