by Blaze Ward
Nobody liked waking up with no memory of the last few hours, in a strange place, frequently with total strangers and sometimes with a lack of clothes.
At least nobody had put anything in her drinks, this time.
Still…
“The dust storm triggered some sort of tertiary, electromagnetic effect,” Dani said. “Shuttle’s scanners and radar saw it as a solid wall, so I can only imagine what the signature looked like. Hopefully Chike Odille and the gang at Beta got a good sniff of it before we lost the transmitter. We were partly through it and starting to head out the back when the ship failed, but I had to pretty much abandon ship right into the nastiest parts of it. Wouldn’t surprise me if it scrambled your RAM pretty good. How’s your ROM doing?”
RAM. Random Access Memory. Short term stuff. The last few minutes of whatever was going on, whatever comm number you needed to remember. The cute girl’s name. Little stuff.
As opposed to ROM. Read Only Memory. Important Files put in a box and locked. Stored in the attic against need.
Memories.
“Scanning,” Eleanor replied.
Dani let the silence pass.
The slope below her was maybe one in six now. Six meters forward, one meter down. A haul, but nothing compared to what was above her as she turned around and looked. That looked like one in two, or maybe two in one.
It got vertical up there in places.
Dani wondered where she had hit, and how far she had fallen.
She was standing in a small puddle of gravel, and had apparently carried it with her in a micro–avalanche from someplace farther up the slope.
Somewhere, up there, there was a rock with a head–print on it.
Dani flipped the entire mountain off with both hands, a silent salute to surviving.
“Was that really necessary, dear?” Eleanor asked.
The snark was back. Hopefully, Eleanor was back as well.
“Nope,” Dani replied with a savage, survivor’s grin. “Felt good.”
“Fine,” Eleanor retorted. “But next time, could you put me in your pocket first? I get a little motion sick from sudden gestures of juvenile aggression.”
Dani actually felt her cheeks redden, inside the helmet where, hopefully, Eleanor couldn’t see.
“Sorry,” Dani mumbled, putting her hands down by her sides, before lifting her hand back up so she could see Eleanor’s face on the little display.
Eleanor had been programmed with a diamond–shaped face. Prominent cheekbones dominated a long face with a high forehead and a small chin. It was a face of a Governess: intellectual, beautiful, and tough.
“All systems green?” Dani asked.
“At present, yes. What’s next?”
Good question.
Dani turned back to the valley below her, so she and Eleanor could see.
Escudra VI’s moons were all tiny rocks locked in temporary, millennia–long orbits instead of a big one like Earth had. Nothing that would have generated decent tides. Not like Luna.
When it got dark at night, it was like a new moon on Earth. Ten billion stars visible from this location in the local arm, but the mountains around her had to be deduced from the deeper darkness they cast.
Still, it was local summer, more or less, in this hemisphere. Escudra VI had only a minor axial tilt, so the seasonal variance would be minimal. The storm had left things warmer than normal, but Dani wasn’t about to pop her lid off to sniff the place if she didn’t have to.
The life support in her suit would keep things regulated, even mechanically, for a week or more, provided she didn’t do anything stupid or damage it any more than she had.
Dani opened her mouth wide enough to pop her jaw and yawn.
Down had settled into down finally and her head was only ringing a little bit.
Not like any of the times she had managed a concussion. She could hear, even. That was always a good sign.
Around her, fields of gravel.
No plants, trees, or itinerant fauna looking back.
The dust was a fine haze now, rather than a morning fog casting a pall over everything. Headlight visibility was probably two hundred meters now if she held her head still.
Dani found herself standing on something of a mountain saddle.
Big, ugly mountain behind her fell away in all directions, but right here it kind of flattened out into a thing that could be charitably called a highland meadow, if there had been any clover or grass growing up here.
Not that Escudra VI had much, and the treeline was supposedly receding every century as water either evaporated out into space, or got pulled down into the rocks and bound into oxides and nitrates.
“How far can you scan?” Dani asked Eleanor with a serious tone for once.
She watched Eleanor screw up her face in concentration on the little screen and squint.
Recently, Eleanor had taken on an avatar with semi–long brown hair that she usually wore up in a bonnet or hat in a style she had explained as Victorian.
Something pre–space flight. Antique. Like Rudy’s vintage ground cars with internal combustion engines.
Today she was wearing a tight bodice in a brownish–maroon over what looked like a cream–colored silk blouse, with a very high collar.
Dani would feel strangled in that kind of outfit, but she supposed that an artificial lifeform AI could present herself however she felt, since she could never get an outfit dirty.
It was not like Dani followed that many fashion rules, herself, most of the time.
Generally inversely proportional to the expectations of the situation, if just to drive her family nuts. She knew she looked good. She didn’t have to dress like a show pony to prove it.
“Something’s off, somewhere,” Eleanor finally responded. “My scanning range is strangely curtailed. Possibly as a result of the storm and electrical phenomena.”
“So we’d have to be close enough to pee on them, if I was a boy?” Dani asked with a grin.
“Perhaps a bit more than that, dear,” Eleanor tartly observed. “Even with a tail wind.”
A pause.
“And my radio functions are not picking up the navigation satellites I would normally use to triangulate with. I’m sure, again, all your fault.”
At least Eleanor projected a smile when she said that. Dani was beginning to wonder if maybe she had finally managed to get the two of them into something over her head.
Not for lack of trying for the better part of two decades. But this might be more than she could talk her way out of or around.
That was an exceptionally unpleasant place to dwell.
“Well, I would like to sleep some,” Dani announced, risking a few steps onto what looked like it might be more stable ground. Or at least less gravel. “Hopefully nothing can sneak up on you. I’m bushed and not thinking straight.”
“I will guard you like a lioness, Danielle,” Eleanor said.
That just made it worse.
Eleanor only called her by her given name when Dani was in a lot of trouble, or really, really depressed.
Dani let her butt find stone and stretched herself out until she found a piece of ground that was flat enough that she didn’t hurt too badly.
She was asleep in moments.
Chike
All the big huts were empty.
Everyone was waiting inside one of the small tents, theoretically insulated, grounded, and safe from what was about to happen outside the carefully–sealed–up mini–shelters.
Chike was taking bets with himself.
Somehow, he had ended up in a two–person tent with Ann–Marta and Hadley Swain, who was at least now clean, mostly dry, and even dressed, if a damp T–shirt and baggy expedition pants counted.
Chike knew he should pay less attention, but her lovely smell was distracting in the confined quarters.
And he was far too old for her.
He gave up and turned to face Ann–Marta, who had a knowing grin on her face and a portabl
e sensor slab in her hands.
Chike felt his skin grow an increment darker with blush.
At least anybody but Ann–Marta wouldn’t probably be able to discern it. Not in this light, anyway.
He settled for gripping his own slab more tightly and running through the diagnostics on the screen. Every camera, sensor, or weather pack the team could get out and up in six minutes was deployed somewhere within twenty meters of him, furiously recording every bleat and hiccup as they all waited with baited breath.
“Chike,” Hadley said to get his attention, leaning too close and pointing at a readout on his screen. “Are we sure that the calibrations are correct? That says sixty–two degrees Celsius outside and rising. Is that even possible?”
Chike turned to grin at her without otherwise moving.
“I remember a story I heard from a xeno–meteorologist about a storm in Texas, on Earth, in the very early days of the space age.”
“Kopperl, Texas,” she replied with a sudden nod. “Satan’s Storm. I had forgotten. But that temperature spike peaked out at sixty degrees Celsius and even that quickly faded. And the clocked winds only reached one hundred twenty kph for a very brief time before they faded as well. What makes you certain this storm will be so much more dangerous?”
Chike had to remember that underneath that brown–eyed, bottle–blond, pretty face was a brain like a computer and a talent that would probably have her commanding her own expeditions soon. Pretty girls weren’t supposed to be that smart, and smart ones weren’t supposed to be that pretty.
It was like they were violating one of the laws of thermodynamics.
“Because there were temperature readings from Fairchild at close to seventy Celsius, clear up at her altitude, Hadley,” Chike said with a serious mien. This was a pair of scientists discussing theories and findings, not a too–pretty girl close enough to befuddle his higher brain functions. “Also, the sustained winds at that point were one hundred sixty kph. If you collapse the storm head atop that, and run the entire boundary downhill, which we have done, it’s likely to have maintained, if not accelerated as it crossed the intervening terrain. It happens.”
“You’ve been through something like this before,” she accused sharply.
Chike glanced at Ann–Marta, who nodded solemnly back at him at the memory of Riggel III.
He turned back to Hadley.
“Possibly worse,” he hazarded a guess. “But that was just a thunderstorm with rain and hailstones the size of fists. This will be a sirocco with a lightning genie bottled up and being drug along kicking and screaming behind, much like my four–year–old nephew used to do.”
Hadley leaned back and her eyes flared a little wider.
Brilliant academic, but she was on her first serious dig as a post–grad working towards her doctorate. Things out here this afternoon were far more serious than drinking, dancing, and partying. Or, in Hadley’s case, reading constantly in a quiet corner of some tent.
Lives were possibly on the line, and her expert background in xeno–meteorology put her in the command tent where those decisions would be made.
Chike watched the young woman suddenly change gears. It was like seeing her turn into a grown–up before his eyes, or maybe that same transformation that always came over Ann–Marta when things got tight.
Good. She understood.
Without a word, Hadley looked down and consulted her own slab, furious typing and swiping across the screen for several seconds.
“We will see seventy–six degrees sustained for at least sixty seconds, with a surge peak of seventy–eight,” she said in a tight voice. “Winds will sustain at one hundred forty kph, with gusts to one hundred fifty–five. Dr. Odille, do you agree?”
“You are within three percent of my guestimates, experience, and calculations, Hadley.”
She paled, just a little, and reached out, almost unconsciously, to touch the side of the tent. Already, the winds outside were audible.
At least the tent was rigid enough to protect them for now, assuming that an induced current didn’t cause the shell to collapse back into fabric.
And it wouldn’t tear, not without something moving faster than this wind.
Ann–Marta’s first rule of planetfall was to set the anchor spikes deep and solid before the tents and buildings deployed.
Even Chike wasn’t in charge of his own Base Camp until the Ground Services Coordinator was satisfied.
Where they sat would hold.
But he could only imagine what Fairchild must be going through as the winds suddenly surged around them. He thought he heard the walls creak with the strain.
He glanced back at Ann–Marta and they shared a common memory of that hell–storm on Riggel III. Fairchild had missed that one, safely in orbit aboard Zheng He.
Even a sturdy craft like a survey shuttle would have suffered damage from some of the ice balls that had fallen from the sky. Chike really didn’t believe a lump of ice the size of a football qualified as hail.
“Mary, Mother of God,” Hadley whispered, staring at the screen in front of her. “Can Fairchild survive this?”
Chike nodded and shared another semi–secret grin with Ann–Marta.
“If something happened to the shuttle, she can always bail out,” Ann–Marta replied. “She’s in a special, custom flight suit designed for hostile environments and vacuum. I’m more worried that the storm will mess up all of our electronics and we won’t be able to find her quickly.”
“I see,” Hadley said quietly, eyes and mind still focused on her readouts. She looked up suddenly at Chike with a gleam in her eyes like an eagle spotting a salmon trying to sneak upstream.
“I call dibs on Escudra VI electrical mega–storms as a dissertation topic,” she announced quietly.
Chike chuckled and grinned at her.
“That, young lady, is between you and your faculty advisor when you get home,” he said. “You are, however, the only xeno–meteorologist on site and will therefore be the galactic subject matter expert in a few hours.”
“I’ve read some about Riggel III, Dr. Odille,” Hadley said. “That was just Earth weather on a grander scale, correct?”
“Correct,” he agreed. “This will apparently be something bigger. Hopefully, reasonably rare, because our automated probes either did not record an event like this, or if they had, it was discounted as faulty equipment.”
Around them, the walls started to vibrate with energy.
Chike glanced down at the little regulator box in the corner, striving mightily to blow cool air into the room as the heat outside approached the level where efficiency broke down.
“Countdown to impact,” Hadley announced. “Or whatever you want to call the intersection of that wall of electromagnetism with our position. We are seeing the speed begin to fade with distance from the center, elapsed time, and ground friction. Outside speeds are sustaining at one hundred ten kph, but the temperatures are still above seventy Celsius. Ten seconds to storm front.”
Chike hoped that she had remembered to broadcast that to all the other tents. He had the only weather expert handy in here with him. Most of the rest were planetology specialists, experts in the ground, not the sky. Fairchild was probably the next best sky adept handy.
The entire tent felt like it wanted to take off, one solid wall actually leaning just the slightest bit as the winds got louder outside.
“And, contact,” Hadley yelled as the wall image on her screen moved across the camp.
Everything changed in an instant.
It couldn’t penetrate the insulated and grounded walls, but the air itself felt like it polarized. Or maybe the polarization flipped.
He felt Ann–Marta’s hand on his shoulder, providing the kinds of strength the chocolate Viking was known for.
Hadley kind of shrank in on herself at the rampant sound and fury, so Chike put his hand on her shoulder.
Human contact, in the face of nature’s grand fury. As if Ann–Marta’s s
trength could flow through him and into the other woman.
It might.
Moments passed. Or minutes. It was hard to measure.
“All sensor packs have now overloaded and reset, or rebooted entirely,” Hadley said. “Next time, we’ll need to build tougher gear. Might have to have a talk with some of Calypso’s electrical engineers. I have some ideas.”
Chike nodded. He did as well. This storm, this planet, was likely to make the careers of a number of the people here in Beta today.
He was already well–known, but Chike was a planetologist. A xeno–geologist/vulcanist. The underground signals he would be pursuing were already fascinating and hinted at big and deep secrets to be uncovered. If Hadley Swain played her cards right, she might be an Expedition Lead next time he worked with her, and he might be on her team, instead of the other way around.
It would make a nice symmetry.
Chike pushed a physical button on his slab and waited while a little wheel icon spun as the radio systems tried to punch through the mass of static overhead.
The signal locked in, but the icon flashed yellow angrily with the number 2/3 presented. Barely adequate contact to talk to Calypso, even with the transmission boosters available at both ends. Lots of squelch.
“Calypso, this is Ground Station Beta, do you read?” Chike enunciated clearly.
“Affirmative, Chike,” the ghost of a voice came back through a nearly–painful amount of static. It sounded like Giles. “What is your status?”
“Hopefully, the worst is over, Giles,” Chike said a little louder. “We are still waiting for the winds to die down some before we emerge to take stock. What do you see from orbit, Calypso?”
“I don’t know weather all that well, Dr. Odille,” Giles replied. “From what I can see, the storm is rapidly breaking up. If you had been fifteen or twenty kilometers farther from the epicenter, you might not have gotten nearly as heavy an impact. At thirty kilometers, you might not have noticed. Has Ms. Swain had a chance to study everything?”
“I’m here, Dr. Jones–Parker,” Hadley spoke up. “We have deployed our full package and turned it to verbose logging for this.”