Citadel: First Colony (6 page)

“Lissa, I’m going to step away. Just for a second,” he added when she seemed ready to protest. “I’m just going to scout around for a few feet, see if I can find any sign of the landing module or the crew. They can’t be far. We were thrown out by the blast, but we have to be close. I’ll be in ear shot the whole time, ok?”

She nodded and lowered her head to the ground.

Gingerly, trying not to use his burned hands, he rose to his feet and began walking a perimeter. He picked a distinctive-looking tree as a landmark and kept it always on his left as he made an ever-expanding circle. True to his promise, he stayed close enough to hear Lissa cough and groan as he pushed through the heavy brush. Every few moments he would stop, remaining still while he listened for signs of the crew.

This was taking too long. Lissa was in bad shape, and if she didn’t get medical attention soon, she’d die. Thomas felt responsible. It was he, after all, who had screwed up with the manual release for the module. This crash, Lissa’s injuries, the injuries and deaths of the rest of the crew—it was all on him.

Again.

He shook his head, fighting back the self-pity and loathing. This wasn’t the time for it. The weight of responsibility for all of this made it even more crucial that he save Lissa. He pressed on in the staggered walk-pause-listen-walk pattern.

Finally he heard something that sounded very much like talking. It was faint and distant, somewhere in the thick brush, but it was nearly unmistakable. It sounded like a group of men some ways off.

“Hey!” he called out. “Hey, we’re here! Over here!”

He quickly made his way back to Lissa’s side. “Here! Here in the brush!”

It took several minutes, but soon he could hear shouting and the sounds of people pushing through the undergrowth. In moments, four Blue Collars broke through to the clearing where Thomas and Lissa had landed.

The four men paused at the edge of the clearing, taking in the scene. One of the younger seemed, for a moment, to be staring strangely at Thomas, but then all four men pushed ahead and hurried toward them.

“Lissa,” one Blue Collar said, kneeling beside her.

Lissa coughed again, and blood spattered the corners of her mouth.

“It’s ok,” the young man said with a strong, reassuring tone. “We’ll get you out of here. You’re going to be fine.”

The four men began tearing the sleeves from their jump suits and breaking limbs from the trees, fashioning a makeshift stretcher for the injured woman. Thomas felt completely useless as he sat with burned hands, forced to watch them.

One of the men bent to take a look at Thomas and his burns. “These are bad,” he said. “You hurt anywhere else?”

“Shoulder,” Thomas said. “I don’t think it’s dislocated, but I wrenched it pretty good.” Briefly, Thomas thought about the pain he’d felt in his arm earlier, but if it was sprained, the pain was being masked by his other injuries. He wondered if it was a good or bad thing for one potential injury to be forgotten in light of several others.
Wonder what else I’ve banged up
, he joked with himself. Internal gallows humor.

The man nodded. “Can you walk?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” He nodded towards Lissa, “I think she may have a punctured lung, though. Pretty bad. Is there a medic back at the crash site?”

The man shrugged. “Maybe. There’s a field medic in the BC crew, and the White Collars are supposed to have at least one doctor. Whether they survived or not ... ”

Thomas didn’t need him to finish.

“They were setting up a camp when we left. The scrub ... that Somar guy ... he was in charge,” the man practically spat. “The camp isn’t far. But you two were thrown pretty deep into the brush.”

Thomas wasn’t sure if he’d heard the man right.
Scrub?
He hadn’t heard it much, but he was pretty sure that was slang used to describe the Esool. Somar—the Esool Captain who had helped everyone get strapped in and prepared for the crash. The man who had helped save humans when he could have thought only of himself.

How could anyone still be a bigot in this day and age? Shouldn’t that world have died off long ago? Some things, Thomas supposed, just stayed the same as long as humans were at the heart of the equation.

Thomas decided that this wasn’t a good time to point out the foibles of racism and struggled to stand again. The man helped him, carefully taking hold of his elbows and lifting Thomas to his feet. Thomas glanced up through the trees. “We must have been launched out of the door pretty fast to be thrown so far. The brush may have been the only thing that kept us from going splat.”

The young man, Alan, stepped up to them. The other two were gently putting Lissa on the stretcher. “You saved Lissa,” he said stoically. “If not for you, she would have died in that explosion.”

Thomas studied him for a moment. It was as if there was something unspoken there, some hint of a conversation unsaid. “Seemed like the thing to do,” Thomas said finally.

Alan nodded and returned to help the others in getting Lissa on the makeshift stretcher.

“Don’t mind him,” the man beside him said. “He’s always been a little weird. He reads too much.”

Thomas almost laughed. “I didn't think anyone read anymore.”

The man laughed and helped the others to lift the stretcher and carry Lissa toward the edge of the clearing.

Thomas looked around and, despite himself, had to smile. They had just crashed on an alien world—a world where he was prepared to spend the rest of his life. A world that represented a fresh start. “Welcome home,” he said quietly, as the group began the hard trek back to camp.

––––––––

“
T
here
are supplies and tools inside the module,”
Mitch reported to Captain Somar. “It’s likely they’re still in good shape. Most of that stuff was sealed in individual fireproof containers.”

Somar nodded, glancing up at the gleaming tower that loomed above them. It seemed to Somar to be a majestic thing, every bit as regal as its name implied. “The Citadel module almost made its landing, it seems.”

Mitch glanced up as well, squinting in the bright light that reflected from Citadel's solar coating. “The safety system kicked in and righted it. Plus, Reilly dumped everything the module had into pushing back against gravity. It slowed us enough to make a semi-decent landing. But the crew chamber is part of the shuttle. It was supposed to release from the module before it landed. That’s our link back to the orbital platform, if it survived.”

“Why didn’t the shuttle release?” Somar asked. “It seems unlikely that its systems would fail at the same time as these other mechanical failures.”

Mitch looked around to make sure no one was paying close attention. “You’re right,” he said to Somar, lowering his voice. “It’s too much of a coincidence. The whole colony ship comes off of the lightrail too close to a planet’s surface, the release clamps fail, and the shuttle doesn’t detach? That’s a pretty long string of failures.”

Somar looked again at the Citadel module. The shuttle that formed the top portion was pointing prominently toward the sky, as if yearning to launch. “Once we have a base camp established and the wounded are tended to, I’d like you to examine the shuttle. We need to know if there has been sabotage.”

“It’s almost a sure thing,” Mitch said intently.

Somar sniffed and shook his head. “May the Creator help us if we have a saboteur among us. Worse still to have one who is at peace with dying himself.”

Mitch nodded. “Well, I’ll figure out what the story is with the shuttle, but at least Citadel seems to be intact. More or less.”

The module did seem to be in decent shape, as Somar allowed his gaze to move from the shuttle to the base of the structure. “Take someone with you, and retrieve the supplies and tools.”

The engineer nodded and was turning to leave when Somar added, “And Mr. Garrison?” Mitch turned. “If there are weapons on board please secure them.”

Mitch paused briefly, then nodded again and was gone.

Somar looked around at the crew of humans he was now commanding. This was by no means going to be easy. Many of them were injured beyond the abilities of the Blue Collar field medic, some of the White Collar physicians were among the injured and dead, and there was apparently an enemy in their midst. Add to that the open bigotry that many of the humans felt toward him, and Somar’s isolation was nearly complete.

There was something else, as well. It had nagged at him for a while before he’d finally begun to put the pieces together. The Blue Collar crew was tending to it’s own, as was the White Collar crew. There was a definite division in the group—to the point that Somar could see a physical line of demarcation as the groups of blue-clad crewmembers lay apart from the more casually dressed White Collars.

There was a growing division in the ranks.

In this situation, on an alien world, with so many injured and the odds stacked so high against them, division was one thing that could not be tolerated. They would all have to work together for their common good. The question was, how could an outsider such as himself ever hope to lead a group that was divided even amongst their own?

“Captain?” a woman’s voice said from behind.

Reilly, the ship’s pilot, was holding her side as she stepped up to him. “One of the White Collar doctors has a broken arm, but he’s asking to be allowed to help.”

“Of course,” Somar said, nodding slightly. “We can use all of the help we can get.”

Reilly nodded. “Thought so,” she said.

She didn’t move, and Somar had discovered during his time among the humans that this meant they had more to say but were unsure how to proceed. “You wish to say something else?” Somar asked.

Reilly blinked, then smiled slightly. “It’s just, some of the crew are ... suspicious of you.”

Somar was not surprised by the news. “Oh?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. There have been comments. Some of them think it’s a little much that an Esool was onboard when all of these things went wrong. Some of them are even wondering why you were out of stasis.”

Somar reflected on this for a moment. “Are you one of them?” he asked.

She shook her head fervently. “No. When Captain Alonzo ordered us to wake everyone in the WC stasis bay, I was the one who woke you,” she said.

Somar blinked and smiled. “Oh? Why was that?”

She shrugged. “It was chaotic. I’m not an engineer, I’m a pilot. I just started hitting buttons. You were in one of the pods that was activated.”

Somar laughed. “So, I am here by accident?”

Reilly smiled. “Yes, sir, I suppose you are. So I’m pretty sure you weren’t running around sabotaging the ship.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said. “But the two of us are apparently in the minority. It seems the rest of the crew is determined to make me the villain.”

“Mitch isn’t,” she said. “You can trust him. And there are a few others. We don’t all hate the Esool, you know. Most of the fighting was over when we were very young. A lot of us saw this exchange program as being a pretty good thing for humans and the Esool.”

Somar nodded. “I appreciate your support, Pilot.” He bowed slightly in the tradition of honor that his people used, “I thank you.”

Reilly smiled and attempted a slight bow, unaware of the traditional response. Somar took no offense.

It
was getting dark when the rescue team breached the underbrush
and burst into the open area formed by Citadel’s crash. The men holding the makeshift stretcher took their first rest since finding Thomas and Lissa, and Thomas joined them happily.

He felt hot and feverish. That was a very bad sign. He may not have much medical knowledge, but he knew enough to recognize signs of infection. His hands, now wrapped in the torn sleeves of his jump suit, throbbed and ached furiously. And the fever was taking a toll on his strength, causing him to feel weak and very thirsty.

Alan had noticed early on that Thomas was having trouble and had stepped in to support him on occasion, without a word. Thomas was grateful not to talk, actually. At this point, all he wanted was to collapse, preferably into an icy stream somewhere.

Citadel rose high above the surrounding forest, and for the very first time, Thomas got to see it in all of its glory. Even now, wrecked and damaged as it was, it was awe-inspiring. All those years ago, he’d dreamt of being exactly where he was right now. Sure, he’d envisioned things going a little more smoothly. But in general terms, it was exactly as he’d dreamt it. Standing on an alien world, breathing an alien atmosphere. And it was made all the sweeter by the fact that the ship that had brought him here was based partially on his own work and designs.

It had all worked.

“Doctor!” Alan suddenly called. “We need a doctor! We have injured here!”

The camp had taken shape amongst the trees with the looming structure of the Citadel module standing guard, just as its namesake might have millennia ago. A man with his arm in a sling came forward with one of the Blue Collars in tow. The Blue Collar was carrying what seemed to be a med kit, and he rushed to Lissa’s side.

“It’s going to be ok, Lissa,” the Blue Collar man said, as he had them put the stretcher down and he opened the med kit beside her. “Doc?”

The other man, casually dressed, knelt down beside them. He reached out and gingerly touched Lissa’s side with his good hand. She winced and cried out, coughing slightly. “Punctured lung,” the doctor said. He turned to the Blue Collar, “I don’t suppose you’ve had any experience in an operating room?”

The Blue Collar shook his head. “No,” he said. “But now’s as good a time as any to pick up a new skill.”

The doctor gave a sharp, almost derisive laugh, then nodded and directed the men to carry Lissa to a makeshift triage. He then turned his attention briefly to Thomas. Unwinding the bandages was a little more painful than Thomas would have hoped. “Bad,” the doctor said. “It looks like infection is setting in. We have antibiotics, but someone will need to dress these.”

“I’ll do it,” Alan said, stepping forward immediately.

The doctor looked him over and nodded. “ok. I have to assist with the surgery of the young woman. You take care of this man,” he said.