by J. S. Morin
He stared at the shield status display. It wasn’t blank anymore; it simply showed the shields as off line. That was an improvement over knowing nothing at all. It meant that things were coming back together.
The comm crackled, its sound quality awful. “Shields reinitializing,” Roddy said. “I’ll have the atmospheric controls up quick as I can.”
“No rush,” Carl replied, drawing a furious glare from Tanny. He chuckled. “Just kidding. If you don’t get those online in the next minute or so, we’re screwed.”
Tanny reached over and reactivated the comm as soon as Carl switched it off. “Roddy, any chance of engines?”
“Do you believe in divine intervention in mechanical repair?” Roddy asked. “Because that’s what it’d take. The antimatter ejected as soon as we lost tech, and the thorium core is still warming back up. We’re on battery power and a trickle of nuke.”
“See?” Carl asked. “Listen to the horrible things you learn when you press a mechanic for details.”
The windows were streaking, the outer layer already turning molten. Carl unbuckled his safety harness and shrugged out of his jacket. Grabbing the flight yoke, he winced at the unexpected heat they had already built up. But holding on despite the pain, he stared at the shield status, waiting for it to go green.
“Shields up!” Carl shouted. The Mobius lurched as the wash of burning atmosphere parted ways with the hull, only to reappear meters away, spreading over the shields. “Now we’re in business.”
Flipping on the atmospheric controls, the shields reshaped. No longer a rough bubble, the energy reformed into an aerodynamic wing whose shape was controlled by the flight yoke. Still hurtling toward the moon’s surface, Carl steadied their descent, stopping the uncontrolled tumble and pointing the nose of the ship straight toward a landing vector.
Landing was probably a generous term for what Carl was planning. With no thrust and more downward momentum than he cared to contemplate, any sort of gentle meeting with the surface below was out of the question. This was about mitigating damage.
Carl eased back slowly on the yoke. The nose of the Mobius crept upward. “Scan the surface,” Carl said to Tanny without taking his eyes from the window. “Find us someplace to land.” The moon grew larger by the second. It was the night side, so everything was dark; it just blotted out more and more of the stars beyond the horizon.
“It’s no use,” Tanny said. “There’s nothing. Scanners seem fine, but they’re not picking up anything—I mean not even the moon we’re about to crash into.”
“Onto,” Carl corrected. Crashing into implied an uncontrolled splatter. It implied debris and pieces, the sort of scene that investigators tiptoe through days later, hanging their heads and clucking their tongues. Carl could do better than into. “Anyway, just keep your eyes wide. We’re going with best visual we can find by the time we run out of time.”
Tanny unbuckled from the copilot’s seat. “I’m getting Mriy.”
It was a good idea. The azrin’s eyes saw nearly as well in the night as in daylight. It was a shame there Tanny wasn’t going to get back with her in time to be of any use.
Carl had always appreciated the gravity on the Mobius. It overrode inertial effects of acceleration and maneuvering. It gave a comfy, home-like feel of being planetside without actually being stuck on an orbiting ball of rock. But most of all, he appreciated everything it was about to do to prevent the crew from getting thrown across the cabin like bullets when the ship impacted Ithaca.
Pulling back as far as he dared, Carl brought up the nose of the ship to meet the planet bottom-side first in a skid.
# # #
Carl regained consciousness. The instant before everything went dark, he had wondered whether he would. With a grunt, he pushed himself to his hands and knees on the floor of the cockpit. That was right; he had unbuckled his harness. Once gravity had returned, the straps had seemed redundant. It just went to prove that Carl had little experience crashing starships.
“Hey,” he shouted as he rose to his feet. “Anyone alive down there?” He winced as raising his voice caused a pain in his ribs.
The world outside the windows was dark. Motes of starlight, distorted through the melted glassteel, illuminated little. Most of the interior lights had gone out, but a few displays were still active, casting enough light to navigate by.
“Carl?” Tanny called back from somewhere down the corridor. “Are you injured?”
Good question. Carl took a moment to feel under his shirt, along his ribs. Nothing felt broken. His legs bore his weight. Probing along the borders of a headache, he felt a lump but his fingers came away clean—no cuts. “Nothing serious.”
When he arrived in the common room, it shone with eldritch light. Rhiannon lay on the couch, with Mort looking over her. “She’ll be fine,” Mort said before Carl could ask after his sister’s health. “Or will be once Esper has a look at her.”
“Where is everyone else?”
“Mriy went down to check,” Tanny said. “I was about to come looking for you. You didn’t answer when I shouted.”
Carl shrugged. “Crashing’s hard work. Thought I’d earned a quick nap. Any word from Roddy?”
“Comm’s down again.”
“That’d be my fault,” Mort said. “Or rather, I stopped stopping whatever’s having its way with our technology. I’m holding it back a bit, but I can’t ask the universe for two different things at once. Either I want my magic to work, or I want standard-issue science to reign; and let me tell you, pitching science’s case leaves a foul taste on the tonsils.”
“We get a reading on the atmosphere outside before the tech went dark?” Carl asked. It was one thing to be stranded on an alien planet. It was another to be stranded on one with a toxic atmosphere, deadly radiation, or viral hazards.
Tanny gave a mirthless smile. “We’ve got the canary method up and running,” she said. “Outside atmo’ got in here the second we crashed. The hull’s torn open a bunch of places. So far, so good, though.”
“How long we been down?”
“Chronos aren’t working,” Tanny said, turning her empty palms up in a helpless gesture. “Five minutes? Ten?”
The cargo bay door opened. “The fuck you doing to me, Carl?” Roddy demanded. “Drag my goddamn engine room across the ground of some nowhere planet. We might as well have gone in without shields. Now we’re just going to die slow down here.”
“How long to fix everything?” Carl asked.
“Are you listening to me?” Roddy asked, hopping up on the pedestal of the holo-projector to look Carl in the eye. “Dead. Ship. I don’t have spare parts for the shit you just ruined. And I don’t think there’s a DABCA Parts Depot satellite store on this rock.”
Carl scratched at the back of his neck. “So, we’ll just have to be our own first customers on the Odysseus salvage. Come on, don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to see some Earth Navy tech grafted into this thing.”
“How’re Esper and Kubu?” Mort asked.
“Esper already fixed herself up,” Roddy said. “Couple broken bones, she said. Charlie’s fine, too, just so you know. Girl’s good—I’ll give her that. She’s taking stock of the systems damage, which would be easier if someone would knock off the magic up here.”
Mort held up his hands. “Not me. I was holding that arcane disruption in check.”
“And Kubu?” Tanny prompted.
Roddy sniffed. “That lumbering sack of muscle probably would have been fine if we did hit this moon nose-first.”
Carl let out a sigh. “Hey, crashes you can walk away from, right? Glad everyone’s OK.”
“I’ve got a broken arm and a few cracked ribs,” Tanny said with a sneer. “Thanks for asking.”
“But, you didn’t—”
“I’m tougher than you lot,” Tanny replied. “I’ll hit Esper up for a little of that healing magic of hers once she’s got a minute.”
“Anyone taken a look outside?” Carl asked.
Roddy crossed his arms. “Good luck with that. Cargo ramp is pinned closed. And the airlock opens onto rock. You dragged the tail section when you brought us in.”
“Seemed less likely to get us all killed.”
“Yeah… if you were in the cockpit.”
“So, what are you saying?” Carl asked. “That we’re stuck in here?”
“Unless you want to crawl out through one of the ragged tears in the hull—which you don’t,” Roddy said. “We’re going to have to cut a new door.”
Carl had an idea. “Hey, Mort. Can you steady science around here for a minute?”
“I’m holding back the distortion effect just enough that I can still keep a light on,” Mort replied. “How much more do you need?”
Scratching at his chin, Carl considered for a moment. “Dunno.”
He ambled over to the door to his quarters but didn’t enter. Popping open a never-before-used panel beside the door, he reached for a lever concealed inside. With a quick jerk, the lever snapped down, and huge thump shook the Mobius, followed by a rapidly fading hiss of released pressure. When he opened the door to his quarters, there was nothing but open air to the moon’s surface. All the quarters on the Mobius doubled as escape pods, and he had just jettisoned his own off somewhere on the lunar surface.
Standing in the opening, he took a breath of humid, pungent air. “Welcome to Ithaca. We might be sticking around a while.”
# # #
Dawn on Ithaca came when the local star peeked over the horizon of planet G5344-4. Far from being a desolate, barren rock, the Mobius had crashed in a tropical jungle. Yellow sunlight illuminated the native flora, whose largest specimens were twenty-meter-tall shoots of green, resembling nothing so much as giant blades of grass. The Mobius had plowed a swath through them en route to their crash site, splattering the ground with a sticky, translucent goo that oozed from the broken stems.
“Hey, Mort,” Carl shouted. “What’re the odds that these are actual blade of grass, and we got shrunk by that wacky magic that pulled us out of astral?”
“Fifty-fifty,” Mort replied. “Either it did or it didn’t.”
“Not funny,” Carl replied. The crew was dropping one by one from the hole where his quarters used to be. “Seriously, we small or are these just weird plants?”
“You sure you didn’t leave Carl With Half a Brain back in Lloyd’s head?” Mort asked. “Of course we’re not small. That’s utterly ridiculous. If we’d been the victims of some diminutization bewitchery, I’d have noticed.”
“But would you have said anything?”
Mort paused with a slight frown. “We’re not small.”
Scarecrow came over, tank top plastered to her skin with sweat. The whole crew was feeling the effects of the soggy jungle heat. “We got a search plan?”
Tanny scoffed. “Search plan? We’re lucky to be alive. We need to secure a perimeter and figure out whether there’s edible food and clean water on this moon.”
“I’m with mop-head,” Roddy said, jerking a thumb on one foot at Scarecrow. “We need to find anything salvageable here—if there’s any such thing. I don’t plan on dying on this rock, not even if it’s years from now. Especially if it’s not years from now.”
Rhiannon had changed into a sundress, the closest her wardrobe came to jungle attire. “Nice thought, but I’d like to not get eaten by some alien jungle monster.”
Kubu hit the ground with a thud that made the tree-grass shake. He had barely managed to squeeze through the doors inside the Mobius, and any effort to get him back in would be for naught once he had a few more meals in him. There would be no getting him back in until the cargo bay was back in operation.
“I say we split up,” Carl said. “We break up into parties of—”
“Carl!” Mriy shouted. She had climbed atop the ship and stood pointing off into the distance on the far side from where they gathered. “We have one less thing to search for.”
They found what handholds they could, and the crew clambered atop the vessel to find out what Mriy saw over the tips of the tall grasses.
“Yup,” Carl agreed. “Tick that one off the list.”
A mountain rose not far from their crash site. Jabbed into it, like a pushpin into cork, was the tail end of a starship. More specifically, it was the rear two-thirds or so of a Pandora-class Earth Navy battleship.
# # #
Hours later, Mriy returned. The jungle outside the Mobius was strewn with supplies from blankets to perishable foods. For the time being, the ship was no fit place to make camp. For most of the time the azrin was gone, Carl had directed the efforts to salvage his own ship. Not being an outdoorsman (or even faking it well), his contribution had consisted mainly of staying out of the way.
“What’s up there?” Carl asked. “Any sign of survivors?” As heartwarming a tale as finding living crew from the Odysseus might have been, he was hoping that there was nothing but a lifetime supply of never-spoil food, a working maintenance bay, and enough fuel to keep the Mobius going until it decayed to atoms. Not having to negotiate for any of it would have been a welcome respite.
“There is an extensive burial site near the mountain’s base,” Mriy replied. “I have no count of the dead, but hundreds, maybe thousands.”
Esper made the sign of the cross and bowed her head.
“Hey, good news, right?” Carl asked. “Burials mean survivors. Any idea where they went?”
“There are numerous paths into the jungle, and at least one mountain trail leading to the ship,” Mriy said. “There is a hole in the hull that appears to have been cut deliberately. I entered, but the darkness was too deep after a few turns. We’ll need a light source to explore it.”
Carl clapped his hands once. “Great. Let’s get on that.”
“Wait,” Tanny interjected. “Get on what? We don’t have so much as a working hand lamp. Do you expect us to go in there with torches? I think we’ve got higher priorities than the salvage scam at this point.”
“Scam?” Scarecrow echoed. “You saw that ship up there. That’s retirement money. That’s ‘everyone buys their own moon’ money.”
“We’ve got our own moon,” Roddy said, spreading his arms to the jungle around them. “Congratu-fucking-lations, we’re stranded here until someone invents magic that can lift a starship into orbit. Cuz tech’s down the shit pipe.”
“Mort,” Carl said. “You kept that magic off our backs long enough to get planetside. How long can you do that?”
“The effect’s stronger down here,” Mort said. “I doubt I can keep the whole ship stabilized against the local distortion effect for more than a few minutes at a stretch.”
“What about sections of it?”
Mort scratched his chin stubble. “Sure. But I always imagined you needed a whole ship to fly in space. How much of that tin contraption is superfluous?”
“None of it, you book-worshiping relic,” Roddy snapped.
“Knock it off,” Carl said. “I need you two to work together. Mort, I need you to hang with Roddy and keep science working as he fixes the Mobius bit by bit. I don’t care if it’s pretty. We need it vacuum-ready, with life support and engines. The shields, weapons, the waste reclaim—even the holovid—none of it matters right now. Worry about those once we can get it off the ground and not die hitting orbit.”
Mort and Roddy locked gazes for a moment. “So this is what hell will be,” Mort muttered. “Subordinate to that monkey and licking science’s boots.”
Carl ignored the wizard’s grumbling and continued. “Tanny, I want you in that starship. Take Esper; see if she can keep some magic light going or something. If not, yeah, torches.”
“I’m going, too,” Scarecrow said. “I’ve worked too long to sit this one out.”
Carl shrugged. “I didn’t think I had to tell you that. But Tanny’s in charge. Got it? No freelancing. Stick together.”
Winking as she snapped a lazy salute, Scarecrow replied, “Aye aye, Co
mmander.”
“Mriy, you and Kubu are going to lead me to the survivors,” Carl said, pointing to the jungle in a random direction. “If any of them are still alive on this moon, we could sure as hell use the help.”
Mriy nodded.
“Kubu will help,” Kubu said, his massive tail wagging at a dangerous rate. It seemed he was the only one who liked Ithaca.
“What about me?” Rhiannon asked. She had kept quiet since the crash, sitting hunched on a footlocker at the edge of the campsite.
“You stay here,” Carl said. “Just… stay out of trouble. If anything scares you, just go find Mort. Got it?”
“I’m not ten anymore, Bradley,” Rhiannon snapped, using Carl’s given name. “I’m not going to just sit around while everyone else rescues me.”
“To be fair,” Carl said. “We’d be doing the same thing without you here. We’re rescuing ourselves, not just you.”
“Not helping,” Tanny said quietly.
Rhiannon stood. “That’s it. I’m going with Tanny.”
Carl caught the frown before Tanny softened her glare. He knew she didn’t want Rhiannon along. But that didn’t stop her. “Yeah, fine,” Tanny said. “Just don’t slow us down.”
“She won’t slow us down,” Esper said. She met Carl’s eye and in that brief exchange, gave him her assurance that she’d look out for Rhiannon. It was stupid, he knew, but it made him feel better about his little sister trekking through an alien jungle to explore a crashed battleship. Esper could barely keep herself out of trouble.
“Look for food, first,” Carl said. “Who knows what’s edible on this rock? Anything from the Odysseus should be safe to eat. But don’t take any stupid risks.” He aimed the last comment squarely at Scarecrow, for all the good it would do.
# # #
Carl had left his leather jacket back at camp. It had seemed like a sensible precaution against the jungle heat, but by no means was it enough. An hour into the search for Odysseus survivors, he had taken off his shirt and tied it around his head to keep the sun at bay. His pants clung to his legs with sweat, making him wish he had worn hypohydrex instead of denim.