He looked across at the African.
“My guess is the fault’s in the relay,” Hendry said. “If we can reconnect the matrix, maybe we can get something worthwhile up and running.”
Kaluchek looked up from where she was applying a bandage to Carrelli’s head. “You really think we can survive in this place?”
Hendry let a second elapse, then said, “You saw outside?”
The Inuit nodded, and with a wry grin said, “Reminded me of home, and I left home at sixteen, swore I’d never go back.”
Olembe grunted. “Didn’t remind me of home. Never saw snow before Berne.”
Lisa Xiang knelt beside Carrelli and stroked the unconscious medic’s cheek. She looked up. “Winters were bad in Taipei. We survived minus twenty for months and months.”
Olembe glanced back at the screen. “What little telemetry we have says it’s minus forty out there, and falling fast.”
“What about atmosphere?” Xiang asked.
Olembe concentrated. “It’s breathable. Almost Earth-norm. A little oxygen rich, a touch more nitrogen and argon.”
Brightening, Lisa Xiang said, “A breathable atmosphere is a start.”
“A start,” Olembe said. “But where do we go from here? When I was picked for this mission I expected some kind of Eden, man. We sure as hell can’t get this crate up and running again. We’re stranded here. You’re saying we can colonise this ice cube?”
Hendry said, “We might have come down in the planet’s polar region, Friday.”
Olembe was shaking his head. “I don’t think so... Hendry, access the back-up file coded 11-72-23.”
Hendry touched in the code and watched the figures slide down the screen.
“What is it?” Kaluchek asked.
Hendry said, “A scan program got a little of the planet as we came down. Not much, but enough to tell us where we landed. And it isn’t a polar region.”
Kaluchek opened her mouth to speak, but instead just shook her head.
Xiang, still caressing Carrelli’s pale cheek, closed her eyes as if in silent prayer.
Olembe snorted. “If you want to know the truth, we came down smack on the planet’s equator.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s as warm as it gets out there, sweethearts.”
Hendry turned to the screen, going through what little remained intact of the ship’s smartware matrix.
Xiang looked from Olembe to Hendry, something piteous in the size of her sloping eyes. “So... what do we do?”
“We do the best we can,” Hendry said without taking his gaze from the screen.
“Which is?” Olembe said.
He thought about it. “We assess the damage. We go out there and see what’s left. With luck, if the power plants are still functioning, and if the engineering stores are intact... maybe we can set up a colony, of sorts.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” Olembe said.
Kaluchek said, “Just two,” and smiled across at Hendry.
“I’m a realist,” Olembe said. “The way we came down, my guess is there’s jack shit left back there.”
“The first thing we need to do is assess the damage to the hangars,” Hendry said, thinking about Chrissie. “Our most useful assets now are the colonists.”
Olembe laughed. “They might be a liability, man. You thought of that? I mean, how easy will it be to survive out there? It’ll be hard enough for the five of us, never mind another four thousand.”
Hendry stared at the African. “I’m confident we can build some kind of viable colony, no matter what the conditions.” Even as he said the words, a small, treacherous voice was nagging away at the back of his mind, suggesting he was talking bullshit.
Kaluchek said, “So what next?”
Olembe shrugged. “It’s over to you, boss,” he said, smiling across at Lisa Xiang.
She was sitting next to Carrelli, stroking the Italian’s cheek. She looked fearful, then, like a frightened animal. “I don’t know. I think Joe’s right. We can’t give in. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it seems.”
Olembe sneered. “So much for your leadership qualities.” He looked across at Hendry. “You’re the senior party here. How do you feel about taking on the responsibility?” Was there a hint of a challenge in Olembe’s question?
He felt three pairs of eyes on him, waiting for his reply. He wasn’t a man of action, still less a leader. “We all take the responsibility. We assess each situation as it comes, talk it through and then come to some consensus decision, okay?” He looked across at Lisa Xiang. “Does that suit you, Lisa?”
She nodded, looking relieved.
Olembe nodded. “Sounds fine by me.”
Kaluchek nodded in tacit agreement. “Fine, Joe.”
“So first,” Hendry said, “how about we try to assess the damage to the cryo-hangars?”
* * * *
2
Hendry, Olembe and Xiang upped the temperature of their atmosphere suits, broke out strap-on illuminators from stores and set off through the maze of fractured corridors towards the cargo holds, which stretched the length of the Lovelock. Kaluchek stayed behind with the still unconscious Carrelli.
Hendry led the way along the first lateral corridor, viciously bent out of true by the impact. As he made his cautious way forward, his headlight picking out buckled corridor floors and walls, it came to him that Chrissie was dead, along with who knew how many other colonists.
The disc of his headlight played over a sheared section of decking and a truncated section of corridor wall. He felt a wave of something ice-cold against the chest panel of his atmosphere suit and realised it was the wind from outside.
This was as far as the lateral corridor went. The rest of it was gone, sheared off in the crash-landing. He came to a halt on the threshold of the alien world a couple of feet beneath him, and waited for the others to catch up with him.
Olembe established radio contact and said, “There’s no other way to get to the hangars. We’ll have to cross the ice.”
Hendry turned his head forward, playing the beam across a mess of mangled metal, much of it smouldering and glowing in the aftermath of the impact. The ice stretched beyond, pocked with dark gouges and blackened sections of what had been the Lovelock.
His heart thumped as he stepped down awkwardly and looked for the cryo-hangars. His boots crunched ice, the sharps cracks reminding him that he was the first human ever to set foot on extra-solar territory. If only the occasion had been a little more auspicious...
Olembe pointed to the starboard sponson, or rather to what remained of it. Far to the right was a snapped spar, ending in a fused mass of metal. Hendry turned, looking for the port sponson. It too had been sheared off. The sponsons had held the main drives, and he knew that with their loss went any hope of establishing the cause of the accident.
A thought occurred to him. “What were the chances of losing both sponsons?” he asked the engineer.
Olembe nodded. “Saboteurs could have got at both drives—but then again we might have lost one to a blow out in space, and the other during entry. There’s no way of knowing.” His voice sounded tinny, distant in Hendry’s earpiece.
“Wouldn’t saboteurs have bombed the Lovelock before take-off, to satisfy themselves that they’d wrecked the mission?”
Olembe shrugged. “One group did try, but security caught the bastards. Maybe this was their back-up plan.”
Hendry thought about it. “But what were the chances of the bomb or bombs detonating just as we arrived here?”
Olembe said, “Pretty good, if the bomb was set up to be triggered by the activation of the AIs when they came online approaching the destination system. It’s possible.”
Accident or sabotage, Hendry thought. He’d rather it be the former—the alternative, that the mission had been thwarted by jealous protestors, filled him with futile anger.
Olembe set off, picking his way through the debris. Hendry and Xiang followed.
He thought he sa
w something a hundred metres ahead, where the first of the hangars should have been. He stumbled, cursing the tight beam of his headlight. The only illumination, other than the three bobbing discs, was from the scant stars overhead.
But he could see enough to tell him that the hangar was intact, if dented in either the initial explosion or the subsequent crash-landing.
They came to a stop together, dwarfed by the flank of the cryo-hangar. A vast painted numeral told Hendry that this was Hangar Two, and something withered within him. Chrissie was in Hangar Three.
“Lisa,” Olembe said, indicating the hatch. “Get in there. Run a systems check.”
The pilot nodded, cycled herself through the hatch and moved into the hangar, disappearing from sight. Olembe signalled Hendry to follow him.
It was obvious that the metalwork holding the hangars together had not survived the crash-landing. The spars had snapped and buckled on impact, sending the cryo-hangars and cargo holds tumbling across the ice like so many casually scattered dice. A hundred metres beyond Hangar Two, the broad monolith of Hangar One squatted in the darkness.
They hurried towards it. Olembe entered the code into a panel beside the hatch and seconds later it sighed open. They stepped inside and automatic lighting sensed their entry and flashed on, dazzling them.
They were standing on a raised platform above the floor of the hangar. Below them, a thousand catafalques lined the aisles with reassuring, geometrical precision. Olembe was tapping at a touchpad set into the padded gallery rail.
He scanned the screen and turned to Hendry. Even behind the faceplate, Hendry could see that the African was smiling. “They’re okay, Joe. They survived.”
Without replying, Hendry turned and almost stumbled from the hangar. In slow motion desperation, careful not to lose his footing on the ice, he moved into the darkness. There were two more cryo-hangars somewhere, and one of them contained Chrissie.
He was aware of movement beside him: Olembe, keeping pace. He felt a strange concern that the African shouldn’t be aware of his desperation.
Something loomed up ahead, the black shape of a hangar. He made out a tall white number Three stencilled across the corrugated flank. Beside it was another hangar, this one a smaller provisions store.
Hendry indicated the storage hangar. “We need to see what provisions we’ve got, okay? You do that, I’ll check in here.”
Olembe looked at him, the expression in his eyes registering Hendry’s need to do this alone. He nodded.
Hendry turned to the hatch and tapped in the entry code with clumsy gloved fingers.
The hatch cracked and sighed open, easing outwards on lazy hydraulics. He paused on the threshold. A vast fear stopped him from taking that first important step. He wanted to know so much, wanted confirmation of Chrissie’s survival, that he was too afraid to initiate the movement that would bring him the knowledge, one way or the other.
Like someone afraid of water and facing a vast ocean, he took a deep breath and stepped forward.
The automatic lighting failed to respond to his presence, and he knew.
He stumbled over to the com-screen set on the gallery rail, and with shaking fingers initiated a diagnostic routine.
The screen pulsed to life and a second later flashed up three lines of script. The words were in English, yet his brain refused to acknowledge the meaning of the simple message.
He read it again, then again, and felt grief fill his chest like something physical, as hard and cold as ice.
TOTAL PRIMARY SYSTEMS FAILURE.
AUXILIARY PROGRAM INOPERABLE.
LIFE-SUPPORT MECHANISMS DYSFUNCTIONAL.
He swung his headlight around the interior, and a second later saw it. Across the chamber, where the banks of self-regulating fuel cells should have been, was a jagged, gaping hole in the corrugated wall revealing the darkness beyond.
He pushed himself away from the gallery rail and stumbled down three steps to the deck of the cryo-hangar. Maybe there was still hope. If the malfunction had occurred on crash-landing, and the resurrection program had already kicked in, then perhaps there was still a chance.
He stopped, swept his beam across the ranked catafalques. He found the third row and set off along it, counting the cryogenic units as he went. Chrissie was in Unit Seventeen. She had always claimed seventeen was her lucky number.
He approached Unit Fifteen and slowed, trailing a hand across the cold surface of the catafalque. His footsteps clicked on the ceramic floor, loud in his ears.
He came to Chrissie’s unit and stopped.
He should have turned then, walked away. He should have saved himself the sight that he would never, to the end of his days, forget. But a tiny futile hope pushed him forward. He reached out and took the lip of the crystal cover, and raised it, briefly.
His daughter was blue, and still, and when he reached out and touched her cheek it was frozen as hard as marble.
He wanted to lift her, to cradle her in his arms. He had the irrational desire to tell her that everything was all right, that she had nothing to fear, as he had done countless times in the past.
Instead he closed the lid, then turned and fled, following the crazily spinning disc of his headlight. Once on his way back to the hatch he stumbled painfully into a hard, unyielding unit. He fell to the floor, hauled himself upright and continued.
He emerged into the cold dark night and stopped, grabbing the frame of the hatch for support and taking deep breaths. For the first time he became aware of the wind, keening through the skeletal remains of the destitute starship.
He looked up. Fifty metres away across the ice was another cryo-hangar, this one marked with a giant number Four. As he watched, a small figure emerged from the shadow of its flank and approached him, growing larger. Olembe signalled with a wave.
“The sleepers in Four are fine,” he called out. “But the stores are badly damaged. The fliers are wrecked. A couple of the trucks are operable, but...” He stopped, peering closely at Hendry. “Joe?”
It was all Hendry could do to shake his head, but the gesture conveyed all the meaning necessary.
“Christ, man. All of them?”
“All of... A thousand. All dead. Chrissie...”
“Christ.” Olembe gripped Hendry’s arm in a gesture both consoling and supporting. “Come on. Back to the ship.”
He allowed Olembe to take his weight and somehow, his feet trailing through compacting ice crystals, they made their way back towards the towering structure of the Lovelock’s distant nose-cone.
Halfway there, Hendry made out Lisa Xiang’s small figure waving and running towards them. She skidded once or twice and almost lost her footing, before finally coming to a halt before them. “I was in the hangar—”
Olembe interrupted. “They’re dead, right?”
Wide-eyed behind her faceplate, Xiang shook her head. “They’re all fine. But while I was in there... I heard something.”
Hendry was hardly aware of what the pilot was saying. He could only think of Chrissie, and the fact that of the four cryo-hangars only hers had malfunctioned.
“...So I came out. I was going back to the lounge when I saw it.”
“Saw what, Lisa?” Olembe said.
She shook her helmeted head, as if in wonder. “It was... I don’t know. A being... an extraterrestrial being.” She looked from Olembe to Hendry, her expression behind the faceplate ecstatic. “It was over there, behind the microwave relay.” She pointed to a downed antenna, perhaps twenty metres across the ice.
Hendry turned to look, his heart beating fast.
“We’ve been dreaming about this event for years, centuries...” She laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe... I don’t know. Maybe they can help us. If they can survive in this climate, then perhaps—”
Olembe cut in, “Get real. Any creature making this their home is adapted, right? They’ve evolved to the hostile conditions. We couldn’t live here, even with help. And anyway, what makes you think they’d
help us? What makes you think they’d understand a fucking thing about us?”
Xiang stared at him. “This is a momentous occasion, Olembe. Need you be so cynical?”
“I’m being practical, sweetheart.”
Xiang turned to look at Hendry. “What do you think, Joe? Should we try to make contact?”
He wanted to tell her that he was in no fit state to make such a decision. His head was too full of what had happened to Chrissie to contemplate the enormity of the fact that they were not alone in the universe.
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