Crash

by Guy Haley

  He returned to the ATV and resumed his drive through the storm. He slavishly followed the buggy’s visual cues, and as a result his mind had nothing to do but stew on his guilt and the horror in the sand, and what might have happened to his son.

  DARIUSZ SPENT ONE night, and then a second, sleeping stretched out on the seats in the back of the ATV. It was storm-dim outside, and with the buggy’s windows darkened, it was dark enough for him to sleep soundly. He was exhausted, mentally and physically. He doubted his own sanity; before Kościelniak had obliquely advised him to take the ATV, he had been going to walk into the desert. What had he been thinking? He would have been dead in hours.

  With the temperature at eighteen degrees and him spared the exertions of walking, his supplies were lasting well. The vehicle manufactured its own fuel while he slept, drawing power from the sun where it could and pulling gases into its compact fuelcell from the atmosphere. Humidity was up, markedly so, climbing from nothing to the low teens over the space of a day. By the time Dariusz picked up the beacon emanating from deck 46A, the wind had abated, and the sky had taken on a new gloom, green-tinted, dark as a bottle.

  The landscape changed. Rock formations, besieged by the crawling edges of dunes, loomed up suddenly from the murk. For all that they were delineated in lines of light by the ATV’s sensors before he saw them with his eyes, their appearance alarmed him, and he drove slowly. The dunes became smaller and smaller, until they were ripples on the floor. Large boulders became common, and his journey became bumpier.

  He was close to giving up hope when the soft pinging of 46A’s locator impinged on his enclosed world. He quickly diverted it from the headpiece’s internal unit, projecting compass arrows onto the windscreen. They blinked red at the edges of the glass, and he swung the vehicle around recklessly until a pulsing target centred itself in the digitally conjured no-place to the front of the vehicle. He resisted the temptation to accelerate, forced himself to calm down. What good would killing himself in a crash do, so close to his goal?

  He was not far from the deck segment. Visibility had improved as the sandstorm’s fury spent itself, but he still could not see further than one hundred metres. He followed the pinging target on his windscreen, tenacious as a bloodhound, his body tense.

  A dark block on the sand, below him as the land dropped. Deck 46 was a large one, and this half had landed well.

  He drove faster, the six independent wheels of the ATV bouncing over the rocky ground. The ride suddenly became smooth, there was cracked mud here frosted with salt, a detail he observed but whose importance eluded him, his every thought fixed on the downed deck segment, and Danieł.

  He stopped a few metres short of it. The emergency ladders were down, the doors open. Trembling, he flung the door of the ATV open, treading only upon the first two rungs of the ladder before he leapt down to the ground. His imagination alternately tormented him with images of a small corpse, then teased him with joyful reunions.

  His relief foundered. He could see no sign of survivors. No, there, a shape on the ground, half-covered in sand blown down from the dunes. He walked over, his legs as water, his heart pounding.

  A body, skin already stretched tight with dessication. A few bottles lay around it. A man? A woman, he decided. Not a child, not Danieł. He felt a knot around his heart. Questions clamoured. Had there been other survivors? Was his son among them?

  He scrambled for the ladder, and was inside in seconds. There was enough power remaining for the emergency lights, and the sarcophagus panels. Nearly all were red. Their light revealed a nightmarish scene of broken machinery. Sarcophagi had come loose from their moorings, and were piled one on the other, forcing him to wriggle through. He could not see and tore off his mask. He instantly regretted it; the air was ripe with the scent of decaying flesh, thick and cloying. Like strong perfume it filled his senses, threatening to choke him. The sharp, rank smell of spoiling pseudo-amniotics overlaid the odour of death. His gorge rose.

  Dariusz struggled his mask back on, breathing short gulps of air. Once it was secure again, he held his breath until the mask’s air scrubbers had had time to do their work. He took an experimental breath. Then another. The sweetness had gone. He put his foot down on something yielding. He felt queasy, but forced himself forward, staring resolutely ahead.

  He called up a torch beam from his suit’s headset. Signs of damage were everywhere. He was amazed the segment had come down so surely. Those sarcophagi not smashed or thrown free from their mounts were silent, their status panels red, their occupants dead.

  He found the number he was looking for, as he had the last time, the number stencilled on the side of the sarcophagus. He knelt astride it, his mouth working wordlessly.

  Danieł’s status panel was red. Danieł had died, perhaps long before the crash. In a moment of insanity he was sure the mask’s visual filters were lying to him, and he tore the headpiece from his face, heedless of the charnel stink. He blinked in disbelief, hoping he would see something different, but no; here was the unmediated truth of his son’s death. There was the risk, there had always been the risk, but to see it fulfilled, so finally...

  He crouched onto the sarcophagus and moaned.

  How long he stayed there, he did not know. Blind with grief, he staggered out of the deck segment, half-falling to the ground from the door. He wavered drunkenly on for some time, perhaps as little as ten minutes, perhaps as much as an hour. The cracked pan of the plains became sand again, and he ascended halfway up a low dune before his legs gave out under him and he collapsed.

  Dariusz rolled onto his back and lay his head on the sand, uncaring of the granules of sand invading his ears. He stared into the desert sky, a marbled wall of beige sand streamers and racing cloud, the sun a ragged scrap of light. The wind blew sand at him, languid where it had been angry, as if it comforted him. He felt the small impacts of the grains through the smartcloth. It stung his face, but he did not pull the headpiece back on.

  I’m in hell, he thought. I’m in hell for what I have done.

  Dariusz was not religious by the standards of the time – and they were religious days – but in that moment, he genuinely feared for his soul. He was pinned by the weight of his sins.

  He closed his eyes. Breathing was a supreme effort. His chest rose and fell. The sound of the air entering and leaving his lungs became a monster’s breath. He was a monster, a slayer of men. In, out, in, out, the monster breathes in its cave. The winds of the planet receded, silenced by the thundering drafts of his respiration. The space in his chest had become cavernous, his core hollowed out. There was nothing but air to fill it; all his purpose had gone.

  In, out, in, out. He dropped deeper into a fugue of grief. How easy it is, he thought, when one concentrates on the sound of one’s breath, to imagine it stopping, the ceaseless ceasing, the warm rush coming no more.

  In, out, in, out. In... Out...

  Dariusz let out one final breath. He did not inhale. The effort to breathe was too great. He had failed. He had failed Lydia, he had failed Danieł, and he had failed himself, set up and used at the cost of all he held dear, and at his own collusion. He could only blame himself. His anger at the Pointers had made him too eager to believe. He was guilty of the crime of idiocy. Naiveté on such a scale deserved punishment. He had been punished, and now he wanted no more. Sleep, he wanted to sleep forever. He did not deserve to live.

  He was no longer conscious when the first droplets of rain pattered onto his face, nor a minute later, when a great metal hand reached down and carefully plucked him from the sand.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sand in the Sand

  SAND CAME ROUND to the touch of a small, cool hand. “Pilot? Pilot? Miss?” The voice was distant, distorted at the edges. “Pilot? Please wake up, please.” The voice sent vibrations into her skull that made her nauseous. She thought she opened her eyes, but she saw light as rippled as a bull’s eye glass, and no images formed. She could smell something pleasant, lik
e cinnamon.

  “Pilot?” Shaking, very gentle. A child’s voice; a girl. There was an edge to it. “Please!”

  Sand experienced a rushing sensation, of reality tautening to its accustomed shape. Her mind filled out her body, and she came to fully. Her head hurt abominably. She lolled in the straps of the pilot’s chair in her ruined cockpit. Efforts to move herself upright were inelegant, robotic, not the movements of a person. She managed finally to haul herself back into a proper sitting position, and fought off the waves of nausea that crashed over her. “Okay, I’m okay,” she said. She was not.

  There was a face. A child. The crash.

  She couldn’t open her right eye, it hurt. She reached up to her face, to find it sticky with blood. She felt half in and half out of herself. She looked down. The lower half of her body was buried in sand, and the sand rose from her, through the smashed windows, in a slope that went up as far as she could see. Granules trickled onto her and she panicked, fearing an avalanche that would swallow her ship. Her hand flailed, grasped hard at the kid, and she pulled her legs up. They came out easily; the sand was dry and moved fluidly. She smacked the quick release on her harness, swung her legs around, and stood. She winced, and bent double.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Sand shook her head, and wished she hadn’t. The world swung pendulously with the motion.

  “No. I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

  “You should sit down again, you have probably a mild concussion.”

  “Smart kid,” gasped Sand. “And not that mild.”

  “My mother is... My mother was a nurse.” Tears tainted the girl’s voice. Sand figured she better pull herself together quick. Sand disliked being in charge of others, she preferred to go and do her own thing, banging up against authority every now and then in a manner that was not much fun for her, nor for the authority. She liked being a pilot, as she was often on her own. She had little idea how to manage other adults, even less of how to manage children. Like most people of her time, she was an only child. There had been no siblings or children of siblings to practise her parenting skills on.

  “Okay,” she said. She groaned, and her mouth filled with bitter saliva. “I’ll sit down. Do you think you could fix me some water or something? There should be some in a locker at the back.”

  The girl looked confused for a moment before she nodded. She turned to someone and said something in a language Sand did not know. Sand did not turn to see who. Every time she moved her head, she was in danger of falling sideways off the face of the universe.

  “What are we going to do?” The girl spoke Lingua Anglica, with a mid-Euro accent. Sand dropped into the international speech.

  “Is anybody hurt?”

  “Piotr has broken his arm. I’ve put it in a sling. One of the little ones... One of the little ones...”

  Sand looked up. The dead girl had been put in a corner. Broken neck.

  Two of the other kids were kneeling by a third, who lay stretched out on the floor.

  “Diana’s not breathing properly. I have tried to make her comfortable.”

  “You did the right thing.” Sand stood. She had to stop and grip the back of the chair to steady herself. The sense of unreality rushed back at her. She breathed deeply for five breaths, and the void retreated to the edges of her perception. She was going to have to be careful. She hung from the webbing attached to the ceiling, letting her arms take most of her weight. It seemed better than having it all on her feet.

  “Let me see her,” she said.

  The two kids moved aside. There were nine people in the cabin. With the desert spilling through the window, it was cramped.

  It was the kid whose father had pleaded at the last to let her aboard, fat lot of good it had done her. Diana was dying; that much was apparent. Her lips were blue and her skin pale. She breathed shallowly, panting. An ugly contusion started at the neck and continued under her shirt. Sand recognised the signs, although she lacked the expertise to treat them; Diana had been thrown against her harness as they hit. It was risky putting two kids into an adult-sized harness. Her ribs had probably shattered, then pushed into her internal organs. From the looks of it, she’d suffered a collapsed lung. Her lungs, holed, were acting as pumps, forcing air out into her chest cavity which was in turn preventing her lungs from inflating properly. Pneumothorax. It was a vicious cycle that would continue until the girl’s lungs could not fill at all and she would suffocate. Sand could probably treat that, but the colour of Diana’s skin suggested she was also bleeding heavily internally. Without immediate medevac, she was dead. They had no way of treating her here, no autodoc, not even a hibernation pod to stuff her into. And if they did, what then? Drag her out of the desert? Sand had tried to get them down close to the terminator and the liminal zone, but how close? Two hundred, three hundred kilometres?

  Sand dithered over what to do. She was frozen in place, her own injury slowing her mind. She just stared at the girl, whose breaths became shorter and shallower as the other kids stared at her. She was unconscious. Not long now.

  “She’s going to die, isn’t she?” said the eldest girl, quietly.

  “I don’t know what to do to save her. If we had more equipment...” She could not finish. If helped nobody. They were all fucked.

  “Are we going to die?” asked one of the other kids. Must be Piotr; kid had his arm in a sling.

  “Shush,” said the girl.

  The kids were scared and all looking to Sand for guidance or leadership, or to play mommy or whatever the fuck it was kids needed. Why her? What the hell was she going to do? Two of them were barely six, two more around ten. The boy with the arm, she reckoned about twelve. The girl was the oldest, fifteen maybe. Sand couldn’t be sure, she was lousy at telling how old kids were. Kids had always been someone else’s problem.

  Not any more, she told herself. Not any more.

  Diana made a final gasp. Her body quivered once, mouth gaping. A soft, inarticulate noise escaped her throat. Then the two ten-year-olds by her side patted her hands, like they could comfort her back to life. One of the six year olds started to sob, a wet, desolate sound that pricked at Sand more than anything.

  Sand took a ragged breath. “No, we are not going to die. I won’t let it happen,” she said, wondering if that were true, if she had any right to make that kind of promise to them. “We are not going to die. We are going to get out of here. All of us.”

  The children, teary, dirty, pale with shock. Her responsibility. Fuck.

  “You really mean that?” said the girl.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do,” she said. Her nausea was retreating to manageable levels.

  “What about our parents?” said Piotr.

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said. “With a bit of luck, they got into the passenger pods still on the Mickey and got out in time.”

  “Mitz-kay-e-veech,” said Piotr.

  “I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” Sand grumbled. “I’m lousy at languages.”

  The older kids smiled through their sniffles. That made things a bit better. Sand looked carefully around the cabin of the shuttle. The thing was totalled; it’d never fly again, not if a thousand mechanics and their helpful robot buddies spent a lifetime apiece on it. There was no power evident, not the smallest ready light or warning blinker. A blessing, she supposed. She could do without a means of ignition for ruptured fuel cells and tanks. The nose was buried under the skirts of the dune, but she could see from stress patterns in the glass and buckling in the supports that the airframe had suffered. Her pilot’s desk was remarkably whole, but the touch-screens-cum-holo-projectors on the other four stations had shattered. The door leading from the rear of the cabin wouldn’t open; she could tell that by looking. As for the engines, well – she sighed and drummed her fingers on the ceiling – Sabres were marvels of engineering, even one hundred and seventy years after the first iterations had first flown, but not when they were stuffed full of sand.

 
“Write off,” she said. “Total write off.”

  “I’m sorry?” said the girl, who did not understand Sand’s American.

  “Damaged beyond repair,” Sand said in Lingua Anglica. “Broken. We’re not flying out of here, that’s for certain.”

  “What are we going to do?” said Piotr.

  “We’re going to have to walk,” she said. Her mouth filled with saliva again. She swallowed with difficulty. “I’m going to need you to help me.”

  Piotr nodded at her, as did the ten-year-olds. “Yes,” said the girl. The six-year-olds looked terrified. They could not understand her. They were too young to have learned the Lingua.

  “Chcę mamę,” said the crying one. “Chcę iść do domu.”

  What the fuck was she going to do? The other young one started to cry, followed by the ten-year-olds. They did not bawl or make a noise, but wept quietly, huddling into each other. The quietness of it terrified her. Two hundred kay, walking all the way. They’d all die.

  She had an idea. Relief hit her. She almost smiled.

  “The robots,” she said. “The goddamned robots.”

  She let go of the webbing and stepped with purpose toward the broken windows, and her leg folded under her. One moment she was moving, the next she was on her back, the girl and the boy – Peter or whatever he was called – staring down at her. She had no memory of the fall.

  “I think you are going to have to lie down for a while,” said the girl.

  “Damn right,” said Sand, who promptly passed out.

  SAND WAS ASLEEP for twelve hours, or so her inChip told her. When she came round, the sun had not moved, and she found the fact of that disorienting. The movement of the sun was a fundamental, something a billion years of evolution expected, and it felt deeply wrong to see it so still. Someone had placed a survival blanket on her and put a rolled jacket under her head. Two small bodies lay under more blankets, side by side, at the back of the cabin.