The thing’s head was an elongated sphere. Kind of like the football Matti-Jay’s grandfather had spent all that time chasing around wrecking his knees. Bigger, though. More like the size of big seat cushion.
No eyes or ears. No mouth or nose.
There were sensors, though. At least, probably sensors. Small blank holes in the head, and lots of antennas. All over. The thing fair bristled.
The rain was growing cold. Matti-Jay needed to get back inside. Into shelter.
The Blue Defender lay closer to the dunes than to the water. Would Matti-Jay be running the gauntlet trying to reach the vessel? Would the cats see her getting closer and get excited? Would they rush her, beach or no beach? Were they hungry enough?
Something tugged at her foot. Looking down, she saw some of the little fish. They had gray bodies with a red stripe along their sides. Three or four centimeters long.
A bigger one–more like ten centimeters–darted from behind and grabbed at the side of her boot. As if the fish was feeding.
The water lapped around her. The rain grew harder.
Matti-Jay stepped away from the fish. She started running for the wreck of the runabout.
The cats moved too. Not running out, but ducking their heads. Taking a few steps. Darting back. Coming out again.
A few more steps each time. And more of the animals broaching the edges each time. And fewer going back each time. Or not so far.
But Matti-Jay was making good time. The way that the cats were just making tentative progress wasn’t threatening. But then, there was this big bot. Hovering around her vessel.
What was the robot’s deal?
Assuming it was a robot. Maybe it was a vehicle. Then again, maybe it was like the dragon up in orbit. It seemed that that was just a robotic vessel too. Just operating on some simple command. A kind of defender.
If this walking machine wasn’t a robot, then what was piloting it? It would have to be something smaller than herself. While the machine’s body was large, it still needed mechanisms to operate. There wouldn’t be much space left inside. Not for a pilot.
Then again, maybe the pilot was hundreds of kilometers away. The thing could be operating on remote.
Matti-Jay was out of the water now. Running across wet sand.
A whole bunch of the cats was well out off the dunes now. Running toward the Blue Defender. What did you call a group of cats? A herd? A flock?
Didn’t matter. Matti-Jay had almost reached the wreck now. Only a few more meters.
The tall machine shifted on its legs to get a better look at her. It was around the stern of the Blue Defender. The robot–she was going to go with it being a robot now–tilted its head. Staring at her eyelessly.
It made an odd sound. A moaning trill of sound like someone playing a tune on an oboe. Deep and mournful.
Matti-Jay reached the main hatch. The cats were closing in fast. Less than twenty meters beyond the Blue Defender. They didn’t seem to care about the robotic thing still striding around.
Matti-Jay grabbed the edge of the hatch. She tapped the codepad at the side. The hatch creaked. It gave a hiss as the mechanism pulled it inward.
With agonizing slowness, the hatch crept into the airlock access.
Matti-Jay looked at the cats. Coming very fast now. At least twenty of them.
Easy to imagine them swarming over the Blue Defender’s wing. Pouring off the leading edge and clambering all over Matti-Jay herself.
The hatch made an odd sound. A kind of clicking, snapping noise.
The hatch stopped moving.
Only open about ten centimeters. Much too narrow to get through.
The cats were only about ten meters from the vessel now. Closing fast.
Matti-Jay pushed on the hatch. It wouldn’t move. She pushed harder. No luck.
She tapped at the codepad again.
Nothing.
Well, this was going to be stupid. Practically the sole survivor and she would get herself eaten because she hadn’t checked that the hatch was working properly before leaving.
Her death would be recorded as the first human ever to be devoured by alien predators. The books might even mention how cute those particular predators were.
Not far away now. The first of them leapt onto the Blue Defender’s wing.
Matti-Jay tensed.
The tall, striding robot stepped over. It lowered itself toward her.
Great. Killed by a robot, and her body eaten by the cats. They would be labeled scavengers rather than predators. Just great.
A half dozen of the cats on the wing now. The first of them near the leading edge. A couple of meters from her.
The robot lifted one leg. Aimed at her.
The foot moved right at the hatch. Gave it a hard shove.
The hatch squealed.
But it opened wider.
The robot made its lowing oboe sound again. A quick little tune.
The lead cat leapt right at her.
Matti-Jay dove into the open hatchway.
Chapter Twenty Eight
As she flew through the Blue Defender’s hatchway, Matti-Jay caught her shoulder on the hatch itself. The pain lanced through her.
She tumbled to the floor. Landed in a crumpled heap in the narrow space. Her neck was at a bad angle. She was kind of caught.
The cats whistled and peeped. Just outside. They made scuffling sounds in the sand.
Twisting and pulling, Matti-Jay managed to get herself up off the floor. Her shoulder still hurt. Reaching, she tapped the code pad to close the hatch.
Didn’t budge.
Of course. Matti-Jay got in around it and pushed from the inside. She turned and put her back against the hatch. Legs up on the inner hatch. She stretched.
And it moved. The outer hatch creaked and slid back into place. Something whirred and the sounds from outside faded away. After a moment it all fell silent and a green light lit on the internal codepad by the inner door.
Inside.
Safe. Well. At least safer than she’d been out there. If she’d been much slower, she might have been dinner. If the tall robotic thing hadn’t helped her, the cats would be tearing her apart right now.
So what was going on here? Why had that thing helped?
Matti-Jay took a breath of the recycled air. It actually tasted all right. After weeks of it, though, it had been nice to be out on the beach, breathing in clear, fresh air. Very nice.
After a moment Matti-Jay pushed on the airlock’s inner hatch. It was good to be back with the Blue Defender. The little vessel’s familiar smells and familiar hum and feel were reassuring.
She stepped into the cockpit. Water dripped from her, puddling on the floor. Her boots and socks were soaked. And the rest of her clothes. Just from that light rain.
Matti-Jay looked out through the cockpit window. The rain was coming in harder now. The cloud and haze were thickening, hiding the horizon in haze.
This was the weather here. Sweeping in and changing.
Matti-Jay jerked as something peered through.
The tall robot thing. Just outside the window. The robot’s antenna-strewn head inclined as it looked. At least maybe it was looking. Without obvious eyes, it was hard to tell.
“Thanks,” she said, and gave it a wave.
The head just hung there. Kind of friendly, but kind of creepy at the same time.
The head pulled away. The legs strode past and the thing disappeared from view.
Matti-Jay stripped off. She put the clothes in a sad damp pile. They smelled fresh.
The Blue Defender’s cabin was cramped, but still flexible and adaptable. The cockpit seats both folded down to the floor to create extra space. The tiny water closet at the back doubled as a shower.
Actually it would be great to take a shower in gravity. The zero-gravity body washers aboard the Donner were efficient and left you feeling fresh, but there was nothing like the pounding massage of a real water-jet shower.
Especially with
the way she was feeling now. Tired, and shaky
She bent over the consoles and brought up the controls to reconfigure the cabin so she could clean up. In moments she was under the shower’s steaming stream. It was good that at least this part of the Blue Defender’s systems was still working. She could enjoy the moment. Almost pretend that she wasn’t stuck here on an alien planet, thousands of kilometers from everyone else.
And over fifty light years from Earth.
No way to get home.
There was no way that the Donner would ever be flying back to Earth. The damage was far too extensive. And who knew what was left of her now that she’d crashed on the planet’s surface?
The ships could self-repair to some extent. The Blue Defender had demonstrated that admirably. It had held together and gotten her safely to the surface. Despite the damage.
Admittedly that had been touch and go for a while there. Though, she could have done a better job of steering around the storm.
That was behind her. She needed to focus on the next things. In the narrow shower space she leaned against the wall opposite the spigot. The water massaged her back. She leaned her forehead against her arm on the wall.
She watched the water spin down into the drain. Below, the plumbing would be hard at work. Taking the water, filtering it and replenishing the reservoir tanks. All a closed system.
What was the next step?
Get her vessel operational again. Get in the air and fly to Charlie and the others.
Simple.
The heat of the water was good on her shoulder. Where she’d banged it against the hatchway when she’d jumped in. She was going to have to be real careful that she didn’t get herself badly injured.
There was no help out here. The Blue Defender had very limited medical help available. Little more than a smart first aid kit.
Matti-Jay scrubbed all over again. Delaying getting out. Just a moment longer. Just to pretend for a while more that she wasn’t in absolutely the worst situation ever.
Ever.
Matti-Jay took a breath and shut off the water. It dripped for a moment, and the blowers began. The air swirled. Uneven and warm. Droplets ran upward over her belly and legs. Soon she was dry. She stepped back out to the cabin.
It was still raining outside. Harder if anything.
From the supply locker in the wall opposite the airlock hatch she took out a fresh set of clothes. Underwear and a set of warm overalls. Socks and ship slippers.
The locker still held another three outfits, emergency food, a simple tool kit and the football-sized medical kit. It had red and white casing, with a pair of buttons to activate its systems.
There were a lot of things she would never need in there. A microbot incubator and starter kit. A spare radio. Walkie-talkies. How primitive when she had handhelds. Well, there was no one else to talk to anyway. Not over short range.
Matti-Jay closed the locker and the door latched with a quiet snicking sound.
She gathered up her pile of wet clothes and her boots. They were cold and clammy. She tossed them all into the shower cubicle. It would reconfigure to clean and dry everything. Ready for her next venture out.
“Going to need something to discourage the cats,” she said. It was odd hearing her own voice. Kind of like a reminder that she was on her own.
The rain made a pattering sound on the window and the hull. She checked the time and three hours had passed since she’d left on her little expedition to the highest point.
What had happened to the time?
With some waves and taps at the consoles, she brought the pilot’s seat back upright. She felt refreshed and ready to deal with the next thing.
She had to deal with the next thing. Otherwise she would lose her mind out here. So far from everything and everyone.
Best not to think about it.
The seat molded to her as she sat, comfy and warm. So nice to have simple homey touches. As if she could live out here. Like a little vacation home.
With more taps and waves at the consoles, she brought up the vessel’s status. If she was going to attempt getting it repaired she needed to get started. It would push the self-repair capacity, she knew that already. But what she didn’t quite know yet was the extent of the damage.
Which is what she should have done first. Before she went gallivanting off and almost getting devoured by predators. Should have checked out the ship properly.
Don’t be so hard on yourself.
She’d needed the break. Needed to do something that wasn’t to do with ships crashing and destruction and death. Needed just to walk along a beach.
Matti-Jay smiled. Hadn’t that been what her parents had talked about? When they’d first gotten together. Taking walks on the beach and having long candlelit dinners.
Once that had felt weird and icky and just weird. Lovey-dovey stuff. Now, though, she just felt sad about it. She was growing up, and maybe starting to understand about love and stuff. Still kind of odd thinking of your parents as girlfriend and boyfriend.
She missed them. Too much.
Chapter Twenty Nine
The console displays came to life, giving Matti-Jay something to focus on. With some waved commands she brought up the full schematic of the vessel. The displays showed six views. A side view, a top view and a nose-on view, a wiring and circulation diagram, a structural integrity diagram and an unfolded hull integrity image.
Didn’t look good.
The schematics were color coded. Green for systems in good shape.
There wasn’t whole lot of green. Maybe ten percent.
Orange for things that needed attention. There was a lot of orange. Probably weeks of work for a dedicated crew.
If this was back on Earth, the Blue Defender would be junked. Its parts would be fed into a cycling hopper and all the raw materials would be reconstituted into new parts.
But she wasn’t on Earth. She didn’t have a recycling machine. She had microbots. Hard-working little machines that would do their best.
The rest of the diagrams showed red. Not as much as the orange, but more than the green. These were the parts of the runabout that were critically damaged. Structural members that were required not just for safe operation, but for any operation at all.
Wing surfaces. Hull panels. The main wing strut that kept the wings straight and level. Even just that was enough. If the Blue Defender tried to fly now, the wings would just fold up like a pair of hands clapping.
The microbots were tiny. Ant-sized. With thousands of them, the Blue Defender could effect a lot of self-repair. But fixing a critically damaged main wing strut, well, that had to be beyond them.
Matti-Jay started feeding the data into the repair system. Right now the whole program had hung up. Not interested in even looking. Mostly it should just operate on automatic. Now it was overwhelmed.
But she could tell it to work on various scenarios. Explore options. The system would try to do as much as possible at once but then still look to prioritize its repairs. Hull breaches, then life support, then propulsion. She had to make it focus on the flight systems. If she couldn’t get that wing strut repaired then everything else was moot.
It would take some imagination, but maybe she could coax something out of the microbots.
She needed two things, really. That strut to be serviceable enough for powered flight. And to have better communications.
Each just as important as the other.
Without being able to talk to the others, it would be hard to know their status. And hard to find them.
Without a flyable vessel, she had no way to get to them.
The design specs of the Blue Defender included some things that could be adjusted and adapted. What she needed was a better antenna. And a way to track any of the remaining satellites.
They might just be the key to saving this situation. Well, at least saving something.
Matti-Jay set to work. This was going to be a tough job. But it wasn’t as if she h
ad a whole lot of other things to do.
Especially if she was cooped up inside the Blue Defender.
No way she was going back out onto the beach anytime soon. Maybe the microbots could manufacture some kind of little weapon she could use to discourage the cats. Like a prod with an electrical arc at the tip. She didn’t want to injure the animals, but she would go nuts stuck inside for too long. Just needed a little reassurance once she was out there.
Glancing up from the console displays, she stared through the cockpit window. That rain still pounded in. Not that encouraging anyway.
Not to be out in that.
Matti-Jay set the microbots to focus on repairs to the strut. With some more waves she got fifteen percent of them to work on building a new antenna. Maybe she should see if some of them could improve the efficiency of the transmitter too? The Blue Defender was a small vessel, and that meant a smaller communications set up. There was some possibility that maybe they could build something more like the Marauder’s system.
So many things to consider.
The day progressed. She kept tinkering with the microbots’ progress. They had begun disassembling the strut. Pulling out the long-chain plastics, carbon fibers and titanium strands.
Matti-Jay tried the radio. She got back just static. The smaller contingent of microbots was peeling away parts of the second cockpit seat to make a larger antenna.
The rain eased and strengthened. The wind whistled. It grew darker outside.
Matti-Jay’s rumbling stomach reminded her that she’d forgotten to eat.
The second locker had the main food supplies. Actually they were designed for exactly this. For emergency situations. Where you had to wait things out. A couple of weeks of food.
She could probably get the microbots to build her a food reconstituter too. There would be plans in the databases somewhere.
Not the kind of thing she liked to think about, though. Once food had been eaten, it should be done. Not processed from waste and eaten again.
But you did what you had to do to survive.
From the supplies she selected a couple of transparent plastic bags. A lasagna and cheesecake. According to the labels. They both looked pretty similar.
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