Edge of Infinity (12 page)

Pretty, he thought to himself. If you liked that sort of thing. If you ever saw it, instead of spending all of your time working or sleeping or drinking in grey rooms under artificial lights.

No wonder Javinta had stayed on Earth.

Rahiti shook off his gloom and poured more coffee. Everything from here out was new ground, literally. The entire moon was just one giant frozen sea. The lines formed natural roads of fresh ice in a criss-cross maze, with hidden obstacles and freshly opened cracks between him and the pole. As long as he could stay awake, stay alert, and stay on schedule, he’d be fine. The extra eight hours in the schedule gave him time to catnap, and he could trust the autopilot as long as the way was steady and straight.

Two hundred kilometres later, a liquid sound burbled in the access tube to the sleepsled.

What the fuck?

He checked the path ahead and enabled the autopilot. Four low-gravity hand pulls brought him to the tube. Six crawls through the tube and he was in the dim sled, where the colder temperature made his breath frost.

Anu was sitting on the lone bunk. Meekly, she said, “I had to use the bathroom.”

Rahiti’s vision darkened. His hands fisted, anger flooding up. It took everything he had not to kick at something or punch the bulkhead. “What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?”

She cringed. “I pulled the fire alarm so everyone was distracted. I have to see Ted. Mom won’t pay, so this is the only way.”

He didn’t believe her. It was more likely that someone had planted her here the same way they had arranged for Will’s accident. For a brief, hot moment he contemplated throwing her out the airlock.

But then he asked, “Your mom?”

“Dr. Desai,” she said.

That did it. He punched the bulkhead and was rewarded with bright hot pain in all his fingers.

Quickly Anu said, “I won’t be any trouble! I can keep you company, maybe even drive. You said you needed help.”

Rahiti shook his head. “You think you can just drive a rig, no experience? I’m going to have to take you back to Conamara. My whole schedule – Jesus. What you’ve done to me. You don’t even know.”

The sleepsled jerked violently. The snowcat gave off a sharp peal, like a bell being run, as it struck and broke through something on their path. But the cat didn’t stop. It continued to bounce and surge forward. Anu yelped in surprise, started asking questions, but Rahiti was too busy racing back through the tube to care about her curiosity.

He was halfway back to his seat when the cat slammed to a halt with terrible metal shrieks. He couldn’t grab a handhold in time. Momentum slammed him face first into the front console, right below the picture of Javinta.

The last thing he saw was her bright eyes, full of reproach: Crazy Samoan.

H
E WASN’T OUT
long. Maybe a few seconds. The blare of alarms dragged him back, accompanied by the whine of engines. The autopilot kicked in, shut them down. Lights flickered in his face, bright and annoying, but nothing he could clearly focus on.

“Mr. Ochoa!” Anu’s voice was frantic.”Are you okay?”

Rahiti wiped blood away from his face. His nose was a bright flare of pain. Warm liquid and debris were floating in his mouth. Blood. Broken teeth. He spat out as much as he could. He was dizzy and breathless and maybe even dying.

“Mr. Ochoa? Here, sit down.”

Anu helped him to the driver’s seat. Rahiti thought to ask, “Are you hurt?” but then had to cough out more blood and only caught part of her answer.

“– and my knee, I think. What happened?”

“What do you think?” he snapped. “We hit something.”

Something the autopilot hadn’t seen. A ridge hidden by snow? He should have been at the controls, not babysitting this schoolgirl.

“You’re a mess,” she said. “Medical emergency, first aid program.”

The computer answered. “Hi. How may I help?”

Anu talked to the program. Rahiti tried peering at the sensors, but his eyes were getting worse. He was reasonably sure now that he wasn’t dying, but maybe death would be easier than complete and utter failure. Easier than facing the shame. People like Hal Carpenter would mock him for years to come over this.
Couldn’t even follow a straight line
.

Despair pulsed through him as his eyes swelled shut. Blind, broken nose, the snowcat jammed –

Uncertainly Anu said, “That’s all I can do for now. Do you want to lie down?”

“No,” he ground out. “Emergency doctor off.”

The speaker went silent. The cockpit consoles were still making small alarmed noises, but Rahiti ignored them. “Did we lose the sleds?”

“I don’t know. How can I tell?”

“Look at the panel lights on the left upper bulkhead.”

Silence for a moment. Then, “They’re all green. That’s good, right?”

Rahiti tried to think clearly. The taste of blood was making him sick.

Anu’s voice was thin. “Can I call anyone for help?”

“We’re out of radio range.”

“They’ll come looking for us, right? Eventually?”

He didn’t answer. Yes, eventually Orbital would come for them. And charge him for the rescue and recovery. Technically he was using his vacation time for these eight-five hours; they’d probably find a way to charge him for any medical treatment he needed, claiming that he wasn’t on duty and therefore not insured. Years and years more work added to his contract, more steel chains of days wrapped around his legs and wrists. But there was one way to avoid it. One way out.

“You’re going to have to drive,” he said.

“What?” she squeaked. “You said I can’t! It’s too hard.”

Rahiti spat out another wad of blood. “If we don’t make it to NPS, I lose all the money I borrowed to rent this equipment and buy fuel. I’ll never be able to go home. I’ll never see my wife again. And you won’t see your boyfriend.”

She was silent. Thinking, fearing, setting herself up for failure. He knew what that was like.

“Okay, so it’s not like driving on Earth,” he admitted. “It’s like a tank pulling a train, just faster and more complicated. But the route is mostly a bunch of straight lines. If you can steer, I can keep us moving.”

“I guess I can try,” she said doubtfully.

“Computer, audio mode,” Rahiti said. “Report configuration changes since departure.”

“Zero configuration changes.” Which was good. All the sleds were still attached.

“Report significant anomalies, priority order.”

“Emergency brakes deployed on all sleds. Tractor is tilted left at 82 degrees to the horizon. Sleeping sled is tilted left at 25 degrees to the horizon. Shock sensors tripped. Fuel feed safety disconnect activated. Autopilot disabled. Satellite telemetry inoperative. No response for medical emergency distress call. Headlamp 1 inoperative. Cameras 1, 3, and 5 disabled or blind.”

“That sounds bad,” Anu said, her voice small.

“Most of those are emergency reflexes. They’ll clear when we flip the right switches. The telemetry and tilt are bad. We’ll check the cameras once we’re outside.”

Now her tone shifted to disbelief. “You can’t go outside! Maybe you didn’t notice your severe facial injuries –”

“Stop talking and help me,” he said.

The easy part was having her bandage his eyes. The hard part was struggling into the skinsuit’s tight confines in his personal total darkness, acutely aware of being naked in front of her, not knowing what she was looking at. It took twice as long as normal. Anu hadn’t brought a skinsuit, of course, and had to use the emergency one. And of course she’d never put one on before. He had to instruct her, several times, to make sure she did it right. The last thing he needed was for her to die out there due to cold or oxygen loss.

Once they were outside, Anu tethered Rahiti to the sled so he wouldn’t wander off blindly. He didn’t like that, but then again, he didn’t like any of this. She reported, “The cargo sleds are upright, in a kind of wavy line. The left cameras and headlamps are all smashed up.”

“What about the antenna? It’s on top, dead centre.”

“There’s just some twisted metal.”

“Check out the sleds and tell me if anything shifted. While you’re at it, rewind the grapples. There’s one on each side of the back of every sled. They’re our emergency brakes. It should be easy. The feed button lets out the cable, then you pull the grapple out of the ice, and then flip the retract button. Just keep the points of the grapple facing upward.”

“You’re kind of bossy,” Anu said.

“Do you want out of here or don’t you?”

She went to work.”Why’d you decide to do this, anyway?”

“Profit.”

“I guessed that.”

“Asterius owns all the bases and outposts on Europa, but Orbital operates most of the shipping contracts. To get stuff to NPS they launch a payload into polar orbit, cancel its angular momentum, then de-orbit and land. That all takes fuel, thousands of tons of it. Very expensive, but it’s passed along to Asterius. I told Asterius that I can deliver the same load a lot cheaper, just by pulling sleds. So this is my one chance to prove it.”

“If it’s so easy, why hasn’t anyone ever done it before?” Anu asked.

“Because I thought of it first.”

“And because everyone else thought it was crazy?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you been here, anyway?”

He knew the answer down to the hour, but all he said was, “Six years.”

It took two hours to inspect the sleds and retract the grapples. Another three hours to drive the loader to the snowcat, tow it out of the ridge, shove it in line with the sleds, and stow the loader again. Anu was a quick learner, but the crash had rattled her, and she was young, and everything was new to her. Every step went slower than Rahiti wanted. Here he was, barely five hundred kilometres into the three-thousand-kilometre trip, and his contingency time was rapidly dwindling. Pain and fear gnawed at him.

Back inside, stripped out of their skinsuits again, Anu asked, “Do you want to sleep for awhile? Then we can go?”

Yes he wanted to sleep. No, he didn’t dare it. “I’ll get us moving, you drive, then we’ll see,” he said.

He started the snowcat’s engine. It made a protesting noise or two, but settled down quickly. It took him several minutes of working by touch and instinct to get the sleds moving again. Anu read out their bearing and the autopilot suggested it take over.

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Anu said.

Rahiti said, “It drove us right into that snowbank.”

She was quiet for a moment. “On purpose? Like, sabotage?”

He didn’t want to say
yes
. No use both of them being paranoid. But he couldn’t honestly tell her
no
. He thought about Hal Carpenter sneaking into the snowcat while he was in the infirmary with Will and making just a few little changes to the program.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We can’t trust it.”

At 10 kph, Rahiti let Anu operate the controls. She practiced speeding up to 15 kph and down to 5, and tried some slow, gentle swerves. When Rahiti was confident – as confident as he could be, blind and in pain and exhausted – he let her ramp up to 20, then to 30. Finally he let her go to 40. The ride was smoother than he’d hoped.

“You’re not bad at this,” he said, begrudgingly.

She sounded pleased. “Thanks.”

“Just stay sharp. Something could go wrong at any minute.”

And probably would, just when he was least expecting it. Europa luck. Worst kind of luck in the solar system.

S
IX HOURS AND
two hundred and forty kilometres later, Rahiti gave up trying to nap. Every time he drifted off, he would feel a movement in the sled and start to panic. The total darkness scared him to the bottom of his gut, made everything around him sharp and hard. His face hurt and his broken teeth throbbed, but he didn’t want to pop anything but the mildest painkiller in the kit. Couldn’t afford to, not at the risk of clouding his thinking. Abandoning the bunk, he inched his way forward from the sleepsled.

“My turn to sleep, right?” Anu asked. “I’m exhausted.”

“You can’t leave. I need your eyes.”

“Like I’m going to stay up this whole trip,” she scoffed.

He didn’t answer.

Sharply she said, “I didn’t sign up to do this whole thing without sleep!”

“You didn’t sign up at all. If we don’t get there on time –”

“I know. You lose your money. But seriously. You want me to hallucinate? Go crazy on you? That’s what happens when people don’t sleep.”

“Help me get these bandages off.”

Unwrapped and flushed with water, his eyes still proved useless. He wondered, sickly, if his vision was ever going to come back. What use was sitting on a beach with Javinta if he couldn’t see her smile, or watch her trickle sand through her brown fingers?

“You’re going to have to keep driving,” he told Anu.

Several more kilometres passed. He sensed that she was thinking up new arguments. Eventually she said, “I know you don’t trust the autopilot, but what if we turn it on, and go really slow, and I nap right here? If something goes wrong, you could wake me up. Otherwise I’m going to go crazy from sleep deprivation.”

He didn’t actually think two more days without sleep would drive her psychotic. Then again, it probably wasn’t worth testing.

“Nap for how long?” he asked.

“Four hours.”

“Three.”

“I’ll still be tired.”

“But we’ll be on time,” he said.

They slowed to twenty kilometres per hour and engaged the autopilot. Anu went to sleep. Rahiti fretted. Headset plugged in, he made the computer announce their coordinates and speed every three minutes, and the time every ten minutes, and Jesus, who knew three hours could drag like that? He woke Anu up thirteen minutes early. She grumbled but got herself some coffee and increased their speed.

“So what’s next? Straight line to NPS?” she said around a yawn.

“Not quite. In five hundred kilometres we’re going to make a turn.”

“You should let me speed up now that I’m used to it. How fast can I go?”

He hesitated. “She tops out at fifty.”

“Then fifty it is.”