Michael Siemsen - Exigency

Lying prone in the soil, Minnie stretched her arm into the hole, feeling around for her prize. No such luck. After a quick scan through the soil for biomagnetic waves, she dug around to widen the entrance. Quite a few flatworms were exposed in the process, and, unsure if they were related to the ones from the cave, she disdainfully flung them away. Finally, upon reaching and extracting the electrocuted bunny carcass, Minnie stood up and inspected herself for worms or anything else that might have attached itself to her suit. All clear.

She unzipped a storage pocket, pulled out the crumpled bag attached within, stuffed in the bunny, and sealed it up.

As she continued on to the EV site, she felt a strange mix of pride and guilt about the limp animal bouncing on her thigh. Hooray for a successful first hunt, but it was almost as though she’d killed a puppy.

JOHN: Good job with the rodent.

MINNIE: I forgot you were there. Thank you, but shush.

He resent her the sealed lips.

There weren’t many things on Epsy that reminded her of home. The forests were dominated by teal, orange, and yellow megafungi, and the lack of flying insects limited the number of aesthetically Earthlike plants to a few remote locations. But bunnies reminded Minnie of home, and the fact that she’d have to go on killing and eating them reemphasized the fact that she’d never again be at home. A real hunter would probably feel the opposite.

The red guide line ended beyond a dense thicket of green wafer fungi, like the underside of a portabella mushroom, turned on its side and shooting up from the soil like rows of wavy walls. She could have slipped between them as the guide line suggested, but wasn’t keen on being coated in spores.

Instead, she took the long way around, observing familiar terrain and the first remains of dead Hynka. If she had more time, a close inspection of a cadaver could prove useful, but her mission was comms. She passed a worm-riddled behemoth and disregarded the bones of several others. But as she came upon the EV site, trampled and littered with more Hynka bones than EV scraps, she noticed a few interesting things.

The EV was gone.

All of the Hynka remains but a few were practically scoured of meat. The intact ones had been left to the worms and fungus—the Hynka hadn’t eaten the individuals she and John had killed.

A not-so-subtle stampede trail led east through trampled foliage; a telltale track marked the middle where the EV had been rolled. The Hynka had taken a prize.

Pieces of small components littered the entire area, many pressed into the soil beneath massive footprints.

Minnie squatted over a little blue component she recognized from the station’s rebreathers. In the EVs, these things were mounted deep inside the hull behind the seats, protected along with all of the other life support-related gear. The Hynka must have ripped the inside of the pod to shreds.

JOHN: Sorry, but what is that?

MINNIE: CO 2biscuit from the scrubbers.

She peered around the site, spotting hundreds of other tiny pieces, like hi-tech confetti.

JOHN: I’m sorry, Minerva.

MINNIE: It’s ok. I didn’t have high hopes.

JOHN: Are you going to try to go after it?

MINNIE: Just looking around here, it’s highly doubtful that any kind of comms gear survived their rage dissection.

JOHN: What about the beacon?

Again with the beacon?

He seemed otherwise lucid, but strange how his memory repeatedly erased the bit about the EV beacon being dead.

MINNIE: Do you not remember us talking about the beacon? That’s twice in the past 20 mins.

JOHN: I remember it was out of range. Thought maybe since you were closer now… Shutting up.

Minnie sighed, feeling like she was once again being mean to a severely wounded man. She pulled out her multisensor. She looked directly at the screen so John could see it through her feed, and set the device to listen for emergency signals. The device immediately emitted the three-beep chirp of an affirmative. Range and coordinates of a beacon popped up on the screen.

What the hell?

MINNIE: You see this?

JOHN: I see.

JOHN: I’ll stop asking about the beacon now.

Minnie smirked. So a dash of the old John was still hanging around in that head.

She couldn’t believe it. Not only had just a few kilometers been the difference between sensing the beacon or not, but she was amazed that the emitter was still functional after all the abuse. Then again, they did make those things to survive pretty serious impacts.

Wait a second…

She expanded the beacon signal’s details and found ID info. It wasn’t EV6; it was EV5.

MINNIE: John?!

JOHN: Wow, I see it!

MINNIE: She’s 11K away. I’ll route the course and head straight there.

MINNIE: How were Angela’s SP scores?

MINNIE: If her beacon’s active, they probably didn’t find her.

MINNIE: Or maybe our landing distracted them for her.

JOHN: Angela didn’t evac in EV5. I guess I never told you. Ish stopped her, volunteered to trade spots so Angela wouldn’t have to be alone. She let her go with Tom in EV4.

MINNIE: Oh.

Minnie remembered the clang of EV4 launching into open space. She remembered the recroom and Angela hugging Tom from behind, her cheek smushed up between his shoulder blades. Angela giving Minnie a pedicure with probably-toxic enamel paint. “Now if only we could cut the tips off some old runners and glue on a high heel,” she’d joked as she fanned Minnie’s toes. “She won’t be able to resist you.” An early date night with Aether.

At least Angela got to be with Tom.

MINNIE: Well, how thoughtful of her in the middle of exigency.

Could Ish have known in the midst of all that chaos that the EVs were launching askew, and deliberately sent Angela to die in her place? Minnie just couldn’t see Ish doing something for her fellow humans in a time of crisis. She simply didn’t like people .

Or what if… was she that crazy?

MINNIE: John, how was Ish’s last psyche eval?

JOHN: You know I can’t talk about that stuff.

MINNIE: Honestly? Even now? Think for a second. Really think about it. I bet you that looner blew up the station on purpose. Killed more than half of the crew. How would she accidentally guide the pod in on a collision course without Qin noticing? It would take more than a little planning and strategy to hide what was really going on. No way he left her unsupervised for 2 effing hours.

JOHN: If she was suicidal and meds didn’t help, there were numerous systems in place to detect and report anomalous behavior. But she evac’d with the rest of us. She didn’t even hesitate. She didn’t have a death wish.

MINNIE: No, she didn’t have a death wish! She wanted to be down here! With her real people. Surface evac was the only way. Did the supply pod hit the tube to the BH first?

John didn’t respond right away. She knew it had, and she knew he was mulling it over. Minnie paced around the scene, kicking Hynka bones out of the way. Every passing second solidified her suspicions. Ish guided the supply pod to impact the escape tube, and then to destroy the engineering sub-bay. Exigency procedures went into effect and she got her surface evac. As mission psych, though, how could Aether have missed the warning signs? Weekly one-on-ones were as non-opt as group.