S. Swann - Prophets

“Getting you some light.” He picked up the flashlight and turned it on, still amazed at how quickly his new eyes adjusted from the monochrome dark to the starkly colored cabin interior.

“Shit, warn someone, would you?” Kugara held her hand up between her and Nickolai, shading her eyes. He noticed he was pointing the light right at her. He moved the beam away and pointed it at the door to the lifeboat.

“Thanks,” Kugara whispered as she undid the harness holding her down.

Nickolai stared at the door. It was now oriented horizontally. The floor he stood on, with the acceleration couches, had been the right wall when this cabin had been part of the Eclipse . It was hard for him to tell, but it looked as if the frame had warped outward with the same impact that had dented in the bulkhead above.

Kugara stood up next to him, shaking her head. She looked at the debris on the floor, and the unpleasantly curving bulkhead above them, and said, “That was one rough mother of a landing.”

“Seems like it.”

“Don’t you remember the descent?”

“No. I blacked out.”

She nodded. “Me, too. Right after the chute gave up.”

“What?”

“Sometime between reentry and the ground, the chute cut out and we hit free fall again.” She rubbed the bandage bonded to her temple.

Examining the door more closely, Nickolai could see that the frame was warped, bowed outward nearly five centimeters. The door itself had buckled a little, becoming very slightly concave. There was no way it was going to slide back home, even if there was power left.

“How do we open this?”

“Well, first we should get some heads-up on what it’s like outside.” Kugara walked to the door and pulled open the emergency control panel for the door, the same one that had shown the schematics of the lifeboat’s launch. It was one of the few panels that hadn’t popped open during landing, and for a few moments it looked as if it never would. She strained against it, and the warping bulkhead seemed to have jammed it as badly as the main door.

Just before Nickolai stepped up to help her with it, the panel opened with a nasty screech that hurt his ears. It also released the smell of burned electronics.

“Damn,” she said. “It’s dead.”

He wasn’t surprised. However, he smelled something beyond superheated metal and roasted ceramics.

“Okay,” she said, “Maybe one of the other boats can give us an idea.” She hunted around on the floor and found the handheld comm unit. When she picked it up, half the unit stayed on the floor. “Damn it!”

Nickolai took another deep breath. Under the smell of the dead lifeboat, he could smell cool air, the woody, earthy smell of some sort of plant life.

Kugara stared at the fragments of the comm unit and repeated, “Damn it!”

“I think it is safe to open the door.”

“What?”

“The skin’s already been breached. Can’t you smell the air?”

She wrinkled her nose. “All I can smell is my own blood gumming my nostrils.”

“By the panel you opened.”

She stepped back over to the door and bent down. “No, I can’t smell—” She froze a moment. “Well, what do you know? I can feel a draft.” She stood up. “We must have hit hard enough to crack the shielding. The leftover heat from reentry must have been enough to fry the circuits in this thing.”

“So? How do we open the door?”

“There’s a manual emergency release that should blow out the whole door mechanism,” Kugara said. She knelt and opened a red-and-yellow-striped panel to the left of the dead control panel. In a recess behind it was a T-shaped handle. She grabbed it and pulled it out to the right—which would have been up had the lifeboat been docked on the Eclipse and the floor had been the floor. The handle pulled out a lever that extended about fifteen centimeters. She looked back at Nickolai. “You might want to back up a bit.”

He took a step back and found his back against a bulkhead.

“Okay,” she said. She turned away from the door and pushed the lever to the left, toward the original floor.

The whole lifeboat resonated with a rapid series of bangs that rocked the cabin briefly back toward Nickolai. In a moment, he could smell freshly vaporized metal drifting in from outside.

The door still hung in place.

Kugara stared at it, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. There shouldn’t be anything left holding that door in place.”

Nickolai stepped up to the door and pushed.

The metal creaked, then a massive shudder gripped the bulkhead in front of them. The door leaned outward and the whole outer skin of the bulkhead seemed to slough off in a cloud of ceramic dust and an odor of heated metal. In its wake, the falling door revealed the bark of a massive tree trunk.

A cool wind blew into the lifeboat, carrying the odor of a living forest.

The lifeboat had come to rest on the edge of a hardwood forest. From the divots in the ground and broken trees, it appeared that it had actually made landfall on a small rocky mountain about two thousand meters above the tree line. It had then bounced, slid, and rolled down a 40 percent grade and a couple of cliffs until it slammed to a stop against a massive tree with a fifteen-meter-diameter trunk.

The impact hadn’t killed the tree, but it now tilted at a perceptible angle away from the lifeboat, which had recoiled and rolled to its final stop about ten meters away in the direction from which it had come. Judging by the scar burned in the tree’s trunk, and the orientation of the lifeboat, Nickolai suspected that slamming into the tree was what had dented the bulkhead.

Another twenty meters downslope, and the other side of the lifeboat would have slammed into it; the bulkhead where they’d been strapped in. That might have been the most heavily-shielded portion of the lifeboat, but if it had been that bulkhead taking the brunt of the impact, the two of them might not have survived.

At least not in shape to crawl out of the lifeboat.

“The beacon’s still active,” Kugara said, “but that’d survive anything. Comm’s for shit though.”

Nickolai stood between the tree and the wreck of the lifeboat staring up at the bluest sky he had ever seen. A tiny yellow flare of a sun heated his face, especially the leather of his nose, way out of proportion to its size.

He wondered why he was still alive.

“Nickolai?”

He turned around to face her. She was crouched down, the broken comm unit spread out on sheet before her. It was in a half dozen pieces. “Are you listening to me?”

“Can you fix it?”

She laughed. “The main circuit snapped in half. Even if I had an electronic repair kit and knew exactly what I was doing, we’d still have to replace the thing. This is pretty much a disposable unit.”

“We set up a rendezvous at lifeboat five.”

“Yeah, but no telling where they landed without this.” She tossed the part she was holding into the pile. “They could be two klicks away and we’d never find them.”

“So what do we do?”

Kugara stood. “We got two choices.” She looked at the wreckage. “We stand pat and wait for our dubious comrade Mallory, or someone else, to catch up with the emergency beacon.” She looked back at him. “Or we strike out independently to find civilization or another lifeboat with a working comm.”

Nickolai nodded. “There’s a third choice.”

She arched an eyebrow, an expression that Nickolai still didn’t quite know how to interpret. “Oh, really?”

“One of us can stay by the lifeboat, the other go out and—”

“Oh, hell no!” She folded her arms. “You think I’m letting you out of my sight, tiger-man? Have you forgotten why we’re in this mess in the first place?”