Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  If you fall, then Search and Rescue is supposed to launch within a minute of the call-out and dive after the poor sucker, catching him before he drops too deep. Sometimes it took two minutes to launch because the union wouldn’t give up the SAR pilot slot and let the machines do it. Plenty of time though, because, like I said, you can fall a really long time before you get crushed or melted.

  But on that morning, SAR wasn’t going to come after me. The shock of the first missile impact knocked me off my feet and flung me at least ten meters up and sideways. I dropped headfirst past the intake, then down past the collector vane, barely missing a rigged spar. I looked up between my boots and saw the whole upper superstructure collapse and shred. Flames and smoke blossomed out of the inhabited sections when oxygen met hydrogen and the torn metal added a spark. Out in the blue distance I saw numbers Four and Six rigs suffering the same fate. That’s when I figured there was a war on.

  I figured I was dead, but it didn’t hurt to give miracles a chance. So I followed my training and twisted into a prone position to slow my descent. My transponder indicator was on, and for a second I thought about shutting it down. I didn’t want to attract a missile from whatever killed us. It was a ’Roider attack, I figured. Had to be, because only the Asteroid Belt Confederation had any reason to hit a Martian-owned rig, and they probably didn’t care that I was just an Earth boy trying to make a living.

  But it’s a long fall. And that gave me time to decide that just because it was a surprise attack, that didn’t mean they would hunt down helpless survivors. Well, maybe they would. But if I went silent, no SAR from any world or rock or station was ever going to find me and I was dead for certain. I didn’t know until later that my transponder was broken.

  So I fell. Denser wreckage started falling past me, enough junk for me to turn face up to look out for a chunk with my name on it. Burning debris lit up the dim blue sky, glowing brighter than that far spark of the sun. It had been a nice morning.

  I didn’t see any SAR flyers or lifeboats coming out of that mess, but one big chunk caught my eye. It was the mostly intact lower observation deck, a fancy module built around a panoramic dining area and luxury suites for visiting executives. Below the deck was a huge morph metal fin that once acted as the forward rudder. Now it was morphing, changing into something big and round, something that looked like a giant umbrella. No, not an umbrella. A parachute.

  It fell past me. The morphed chute expanded and flipped the observation deck upside down, and then the whole thing began to come back up toward me. Not really. It was just falling slower. But it looked like the miracle I was waiting for, so I did my best flying human imitation and angled my fall toward it. It’s not as easy as it sounds. It would have been easier if I had a cape or wings or something, but the thing wasn’t that far away, and the difference in fall rates wasn’t too big, so I survived the bounce off the edge of it. Nearly shattered my wrist; morph metal is still metal. But I got a grip on this strip that was acting like a rope or support and half slid, half fell onto the inverted base of the deck. The metal above me was still morphing into something like a wing or a parasail, slowing the fall until we were getting near some sort of buoyancy. The morph was not something preprogrammed, as far as I knew, so somebody had to be alive in there. I tried my comms, but nobody answered. My magnetic boots saved my ass at least twice as I crawled my way across the hull until I made it to an air lock. The lights on the lock’s panel showed emergency power, and the damn thing wouldn’t listen to voice commands, so I hit the emergency entry sequence and waited until the lock reached outside pressure.

  It was dark under the wing. The wind was picking up, and my suit said I was at two hundred atmospheres. Deeper than I wanted to be, but a lot better than still falling into the crushing sky.

  The lock opened and I dropped into it. I worked the upside-down manual controls and waited again as the pressure dropped to zero to push out all the hydrogen, then rose back to one standard atmosphere. I knelt beside the inner lock door, opened it and lowered myself into a corridor lit dim and red with emergency lighting.

  I’d been on the observation deck a lot of times before, but it didn’t look right upside down. My suit wasn’t talking to this detached piece of the rig, so it took me a while to get my bearings. Then I crawled down the passage to find a door to the main deck. The stairs were upside down and didn’t really help, but with boots up locked against the wall, I got the door open, then swung through and dropped onto the ceiling four meters below.

  A woman with a two-foot section of metal pipe met me as I got back onto my feet. She gripped the pipe like a club, but at least she wasn’t swinging it at me. I put up my hands and said, “Hold up! I’m friends.”

  I still had my helmet on. It didn’t have an external speaker, since, well, if you had your helmet on, it was supposed to be because everyone else had their helmet on, and radio was the only way to communicate. Except the radio wasn’t working, and if it had been no one was listening anyway. So I did my best hands-in-the-air routine and waved and pointed until she got the idea that I was going to take off my helmet. She nodded, looking more impatient than afraid or angry.

  “How did you get in here?” she asked.

  I eyed the pipe. She held it like she didn’t really know how to swing it, but I wasn’t about to put that to the test.

  “Through the air lock. Hi, I’m Vic Basilone, Outside Mechanic, Grade Two.” I held out my right hand and she looked at her pipe before grasping my hand uncertainly.

  “Kyla Resnick. I’m a nurse and—”

  “Great, because I really smacked my wrist on the way in and . . .” Her look was like the one my mother used to give me when I’d done something really annoying, and that stopped me short.

  “We’ve got bigger problems,” she said. “Come on.”

  I followed her across the ceiling-turned-floor, stepping around chandeliers overturned and drooping, hopping through the high threshold of an inverted doorway.

  “I’m not sure I can place that accent,” I said.

  “I’m from Thetis—on Venus, not the asteroid.”

  I nodded. Most of the crew were from Venus or Earth. The gravity on Uranus was just less than Venus, but still over twice what a Martian was used to, never mind a ’Roider.

  “I thought I knew everyone on the crew.”

  “We just got here. I’m on the staff of Mr. Achuthanandan.” We stepped around some more damage in the corridor and around the corner. Three men lay unconscious on the floor—what used to be the arched ceiling.

  “The banker?” I asked. I’d seen something about an incoming shuttle with bankers and some sort of loan restructuring. I only remembered the name because I didn’t know how to pronounce it.

  “Yes,” she said. “Do you know any first aid?”

  “Just the basics.” I’d passed the certification, but I wasn’t exactly up on the practice.

  “How about engineering?” another woman asked. The voice came from the better-lit room just past the injured men. Her accent I recognized right away, Hesperian Martian.

  Nurse Resnick—good looking, but a little too stern for me to start calling her Kyla—gestured with her head toward the open door and turned her attention back to the three wounded men.

  The lit room was an oversized tech closet. Resnick had an Earther’s build, but the dark-haired woman in the room had the spindly shape of a Martian. She sat in front of a terminal pulled from a rack and inverted to our new orientation. Workstations and panels still hung upside down in the small room. Blinking lights and battery packs filled three other racks.

  “I can fix things pretty good,” I told her. “I’ve got Level Two ratings in—”

  “Yeah, whatever. I need another brain to double-check what I’m doing here. Sort of out of my experience.”

  Her terminal showed a schematic of the morph metal, now
tapered like a giant wing. Another screen, still upside down—at least from my perspective—showed tracking and atmospheric data. The slope of one line meant that we were still falling, but really slowly.

  “Air density down here is about twenty times standard, and I’ve got the glide ratio about twelve to one, which is pretty good, but it’s not going to level off to flat before we get too deep.”

  “What about thermals?” I asked. “Vic Basilone, by the way.”

  “Moor Nakamura.”

  “More?”

  “Moor like the African. For Maureen. I hate ‘Mo.’ What do you know about thermals?”

  “Um, they help gliders rise.”

  “So you know nothing, then?”

  “Well, they’re hot, so you’d look for heat rising.”

  “Great, genius.” I don’t think she meant it as a compliment. She thumbed toward another screen. “See if you can bring up a heat map of the atmosphere and give me something to aim for.”

  I heard a man screaming in the hallway, a sound of intense pain. I turned back toward the doorway, but Moor grabbed my arm. “Let the nurse handle it. Compound fracture or something.”

  I went back to the screen, pulled it out of its setting and turned it around, then flicked through the menus and query screens until I got to Meteorology. I had no current data—not surprising since the met sensors were blown to bits, but I got up the last recorded data.

  “You the one who morphed the fin? Pretty clever. Genius, even.”

  Moor snorted. “Yeah, maybe, but all we have is this battery power and the auxiliary life support, so even if we don’t get crushed or cooked, we’ve got about a day until we’re drained.”

  “Standard or local day?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, twenty-four hours is better than seventeen.”

  “Yeah, closer to twenty-four. At least twenty. Maybe. Depends on how much power I need to use changing the morph.”

  I nodded. Better than the thirty minutes that I thought I had left to live when I’d fallen into the sky. “Looks like there used to be an updraft off twenty klicks east-northeast.”

  “Great, I’ll try that.” Moor adjusted the morphing metal to dip one part of the wing down. We turned, but it was painfully slow and our glide ratio fell.

  “Now what?” I asked her.

  “Well, Vic, why don’t you check out the rest of the rooms and see if you can find some power modules or anything else that might keep us going. I didn’t exactly have a chance to look around a lot before I came up with this hare-brained scheme.”

  I started to leave, then stopped in the doorway. “I don’t recognize you either. Did you come in with Achu-what’s-his-name, too?”

  “Nah, just off the last shuttle and into a Senior Systems Tech job. My first shift. It was supposed to be a nice job far away from all the trouble. I should have stayed in the army.”

  I gave her a look that must have made her defensive, because she continued, “Ex-Technical Sergeant, Third Battalion, Second Cohort, Sixth Army Legion.”

  Yeah, I know, falling through the sky and all that, but the Martian Unification Wars were still a big deal at the time. At least until that day where I fell into the sky and the Martian-Belter War started. So I had to ask, “Were you in the war?”

  Now she gave me the look like my mother used to and said, “Yeah. Lost both legs in the Labyrinth.” She looked at two fully functional legs and continued. “But they got better. Nice medical pension, too. Eventually.”

  Seems that was all she wanted to say about it, so I went off on my search. I stepped over the high threshold and passed Resnick, who was wrapping the leg of the man who’d been screaming. A bone was sticking out. Not pretty, but the other two guys looked worse. They both were unconscious, bloody and pale.

  I found three others in my search of the rooms. I didn’t know if Nurse Resnick had already checked on them, but they were obviously dead. The only useful things I found in the upturned wreck of the kitchens and storerooms were a few small battery cells. Hardly enough to make a difference. But at least it looked like we had plenty of food and water.

  “Not much,” I said, dropping the pile of bottle-sized battery packs when I got back in the tech room. That room really wasn’t much bigger than a closet, but it had enough backup power to keep our systems running. Turns out most of the power Moor was using to morph the metal came from the kitchen backup generators, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  “I’ve stopped the descent, but we’re not rising at all,” she said. “And when darkness comes, we’re probably sunk.”

  “So to speak. So what’s the plan, Sarge?”

  “I’m not a sergeant anymore!”

  I backed off, hands up. Note to self, don’t bring that up again. “Sorry, I just wanted to know—”

  “Yeah, well, unless you have any better ideas, I’m going to cut climate control for everything but this room, this corridor and the one that leads to the rear air lock. If we do that, especially if we cut off the observation deck, then I can really save power.”

  “What about rescue?” Resnick said. She’d popped her head through the door. “I’ve got a man with an epidural hematoma and another one who’s probably bleeding internally. I don’t have anything but drapes and splints to fix them.”

  “There were a couple of first aid kits in the kitchen,” I said.

  “Did you bring them?”

  “No, but I can go—”

  “Never mind, I’ll get them.” She was gone, stomping down the hall. Moor glared at me and I decided it wasn’t time for excuses.

  “So what about a rescue?” I asked. “All three of our rigs got blown away, but there’s another eight Martian rigs out there, plus four Venusian rigs, and if we really need to ask, at least a half dozen ’Roiders.”

  Moor frowned. “Spread across a sky with over fifty times the surface area of Mars. Good luck finding them. Besides, the other Martian rigs are probably gone, too. And we might have taken out the Belter—’Roider, if you insist—rigs in retaliation.”

  She didn’t seem to have a positive attitude. But I’d just survived—so far—falling off a burning rig, so maybe I was just a bit more optimistic. “So let’s see where the nearest Venusian rig was when all hell broke loose,” I said. “We’ve got a Venusian banker and nurse aboard, and I’m from Earth, so it’s not like I’m likely to be seen as anyone’s enemy.”

  Moor flicked the screen and muttered some commands—don’t know how she got voice to work when it wouldn’t for me, but I’m not that sort of tech—and said, “It’s just about a thousand klicks to the Caelus IV rig at its last reported location and heading.”

  “So we’d have to go about fifty klicks an hour . . .”

  “Its wind stream is plus ten meters per second relative, so we have to do more like seventy-five or eighty, or cut into its stream, which is a longer distance. I’m not a glider pilot or anything, but I know that all we got to work with is trading altitude for velocity. In this soup, I can get us sixty klicks across and five down an hour, but we’re already forty down from where we started, and twelve hours of drop will kill us. Probably cook us before it crushes us.”

  “Yeah . . . Hey, I’ve got a stupid idea.” Maybe not the best way to say it, but it got her attention. “Can’t you morph part of the wing into a sail or something? You should be able to tack against the wind. I saw people do it all the time back at Disney Beach.”

  She squinted at me. “Don’t be an idiot. Unless we’ve got some sort of differential, we’re just going to go with the wind. Sails only work because the boat and keel are in the water. You’ve got to trade something for something, and all we have is altitude to give up.”

  “Can’t you flap the wings or something?” I asked.

  “Not enough power. We’d wast
e it all and then not be able to morph anymore.”

  “Well, can you morph the wings into a giant balloon? We could pump out all the air, make it like the vacuum chamber that floated the rig.”

  “Pump out the air with what?” she asked. Irritated, she continued, “Don’t you think I already thought of those ideas?”

  “Well, you didn’t share them with me. You can use an air lock as a pump, you know. Empty it to vacuum, then release the ballast gas to the outside, then open the inner door, let in more air and repeat.”

  “Huh. Well, that’s clever, but there’s no way to use that to pump out a canopy above us, is there? Tell me how I can wrap a bag around us and arrange the air locks to do that without evacuating our section.”

  “I don’t know.” Then I had an idea. “Well, you don’t need to evacuate it, just to, um, inflate it. Sort of.”

  “Not seeing it.”

  I put my hands together. “Okay, so you’ve got the morph metal in a solid mass, right?”

  “For the wing, yeah.”

  “Right.” I expanded my hands around a hollow pocket. “So just split it apart on the inside, so it turns into a hollow shell. There’s going to be nothing in the middle of that, so you’ve got the vacuum you need. You can expand it as a vacuum balloon as big as the strength of the metal will support.”

  She nodded slowly. “And if I can get it big enough to give us lift, then I can morph the envelope and turn that lift into velocity and get us moving against the wind. Yeah, that might work, genius.”

  The genius part seemed less than sincere, but she set off to shape the morph metal, and sure enough, it inflated around a hollow, empty interior. Sure enough, we began to climb.

  “It’s going to eat more power to hold this shape against external pressure,” she said. “But it might work. I’m going to try to cut diagonally across to the same latitude as Caelus, so we’re not fighting the stream, but then we might be able to close before we run out of juice. Maybe.”