IronStar (5 page)

I know, dear, this is hard. Just a
few seconds more…

…objection!
(that male voice
again!)
The Accused is the cause of all of this, for every single person on
that ship! Let her watch it all!

That is acceptable. Kirrah, dear,
just a few seconds more, we must do this, please, I’ll be right beside you…

Pictures: so slow, more like
freezeframe, one terrible image after another: the slowly spreading debris
field; then a sudden, impossibly intense flare of light, its source behind her;
every bit of debris flaring a saturated, painfully brilliant solid white,
razor-sharp against the utter blackness; a voice, faint and familiar,
whispering in savage triumph: “
Got
the sonnofabitch!”
 
…Sammy? Was that you?

Where…

Fading now, the images shrinking,
no, her field of view shrinking, the damned black tunnel closing off her sight…
wait one, that wasn’t a tunnel, that was, that was… that was her survival
suit! The helmet closing automatically on decompression, polarized to blackness
by the intense light… and something tickling under her right ear, just where
the suit’s air feed was… waitaminit, something stinks here! I’m
not
dead!

…well, now you’ve done it! How’s
she ever going to learn from her mistakes, if she keeps surviving them?

“The seed of God is in us. Now
the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree. And a hazel seed grows into a
hazel tree. A seed of God grows into God.” – Meister Eckhart, 13
^th
century A.D. mystic and theologian; Germany, Terra

Something stank - it smelled like
Aunt Risa’s cookpot, the time a nine-year-old Kirrah accidentally left the
burner on…
no, worse than that
. Someone was coughing, weakly. Someone’s
head hurt, someone’s ears were ringing, buzzing. Someone’s eyes opened into
utter blackness.
Blind,
Kirrah thought,
thank God I’m blind, I won’t
have to look at the pictures any more
.

…pictures, what pictures?

Someone’s fingers found the switch
for the suit’s shoulder lights, right where hours of practice had drilled them
it would be.
Now
Cut That Out!
It’s not ‘someone’, it’s
me
,
I’m Lieutenant Kirrah Roehl, Regnum Draconis Survey Service, I’m alone and I’m
in deep, deep trouble.
The light revealed a rough, translucent gray surface
about a meter above her head. She appeared to be lying on her back in a cloud.

Not in a cloud.
In the gel
interior of a drop bubble
. Her suit - (
thank you Captain Leitch, you
said we could thank you later for making us wear these suits all day, so – thank
you
.) Her suit had covered her, fed her air, detected the planet nearby.
When she remained unconscious, its AI’s defaults must have kicked in, used its
limited delta vee to slowly break orbit. Once her falling body was committed to
the planet far below, the suit had spun its 1.5 liter reservoir of modified
silicon-based goop into an aerogel bubble, a rigid sphere twenty-five meters
across, as light, literally, as air. Impacting the upper atmosphere at a little
under thirty-eight thousand kilometers per hour, the gel’s outer layers would
have ablated and rapidly slowed her plunge, and the inner, softer gel would
cushion its occupant against the deceleration. With its orbital speed shed, the
bubble would descend like a bit of eiderdown. At this gravity, final contact
with the surface would be at under ten kilometers per hour.

Uuuh! The surface! Was she there
yet? Was she even in the atmosphere? Had the suit missed the whole damned
planet? Wait: look, oh clever graduate of SS Astronautics and Navigation 412, Professor
Stanglee presiding; you are lying on your back. That would require a gravity
field, yes?

Slowly, Kirrah rolled on her side,
then raised herself on one arm.
Ow!
Ok head, we’re very sorry, let’s
try that again, slowly, and promise you won’t stab me with that incandescent
spike again, Ok?

The second time, she made it to a
sitting position. A tug at her left shoulder reminded her of the sensor wire
the suit had embedded into the gel, so it should be possible to… yes, there’s
the readings on her wristcomp. Gravity, 1.071 Standard. Air…
Shit! Air!
Where are our priorities?
Changing screens… yes, her air scrubber was
working fine, another 28 hours at least,
be still oh my heart
.
Now
then,
outside
air… holding steady at 1225 millibars, so wherever we are,
we’ve stopped descending, we’re on the ground. Or water. Or ice… Yes, well,
moving right along… 19% oxygen, not too much CO
₂
, humidity 70%, huh,
these are the same numbers Doris had, um, before, uhhh, beforebeforebefore
…

Lieutenant Roehl! Front And
Center! We Are Doing A Survival Checklist! If you would Kindly! Pay! Attention!

Right, um…no detectable
pathogens, no dangerous trace gases, fine, we can probably breathe this stuff.
Now where in God’s Green Universe have we landed? Is the video feed working on
this sensor? (Why was “video feed” such a, a familiar phrase?)

No damned video.
Ok, the vid
pickup’s burned away, start digging. There’s not more than ten meters or so of
gel between us and the big wide world. There’s a tube of solvent here
somewhere, yes
. Within ten minutes, Kirrah breached the gel wall at nearly
its thinnest point, only three meters. Only three meters of insulating gel out
of twelve, had remained to shield her unconscious body as the last, fierce heat
of entry had torn at her drop bubble.

Kirrah stepped out into a brilliant
late afternoon sun, soft blue sky overhead, coarse green growth underfoot,
spongy like a mattress. Trees (
no, that’s “tree-like structures”, no
dangerous assumptions please
) scattered across gently rolling hills to a
line of,
well, it
looks
like forest
, about a klick to the north. Scattered white clouds
filled the sky. To the …yes, that would be east, a dark wall of clouds stacked
high into the sky. A spectacular double rainbow shimmered on the cloudbank. The
air was,
let’s see, the air was 14 Celsius, aww, screw it, we’re going to be
breathing it soon anyway…
Kirrah pressed the two studs and twisted. With a
tiny sigh, the helmet folded back into its ring. The air was …
bright
,
yes. It smelled fresh and fragrant, a tiny pungency, a
lot
better than
the inside of her suit. A long, slow rumble penetrated the buzzing in her
decompression-damaged ears: thunder.

Great. Stranded on an unexplored
planet for who knows how long - Yes, Captain Bill Leitch, again I thank you and
your professional paranoia, for sending that mailtube ahead of us. It will be
activating in exactly… one hundred eighty-one hours, twenty-seven minutes. It
will require approximately seventy-five days, Standard, to reach the NavInt
station on Trailway. It will take …oh, two weeks, to mount a rescue force.
Another one hundred eleven days for them to reach local space. That’s, um, two
hundred and eight days, give or take, and then
this
little blue light is
gonna light up on my wristcomp, and I’m gonna say, ‘Over here, people’, and
then
I’m gonna have a long, hot shower.

And speaking of ‘other people’…
Kirrah cycled her wristcomp's screen to
display “Local comm traffic”. Zero entries. She opened an analog channel, let
it sweep the radio spectrum a few times. A faint, impersonal hiss, floating on an
ocean of silence.
Well, what were you expecting, genius? They're all dead.

Right… now, where was I? Yes,
stranded here, night approaching, also rain, which will turn that nice
four-story high gel igloo behind me, back into a liter of goop in about six
hours. Damn, right now I’d trade six years of Astronautics and Navigation
courses for a good two weeks of planetary survival school. That I’d pay really
,
really
close attention to, this time. What’s the drill? Shelter, Fire,
Water, Food… Ok, Lieutenant Roehl, let’s get organized.

“When abroad, take half the
clothes, and twice the ammunition” – ancient advice for travelers, origin
unknown; modified by Survey Service for training use.

The term “organized” is probably
over-rated anyway
, thought Kirrah, as she huddled miserably in the
non-shelter of a thirty-meter “tree-like structure”, at the edge of what her
mind kept insisting was a forest. Cold rain spattered on the ground around her,
drummed against the hood of her suit, and somehow found its way to her cheek
and chin, but she refused to close her helmet and use bottled air, just to keep
her face dry. A few meters away a jumble of cut branches and sodden leaves
mocked her efforts at building a shelter. It had seemed so much
easier
at
survival school…

And
dark!
No one had told
her how
dark
it was going to be. Darker than nightside on any civilized
planet she had ever visited; darker than a 3V theatre; darker even than space -
no starlight penetrated the dense clouds. As featureless as Tubespace, and
probably colder. Certainly
wetter
.

She felt naked and exposed here:
her hearing was still damaged, although it had returned a little over the
course of the evening, she was still sure there were hunters in the forest
she’d want to know about. Her suit’s material would turn most teeth or claws,
but might not protect her from a sprain or a broken limb if something big
attacked. She lay on one side, her back to the meter-thick trunk, sidearm
clutched in one hand. A small J-1P beamer, useful for welding, cutting, or
making holes in unsuspecting night monsters. In a pinch it could even modulate
a tightbeam to an orbiting rescue ship. What it could
not
do, however,
was fire more than a dozen more times tonight. After an evening of cutting
branches for that misbegotten lean-to, it badly needed a recharge, which would
be first on her list tomorrow, when the sun came up and began to feed the
photoelectric sheet she would spread on the ground.

If
the sun came up. How long
were
these nights anyway?
Let’s see, twenty-seven hours fourteen
minutes rotation, it was spring in the northern hemisphere, assuming she was
in
the northern hemisphere, wasn’t there a way to measure your latitude from the
noon sun? That would be, hmmm, gotta reprogram the wristcomp to local day
length, yes. And find food – the suit’s nutrient inventory was not intended for
a two-hundred day sabbatical, no, and shelter… how about a nice warm cave…
warm, and dry, and dark…

See (said that familiar voice), I
told you she’d be fine.

Fine?
You call that
fine
? Without that suit, she’d be dead of hypothermia
before morning! Her survival skills are pathetic! Inattentive, that girl has
had her head somewhere else all of her life! We’ll be seeing her again, and
soon, you mark my words!

Maybe, we’ll see. We all have to
find our own path through life’s lessons, old friend, even you.

…oh, fiddle!

…whuff-
whuff
, crack, whunch,
whunch, whuff…

With a start, Kirrah opened her
eyes, and noticed two things immediately. One, it was morning, and two, a big,
dark brown, furry,
something
was standing about three meters away from
her head. With a nearly audible click, her eyes snapped into focus. Not three
meters,
ten
meters, which made that “big” adjective just pale, that
thing was
huge
, it must be a good five meters tall, and six or seven
long, from its whiplike tail to its slowly swinging head, and a set of …not
just horns, more like a helmet mounting a three-meter parabolic dish antenna…
twelve scalloped curves spaced evenly around its circular horned rim, and a
sturdy bony support. The rim looked
sharp
. A small amber eye glared at
Kirrah suspiciously, all four heavy legs did a sort of sideways shuffle, then
slowly the massive head lowered, and a wrinkled mass of skin around the, the
face, just lowered to the ground like an animated curtain, whuff, whunch,
whunch… and lifted, leaving a half-meter-wide oval of much shorter …grass,
whatever that ten-centimeter green wooly stuff was that covered the ground as
far as the southern horizon. Behind the creature, now that she looked, there
were quite a few like him (her?), in fact a loose but rather large grouping,
extending right from the treeline out half a klick onto the rolling plains,
perhaps a hundred individuals munching their ponderous way across the savanna.

Ok, matey, we’re not gonna hurt
each other, are we?
Kirrah subvocalized, as she very slowly rolled to a
sitting position, sidearm tightly gripped in her right hand. Personally, I
don’t know if this popgun
could
hurt a mountain like you, you must mass
at least twenty-five tonnes. With a feeling of relief and accomplishment, she
eased around the bole of the tree, backing a few steps into the forest. “Matey”
turned indifferently and continued grazing, lifting his two-meter-long tail and
leaving a steaming thirty-liter deposit on the ‘grass’, which went, Kirrah
noticed, a long way toward explaining that ‘tiny pungency’ she had detected
last evening.

Sunlight, I need sunlight
,
she thought.
And water. And food. Not in that order, though; where’s the
damned ladies room, the suit’s honeybucket is full
…

An hour later, with her beamer
happily sucking up energy from the photovoltaic sheet spread over a low bush,
Kirrah got down to the serious matter of food. Water was not a problem at the
moment: a shallow pool in a small depression had filled her suit’s reservoir,
and fresh, clean water was even now filtering through its recycler. So far, the
suitpack’s analyzer had rejected samples of grass (indigestible), three kinds
of leaves (all indigestible, one mildly toxic), a vine, and, to her secret
relief, a pale ten-centimeter slug-thing she had found at the base of the bush
(digestible but toxic). She was beginning to wonder whether “Matey” (she was
already thinking of the huge beasts as woolly mammoth analogs) had any smaller
cousins. And another thought from Survival 101 was seeping disquiet into the
back of her consciousness: If a herbivore as large as ‘Matey’ needed to (a)
travel in herds and (b) carry a three-meter circular(!) horned weapon on its
head, then what in Murphy’s name did this planet use for
predators
?