by Scott Baron
Two hours had passed when Charlie suggested a break from the heat of the sun. Rika was more than glad to take him up on the suggestion, and in short order, he rigged a temporary sun shade for them from bits of metal and plastic gathered from the debris field. Seated comfortably in the shade, they surveyed what they’d managed to dig up so far. It wasn’t much.
“So, we’ve got a roll of duct tape, four intact containers we can use for water storage, a few smaller canteen-sized ones, and a few drained but seemingly undamaged battery packs, though we’ll have to see if we can find a way to get them charged on a trickle feed once we get back to the ship.”
“Don’t forget the food,” Rika said.
“Of course. And one slightly worse-for-wear case of freeze-dried beef stroganoff,” Charlie added. “That’s really gonna suck without enough water to properly reconstitute it.”
“And if you eat it dry, it’ll absorb the moisture in your gut and leave you all plugged up. A food cork, of sorts,” Rika joked.
“That is downright nasty, Rika.”
“But true.”
“Well, yeah. True, but still, nasty.”
The corners of her eyes crinkled slightly, glad for the moment of levity breaking up the stress of their otherwise oppressively difficult situation. Charlie dug through a few plastic containers holding sealed pouches with a variety of seeds in them. They had once been carefully cataloged and organized, but after the crash, they were a jumble of tiny, vacuum-sealed pouches that grew Lord knew what.
“What do you think? These look like apple seeds to you?” Charlie asked, holding up a pouch to the light.
“Could be,” Rika said, scoping out the seeds.
“Great. All we need now is about three years and a few hundred gallons of water and we’ll be rolling in apples.”
“If we can find any of the hydroponics equipment, we could maybe try to set up a small greenhouse. Use more of your solar stills to generate enough water to maybe grow something.”
“It’s a great idea, but you know those were stored in the ship’s belly, right along with the rest of the experiment equipment for our little voyage. And all of that is strewn over a few miles of desert, so I pretty seriously doubt we’re going to find any of it intact enough to use.”
Rika’s shoulders slumped slightly.
“Hey, but it was a really good idea,” Charlie quickly added. “I mean, who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky, right? Never say never.”
She smiled. “I appreciate the pep talk. Or the attempt at one, anyway. But you’re right, we’re pretty well screwed on the food-growing front. Though maybe if we can somehow get the scanning arrays up we’ll be able to see if there’s anything resembling foliage beyond the line of sight out here.”
“Well, the reactor core is intact, so given enough time to scrap together parts, I think I should be able to power up the unit––that is, if it wasn’t too badly damaged in the crash. But we can make fixing it a priority. Not like we have any other pressing obligations, right? And the plasma cutter seemed to be undamaged, so once I rig a power source for it, we should also be able to use it on thicker pieces so we can build some proper shelter. No telling how long the weather on this planet will stay favorable.”
“Good point. For all we know it could get much colder, or hotter for that matter. I suppose worst-case scenario, we use the EVA suits. We’ve got plenty of ‘em stored in the ship, and almost all of them are intact, so those can be an emergency source of insulation if the weather starts to really shift on us.”
“You think we’ll really live long enough to see that, though?” Charlie asked, fixing her with a sad look.
“You know what? I do. And so should you. We need to keep our spirits up. If not just for us, then for the others. It’s going to be a while before they’re healed up enough to help us, so for now, as long as we’re acting as nursemaids, we need to set the tone.”
Charlie digested her words, the sage advice well-taken despite their desperate situation.
“You’re right, Rika. Sorry I was being a downer.”
“No, you’ve got every reason to be down, but right now, we simply can’t afford it.”
She climbed up to her feet and brushed the sandy red soil from her hands. “Come on, let’s get back to it. I thought I saw something in the distance. We should check it out.”
With that, they folded up their sun shade, loaded it onto the sled with the other salvage, and started walking beneath the glaring gaze of the world’s twin suns.
Chapter Seventeen
The larger rocky formations dotting the landscape were far more distant than it had seemed when Charlie and Rika set out on foot to get a better look at what appeared to be the nearest one.
The nearest turned out to be almost two miles away, and the others were easily several times that distance.
“You okay?” he asked, offering a water container to his companion.
“I’m good,” Rika replied.
“You should hydrate. It’s getting warmer.”
“We need to conserve our water.”
“What we need is for us to not pass out from dehydration. The others are resting. We’re exerting ourselves. Besides, if we find more plastic sheeting, I can put together a few more solar stills when we get back.”
Reluctantly, she took the container.
“Atta girl.”
They walked in silence for a while, saving their energy as much as they were deep in thought. There were mountains far off in the distance. From the look of them––at least what they could see from so far away––they spanned across the entire horizon three hundred sixty degrees. It looked as if they almost curved all the way around them.
Of course, it would have been easy to survey the area from space and map the exact terrain, but they had crashed blind. All they knew of the terrain was what was in front of them.
“Charlie? Does that look like something moving?” Rika asked, pointing to an area fifty meters from the rapidly nearing pile of rocks.
It did kind of look like something was moving. Blowing in the wind.
“Debris, maybe?”
“You think?”
“Something light could have blown this far when it was windy.”
“We’ll find out soon enough.”
Soon enough turned out to be nearly fifteen minutes of slow walking, the sled dragging behind them with the soft sound of soil grinding along its bottom.
“Holy shit. That’s a plant!” Charlie exclaimed as they grew closer.
They picked up their pace, rushing to the discovery. A small cluster of thin, tan shoots were jutting up from the ground, waving in the gentle breeze.
“Vegetation, Charlie! Do you know what this means? There’s got to be water close by.”
“That, or they live off of the sparse moisture the way we’ve been doing.”
Rika knelt in the dirt. “Give me something to dig with.”
He handed her the knife they’d salvaged from Jamal’s locker.
“Thanks,” she said, carefully removing soil from the plant, digging deeper and deeper as she explored, searching for water. What she found was not what she expected, but something that had the potential to drastically alter their odds of survival just the same.
“Is that a potato?” Charlie asked as she pulled a small tuber from the ground.
“It looks sort of like one, doesn’t it?” She brushed the dirt free and sniffed the beige lump. “You think it’s safe?”
“No idea,” Charlie replied. “Here, let me try something.”
He took the potato-looking plant and wiped an area clean, then made a small cut in it. A milky sap began to form at the site of the incision, which he dripped on a clean spot of his exposed forearm
“What are you doing?”
“Testing to see if it’s poison or not.”
“By rubbing it on yourself?”
“It’s like the old allergy tests. The inner arm is a very sensitive area, so if there’s going to be any
reaction, that’s the most likely place a test would show it."
Rika stared at his arm expectantly. “So, um, how long, exactly, until we know if it’s going to make your arm fall off?”
“I can’t say for sure, but twenty minutes should suffice, I’d think.”
“Okay, let’s start the clock.” She took the tuber back from him and studied it, turning it over and over in her hands. “It looks so normal. So Earth-like. And yet, here we are, Lord knows how far from home, and the first ever proof of alien life is a potato.” She fixed it with a fierce gaze. “Take me to your leader!” she demanded of the tuber.
Charlie burst out laughing, and Rika, too, soon found herself caught up in his mirthful delight.
“Oh man, thanks for that,” he said a minute later, wiping his tearing eyes. “I really needed a good laugh.” He held up the plant by its stalk. “I am Charlie Gault, man of Earth. If you’re not toxic and good eating, how about taking us meet your friends, if not your leader? Hello? Anyone?”
“You’re ridiculous, Charlie.”
“My most endearing trait, and it takes one to know one,” he said, his spirits restored. “Well, since we have to wait a bit to see if my arm falls off, let’s keep looking. This little guy is a super positive sign. Now let’s just hope there’s more vegetation growing around here, and who knows? Maybe we’ll even get lucky and find some water.”
“Let’s leave the sled here. Canteens only. We’ll be coming this way on the way back, and there’s no sense dragging that extra weight along. The rocks are only about a quarter mile away.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Charlie said, dropping the straps to the sled on the ground. “Come on, then. Let’s go see if this walk will bear any more pleasant surprises.”
They covered the potato-thing and left it on the sled, then set a course for the jumble of rocks nearby. As they approached, they found the ground was much more uneven than the rest of the area.
“I’m glad we left the sled,” Charlie said. “Dragging it across this would’ve sucked.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it? This doesn’t look like normal geologic activity to me. What do you think?”
“You’re right. It feels odd. Like, things were picked up and smashed into the ground, then yanked up again. But that’s impossible. Look at the size of some of these stones.”
Rika ran her hand over the first one they came to. “I don’t know. Feel this. It’s so smooth. Geometric. How could it be natural?”
“I don’t know, but no one would build in a wasteland like this,” he said, gesturing at the stones, most of them buried in sand and debris.
“Maybe, but couldn’t it have been a long time ago?”
A flashing light caught his eye in the distance. A shimmer.
That’s gotta be a mirage, he reasoned.
“Charlie? Earth to Charlie.”
Rika followed his gaze.
“Water!” she shouted, bolting for the apparition.
“Rika, wait. It’s probably just the heat waves making it look like––”
She dove to the ground, splashing the water over her face.
“Or, maybe it actually is water,” he said, hustling over to join her. There was an odd shimmer to the water. Something more than just the dual suns’ reflections. “Don’t drink any until I test it. We don’t know if it’s safe.”
Rika smiled, rivulets running down her hair, the dust washed from her face.
Huh. Must’ve been mostly the red dust, Charlie mused, noting her healthy skin. Looked like she was pretty sunburned earlier.
He turned his attention to the small pool. It was perhaps three feet across and only a few inches deep. How it hadn’t merely evaporated in the arid environment was a mystery.
I wonder.
Charlie took the medical scanner from the small pouch on his hip. In their haste to depart after burying Jamal, he had forgotten to leave it behind at their camp. That oversight might now bear unexpected fruit.
“What are you doing, Charlie?” Rika asked as she dipped her compact materials analyzer into the pool.
“I’m changing the settings to treat the soil as flesh, and this water as blood.”
“Can you even do that?”
“Well, not really, but sort of. I just have an idea, but I need something that can see through the ground to do it. We don’t have any geological survey equipment, so I’m making do with what we’ve got.”
A green light sprang to life on Rika’s analyzer, and the display churned out a stream of information.
“It’s water, and aside from a somewhat high mineral content, it’s perfectly safe.” With great relish, she leaned down and took a big gulp from the pool. “Oh my God, that’s what I’m talking about!”
“So nothing unusual?”
“No. Why?”
Charlie looked again at the odd shimmer to the water. “Nothing. Never mind.”
Rika filled their containers until the pool was nearly entirely empty. “Shame, we could have used more than this, but it’ll have to suffice,” she said, swirling the filled containers.
While she carefully collected as much as their vessels would carry, Charlie had been fine-tuning the med scanner. The readings were all over the place, as if the machine was intentionally keeping him from dialing in to the settings he desired. But Charlie was persistent. A brief flicker lit his screen, then vanished.
“Gotcha!”
He knew he was close, and with a few minute adjustments, he found himself with an incredibly faint, but tangible, reading.
“What’ve you got, Charlie?” Rika asked.
Her skin really does look better, he noted.
“I think this is dialed in,” he replied, bending over and sticking his left hand in the remains of the pool of water.
A faint tingle could be felt, then was gone as fast as it had come. He took his hand out and looked at it compared to his other.
The sunburn is gone. It wasn’t just the dirt washing off. This water made the burn fade almost immediately.
“You okay, Charlie?”
“Yeah,” he said, more than a little distracted. The implications were staggering. “I finally got this working, I think.”
“So what does it do, exactly?”
“It’s like a high-tech dowsing rod. Only this one is set to penetrate the soil to seek out water as if it were flowing through a vein.” The pool was still nearly empty. Based on his readings, it would take weeks, if not months for it to slowly fill again.
“What are you saying, Charlie?”
“I’m saying, there’s a teeny, tiny leaching flow of water deep under the surface. You’d never find it if you didn’t know where to look. But thanks to blind luck, we did. And there’s more water somewhere around here, Rika, and this baby’s going to take us to it.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Help me dig.”
Charlie had walked like a drunk on a beach, following the beeps and chirps of a metal detector in his quest for shiny, only he held a modified med scanner, and Charlie was stone sober.
After following a weaving path through tumbled rocks the size of small cars––losing the signal a few times along the way––they had arrived at an impassable mound of shattered stone, the base of which was deeply buried under windswept sands.
“It says it’s here, Rika. Look at the readings! There’s water in here,” he said, his hands digging deep into the soil. His left hand was quickly dirty again, but there was no doubt, the waters had somehow healed his sunburn. He found himself wondering what else they could do.
We might even be able to help the others.
“Less daydreaming, more digging,” Rika joked, nudging him with her elbow.
“Sorry. I was just thinking, this water has a strange effect, don’t you think?”
“How so?” she grunted, pulling aside a large armload and shoving it away from the stone.
“You were filling the containers. Look at your hands.”
“What about them?”
“The sunburn. It’s gone.”
“No, it isn’t, just loo––” Rika paused, gasping as she studied her hands. “How is this possible?”
“I don’t know, but it did the same to my hand. And how are you feeling?”
“I feel––I feel pretty great, actually.”
“You drank some. I think whatever it did on the outside, it did to your insides as well.”
“The Fountain of Youth? In deep space?”
“Maybe not quite that, but the effects are incontrovertible. Maybe it’s something in the soil. Maybe it’s being exposed to the dual suns’ rays. I don’t know, but the scanner shows a larger body of water somewhere under these rocks, and if we can get to it, I have hopes we can maybe use it to help heal our crew.”
“You think it could fix broken bones?”
“Who knows what properties it has? Sunburn’s pretty minor, after all. But even if that’s as much as it can do to help our bodies heal, it’s still doing amazing things. And at the very least, we could sure as hell use the hydration, in any case.”
Rika began digging with renewed vigor, the soil falling aside as they burrowed deeper and deeper toward the long-buried rocks.
“Look at the color,” she said. “The dirt is darker.”
“Moisture. We’re getting close.”
They continued, pulling with both hands until they finally reached the hard mass of a buried stone. Its surface was cool. More importantly, it was damp. The pair made quick work digging out its perimeter.
It was an irregular shard, no more than perhaps a half meter at its widest, tapering down to a smaller end, which had apparently fallen from height, the weight driving it into the ground.
“I can feel a breeze,” Rika said, running her fingers along the topmost edge, where a gap had been exposed. “You think we can move this thing?”
“Together? Yeah, we might. But look how it’s situated. If we pull and pivot at the same time, it might flop back and rest against the other rocks. That’d take a whole lot less effort.”
“Then stop yapping and give me a hand,” she said, wedging her fingers into the narrow space.
