Bad Luck Charlie

by Scott Baron

  He stared at her silently while her own words hung in the air.

  “What?”

  “Say it again.”

  “The part about your remote-controlled toy?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She felt her ire rising, then it hit her. “Holy shit. Remote control. Damn, now that is clever.”

  A broad smile lit up his face.

  “How long for you to get something operational?” she asked.

  “I think I should be able to tweak a few of the control units from the rover and get them jury-rigged into something that should do the trick in an hour, maybe.”

  “Will it be able to navigate around the debris?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “What about the tighter spots?”

  “Taken into account. I’ll have to be a little creative, but using a few existing devices, I think I can get us something that will be able to access pretty much everywhere there’s a signal.”

  “Then you’d better get to it. People could be hurt. Trapped,” she said. “What can I do to help?”

  “Start loading the crew locator signal readouts into your handheld. I’m going to install a proximity upload unit so it can read the device directly without our needing to input everything by hand.”

  “On it.”

  The two of them worked in near silence for the better part of an hour as Charlie’s hands moved in a blur of activity. He was building something. Engineering. Problem-solving. This was where he excelled, and it seemed as if his state of shock and accompanying malaise were a thing of the past.

  The small rover on its own could access most places by means of its regular drive systems, but there would be obstacles, as Rika had noted. But Charlie had a plan. An audacious one, but one that should do the trick.

  A half dozen small mechanized soil sampling units lay in pieces as he fabricated a makeshift mounting system for the armature to ride on the rover’s back. Wires were jutting out all over the place, but ever the engineer, Charlie soon had them all tied off and tidy, not leaving much of anything to snag on random debris.

  The six mechanized scooping and sampling arms cannibalized from other machinery were soon mounted atop the small, wheeled device, their arms tucked tightly into the sides until they would need to be deployed. Charlie powered it on and held his breath.

  A series of beeps sounded out, then the readout on the remote in his hand flashed to life.

  “We’ve got it!” he shouted.

  With a feathering of the joystick, he maneuvered the breadbox-sized unit forward in a slow roll.

  “Good so far, Charlie. What about the arms?”

  “Should be good to go,” he replied, keying in an activation sequence on the remote.

  The six arms extended out slowly, their digging and sampling tips all slowly pressing down on the ground until the rover raised up in the air. It was two limbs short of arachnid, but Charlie’s improvised search-and-rescue drone was up and walking––albeit slowly––successfully.

  He steered it toward a storage container he had been digging through for supplies and managed to successfully maneuver it into a climb, mounting, crossing, and descending from the box relatively smoothly.

  “How’s the readout?” Rika asked.

  “Looking good,” he replied. “All of the crew location signals are showing on the remote, and I’ve overlaid each level’s floor plan into your handheld as well,” he said, showing her the display on the remote, which now showed not only a series of blinking dots, but a framework map of the ship’s compartments.

  “Nice work,” she said. “You’ve just saved us hours and hours of time.”

  “That was the plan,” he noted.

  “Yeah, it was. Now let’s get a move on and put that thing to work. We’ve got a crew to find.”

  They were both energized by the turn of events, and once they had crossed through the carnage wasteland of the adjacent pod, they began their rescue operation in earnest, hoping for the best, but preparing themselves for the worst.

  Chapter Ten

  Seven people.

  Of a crew of two dozen, seven had survived the crash, and of those, only two were unscathed.

  With his wits returning following the utter shock of the initial horror, Charlie’s medic training from his early days before he decided to pursue an engineering and sciences path finally kicked in.

  His skills, while out of practice, nevertheless proved quite helpful, and with the ample supplies from the salvaged first aid kits, he had managed to patch up the least serious of the little band of survivors’ injuries as best he could.

  Jamal had been pinned under a support beam when they found him. He was playing it tough, but Charlie knew the man had internal injuries. For all that muscle and power, without proper medical care, their head of security and disaster response wouldn’t last the week.

  Others had suffered broken limbs, which he set and splinted, as well as a variety of lacerations he sealed with medical adhesive when he could, and somewhat ugly sutures when he couldn’t. By the time he had patched up their hurt, he was exhausted, emotionally as well as physically.

  Still, he wished he had more patients to treat. Hurt was better than the alternative the others had suffered.

  The lowermost lab spaces had, as they had feared, been utterly obliterated in an instant, they verified. Judging by the angle of impact, the belly had been destroyed immediately.

  He hated to think what had happened to those people’s bodies. The ones they hadn’t found in the wreckage.

  At least they didn’t suffer, Charlie comforted himself. The others weren’t so lucky.

  “Charlie?”

  It was Winnie Yang. The bandage wrapped around her head bore a small blossom of red, and her arm was wrapped in a makeshift splint, but her injuries had been relatively minor, all things considered. Compared to the rest of her teammates, she was in great shape. Compared to them, she was alive.

  She had been up a few levels in her quarters rather than down below in the research lab when the crash occurred. She was always a little chilly, and running to get her lucky scarf had saved her life.

  Perhaps it really was a good luck charm, Charlie mused.

  Trapped on an alien world, time would tell if the survivors were actually the fortunate ones.

  “Yeah, what’s up, Winnie? Are you okay?” he replied.

  “I-I think so, Charlie,” she said, unable to take her eyes off of the row of bodies covered by tarps and whatever else they could find to keep them out of the elements until they could provide a proper burial. “I was thinking about the rats. Their containers were reinforced plastic, and boxes that size can withstand a lot of force without breaking. Do you think they might have survived?”

  Charlie shared a quick look with Rika. Winnie was in shock and on the verge.

  “Hey, you know what? They might have,” he replied, cautiously. “The labs were torn open, but if they fell out, sure, I suppose they could have survived.”

  “We should look for them, then.”

  “Uh, we simply don’t have the resources to do that, Winnie. People are hurt, and there’s limited food and water to burn through searching for them.”

  “But they’d be useful to test local plant life to see if it’s edible or not.”

  “Oh, you want them for experiments,” he said, humoring her.

  “What? Did you think I was getting sentimental about my rodents? They’re tools, Charlie, and we could use every tool we can salvage.”

  “Still, finding those tiny boxes in that trail of debris, well, it’s going to have to be a lower priority.”

  “But don’t you see the value they could provide?”

  “Sure I do,” he said, seeing where this was going. “I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow, I’ll head down the debris path from our crash and see what I can find, okay?”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “You got it. Now try and get some rest.”

  Charlie would be true to hi
s word and keep his eyes open for her little friends, but higher on the list of priorities was seeing if there were any traces of the thing she wanted to use them to test in the first place. Food and water.

  They had crashed in a barren desert area, the red rocks and dry dirt finding their way into every nook and cranny. Charlie just hoped there wasn’t any irritant in the soil.

  He and Rika set to work, forcing their weary bodies into action once more, gathering up shelter materials, creating a windbreak at the entrance to the section of the crippled ship they had determined to be safe enough to serve as housing for the night. They had no idea exactly how cold it would get that night in the desert-like environment, but they took no chances, arranging their salvaged sleeping bags and other warmth-saving layers close by should they need them.

  Charlie gathered whatever crude kindling they had and set to stacking them to form a basic blaze to help warm the group.

  “No fire,” Jamal said, fighting to keep the pain from showing on his face. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

  “You actually think there’s aliens?” Charlie asked.

  “I have no idea, Charlie. What I do know is it is always better to assume the worst, even when you’re hoping for the best. Keeps you from unpleasant surprises.”

  “And disappointment,” Rika added.

  “That sounds more like dating advice than a survival tip,” Jamal said with a pained grin.

  “Aren’t they one and the same?” she replied.

  “Ow. Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Sorry, Jamal.”

  “It’s all good,” he said, forcing the grimace from his face.

  Charlie looked at the huddled survivors. The corpses wouldn’t be suffering from the cold, but the rest of their motley group very well might.

  “Okay, then, no fire. We started to gather up whatever rations and water were readily accessible. But there wasn’t much. Saving crew was the priority.”

  “Appreciated.”

  “I’ll grab what we have and hand them out. We’ll eat while there’s still light, then I’ll make a trip into the powered sections to find what more we can salvage.”

  He handed each of the survivors a little something to eat from their sparse supplies, then hurried off, ready to once again search through the wreckage.

  “Let me help,” Rika offered.

  “Thanks. I’m glad at least one body besides mine is intact.”

  “You really know how to flatter a girl, Charlie.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “I know, I’m just fuckin’ with ya. It’s been a long day, you know.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Quietly, the two dug through the wreckage of the once-great ship for whatever additional food they could salvage. Laden with their meager booty, they soon returned to the others.

  The suns were getting lower in the blue sky, the light spectrum shifting to a more normal, Earth-like shade as the red star dipped beneath the horizon, leaving them awash in the yellow light of the remaining sun. The survivors ate in silence until that sun, too, slid lower and lower, leaving them in darkness.

  The wounded huddled together, sharing warmth. Charlie felt an arm wrap across his chest as the welcome heat of Rika played big spoon to his little one. He was unconscious in minutes.

  The survivors all slept soundly that night, despite their situation. The stress and exhaustion of the ordeal had drained them completely. The next day, however, there would be little time for rest. It would be the beginning of the next stage of their scenario.

  The one where they figured out how to survive.

  Chapter Eleven

  There had been no sign of vegetation of any sort as far as the eye could see, which was discouraging, to say the least. But as Charlie began the slow walk backtracking the debris trail strewn along the rut the ship had carved into the desert soil, he noticed one interesting detail.

  The soil at the bottom of the trench was damp.

  Damp means liquid water, he noted with a pleased grin. It looked like they might not die so quickly after all.

  As for other resources, however, they might not be so fortunate. There was no sign of plant or animal life whatsoever, and the barren landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. There were occasional formations of rocks, long ago forced into unusual angles by the geological shifts far beneath the planet’s crust, though some seemed almost unnaturally positioned, as if an even greater force had abruptly thrown them into place.

  Those might provide decent shelter, Charlie hoped as he strayed from his path to examine the nearest pile.

  Upon closer inspection, the rocks seemed almost as if they’d once been part of a building, though in that desert wasteland, that was simply impossible. Nevertheless, the lines of their bulk were clean more often than not, a few pieces even fitting together where cracks looked very much like seams.

  Whatever their origin, some shady respite could be provided by their mass if need be, though the wrecked ship was serving that purpose well enough for the time being.

  “Okay, chalk up one more potential resource, should we need it,” he noted, then trudged back to the deep rut carved by their ship.

  Much of the debris was either shredded, shattered, or ground to useless bits, the sheer mass of the craft effectively pulverizing all that was unfortunate enough to be beneath it as it slid to a stop. Some debris, however, had been thrown free, and Charlie was thrilled to find several snack bars someone had tucked away in their workspace, along with vacuum-sealed pouches of lab gear.

  It wasn’t high-tech equipment, but the plastic sheeting used to cordon off experiment areas was even more valuable than other equipment with what he had in mind.

  “Now I just need some containers,” he muttered, digging through a fairly dense cluster of debris. “That and some IV tubing from a med kit should work,” he said, pulling up a piece of hull covering what seemed to be a sizable pile of wreckage.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, falling back on his ass as he scrambled backward. His stomach heaved, but having nothing to discharge but a lone and long-digested nutrient bar, he vomited no more than a thin stream of bile.

  A leg was in that pile. A leg, and nothing more. The rest of the body was nowhere to be seen.

  Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Charlie pulled himself together and slowly climbed back to his feet, his eyes locked on the bright white bone where the leg had been torn free, mid-femur. It was a smaller limb. Possibly Kim, or maybe Inez.

  “Don’t think about that. This is survival 101. Just scavenge and keep moving,” he told himself, the sound of his own voice mildly comforting in the silence of the barren landscape. “Don’t let anything keep you from the three basics. Food. Water. Shelter.”

  It was easy enough to tell himself that, but he feared his dreams would now be prominently featuring the detached limbs of his former friends.

  Charlie dug through the remaining debris in the area, careful to be sure there were no other body parts waiting to surprise him. Luck was on his side, and by the time he turned to head back to the others, no other limbs had presented themselves.

  He walked past the leg, arms full of plastic sheeting, tubing, and a few dented drawers salvaged from a ruined shelving unit, but turned and looked back at the remains and paused.

  I can’t just leave it like that. Charlie dropped his haul to the ground and doubled back.

  Pulling free a nearby fluttering scrap of insulation and using it to gather up the leg, he then dug a small trench in the red soil, in which he placed the remains. Charlie quickly covered them with a small mound.

  He didn’t bother making a marker. The whole debris-scattered area was a graveyard, of sorts.

  “I wish I knew who you were so I could say something about you. Some last words, or rites, or whatever. Hell, I don’t even know if you were religious.” He shuddered, talking to a dead woman. “Anyway, I hope your end was a quick one and you felt no pain.” He stared at the sm
all mound of damp, disturbed soil a long while. “Okay, then. That’s it, I guess. Rest in peace.”

  Charlie bent and gathered the collected materials up in his arms once more and began trekking back toward the others. He really hadn’t walked very far, since he had set off just after dawn, when the red sun had peeked over the horizon, but the yellow one had now joined its twin, their combined rays rapidly heating the air.

  “Did you have any luck finding my rats?” Winnie asked as Charlie trudged back into their makeshift camp.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. After this long, they probably died of exposure anyway.”

  “I really am sorry, Winnie.”

  “It happens.”

  “How about finding any food or water?” Rika asked.

  “A few nutrient bars is all. I’ll look for more next time I'm out.”

  “I meant indigenous resources. Was there anything we might be able to use?”

  “Not really. There’s no sign of vegetation or animal life anywhere. But I did find this,” he said, dumping his haul on the ground.

  “Plastic sheeting, some tubes, a few busted drawers? Charlie, what are we supposed to do with all this junk? We need food. And even more importantly, we need water.”

  “I know. That’s where this all comes in handy.” He opened a roll of clear plastic and laid it out beside a length of tubing and a metal drawer. “There’s moisture not too far down in the soil. I saw it in the bottom of the trench the ship carved when it crashed.”

  “That doesn’t help us. We can’t suck water from dirt.”

  “No, but with these two suns, I bet we’ll have some success with a solar still.”

  “A what?”

  “A solar still,” Charlie repeated. “Something my grandpa taught me when he took me camping as a kid. He said if I was ever stranded somewhere, I should know how to make water out of nothing. I thought he was wasting my time back then. I mean, everyone knew you just filled your bottles before you went camping. But he was old-school. Loved that living-off-the-land thing.”