Dev heaved a heartfelt sigh. “Lay it on me.”
Beauregard jerked a thumb rearward. “Somewhere behind us, day is coming. We were outpacing it, but now that we’ve halted it’ll be catching up. Fast. Iota Draconis will be broaching the horizon, and when dawn arrives, we won’t have to worry about baking. Then, my friend, we are going to fry.”
37
“THERE IS SOMETHING we can do,” Beauregard went on. “It’s a gamble, but it beats sitting on our derrieres hoping help’ll come in time.”
“I’m listening,” said Dev.
“I have shieldsuits on board. The kind used by workers running the helium-three converter units. I bought them in case of this very eventuality.”
“So we put them on and we won’t cook as quickly.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m suggesting we put them on and start walking.”
“Out there?”
“Out there. We don’t want to be inside the Frog when the sun reaches her. We’ll be trapped when she starts to burn, like rats in a bonfire.”
“How far are we likely to get before the sun catches up with us too?”
“I’m not pretending it’s the ideal solution,” said Beauregard. “But an extra couple of hours out of the sun, even just an hour, might make all the difference. We keep beaming out maydays from our commplants, like distress beacons, and rescuers will still be able to home in on us even on the move.”
“I thought a basic rule of survival was stay put. An arcjet is easier to locate in the wilderness than four men on foot.”
“Basic rules of survival don’t apply on the surface of a thermoplanet. Here, your chances are better the less you stand still. Think of the shieldsuits as individual, self-contained lifeboats.”
“Okay.” Dev could see the sense in what Beauregard was proposing. He didn’t like it, but it was the lesser of two evils. “Then I suppose time is of the essence. Where are these shieldsuits?”
They were hanging in lockers in the hold. They were scuffed and battered, their faceplates scratched, their shells covered in tatty old decals identifying the mining conglomerate they had belonged to – France-registered Dumoulin Et Fils Exploitation Minière d’Espace Cie. – and stencilled with the surnames of their previous occupants.
“Wow,” said Dev. “These look... pre-loved. I hope you got them cheap.”
“Reasonably,” said Beauregard. “To be honest, they were past the end of their useful lives. They were going to be decommissioned and broken down for scrap. Rest assured, I’ve overhauled them and I keep them well maintained. The cryo-coolant systems are in working order, and the waste-water filtration and recirculation units are fully operational.”
Trundell and Stegman were present, and the former voiced an observation that Dev himself had made, but hadn’t wanted to mention yet.
“There are only three of them,” he said.
“I could only afford three,” said Beauregard. “Mostly I’m alone on flights. Sometimes I’ll have one passenger, never more than two. Three shieldsuits would under normal circumstances be fine.”
“But not now,” said Stegman. “We’re one short.”
“You haven’t got another spare stashed somewhere?” Dev asked, more in hope than expectation.
The pilot shook his head. “We all realise what this means. One of us is staying behind with Milady Frog. But that’s okay. We won’t have to draw lots or anything, because I know who it is.”
“Yes,” said Stegman. “Me. I’m the one with the messed-up leg. It feels fine right now, but the analgesics won’t last forever. I’ll start dragging it, and I’ll slow the rest of you down. I’ll stay.”
“Noble, but no,” said Beauregard. “It’s me. This is my plane. The captain always goes down with his ship, right?”
“Bullshit,” said Stegman. “I’ve stated my case. No arguments. Get those suits on, the rest of you.”
“I could stay,” Trundell offered. “I’m not that physically fit. I’ll tire before the rest of you. I’d end up holding you all back.”
“This is stupid,” said Dev. “Each of us can give a good reason for being the one who doesn’t go. Look at me. This isn’t even my body. Why should I give a damn if it gets burnt to cinders?”
“Nice try,” said Trundell, “but we all know you’ll die if it does. You of all people have to get back to Calder’s Edge. More so than me or Stegman or Beauregard. You’re the one who’s got the expertise when it comes to Plussers. The city needs you.”
“Your faith in me is touching.”
“It isn’t faith. It’s common sense.”
“This isn’t even open to debate,” said Beauregard. “I’ve made the decision. Now hurry up and get into those things. Day’s on its way.”
“Actually, the wingco’s got a point,” said Dev. “We could go round in circles about this for hours. He is the sensible choice.”
“Harmer...” said Stegman.
“Hear me out. I don’t like it. Really I don’t. But we’re in an impossible situation, and it has to be settled quick-smart. So I’m backing Beauregard. We leave him, and he can get busy trying to get Milady Frog off the ground. None of us three can fly this thing. Beauregard knows her inside out. Maybe, just maybe, he can restart her and then pick us up en route to Calder’s. If he stays, the odds of us all getting out of this alive actually improve.”
Beauregard appeared relieved, and even grateful, that Dev had come up with this excuse to justify his remaining behind. Both he and Dev knew there wasn’t much likelihood of Milady Frog taking off. Trundell and Stegman probably knew it too. Now, however, there was a fig-leaf to cover Beauregard’s act of self-sacrifice. It was a tiny, slender one, but it would do.
Stegman said, haltingly, “Well, that’s a plan, isn’t it? Makes sense.”
“I can see the logic,” said Trundell.
But neither man could meet Beauregard’s eyes as he helped them put on the shieldsuits.
The suits had the bulky profile of EVA spacesuits, but were lighter and more durable, each weighing less than twenty kilos all told. The shell was ceramic, coated with a layer of heat-resistant graphene. The joints were a flexible polyaramid-fibre weave also coated with graphene.
The faceplates on the helmets were borosilicate glass inset in a narrow, roughly V-shaped slit – little more than visors, really. They had to be that small, because they were the shieldsuits’ most vulnerable component. The glass had the lowest melting point of all of the suit materials and would succumb to Iota Draconis’s furnace-like blast before any other part did.
Once Trundell and Stegman were fully suited up, Dev told them to establish a three-way commplant link so that they could talk when they got outside.
He picked up his helmet, the last item left to put on.
“Beauregard...” he said.
The pilot was taking a swig from his hip flask, which he had retrieved from the cockpit floor and replenished from a bottle in the provisions cabinet. Vodka, it appeared, was his preferred tipple. Spirit of Gdansk, in fact, a particularly potent brand distilled by Polish settlers on 16 Cygni Bb, Little Warsaw, where the dry, rich soil yielded handsome potato crops.
“It’s all right,” Beauregard said. “I’m not scared. Been here before. Some of the high-altitude drop raids I ran, I never thought I’d come back from. Nearly didn’t. Blizzards of incoming fire. Wingmen falling away on either side. Every day I’ve had since the war ended has been a bonus, as far as I’m concerned. It’s all been borrowed time.”
“You’re going to try with the Frog, though, aren’t you? At least promise me that.”
“I’ll do my best. There’s one or two tricks I can think of. Maybe if I dicker about with the multidrop buses or reset the power breakers... But I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. Polis Plus malware’s bastardly stuff. Super thorough. Wipes everything back to factory-blank level. It’s like a thief who steals all your valuables then squats out a turd on your living-room carpet for good measure.”
&n
bsp; “Very picturesque.”
“Just don’t waste this, Harmer. If, you know, I’m not going anywhere, make sure it wasn’t all for nothing. Make sure the Plussers don’t get their way. Alighieri’s not much, but it’s been my home for the past five years. I’d hate to see them claim it for their own. What was the Frontier War for, if it wasn’t to keep these digimentalists off our property?”
“Will do,” said Dev. “And I apologise for losing my temper in the cockpit earlier. I shouldn’t have sounded off at you. You got us safely down. Respect is due.”
“Post-crash shock. Heat of the moment. It happens.”
“Still hate all your religious crap, though.”
“Me too,” Beauregard admitted. “It’s not there just for fun. It’s there to remind me what I didn’t have when facing the Plussers, and what they thought they did. They believed that faith in the Singularity would guarantee them victory. Hah. Guess what? We fought them to a standstill. We held them to a draw. So much for gods, eh?”
Dev clamped the helmet into place. Beauregard helped him adjust it until it mated with the rest of the shieldsuit.
The suit, once complete, automatically booted up. Batteries hummed to life. The rebreather apparatus kicked in. Cryo-coolant sloshed through tubes, settling on a temperature level just above average body warmth.
Through the V of the faceplate, Dev saw Beauregard give him a thumbs-up. Dev returned it clumsily, as best the suit’s thick gauntlet would allow.
Then he turned and stomped towards Trundell and Stegman at the rear of the hold.
Stegosaurus? Trundle? Are we ready to roll?
Ready to rip that suit off you and give it to Beauregard, Stegman replied, if you call me that name one more time.
Beauregard withdrew into the cockpit, sealing off the hold from the rest of the arcjet’s interior. Then he depressurised the hold and hit the switch to lower the loading ramp.
Fierce heat rushed in from the darkness outside. Digits on the readout of Dev’s shieldsuit’s temperature gauge, visible via a head-up display projected on the faceplate, shot up. Within seconds they had reached the middle triple figures.
Sections of the hold walls, ceiling and floor began to crackle and char.
The shieldsuit compensated by increasing the energy density of cryo-coolant and upping the rate of circulation. The heat sink mounted on the back began dissipating excess heat out into the atmosphere.
A timer next to the temperature gauge calculated how long the shieldsuit would continue to be viable under present conditions. It arrived at a figure of 133 minutes, and immediately began counting down, glowing red digits superimposed on the landscape outside.
02:12:59
02:12:58
02:12:57
A little over two hours. After that, the suit’s integrity could not be guaranteed any more. Internal systems would start to break down. The nanorod-suspension cryo-coolant would increasingly lose effectiveness until it was no better than plain water. The shell would start to crack and split.
Two hours.
How far could you get in that time at walking pace? Ten kilometres under optimal conditions, and the conditions on Alighieri’s surface were far from optimal. Beauregard had said they were a hundred klicks from Calder’s. So at best they would shave a tenth off the journey any would-be rescuer might make, but only a tenth.
But then this wasn’t about narrowing the distance between the crash site and Calder’s Edge.
It was about escaping the rising sun.
As they exited Milady Frog, Dev checked the eastern horizon. There was the faintest of glows there, a hint of reddish-orange light.
Alighieri was a small planet with a fast rotation.
Dawn would be coming soon enough.
38
THE THREE OF them skirted back around the downed arcjet, taking a path that continued in the direction she’d been travelling before the crash. Dev noted missing tiles on Milady Frog’s belly and a scraped, dented engine nacelle. He was surprised she wasn’t in a far worse state. Beauregard had truly worked wonders.
Eyes now having adjusted to the darkness, Dev glanced back and saw a line of gouges in the rocky terrain marking Milady Frog’s path coming in. She had bounced five or six times like a skimming stone before fetching up to rest against a metre-high ridge.
As Beauregard had said, any landing you can walk away from...
Turning back, he looked up to the cockpit. Inside, Beauregard gave a salute. He had his feet up on the console. He didn’t look as though he was making any great effort to jump-start the arcjet.
A man resigned to his fate.
Dev saluted back, then began walking in earnest. Trundell and Stegman fell in step beside him.
The ground was mostly level plain, with here and there a bulbous outcrop of basalt or a trench-like fissure. A layer of regolith crunched underfoot, the dust of shattered rocks and cosmic debris that had settled on Alighieri over the eons. Puffs of it floated up into the thin atmosphere behind the three men as they trudged forward.
The heat radiating off the surface made the night sky waver as though it were a reflection in rippling water. The stars flickered in their constellations like tiny candle flames. The light they shed was just enough for Trundell to see by. For Dev and Stegman, with their Alighierian eyes, it was more than adequate.
Soon Milady Frog was a silvery twinkle in the distance, so small Dev could only just make out her amphibian contours. He pictured Wing Commander Beauregard still in the cockpit, gazing out through the windscreen, watching them go. Perhaps, to him, they were already lost in the bleak black landscape. The last fellow human beings he would ever lay eyes on – vanished.
Dev understood Beauregard’s motive in refusing even to consider taking one of the three shieldsuits. Having been through the Frontier War himself, he knew how it changed your perspective on life and death. You realised the fragility of the one and the ever-present proximity of the other. You didn’t lose the dread of dying – who did? – but you learned to make peace with death better than anyone else might, even while you cherished your life all the more.
Beauregard was meeting oblivion with acceptance in his heart and a hip flask in his hand.
There were worse ways to go.
The three men had walked a little over two kilometres before they encountered their first obstacle, a crevice four metres wide and several deep. Even if they weren’t encumbered by the shieldsuits, they would have had trouble jumping the gap.
There was no alternative but to go round.
The crevice followed a saw-tooth course for nearly a kilometre, tapering little by little until it was narrow enough for them to be able to bound across with impunity. They had had to go due south, losing a kilometre’s worth of westward travel. The sunlight would be reaching them that much sooner.
01:47:37
Next they found themselves approaching a long escarpment, which rose vertically and extended as far as the eye could see in either direction, the inner rim of a vast crater. It was perhaps ten metres high, and from a distance seemed sheer. Closer to, however, its face revealed notches and grooves that suggested it might be scalable.
The three men conferred and decided to give climbing it a try.
Is your knee up to the job, Stegosaurus?
Just watch me, Harmer.
Each of them selected a different route up the escarpment. As Dev began to climb, he realised just how restrictive the shieldsuit was. It was like being encased in armour. You couldn’t feel precisely where you were placing your hands and feet. More than once he thought he had established a firm toehold, only to have his leg shoot out under him when he pushed down on it.
He lost count of the number of times he nearly fell, but eventually he crested the brow of the small cliff. Beyond lay a sweeping expanse of boulders, like a glacial moraine. This was probably the remains of a volcanic ejecta field; that, or the detritus from some ancient meteorite impact.
Dev’s heart sank. Their alrea
dy slow progress was about to get even slower.
Uh, a little help here?
The plaintive plea came from Trundell, who was near the top of the escarpment and had got into difficulties. One foot was wedged tight in a narrow fissure and he couldn’t extricate it.
Dev grabbed his wrists and heaved, but was unable to pull him free. They had to wait until Stegman finished climbing and was able to come over and join in. Together, with their combined strength, he and Dev managed to wrench Trundell up and over the rim.
Trundell lay on his belly, wheezing. Dev gave him a minute to recover as he surveyed the eastern horizon. There was a corona of golden light there now, and it seemed to be expanding and becoming more brilliant even as he watched. He had never thought the sight of a sunrise would instil him with horror.
A looped message was being beamed out by his commplant, repeating itself at five-second intervals. Dev Harmer. Down here at these GPS coordinates. In danger of getting terminated by the terminator. Any time you want to drop by and give us a lift, that’s fine with me.
Someone had to have heard Beauregard’s mayday. Someone had to be coming.
Had to be.
But if so, how come there had been no reply yet to Dev’s message? It didn’t need to be much, a simple Hang in there, we’re on our way, that was all. Why the silence?
01:32:51
Nothing to be gained by worrying about it. Keep going, that was the only option. Keep going and keep hoping.
He helped Trundell to his feet, and the three of them set off across the boulder field.
Tripping, slipping, squeezing between the rocks when possible, crawling over them when not. Hopping across from one to the next when they were flat enough to allow it. Straddling them when they were small enough to allow that.
The constant effort began to take its toll. Dev’s breathing became laboured. The air in the shieldsuit grew insufferably stifling. The temperature inside was rising, now a feverish 38º Celsius thanks to his exertions. The cooling system worked hard to bring that down, but the external temperature was rising too, so it was fighting a battle on two fronts.
World of Fire (Dev Harmer 01) Page 24
