Robert Reed - Marrow

She had to laugh, for a moment.

Then somewhere nearby, two great masses of iron dragged themselves against each other, and piercing squealing roars split the air, sounding like monsters in the throes of some terrific fight.

When the quake passed, Washen stood and casually adjusted her uniform.Then she announced, “Time to leave.”

But most of her team was already making for the car. Only Diu waited, looking at her and not quite smiling when he said, “Too bad.”

She knew what he meant, nodding and adding, “It is,”

their eight-day-old map was a fossil, and not a particularly useful fossil, at that.

Washen blanked her screen, flying on instinct now. In another ten minutes, maybe less, they would reach their destination. No other team would travel this far. Drawing a sturdy little satisfaction from the thought, she started to turn, ready to ask whoever was closest to check on their champagne.

Her mouth opened, but a distorted, almost inaudible voice interrupted her.

“Report… all teams…!”

“Who’s that?” asked Broq.

Miocene. But her words were strained through some kind of piercing electronic wail.

“What do… see…?” the Submaster called out.

Then, again, “Teams… report…!”

Washen tried for more than an audio link, and failed.

A dozen other team leaders were chattering in a ragged chorus.

Zale boasted, “We’re on schedule here.”

Kyzkee observed, “Odd com interference… otherwise, systems nominal…”

Then with more curiosity than worry, Aasleen inquired, “Why, madam? Do you see something wrong?”

There was a long, jangled hum.

Washen linked her nexuses to the car’s sensor array, finding Diu already there. With a tight little voice, he said, “Shit.”

“What—” Washen cried out.

Then a shrill roar swept away every voice, every thought. And the day brightened and brightened, fat ribbons of lightning flowing across the sky, then turning, moving with a liquid purpose, aiming straight for them.

From the far side of the world came a twisted voice:

“The bridge… is it… do you see it… where…?”

The car lurched as if panicking, losing thrust and lift, then altitude, every one of its AIs failing. Washen deployed the manual controls, and centuries of routine drills made her concentrate, nothing existing now but their tumbling craft, her syrupy reflexes, and a wide expanse of cracked earth and burnt forest.

The next barrage of lightning was purple-white, and brighter, nothing visible but its wild seething glare.

Washen flew blind, flew by memory.

Their car was designed to endure heroic abuse. But every system was dead and its hyperfiber must have been degraded somehow, and when it struck the iron ground, the hull was twisted until its weakest point gave way, and it shattered. Restraining fields grabbed helpless bodies. Then their perfect mechanisms failed. Nothing but padded belts and gas bags held the captains in their seats. Flesh was jerked and ripped, and shredded. Bones were shattered and wrenched from their sockets, slicing through soft pink organs, then slammed together again. Then the seats were torn free of the floor, tumbling wildly across several hectares of iron and cooked stumps.

Washen never lost consciousness.

With a numbed curiosity, she watched her own legs and arms break and break again, and a thousand bruises spread into a single purple tapestry, every rib crushed to dust and her reinforced spine splintering until she was left without pain or a shred of mobility. Lying on her back, still lashed to her twisted chair, she couldn’t move her crushed head, and her words were slow and watery, the sloppy mouth filled with teeth and dying blood.

“Abandon,” she muttered.

Then, “Ship.”

She was laughing. Feebly, desperately.

A gray sensation rippled through her body.

Emergency genes were already awake, finding their home in a shambles. They immediately protected the brain, flooding what was living with oxygen and antiinflammatories, plus a blanket of comforting narcotics. Trusted, pleasant memories bubbled into her consciousness. For a little moment, Washen was a girl again, riding on the back of her pet whale. Then doctoring genes began rebuilding organs and the spine, cannibalizing meat for raw materals and energy, the captain’s body wracked with fever, sweating perfumed oils and black dead blood.

Within minutes, Washen felt herself growing smaller.

An hour after the crash, a wrenching pain swept through her. It was a favorable, almost comforting misery. She squirmed and wailed, and wept, and with weak, rebuilt hands, she freed herself from her ruined chair. Then on sloppy, unequal legs, she forced herself into a tilted stance.

Washen was twenty centimeters shorter, and frail. But she managed to limp to the nearest body, kneeling and wiping the carnage out of his face. Diu’s face, she realized. He was injured even worse than she. He had shriveled like old fruit, and his face had been driven into a craggy fist of iron. But his features were half-healed. Mixed with his misery was a clear defiance, and he managed a mutilated grin and a wink, his surviving gray eye focusing on Washen, the battered mouth spitting teeth as he lisped, “Wonderful, you look. Madam. As always…”

Saluki was impaled on a spar of browned hyperfiber.

Broq’s legs were severed, and in a numbed anguish, he had dragged himself to the legs and pressed them against the wrong sockets.

But the siblings were the worst. Dream had slammed into an iron slipfault, and her brother then impacted against her. Flesh and bone were mixed together. Slowly, slowly, their carnage was separating itself, their healing barely begun.

Washen repositioned Broq’s legs. Then with Diu’s help, she eased Saluki off the spar and set her in its shade to mend. And with Diu keeping watch over the siblings, she searched the wreckage for anything useful. There were field rations and field uniforms, but the machines wouldn’t operate. She tried to coax them awake, but none of them was well enough to declare, “I am broken.”

If there was luck, it was that the crust seemed stable for the moment. They could afford to do nothing but heal and rest, eating triple shares of their rations. Later, Saluki even managed to find two pop-up shelters and their survival packs, plus a full diamond flask of champagne. Hot as the ground, by now. But delicious.

Sitting in the shadow of a pop-up, the six captains drank the flask dry.

Pretending it was night, they huddled and discussed tomorrow, options named and weighed, and most of them discarded.

Wait, and watch; that was their collective decision.

“We’ll give Miocene three days to find us,” said Washen. Then she caught herself trying to access her implanted timepiece, out of pure habit. But every one of her implants, every minuscule nexus, had been fried by the same electric fire that had ripped them out of the sky.

In a world without night, how long was three days?

They made their best guess, then waited an extra day, in case. But there wasn’t any trace of Miocene or any other captain. Whatever had crippled their car must have left everyone else powerless. Seeing no choice in the matter, Washen looked at each of her companions, and she smiled as if embarrassed, and she admitted to them:

“If we want to get home, it looks as if we’re just going to have to walk.”

Do something new, and do nothing else, and do that one thing relentlessly—particularly if it is painful and dangerous and utterly unplanned—and your memory begins to play one of its oldest, sneakiest tricks.

Washen couldn’t remember being anywhere else.

She would find herself standing at the base of a tall newborn mountain, or deep within some trackless black-bellied jungle, and it was as if everything she remembered about her former life was nothing but an elaborate, impossible dream, more forgotten than remembered, and those memories, at their heart, utterly ridiculous.