Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Luka periodically asked Adams to do trivial things and report back, which Mairwen thought was odd, until she realized he was trying to keep Adams from worrying or drifting off to sleep. Mairwen liked hearing the sound of Luka’s voice, and regretted she’d never told him so.

  She stayed as still as possible, resting as best she could in zero-G, knowing she’d be grateful for it later. Haberville’s voice woke her from a semi-doze.

  “If it’s any consolation, ladies and gentlemen, Insche 255C is definitely not a dead, poisoned planet like Concordance records say it is. Morganthur, check your console. Adams, I sent the scans to the shipcomp, if you’ve got a working display.”

  Mairwen found the feed and opened it. Temperature and gas composition values suggested a hot, steamy, high-oxygen but breathable atmosphere, and a wide swathe of green that expanded far above and below the equatorial zone. There were no oceans in the section they’d scanned, but many big lakes. Haberville pointed out several energy concentrations that she said meant tech was in use, and said she planned to try to land near one of them.

  “I’d like to be more precise than that, but I won’t know how bad off the ship is until I try to land it. We’ll hit exosphere margin in ten minutes. Seal up your suits.”

  Adams reported that he’d crammed himself, exosuit and all, into the autodoc unit that was installed in the ship wall next to the engine pod. It was the best of a bad lot of options for surviving the descent.

  “If I don’t make it, and any of you do, would you please tell my daughter I love her? I didn’t record a last-chance packet for her this trip like I usually do.”

  “Goddamn it, Adams, don’t talk like that…” began Haberville angrily.

  “Yes, we’ll tell her,” said Luka, overriding whatever else Haberville was going to say. “What’s her name?” Mairwen knew Luka’s voice well enough to hear the compassion and guilt behind his words.

  “Peregrine, but I call her Pico,” said Adams. “She lives with her mother on Vaylamoinen. La Plata has the coordinates.”

  Mairwen didn’t know the words for what she felt, but it hurt to think Adams might not see his daughter again. Somehow, over little more than a few shared meals, Adams had become a friend. If they lived through the landing, Mairwen was determined to protect Adams, too, if only so Luka wouldn’t take on the added burden of Adams’s death.

  Before she’d met Luka, she wouldn’t have had friends to worry about, but no one would have cared whether she lived or died, either. Like everything else worth having, being a normal human had a price.

  15 * Planet: Insche 255C * GDAT 3237.041*

  THE LANDING, WHEN it came, was beyond the worst Mairwen had imagined. Noise and lights assaulted her senses. Each bone-jarring impact did more damage to the engine pod’s skin, and the ship tumbled and felt like it was shaking apart plate by plate. She’d have been bounced and broken if she hadn’t been strapped in. The fasteners she’d lost while making the comm relay became tiny missiles that threatened to pierce her exosuit.

  It felt like hours, but her time sense told her it was only eighteen minutes from the first turbulence to gliding through the troposphere, if a ripped-apart mass of incalloy could be said to glide, and another seven minutes until her pod came to a jolting, lurching stop.

  Total darkness enveloped pod, the display having died in the last big shuddering flip once it hit the stratosphere. She hung suspended from the pilot bench, which was sticking out perpendicular to what was now down.

  Luckily, her exosuit’s interior display still workws. She had a few new bruises, but no significant damage. The flexin armor she wore inside the suit had done its job distributing the kinetic energy of the impacts.

  “Adams? Foxe? Haberville?” she called as she released the straps and cautiously stretched her feet to the wall that had become her floor.

  No answer.

  She pushed her worry and dread into a tight cube in her mind and sealed it.

  She flipped on the hand light zip-tied to the wrist of her exosuit. The pod looked surprisingly intact, but the water creeping under her feet told her it was no longer sealed. When she directed her light to the entry door, she could see muddy water flowing in where the frame had warped. She sloshed over to the other side of the pod, where the built-in tool bin lay submerged under her feet. She wrestled it open and fished out the manual crank and the meter-length bent alloy bar. She tried vocal pings again and got no answers.

  Her exosuit would protect her from the inevitable flood of water, but would also impair her mobility and leverage. She concentrated on the task of prying open the door, and not thinking about the dark and heavy water above her that might soon swallow her whole.

  Her fear of large bodies of water was instinctive, possibly from some childhood trauma she had no memory of, thanks to the CPS. She pushed her fear aside and focused on escape.

  She dropped into half-tracker mode to power her muscles, knowing she had to get out to stay alive, and hoped that the ship landed close enough to a shore for them to swim. Slowly, reluctantly, the door slid up into its pocket, and water poured in, but equalized when the water level was just above her knees. After one last push using her leg and back muscles, the opening was wide enough for her to slip through underwater in her exosuit.

  She stood up in the hall and shined her hand light around. The hall’s intact walls angled up to the right to where the nav pod should be, and there was a glimmer of emergency lighting in that direction. To her left, against the outer wall of the engine pod, the battered autodoc unit was miraculously intact, powered, and still sealed.

  She climbed up on its rounded end and pointed her light in the transparent view window. All she could see were exosuit boots, so Adams’s head would unfortunately be below water when she got the autodoc’s clamshell lid open. She stuck her head underwater and turned the light on what should be Adams’s head, but the light died almost instantly. From the glimpse she got, she didn’t know if he was conscious or not, but at least water wasn’t leaking in. The unit’s external controls were submerged and nonfunctional.

  Next, she waded around the wall of the angled nav pod until she got to the pod’s door, which unlike hers, was at least two meters up from the waterline and looked deformed in the middle. Water wouldn’t be a problem at that height, but the deformed door would be a lot harder to get open. She stretched up and grabbed the doorframe with one hand, then pulled herself up high enough to bang three times on the door as hard as she could with the pry bar. She hung on and waited, cursing the sound impedance caused by the exosuit. After thirty of the longest seconds of her life, she heard three muffled answering thuds. It didn’t mean that Luka was alive or uninjured, but it was a start. She dropped back to the flooded floor.

  She needed a way to create leverage if she was going to get the door open. She made herself go back underwater through the engine pod door and retrieve the repositionable panel lift handles, then used some plastic sheeting to wrap them up, hopefully keeping them dry enough to stick to the wall surface. She found some flexline and wrapped it around her torso and shoulders to create a temporary sling for the pry bar.

  Back at the nav pod doorway, she pulled herself up far enough to slap two lift handles onto the wall. They proved sturdy enough to handle her weight, and she hoped they could handle more. Using them, she raised her feet, wedged them into the doorframe, and pulled her body up. The door and frame definitely bowed in toward the pod. She slid the edge of the pry bar around the inside edges of the frame, hoping she’d find a place where she could jam the bar in and start working the door open. Just when she was afraid she’d have to try something else, the bar caught. The angle was awkward, but by moving the lift handles, she was able to use her leverage to rock the bar in, bit by bit, until at last she saw a puff of dust move and knew she’d broken the seal.

  She badly wanted to call out for Luka, but she couldn’t risk opening her exosuit for that unless there was enough oxygen in the trapped atmosphere to breathe. She used m
ore half-tracker mode strength to make lurching but steady progress on getting the door open. When she had it open about a quarter of the way, she rested, and noticed the pod interior still had emergency lighting. Encouraged, she kept prying until she had it open half way and her muscles were screaming for relief. She turned off her awareness of the pain, not caring that she’d be paying for it later. She slid the pry bar into the makeshift sling on her back and poked her head into the pod.

  About two meters below, she saw an inert-looking Haberville still strapped into her chair but hanging sideways, and next to her was Luka, standing, looking up at Mairwen. His smile was visible through the faceplate. All the fear for him that she’d been suppressing suddenly dissipated, making her shudder in relief, and she barely managed to hang onto the lift handles. When she could finally drag her eyes away from him, she saw he’d tied electrical conduit around Haberville’s torso and legs in the form of a harness, from which Mairwen inferred that Haberville was still alive but incapacitated.

  Thinking a moment, she signaled to Luka that she’d be back. She dropped back into the ruined corridor and returned to the engine pod, where she cobbled together a five-meter line made of short lengths of braided wire, fiber cable, and miscellaneous equipment straps, then secured metal pipe elbows to each end to act as weights. She counted seconds in her head to stave off her flaring emotions, none of which would be useful to her now. On the way back to the nav pod door, she checked on Adams again, but couldn’t tell if anything had changed.

  At the top of the nav pod, she wedged a length of heavy pipe as a cross brace, then draped the line over it and dropped both ends down to Luka. Clever man that he was, he figured out what she intended and was soon pulling on one end to lift Haberville up with the other. The makeshift line was holding, but she didn’t trust it. As soon as Haberville was in range, Mairwen hauled her up and rested her on the door ledge. Close up, Mairwen could see Haberville was groggy and marginally responsive. At least her exosuit looked to be intact. As gently as she could, Mairwen lowered Haberville down into the water. She was mostly submerged but didn’t quite sink to the bottom. Mairwen jumped down herself and untied the line so she could send it back down to Luka. He insisted on sending up the medical kit first before using the line to haul himself free of the nav pod. Mairwen pulled Haberville into a half sitting position in the water as he climbed down and joined them in the hall.

  When he finally stood next to her, knee-deep in water, he pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. The exosuit prevented any body contact, and the transit vibration dampeners prevented contact communication, but she clung anyway and let the comfort it provided wash over her for an uncounted number of seconds.

  She stepped back and pulled him toward the autodoc unit. In clumsy sign language, and hindered by the poor lighting, she tried to indicate that Adams was upside down in the unit and she needed Luka’s help getting him out.

  As she’d hoped, Luka’s knowledge of the ship gave them a better way to open the unit than assaulting it with the pry bar, and they soon had Adams out and floating in the water. He was unconscious but alive.

  Completely unexpectedly, Adams had shared the autodoc with a high-end sniper’s railgun, and had jammed a case of ammunition and the xenobiological sampling kit into the end near his head. Had either gotten loose, it could have injured or killed him. He’d been stupid to take the chance, but she admired his dedication to duty.

  By her estimation, Adams only had about thirty minutes of breathing mix left. They were running out of time.

  The intermittent emergency lighting was enough for Mairwen to function, but left Luka mostly blind. They couldn’t communicate except by gesture and lip reading, which neither she nor Luka was good at. She went looking for a safe path.

  Getting out of the ruined ship was alternately frustrating, harrowing, and tedious. The worst part came when she had to dive completely underwater and search through jagged metal for a route that would accommodate pulling unconscious bodies through without risking the exosuits that were keeping them dry and breathing. The suits were designed to resist tears and punctures, but it paid to be cautious.

  The only thing that terrified her more than being in open water was being in enclosed water, like a flooded ship. She focused on her strong desire to get Luka and the others to safety, telling herself she could fall apart later. She finally found a route that would take them to a spot beyond the hull, where they could float to the surface. Then they could tackle the next hurdle of finding dry land.

  She swam back to Luka and found him propping up a shaky but now awake Adams. Adams grinned weakly when he saw her, which surprised her because no one but Luka ever did that, until she realized Adams hadn’t known until then that she’d survived the crash.

  It was easier to keep Haberville’s form moving with Adams helping, though he insisted on taking his railgun and the xeno kit with them instead of coming back for them, and Luka did the same with the medical kit. It seemed to take forever to escape the wreck, and they nearly lost the xeno kit more than once because Adams was still impaired.

  Once in open water, they used the buoyancy of the waterproof kits to lead them to the surface. It was either dawn or dusk, she couldn’t tell which. All she could see as she treaded water were oily patches and floating debris. The exosuit made movement awkward, and a part of her mind was still gibbering in the corner about being in the water. She looked for a bigger piece of flotsam that could help support Haberville so Luka didn’t have to keep holding up her weight.

  Luka had other ideas. He began swimming with purpose, towing Haberville’s exosuit by the conduit harness he’d rigged. Mairwen let Adams go next, and followed in case he needed assistance. She narrowed her focus to just following, just swimming, so she wouldn’t have to think about the surrounding water that might stretch for endless kilometers.

  It came as a surprise when her foot hit something sloped, and she looked up to realize they’d reached a sandy, rock-strewn shore. The increased light told her they’d landed at dawn. Adams was struggling with the kit, and ahead, she saw Luka dragging Haberville and the medical kit in the silty mud. She helped Adams first, then Luka.

  They ended up sitting on dry ground among some scraggly shrubs, about six meters from the water’s edge. Behind them was what looked like the edge of a forest, but it was still too dark to see details. Luka got her and Adams’s attention, then unsealed his own exosuit and took a deep breath of air. They both unsealed their suits, and Adams took several deep breaths. They helped steadily improving Haberville with hers.

  “The planet’s oxygen levels are a little high, but probably not enough to hurt us,” said Luka, reading from his exosuit’s display.

  “I never want to get that close to flatlining my air supply again,” said Adams feelingly. “And no more ship crashes, either. My head hurts.”

  Luka laughed sympathetically, and the sound soothed Mairwen, though she couldn’t have said why, since he was obviously alive and unhurt. Perhaps because she wasn’t in the water anymore and could hear him.

  “I’ve never blacked out like that before,” said Haberville. “Maybe my blood pressure bottomed out or something. I’m still dizzy.”

  “Maybe syncope,” said Luka. When both Adams and Haberville gave him a blank look, he added, “Sudden loss of blood to the brain. That final bounce was intense.”

  Luka and Adams helped Haberville stand so she could try walking, but she couldn’t reliably stay upright when they let go. She kept tilting over to her left, like her sense of balance didn’t know which way was up.

  Trusting they’d ask for her help if needed, Mairwen stepped away and turned up her senses, trying to get a feel of the sounds and smells of their new environment. The lapping water had a rhythm to it, like ocean tides, but shallower, and it smelled slightly salty. She hadn’t seen or heard any insect or bird sounds, but that presumed the hybrid planet’s fauna was terra-like. The air was warm, even though it was dawn and near water. From what
Haberville’s scan data had indicated, heat could become a problem.

  The smells were all new and complex. All Mairwen could do was start tagging them in her memory for later association with sources.

  The light breeze shifted and brought a whiff of lubricant and fluids from the ship, which in the increasing light, appeared to be about a hundred meters from the shore. From its silhouette, it looked like it was stuck in the lakebed at an angle, with the nav and engine pods at the waterline. She imagined the ship’s manufacturers hadn’t envisioned a crash landing on a lakeshore when they advertised the ship as being “wilderness ready.”

  She went back to where Luka and Adams were. Haberville still sat, looking pale and nauseated. The scents of Luka and the others were comfortingly familiar.

  “Luka, where did we land?” she asked. Since he’d unerringly taken them to shore, she assumed he’d seen visuals after they’d hit the atmosphere.

  He gave her a quick smile, perhaps because she’d unthinkingly called him by his first name in public, if Adams and Haberville counted as public.

  “On a peninsula. Haberville aimed the ship for it, but we hit some trees and tumbled in just short. I saw the shore as we went in. The lake is big, probably a hundred and sixty kilometers across and five hundred kilometers long. We’re about sixteen kilometers from what looked like a large building and a landing field with an interstellar ship. The base was well lit.” He pointed vaguely toward the trees. “We have the coordinates, so we should be able to find it with the xeno kit’s readers. This part of the continent has low-energy geoposition transmitters about every six hundred kilometers or so, in a grid pattern.”

  He made eye contact with Adams and Haberville. “The installation may not be the safest place to go, but the alternatives are worse.”

  Adams and Haberville nodded their agreement. Mairwen nodded, too, for their benefit. Luka already knew she’d go wherever he was going.

  She didn’t see any way to avoid going back into the ship to look for salvageable supplies they’d need to stay alive, and that meant going back into the inky brown water. Despite the temperature control in her exosuit, she shivered. She decided she could at least wait until there was more sunlight.