by Guy Haley
There was no sign of the children, and her heart somersaulted. Then she heard voices outside. Still groggy, she crawled through the smashed windows, emerging into a glaring desert. It was very hot. Sand had experience of deserts on Earth and Mars, but this one seemed particularly dry. A constant, cinnamon-flavoured wind blew from the south, carrying the voices of the children. They were busy under the direction of the girl. They’d done well. Sand was surprised, and grateful.
The kids had dragged out everything they could from the ship and arranged it into neat piles a safe distance away. The girl saw Sand emerge and said something to the others, then came running back to the ship.
“Sit down, sit down! It is not safe for you yet,” she scolded.
Sand could only agree. She felt too nauseous to move much, and slid down with her back against the wreck.
“Have we done well?” said the girl.
“Really well,” said Sand. Praise did not come naturally to her, but it was hard not to want to make the girl feel good about what she’d done. She’d seen hardened spacers go to pieces in lesser emergencies.
“We wanted to move you, too, but I thought it was not safe. A bang to the head like that...” She let the sentence hang.
“Sure, sure,” Sand nodded without thinking, and her head rang like a bell. Her bruised eye was swollen shut and throbbed. She winced. “Have you got anything to drink, kid?”
“Yes, we found it.” She called to the others in her language, and one of the little ones ran over, eager as a puppy, lugging a litre bottle of the vile isotonic drink over in his arms.
The girl took it and passed it to Sand. She’d have preferred water – the sickly salt/sweet combination provoked her nausea – but she sipped it determinedly, keeping it down.
“Thank you,” she said. “What is your name?”
The girl smiled, and told her all their names. She was Katarzyna – Kasia, she said – and she was fifteen. Piotr, the kid with the broken arm, was twelve. The two ten-year-old boys were Arek and Dominik, although Arek was nine and Dominik nearly eleven. The youngest were five and six, Elenora and Roman. All of them were Poles, but Elenora’s mother was Swedish and Arek’s father German.
While Sand had been out, they’d pulled together just under ninety litres of the godawful isotonic, thirty kilos of dry rations, five adult-sized survival suits, and an inflatable lifeboat-shelter. There were two tablets. Enough gear to keep five adults alive for a couple of weeks, if they were careful; even cling to life on an airless asteroid if need be. But the suits were too large for the children, and the shelter was designed for zero-g use, and would be too big for them to carry if they could not find and activate one of the robots.
“And these.” Kasia glanced back at the other children, playing now in the sand. Sure they were not watching, she pulled out a case from a hiding place behind a piece of shattered hull. “Piotr found them. He did not tell the others.”
Sand took the box, flipped it open. Five pistols: the crew’s weapons.
Still feeling sick, Sand snapped the box shut and put it to one side. She’d check them later. What did five hundred years do to chemical propellant? The guns looked fine. She hoped the ammunition still worked.
“Now what do we do?” said Kasia.
Sand rested her head on the downed ship and closed her good eye. The sun was too bright.
“We wait until I get my shit back together,” she said weakly. “And then we get out of here.”
IT TOOK TWO days, by Earth reckoning, until Sand could move around without wanting to throw up. Her black eye went down enough that she could finally see out of it. The light bothered her, but that would pass. She’d retrieved her sunglasses from the cabin, and now felt more or less okay.
“Why do I feel so heavy?” asked Arek.
“Higher-g. I reckon it’s pulling 1.25, 1.3. Big ol’ planet, this. Bigger than home,” said Sand.
She realised she’d slipped again into proper American when she heard Arek asking something of Kasia in that hard, shushing language of theirs. Sand explained herself in Lingua. She was distracted as she spoke, running her hand down the outside of the Lublin. The damage looked much worse on the outside. One of the cargo spurs had been torn out of the hull bedding, taking the lower door assembly and its heatshield with it. It was a good job the cargo container had ditched itself when it had. She’d be looking at a pile of crushed robot limbs otherwise. She sighed deeply, feeling profoundly sad. Her ship. A wreck. Sand had nobody else on the Mickiewicz to lose, and nobody back home to miss, but for her the destruction of the Lublin was a personal loss. The ship was her wings, flight was her life.
“Right, let’s find those constructors,” she said finally. She caught the container’s beacon using the tablet hanging from her shoulder. “Three kilometres, not bad.” She asked if Kasia wanted to come with her, which she did.
They left Piotr with the second tablet and the other children; Sand told him that under no circumstances were they to go out of sight of the ship. “Anything happens, call me on the pad and sit tight inside, you got that? We’ll be back in a few hours. Do not wander off from here. Hopefully when we get back we’ll have a couple of robots to carry all that gear.” Piotr explained to the little ones. Roman got excited about the robot. Elenora was too quiet.
She was about to say they’d be back before nightfall, then looked at the unmoving sun. It’s not like it’s ever going to get dark, she thought. It struck her again as wrong.
Sand and Kasia set off. Her inChip functioned, but there was no incoming traffic, no locator dots for her friends, no mail, no messages or silly videos, no announcements or exhortations to be good from the government, no adverts or feeds. The digital environment on the Mickey had been sparse, but out here... There was nothing. She linked her inChip to the tablet, and offered to do the same to Kasia’s. It did little to alleviate the feeling of isolation. A fragile network, adrift in a sea of sand.
The hexagonal container had come down between two towering dunes. Its yellow, corrugated sides appeared undamaged, but Sand’s relief gave way to alarm when she spotted tracks leading away from its open doors.
“Damn,” she said. She motioned to Kasia to stop. She held the tablet up to the container and had it zoom right in. The doors had been pushed open from the inside.
“What happened?” asked the girl.
“They must have malfunctioned,” Sand said. “The robots. They got up and got out.”
“Can robots do that?”
“Not really, no,” said Sand.
Deep, elliptical footprints, the shifting sand obscuring them already, led away from the container in all directions. One set led toward them, and disappeared into a crease in the dune Sand and Kasia stood upon. They went to investigate. The track ended in a large robot, an andromorph twice the height of a human, and much broader. Beyond its basic configuration it was not particularly human looking, with massive hands and feet, and attachment sockets for tools prominent in a red carapace reminiscent of a knight’s armour. Under the red shell, the rods and pistons of its limbs were deep carbon black. Hazard striping adorned plates on its elbows, knees, and feet. It lay face down, its head pointed toward them, hands out and flat to the floor as if it had been doing push-ups.
The robot didn’t respond to commands, either verbal or sent via the tablet. There was a faint smell of cooked meat to it. Sand leaned in toward where its brain case was stored in its thorax, and recoiled quickly. The brain had baked in the heat; the casing must have cracked in the crash.
“Shit,” she said. Using the robots to get out of there had been her big bright idea. Without them, what then?
Kasia stared at the machine. She had never been as close to a robot as this. She felt Sand’s eyes on her and looked up nervously.
“Yes, pilot?”
Sand smiled at her. She hadn’t told Kasia her name. “The name’s Cassandra, Kasia. But my friends call me Sand.”
“Like the... sand?”
“Exa
ctly so. Kind of ironic, don’t you think?”
The girl looked at her without comprehension.
“Have all the robots gone, Pi– Sand?”
“Let’s see honey, shall we? Come on.” Sand held out her hand, and Kasia took it.
She was anxious as they approached the container. Sand counted five other tracks leading away from it. There had been eight units in the container. She hoped the remaining two had not been destroyed. Even if they had not, the brains were kept in a similar state of deathly hibernation as the humans, and, like the human passengers, they’d slept for far too long. Malfunction looked likely for them all.
Her heart sank. A second dead robot lay broken, hidden in a dip just outside the doors. It had probably been pushed there by its fellows. Its red carapace was stained with dried cranial fluids. She held her breath as she walked over its broken back and peered into the dark.
At the very rear of the container, a robot crouched. It had not activated, and was still curled into a ball for transport, head between its knees, hands wrapped around its shins. Maybe it had died in transit. She pinged it with the personal unit’s short range wifi, and blew out a breath of relief. All good. Systems diagnostics ran over the screen and through the internal display of her mind’s eye. She could see nothing amiss. She allowed herself a wide grin.
“Unit 7, are you functional?”
A hum struck up from the robot. “Yes,” it said. Its voice suited the size of its carriage; deep, sonorous. A large robot with the voice of a normal man was ridiculous. Humans could anthropomorphise pretty much anything, but needed certain signifiers to accept machines, and voice was one. “I am undamaged. I await your command.” It spoke in the same way as every other unit Sand had ever met; distant, as if you were distracting them from something pressing.
“Activate and exit the container,” said Sand.
“Yes ma’am,” it said. It uncurled into a crouch, waited for Sand and Kasia to back out of the door, then crawled to the mouth of the container, where it pulled itself out, and unfolded to its full height.
“Unit 7, heavy plant construction model Titan-3C, awaiting orders, Pilot Sand. What are your wishes?”
It glinted in the sun. Sand had never seen anything so magnificent. She smiled and threw an impulsive arm around Kasia’s shoulders. With the unit, they stood a chance. “Get us the hell out of this desert in one piece, would you?” she said.
The robot’s head swivelled down. Unblinking camera eyes stared at her. “Please explain,” it said.
WITH SOME DIFFICULTY, they fashioned a set of straps and harness from the cabin’s webbing so that the machine could carry the majority of their supplies. Sand also instructed the robot to pull off several pieces of hull from her downed shuttle. Looking at the terrain, she figured they’d need something to spread the robot’s weight if it got bogged down in the sand. She struggled for a couple of hours to find a way to attach them to the robot’s back before giving up.
“You’ll have to drag them, Unit 7,” she said. “I’ll fix a line to your back.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the robot.
She had the robot hold one large plate out in front of it like a tray. She gathered the children under the shade of it. “Should keep the sun off,” she said. The children giggled. The robot provided a welcome distraction for the younger ones. Kasia and Piotr were less inclined to laugh. They were old enough to understand.
She let the children play for a few hours as she and Kasia cut down spare jumpsuits and the environment suits to protect the kids from the sun. She then had Kasia put them all down to sleep. She wanted them fresh for the morning. Morning, night, she thought. How long would they hold on to those terms? Assuming they survived.
Sand could not sleep. Her concussion had not faded completely. With her eyes closed, she felt dizzy, and there was always the light, hammering its nails into her skull.
Her mind would not be quiet. Elenora was beginning to concern her, more deeply affected than the others. The pilot lay in the shade, surrounded by fitful youngsters, a gun holstered at her waist; they’d seen no life here yet, but that did not mean there wasn’t any, nor that it wasn’t hostile. The younger ones had scared themselves stupid talking about monsters, and they all felt better for having the robot watch over them. Its tireless eyes swept the sand, sensors alert to any sound, its nearly human mind thinking inhuman thoughts.
Did it dream, while it slept on the ship? wondered Sand, as she slipped into sleep herself.
THEY AWOKE TO the endless day. Sand felt as if she had hardly slept at all; only her inChip gave her an indication of the passage of time. Seven hours. Felt like seven minutes. Kasia roused the others and they ate a spare breakfast of hard rations. Sand was already sick of the rations.
She rounded her charges up, and had them stand under the shade of the robot’s makeshift parasol.
“Let’s go,” she said.
The kids stared at her. They were not ready to leave.
“What’s up?” she said.
“What about the others?” Piotr asked.
“We can’t just leave them there,” said Kasia. Her voice was quieter than normal, as if she was afraid she would anger Sand.
“Who?”
“Diana and Gosia,” Kasia said.
The dead kids. She’d been so occupied with keeping the others alive she’d forgotten to think about the bodies. Bury them? It’d take a while. She could tell them to get moving.
What was she thinking?
“Of course. Of course, I’m sorry. We’ll bury them before we go.”
Unit 7 scraped out shallow graves in the sand with its hands. Sand did not know what to do when their small corpses were placed in the ground, but Kasia said something in Polish that seemed to keep the others happy.
She was right not to deny them the ritual. It probably would have been very unwise to do so, for that matter, she thought, for all that they’d wasted time.
They had their heads bowed. Must all be religious; so many people were now. She didn’t understand it, herself. She watched them pray. They squinted against the light. She had to get them to wear their head protection or she’d have a bunch of sunstroke victims on her hands. Shit, there was too much to remember. Too much to do.
They lifted their heads and blinked.
“We can go now,” said Kasia.
Sand nodded and put a hand briefly on the girl’s shoulder. Unit 7 retrieved its parasol of woven carbon, and Sand yoked his blocky waist to the crude sled once more.
They set off into the desert, the sun at their backs, and crested the first dune soon enough. Sand let the small party walk on ahead of her as she turned back to look at the wreck of the Lublin. Its shattered remnants littered the landscape. Sand wondered how long it would take for the desert to bury it. She realised she’d forgotten all about Roosevelt, and for one impulsive moment she considered going back to get him.
“Rest in peace,” she said, although for the ship, her bear or her old life, she couldn’t say. A spacer without a ship was no spacer at all. Only then did she think she might never be one again.
She turned her back on the ship for the last time and followed the children down the steep slipface.
THEY WALKED DIRECTLY north, toward the liminal zone, somewhere ahead. Sand tried to calculate the distance they had to go from the sun’s elevation, but without knowing the diameter of the planet, she could come up only with the broadest estimate.
They struggled up the long wind-facing slopes of the barchans, then tumbled down the steep slipfaces on the other side. It was on the leeward slopes that the robot had most trouble. Unit 7 was built for uneven ground, but the dunes’ steep, yielding surfaces were too much for its weight. They all stumbled and slid, but the robot sank deep, sending avalanches of sand down before it. Its motors whined as it tried to extricate itself. Every step took long seconds. Sand monitored it through her inChip for signs of overheating. If sand got into its workings, it could quickly seize up, and without
it, they would in all probability die. The robot was forced to set aside its parasol hull plate at these times. The children made a game of sliding down the slipfaces on the plate as the robot struggled on. They made Sand nervous, at first, but they enjoyed it, and it afforded them a chance to rest as the robot struggled down after them.
Travelling was hard work with little reward. Each peak delivered only an unbroken view of more dunes. The youngest children grew tired, and Sand and Kasia had to help them along. When it was clear they could walk no more, Sand put them on the robot’s hull-plating shed, and let them ride it a while. “Not for long,” she said. The carbon weave was burning hot to the touch.
Roman said something.
“What did he say?” Sand asked.
“He wants to know why he can’t ride all the way to his mother and father. I told them it is not good to be in the sun for a long time.”
“That is why.” She paused. “Kasia, did you tell them their parents are waiting for them?”
“What should I tell them?” Kasia said, her voice suddenly brimming with emotion. She walked away quickly, head down, her small footprints dwarfed by the tracks of the construction robot.
Elenora said little. When she did, she spoke to herself in Swedish, a language none of them knew, although Sand understood “mama” alright. She soothed her, held her. It didn’t seem to do much good.
After a time, Arek and Dominik joined the little ones. Then all the children were riding the sled more often than not. The robot had no problem pulling the children, and Sand thought they might as well stay on the hull plating. She thought about inflating the emergency shelter, but it was too big; she tented a survival blanket over the youngsters’ heads instead, trusting it to shade them from the worst of the light and heat. She was happier when they were out of the sun in the dunes’ lees.
Kasia was the last to accept a ride, doggedly keeping pace with Sand at the head of the small column until the pilot sent her back to the sled.