by R. Lee Smith
The fact that she could smell the smoke at all—and now feel it itching at her nose and throat—meant that the fire was somewhere in the ventilating system. Or, even worse, that the Sleeper wasn’t airtight the way it was supposed to be, and if it wasn’t, what else wasn’t working right? Where were they? Dear God, was the ship burning in space? No, no surely not. The false gravity the ship used during flight pulled everything straight toward the floors, no matter how the ship itself was tipped. She was on her side, so there had to be real gravity, meaning that they’d landed.
Only she was on her side. So they hadn’t landed. They’d crashed.
“A medico has been notified of your distress,” the voice informed her. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute eleven seconds.” A short pause and that musical tone again. “The umbilicus is about to be withdrawn. You may feel some discomfort.”
She didn’t or perhaps simply couldn’t notice against the prospect of the ship burning all around her, but she could hear the whispering sound as the cable slithered out of her clothes and back into its port.
“The umbilicus has been successfully withdrawn,” the computer said. “You will shortly begin to recover mobility—”
Amber’s hands twitched. Then her lips, although she couldn’t manage to shape the word she wanted, which was just as well since it was nothing but a swear and no one was there to hear it anyway.
“—will not open immediately. Please remain calm. Your Sleeper is in perfect working order and will unlock as soon as its final maintenance scan has been completed.”
Amber’s eyes opened at last, but showed her only the glass plate against her face, fogged over by her own breath. She saw no smoke, except the thin ribbons sneaking in through the vent. She was able to see only by the light of the monitoring bar as it finished its sweep down by her feet; the overhead lights had not come on the way the seminar had said they would. Her room remained perfectly black.
She rolled over, her numb arms falling limply across her stomach, slow to respond after being crushed up between her and the Sleeper’s wall. The computer was still talking, telling her that she should report to the recreational area of her housing unit as soon as she was released by a member of the crew. The disembarking stations had been alerted and someone would be here shortly to release her. Did she want directions to the recreational area now?
“No,” croaked Amber. She got her arm up, groping clumsily at the underside of the Sleeper’s lid until she hit the medico alert switch. “Hello?” she said and coughed. The air coming in through the vents suddenly seemed smokier. And hotter. “Hello? This is Amber Bierce in room…um…three. In the women’s dorms. Mod A. Or WA, I guess. I’m okay, but there’s something wrong with my Sleeper. I can smell…smoke…hello?”
No answer. If she held her breath to listen, she could hear the faint hum of empty air in the speakers, so they were probably working. But no one was answering. Of course, they might all be away from the alert station, if every screaming person Amber could hear had their own medico dispatch, but Amber really didn’t think so. There weren’t enough medicos on the ship to answer all those screamers.
“Hello?” Amber pushed the switch again, and again, and then really leaned her thumb on it and kept it there, but no one buzzed through and told her to get off and quit being a bitch. No one told her she was on the list of panicky people to deal with and she’d be charged a fee or even arrested for making a nuisance of herself on her first day awake. No one told her anything. Because no one was there.
“Bullshit,” said Amber, badly frightened. But she stopped playing with the alert switch at once and started hunting for the latch.
It opened without incident, dispersing the fear that she would be burnt to death right here in the tube, but it didn’t go far. She could still be burnt to death in this room. She rolled out and onto her feet, but kept her hands on the Sleeper to help keep her balance until her head was together. The floor was definitely slanted, but not as much as she’d thought inside the tube. Maybe it was a little steeper than the average incline on, say, a wheelchair access ramp, but not much more. She could walk just fine.
Amber let go of the Sleeper and moved to the wall, unlocking her duffel bag from its restraints without any thought in her head at all except for how much she needed to hurry up and get out. Getting her luggage was Step Two of that process, right after exiting the tube and right before opening the door, so she did it. She didn’t think she was in shock. She knew she was scared, but she thought she was handling it rather well, all things considered.
“Please remain in your room until you are released by a crewman. Failure to remain in your room may result in loss of privileges or reduction of earnings.”
“Fucking bill me,” said Amber and opened her door.
The smoke came sweeping in, eddying around her in gusts and streams, sometimes thick enough to choke, but not often. The wind was blowing the other way. The wind…
Amber looked out through her open doorway at what should be the central hall of Mod A and saw an ugly overcast sky instead. The hallway broke open just a few meters outside her door, leaving nothing but a handful of odd-numbered rooms before those too were just…gone. Out of the entire mod, there were only five doors—
nicci
Amber lunged for her sister’s door, catching at its frame to anchor her on the metal ledge that used to be a hallway. Nicci’s door opened as easily as her own had done. Nicci’s Sleeper was still shut. Nicci was on her side, both hands pressed to her face, crying. She screamed when Amber opened the Sleeper, slapping and kicking and trying to pull the lid shut again until Amber got her by the arms and gave her a shake.
“I’m having a nightmare,” sobbed Nicci, still struggling. Then her dazed eyes finally seemed to focus. She shrank back against the wall of her Sleeper, then let out a startling cawing cry and attacked.
To Amber’s knowledge, Nicci had never hit anyone or anything in her life. It was the last thing she was expecting; she never thought to duck away but only stood gaping as her baby sister slapped her in the forehead, the ear, the chin and the nose. Then Nicci burst into fresh tears and lunged in to hug her, howling, “You promised there wouldn’t be dreams! I want to wake up now! Right now!”
Amber brought up her arms and hugged her back. If it wasn’t for the mild throbbing of her nose—Nicci was no better at hitting than Amber at dodging—she’d wonder if it had really happened at all. Nicci didn’t hit people and Nicci would never hit her. They were sisters. They were all either of them had left.
‘She’s in shock,’ Amber decided. ‘People in shock do weird things.’ “Come on, Nicci,” she said out loud. “Get your bag.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Get it anyway. We have to go.”
Nicci allowed herself to be pulled from the Sleeper and put on her feet, but she made no effort to do more than that. Amber had to pull down her duffel bag and put it in Nicci’s arms, and then had to take her sister by the hand and physically lead her through the door. Nicci moaned when she saw what was waiting outside and refused to step out onto the broken ledge, but Amber didn’t try to force her yet. She didn’t know where to go either. Following the green line back through the ship to the boarding bay was the only thing she could think of; it seemed that the ship had broken cleanly off at the perimeter wall of Mod A, suggesting that the rest of the ship was still there. That it might be a very bad idea to go any deeper into the burning ship did not yet occur to her. She let go of Nicci, who promptly began to cry harder, and eased carefully out along the ledge until she could reach the keypad beside the sealed door that separated the women’s dorms from the rest of the ship. The ship was slanted so that gravity pulled her into the wall, which was lucky because she was not the most coordinated person under the best of conditions. When the door didn’t open at her touch, Amber turned around and put her back to it, utterly lost. Where was she supposed to go now?
Down.
&nbs
p; She looked down through shifting walls of smoke and saw Mod A and the rest of the Pioneer about five meters below her, all three levels—crew civilian and ship’s functions thank god for all those informative seminars i learned so much—pancaked together in a rumpled ruin, like a burnt blanket someone had tossed on the floor. Beyond it, the blackened scar of the ship’s landing reached out for miles, lifeless.
But someone was alive. The screaming/sobbing/hysteria had never stopped, never even slackened. People were alive and they weren’t in Mod A, that was for sure.
Amber crept back along the wall to Nicci. “We have to get down from here,” she said firmly. She felt better, having a goal, a plan. “So we’re going to drop down—”
“No! No, we can’t! We’ll fall!”
“It’s not that far, Nicci. We can do this.”
“We have to stay here, okay? Someone will come and get us, okay?”
“Maybe,” said Amber, looking doubtfully back at the sealed door that led deeper into the ship and where she knew (in the shocky state she didn’t realize she was in) the crew and the Fleet were mobilizing to meet this emergency. “But it could be a long time before they get to us and the ship is on fire. I’m not waiting. We’re going down.”
Nicci shook her head frantically, even as her tears subsided. She had to be tugged out onto the ledge, but after that she moved on her own. Giving orders made Amber feel better; taking them had the same effect on Nicci.
“Right there.” Amber pointed to the little jut that was left in front of the mod door. “That’ll be the shortest drop. Send your bag down first and try to land on it.”
“You go first, okay?”
Amber shook her head. “I’ve got to check the other rooms.”
“No! Don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”
“I’m not leaving, I’m just—”
“No!”
“Damn it, Nicci, just do it!” Amber shouted. “This is serious, so stop acting like a fucking baby and go!”
Nicci stared at her, tears sliding sideways on her face in the wind.
Amber stared back, as stunned or more than she’d been after Nicci’s attack. She and Nicci fought now and then, but she didn’t think she’d ever raised her voice before. At Mama, sure…but not at Nicci. She wondered if the crash had made her go crazy, the way that things sometimes did in the movies. “I’ll be right behind you,” she said. “Okay?”
Nicci nodded, silent. She looked down, hugging her duffel bag to her chest, then slowly got to her knees. Her lips moved, but the wind took away her words.
“You can do it,” said Amber, backing away. “I’ll be right back.”
Nicci did not react. She might not have heard, the way Amber hadn’t heard whatever she’d said. It was the wind…and the screaming.
Amber turned around, groping her way along the wall past Nicci’s room and her own to the next room, WA-0005. The door opened when she slapped the pad and the woman pacing inside immediately turned on her in the kind of calm, accusatory fury that meant she was probably on the verge of some pretty impressive hysterics. “It’s about goddamn time! What the hell is going on? Who are you? Are you one of the crew?”
“No, I’m from next door. We crashed. Get your things.”
“Figures. This is all the military’s fault,” she spat, yanking ineffectively at her duffel bag until Amber came over and opened the restraints. “The Director had billions and billions of dollars, but oh no, he had to let the military take over and what did they do? They contracted out to the lowest bidder. Over eighty percent of this ship was built in Uruguay, do you believe that?”
“Uh…”
“It’s a fact,” the woman insisted, shrugging the duffel onto her shoulder. “You can look it up. Or at least, you can look it up when we get back to Earth and you better believe that’s where I’m going right now. Right now! And if they don’t have a lifeboat on this goddamn thing that can get me there…” She faltered, some of the fire in her eyes fading behind a shine of watery panic, but only for a moment. She shored herself up, her shaking hands clenching into fists around her duffel bag’s strap. “Where are we going?”
Amber moved aside. The woman’s eyes flicked past her to the smoky sky where the other half of the hallway should have been. Her brows knit. She took one step forward and looked down, at the top of the Pioneer. Her lips parted, then pressed firmly together.
“I am going to sue their precious little Director to death,” she announced. “I’m going to start a class-action suit and just…just kill him with it. Where do we go?”
Amber pointed down the ledge to the place where Nicci still huddled, hugging her duffel bag. “Drop down from there. Make sure she gets down too, okay?”
The woman nodded and went, keeping one hand on the wall and the other in a firm grip on her duffel’s strap. Amber watched until she saw the woman talking and Nicci listening, or at least looking up, and then worked her way back to room WA-0007, but when the door opened, it showed her only half a room. The hallway wall might continue on for two more doors, but the ship itself stopped here. There was no Sleeper, no angry occupant ranting about lawsuits and Uruguay, no floor. There was only smoke, broken framework, spitting cables, and the ruin of the ship below her. Of the four thousand people who shared this mod of the women’s dorms, she’d saved everyone there was to save.
All three of them.
The shock she hadn’t known she was in suddenly welled huge inside her and popped, soundless, like a soap bubble. Amber staggered back, feeling the slant in the floor and the distance between her and the ground for the first time to real, disorienting effect. Smoke filled the gasping breath she took; she bent, coughing, and saw the world darken around her.
‘If you faint up here, you’ll fall and die,’ she thought, but she wasn’t fainting. The world really was darker. The clouds overhead were thickening; the heavy wind didn’t seem to be blowing them away, but rather pulling them down. She’d never seen clouds do that before. It wasn’t even raining.
But it was cold. It was cold and the wind was brutal and the only shelter Amber could see was a burning ship.
She didn’t know what to do.
5
She stood there for an undeterminable stretch of truly awful minutes, locked in a kind of mindless, paralyzed panic, aware that time was passing but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. It was bad, and she often thought back on that moment later with the idea that that had to be at least some of what Hell was like, if there was a Hell worse than this, but eventually Amber looked down and saw Nicci below her, huddled small against a twisted flap of metal in the torn hull. Smoke poured through this wound so thickly it formed a solid wall behind her, but Nicci just sat there. Like it was a safe place. The other woman had left already but Nicci was waiting for her. Nicci needed her, just like always. She had to be there.
“Okay,” whispered Amber, and started back down the ledge. “Time to suck it up, little girl. Let’s do this.”
She dropped her duffel bag over the side and tried to dangle herself over it, but her arms gave out before she even had both legs free of the ledge. She fell with a yelp and landed mostly on her back, missing her stupid duffel bag entirely. She lay there for a second or two, dazed and breathless, needing Nicci to come tug at her arm before she could pull herself together enough to try and stand.
“Are you okay?” she managed, rubbing at her back.
“No.”
Amber looked her up and down. “You’re fine,” she said, and picked up Nicci’s duffel bag, shoving it once more into her sister’s arms. “Where’d the other lady go?”
Nicci looked helplessly around. “I-I don’t know…”
“Nicci, we have to stay together,” Amber said firmly. “I know you’re scared, but we’ll get through this. Now I need you to pull it together. Which way did she go?”
Mutely, Nicci pointed across the smoky wreckage.
“Okay,” said Amber. She shrugged to feel the weight of her duffel
bag more securely against her shoulder. She took her sister’s hand and squeezed it. She was fine. They were both fine. She started walking.
When they reached the edge of the hull, there was another drop, but the buckling of the Pioneer’s metal skin when Mod A had broken off made for a fairly easy descent. Not as easy as walking down a set of stairs, but there weren’t any more painful landings and when they reached the bottom, they were standing on the ground. True, the ground had melted and cooled again into a mass just as rigid and uneven as the crumpled hull had been, but it was the ground and that made her feel better. She was off the ship and she’d gotten Nicci off the ship. Now she just had to find the others.
They walked, hand in hand, around the side of the Pioneer and as soon as they’d navigated the corner and were out of the smoke and most of the wind, there they all were. And at first, she thought it wasn’t that bad. People were screaming, crying, and hysterical, sure, but there were a lot of them. They’d survived. That had to count for something, right?
Her relief at seeing so many survivors was a kind of second shock, and its bolstering effects wore off much more quickly. Even as she was taking that first reassuring look at the crowds, her vision seemed to double, and suddenly the hundreds of people before her shrank back into the miniscule fraction of fifty thousand colonists and crewmen that it really was. She staggered on her feet a little and then turned slowly around and looked at the ship.
This time, she really saw it.
The Pioneer had scraped over the skin of this alien world for miles, sharpening itself like a knife; family housing and the rest of the forward compartments were gone, rubbed away, and the pointed tip of what was left had ultimately struck something unyielding in the ground and stabbed itself in. This was what had created the steep angle of the ship’s final position, which had in turn created the awful weight that had caused not just Mod A but also Mods B and C to break away and fall. All the women’s dorms were gone. The men’s mods were still there, jutting crazily into the sky and spewing fire from every opening. Virtually everyone was dead.