by Piers Platt
“We’re getting close,” Falken observed, peering under the boom at the island ahead of them. “I think I can see the beach now.”
“Another few minutes,” Weaver agreed. He dipped one hand into the water over the stern and brought it to his mouth, drinking. “You want to land and explore on foot, or continue sailing around the island?”
Falken shrugged. “I’ll follow your lead, Captain.”
Weaver chuckled. “Let’s land. My butt’s sore from sitting.”
They coasted toward the island; the only sound was the gentle murmur of the water against the hull. Weaver eyed the distance to the shore and pulled up the daggerboard. A moment later, the bow slid up onto the beach with a soft crunch. Falken hopped overboard, and tugged the craft farther up onto the sand, closer to the trees. Weaver grabbed a small basket of food and joined him, stretching. Falken saw him grin sheepishly.
“Well, we did it.”
“Yup. Which way?” Falken asked.
Weaver looked both ways down the beach. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s go that way,” Falken decided, pointing to their right.
“Why?”
“Because I’m right-handed,” Falken said.
Weaver laughed. The shore curved gently away from the landing site, and as they walked, their boat soon disappeared from view behind them, hidden by the trees. They walked in silence, leaving a trail of footprints in the sand as they went.
“If this shoreline keeps curving like this, the island can’t be very big,” Weaver said, after a time.
“Mm,” Falken said. “Looks to be kind of an oval, but only a couple miles across. Doesn’t look like there are any hills here. Same trees as the main island, though,” Falken noted.
“I haven’t heard any blue-balls,” Weaver said.
“They’re not nocturnal,” Falken told him. “Probably sleeping. And they usually live away from the water. We’ll have to look for them inland.”
The horizon grew brighter, and a dim reddish-purple glow began to spread across the ocean. The sun appeared a few minutes later, and its first rays fell on the beach ahead of them, illuminating a dried lump of wood on the sand that Falken first mistook for driftwood.
No. That’s a boat.
Weaver looked at him, disappointment writ plain on his face. “Bearnes’ boat?”
“Think so,” Falken agreed.
They picked up their pace and jogged up to it. The wood was sunbaked and cracked, gray-white with age. The ship’s mast still stood, and Falken saw what looked like a paddle lying across one end of the boat, along with a number of empty wooden boxes. The bottom of the ship’s hull was scored and gouged – it looked as if it had been dragged across jagged rocks, or scratched by some unseen force.
… or attacked by some animal, a fish maybe? Blue-balls wouldn’t have been able to make those marks, Falken thought. He looked up and saw Weaver’s crestfallen expression.
“He didn’t get off the planet, then,” the bookkeeper said simply.
Falken squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “We knew it was a long shot.”
Weaver nodded. “Yeah.”
“… and we still don’t know where he tried to go, or how far,” Falken said.
“Yeah.” Weaver circled the wreck, inspecting it with a frown. “He can’t have gotten too far on this thing. It’s not a very good design. It’s basically just a square raft with an oar for a rudder.”
“Bearnes and Tifkill probably didn’t take sailing lessons as kids, like you did.” Falken picked up one of the wooden crates and dumped it out, scattering white bones onto the sand. “These are blue-ball bones,” he said.
“You think they took live blue-balls from the colony before they set out?” Weaver asked.
“No,” Falken shook his head. “Salty tried to see if blue-balls could swim ages ago. Short version: they can’t, they hate the ocean. The moment you put them near the water, they freak the hell out. Bearnes and Tifkill would have taken dried meat, just like we did.”
“So where are the bones from?” Weaver asked.
“Blue-balls from this island, probably,” Falken guessed, picking one up and rolling it between his fingers. “I’m betting Bearnes caught them himself, when he got back from his explorations. He ran out of jerky and other food supplies, and had to improvise.”
“So where the hell is he?” Weaver asked, turning slowly in a circle. “He had his boat. He was only a day’s journey away. Why didn’t he just come back to the main island?” He stopped turning and stood still. “Oh.”
Falken looked up, following Weaver’s gaze. Farther up the beach, at the edge of the forest, he saw a heavily-decomposed corpse – barely more than a skeleton – hanging by its neck from a cord attached to a tree branch. Faded yellow inmate coveralls hung from the bones, and an upturned basket lay several feet away.
By unspoken agreement, Falken and Weaver walked over to Bearnes’ body. Weaver stopped several feet away. “He hung himself,” the bookkeeper said, unnecessarily. He turned to one side and dry-heaved. “Sorry. Just … never seen a body like this.”
Falken stopped next to the basket, and righted it with a foot. He bent over and examined its contents: a wood-handled knife, some spare rope, a few dried corn husks.
… and a note pad.
Falken picked it up. It was roughly made, wrapped in leather, which he assumed was dried blue-ball skin. He opened the book, and flipped through the first several pages. “Weaver.”
The smaller man straightened up and walked over, carefully avoiding looking at the remains of Bearnes. “What?”
“I think it’s a journal.” Falken turned a few more pages as Weaver leaned down, reading over his shoulder.
“Looks like it,” Weaver agreed.
A loose piece of paper fell out of the book, and Falken picked it up, unfolding it. On it they saw a crude map, showing the main island and this smaller one. From the smaller island, Bearnes had drawn no less than eight dotted lines, each leaving the island in a different direction. Each line was segmented by cross-hatches, marked Day 1, Day 2 … all the way to Day 14, at which point the lines looped back and returned to the small island. One of the lines even detoured around the main island before heading out deeper into the ocean, and then returning.
“Turn to the last page in book,” Weaver said.
Falken flipped to the back, but it was empty. He turned back through the pages until he found the final written entry, then cleared his throat. “Day 235: Passed the colony on the way back to the island this morning, made landfall tonight. Not really sure why I bothered to return. There are still some blue-balls on the island, enough for one more trip, perhaps, but … I’m exhausted. And I’ve exhausted all the options. Fourteen days each, sailing in eight directions, and no hint of land at any point. If there’s land out there, it’s well beyond my reach – I’d need a much larger ship, with food enough for a month or two. It’s over. But I’m not going back to the colony, to live like an animal in a cage until I die of old age. I’m going to escape from Oz the only way I know how.”
Falken closed the book. Weaver took the map from him, and spread it on the sand.
“Two weeks’ sailing … call it forty or fifty miles a day … Bearnes covered a lot of ground. I don’t think we can even come close. Not with two of us.”
“Well, Mayor Luo isn’t going to sign off on more supplies,” Falken said. “It was hard enough getting his approval for the stuff we did bring.”
“I know,” Weaver said. “The boat can’t float with much more cargo, anyway. But we’ve got four weeks’ worth of food, and I’d bet our boat is faster than his. That means we could sail for two weeks in one direction, and maybe make it farther than Bearnes did. He might have been closer to sighting land than he thought.”
Falken frowned. “Which direction?”
“I don’t know,” Weaver admitted, sighing.
“Well, we’re not going to sail from here,” Falken said. He folded Bearnes’ map and journa
l, and handed them to Weaver. “Might as well make our way back to the boat.”
“Yeah,” Weaver agreed. “Let’s cut across the interior.”
He took a last look at Bearnes’ boat, and then set off into the trees. Falken followed, noting the slump in his friend’s shoulders, and how his pace was noticeably slower than before.
“Are you okay?” Falken asked, after a time.
Weaver shook his head. “Trying to figure out what to do, that’s all.”
“You’re thinking about how far you could get if it was just you on the boat,” Falken guessed.
Weaver didn’t answer for a time. “I wouldn’t just leave you here. I could drop you off on the main island on the way.”
“Weaver, no.” Falken shook his head emphatically. “I can’t let you just go off on your own like that.”
“What if it’s the only way we can find a way off of the planet?” Weaver asked.
“What if you get obsessed with sailing farther and farther out, and die somewhere out there?” Falken shot back. “I’m not going to let you end up like Bearnes.”
“Maybe Bearnes had the right idea,” Weaver suggested, angrily.
Falken grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning the smaller man around to face him. He pointed a finger in Weaver’s face. “Snap out of it,” he warned the other man. “That attitude’s not going to get you back home to help your wife and kids.”
“What the hell do you know about it?” Weaver screamed, his face contorted with frustration. He swung a fist, wildly, at Falken’s head. Falken blocked it easily with a forearm. Weaver swung again and again, as tears streamed down his face. Falken let him flail, largely ignoring the punches as they landed on his arms and chest. Eventually, Weaver collapsed to his knees, sobbing.
Falken watched him for a moment, and then squatted down next to him. He put an arm around Weaver’s shoulders, holding his friend while he cried. “It’s okay.”
They stayed that way for a while, kneeling beneath the sun-dappled trees. Then Weaver took a deep breath and looked at Falken.
“You want to head back to the main island?” Weaver asked, sniffing.
Falken shook his head. “I guess so. I don’t think we’re gonna just sail our way off this planet.”
“No,” Weaver said. “Perhaps not. Sorry … sorry for hitting you.”
Falken laughed. “Just promise me you won’t try to throw a punch again. You suck at fighting.”
Weaver smiled, and wiped at his eyes. Then he frowned, looking past Falken, through the forest. “What the heck is that?”
Chapter 18
The device stood about four feet tall, planted firmly on a metal tripod in a small clearing among the trees. The case was weathered and dented in places, and roughly cylindrical, with a smaller cylinder and what appeared to be an antenna array mounted on top.
“Do you know what it is?” Falken asked.
Weaver shook his head. “No. No clue.” He touched the side of it tentatively. Nothing happened. “Hang on,” Weaver said. He peered more closely at it, then pulled on a panel, and the case opened, folding downward to reveal a small screen and a keyboard.
“Some kind of computer,” Falken noted.
Weaver tapped at the keyboard and the screen, but neither one responded to any inputs. “The battery must be dead.”
Falken poked the smaller cylinder atop the device experimentally – it moved at his touch, rotating with a metallic creak. Frowning, he grasped the top of the cylinder, and unfolded it into a curved dish, facing upward like a shallow bowl. The inside of the bowl was lined with shiny black glass.
“Is this part a communications dish?” Falken asked.
“Maybe?” Weaver agreed.
Then something inside the machine went CLICK.
Weaver’s eyes went wide. “I think you just turned it on,” he said.
The black dish spun slowly on its axis, then tilted slightly, until it was pointed directly at the sun. Weaver snapped his fingers. “It’s a solar panel! It’s charging up.”
They waited nervously, and then, nearly three minutes later, the computer screen lit up. A jumble of code appeared as the machine ran a systems diagnostic check, and then the home screen icons appeared. Weaver tapped on one that read Manual of Operation.
“It’s a sensor node,” he said, reading from the screen with mounting excitement. “This must have been put here by the initial explorers that discovered New Australia.”
“What does it do?” Falken asked.
“As I understand it, it’s kind of like a souped-up weather station,” Weaver told him. “The surveyors drop these all over a new planet, and let them record atmospheric conditions, geological activity, that kind of thing.”
“But where does it send all that data?” Falken asked.
Weaver turned to look at him. “Earth … maybe.”
Falken picked up the smaller man, wrapping him in a bear hug and whooping. “Easy!” Weaver gasped. “I don’t know for sure. We gotta read some more. Put me down, you big lunk.”
Falken obliged, setting Weaver back down. They flipped through the screens in the manual, skimming for the section on communications.
“Here it is,” Weaver said. He traced the words on the screen with one finger, and then his face fell. “‘This model is rated for intraplanet data uplink only. Interstellar communications are relayed through the command station, typically located on the primary exploration vessel.’ ”
“Shit,” Falken observed. “Should have known it was too small to send a signal all the way to Earth, I guess.”
Weaver didn’t answer – he was still reading the manual, flipping between sections.
“Shouldn’t they have picked this thing up before they left? Why leave it behind?” Falken asked.
“I don’t know,” Weaver replied, straightening up and sighing with resignation. “Maybe they forgot it. Or had to leave in a hurry. Could be any number of reasons.”
“Maybe they left it behind to gather more data,” Falken guessed.
“Yeah, that could be, too,” Weaver said. “It means they would have had to send another ship back here to collect the data, though.”
“… or leave a satellite in orbit?” Falken mused, thinking hard. He reached over and tapped on the screen, exiting out of the manual application. He searched the home screen for a second, and then found the communications app, opening it.
“What are you looking for?” Weaver asked.
“Hang on,” Falken said.
A prompt appeared on the screen: >>>Data connection to command station lost. Reestablish uplink?
Falken hit the Enter key. Atop the device, a directional antenna swiveled, searching. Falken looked back at the screen.
Come on … come on.
The antenna stopped moving, and then a new message popped up on the screen: >>>Error #32.
“What the hell is ‘error thirty-two’? “ Falken asked, exasperated. He reopened the Operations Manual, and skimmed through the troubleshooting section. “‘Error thirty-two: weak signal; terrain interference likely. Reposition sensor node and / or command station and attempt to reestablish uplink.’ What’s ‘terrain interference’? “
“Probably just a generic error that it gives whenever it can’t find the command ship,” Weaver guessed.
Falken looked above them, where branches had overgrown much of the clearing. “Or the trees are blocking the signal …?” He folded the keyboard up, carefully, and left the solar panel open. Then, with a grunt, he wrapped his arms around the device and lifted it off the ground, testing it for weight. “Gonna need your help,” he told Weaver.
Weaver found a handle on the far side of the device, and shifted the basket of food he had brought to his other hand. “Where do you want to move it?”
“The beach,” Falken said. “That should give it a clear shot at the sky, and any satellites that might still be up there.”
They carried it in short trips, stopping often to rest, until the ocean came
back into view through the trees. Looking out across the water, Falken could make out the dark strip of land that was the main island, miles away – farther down the beach, he saw their own boat, sail still flapping gently in the wind. They set the device down near the waterline, and then Falken reopened the computer panel, and initiated the communications uplink once again. He saw Weaver watching the device, biting his lip in nervous anticipation. The antenna on top of the device swiveled again, briefly, before settling into place. Then another message appeared on the screen.
>>>Error #32.
“Fuck,” Falken swore.
The bookkeeper frowned, and pointed at the communications antenna. “The antenna’s not pointing up,” he said.
“What?” Falken asked, confused.
Weaver turned to look behind him, following the direction of the antenna. “It isn’t pointing up at the sky at all. It keeps pointing …” he turned, and looked behind him, over the sea, “… back at the main island.”
“Why would it point at the main island?” Falken asked.
“Because that’s where it thinks the command station is,” Weaver said, slowly. His eyes met Falken’s.
“Maybe the command station is in the facility?” Falken suggested, after a moment. “Archos said none of their communication equipment was working anymore, but … I wouldn’t put it past him to lie.”
Weaver lined up behind the device, sighting along the antenna with one eye. “No,” he said, shaking his head slightly. “It’s pointing at the other end of the island. Near the colony, actually.”
“You think someone’s been hiding long-range communications equipment in the colony this whole time?” Falken asked.
“I mean … maybe?” Weaver said, shrugging. “We’re talking about a bunch of hardened criminals, right? But … I don’t know. Interstellar communications require a lot of power, I think. I think the command station would have to be big. You really need a nuclear power plant, or a ship’s engine, or something like that.”
“Well, no one’s hiding a spaceship in the colony,” Falken pointed out.
“No,” Weaver agreed, putting his hands on his hips. “It would stick out like a sore thumb, seeing as the entire island is just a big, flat patch of sand.”
