Charles Sheffield: Resurgence

“Doing fine.”

“We’re about ready for another course change. Hold your breath. This will be the last one, and I don’t see any way to shield us.”

He veered away, and in the moments before Sinara followed she could at last see their target. The rocks and rubble formed an untidy splotch of black against the ruddy background of Marglot’s remains. Somewhere inside that mess floated Ben Blesh.

Torran had increased his speed, diving in on an all-or-nothing approach. Sinara did the same until he said, “All right. Time to turn and decelerate—hard!”

She saw the front of his suit, briefly, until her own suit’s rotation sent her feet-first toward the floating pile of rock. The backpack on her suit whined in protest as it was called upon to exert maximum thrust. Her proximity radar added its warning, as four hands grabbed her.

“Picture perfect,” Teri said. “One for the record books.” Then, “Torran! You’ve been hit!”

The left shoulder of his suit showed a fist-sized bulge of black sealant.

“You mean, you weren’t?” He held up his right arm, to show two more dark patches. “I was pinged three times, but only the one on my shoulder got all the way through past my skin. I compressed that area of my suit to stop the bleeding, but one of you will have to dig out the pebble once we’re back aboard the Have-It-All .”

Was he understating his injury? Out here, Sinara had no way to tell. But he certainly wasn’t letting it stop him. She and the others pawed their way through the untidy pile of space rocks, using their suit headlights. They followed Ben Blesh’s signal and paid little attention to the heat of the rocks.

When they finally came to Ben he seemed like just another misshapen lump of gray space debris. His knees were lifted up toward his chest, his head bent forward, and his arms were folded. Sinara, with Teri’s help, eased Ben’s head back far enough for her to peer in through the faceplate.

“Hemorrhaging around his eyes. He went through high acceleration somewhere along the way.”

“Think that’s why he’s unconscious now?”

“It’s only part of the reason. There were impacts, too. Look at the lower half of his suit, and at his right side. The transport vortex must have returned him to the surface of Marglot just when the whole planet was coming apart.”

Teri said, “He should never have left the Have-It-All , so soon after his treatment.”

“If he hadn’t, not one of us would be alive.” Torran ran his gloved hand over Ben’s rib cage. “Any response? That should hurt like hell.”

“Nothing. He’s under deep.”

“That answers one question. He won’t be able to help by flying his own suit. We’ll have to tow him.”

“Why go anywhere?” Teri said. “This is just a horrible jumble of rocks, but it did well for Ben.”

Sinara was still examining the unconscious figure. “Depends how long it would take us to reach a place where we might be picked up. Ben’s condition is stable, but how long are we talking about if we hang in here? Torran, do you have our vector?”

“Close to it. We’re talking forty hours, give or take five. That would bring us to a point far enough out of the main plane of debris for Julian Graves to agree to pick us up. Can Ben stand that?”

Sinara said, “I don’t think that’s the issue. If we leave here, we’re sure to need some fancy jumping and dodging to avoid being hit by debris. I said Ben seems stable, but I think those kinds of acceleration would kill him.”

“That settles it. Teri, do you agree? We stay?”

“We stay. Sinara?”

“We stay.”

For forty more hours. That was going to feel like eternity. Arabella Lund had made the point during survival training: “If you want to learn what a person is really like, arrange to be with her in two special situations. The first is when you have to make rapid decisions based on pure instinct. The second is when you are forced to spend a day or two together, with nothing to do but wait.”

Sinara had seen Torran and Teri in the first setting. Now she would have a chance to observe them in the second. Within the first couple of hours both of them became restless. First they calculated and re-calculated their velocity vector, estimating the earliest time that they might hope to be picked up. After that they went wandering around, wasting—in Sinara’s opinion—suit fuel. They explored the jumble of rocks and fragments surrounding them, moving large pieces to provide better protection from incoming debris.

Sinara did not join them; nor, after the first hour or two, did she watch them closely. She had her own preoccupation. Her suit, like every decent suit designed for use by humans, contained information on the species’ physiology and medical treatments based on ten thousand years of theory and practice. Of course, only a tiny fraction of that volume of data applied to Ben, but Sinara studied that fraction as intensively as she could. Sometimes sheer fatigue made her close her eyes for a few minutes, but each time that she awoke she at once checked Ben’s condition and ran a new prognosis.

Her task was made more complicated by Ben’s suit. It was not sitting idle. It monitored his condition second by second, and provided appropriate medications. Sinara could override it at any time, but she did so only once. She drastically reduced the narcotic dose, in the hope that it would return him to consciousness. When after twenty minutes it did not, she fed that information into her own suit and received confirmation that Ben had suffered a severe concussion. There was also edema, a brain swelling that was being controlled by anti-inflammatories. The cause was probably that same concussion.

Sinara’s actions absorbed her completely. She was more irritated than interested when Teri came floating over to halt on the other side of Ben.

“We need your opinion.”

“I’m looking after Ben.”

“He doesn’t seem any different now than he was when we first found him. He’ll be fine for five minutes. That’s all we need.”

“What’s the problem?”

“A little disagreement. Come and look at something.”

As a result of Teri and Torran’s continued labors, the barrier of protective rock fragments had steadily become more complete. Teri led Sinara to six great overlapping basalt wedges that offered between them only an irregular narrow slit through which to see beyond.

Torran was waiting a few meters away from it. “Take a look,” he said, “but don’t get too close. Sometimes little bits and pieces fly in—though we’ve not had anything with much speed.”

Teri added, “Tell us what you think. Torran and I don’t agree.”

“No hints, Teri.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Sinara approached within arm’s length of the ragged barrier of rocks. There was no such thing as a safe distance. Any second, a high-speed fragment could fly in through the slit and hit her. She peered cautiously out past one of the slabs.

The same kaleidoscopic litter of debris, large and small, near and far, filled the sky. It was a little less densely packed than before, thinning out as their distance from the sometime planet increased.

Nothing out there seemed worthy of a second look. Had Sinara not in effect been told to expect something, she would have returned at once to her vigil at Ben Blesh’s side. Instead, she scanned the scene before her a second time, focusing on each area of the sky in turn before moving on. Her attention finally returned to one small region. Something was different there, some oddity that was difficult to pin down.

She used her suit’s image intensifiers and narrowed the field of view. She made out a small disk, an oval shape brighter than its surroundings. As she stared, it thinned and dwindled. It lost width until it was no more than a bright line, then vanished completely.