Castaway Planet (2 page)

Chapter 2

Laura smiled as she dropped through the entry hatch to see that her husband, Akira, had just finished strapping Hitomi into her crash seat. The seven-year-old was behaving very well, clutching her winged-wolf plush and pretending it was flying back and forth in front of her, but otherwise sitting still. “You made good time,” she said, giving Hitomi’s inexplicably blonde hair a ruffle and kissing Akira on the cheek as she passed.

“Hitomi and I were taking a break in the exercise room,” Akira replied, making sure his own long, black hair was firmly tied back, “so we were not far away.” He glanced back to their second-youngest. “Melody, tighten your restraints.”

“
Daaaad
,” Melody protested in the tone of put-upon children everywhere, “it’s a drill, not an emergency, and the straps squeeze too much.” She looked appealingly at Akira, her face and hair looking like a miniature mirror of her father’s Japanese features.

“Don’t argue with your father,” Laura said firmly. “The point of a drill is to do everything right
all
the time, so that if a real emergency ever does happen, you don’t have to think about whether you’ve done it right when it counts; you just
do
.”

She finished locking down her carryon. “We’re still two short.
Outward Initiative,
this is Laura Kimei. Where are Caroline and Sakura?”

The omnipresent AI that ran the starship
Outward Initiative
responded immediately. “Caroline is very nearly at your assigned shuttle. Sakura was in cross-corridor E-3 and will arrive in a few minutes.”

Laura nodded, and tried to ignore Melody’s predictable grumbles. Sure enough,
Outward Initiative
had barely finished speaking when Caroline dropped precisely through the center of the entranceway, landed, and walked to her location, locking down her own carryons with perfect, practiced motions. “All ready, Mom,” she said, sitting down and locking in.

At least
one
of my children is organized. Though sometimes a bit much for her own good
.

Laura sat down and strapped herself in, bringing up the telltales for the shuttle on her own iris displays. She couldn’t pilot such a ship—few people could, and of her family the only one who had any idea how such a ship flew was Sakura—but she knew the check routines.

Landing Shuttle
LS-5
was one of over one hundred similar shuttles, spaced evenly around the spinning habitat ring of the giant colony ship
Outward Initiative
. The “Trapdoor Drive,” which was how the ancient Bemmie word for the faster-than-light device translated, may have reorganized a lot of views of physics, but it hadn’t given them the ability to generate gravity on demand, so habitat rings still spun, and probably always would. For a lifeboat, this was convenient; to launch away from the main ship simply required detaching the links, and centrifugal force would hurl
LS-5
away from
Outward Initiative
.

LS-5
was already loaded with most of the cargo the Kimei family was bringing with them to the colony on Tantalus (formal designation EC-G5-4-100-11)—medical equipment and supplies, biological research and analysis systems, and the most current 3D manufacturing systems, which would produce just about anything given the right materials as input. They were just lucky they got one all to themselves, given that there were over a thousand colonists on this mission.

No
, she corrected herself.
Not luck, just supply and demand. The only luck is that they needed both doctors
and
biologists, so we got double priority for me and Akira.

Sakura suddenly plummeted through the hatch and instantly ran toward the pilot’s console, dragging her carryall bag with her. The console wouldn’t actually be active except in a real emergency, but Sakura had argued that if there was a real emergency, it only made sense to have the only person with any flight training already sitting there. “Hi, Mom, Dad, drill number one thousand six hundred twenty-seven can now complete! And look who’s with me!”

“It’s only drill number thirty-seven,” Caroline corrected Sakura. “We do one drill a week on average and we’re almost halfway to Tantalus. And what are
you
doing here, Whips?”

Laura saw Whips’ arm-tendrils curl inward nervously. “Well, Sakura
said
the regulations claimed I should go to the nearest designated boat, and . . .”

“And she was perfectly right, Harratrer,” Laura assured him, using his official human name; the tendrils relaxed. “Just get your tie-downs on.
Outward Initiative
, let Harratrer’s pod know that he’s with us during this drill.”

“They have been informed,”
Outward Initiative
replied. “Proceed to Phase II of drill.”

Melody sighed from her seat. Some drills ended once Phase I—getting to the lifeboat—was completed, but with Phase II—actual preparation for launch—being tested, there was no getting around the need to finish strapping in properly. “What a
pain
. . .” she muttered.

The display in front of Laura was a “reality overlay” that included status telltales as well as enhancing key images in reality. She could see everyone’s medical condition and current location status, but there was still procedure to follow. “Everyone settle down, we’re doing count-off. Laura Kimei, here and secured. Nothing to report.”

“Akira Kimei, here and secured,” her husband said immediately. “Nothing to report.”

“Caroline, here and secured. Nothing to report,” the seventeen-year-old said quickly.

“Sakura, here and secured! Nothing to report!” said the irrepressible black-haired girl from her pilot’s seat.

“Melody, here and secured,” came the bored voice of the ten-year-old in the seat behind her. “The straps dig into me. Otherwise nothing to report.”

“Hitomi and Skyfang!” announced Hitomi proudly. “Ready to fly!”

“Harratrer of Tallenal Pod, here and secured,” said Whips in his usual calm, slightly buzzing tones. “Nothing to report.”

“All present and secured. Pilot’s station, report status.”

She could see Sakura straighten with pride. “Pilot Station reporting! Launch systems . . . green, on standby. Autopilot and AI Support, green, on standby. Maneuver rockets, green, all self-checks complete. Life support, all green, fully supplied. Cargo integrity, all green. Nebula Drive, green, seals intact, updates complete. Emergency Trapdoor Drive, green, seals intact, updates complete. Nuclear reactor, all green, on minimal operating level. Atmospheric jets, all green, secured and sealed. Variable configuration actuators, all green. Sensor systems, all green.
LS-5
ready for launch, Mom.”

Laura smiled at the last word. Not
quite
the formal tone preferred, but she’d checked off all the vital systems. Laura could, of course, see all of that on her displays, and in fact the operation of
LS-5
would be done entirely by the onboard AI if a real emergency occurred. All AIs except the main shipboard AI were kept shut down at most times, of course, because the colonists would be on a world with minimal automation aside from whatever they brought with them.

“Good,” she said, then went on with the procedure—it was her turn. “Medical station—all crew and passengers show green.” Not surprising, of course; not only did she track her family’s health, and that of over half the colonists on board, regularly, but modern medical treatment combined with the standardization of medical nanotech implants had virtually eliminated poor health for those who didn’t simply abuse their bodies to the limit.
It won’t be long before doctors become completely obsolete
, she admitted to herself.
And honestly? I think I’d be okay with that.

The simple check procedure done and everything on
LS-5
showing green, Laura relaxed back into the secured chair. There was nothing to do now but wait while everyone else finished checking off and the usual wait to cycle through the launch sequence as though they were actually doing an evacuation.
This week, unfortunately, the sequence was starting from the last shuttle and counting down, which meant they’d be waiting a while.

She activated the nose cameras, giving her a view of
Outward Initiative
. As the whole ship spun, not just the hab wheel, there was no relative motion, so the great ship’s forward section, silver with multiple patterns of other colors from the logos and flags of its builders and supporters, glittered unmoving and stark in the exterior floodlights against the utter, unrelieved blackness of the . . . not-exactly-space that was generated around them by the Trapdoor Drive. Three kilometers long and well over a kilometer wide,
Outward Initiative
was one of the larger human vessels operating today—though not quite the largest.

She could never look at that sight, of the impossible-black space and the brilliant starship, without thinking on what it
meant
that she could be here, with her family, traveling at eighty times the speed of light to another star.
A hundred and fifty years ago, we were still stuck in our own solar system, all alone in the universe . . . and then it all changed
.

Changed, when Dr. Helen Sutter discovered an alien skeleton in earthly strata sixty-five million years old. Changed, when NASA and the Ares Corporation discovered an ancient alien base hidden within the Martian moon Phobos, and another on Mars itself.

And changed forever when Dr. Sutter, trapped beneath the ice of Europa, discovered that the aliens had left behind one last, incredible, wonderful legacy: a new, intelligent species that turned out to be as curious and eager to learn as any human being ever was.

Laura smiled and glanced back, seeing everyone—
even Hitomi, for a miracle!
—sitting quietly. Melody’s slightly glazed look showed she’d brought up one of her immersive games to pass the time, or maybe one of the interactive books she liked. Whips was relaxed, his three-sided form rounded slightly from the pressure of the artificial gravity, and the rippling patches of light and color on his sides showed he was in a good frame of mind.

Her husband caught her eye and smiled and winked.
He’s still as gorgeous as when I met him,
she thought. Akira Kimei was dancer-slender, delicate-featured, with black hair so long he had to pay constant attention to controlling it whenever he might be entering a low-gravity area—a
bishonen
even at the age of forty-three.

She winked back.
Of course, being forty-three
now
is a lot different than it used to be; I’m forty-five but I haven’t aged that much since I was in my early twenties.
With average lifespans over a hundred and seventy-five, “old” had been redefined quite a bit.

Sakura’s wireless link was active, and Laura smiled. Sakura never stopped talking even when she had to be quiet
.
Sometimes she was a bit sorry for Whips, but the Bemmie adolescent and Sakura had been best friends for years, even before they applied for the colony trip. She supposed he’d gotten very good at listening along the way.

She gave a satisfied sigh and settled back.

Alarm klaxons suddenly screamed, and as her stunned mind tried to grasp what that meant, the pressure door to the hatch slammed shut and locked.

“Oh, my God . . .” Sakura said, and Laura heard fear in the usually fearless voice.

Stars bloomed into existence around them;
Outward Initiative
was—incredibly—no longer in the Trapdoor Drive mode.

No,
her horrified mind said numbly,
It’s worse than that
.

For one splintered fraction of an instant, she saw something in the displays that was utterly impossible; a ghostly shimmer of structures below them, as though part of
Outward Initiative
was here, with them, and the rest . . . not.

Even as she saw that, even as Sakura’s shocked gasp was dying away, there was a
thud
and a virulent flare of green-white light, and
LS-5
was suddenly spinning away, uncontrolled, free-falling, lights momentarily flickering and threatening to send them into darkness. With only fragments of metal and composite following it,
LS-5
hurtled away into the emptiness of interstellar space.

Chapter 3

Sakura clamped her jaw shut to keep from screaming as
LS-5
whirled into the void. She gripped the arms of the pilot’s chair convulsively. She heard herself muttering, “Oh my God, oh my God . . .” and her mother and father both whispering something that sounded very similar.

The whirling, dizzy, uncontrolled spin lasted only a few moments; automatic stabilizer jets fired momentarily and then cut off. She felt the odd floating feeling of microgravity; over the private channel she heard Whips’ own half-formed prayers to Those Beyond the Sky.

For a few moments, no one moved; finally her father spoke. “My God, Laura, what happened?” Dad’s voice was filled with the same disbelieving horror welling up through Sakura, filling her with cold shock. Whips’ electronic link had gone blank, the loss so great that he wasn’t even forming thoughts she could understand.

Her mother was silent. Hitomi was sobbing, the cry of a child who doesn’t really understand, but knows something terrible is happening.

Then she felt a stirring in her best friend’s link.
Are you okay, Whips?

I . . . must be. Panic is useless.
His determined statement of that fact gave her a lifeline to hold to, and she sent him a smile that firmed his resolve.
I am a descendant of Blushspark herself, child of the Seven Vents, the people who dared the chance to become part of both worlds. I must get a
grip
, as you would say
.

Whips spoke aloud, answering Dad’s question. “The light . . . looked like a malfunction in the Trapdoor Drive,” he said. “When a ship does the drop into the Trapdoor space, you’ll often see a flash of about that color.”

“So . . . what, parts of the ship were dropping and others weren’t?” Laura asked, her voice frighteningly casual. Her mother was scared
.
The thought almost made Sakura panic again. Her mother simply did
not
get scared by anything.

“I guess so.” Whips squeezed his three hands together nervously. “A field instability—the field’s usually kept larger than the ship by a fair distance, but if something went wrong . . . I guess it could cause the field to dip down below the outer edge of the habitat ring.”

“Are we going to die, Mommy?” Hitomi asked tearfully.

“We are not going to die!” Laura snapped, and Sakura winced at the underlying near-panic in her tone.

I’m in the pilot’s chair. I should do . . . what a pilot does.
She bent over the displays, searching. “I don’t see any other shuttles.
LS-5
, are you getting other beacons?”

There was no answer. “
LS-5,
respond!”

When the AI remained silent, she turned her attention to the displays on the board.
Oh . . . no
. “Mom . . . the AI’s offline. And there’s medical alerts—”

“What?” Her mother had the expression of a doctor discovering a patient had unexpected terminal cancer.

“What is it, Laura?” Akira demanded.

“Radiation. Huge spike, I’ve never seen anything like it. The diagnostics say it was a mixture of the common types plus some particle bursts that I don’t even
know
.”

“Does
that
mean we’re going to die?” Hitomi’s voice was almost a whisper.

Sakura saw her mother pause before answering.
She’s checking. This is what Mommy
does
.

Then Mommy smiled and shook her head. “No, Hitomi. It was bad—very bad—but
LS-5
shielded us from the worst. We didn’t get a lethal dose, and I’m already directing our medical nanorepair. We all might get a little sick in the next few days, but we’ll be okay.”

Hitomi relaxed visibly, and so did Sakura. She knew her mother wouldn’t sugar-coat anything like this, so saying it was all right meant that it was, indeed, all right. But . . .

“Mom? What about Whips?”

She smiled. “His pod knows you spend lots of time with us, so his doctor gave me the data and access codes to his medical nanos too. He’ll be fine.”

“Thank you, Dr. Kimei,” Whips said. “I think the radiation explains the problem with
LS-5
, although I’m not sure why our other systems are working.”

“Trapdoor radiation surge,” Melody said.

Sakura sensed the Bemmie equivalent of a headslap
of course!
from Whips, but no one else seemed to understand. “What do you mean, Mel?” asked her father.

“The Trapdoor Drive creates a surge of subatomic particles when it’s used,” Melody answered, in the tense, focused tone that she always had when she was thinking to keep herself from being nervous. “That’s why the ship always stops talking whenever you’re preparing for drive activation or deactivation; the particle flux isn’t dangerous to
us
but disrupts the quantum channels the AIs use.”

“She’s right,” Whips confirmed. “I should have thought of it myself. And the malfunction must have caused the dangerous radiation surge; we were sitting
on
the Trapdoor interface. But I’m surprised you’d know that, Mel.”

I’m not,
Sakura thought.
She’s the family genius—heard Mom once say to Dad that Melody might be smarter than both of them put together.

Melody looked pleased, even though still worried. “I studied up on it when I knew we were leaving.”

“Whips, can you get the AI back up and running?” Laura asked.

Sakura saw the rippling pattern of hard thinking on her friend’s skin. “I . . . don’t think so,” he said, finally. “I’m not nearly finished in my training, and anyway the only way I think might work we can’t use right now. We’d have to shut down all associated systems and extract the cores, then do a clean memory restore. We
have
a memory backup onboard in the central repository, I think, but the other part means shutting down most of
LS-5
.”

“Can we handle things without the AI?” Akira asked after a moment. “Shutting down
LS-5
and living in our suits may be necessary.”

“There’s still a lot of basic redundant automation in the systems,” Sakura answered, looking at her readouts again. “Exterior comms aren’t working—I think some of the antennas got fried or something—but all the interior systems seem to be okay, and most of the sensing systems are still running.” She halted, staring at the readouts, and felt as though an ice cube were sliding down her spine. “Oh, crap.”

“What is it, Sakura?” her mother asked tensely.

“The piloting and navigation. The automation there is based on the same kind of quantum-channel circuitry as the main AIs, and it was up and running for the drill.”

“My God,” said Akira in a soft voice. “Does that mean we’re dead in space?”

Sakura flipped the controls from
Auto
to
Manual Control
.
Please, if there’s anything listening . . .
She gripped the joystick and pulled.

LS-5
immediately spun smoothly about its axis, and Sakura felt a relieved smile spreading over her face. She did a quick, sharp test-fire of one of the rockets, and then ran through manual checks of the other systems. “No, Dad. We’re not dead in space. The manual controls are all operating, and systems all check out.”

“Can you run it all?”

She swallowed, then sat up. “I . . . I guess I have to, don’t I? I’ve got the basics down—the sergeant said I was doing really well. And . . . well, I think I can pilot
LS-5
with Whips to help and Caroline to work with us to figure out destinations and courses.”

Laura looked to Whips. “What is your honest guess as to how long it would take to get the AI back up and running, if we try that? That would bring back our automation, right?”

Whips’ arms curled backward in a momentary defensive posture. “Um, Dr. Kimei, I . . . I’m not
sure
we can get it back up at all. I’m just learning, still, you know! If I tried . . . well, several days, at least. If it worked. And it’s possible I’d mess something else up while I was doing it.”

“Mom, Dad,” Caroline said after a moment, “I think we’d better stick with what already works. If Whips tries and breaks something by accident we could be royally sc . . . er, in a lot of trouble.”

Laura looked uncertainly at Sakura, and there was suddenly a private channel.
Sakura? Honey, this will put a lot on you. Are you really okay with this? Do you
really
think you can do it?

Mom was being serious, and that meant she had to be serious too. The controls and readouts suddenly looked bigger, more intimidating, and it sank in that what Mom was really saying was
we’ll all be depending on you to do it
right
.

Sakura took a breath and made herself really think about it.
Look first, jet later
, Whips reminded her.
Not the time for your usual charge-forward, Sakura
.

I know, Whips. Don’t nag.
Still, she knew he was just reminding her of her own worst failing, and she couldn’t argue with him. She considered all the controls, everything she’d have to do—if they could survive at all, something she didn’t want to contemplate. It was terrifying.

But at the same time, part of her was
excited
. At most she’d expected to get a solo shuttle flight many months from now, with the automatics handling most of it and the sergeant, or another pilot, hanging over her shoulder. This was scarier . . . but it was
real
. She, Sakura Kimei, would be the honest-to-God pilot of a real spaceship.

Whips
? she sent.
Can you keep everything else running?

Everything that’s not damaged now? Yes. I can.

She looked over at Caroline, who met her gaze, frowned . . . and then smiled and nodded.

Relief burst in on her.
Yes, Mom. Me and Whips can run this little ship, I promise.

“All right, then,” Laura said decisively. “It’s not the way I’d have wanted Sakura to get her real flight experience, but I guess it’s our best choice.”

“Yay!” Hitomi said happily. “Does that mean you’re the Captain, Sakura?”

That caused a faint chuckle around
LS-5
’s interior. “No, Hitomi, Mom’s the Captain. Dad’s the First Officer. I’m just Navigation. Whips is Engineering, and I guess Caroline’s sciences or something.” She looked over to her mother, who was smiling fondly at Hitomi. “So what next, Captain Mom?”

“‘Mom’ or ‘Captain’ please, the two together are just silly.” Laura looked out the viewport. “Can we get any comm beacons?”

“No, sorry, Mom. Remember I said most of the comm system’s down. Just internals.”

“Can’t you use the other scanning systems?”

“Maybe.” Sakura thought a moment, then after poking around in the controls was able to check out the infrared and radar scans. “Radar’s still working—don’t know why, that’s an RF-based system too. Umm . . .”

After a few minutes, she shook her head. “I’m not getting any radar patterns that look like other shuttles, no IR glows, either, at least nothing nearby.”

“There might not
be
anyone else,” Whips said bluntly. “I . . . wasn’t looking carefully, but can’t we play back the recording of those last seconds?”

Laura looked at him. “I’m sure we can . . . but why?”

“Because I don’t think I saw any other of those Trapdoor flares. If I’m right that means that we’d be the only ones who fell off, so to speak.”

“Or,” Sakura said slowly, “that if there are any others they’d be somewhere else along
Outward Initiative
’s path, dumped whenever the instability reached their area of the hab ring.”

Hitomi brightened. “So once they realize what happened,
Outward Initiative
can just come back and pick us up, right?”

Sakura winced, and she saw her mother close her eyes before turning to face Hitomi. “I’m . . . afraid not, honey. If it’s just us, well, they still probably lost a big chunk of the hab ring. There’s going to be a lot of damage to the ship and they won’t dare stop. They’ll have to get to the nearest colony and get repairs, even if they think we might have survived.”

“And with our comm systems out . . .” Sakura swallowed, but made herself go on, “well, with them out, even if they did come back there’s so much space for them to look through that they’ll probably never see us.”

“And if our comms are out, the same is almost certainly true for anyone else who escaped, so if there are others, we may never see them, and they may never see us,” her father pointed out. “The important thing is to determine what we do next. Are we equipped for a system survey?”

Sakura checked, but got the answer she expected. “Sorry, Dad. No, there’s no survey software installed. No reason to have any.
LS-5
is really meant as just a shuttle between orbit and ground and vice versa, and maybe a small ship for moving around a known system. Even in a lifeboat context, it’s assumed we’re in some inhabited system. Surveys are done by big ships, usually.”

She sensed her Bemmie friend suddenly close off, as though he’d had a terrible thought. His next words brought that thought out for everyone to look at.

“Sakura . . . most of space is . . . well, very empty. If we’re not in a solar system . . .”

She saw her mother’s eyes widen, and Caroline’s too; they both understood the implications. “It’s not
that
bad . . . I think. The Shuttle’s got its own Trapdoor Drive, so we can go FTL . . . in hops, because we have to charge the loops to run it—takes more power than the reactor can generate by itself. So . . . in effect it’s about a third the speed of a regular Trapdoor.”

“So that’s about . . . what, twenty-five times the speed of light or so?”

“A little more, but yeah.”

Her mother frowned and looked towards the back, and Sakura suddenly understood what she was worrying about. Whips. His people were amphibious, and he had to immerse in water fairly often for his skin and other biological functions. She knew that wasn’t necessary every day, but . . .

“Honey, let’s say we get to a good solar system. How long will it take to go from, well, wherever we get in the system to landing?”

“Depends on where we come out of Trapdoor,” her sister Caroline said. As a planetographer, Caroline had a good grasp of distances and times in solar systems. “Could be only a few days—long enough to get a good look and choose a landing site, or get noticed by anyone already in-system—or could be several weeks, maybe over a month.”