Crash

by Guy Haley

  Yuri’s darker nature had not deserted him entirely, but nowadays he kept his pessimism to himself.

  Piotr arrived in the ATV. He climbed down from the cab, hoses over his shoulder.

  “Ah,” said Yuri. “First, the sponges.”

  They drove back to First Landing satisfied, the tanks of their trailer full of brackish clam water, the back of the vehicle crammed full of meat they could not eat.

  FIRST LANDING’S WALLS were ruddy in the sun that never set. Solar arrays gleamed along the buildings’ roofline now. The original settlement had become a citadel, the two halves linked by a suspension bridge. High ramparts of steel-studded stone circled both mesas. The inner gate to the Western Mesa had been closed up, offering the colonists a refuge that could only be assailed by scaling the cliffs or taking the bridge. The bridge, naturally, could be dropped. After the battle of First Landing, a certain militarism had crept in to the colony’s way of thinking. Anderson had been both right and wrong. Yuri had found this duality to be a tedious constant of government.

  The town had grown beyond its core. Dariusz’s farm was lush with earthly vegetation, and fringed by barns made of recycled containers and pressed clay harvested from the Leonid River. The fences that had once encircled the mesa tops had been removed, and repositioned to link the farm buildings together, enclosing their primary food supply within a third, loose perimeter. Beyond the fence, new fields were being laid out. Irrigation canals gridded the plain, connected to the river to make use of its erratic flow, gates at the ends that could be closed when the river vanished beneath the sand. Pipes ran from boreholes to fill the canals in between times, windmills pumped at the boreheads. Watchtowers stood at the intersections of the canals.

  A sizeable district had sprung up at the feet of the West Mesa, between the airfield and the new fields on the plain beyond. It had been named, unofficially, Airtown. The colonists had grown used to village life, and all knew each other by name, but they yearned for privacy and sought it even in the face of danger. Berms had been built around the suburb, faced with panels cut from the Mickiewicz’s cargo containers, and a ditch lay before it. All followed Anderson’s original plans.

  The saddle that linked the mesas had also been fortified, and behind that a small industrial zone was corralled, an expansion of the facilities originally raised on the East Mesa. The smell of the rendering plant especially was intolerable up in the citadel – another factor influencing the colonists to move into Airtown – but the colonists did not feel secure enough to move their vital manufactories away from the safety of their city, and so the stink and clamour of industry remained tucked in close to the heart of First Landing. It was here that Yuri directed the ATV, driving along a road fringed by green rows of potatoes. He reached the gate in the secondary perimeter; Anderson’s perimeter. A militia man hailed him.

  “Back already, sir?”

  “Good hunting today,” he said. “We landed a big one.”

  “Bioreactor C’s just being cleared. They were expecting you. Should be ten, fifteen minutes.”

  Yuri nodded and drove through. He passed through another gate into the industrial zone. The zone’s walls trapped the stink of the refinery, intensifying it. Up on the mesas the smell was bad; down here it was nearly unbearable. It was thick in his throat, and reminded him of deck segments choked with the dead. His mood darkened as he pulled up at the bioreactor.

  The stench was worst by the reactors, a vile, fishy reek. Bins outside housed the few parts of the clams the colony did not use, while the great shells were stacked nearby. They were supposed to be clean, ready for their processing, but scraps of meat still clung to them, feasts for small clouds of lizardflies. As the people of Earth had adapted to the local ecology, so the local ecology had adapted to them. The lizardflies had previously only been present after each major rain event, but now there was a steady supply of food, they bred whenever the Leonid River brought enough water out of the nightside to wet their eggs. They were a nuisance, and Yuri flapped at his face as he and Piotr helped those on reactor duty unload. They were already filthy with blood from butchering the clam in the field, why should they not help? Some of the others on the council thought such work beneath them. It was dangerous thinking, and he had constantly lobbied for everyone, council members included, to take turns doing the colony’s less pleasant jobs. He saw the signs of a new elite emerging, and he did not like it.

  The flesh and viscera went into the bioreactor. Fuel and food would be the result. Their attempts at making a retrovirus to alter the genomes of the colonists had been accomplished after much effort, but had been only partially successful. Only in a very few had the genes taken hold and allowed normal consumption; some of the colonists could only eat the native life in small amounts, while others remained entirely unaffected and dependent on Terran organisms or processed foods. Furthermore, the endogenous capacity of the virus had yet to be proved, necessitating infection of all infants at birth.

  Yuri passed on the location of the shell so that it could be collected by a heavier truck.

  “I don’t know why you just don’t radio it in,” said Kościelniak cheerfully. He had, mainly by accident, become the executive officer of their industrial facilities. “We can truck out and bring the thing back whole. Save you getting your hands dirty.”

  Yuri smiled. “I like to get my hands dirty. It keeps me grounded, stops me picking up airs. And I don’t want some scavenging beetle to come along and gobble up my kill. It pisses me off.”

  “Fair enough,” said Kościelniak. “Speaking of getting your hands dirty, there’s a council meeting been called.”

  “Again?”

  “Tomorrow. Sand’s had an idea. You’d find out on your own, but forewarned is forearmed, right? That’s the right expression, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Yuri walked away, past the ATV where Piotr waited.

  “Hey, you going?” The younger man frowned. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “More politics,” said Yuri. “I wish we’d stayed out.” He stalked off, back up to his apartment on the East Mesa. He needed a shower.

  SAND BANKED THE new plane around carefully. “Control,” she said into the radio, “I’m coming in for a pass. You got eyeballs on me?”

  An aggravated sound came from the other end. Not all of the Poles could keep up with her uncompromised American. “We are watching you.”

  Sand glanced over the plane as they approached the mesas. Ailerons, flaps and rudder were all working fine. There wasn’t much more to the airplane than that. Everything it did, it did because she was pulling a lever. This was her Mark IV effort: broad-winged, swift, top speed of two hundred kay an hour, range of four hundred. Primitive, but they’d come a long way from the days of the ultralights, and she’d designed and built most of it herself.

  The ULs had served well for local reconnaissance, but she wanted more. Sand gathered a group of engineers to her, told them to think away from the fabricator units, to work with what they had. The first airplanes of Earth had been made of wood and canvas. Why should she wait for the fabricator to be available to weave the modern equivalent? Her expanded team had looked at her as if she were crazy at first, but they’d got into the spirit of it. Crabhawk leather and salvage worked just as well. Sandclam fuel powered its combustion engine. The airframe and propeller were modern, woven carbon. A mix of the old and the new, like everything in the colony.

  She loved her planes. The feedback from the stick, attached physically via cable and hydraulics to the flight surfaces, the feel of the air rushing over the open cockpit, all led to a communion with flight that was so powerful it was intoxicating. She’d tasted that flying the ULs, and she wanted to keep it. Fly by wire was for sissies.

  “All looks good to us,” said control. “Well done, Sand. Come in to land so we can review flight data and performance.”

  “One more pass,” said Sand. It was a statement of intent, not a request.

  She banked
around the end of the airfield, over the windsock at the southern end which pointed, as it did for seven tenths of the year, to the north. She levelled out again.

  “Coming in to land. Out of my way, folks; I have no idea if the brakes on this thing work.”

  She brought it down with textbook precision, regretting it the moment the wheels touched the ground.

  Sand pulled off her goggles and helmet as Kasia came running up. Both of them were grinning madly. Kasia giggled, Sand followed suit. One of her ground crew came toward them at a run.

  “Hey! Marek! How’s it going?”

  Marek came to a stop. He’d run fast but did not pant. Life here had made them all fit. “A message for you. You’re to go to West Mesa at once. Emergency council meeting.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “They wouldn’t say.”

  “WE’VE LOCATED THE Systems core,” Amir put it simply. How he’d dodged the noose, Yuri often wondered, but Amir had always been good at looking out for number one, and had a certain utility as administrator. The reaction to his statement was muted. It had been a long time since they’d lost all the Syscore represented. “It is one thousand and sixteen kilometres from here, on the other side of the magnetic pole, in the nightside,” he said.

  There were whispered conversations, words passed between the council members. There were fifteen of them, the numbers cut from twenty to an odd number to avoid deadlock in voting and to streamline the process of government. Yuri remained on the council, although not by dint of his birth. He had insisted he be voted for like every other candidate. He’d have left it to others if he trusted them. Things had changed since Leonid died. He had changed, but so had everyone else.

  Yuri saw the people in the room, he saw the masks they wore. Technocrats, leaders: elected, definitely, but politicians above all. The same faces, in the main, were returned at election time and again. A political class had emerged with brutal speed. More than half expected deference and consideration to go with responsibilities they regarded as grave and onerous. Even if they did not demand such respect, it was given them. Old habits die hard, thought Leonid. The council had set themselves apart in dress and speech, using proper English as a matter of course, adopting coloured tabards to denote their area of expertise. How quickly the pioneer spirit was diminishing, how quickly a new order was asserting itself.

  “How?” Kościelniak said. Yuri liked him. He trusted him more than the others; or rather, he corrected himself, he distrusted him less.

  Amir nodded to Moore.

  The holo projector spun up an image of Nychthemeron, a patchwork of low and high resolution mapping. Sand and her infant flying corps had crisscrossed the area for three hundred kilometres in all directions, excepting into the nightside. The turbulence where the dayside and nightside atmospheres met was too much for their existing planes, and so the area of high-res data was a circle around First Landing with a flattened side edged by night.

  Moore cleared his throat. Nychthemeron rotated, revealing a patchwork of blank patches and low-detail mapping. Everything from the nightside had come from the shuttles before the crash, retrieved before the virus had locked them out. Scouts had ventured into the dark, but not far, and too many had not come back at all. It was a mysterious land to them, a realm of great danger. “To be most accurate,” he said, “we did not find the Syscore. It found us.” A bright, pulsing point of light sprang up on the map. “The broadcast began this morning.”

  “The message content?” asked Brzezinska. It was ironic; she had opposed Anderson so bravely, and she was among the worst for assuming airs and graces, to Yuri’s eyes. She used her psychology training like it were some kind of magic power. She intimidated several of the others in the council, and many outside of it.

  “All isolated and examined,” said Moore. “There is no trace of the virus, it is the locator beacon of the System core, that is all.”

  “And it’s started on its own? Why has it started to broadcast now? It could be a trick.”

  “A trick by whom?” said Amir.

  “The virus?”

  “The virus is not intelligent!” said Moore.

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know what other traps the designer of the virus built into it,” said Yuri.

  “We have to be careful,” said Amir. “We cannot afford to be infected by the virus again. But can we afford not to investigate?”

  Sand sat forward with such swiftness everyone in the room looked at her. She was grinning in that way she had when she was about to lay out an idea no one else was going to like.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “A good one.”

  “Let me guess. You want to go into the nightside,” said Plock, who had taken Dariusz’s place. She shot him a look and he became abashed. It was no secret Plock was fond of her. “I mean, we all know how brave you are, Sand.”

  “Reckless,” said Corrigan. Corrigan and Sand were close, and he said it with good humour, but Yuri knew her headstrong nature wore at him.

  “By air?” said Brzezinska.

  “How else?” said Kościelniak. “It is Councillor De Mona talking.”

  “Please go on, councillor,” said Amir.

  “We fly there. I’ve designed a new airplane. Bigger, more durable. Range might be a problem, but if we drive in close and take off close to the terminator, and send a tanker through to top it up, it should work. I could get you all the way there.”

  “Two aeroplanes through the storm? In-flight fuelling? It’s a bold plan. Your Mark IV plane is not up to the task, surely,” said Amir.

  Sand pulled a face. She was less guarded in her dislike of Amir than anyone else. “I did just say I designed a bigger one, didn’t I? I did. Good. Not the Mark IV, the Mark V. It’ll take three months to build the aircraft. I’ll need more fabricator time.”

  A general groan at this. Everyone needed more fabricator time.

  “I can get it built, and it will get through the storm belt into the nightside,” she said. She leaned on the table, her arms tense, looking at them all, defying them to disagree. Even Sand, thought Yuri, an otherwise decent person, is only at her most vociferous when promoting the things she is personally passionate about.

  Amir sighed. “And pilots, Councillor De Mona? Do we have pilots of sufficient skill?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll do it. I’ll fly lead, I should be able to get it through the storms and out the other side, no problem.”

  “Out of the question,” said Amir.

  “I am sorry, Councillor,” said Moore, “but you are too valuable to risk. We’ve lost enough expertise as it is.”

  “I say, let her go. If anyone can do it, Sand can,” said Plock.

  There was much talking around the table. Amir called for silence. “We’ll put it to the vote,” he said. Yuri smiled to himself. Amir was a creature of circumstance, once the autocrat, now the democrat. As long as he was important enough to count, he didn’t care how his importance was decided upon.

  “I move that Councillor De Mona remain here,” said Moore. “Sorry, Sand,” he said, “you’re too important. You’re a fine engineer, a valued member of this council. Who will train our other pilots? Your knowledge of aeronautics is better than anyone’s.”

  “Not true,” she said.

  “Nearly everyone’s, then. You’re too important,” said Marina, who had been elected to the council a few months before.

  “I agree, Sand,” said Corrigan. “Sorry.”

  “I’m the only one skilled enough to get through the storm belt!”

  “What about your apprentice? Kasia?” said Brzezinska.

  “Kasia? She’s not ready.”

  “This is the Kasia who flew bombing runs on the natives and who has been flying with you practically every day since?” said Loewen. He said it kindly, with a smile.

  “She’s not ready.”

  “Then make her ready,” said Amir. “We cannot afford to lose your expertise. Think of your daughter.”
r />   “Kasia is my daughter.”

  “You know what I mean, Sand. You have a two-year old daughter as well as Kasia, one of the few pregnancies here to be brought to term. Would you leave your child motherless?” said Amir.

  “Sand, Sand, please listen,” said Corrigan. “We have too many orphans as it is.”

  “You’re saying I’m not expendable, but Kasia is?”

  “If you have to put it in such bald terms, then I too will be direct. Yes, Kasia is less valuable to the colony than you are. We all have our part to play in making this colony work, De Mona, and yours is not to go off on a dangerous venture like this,” said Amir.

  “It’s an in-and-out mission. Just a scouting run. I’ll be back in no time.”

  “We can’t risk you, we’re sorry.”

  “You’re worse than Anderson,” she said. She regretted it instantly, became contrite. “Sorry,” she said. She stood, then walked out.

  “Sand!” shouted Corrigan. He rose.

  Yuri finally spoke. “Oh, let her go. We’ll just have to listen to her roaring at you for ten minutes. We’ve told her what we think. The plan is a good one in principle, I think she’s more than capable of designing an airplane up to the job, but Amir is right, we can’t lose her. We need to vote.”

  Sand waited outside for the deliberations to finish. The motion was passed, the expedition was to go ahead. Piotr and Kasia would fly the aircraft.

  Sand was to remain behind.

  KASIA’S CONFIDENCE IN the air grew rapidly. Sand had her flying the Mark IV daily as soon as the prototype cleared its tests, a process that, though fast-tracked, took a week. During that time Kasia chafed, eager to be off the ULs and at the controls of the larger craft. The seven days of its final checks dragged by, and Kasia’s snappy attitude, shed long since, returned on the back of her frustration. For a while the young woman became catty. Flying the ULs or working on the new planes did not placate her. Some disapproved of her irritation, and said Sand was a bad influence. They said Kasia had adopted Sand’s maverick approach to life, and was inclined to impatience and running her mouth off when things did not go her way.