Under Strange Suns (21 page)

Weakness? Were the benighted joon across the mountains laughing at his weakness? Mocking the Watchful God? He felt his geniality melting away, replaced by a growing fury. He fought that back, recalling the dictate to acts of charity. He had done those poor joon no favor, leaving them outside of the embrace of the Lhakovi. It was a charitable action to draw into that embrace those who saw the wisdom of joining the Lhakovi.

As was the killing of those joon who failed to see wisdom.

Those living beyond the pale of the Protectorate thought of themselves as free. But what was freedom? Want, privation, ignorance. The Keepers of the Dictates, and for that matter Vongük himself, saw to the enforcement of the Dictates, including the injunction of charity. No Lhakovi faced starvation, not the lowliest woman toiling in the fields nor the poorest indigent begging for alms outside the Watchful God’s fane. What sort of boon was freedom to starve?

Poor, hungry barbarians. Animists or atheists, bereft of the true meaning of existence that only the Watchful God could provide. A life without meaning was the life of a beast. And false meaning was no meaning at all. He had let the joon north of the Wild Wall retain their freedom out of a combination of misdirected pity and–worst of all–sloth. No, he was doing them an active disservice by permitting them to maintain such a spiritually impoverished existence.

Vongük unsheathed his sword of rank. The gems inset in the blade spun a pale blue and white fire. He thrust the point at the far Wild Wall. He considered uttering a vow, a solemn declaration of intent, along the lines of, “Your respite is over. Prepare for the embrace of the Lhakovi.” But such smacked of pride. Instead he sheathed the blade and muttered, “Deeds, not gestures.” Then he spun on his heel and walked back to the Keep of the Pontifex-General.

He had work to do.

T
HE THREE WOMEN OF THE YUSCHENKOV
sat in the command center. Brooklynn Vance thought Doctor Roberts looked markedly incurious for her first time on the bridge. Still, it was nice to see more than one person at a time. That hadn’t happened much since the last meeting in the galley, and Vance had been here in the command center for that. It was getting lonely on board the
Yuschenkov
. Matamoros she saw a lot of up here, but mostly Matamoros did what she was doing now–poring over the continuous flood of sensor information, sifting through the electronic flow for clues about the fate of the shuttlecraft and its crew. Mostly in silence.

Vance couldn’t remember the last time she had seen Park. He was examining the Y-Drive. Again. Seemed to spend most of his time there, tinkering. As if he was going to discover some secret that had eluded starship engineers for the last couple of decades.

Sam McAvoy appeared to be handling the setbacks well enough. He continued to busy himself with geological analyses. Though she thought he had ramped up his ad hoc fermentation. Laying in stock, she supposed.

She hadn’t seen Foster after the incident with the coffee cup.

“How is Foster?” she asked.

“I administered a sedative,” Doctor Roberts said. “That appeared to calm him. But I haven’t seen him since. He was supposed to come in this morning for a follow up visit.”

“Inspecting the attitude jets,” Matamoros said, looking up from a screen. “At least that’s what the log says.”

“Good,” Doctor Roberts said. “Keeping himself busy is likely what I’d have prescribed anyway.”

Vance nodded. Exactly her thought. Foster worried her. He was a loner. Fine; that personality trait could work well for a spacer. But facing this, what? Almost certain doom? Well, she had no personal experience with it, but she figured it was best faced as a group. Better for the ship, anyway. Who knew what a depressed, hopeless, unsupervised crew might do?

“How are you holding up, Doc?” Vance asked.

“I doubt I’m keeping sufficiently busy. You are all–unfortunately–healthy. Physically, at least. And, call me Grace, considering the circumstances.”

“All right, Grace. Would it help if I broke something? Matamoros, let me see your left wrist.”

“You still aren’t funny, Captain.”

Vance had to agree with her. Matamoros did not sound amused. Best not to push her; the computer tech still harbored a simmering anger, blaming Vance in some amorphous manner for Thorson’s death. But at least she was talking.

“Thank you for the offer, Captain,” Doctor Roberts said. A trace of a smile raised the corners of her lips. “But no. I’ve been through plenty in my life. This likely fate of ours is far from the worst outcome I’ve had to consider. The rest of the crew, now, is an open question.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Matamoros said. “I’m not giving up. Thorson wouldn’t have given up. I suppose I should wish I’d never met the man. That I was still serving beers in Kourou. But I’ve thought about it. Even if I die up here, getting into space, seeing what I’ve seen, was worth it. So I ask myself what Thorson would do. He would keep working, keep trying.”

Vance wasn’t sold on that. But she nodded again, hoping the gesture looked encouraging and supportive.

“If you’re going to worry, worry about the boys,” Matamoros added.

And that Vance did agree with.

* * *

Aidan reached the treeline before the primary set. McAvoy had warned him that the days on this moon were longer than Earth days, and Aidan felt every extra hour. His legs were jelly from the climb downhill. He had enough energy left to set up camp and shovel a meal into his mouth before falling into the exhausted sleep that had escaped him the previous night.

After breaking camp and allowing himself a brief meal, Aidan set off again.

He found the morning’s descent leisurely compared to yesterday’s strenuous mountaineering.

When gaps in the forest allowed glimpses of the plain below he searched for signs of habitation, but the only artificial elements he could see were remnants of the shuttlecraft. At least he didn’t need to fear straying off course. He couldn’t possibly miss the wreckage strewn across the landscape, or the furrows and fire-blackened patches it had caused.

He steered his course a point or two east, hoping to begin his survey, salvage, or rescue at the point of initial impact. He worried he might miss something essential if he began near the center of the debris field.

The perceived proximity of his campsite to the wreck proved deceptive. Aidan gave in to the importuning growls of his stomach and stopped for a lunch break while still at least three miles shy of the nearest chunk of twisted metal. But he reached his goal less than an hour after his meal.

The first artifact he encountered was an engine cowling, bent and warped by impact. It had bounced and tumbled a couple hundred yards from the trench gouged into the sod by one of the ramjet engines. Aidan tossed away the section of ceramic coated titanium alloy and strolled to the pit where the engine had come to rest. It was fire blackened and its extremities, attachment points, and bits of adjoining shuttle innards that had sheered off with it were mangled beyond recognition or repair. But the engine itself seemed to have survived intact.

Aidan took that as a good sign. If he found both engines near the commencement of the trail of wreckage that would indicate that the shuttlecraft had come down nose up, suggesting that Thorson had maintained a degree of control. And that allowed at least a glimmer of hope of survivability.

He did find the second engine, right about where he’d hoped. It had suffered worse fire damage than the first, reduced to a cooling hummock of slag. Cooling, but still warm to the touch.

Aidan kept walking the trail. Ahead he saw the control surface of the aft fuselage. Nearing, he passed components he wouldn’t have been able to identify even had he seen them intact. The twin tail rudders rose as he approached, reflecting pale blue light from the planet rolling ponderously overhead. Perhaps the aft section of the fuselage had come through relatively whole.

It had not.

Forward of the tail section the cargo compartment no longer existed. That portion of the shuttle body had not retained any semblance of structural integrity. Panels and struts were dug into the blue turf, initially following the direction of travel of the crash. The tops of cargo containers emerged from the holes they’d dug. But after a few meters the wreckage ramified from its linear pattern into a blossom of twisted sheets of metal, sprigs of multi-colored wiring, and scattered cases. Some of the cases had survived intact, others had sprung open, still others had shattered. Quentin Burge’s carefully stowed gear was an alluvial fan of detritus littering the plain.

This was a less promising sign.

Aidan noted the yard sale as he passed. He would glean what supplies he could after he had finished his inspection. Stopping now felt too much like surrender.

He passed remnants of the undercarriage. Curved support struts poked up like sections of dinosaur ribcage, some with bits of fuselage still attached like so much desiccated skin and gristle. Off to his left, a wingtip thrust up from the harrowed soil like the dorsal fin of some alien land shark. To his right, a great swath of turf had been torn up and bulldozed into a hillock by the shuttle’s right wing.

Ahead of him, still some distance away, lay the end of this trail of wreckage, looking from Aidan’s position like a lone boulder, some final upthrust outlier of the mountains. Solidity, regularity of form. That suggested that the cockpit had retained its structure, had come through the crash in one piece. Maybe all the safety features had achieved some sort of synergistic feat of mechanical heroics.

Maybe.

Aidan patted the zippered pocket of miscellany on his combat harness. He felt the lump of his lucky die. He could use a natural twenty right about now.

Nearing, he could see the circular port of the cockpit’s rear hatch. It was closed. So they’d closed it after he’d bailed out. Evidence of clear thinking. Thorson had a lot of confidence. Perhaps it was well-founded. He had brought the shuttle in nose up, hit hard enough to turn the cargo compartment into a small bomb, but the nose had come to rest...in one piece?

Aidan reached the end of the furrow. The back end of the cockpit rose above him, appearing less neatly intact close up. Shards of fuselage edged the remains like a broken eggshell.

Aidan stopped. He should just walk around, take a look at the front and get it over with. Instead he knocked on the hatch.

Nothing.

“Yeah, that was kind of a long shot,” he said.

He took a deep breath and walked around to the side.

The nose was crumpled. The front windows were missing, glittering specks spread like confetti in a wide fan across the blue plain. Side view ports were spider-webbed. The impact force required to do that kind of damage to the sapphire/carbon-nanotube composite glass told Aidan all he needed to know.

Examining the interior of the cockpit was unnecessary.

He did it anyway.

He clambered onto the buckled plates of the shuttle’s nose and looked through the empty window.

Restraint belts, airbags, hardening foam–none had been sufficient. The airbags had sagged to flaccid balloons trapped in a foam matrix now gradually reverting to a gel. And tightly strapped to impact cushioning acceleration seats were the bodies of Michael Thorson and Quentin Burge.

Aidan sank to his knees. All his effort, all his focus on the mission, had been just so much killing time. Thorson and Burge had been dead long before he had parachuted to the ground. He wondered if the thought that at least it had been quick was any real consolation. He swiveled to the side, rearranged his position so he was seated in a crumpled divot on the nose, his legs hanging over the starboard side. He put his head in his hands.

How was he going to go? Some disease his body had no natural immunity against? Torn to bits by one of the local predators? Stabbed by one of the natives? Starvation? He remembered thinking, way back when he took this job, that he didn’t mind the risk of dying far from Earth. Now here he was, running through a list of possible death scenarios. Yet none of the options engendered any particular sense of dread. He was alive, intact. In no immediate danger. No, he really didn’t mind the risk of dying here after all.

What was really gutting him was the thought of loneliness. The thought of never again seeing Brooklynn rose up from somewhere and sucker-punched him.

“Shit,” Aidan said. “What do I do now?”

“Well –” He heard a voice he did not recognize–“you could say hello.”

* * *

Early evening was Vongük’s favorite time of day, with its lambent blue light, the illumination of both the sun and the Watchful God imbuing the shadows with the illusion of dimensionality. The Keepers of the Dictates dismissed the Lhakovi from the fane with the blessings of the Watchful God, capping the reading from the Dictates.

Vongük felt a sense of well-being and saw it reflected in the joon milling about him, conversing, sharing the fellowship of the just. It was the contentment felt by any joon who knew and accepted his position in the universe as ordained by the Watchful God. It was the camaraderie felt by one who knew he was but a part of a greater whole, owing a duty to all and accepting as a matter of course that all others owed a duty to him.

Such was the perfect scheme of the Watchful God. So long as each comported himself as the Watchful God dictated, as expressed in the inspired readings of the Dictates by the Keepers, and as overseen by the Pontifex-Generals, the joon–collectively and individually–knew peace.