Terry Pratchett - The Long War

And here was the downed ship.

She was called the Pennsylvania . She had been caught in a dust storm when she tried, cautiously, to cross the Joker, and then one of her helium sacs, maybe already carrying a fault, split open at the sudden expansion caused by the heat of the Joker’s dry air. The leak had been quick but the crash slow, relentless; it must have been a terrifying experience. The Gold Dust passengers saw the wreck now through a veil of windblown dust that hissed against the windows, the remnants of the storm that had killed the ship. From the air it was a six-hundred-foot reef already half covered by drifting red sand.

The Gold Dust was the first of the following fleet to come upon the wreck, and the largest. As Dan and Helen hung back, trying to keep out of the way, there was a hasty conference call with the Captain in his cabin, and the commanders of the other craft as they arrived in this world. A strategy was soon cooked up, and the crew swung into action with an efficiency and dedication that warmed Helen’s soul. They dropped anchor, and soon had a kind of improvised elevator working, taking crew to and from the ground on an open platform. Helen saw Dan’s buddy Bosun Higgs go down, joining working parties assembled from all the crews of the fleet.

Then, as the crew worked, the Captain used the ship’s intercom to ask for volunteers from among the passengers to go down to help. Volunteers from among the passengers . Helen’s heart sank when she heard that phrase.

Of course she couldn’t stop him.

It all went well enough, for three, four hours, as the sun slowly went down, and the sandstorm finally petered out. From Helen’s godlike point of view high in the sky, she watched what looked like very organized ants working on the carcass of the fallen ship. They cut channels through the wreckage, led out walking wounded, and carried out the worst afflicted, and the dead. A field medical post was set up under a tent, and soon the first of the most seriously injured were being brought up to the Gold Dust on the elevator. The Gold Dust was the best placed of the fleet to take the injured on board, with a well-equipped medical bay that could be quickly expanded into a hospital. Other parties worked at salvaging what they could of the Pennsylvania ’s cargo, mostly Corn Belt wheat. Still others performed the sad duty of digging out graves around the crash site.

Then there was an alarm in the wheelhouse. One of the Gold Dust contingent had got himself trapped, deep in the interior of the Pennsylvania ’s envelope, when a bit more of the structure had collapsed around him as he was trying, heroically, to reach one last group of stranded passengers. He was stuck in the collapsed framework, too high off the ground to be able to step out safely. A rescue attempt was quickly improvised.

“Wow,” Dan said, listening to the crackly radio messages. “Who do you think it is, Mom?”

Not your father, Helen pleaded silently. Not Joshua. Just this once, not Joshua.

A new line was let down from the nose of the Gold Dust , with two individuals clinging to it: Bosun Higgs and Sally Linsay. Helen’s hopes sank faster than the platform. With great caution they were lowered through a rip in the twain’s collapsed envelope, and disappeared into darkness. Helen heard muttered reports on the radio link, saw the spark of cutting torches deep in the Pennsylvania ’s carcass. Then a period of silence.

At last Sally called: “Take her up!”

Slowly, cautiously, the winch turned. The platform came up first, with Sally and the crewman, trailing a length of cable. Then the line shuddered, and Sally waved a halt. Helen heard: “He’s OK. Not very dignified, but OK. Keep lifting.”

Up came the cable, rising out of the wreck. And at last, lifted into the low sunlight, dangling upside down with the cable wrapped around one ankle, was Joshua.

Dan rolled his eyes. “Oh, Dad! ”

Helen thought that summed it up.

Eventually, to Helen’s chagrin, the whole incident made it on to the outernet, and the news channels. Sometimes it was hard being Lois Lane.

And—as Joshua had to point out later, for Helen hadn’t been looking at her —as soon as Joshua was clear of the wreck, Sally had grinned up at the watching crew of the Gold Dust , and disappeared.

As it happened the Benjamin Franklin passed through the Mine Belt only a few days after the wreck. Via an outernet communiqué, the Franklin had been ordered to backtrack from Reboot to a Mine Belt world around seventy thousand steps from home, where some idiot had shot a couple of trolls.

As the Franklin ploughed through the worlds, Maggie Kauffman wondered—not for the first time since the start of this mission—whether the whole Long Earth was a test which humanity was singularly failing. On the one hand there were still Datum-Earthers who led lives that had nothing to do with the landscape outside their heads, the immensity beyond their garden walls; and on the other hand, even now, twenty-five years after Step Day, there were still people stepping East and West, even to the High Meggers and beyond, without so much as looking up which mushrooms were safe to pick. One of the unstated duties of this voyage, as it had emerged, was to give a ride to a place of safety to the wounded, or even just the severely embarrassed, who had given up after their first winter without electricity, or a visit by an unexpected bear or pack of wolves—or maybe the odd dinosaur-descendant if you went far enough. Smart people, while they might at first have everything to learn, soon developed effective ways of making things work out here, but Maggie was seeing very little of them . Dumb people kept doing dumb things—such as shooting trolls, despite the intense political atmosphere after the Gap incident. And it was to the fallout from such dumbness that the Franklin , Maggie was finding, was repeatedly summoned.

So the dirigible drifted across arid versions of Texas, listening out on shortwave, looking for a party whose location stepwise and geographically was only roughly known. The crew was intrigued by accounts of the disaster that had befallen the Pennsylvania ; Maggie ascertained that no assistance was needed from her in the aftermath.

At last, not far from the footprint of Houston, the ship flew over a rough campsite, with a small, solitary figure looking up from below. Nathan Boss pointed out a clump of woods near by which showed a lot of disturbance, the result of some kind of fight maybe.

And Mac gently drew her attention to an infrared image of slumped, cooling forms, deep inside the forest clump. Where the bodies had been dumped, evidently.

Maggie, Nathan and Joe Mackenzie descended. The lone figure at the campsite, a woman, waiting for them by a smoking fire, was a tough-looking forty-something—a few years older than Maggie—evidently a pioneer type. She gave her name simply as “Sally’. Among the weaponry lashed to her back was a ceramic composite rifle, and she had a face full of unfinished business.

Maggie knew her officers well enough to be sure they would step lightly. And she also knew, she thought, from her pre-mission briefings on the Long Earth, who this woman was.

Sally offered them coffee, rolls of bedding to sit on. After that she didn’t waste any time. “I don’t want you here. I believe in handling this kind of stuff myself. I didn’t call you.”

Nathan asked, “Then who did?”

“ He ’ s long gone—lit out of here. However, you’re here. So here’s the set-up. I’ve secured near by several so-called scientists who have killed at least three trolls.”