by Scott Baron
“Do you have anything left for me?” she wondered aloud, flipping a series of switches on the pilot’s console.
The mech silently powered to life, its displays illuminating with diagnostic readouts and status updates. The bipedal craft was in perfect condition, it seemed. Perfect but for one little problem. It lacked even the power to shift from its storage and travel configuration to its proper form.
There was just enough juice to power the internal computers, but nothing to make the thing move.
Rika reluctantly powered down, sitting quietly in her pilot’s seat a long moment before climbing back out of the machine and sealing it up again. It had been a good idea. If she had been able to get the power cells loaded and fire it up, the mech would have made the search for resources so much easier. And finding water? Hell, digging was one of the things it was designed for.
But that was not to be the case. They were stuck searching on foot and digging by hand, it seemed, and that was going to suck.
“Sorry, big guy. I was hoping to take you for a spin,” she said, then left the silent machine in its final resting place. The mag clamps would eventually lose power, like the rest of the ship, as its damaged systems continued to short out. But even freed of the restraints, the massive mech would not be going anywhere.
Rika cleared her head and set back to work. There were some other supplies in the cargo bay, however, and she made quick time in gathering what could be of use to the survivors. She then slung the laden sack over her shoulder and crawled out through the half-open doors and headed back to the surface.
“Any luck?” Charlie asked as his exhausted friend climbed out of their wrecked ship.
“I found some supplies,” she replied, dropping the duffle onto the ground with a dusty thud. “But the mech’s power cells were damaged. It’s not going anywhere.”
“Damaged? How bad?” Charlie asked, sitting up.
“Don’t worry, they’re intact and not leaking. Just all bent up. There’s no way to get them loaded in, so I’m afraid we have a perfectly-intact mech but still no way to use it.”
“Just our luck,” he grumbled.
“Tell me about it.”
“At least you were able to reach the upper cargo bay.”
“It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. I had to squeeze past tumbled gear and shimmy down a partially collapsed corridor just to reach the access door, which only opened about halfway, even with a pry bar.”
“So salvaging anything of any size isn’t an option.”
“Not from that section of the ship. Too much work, and too risky.”
“How about shelter? Anywhere look stable enough to use?”
Rika thought about it a moment. “Well, I think we may be able to set up somewhere on the mid port levels, but we’ll need to give them a more thorough going over before we risk moving anyone back inside. Too many structural issues going on, and I don’t want to risk a collapse trapping us all in there if something goes wrong.”
“Wonderful,” he said with a defeated sigh.
Charlie lay back down and stared up into the vast sky. Tomorrow would be a new day, and he hoped it would bring some better news. For now, however, sleep was a priority, and he soon drifted off into a sound slumber.
Chapter Fourteen
Morning greeted them with clear, rose-colored skies and a slight breeze.
Charlie ran a systems diagnostic on the medical scanner as the injured crew slowly roused with the rising red sun. He knew by now he’d have about two hours before the sun’s yellow twin would crest the horizon, their combined rays casting a faint orange tint to the barren plain.
“We should head out toward those rock formations today, Charlie,” Rika said as she chewed a nutrient bar. “They’re the only things not flat and dirt out here. I figure they’re worth taking a closer look at. Who knows? We may get lucky.”
“Sounds like as good plan as any.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” she said, stretching out the kinks from a bad night’s sleep. “I’m going to get us some extra water for the trek. We’ll head out as soon as we check on the others.”
“I can do it. Besides, I’m the one trained to use the med scanner, anyway.”
“All right. Get to it, then meet me in command. I want to have another look in daylight, and we have a few things to discuss before we head out.”
Charlie gathered up the scanner and some supplies and made his way through the waking survivors, performing a basic medical analysis of each, while distributing breakfast rations from their stores along with small containers of water.
They had accumulated a surprising amount via the solar stills, but nevertheless, water was strictly rationed on the dusty planet. The small containers into which he had siphoned the prior day’s production were far from full, and that would need to be addressed sooner rather than later. For now, however, getting the crew healthy was priority one.
Winnie’s injuries, while undoubtedly debilitating, were not critical. Her broken arm had been properly set, confirmed by the med scanner, and the blow to her head did not appear to have caused any lasting damage beyond a decent concussion and a sore neck.
Sven Jurgensson, the man in charge of logging and organizing the ship’s supplies, was in worse shape. While he looked relatively uninjured to the naked eye, the device in Charlie’s hand revealed a subdural hematoma pressing on his brain. The small leak had self-sealed, and the pressure was gradually decreasing as his body reabsorbed the fluid. In their current location and with such limited resources, it was all he could ask for.
They kept him safely covered in the shade of the ship, where the dazed man refused food, but at least was coherent enough to drink water. He was a big man, and a few days without a meal wouldn’t kill him. A few days without fluids would.
Rika was right about moving back inside the ship for shelter. The craft was terribly damaged from the crash, its walkways were unstable, and liable to shift or even give way without warning. While Rika and Charlie were in good enough condition to avoid the dangers, the rest of the survivors could not possibly move fast enough to stay clear of hazards. In fact, with their injuries, most, if not all, would have to be carried anyway.
“Hold still, Omid,” Charlie said as he passed the handheld scanner over the shallow-breathing rocket scientist’s chest.
“How bad is it, Charlie?”
“If you’d hold still, I could get a better reading and tell you.”
“Sorry. It just hurts to breathe,” he said, tugging on the tight wrap Charlie had placed around his torso.
“I know it does. That’s because you’ve got a flail chest, and that shit hurts.”
“Flail chest?”
“It means several adjacent ribs are broken in a way that lets them free-float with your chest as you breathe. It’s one of the most painful types of rib breaks.”
“I noticed. And this wrap is killing me.”
“Stop tugging at it, Omid. Bad as it feels, the pressure of that wrap against the broken section is actually reducing the pain.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You mean it could be worse?”
“Yep. Now hold still, I’ve only got so much battery on this thing.”
Charlie passed the scanner over the ailing man’s chest, then, once he had a full set of readings, continued over the rest of his body.
“Okay, all done. You can squirm now, though I’d advise against it.”
“So what’s it say, Charlie? Am I going to be okay?”
“I think so. You bruised some organs, which is hardly surprising given the broken ribs, but there seems to be no internal bleeding.”
“Great. How long until I’m able to walk?”
“You could try now, but it would hurt like a sonofabitch. Just rest. Rika and I have things under control.”
Omid let out a pained sigh. “Okay. I’ll just lay here, then. Doctor’s orders.”
“You do that,” Charlie said with a little laugh. “You’ll hea
l, just give it time.”
He rose to his feet and made his way to the heavily bandaged particle physicist lying on a makeshift cot. Both of her legs were splinted, as well as her left arm, which was held in place against her torso with a heavy swathe.
“How you feeling, Siobhan?”
“Not running any marathons,” she said, managing a forced smile. An avid runner, her shattered legs were almost worse than death in her eyes.
“I know this sucks, but we’ll get through it,” he said, not sure if he believed his own words. “Rika and I salvaged some goodies. I didn’t find much of your gear, at least not that was intact, but I did score this med scanner.”
“I don’t need that to tell me my legs are fucked.”
“Such language, Doctor Stewart,” he said with an amused grin as he passed the device over her heavily wrapped legs.
“I’m Scotch-Irish, Charlie. I learned to swear before I learned to walk.”
“Noted. Well, you’ll be pleased to know that, while you are well and proper fucked––”
“We pronounce it ‘fooked,’ by the way.”
“Okay, you’re fooked, but it looks like the bone ends are aligned, so given time, your legs should heal up okay.”
“We don’t have any cast material.”
“No, we don’t. So when Rika and I get back from our next salvage run, we’ll see if we can find something that’ll do the trick well enough. I was thinking we could heat the memory foam from one of the seats until it becomes extremely pliable. Then we wrap your legs. It won’t be totally rigid, but if it holds form when it cools, it should keep stuff in place and protect you from further injury.”
“Won’t my legs burn from the heat?”
“We have some scraps from a damaged EVA suit we can use. We’ll pull the heat-reflecting outer layer and make a sort of under-cast bandage. It’ll feel warm, no doubt, but it shouldn’t burn.”
“Pretty ingenious, Charlie. And here I always took you for more of a follower. I misjudged you.”
“Nah, I don’t want to be doing all of this, but there’s no one else to do it.”
“Well, I appreciate it.” She shifted her gaze, looking past him into the sky. “A binary star system. And a breathable atmosphere to boot. I never in a million years would have thought I’d be standing––um, lying on an alien world like this. We were paving the way for future generations, you know? It wasn’t supposed to be us out here.”
“And yet, here we are.”
“Yep.”
“At least we haven’t been cooked by radiation,” he said.
“With the wave spectrum of these stars, along with the basic look of this world and its breathable atmosphere, I think we’re safe. We may burn a little faster, and who knows what skin cancers we may get in thirty years, but for the short term we should be okay.”
Charlie gave her a long drink from the water container and left a nutrient bar at her side. “I’ll do what I can to find some pain meds, but medical took a serious hit when we crashed. Most of the facility is gone.”
“I appreciate it, Charlie.”
He flashed her a warm smile, then walked to where Rika was squatting beside Jamal’s motionless form. She looked up at him with a pained expression. He knew before she said a word.
Charlie rested his hand on her shoulder. “We should bury him with the others.”
Rika nodded once, stoic, but hurting. The two then covered his body and slid him onto their sled, pulling him away from the survivors to join the ranks of their buried dead.
Chapter Fifteen
Charlie and Rika sat quietly in the ship’s ruined command center. Rika had done another check on the comms systems, confirming their demise. At least they were out of earshot of the rest of the crew. It would be a quiet place for them to discuss the dire nature of their situation without unnecessarily stressing the others.
“They have good reason to be stressed,” Charlie had noted.
“We all do, but there’s no need to unduly increase it if we can help it. I mean, Siobhan is so on edge I think she’s about ready to take someone’s head off. And it’s not for want of pain meds.”
“Nah, it’s a different kind of pain. Being forced into a sedentary role when you’re used to being active, it can drive you batty.”
“Well, her legs are both shattered. It’s going to take a long time of her sitting on her duff before she walks again, let alone runs.”
“I know,” Charlie said. “And believe me, I know how she must be climbing the walls. Did I ever tell you about the time I got a stress fracture in my shin?”
“Not that I recall,” Rika said.
“I was in high school. I used to run a lot back then. So one day, during cross-country practice, my shin started hurting. I ignored it and kept running. Stuff like that happens when you’re an athlete, right? And teenagers think they’re invincible anyway.”
“So you just kept going.”
“Precisely. So about a week later it still hurt, but worse. My coach said, ‘Run it off, it’s just shin splints.’”
“Let me guess. It wasn’t.”
“That’s cheating. I already told you I had a stress fracture. But at that point I didn’t know, so I just did what my coach said and kept running. Eight, nine, ten miles a day, the tiny crack growing until finally it hurt to even walk. My mom took me to get a bone scan, and the doctor said if I’d kept running the tibia would have split vertically. I’d have had one leg over an inch shorter than the other.”
“Yikes. That must’ve really hurt.”
“Oh, yeah. But you know what was far worse? When the doc told me I couldn’t run for nine months.”
“But bones heal way faster than that.”
“I know. But because it was vertical, they couldn’t just break it clean and put a cast on me. Instead, I had to walk around with no cast and no visible reason I couldn’t run. From ten miles a day to zero. Couldn’t even jump rope or anything. As a kid that active, you can imagine how hard it was.”
“Probably even more so for your poor parents. I mean, a teen stuck in the house with all that energy and nowhere to spend it?”
“Yeah, it was not ideal, to say the least.”
“So what wound up happening?”
Charlie took a swig from his canteen and climbed to his feet.
“I drove myself and everyone around me nuts until it healed enough for me to at least start riding a bike. But what I’m saying is, I know how Siobhan is feeling, and unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to help alleviate it. And that’s coming from someone who’s been there.”
He walked to the airlock door and slid an empty pack over his shoulder.
“We should get cracking. Jamal was hurt beyond our ability to help, but the others should mend. But even with one less mouth to feed, we’re still going to run out of food eventually, and, I for one, have no desire to recreate the Donner Party’s little adventure.”
Rika grabbed her pack and joined him, following the corridor back to the orange-lit sky of the strange world.
“I’ll grab the sled,” she said, trotting off to retrieve the makeshift load bearer.
“Okay, I’ll pull us some water from the solar stills. Enough for a few hours' trek at least.”
“Sounds good. Meet back here in five.”
Charlie nodded, and the two went their separate ways. In just a few short minutes, another day of mind-numbing labor would begin, starting with a long walk in a dusty wasteland.
Chapter Sixteen
The winds had been light the prior day, and as a result, the shifting mounds that had begun to cover smaller items had blown clear. Reflection from the metal parts littering the debris field were everywhere, like an exploded disco ball.
The gouge carved by the Asbrú’s crash was a jigsaw puzzle of destruction, filled with exposed bits of the ruined craft, torn free as its belly slid along the hard ground.
Most of the storage compartments in the lower rear of the ship had been comple
tely destroyed, ripped apart on impact. Unfortunately, that was where the majority of their foodstuffs had been located.
As this was to be a relatively short test run, the Asbrú hadn’t even been loaded with anywhere near her full capacity of the assorted freeze-dried and vacuum-sealed meals. There was more than enough for the slimmed-down crew for a lengthy voyage, should it be required, but nowhere near what the stranded men and women would need to feed them for more than a few months.
And that was if those supplies hadn’t been shredded and flung to the wind.
Charlie and Rika were both painfully aware of their increasingly poor outlook for survival.
“If we don’t find at least some of those pods, we’re going to have to go on stricter rationing,” Charlie grumbled as they trudged along the ship’s debris trail.
“I know,” Rika said. “In fact, I was thinking it might be a wise idea to do it anyway. Even if we had all of our supplies, we have no idea how long we’ll be stuck here, or if there is any native vegetation or even, I don’t know, algae or something for nutrition.”
“I’ll pass on algae, thanks,” Charlie said, crinkling his nose.
“If we have to resort to Winnie’s dead rats, you’ll thank me if we find algae,” she shot back.
“Dead rats?”
“Yeah. Protein is protein. And anyway, by the time we find them, they’ll probably be rat jerky anyway.”
Charlie felt a hot flash of bile in his throat and gagged a little.
“Sorry. I forgot how sensitive you were about food.”
“It’s okay,” he said, taking a sip of water and wiping his lips. “It’s just, I’m really not an adventurous eater, ya know?”
“That I do,” she replied with a grin. “But if things don’t improve, and I mean dramatically, you may find yourself needing to get over that issue sooner than later.”
The duo trudged along, digging through what appeared to be debris-dense areas as they pulled their sled behind them, hoping to find anything worth salvaging.