by Scott Baron
“I’m over––I don’t know where I am.”
Charlie vaulted a mangled section of control console to where her voice had emanated. He saw a foot sticking out from beneath an impossibly jumbled mass of electronics, all torn free and deposited against the bulkhead, G-force the likely culprit.
“Hang on, I’m coming. Are you injured? Can you feel your arms and legs?”
“I-I’m not totally sure, Charlie. I can’t see.”
“You’re stuck under a bunch of––” He didn’t want to say wreckage. “Look, just breathe slow and easy. I’ll get you out of there, but I need to move slowly so nothing shifts and lands on you. Do you understand?”
“Yeah. I’ll just lay here, then,” she said with a pained little laugh. “Not like I was going anywhere anyway.”
He worked as fast as he safely could, tracing back bent pieces of superstructure to ensure moving them wouldn’t cause the whole mess to shift and collapse. After nearly a half hour, he was looking his friend in the eye. She was banged up, but intact.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“So, give me about five more minutes, then you should be able to slide out.”
“Don’t rush on my account.”
He continued his work, untangling wires, moving chunks of metal and composite until at long last, Rika Gaspari was free.
She sat up slowly, shook the dust from her hair, and surveyed the scene.
“We are so fucked,” she said with a sigh. “Where’s the captain?”
Charlie didn’t say anything. He simply pointed.
“Oh,” she said, softly.
A hot breeze coursed through the holes in the ship, whipping up little dust swirls within the confined space. It was reddish, Charlie noted. They could almost be on Mars.
Almost.
“We’re not in our own solar system anymore, are we?” he said, already knowing the answer.
“You saw the same thing I did,” Rika replied, “and you know the science as well, if not better, than I do. That was an Einstein-Rosen bridge. A wormhole. Jesus, we actually got sucked down a wormhole, Charlie.”
“I know. And did you see the suns?”
“Yeah. Two of them, one red, one yellow. Binary stars.”
“Judging by the orange light in this place, I’d say that’s a fair assessment,” he confirmed. “I don’t know about radiation,” he said. “The readings on my exposure band are in the safe range, but I think there may be stuff we've never encountered before. Wavelengths we didn’t ever plan on testing for. But I suppose that’s the least of our concerns at the moment.”
“What about the others?” she said, rising to her feet. “Have you made contact with any of them?”
“No. You’re the first, but judging by what I can see of the way the ship came in, I think we lost most of the lower lab spaces on impact.”
Rika looked outside and realized he was right. The ship was sitting on its belly, and far too close to the ground for its normal mass.
“We need to assess the damage. See what we can repair. If Cargo Bay One is intact, then the mech might be all right. We could use it to dig us out. Once we––”
“Rika, the ship’s a loss. We’re stuck here,” he said, sinking to the floor.
Rika took a deep breath and let the reality of the situation set in, then straightened her back and set her mind to dealing with their utterly novel circumstances. This was one emergency her training hadn’t covered.
“Fine,” she said, more to herself than Charlie. “Then our only objective now is survival on this alien world. The sooner we accept that, the better off we’ll be.”
“But they’ll look for us, right?” he asked, holding on to a tiny thread of hope.
“How, Charlie? You know this was a rushed trial. And even if they could get another ship built and launched, we have no idea how we even got here. We weren’t even supposed to do anything more than a simple orbital test. And if they did manage to locate us, it would still be months, if not years, before a ship was ready, even at breakneck speed.”
“Shit.”
“Hey, but at least the air is breathable, so there’s that going for us. Food, water, and shelter are the next steps, once we search for other survivors.”
“You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking,” he said glumly.
“You were thinking you wanted to go home,” Rika said, fixing him with a reassuring look. “And I do too, but since that’s not an option, we’re in improvise mode. Now come on. We’ve got to pull it together and make the best of the situation. Let’s get moving and see if anyone else made it. I don’t have any idea how long we have until nightfall, or how long the night even is on this planet, and we need to do this in daylight if we can. Power is spotty, and the lights may not hold.”
“I’ll grab the portables,” Charlie said, finally getting his head in the game.
“Good. I’ll grab the emergency tool kit and we’ll get started.”
A few minutes later, the duo began the arduous task of finding survivors, as well as those not so fortunate.
Chapter Eight
“Watch the wall on the right,” Rika called back over her shoulder as they slid into the next compartment. “See that conduit?”
“Yeah,” Charlie replied. “Power routing to sub-section twelve.”
“Exactly. Best not touch it.”
Charlie had been taking note of active and dead systems as they moved through the craft. He helped design and build the ship, and on an alien world in a distant solar system, at least this was something he had a modicum of control over.
“That system is powered down, Rika. It’s tied to the scan array we climbed over on the way out of the command module. No juice to any of it. Something knocked that whole section of the ship out, including the backups.”
She eyed the dangling conduit. “Still, steer clear anyway, just in case.”
The pair made their way through the compartment, stepping over the equipment and supplies, all of it torn free and scattered like debris from an over-zealous birthday kid’s piñata, smashed to bits during the crash. Fortunately, there were no flight stations in that room.
If there had been, the occupants would have been torn to shreds.
“The hull’s caved in up ahead. We should cross to the other side and see about accessing the lower levels,” Rika said, shining her powerful flashlight down the pitch-black corridor leading away from the crumpled section of the ship.
Charlie nodded his agreement and followed her lead. Chivalry be damned, Rika was taking charge and settling in to her unexpected promotion as best she could. With the captain dead, the weight of the mission, and the welfare of its crew, was now squarely on her shoulders.
Her light danced along the rippled walls, the force of the impact having caused even the durable metal sheeting to contort, despite the robust core framework of the craft. Stepping through an airlock door stuck two-thirds open, Rika surveyed the storage units still intact and made a beeline for one of them.
She quickly forced the powered-down lock open with a piece of metal.
“What’re you doing?” Charlie asked.
“We need to collect supplies as we go. Basics only at this point. Food, hydration packs, medical supplies,” she said, stuffing a small first aid kit into a salvaged bag, along with some emergency ration bars that survived the impact. Several had been crushed and torn open, but she swept them into the bag as well.
“Hey, those are open.”
“I know. No time to be finicky about food, Charlie. A little dirt won’t kill you. At least, I hope it won’t. In any case, I think that’ll be the least of our worries. Now keep your eyes open and grab anything remotely edible. I’m going to pop up ahead into the next section and see if the access ladder to the next deck is intact. Hopefully the others are just trapped down there, but I think you may have been right about the lowest levels.”
Charlie swallowed hard. Those people would have been torn to
shreds when the belly of the ship ripped apart during their violent landing.
“Of course. Yeah,” he managed. “I’ll, uh...”
Rika grabbed him by the shoulders. “Take a deep breath. We’ll get through this. I need you to focus now, okay? Food. Water. Med supplies. Keep looking. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
She pressed the slowly flashing light next to the heavy door at the far end of the room and waited. The mechanism strained and squealed, but there was still power to the unit, and it finally ground open.
“Door systems are on a different circuit, broken down by level and compartment cluster,” Charlie noted. “I may be able to cross-patch and get us some lights.”
Rika was glad to see her friend start to break free from the shock that had slowly taken hold as the reality of their situation sank in. He was nowhere near one hundred percent, but the old Charlie––the brilliant engineer––was slowly coming back.
“Great. See what you can do,” she said, then stepped through the doorway into the darkness.
Charlie took a deep breath and did his best to drive the creeping fear from his mind. Then he forced his hands to get to work, systematically digging through every single storage space that would hold useful materials. Even the damaged and torn Mylar pouches containing various edible materials went into his bag.
Rika was right. The ship originally had ample supplies, but after the crash, how much of that cache had survived was anyone’s guess.
“Ow! Sonofabitch!”
“You okay in there?” Rika called into the narrow space between the bulkhead and the interior engineering pod.
“Yeah,” Charlie said, rubbing his head and checking his fingers for blood. Clean. “I just banged my head again.”
“Well, be careful. I don’t want to have to go crawling in there to pull you out.”
Charlie hadn’t so much volunteered to squeeze into the tight confines of the service space as had no choice. He was the ship’s engineer, and as brilliant as Rika may have been, this was his area of expertise. She’d fly the ship, and he would keep it running.
The reactor was undamaged, it seemed, but while it was in emergency standby mode, streaming out just a trickle of electricity to keep systems active, the battery backups and many links between systems were physically severed from the areas they were supposed to service.
As a result, they had been stumbling around in the dark for hours, manually forcing open the doors they were able when the power to those units had been cut. Unfortunately, this was time-consuming and tedious, not to mention a massive drain on their energy now that the initial surge of adrenaline had worn off.
The ship had been designed to have sections seal themselves and remain autonomous from the rest of the craft in the event of a depressurization. In such circumstances, the conduits and miles of wires running through the craft would have remained intact, the only issue being that of the lack of pressure.
A crash landing, however, had never even been considered during the spitball sessions when they troubleshot potential emergencies and how to design redundant systems to handle them. For all of their abundant caution, this was something they were not prepared for.
Much as he hated the thought, it was actually Charlie’s idea that he could try to run a temporary bypass of whichever systems were still powered up to divert precious electricity to select segments of the ship one at a time. It was insanely labor-intensive, with Charlie constantly climbing back and forth through the ship.
First he would power up one section with a lengthy bypass, often involving great lengths of salvaged wire to trickle the charge to the correct circuits if their native boards were fried, then on to the next. It was tedious, but he managed.
Over and over, he managed.
Despite his efforts, the main lights were still out in much of the ship, and most of the emergency lighting systems had also overloaded during their tumble through the wormhole and subsequent impact with the alien world. Charlie had managed to find a few workarounds, though, restoring a fraction of the lights in several previously black compartments.
Lighting was good. What it revealed, however, was not.
“That’s Keisha,” Rika said, identifying their crewmate from the engagement ring on the hand that hadn’t been crushed by equipment wrenched free in the crash.
“We should––”
“We’ll come back for her,” Rika said, moving on to the next compartment. “There’s nothing to do for her, but there may be others we can still help.”
She was right, of course.
“Hang on. If I can get the crew’s onboard locators working, we can at least know where to look,” Charlie said, hurrying back to a previously scavenged compartment. “Wireless comms are totally shot. That system was in the lower section of the ship. But the real-time locator will at least tell us where everyone is on board.”
“Just no way to talk to them and no way to know if they’re alive.”
“Nope. That part we’ll have to do the old-fashioned way,” he said. “But at least we’ll have a roadmap where to look. Otherwise, with all these systems down and power so spotty––not to mention all of the unstable sections that might just collapse on us––it could take us days to find them.”
Rika thought on it a moment, then gave a quick nod. “You’re right. Efficiency over raw speed. Let’s implement that plan immediately.”
“You’re the captain,” he replied, and began the backtrack to the nearest terminal.
He hadn’t been the one to design that particular system, so he only hoped his idea would work in practice as well as in theory. Fifteen minutes later, they were on the hunt, map of locator signals in hand. They’d find something. The only question remaining was what.
Chapter Nine
Several dead bodies and a pair of rather banged-up survivors dragged to the surface later, Rika and Charlie were finding themselves facing growing frustration as they delved further into the ruined interior.
Rika attempted to thread a portable camera on a length of pipe into the dark and distant chambers, but it simply wouldn’t reach.
“We need a better plan,” she noted. “We can’t just go cutting through stuff to get into an area that may or may not contain survivors. We’ll diminish the structural stability of this thing, and it's already beat to hell and shaky as it is.”
“Agreed. If we start cutting, there’s a very real possibility we may unintentionally destabilize something that is actually holding other somethings in place.”
“You have quite a way with words, Charlie,” Rika said with a grim little chuckle. “But the point is well taken.”
She took a small comms unit from her pocket and keyed it on.
“Anyone read me? Anyone at all?”
Silence.
“I told you, Rika, the comms system was routed through the belly of the ship, and that got crushed, then dragged and scattered in a bazillion pieces. On their own, our comms units aren’t even as useful as the EVA suit walkie talkies. At least those operate on their own frequency with stand-alone transmitters and receivers.”
“Which doesn’t help us, since no one on board would have any reason to carry one of those things around with them.”
“Obviously,” he replied.
“I wonder if I might be able to reach the mech. If I can get it fired up, I could use its mining attachments to pull free the sections we can’t get clear access to from the inside.”
“But it’ll take forever to even reach the thing. You saw the damage,” Charlie pointed out.
An idea flashed through his mind. That’s kinda crazy, but what if––?
“Charlie, you okay? You got really quiet on me all of a sudden.”
He turned and met her with an excited gaze.
“The mech. I think I have an idea that might just make this search-and-rescue operation a whole lot easier. But it’s going to require us passing through the mid-level starboard labs.”
Rika blanched slightly. They had
already assessed that area. The three crew members assigned that station had been securely strapped in upon impact. That didn’t prevent the lone oxygen cylinder whose anchors had torn free during the crash from pinballing around the room. The devastation was quite horrific.
“Is there another way?” she asked.
“Not if we want to get this done in time. The parts I need are easiest accessed through that pod. Believe me, if there were another way––”
“Forget it. Let’s just get this over with,” Rika said, putting on her captain’s face and steeling her nerves. “This is going to suck.”
About that, she was certainly right.
They had managed to avoid most of the blood and bits of their friends splattered across the room, with the exception of the red smear on Charlie’s pant leg from where he bumped into a sticky-slick table.
“Oh, God,” he said as he desperately tried to rub the blood from his clothes with a clean piece of absorbent lab material salvaged from a bin.
“Forget about it, Charlie. We haven’t got the time. You can deal with that later.”
“Yes, of course. You’re right,” he said, shaken. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
Avoiding any further encounters with the remains of his crewmates, Charlie managed to lead them into the research lab’s storage bay. There were no flight chairs in that pod, so no crew had been present during the crash. Ironically, the room full of dangerous equipment and tools had come through largely undamaged, its contents remaining firmly stowed.
Had anyone been in that area, they would likely have fared better than the rest of the crew.
“Here it is,” Charlie said, pulling a small, wheeled rover from its storage bin.
Rika was nonplussed.
“Uh, that’s not exactly my mech, Charlie.”
He looked at the small survey rover in his hands.
“What? No, of course not.”
“You said my mech. You said you had an idea.”
“I do. Just not using your mech. It was the inspiration, is all.”
Rika sat on the metal floor, exhausted and annoyed. “Seriously, Charlie? We just walked through that,” she said, gesturing to the other room, “and all you have is this little remote-controlled dune buggy toy?”
