Dead… Dead… Dead…
The word played over and over again in Erin’s mind. She’d reconciled herself to the fact that forty years from now, the first time she woke after the mission launch, there was a good chance Tara would no longer be alive to beam messages back to, and it would be a near certainty the second time she woke. She’d been ready to deal with that. But not this. Not to have her taken away before Erin could even say goodbye, before she could apologize for her childish rant at the café two weeks ago.
She had planned to. She had planned to apologize. She just hadn’t found the right time. The mission was taking all her cycles. No. That wasn’t true. She should be honest, even if she’d been lying to herself until this point. She hadn’t found the right words. That was why she hadn’t apologized. She’d been so very selfish. She wanted to find a way to tell her that she was happy for her and Garrett. Because she was.
Or had been.
And now they were dead.
“Erin, I’m so sorry,” Ash said. She moved to take Erin into an embrace, but stopped when the door opened behind her.
An avatar stepped in. Tara’s avatar. The machine that contained Tara’s memories, and liked to pretend she was Erin’s twin sister, but who wasn’t, in fact, Erin’s sister at all.
The digital eyes on her faceplate looked at Erin, then Ash, then Adora. The concern on her face was replaced with one of regret. She’d been coming to tell Erin the news.
“Don’t you say a thing,” Erin said.
Tara looked completely shocked by this. “Erin—”
“Not a fucking thing.”
The hurt on Tara’s face… But Erin didn’t care. She headed for the door, brushed past fake Tara, and ran down the hall.
* * *
Erin limped forward, marching ever onward, paying only passing attention to the enhanced night display through her visor. To her left, just above the brightening horizon was Menelaus’s sister planet, Paris, little more than a twinkling against the indigo sky. It was a bitter reminder of the dreams she’d had back on Earth, dreams she’d shared with a flesh-and-blood Tara.
The system’s Jovian, Helen, rested higher in the sky, nearly overhead. Since it was only one astronomical unit from Menelaus, and roughly the size of Jupiter, it stood as a brilliant blue star in the sky, perfectly visible in full daylight. Erin wondered if the Aeneid was on its way there. She imagined the great ship some fraction of the way to Helen, its crew feeling—what?—shock, certainly. Fear, perhaps. Grief over what they believed to be the complete loss of the away crew.
We’ll get to the shuttle, Erin said to the brightening sky. Don’t give up on us yet.
She kept hoping she’d hear them over the comm, that they’d swoop down and save them, but that was impossible. Their lives wouldn’t be saved by anyone coming down, but by them flying up in the escape rockets.
So she marched, ever onward, while Tara trudged behind, pulling the sled they’d pieced together from the wreckage. It carried several ration tubes, five gallons of water, and Ashley. She hadn’t regained consciousness yet, but her vitals had stabilized.
Erin’s left knee was starting to burn again. She’d instructed her suit to refrigerate the area via the gel in the lining, but she had to be careful. She didn’t want to use up too much energy; her suit, even with the solar panels on her helmet and shoulder pads, couldn’t stand up to prolonged use of the refrigerant, which was only meant for short-term first aid. She didn’t want to squander her limited supply of pain killers, either, so she stomached the pain as best she could between doses of one or the other.
She checked their progress on the topographic. God, six hours and they’d covered four klicks. Four klicks. The only silver lining was that the trees were becoming more widely spaced and a grassy plain was opening up before them. They would make good time now. They’d have to.
Shortly before the sun hit noon, they came to the foot of a range of steep-sided hills. The topo map confirmed that the only way to go was over. Erin’s knee made the ascent awkward and painful, so Tara supported Erin with her good right arm while the sled trailed behind them, tied by its rope around Tara’s waist. The sled made a shushing sound with each incremental step they made up the hill.
“Erin?”
Erin ignored her, taking another shot of the painkillers. It helped, but her knee still hurt like a motherfucker.
“Erin, I can’t take it anymore.”
“Can’t take what?”
“The silence. We need to talk about what happened back on Earth.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
Tara was silent for a time, but Erin knew she was stewing. “Why did you resent my relationship with Garrett so much?”
Erin laughed. “Your relationship?”
“Dammit, you know what I mean.”
“I didn’t resent it,” Erin lied.
“Erin, we’re on the other side of the black now, it’s only the two of us, and there’s a good chance one or both of us is going to die before we get off this planet. Just this once, let’s be honest with each other about what happened.”
Erin climbed. How could she tell Tara? How could she tell her she’d wanted to be with her until they died, that Tara had been the only constant in her life? They’d helped raise each other after Mom died, and Dad had to work three jobs just to scrape by. And again when Dad passed away. Through their parents’ deaths, through a high school populated with cruel children, through the money problems while trying to pay their way through the IASA program, Tara had always been there, and Erin would have died for her. The only thing that seemed as great as their love for one another was their mutual wish to see another world, no matter what the cost. She’d wanted Tara to be happy with Garrett, but how could she have placed a relationship of six months above their lifetime of shared struggles and mutual hopes?
Erin couldn’t voice it, but when Tara spoke again, she knew her sister understood it all.
“I never promised, you know,” Tara said.
“Come on, Tara, this is me.”
“I never meant to fall in love with him.”
“You didn’t try very hard not to.”
“I didn’t want… I couldn’t control it. You’d know that if you had tried to get to know him.”
“A lot of good that would have done,” Erin said under her breath.
“Why?” Tara said angrily. “Because he died? Because Tara died? Why don’t you just admit it? You treat me like you do because of Tara’s death.”
“I’m treating you like an avatar.”
“But I’m not an avatar, Erin. I’m your sister.”
Before Erin could help it, a laugh escaped her. It was strange to realize how much she was talking to the avatar as if she were Tara. “You’re an avatar, my dear, no matter how much your programming says you’re not.”
“You know as well as I that it’s not programming. I am Tara O’Shea, just as much as the carbon-based version was back on Earth.”
“I call bullshit.”
“I remember everything: our fifth birthday, when you got that little red pony I wanted so bad; skiing at Cascade, when you fell on your ass a million times before finally learning how to snow plow; peeing in the pool when I thought no one was watching and Dad blaming you for it. I am Tara O’Shea.”
Erin dragged herself over a particularly gnarly section of vines. “You remember how the aborigines used to think that taking a photograph would steal someone’s soul?”
“So?”
“It’s ridiculous, right? You can’t take someone’s soul by making a copy of it.”
“I’m not a fucking photograph, Erin.”
“No, that’s exactly what you are, you just won’t acknowledge it. The woman who died on Earth in a car crash before I could say goodbye to her, that’s the real Tara O’Shea, not some trumped-up facsimile.”
Erin waited for Tara to lash out, to unleash her pent-up anger. But it never came, which only proved Erin’s point: this cou
ldn’t be Tara, not in a million years.
But if that was the case, why did Erin feel so shitty?
A steep downward slope met them at the crest of the ridge just as the sun came out from underneath a bank of clouds that covered half the sky. Tara switched positions, taking the lead, making sure Erin wouldn’t fall. They made it halfway down before Erin’s bad knee buckled. The suit prevented further damage to the knee, but it was still enough to tip Erin over. Tara tried to steady her, but she was too late to do anything more than knock Erin further off balance. Erin slid down the hill, and Tara came tumbling after.
In the fall, the sled somehow slipped free and flew down the hill.
“Ash!” Erin watched in horror as Ashley slid straight toward the neon yellow forest. She somehow managed to miss the closest fern trunks, but then she was lost from view. “Hurry,” Erin said. “We have to—”
The sound of munitions erupted out of the forest. A long, deadly burst. Then another. The silence that followed stretched to unreasonable bounds.
“It can’t…” she whispered.
A heavy pounding came from the forest. Erin could feel the vibrations through the soles of her feet. They were too far away from the woods, and her knee wouldn’t allow her to reach the top of the rise with any sort of speed. Her gaze fell to the mass of vines at their feet. A metallic sheen glinted through the foliage just beyond Tara, the place where they’d slipped. Erin limped closer and found dull metal shining through, the same color as the war machine near the nosecone.
A building overgrown by the local vegetation? Or was it military? A mobile base like the one the Aeneid had said was headed for the landing strip?
“Under the vines!” Tara said.
Erin blinked. Tara was right. They had to hide.
They worked together to tear the tough vines back. The metal beneath them was slightly convex. A dome, then. The surface had a few holes that looked like sensor ports of some kind, and there were dozens of scrapes and gouges in the metal from bullets or shrapnel.
They lay down and covered themselves with vines, becoming utterly still. Erin tried to control her breathing as a walker shouldered its way through the ferns and began climbing. The body was round and squat. Its hull was the now-familiar pewter color. As it stalked forward, a high-pitched whine emanated from one of the doubly articulated legs. Its unsteady movement made it look like an enormous, drunken water bug. A four-barrel gun was mounted beneath the body, in the dead center of its belly, and opposite the gun, on the top, was a sensor cluster. Several of the eyelike stalks had been crushed. The cluster and the gun swiveled as one, back and forth, up and down, constantly scanning. And then the scanning stopped. Erin breathed as shallowly as her pounding heart would allow, but it was difficult because she swore the thing was looking right at her.
She shivered as a cloud of gray dust jetted upward from the center of the instrument cluster. It sounded the same as before, like a steam-release from an old locomotive that had just come to rest. As the cloud dispersed, the thing moved on, crawling further up the hill, pounding each leg in turn to gain purchase.
Minutes later, Erin could no longer feel the vibrations beneath her. She propped herself up like a newborn doe, and with Tara leading they headed toward Ash. As they approached the sled, Tara’s hands went to her digitally rendered mouth. Erin nearly threw up. She felt the edges of her self-control fraying.
Ashley had been reduced to an indistinguishable mass of bone and muscle and blood among a motionless flock of white and gray cloth. The rest—the rations, the water, the black box—lay in a million pieces around her.
* * *
Erin was having trouble keeping her eyes open. Behind her came the sound of Tara’s footsteps moving through the lush undergrowth. They were making their way through another forest populated by squat ferns with fibrous brown trunks fifteen feet wide. The fronds towered into the sky, reducing the ambient light to an oppressive gloom. The air was strong, with a sickly sweet smell like honeysuckle. It was a constant reminder to Erin that her suit had been breached; had it been intact, her suit’s filters would have weeded out all external smells.
Erin’s eyes burned, and several times she found herself slowing down without realizing it. She had been forced to stop the refrigerant in her knee for fear of running out of energy entirely. The solar panels would recharge the batteries, but they wouldn’t maintain their charge with constant use; if she kept it up, the batteries would run out of juice long before they made it to the landing strip.
Erin had become a machine after losing Ashley and the sled. There was less than ten hours left, and every step counted now. They had to move at three klicks an hour from here on out if they had any hope of making it in time to launch the rocket without a reprisal from the waking planet.
“I can’t feel my feet,” Tara said.
“You what?”
“I can’t feel them.”
The avatars didn’t have as many sensors as the human body, but it had a dozen kinesthetic sensors and hundreds more that simulated the skin’s ability to feel heat and pressure.
“You probably damaged something when we fell on that hill.”
“No, I remember feeling my footsteps after that thing passed us by.”
“Then maybe it’s from the crash, and you’re just feeling it now.”
Tara was silent for a while. “Maybe,” she said, sounding doubtful.
Erin’s eyes burned, and the only thing that seemed to help was closing them. She did, just for a moment, and woke, stumbling, Tara catching her arm and steadying her. How long had she been walking like that? Forty-nine minutes, she realized, after looking at the time. Forty-nine minutes.
Erin felt a squeeze on her arm, and she realized Tara was calling her name.
“What?”
“I feel funny,” Tara said.
They were less than ten klicks from the landing strip now. They had descended through the forest, then climbed uphill for several kilometers, before finally leaving the ferns behind and crossing into an increasingly dry savanna. Erin felt horribly vulnerable after leaving the relative safety of the forest, but to stay out of sight they stuck to the arroyos as much as they could.
“Erin?”
She couldn’t understand why the machines hadn’t attacked when the landing strip had dropped the day before entry. She couldn’t escape the feeling of age in those machines, the feeling of disrepair. Perhaps the strip hadn’t been sensed in time. Perhaps by dropping the strip they’d awakened the planet’s defenses. Or perhaps the strip had been allowed to land since it was essentially lifeless.
Erin felt a painful squeeze on her arm. “God damn it, Erin O’Shea, I’m talking to you.”
“What?”
“I feel funny.”
Erin took deep breaths to wake herself up. It didn’t help. “What do you mean, funny?”
“I don’t know. Sort of spacey.”
“What do your diagnostics say?”
“Other than the arm, and my left ear, everything checks out fine.”
“What about your batteries?”
Tara paused. “They’re low, but that shouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Erin asked. “I’m a pilot, not a tech.”
Tara remained quiet. Erin felt cowardly for blowing off Tara’s concerns, but they had a job to do, and it didn’t include diagnosing the neuroses of an avatar. The sun set, lighting the western clouds the color of blood and fire. Nine-point-five klicks left…
Erin concentrated on her footsteps. Step by painful step.
* * *
“You’re staggering,” Tara said.
Erin shook herself awake. It was night. The landscape was highlighted a yellow and green by her visor’s starlight system. The grasslands had given way over an hour ago to dry, packed earth with the occasional tuft of plant that crunched loudly when she stepped on them. There were still four hours to go until sunrise. She checked her heading, correcte
d it slightly.
The pain in her knee was no longer an acute pain; it was a serious ache that reached the center of her bones all along her leg. As she limped her way around a shallow depression in the dry earth, she ordered her suit to administer a half-dose of the amphetamine, only to realize there was no dose. The painkiller was gone. When had she used it up? She couldn’t afford to cool the area any longer, either; her battery power was too low. She grit her teeth against the pain and kept moving, but it was terribly slow going.
“Why don’t you rest?” Tara asked.
“Because we can’t afford the time.”
“You’re going to ruin your knee, Erin. I won’t be able to carry you if you can’t walk.”
“Can’t be helped.”
“The ship will keep,” Tara said. “We need to make it there in one piece.”
Erin stopped and turned. Tara’s face was set, resolute. Her chin was quivering, and Erin realized for the first time she could see the tiny scar along Tara’s chin that she’d received when they were eight. They’d been playing tag in the dead of winter at their home in Brown Deer. Erin had slithered between the metal bars of a geodesic climbing dome, and Tara had slipped. Chin met bar. Bar won. God, all that blood.
She hadn’t thought of that in years. It was the first time Erin had realized that one of them might die before the other. It had been a child’s notion, gone as quickly as it had come, but she remembered the incident every time one of them got sick or hurt.
“You want me to rest,” Erin said, a statement, not a question.
“What have I been saying for the last eight hours?”
“All right,” Erin said.
She settled down on the grass, and allowed Tara to watch over her. It was the first time she’d let down her guard since well before the crash, perhaps years before the crash. It felt good, having Tara take care of her again.
It felt really good.
She was asleep in minutes.
* * *
“Erin, wake up.”
She was up in a flash. It was morning. Her knee was so stiff she could hardly move it, but she made it to her feet and limped forward.
In the Stars I'll Find You Page 6