Our headquarters had been burned and most of the furniture smashed. Many small objects were missing, but whether from fire, flood, or theft it was impossible to say. The old plank roof had fallen in at two points.
It looked like a complete loss, but a little more searching revealed that they hadn’t bothered to open crates, a lot of things strewn about were merely dirty and muddy, and whatever theft had happened had been extremely hasty. Too, it looked like the rain and flood had extinguished the fire before it destroyed everything. “There’s a lot we can salvage,” I said, “and I guess what we can do is set up the best camp we can, get everything out of here we can, and then go . . . somewhere. Or stay here and settle. Or something.”
“There seems to be a failure in our planning department,” Krurix said.
Bepemm turned on him. “Oh, of course. And I suppose you have some plan for making all this work? In two generations we’ll be back to the Stone Age like every other savage around here, unless we—”
Krurix raised a hand; I had been trying to get him to apologize rather than defend, so I was happy that he said, “Just a badly placed joke. Look, since yesterday afternoon we’ve been doing nothing but run. Between all the packs we probably have two days’ food. With the flood and all, we’re going to have to rig up a still or something before we can even think about drinking the water around here. Everyone’s tired and there’s too much work to do. I was teasing Thetakisus because we just went through this horrible mess, with him leading most of the way, and everyone is safe and alive, and he was about to start blaming himself for not knowing exactly what to do next. It was a joke between friends. I’m sorry I offended you.”
Bepemm sat down abruptly on a log. “I’m sorry, too. And I’m very tired. If anyone has any suggestions—”
I shrugged. “We’ll have to set a watch, build a couple of fires, and sleep in the open tonight, probably right on Palace Square, since that looks sort of dry. It’s a good thing it’s summer, I suppose. We can lay some log floors out of driftwood to get ourselves out of the mud—that shouldn’t take long. After that I suggest we mostly get food and rest, and then tomorrow morning we start clearing mud out of the usable buildings. Not much of a plan, but it will do for the moment, I think.”
At least it gave everyone something to do. We got our little camp together and set some of the younger males on watch, teaching them how to use the hand masers and microslug guns and just sort of hoping that either they would be responsible enough or the Seteposians would be too afraid to approach us.
I couldn’t say which was the case, because I was asleep instantly and I was aware of nothing until Diehrenn awoke me the next morning. Breakfast was a ration bar and a drink of water, not any worse than what we’d often had during training years ago, and apparently a party had gone out to see if it could bring in goat, deer, or pig, so there was some hope of a better meal to come by nightfall. “Well,” I said, “I guess we pick the stone buildings that aren’t too full of mud and junk, and get everyone to work. A couple of days’ hard labor should get us enough places for everyone to sleep under a roof, and then—”
Suddenly I heard the most wonderful sound I had ever heard in my life: a duet of screeching hoots that went on and on. In a moment, everyone was looking at the sky. There, hardly bigger than the tip of my small finger now, but growing rapidly as they drew nearer, descending slowly using only their aerostats, were both of Egalitarian Republic’s landers.
* * * *
7
THE NEXT FEW MOMENTS WERE LONG; IT WAS BEYOND HOPE THAT ALL THE rest of the crew had been on the lander, and so we knew we would hear bad news mixed with the good. They must already know from our not responding that we had no radio.
“Why would they have gone to aerostat so high up?” Bepemm asked. “That’s a tricky landing—they’re going to have to come down out in the fields.”
“Hmmm.” Krurix looked at the descending ship. “Could be they weren’t en route when the fall started. If they had to do a quick getaway from the ship, they might have burned a lot of propellant without a chance to take on more—or if they got away really late, the shockwave from the atmospheric explosion might have given them some damage.”
“So they might be just as helpless as we are?” Bepemm asked.
“Not quite. They always have their antimatter charge. The propellant is plain old liquid hydrogen, and they can make that from water here. Built in equipment for it. So they might be good as new in twenty-four hours.” He sighed. “If that’s true, all we need is somewhere to go.”
Given that none of us was formally a leader, I suppose you can’t really say that discipline fell apart as the lander descended. Everyone rushed out onto the field in front of the ruined wooden palisade to watch the first lander come in. “I think you’re right,” I noted to Krurix, as we ran with the others. “Look how little he’s using the positioning jets—just enough to avoid coming down on rocks and trees or in the big mud pot there. He’s trying to conserve propellant, for sure.”
We came to a halt in the mud, and Bepemm said, “He?”
“Captain Baegess,” I said.
There was a long silence while my two friends looked at each other. Very gently, Krurix said, “Thetakisus, he’d be the last one to leave the ship. There wouldn’t have been time. Whoever it is—”
The lander slid downward, moving very slowly sideways in the slight breeze, before settling onto the muddy plain. I had a bad moment when I thought a leg might sink in a soft spot and tip the lander over, but it settled almost straight, a short spray of mud squirting up. There was a loud slurping hiss as the ballast tanks filled with compressed air, and the lander had arrived.
Immediately, without waiting, the next lander came in. It seemed to be flown even more awkwardly, and abruptly I realized—”That one’s empty, someone’s flying it on remote,” I said. It bumped down to the landing field, sending up huge sprays from puddles, but it stayed upright even when the air hissed back in for compression and it settled onto its feet.
The steps of the first lander came down, and First Officer Beremahm stepped out. I was glad to see her—and miserable because I knew it meant Captain Baegess had not gotten away. We approached slowly; Itenn came down the steps, followed by Tisix and Proyerin, still pulling off the remote rig he had used to fly the other lander down. And that was all.
I walked forward, the two other assistants behind me. Beremahm looked as if she expected us to strike her. “These are all we saved,” she said. “We were on board doing repairs when the ship started to fall. The captain overrode our doors to seal us, then he punched jettison and we were outside before we knew what he was doing. Then he jettisoned the empty lander and all of a sudden its robot pilot was calling for a signal from us— he must have told it to do that in his last few moments alive. I. . .” She fell forward and I caught her; she was sobbing.
“She’s been very . . . not good . . . ever since,” Proyerin whispered to us. I nodded, and we got Beremahm back up the steps and into the lander, hustling her over to a temporary bunk. Bepemm had had more medical training than any of the rest of us, so we let her attend to Beremahm. Krurix and Proyerin immediately started jabbering about exactly what shape each lander was in and how much repair it would need—listening with half an ear, it sounded to me like it wouldn’t be much. I turned to Itenn and Tisix, two ordinary spacers, both among our best crew, and said, “Well, I guess I should hear from you. If the First Officer’s . . . not well, then I guess Proyerin is our senior officer, and I’m theoretically his second. What happened exactly?”
Itenn sighed. She looked exhausted, as if she had been asking herself that question for the whole day since the ship had gone down. “Just what Beremahm said. One moment we were using the ship’s vacuum system to clean up junk from the last trip up we’d made, wiping down and greasing and tightening, you know, all the stuff you have to do around a working machine. Proyerin was in the back. He’d just finished flushing out the liquid hydrogen tank
and he had it about five percent filled. Beremahm was doing a checklist run through the lander astrogation system . . . and then all of a sudden we were weightless. Just like that.”
Tisix picked up the story. “Well, sir, something clicked for me and Beremahm at the same time. We’d been in the cockpit when Krurix was talking about the thing that might go wrong, how the plates might stick together, so we both knew. We were closed but not sealed, so we started for the doors—I don’t know, hoping to get to the bridge, I suppose—but when you’re suddenly weightless, well, there’s not much you can do. We had no footing, nothing to grab onto right away, and while we were getting ready, there’s a sudden thump and hiss, and we know we’ve been sealed from outside. Then there was a huge thud and we fell sideways into a bulkhead, and by the time we got untangled from that there was space and sky and Setepos under us, all whirling around in the viewport. I braced my feet on the bulkhead, jumped to the controls, slammed one fist on the power-up button and the other on the emergency autopilot. In a second we started to get the right attitude, with our tail down, as the side jets kicked in and the autopilot got us righted. Then the autopilot asked me for a course. I saw the Republic falling away below us, already starting to glow orange, and felt the lander shaking and rocking. I had about one breath to decide, or I’d never have done it, but I pointed at the first thing on the menu that would work, ‘low ballistic orbit’, and then the main engine fired hard enough to knock us all flat and nearly black us out—we must’ve pulled five gravities instantaneously, and none of us braced for it. But it did throw us up to safety—using more than half our remaining fuel.”
Itenn added, “It was brilliant that he did that in such a short time— and brilliant of the captain to remember he could save us and the other lander. I just wish there had been a crew in it; I think they must have been taking a break at that moment.
“Our cameras caught what happened to Egalitarian Republic and it was horrible. They must have been well down toward the stratosphere and parts of the ship already burned off—with luck all of them were dead from the heat—before the emergency separator kicked in and the ship’s computer fired the engine with everything it had. The blast ate the ship instantly, and we saw waves with the naked eye, a hundred bodylengths high or more, rolling away from the blast. The air and steam was white-hot all the way up into the ionosphere. If Tisix had been two breaths later, we might still have started to climb out of the atmosphere, but that white-hot shock wave would have had us for sure.”
Tisix gestured agreement. “I think Proyerin is right. He looked at the motion picture of the end of Egalitarian Republic and he says he thinks the disperser was already burnt off—you know nothing on that ship was ever intended to be in the atmosphere, and a thin structure like that would have burned right off it, just like all the little struts and pods and antennae did. So when the zero-point energy laser kicked in, it probably sent a collated beam, not a dispersed one, at full power. It would have punched right through the sea instantly and made the rock on the seabed vaporize; the explosion was even worse than Krurix thought it would be.” He clutched himself tightly and added, “Anyway, there we were in orbit, getting any kind of a look at all about every fourteenth of a day, with practically no propellant. Proyerin was going insane—that was pretty rough treatment for an engine that was only about half-worked-on—and he was crawling all over it, swearing and complaining, even before he found out there was another lander he’d have to fly by telemetry, and that the orbit it had been kicked out into was high and elliptical and practically at right angles to ours. And Beremahm . . . Beremahm ...”
“Was sitting and crying,” Itenn finished for him. “It’s not her fault,” she added defensively. “You knew that she and the captain were lovers?” she asked me.
“I was the captain’s assistant. I had to know where to find him, all the time,” I said. “Yes. And it had happened very suddenly . . . and that sudden feeling of weightlessness—she must have felt helpless—”
Tisix gestured agreement. “I managed to think of something to do and I still felt helpless. I thought I was going to get blown up any instant, actually. And then for a while we thought we didn’t have propellant enough to make a successful reentry—we thought we were stuck up there for good, or that we might have to rendezvous and dock with the other lander to get back down, since it had somewhat more fuel. Fortunately we came up with two good ideas that just barely got us here—have you ever heard of ‘aerobraking’?”
“Bouncing off the atmosphere to lose velocity? I studied it in officer training,” I said. “It’s how they did reentries in the early days of space exploration, centuries ago. And theoretically you can use it to conserve propellant. You mean you did that? And you just learned it from the library in the lander’s computer?”
“Well, I spent half a day flying it in simulation,” Tisix said. “I wasn’t about to try to get it right the first time without some kind of practice. Proyerin sort of remembered that there was such a thing, and we looked it up in the computer, and there it was. But it wouldn’t have done any good if he hadn’t had a brilliant thought. He realized that the lander’s drinking water, and the water in the recycler, could be processed through the propellant generator to make hydrogen, same way we’re using the water down here to refill the tanks. And to get down to a workable velocity we only needed the hydrogen from nineteen units of water, and we had fourteen.”
“You mean you had fourteen in the tank already, so you only needed to use five units of drinking water?”
Tisix grinned, and Itenn did as well. “We really should let you find out from Proyerin,” Itenn said. “If we ever get back to Nisu, he’ll be bragging about this one to his engineer buddies for the rest of his life.”
“We had fourteen units of water,” Tisix said. “Eight from the drinking water—it hadn’t been refilled. One from a unit I’d been using to clean up a mess at the time that the accident happened. Five from the wastewater system. We needed five more. And then it occurred to Proyerin that the processor could separate out the water and other hydrogen compounds from any fluid. So—” He held his arm up proudly, showing me the bandage; Itenn showed me hers as well.
“Not bad flying, if I do say so myself,” he said. “A procedure I’d never done before, in a ship that was only supposed to aerobrake in an emergency . . . and I’d just lost more than a unit of blood. I’m just glad that the lander we were operating as a robot didn’t need my blood, too; it had more fuel to start with and a full wastewater tank, and we were able to direct a patch-through from where we were to get that processed.”
I realized my mouth was hanging open and managed to stammer out that it was very good indeed. Before I had to think of anything else to say, Bepemm came into the little chamber where we had been talking. “Beremahm is suffering from exhaustion,” she said, “and plain old grief, which is going to be hitting all of us soon. The immediate cause of her symptoms, though, is a concussion from when she was thrown against the wall as the lander was ejected. From the look of her brain scan, she was hit hard enough to leave her severely disoriented and dazed for at least a short time, and then while she was still in the earliest phase of the concussion she took five gravities of acceleration. That would disorient and disable anyone. But I think the worst of it is shame. She’s had a perfect record and gone through a thousand emergencies before; she didn’t think she was a person who would have a breakdown at a critical moment.”
“None of us thought so either,” Tisix said. “And none of us would have done any different from what she did, if we’d been hit in the head that hard.”
“I’ve given her a sedative, and an IV to bring her blood sugar up. We’ll start her on antidepressants in about a halfday, but I want to keep her under for at least a full day, until we can be sure that she’s not going to go into a deep depression that we don’t have the equipment to deal with here. But I think if I do that—according to what the medical advisor program in the lander’s computer says—
she has a pretty good chance for a full recovery.”
Proyerin and Krurix had leaned in to hear the diagnosis as well, and Proyerin said, “Well, as ranking officer at the moment, I would love to be able to hand the job back to her. Let’s do exactly what you just said. Meanwhile I guess we try to get an inventory of people and resources, and get every gadget that we can working.”
“Spoken like an engineer,” Krurix said, smiling.
“Absolutely,” Proyerin agreed. “Making stuff work is something I understand, and I’d rather do what I understand.”
* * * *
Since we had the lander’s radio available, we could be fairly sure that the signals we were sending were getting through to Nisu, and that they at least knew we were here and what had happened to us—or rather they would know, in a bit over four years. That wasn’t any great consolation— it would be still more years before we got even a simple acknowledgment—but it was ever so slightly better than feeling that we were stranded forever.
During the two days while we got things together and hoped Beremahm would recover, Proyerin was awake almost the whole time, digging things out of the palace and seeing if he could get them to work. Krurix shared in that work most of the time. As much as anyone could be under the circumstances, those two were happy, with so much to find, test, and fix. Several of the younger native Nisuans were enlisted as a search team to pick through the rubble and find anything salvageable that might have washed out of the palace and ended up in the mud of the city, or been carried off and dropped by Seteposians. There were plenty of small objects of all kinds, and because they had all been designed as field equipment, a surprising number of them still worked.
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