Michael Siemsen - Exigency

Minnie’s multisensor showed the same readings it had earlier: John’s circulation was poor, blood pressure low, but normal temp, electrolytes, and brain activity. She’d repeatedly sprayed down his wounds with antiseptic before applying organic wound sealant. The goop worked on large gashes, acting as a temporary skin while stem cells regrew flesh at an accelerated rate. She’d watched vids on managing similar-but-lessor wounds and precisely followed the instructions. He hadn’t gone into shock, and fever never arrived, so she thought she’d done everything perfectly. It’d simply take time for him to get better. And now that they had a skimmer, they wouldn’t be anchored by his inability to walk.

If only he’d wake up.

“John.” She patted his cheek. “Come on now, wake up. I’ve got good news.” She flicked his forehead and he uttered a pained groan. “John? Wake up now! Hey! Rise and shine! I found Ish’s EV! And we’re going to have us a bunnyque for dinner!” He let out an extended whine, as if trapped in a nightmare. She hushed and stopped touching him and he seemed to calm.

She sealed the tent door behind her, rolled back to sit on her empty survival bag, and held her face in her palms.

She whispered, “Please don’t leave me… Don’t leave me here alone.”

She sniffed and gazed at him through blurring tears. A quick swipe with the back of her wrist. He looked best through biomag at its lowest intensity. His unnerving jaw and neck wounds disappeared behind a contrived flesh tone. An illusion of perfect health. His usually close-buzzed hair had grown out a bit and was painted a solid black. The simplified features and estimated colors evoked a doll or action figure and Minnie heard Superhero in her head, but the voice had been drained of humor.

“John?” It hardly left her mouth. Even if he was awake, he wouldn’t have heard her. “I’m sorry.”

She touched his hand through the survival bag. He emitted a standard sleep sigh, as if he’d just rolled from one side to the next in a regular old bed in a house at two in the morning.

Sleep was good for him. Why was she even trying to wake him up? Let him be. Not moving sped healing, right? He’d wake as usual in the morning, right?

Well, what if he didn’t? This wasn’t normal. She’d always been able to rouse him before. She hadn’t changed his pain meds dosage. If he didn’t wake up in the next 24 hours, he’d obviously need water. There were, no doubt, hundreds of walk-throughs on setting up an IV drip—she growled suddenly and flushed such thoughts from her mind. Premature. Unnecessary. Unhelpful. Let him be.

She had comms to set up.

Maybe after a quick nap. It’d been a long day. A prosperous day. She deserved a break. It was warm inside the tent. She could curl up next to John and pretend he was Aether.

She shook out her head, her cheeks flapping like a hound’s. Pretend he was Aether? Cave fatigue was setting in again.

No… you can sleep any time! You have comms gear outside! There could be messages waiting! This could be last chance to say goodb—

No need to go there either. She just needed to set the damned things up. One thing at a time. More fresh air would be nice, anyway.

She stepped out, zipped the tent shut, and decided to rouse him tomorrow morning.

Back outside, Minnie pulled the Primary Comms Unit out of the skimmer and rigged a probably-unsafe hookup to the heater for power. Separating the laser emitter from its unit proved incredibly easy, and she plugged it into a universal port on the PCU. With the emitter propped up on the flattest section of rock, she enabled autotracking, and let the PCU run through signal establishment protocols.

The little screen scrolled through a series of targets, even listing Earth as an option.

That’s interesting .

Could she send a message to Earth from the surface? Even if aimed absolutely precisely, would the beam maintain cohesion on the way out of the atmosphere? Its intensity couldn’t possibly be strong enough. The comms tower on the station, the one used to exchange data with Earth, was 50 times more powerful than this little laser.

The lime-green beam turned on, streaking past her and into the sky. Start-up GPS instantly failed, so it proceeded on to constellation ID for its current position, then began searching for orbiting supply pods. The beam ticked side to side like a high-speed metronome, rapidly scanning 10 million cubic kilometers of the planet’s exosphere over the course of a few minutes.

NO COMM SOURCES DETECTED

Awesome.

Minnie set it to rescan every 20 minutes and sat down on the skimmer platform. She searched through the flops of instructionals in her fone’s archive and came upon a relevant vid. Munching on a calorie bar, she watched this brilliant old bearded guy in Australia outline a process for using a ground-based PCU to communicate beyond local orbit. He even had an earlier model of the very unit sitting at Minnie’s feet, the critical components all essentially the same. But she appreciated something else about the vid.

Instead of using a fone, the man wore a head-mounted camera and had happened to record his vid on a sunny Australian day, forty-seven years ago. He had a bunch of tools and gear laid out on a table, and the table pushed up against a wall with a wide mirror. He intermittently looked up at himself in the mirror when addressing the viewer. Behind him was a window to a yard, and in that yard Minnie could see a pair of little girls playing. Sometimes, when he looked up, they were not visible outside, but most of the time they were there, aiming a hose or running through a sprinkler. The man’s mic picked up their giggles and shouts, and once or twice, to Minnie’s alarm, he appeared to be annoyed and considering whether to stop their play. To Minnie’s pleasure, he did not.

She’d participated in such antics when she was very small—before she’d become overly bookish, reclusive, and crazy —but she recalled fondly that freedom and unreserved joy.

Cold wind whistled over the skimmer platform and across Minnie’s exposed neck. A fresh whiff of mold and decay she was surprised to find herself enjoying.

She composed herself and skipped the vid back several minutes as she realized she’d missed everything the man had said about actually enhancing an emitter.

What time was it? She was cold and tired but didn’t want to go to sleep. It was dangerous to be out this late at night. She peered at the sweeping beam of green light shooting up in the sky and wondered if any Hynka would see it from afar. They’d certainly all seen the EV during reentry. Knowing now that the kidney-shaped valley in which they’d landed was not all that popular with the natives, it was amazing how quickly the horde had converged on the EV. Most likely the bad luck of dropping in while a hunting party happened to be passing through, combined with a blazing parachute. But what if someone spotted this beam from, say, 5K, how long would it take for it to run through the forest to her?

Minnie ran a therm scan of the valley, indeed spotting several wandering Hynka scattered about. They seemed to favor groups of 2-4. None appeared to be headed her way. A mental note to re-verify this fact in another 30 seconds.

Halfway through the vid, the PCU on the ground before her sounded an inspiring tone. She spun and dropped to her knees and read the blue strip of screen.

COMM SOURCE DETECTED

LINKING…

LINKING…

COMMS READY

“Yes!” Minnie blurted, then cupped her mouth and resurveyed the panorama. The closest she could see was a glob of indeterminate numbers about 8K away, just beyond Duck Rock Mountain.