“It’s already done.” Tara glanced toward the tether station in the distance. “They simmed me, just now. They’ve probably already started its indoctrination.”
“You have to tell them to stop.”
“No.” Tara looked confused. “Why?”
“Because I can’t go on the mission with that thing acting like you. I won’t.”
Tara was silent for a time. The noise of the crowd began filtering back into Erin’s consciousness—a little boy laughing, someone coughing, the incessant chatter of insects. “I’m sorry, Erin, but this is what I want, and I hope you’ll accept her as a team member if not as a sister.”
Erin sat there, stunned. “You’re so fucking selfish. You can’t have your cake and eat it, too, Tara. You won’t experience any of it. You won’t know what happens to the copy beyond today. And you’ll be long dead before it reaches Menelaus.”
“I know I will, but I’ll know it’s going. It’ll be aware and alive. It’ll experience another world even if I can’t. And it’ll be with you. It means a lot to me that she’ll be there for you.”
Erin was so angry she couldn’t speak. But then she realized something. “You gutless squib. You waited to tell me until after they’d simmed you. You didn’t want your precious avatar having to deal with the guilt.”
Tara laughed silently. “Erin, I’ve been feeling guilty for weeks. I wanted the papers signed before telling you because I didn’t want you talking me out of it.”
Erin realized how heavily she was breathing. Tara wouldn’t be talked out of this. She could see that now. She also knew that Tara’s avatar was now just as much a part of the mission as Erin was. There was nothing Tara or Erin could do about it. Not any longer. That was up to admin now. So as long as the avatar checked out—and the technology was solid enough that Erin was certain it would—that sloppy copy of her sister would be going on the mission, and Erin was going to be locked up with it until the end of her days.
Unless Erin dropped out, too.
She seriously considered it. Leaving. Even mad as she was, Erin didn’t know if she could stand being parted from Tara. She’d been such a big part of Erin’s life for so long…. Erin could start a new life, perhaps on the planetary profiling team. She had all the skills and experience needed. Hell, she was overqualified.
But no. She couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t. She’d been on a collision course with Menelaus since she was twelve. No way was Tara taking this away from her, avatar or no.
Erin stood calmly, gathered her notes into an ordered pile, and placed them carefully into her purse. “I hope you and Garrett have a nice life together,” she said, then headed briskly for the exit.
* * *
Erin forced her eyes open, still feeling the hot breeze of Brazil, still feeling the burn of anger and abandonment. But the heat wasn’t Brazil’s, and she wasn’t on Earth any longer. She was a long, long way from there.
She realized she was upside down, or rather, the shuttle was. The harness straps were digging painfully into her shoulders. The entire right side of her faceplate’s interior was discolored by a chocolate-colored stain, obscuring the time readout. She was dizzy, which wasn’t good, she knew, but her mind was too muddled to remember what it might mean beyond a possible concussion. The alarm blared again, and she tongued the acknowledge. A suit breach. She immediately requested a scan of the atmosphere—it tested only for oxygen levels and a handful of toxins, but it read clean. Her years of IASA training implored her to be more concerned about the breach, but with the growing awareness of the crash, and the damage it had surely inflicted, the threat of some on-planet pathogen seemed the least of her worries.
The uplink acknowledgement in her helmet was dark, but she tried hailing the Aeneid anyway. She received only silence in return.
And then the state of the flight deck finally began to register. The windshields, which Erin realized had been robbed of their glass, revealed a wall of ferns and squat, fat palm trees. The left side of the cockpit was crumpled, the now-concave surface compressing her leg against the seat.
She turned and found Ash strapped in her seat, arms hanging above her head like a rag doll. It was difficult to see details through the dried blood in her helmet, but her monitor reported a heartbeat and shallow breathing. Relief washed over her in a great wave. Erin tongued the controls to switch her microphone team-wide. “Ash, you copy?” Silence. “Ricky? Adora?” She brought up the readouts of the away team. Ricky Watanabe and Adora Santiana reported no vital signs. Goot and Tara, the two avatars, didn’t return her suit’s pings either.
Sucking in a deep breath, Erin hit the restraint release at the center of her chest. Pain lanced through her left leg as she crumpled to the shuttle ceiling. She screamed and cradled her left knee. She had no idea how banged up it was. She brought up the med panel in her helmet and sent a local anesthetic to the area. “Fucking hell.” She coughed and sucked air noisily through gritted teeth, willing the meds to work faster. Modern meds were amazing, though. Hardly any time passed before the pain was manageable.
She dragged herself to a standing position in the open space behind her seat. Vertigo struck full force before Erin realized how bad it was, but she stood still, breathed deeply, and the dizziness passed. She was face to face with the avatar that used to be Juan Rios Gutierrez. He was mangled just as badly as the hull. How she and Ash had managed to survive this crash she might never know. She pried open the access panel at the base of Goot’s skull, revealing a readout that should have lit up and showed Juan’s energy levels. “You there, Juan?”
The panel remained dim. He’d taken too much damage. Unfortunate, she thought, but beyond that she could summon little sympathy. The real Juan had died two centuries ago back on Earth.
As she maneuvered herself next to Ash’s seat, preparing to release her from her restraints, a low thumping sound came from somewhere outside the shuttle. She held herself stock still while boosting her audio feed. The noise sounded like a fucking kaiju coming to crush the science team that had come to study it. Erin peered through the front windshield and ramped up her magnification, but could see nothing through the impenetrable mass of yellow ferns. In the blue sky above the forest, though, there was a thick cloud of what looked to be insects, and it was coming closer.
Erin turned back and released Ash’s restraints, and though Erin did her best to slow Ash’s fall, she was still seventy kilos of dead weight that crumpled heavily to the roof. “Sorry, baby,” she whispered. The booming approached as Erin maneuvered Ash toward the payload hatch. She slapped the hatch’s pad, but nothing happened, so she released it manually, sliding the door into its recess.
And then she froze.
She’d expected to find the payload bay, but what greeted her was a fern forest with a swath of debris flowing out from her vantage point like a salt-and-pepper road leading to Oz.
The rhythmic pounding approached, a sound like falling timber resonating through the nosecone, making bits of glass dance. The thing, whatever it was, couldn’t have been more than a hundred meters from the shuttle. Erin grabbed the handle on the back of Ashley’s helmet, tried desperately to heave her through the hatch, but Erin was too weak and Ashley’s suit kept getting caught. With one final heave, moaning from the pain in her knee, she pulled Ash higher and levered her over. Then, as quickly as she could manage, she hauled Ashley over the debris, over the uneven ground, in the opposite direction of the footsteps.
It was only when she’d dragged Ashley’s body behind a thicket of ferns that she thought of the shuttle’s black box. The shuttle had two of them. One was accessible from the pilot deck. The Aeneid hadn’t answered her call minutes ago, but communication had been open at the time of the crash. There might be hours of messages stored there.
She couldn’t leave without it.
She tested her knee. Man, it was bad. She’d never make it to the shuttle unaided, but she didn’t want to squander her meds, either. She debated for a few seconds as the
booming approached. She patted Ashley’s chest—“Hang on, Ash”—and then shot another dose of painkiller and a mid-grade stimulant into her bloodstream. She could feel the blood pumping through her as she sprinted for the nosecone, barely noticing the cloud of insects swarming above the forest thirty meters out. Her knee held strong, though at what cost she wouldn’t know until the drugs wore off.
Ahead of the shuttle, the nearest ferns shook.
She made it to the nosecone and over the sill, scrabbled over the roof of the cabin and dropped to the access panel at the front. She unscrewed the four oversized wing nuts and yanked the panel free. She grabbed the bright red handle of the black box and pulled with all her might. Its sudden release and the force of Erin’s pull sent her sprawling onto her back. Through the windshield she could see a dull metal glinting through the verdant yellow growth around it. The footsteps were thundering closer, but they suddenly stopped.
Erin could only hear her own heavy breathing. Nothing else. She crept backward, cradling the black box between her thighs. Another boom shook the shuttle.
She crept closer to the hatch, wincing from the sounds of crunching glass beneath her feet and hands. The whine of a large electric motor filled the air. She crab-walked over the doorway, being extremely careful to make no sound, but overextended herself, and the black box dropped. The whine intensified.
With some base-of-the-skull instinct telling her she had to run or die in the bones of the shuttle, she grabbed the red handle and sprinted for Ashley’s body. Gunfire erupted behind her. Round after round punched into what remained of her shuttle with deadly speed and efficiency. She dove to the ground before she could reach Ashley.
The gunfire finally stopped. The mechanical whine wound slowly down. Erin’s whole body tensed when a sound like an old steam engine jetting excess steam cut through the air. Finally, minutes later, the booming resumed, fading as that thing, whatever it was, followed the debris path behind the nosecone.
Erin tried over and over to hail the Aeneid, unsuccessfully, as one thought kept playing in her head: she was the only conscious survivor of a crash and the only people who could help her likely thought everyone on the shuttle had died. Her breath came in great, heaving gasps. She wasn’t getting off this planet. She was going to die here.
She took one huge breath and exhaled slowly through pursed lips. Slow down, Erin. Think. There had to be something she could salvage. Food. Oxygen. Battery packs. Anything to keep her and Ash alive until Erin could hail the Aeneid and make a plan for getting off-planet.
Just then, an alert chimed in her ear. A team member coming online.
She tongued the team readout open again. Unlike before, one avatar was now responding. Two klicks south of Erin’s current position, perhaps lying among some other debris from the shuttle, was Tara’s avatar, but she was showing as quiescent, a “sleep” state for the artificial beings. Which was odd, but maybe she’d sustained damage, or her OS had interrupted normal operation and slipped her into that state to conserve energy until she was contacted by a crew member or the Aeneid.
Erin cut a dozen vibrant yellow palm fronds and hid Ashley beneath them. There was no way she was dragging a fully laden astronaut through this forest by herself. But she’d take the black box with her. Tara might be able to read through the data—assuming, of course, the avatar was fully functional. Still, Erin stared at the readout a long while before grabbing the black box and heading off through the forest.
As selfish as it was, part of her wished it hadn’t been Tara.
* * *
She found the avatar’s body in a gully, most of it, anyway. She was still attached to her seat and a smallish section of the payload bay.
Erin scrabbled down the steep slope toward the seat. Insects with six pairs of wings swooped noisily through the air, the sounds fed to her via the ambient mics in her helmet. Tara was covered in dirt and foliage and dozens of insects that looked like iridescent hockey pucks. Erin set the black box down and brushed the bulk of the insects away and inventoried the damage. Tara’s left arm was missing just below her ruined shoulder. Her head had several severe dents, and deep scratches had gouged the charcoal-colored display, but otherwise seemed to be in good shape. The legs had taken almost no damage at all, and the torso was essentially intact, minus a few dents and creases in the fibersteel shell.
Erin took a deep breath and closed her eyes, a wave of regret coming over her as she pictured the real Tara lying on the ground before her, not her avatar. “Why’d you have to die before I could say goodbye?”
Then, thinking of Ash lying alone, camouflaged beneath the ferns but still very, very vulnerable, she pressed the button beneath Tara’s chin and held it for several seconds. The display occupying the majority of the front of the avatar’s head lit a midnight blue, Tara’s favorite color, and then a face formed—a pert nose, red hair, and almost-faded freckles along her cheeks and forehead.
“Erin?” Tara turned her head, taking in the scene around them. Her eyes widened. “The entry. Dear God, what happened?”
“We crashed.” Erin explained everything that had happened in short, clipped sentences. She showed the black box to Tara. “I need you to read through this to see if the Aeneid left any messages.”
Tara tried sitting up, but realized she was still caught in the entry chair. A clicking sound emanated from Tara’s back. She stood, a compassionate expression on her artificial face. “Erin, there’s blood on the inside of your helmet.”
“I’m fine. Just hook up to the box and try to hail the Aeneid.”
Assuming there was anything left to hail. Tara accepted the black box. Her digital face frowned at it momentarily, then she pulled a cord from one of the panels where her stomach should be and attached it to the device.
Erin began climbing the slope. “You can do that while we walk, right?”
Erin heard Tara’s footsteps follow her out of the gully and then fall in line behind her. “You should really let me take a look at you.”
“No time.”
“You think Ash is going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Erin, are you all right?”
One of the dragonflies landed on Erin’s faceplate. She scraped it away, and a handful more took its place.
“You’re going to have to talk to me sometime,” Tara said.
Erin kept walking. Ash. Getting back to Ash was what was important.
Behind her, Tara stopped walking. “Erin…”
There was a note of anxiety in her voice, the kind Tara used to get when she was worried and nervous to talk about it. Like at the café, Erin thought. She turned to find Tara staring at the black box with a pinched expression.
“They left a message…”
Captain Lemercier’s strong voice emanated from Tara. Entry Shuttle Delta. Warning. Series of electromagnetic imprints discovered around planet immediately after crash. Aeneid assuming defensive stance until more information known. Have moved into orbit around Helen. A very large imprint is moving north along coastline. Assume it’s a mobile base. It will reach landing strip in thirty-four hours. Leaving Epsilon…
The recording just stopped. Erin felt the blood drain from her face. “That’s it?”
Tara nodded.
“What’s the timestamp?” Erin asked.
“Twelve minutes after the crash,” Tara answered, “which was seven hours ago. What do you think’s heading for the strip?”
“Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
Captain Lemercier said they were leaving Shuttle Epsilon. It must still be in orbit. And the landing strip had three escape rockets.
“Let’s get moving,” Erin said, and set as brisk a pace as her knee would allow. They had to reach the strip, and they had to do it in less than twenty-seven hours. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to be there when it arrived.
* * *
Erin finished a set of curls in the IASA gym, feeling the burn, letting it brighten sweetly unti
l she couldn’t take it anymore. As she dropped the weights into their holder with a clang, Adora Santiana jutted her chin toward Erin.
“That all you got, O’Shea?” she asked.
The two of them were the only ones in the gym. Adora was in her sport bra and tight black boy shorts—what she always seemed to wear when Erin was alone with her. It was just random, Erin was sure, some combination of Erin’s heightened senses when the two of them worked out together and Adora’s eagerness to show off her supremely ripped frame.
“You think you can do better?” Erin shot back.
Adora smiled, ran her sweatband across her brow. “I know I can, chica.”
She stood from the leg press, clearly preparing to come over and show Erin a thing or two—something Erin wouldn’t mind at all, truth be told—but before she’d taken three steps, the door at the far side of the room opened and Ash stepped in.
She looked from Adora to Erin with a tight expression.
She and Erin had been fighting lately, and this was exactly why. The mission was set to go in three weeks, and Ash and Erin seemed to be growing apart while Erin and Adora grew closer.
Not wanting to give her too much time to think, Erin crossed the distance between herself and Ash, then took her by the hips and pulled her in. She laid a deep kiss over Ash’s lips, which Ash responded to by pushing Erin away and wiping Erin’s sweat off her mouth.
She didn’t look mad, though. She looked concerned.
“What’s wrong?” Erin asked.
“Erin, it’s Tara.” She glanced over to Adora, who was approaching them, a look of growing concern on her face as well.
“Ash, what?” Erin said. “Tell me!”
“Tara and Garrett…” Tears were gathering at the corners of her eyes. “They were in a car crash.”
“What? They’re all right, aren’t they?”
Ash shook her head. She blinked, and her tears slipped down her cheeks.
“Ash, tell me they’re going to be all right.”
“The tail of their car was clipped. They slid down an embankment.” Ash took a deep, stuttering breath. “Garrett was dead when the ambulance arrived. Tara died en route to the hospital.”
In the Stars I'll Find You Page 5