A moment before their lips touched, he pulled. She struggled, shaking her head against his grip. But his arm was stronger than her whole body, and he held her back by her hair. She pounded his chest with her fists in frustration.
He held her hair and turned her head until she fell back on her sleeping bag. She stopped struggling and lay still, looking at him. She’d been right about what it would be like to make love to him.
“You don’t fight fair!” she said, and laughed.
Alon relaxed his grip but didn’t let go.
Her expression became more serious. “But, then again, you are Shinigami.”
∞
“You just scrambled our position,” Toran said, his voice coming out of the darkness, matter of fact rather than accusing. He stood a couple meters away, flashlight off to conserve power.
Kali closed her eyes, but it made no difference. It had been dark in space, but there were stars; even in the cave, there’d been the bioluminescence. Here, on the plain, other than the beam of her flashlight, there was nothing. The rain dripped softly on the cotton of her flight suit, tapping out a metronome of passing time. She sank back on a hump of lava and pressed the cuffs of her sleeves against her palms again to slow the bleeding. She felt rising frustration and the need to push her mind to work against tiredness and pain.
“I can fix this. Just give me time,” she said.
She’d dropped the last thread—let it slip from her hands. Dawn: that was what she pictured. She needed to see the lander at dawn, and they were still many kilometers away. When the sun came up, if the lander wasn’t in sight, someone would die. Who, she didn’t know. Maybe all of them, except for Galia and Manus, if they couldn’t find a dry hole or survive wedged into a crevice in a three-hundred-fifty kilometer an hour wind.
The wind—which way was it from? Before she fell, it had been from the sea to the land, blowing her hair into her mouth from the right. But now it was gone; she couldn’t feel it on her skin.
She slipped her glasses on. The inertial navigation warning blinked a dim, vision-preserving red, and the magnetic compass spun erratically as she turned her head.
“The long-range radio can’t give you a direction?” Toran asked
“No.” The radio didn’t have direction-finding capability and the glasses needed two repeaters to triangulate. Kali made some hand gestures in the edge of the view of the glasses. “The packet trace says it’s still going through the balloon.” That meant they had no line of sight to the lander—it was still over the horizon. The second balloon antenna was packed away with the helicopter in the cargo hold; it would take too long to unload. The paper, the glasses, the balloon, and the booster radio weren’t designed to get a location from an arbitrary radio signal, only from the positioning satellites. Athena had had positioning satellites for so long its technology assumed they were available.
“Fuck,” Kali said.
She could hear Toran moving, his boots scuffing on the surface. “Comm pass with The Child coming up,” he said.
Twenty minutes to midnight, Keto time. The pass was just before midnight. Zansai had insisted on a polar orbit and it only brought The Child over the island twice a day. Something about mapping the seabed from the height of the waves.
Kali opened a channel to the lander, and Manus picked up. “Manus, I need you to turn on all the lander lights—not just the strobes, but the interior lights as well, and the docking lamps. Make sure the windows aren’t shaded.”
“You’re lost?” Manus asked.
“No. I know where we are, I just need the direction to go in.”
“Uh, huh,” Manus said, skeptically. “There’s a flare gun in the module survival kit.”
“Try it.”
Kali stood and panned her view around the horizon with the night vision in the glasses turned all the way up. All she could see was a snow of random noise.
Manus called back, “I fired it out the door. It went into the clouds. Lights are on.”
“Nothing,” Kali said, after another scan. “Take two floodlights, point one out the top docking port, the other through the side hatch, and set the cargo ring to rotate,” she said. “Gray tape the switch down, if you have to.”
“On it,” Manus replied.
“Keto lighthouse,” Toran said.
“What’s that?”
“An ancient idea.”
“If we see the flood sweep, we can sync over the radio. Flip it one-eighty for a bearing.”
“Or just walk into the light…” Toran said.
“That too.”
But, Kali thought, if they couldn’t see the light, the only way to get to the lander was by resetting the inertial direction in her glasses. There had to be a way to do that, but she needed an external reference. She pushed her mind to work. There was a unit for measuring direction and range to a radio source in the helicopter using antennas in the fuselage. But it would take hours to lower the cargo container and unpack it, and, on the ground, the helicopter likely wouldn’t have line-of-sight to them.
The docking radar in the nose of the capsule pointed up, the landing radar altimeter down. There was a handheld laser rangefinder in a storage locker, but the beam was infra-red. She couldn’t see how any of that would be useful.
“We should do something about your hands,” Toran said.
“When we get to the lander.”
Toran stroked the beard around his mouth, squeezing the rain out and flicking it away with his fingers.
“What if the problem’s not solvable?” he said.
Kali sucked in her breath. “We’ll find a hole or a crevice.”
“You found one already.”
“We need a dry cave. Not that one.” She could hear Toran move and sit across from her. Her hand brushed the pin hidden in her pocket.
“I think we should go in opposite directions,” he said. “That way, one of us will make it out.”
“No more than one in two chance either of us would.”
“Better than neither,” he replied.
“You’d leave me here if you made it and I didn’t?”
“Wouldn’t you, if it was the other way round? Isn’t that how you get to be a hero—fixing your own mistakes the hard way?” His voice was accusing.
“What about Ai and Alon?”
“They take their chances. We come down again after the storm, if they make it through. Same if one of us doesn’t get to the lander.”
Kali squeezed the cuffs of her sleeves harder, even though it made her hands hurt. “I’m not going to leave anyone behind.”
“What’s your choice? You can fly the hop. That’s three or five of us out of here. You wait for me, no one leaves.”
“There’s no time. You go the wrong way for two hours, it’s over.”
“I accept that,” Toran said calmly. “It’s in God’s hands.”
“He’ll save you?”
“Or not, but I trust either outcome is the right one.”
Kali shook her head. “As soon as we split up, there’s no chance we all leave.”
“If you don’t know which way to go, one of us is dead already.”
“I’m not leaving anyone behind.” She couldn’t let go of that thought.
“You’re going to risk everyone for one person?”
“I’m going to get us all out of here,” she said. “Try this—after the pass, we each make our own decision which way to go. If it’s the same, we go together.”
Toran laughed darkly. “It won’t be.”
“You choose first,” she said. “But if it’s true we walk in circles, we’ll meet again, even if we go separately.”
“Depending on the size of the circles.”
Kali felt her anger rising—he was being an asshole, treating a life or death decision like a meeting house debate where every point had a counterpoint.
The timer in her glasses showed only ten minutes to the pass.
“Maybe it’s time to consult a higher power,” Tor
an said, a hint of amusement in his voice. “She’s almost up.”
Kali forced herself to think. There had to be another way. Her hand brushed the pin in her pocket again, and she remembered it as she’d first seen it in the cave, shining in the beam of her flashlight: an arrow nocked to a bow, making a line through its arc. That’s what she needed now—a line through the horizon to calibrate the glasses against.
The Child could locate them on the ground from orbit using the signal of the long-range radio, but it couldn’t tell what direction they were facing. What if they moved in a straight line—Kali could set the glasses to an arbitrary direction—and let The Child determine the angle between the start and end point? But it was unlikely they could go far enough in the four or five minutes The Child was over, even if the ship could run two fixes before it went below the horizon. The idea was another dead end.
“You’re playing a game with our lives, and you’re winging it,” Toran said. “We’re all at stake now. If you’d thought for a single moment—”
“I know what you’re saying!” Kali shouted angrily. “I know I fucked up. And you’re not helping. How are you helping me to think now?”
She was silent for a long moment as the rain patted gently on her shoulders. She was beginning to see it—Eresh had played them the whole way, all the way to now. And she had to let Eresh go on winning, right up until the moment they made it back to Helicopter Valley.
“Look,” she said to Toran. “I already know how to get all of us out of here. The problem isn’t finding the way, the problem is who I have to trust to do it. You don’t know what this is going to cost us. One day we’ll all regret it—maybe one day very soon.”
Living
Year 5314
Mission Time: Day Four, 00:45
“Child, Child,” Kali called, “Keto base.”
The radio replied with faint crackle.
“You’re early,” Toran said, briefly clicking his flashlight on to check the time on his paper.
Kali sighed. “I know.”
She pictured the inside of the hab modules circling the spine of The Child. Before the lander separated, the ring had felt cramped and cluttered, full of stores and equipment. The air was stale, and the walls and light panels monotonous. She could only run in two directions, and she’d always end up where she started. She’d gone around the ring hundreds of times on the flight to Keto, ducking through the intermodule hatches, scrambling up ladders, and dodging open maintenance panels. She couldn’t wait to get out of the tube and breathe real air.
But now the ring was more appealing than Keto. She looked at the sky—somewhere up there was a familiar bed, and food that didn’t come out of a foil bag.
“Child, Keto base.”
“Still a couple minutes,” Toran said.
Eresh, Kali thought. It all depends on Eresh.
And Eresh was the one thing she couldn’t trust, Eresh didn’t work for Setona—Eresh worked for Eresh, and who knew who else. The slime-bot had its own agenda and its own loyalties. It was indifferent to human needs, approaching matters of life and death with the same detached amusement as trivial things. But now Kali needed Eresh and had no choice to trust it, at least once.
“Child, Keto base.” Silence.
Why had Eresh appeared in her glasses and led her into the cave? Was the image of her a figment of Kali’s imagination or something planted in the glasses? Once, in basic training, Kali had marched late into the night on very little sleep. She remembered walking half awake, half asleep, in a weird dream state, afraid she would face-plant into the dirt, and imagining the soldiers around her as ancient ghosts. Eresh could just have been an illusion like that.
But she didn’t believe Eresh couldn’t reprogram their paper and glasses if she wanted. Eresh had a lot of computing resources to put on that problem in between worlds. And if the image was a plant, then Eresh had done other things. Most likely she’d altered the path Kali and Toran walked on to take them to the cave. Possibly she’d also sabotaged the helicopter engine to force them to walk to the lander.
Thinking that way would lead to deep paranoia. Why’d Eresh risk Kali’s life to drop her in a cave with a skeleton? Perhaps it was only a contingency, part of a larger plan. Did Eresh want them to see the southwest of the island instead of the east? They’d have missed the ruins if they’d followed the original mission plan.
But Kali didn’t want to believe Eresh had guided them—it meant Eresh was willing to risk killing the crew. There was nothing certain about auto-rotating into Helicopter Valley. It was less frightening to believe she’d hallucinated in just the right place to find the cave. Some events are improbable, but there are a lot of improbable events that are possible—some of them are going to happen.
Kali had another thought: in the worst case, the Eresh she’d seen was actually on Keto—some mitotic offspring secretly brought to the surface on the lander. Zansai had ways of finding morph elements and disabling them, but Kali didn’t have the materials with her. Eresh could be crawling all over her uniform and backpack, and she wouldn’t know it. Thinking about it creeped her out. Eresh had made a point of staying in orbit and leaving ground operations to the crew; if she was down here, she was double-dealing in a big way.
Fuck Eresh.
Kali could see the faint red numerals of the mission clock in her glasses rolling over. It was time.
“Child, Keto base,” she called.
Still nothing but silence. She stood and scanned the horizon, as if there was something to see in the random green speckle of the glasses’ night vision.
“Child.”
“Keto base, go ahead Kali,” Setona’s voice answered.
“Child—This is for Eresh. I need you to do something for me. No questions, no explanations, no time.”
“Go ahead, Kali, I’m with you,” Eresh replied in a smooth, mellifluous voice.
“I need three five-second ME pulses evenly spaced before the horizon. Orient the engine toward us.”
“You knew I’d like that, didn’t you?” Eresh replied. “Crew, standby for orientation change. Emergency avoidance maneuver.”
“Kali,” Setona jumped in with a note of concern, “this is going to change our orbit.”
“Back it out when we’re done.”
“What’s it for, Kali?” Setona asked.
“Thirty seconds to burn,” Eresh reported. “Did you lose your way, Kali? Don’t your glasses have direction?”
Eresh was way ahead of Setona. That’s what hurt—Setona was the captain, Eresh nominally followed her orders. But now Kali was going to burn a hole in that illusion with The Child’s main engine.
“They fell in a hole,” Kali said.
“That’s too bad,” Eresh replied.
“Yeah, particularly since I was wearing them.”
“I hope you didn’t hurt yourself in the fall.”
“Ass first—what do you think?”
“Twenty seconds to burn. Kali, please visit the nearest available medical facility.”
“Why do you think I’m calling you?” Kali snapped.
“I apologize for any action or inaction on my part that may have caused harm to you.”
What exactly was Eresh apologizing for? Kali needed it out in the open. “At least I’m not lying dead and drowned at the end of a lava tunnel.”
“You must exercise caution on the surface of Keto,” Eresh replied. “Such things have happened. Ten seconds to burn.”
Bitch! That was as good an admission as Kali was going to get from Eresh that she’d tampered with the navigation in Kali’s glasses. And that she’d been to Keto before, and knew about the body in the tunnel.
“Watch me burn!” Eresh said.
Kali turned quickly, panning her glasses over the horizon until she saw a glow partway up the sky. At first, it was a green point in her glasses, then white, then bright enough to wash out the night vision in a flood of light. Lowering the glasses on her nose to look over the rims, she c
ould see a faint point glowing in the clouds. In seconds, it grew, breaking through the clouds like a small but intense sun—like Apollo on an overcast day on Athena.
Then it faded away, dying in a moment to nothing, only a phosphorescent image lingering in her glasses.
Two minutes later, the artificial sun shone again. Then, finally, one more time before The Child slipped to the horizon.
Main thrust: The Child’s primary pulse fusion engine. Kali had seen it from the ground as it lit up the night sky of Athena when the ship first arrived, and she’d seen it from orbit light up the dark side of Athena when they’d left on it two cycles later. Each firing was unique, a sign of its times. The burn into Keto orbit had been thrilling—their first arrival over an alien world, a promise of adventure. This burn was the call of the familiar from a place that had become home, whatever the little known risks of it.
Kali lined up the glasses and punched “calibrate.” The highest point of The Child’s current north-south pass was due east of the island. She aimed into the center of the imaginary curve and set the inertial navigation indicator to ninety degrees. It was close enough—it would get them back to the lander.
“We see your orbit, Child,” Kali said on the radio. She didn’t know if the ship would hear or if it was already below the horizon.
She thought of the pin hidden in her pocket: an arrow through an arc—that’s what she’d needed.
Eresh had manipulated them, but she hadn’t betrayed them. Yet.
But Kali needed to know what else Eresh had messed with. The first thing she could check was the engine of the Hummingbird. What if elements of Eresh were in it?
∞
The black spire of the lander cut through the horizon, and its tip dipped in and out of the leaden stream of clouds overhead. The light shining from the open hatch at its top winked slowly as the capsule turned, the only bright thing in a slate-gray dawn.
Kali stared at the lander. Nothing in a long time had made her as happy as seeing that needle pointing to the sky when she crested the hill. A fifty-meter fault scarp had forced them a kilometer south to a point she could climb without scrambling on all fours. She stood at the edge of the scarp, at the point where successive flows of lava had spilled over the cliff and built a slope. Now they were farther from the lander than she wanted, but the last few kilometers would go quickly in a final burst of effort, despite the morning cold.
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