Nightburn
by Ronald Linson
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
part 2
On the second day of the tour, I took my group to one of the planet’s few lakes, about two hundred kilometers from the hotel. I set the shuttle down fifty meters from the edge of the water, wincing at the crunching sound as it settled.
“Okay,” I said, going to the rear hatch, “this is one of the rare locations that doesn’t have coral.” I popped the hatch and was rewarded with appreciative noises from the group.
Ripples in shades of white and gray covered the ground. It looked like a badly iced cake, with crusty bits, shallow depressions, and hummocks here and there. The lake beyond was a glittering azure expanse stretching to the horizon.
I’d seen it in the travelogue video Wallace had given me, but it didn’t do it justice. Sure, places like Aquamarine and Ragnarok had more raw beauty, but this place had color. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like experiencing a sense for the first time you never knew you missed. Just like that.
Rayder Flint was the first one out after me. “Interesting,” he said.
This was noteworthy because it’s the first thing I heard him say since he’d arrived. His profile said he was an independent businessman in the bioelectronics field, and that was it. This seemed fishy to me, as all of the other adult members of the group had at least a full paragraph describing their education and work histories.
I waited while everyone took their sweet time exiting the shuttle. I was anxious to go check the undercarriage. That sound really had been outside normal parameters. Oh, hell, I was beginning to think like Wallace. I made a mental note to seek therapy when this was over.
“Why does it smell weird?” Brandon Taylor asked.
“It’s the salt,” I said. “All the lakes on Isn’t She Pretty are salt lakes like the Dead Sea on Earth.”
“No,” Millie Jones said, “I know what salt smells like. It’s close, but it’s not salt.”
“Yeah,” Alisha Razak agreed, “we spend most of our time on beaches. We should know.”
“It’s a different kind of salt,” Frank Kendall said, before I could open my mouth. “The salt you’re used to is sodium chloride. This is potassium chloride.”
“Right,” I said, “and—”
“Actually,” Zack Taylor said with a snort, “it’s about eighty-seven percent potassium chloride, eleven percent sodium chloride, and two percent trace minerals.”
“Good,” I said. “You must have been really bored. You read the guidebook.”
This evoked a round of laughter, and the kid’s face reddened behind his visor. For a moment, I thought he was going to explode, but instead, he turned around and walked away.
“Okay,” I said, making a shooing motion. “Spread out. Explore. Have fun. I’ve got work to do.”
After repeating the warning to keep their suits on at all times, etc., I went around to the side of the shuttle and peered underneath. What I saw can best be summed up as “oh, crap.”
A pointed rock pierced the belly of the shuttle like a dagger. Its salt encrustation had been knocked off by the impact, and I could see blue gunk from some ruptured fluid line dribbling onto it. I pounded the side of the shuttle as I straightened up.
“Don’t go in the water,” I shouted before I climbed back inside the shuttle. I hoped no one would try. The water wouldn’t kill them unless they drank a couple of liters of it, but the suits weren’t designed for any kind of aquatic activity, and removing them would certainly be life-threatening.
I sat at the pilot’s console and fired up the diagnostics system. There were red, orange, and yellow icons scattered among the green. Damage control, which should have been chugging away, was deactivated.
“What the hell,” I muttered, starting it up.
Data flashed down the screen. After about half a minute, it stopped, stating that the procedure had been aborted due to the presence of a foreign object. The repair log said that it had managed to reroute four circuits and stem a fluid leak.
But when I checked the diagnostics again, I couldn’t tell if anything changed. All at once, I wanted to scream, cry, and put a boot through the damned screen.
“Need help?” someone asked, making me jump.
I swiveled around to find Rayder Flint standing between the first two passenger seats, a sympathetic smile visible through his visor.
“I have some experience with stubborn machines,” he said, gesturing toward the console. “Can I take a look?”
Strictly speaking, it was against regulations, but what the hell. It wasn’t like things could get any worse, right?
“Sure,” I said, getting up. “Knock yourself out.”
Rayder stripped off his gloves, sat down, and lifted his visor. Over his shoulder, I watched as he examined the diagnostics. Then, muttering under his breath, he started jabbing icons to bring up details. Then he began flipping through control panel after control panel, making an adjustment here, a tweak there, almost too quickly for me to follow.
Finally, he leaned back. “That’s all I can do,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at me. “The rock.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “The stupid rock.”
He stood and let me have the chair. There were less orange and red icons in the diagnostics.
“We still can’t fly,” he said, “but I managed to get communications up to ninety-three percent operability.”
“Thanks,” I said, nodding. “It’s a lot more than I could have done.”
He smiled as he slumped into one of the passenger seats. Laughter filtered in from outside. At least someone was having fun. I sighed.. The only thing left to do was to call for help, something I was not looking forward to doing.
Minutes crawled by and, in the course of doing nothing in particular, I found the elevation control for the pilot’s chair. An idea hit me. I swung around and brought up the controls for the shuttle’s landing struts.
Their height was set at forty-five centimeters in equilibrium. I moved the slider to its maximum setting of one meter and jabbed the execute button.
As the shuttle slowly began to rise, I turned around, triumphant. “There,” I said. “We should be able to fix it now.”
Rayder was pale, with an unreadable expression on his face. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. “But—”
The shuttle lurched, then dropped. There was a deafening boom, and I found myself sitting on the floor in front of Rayder, who was clutching his armrests in a white-knuckled death grip. Behind him, the deck bulged upward, forcing several of the passenger seats to tilt at crazy angles.
Rayder dabbed at a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth and smiled ruefully. “You know,” he said, “I cannibalized resources from non-critical systems, including the landing strut hydraulics.”
* * *
“The cost of retrieval and repairs is coming out of your salary.”
“Oh, screw you, Wallace,” I said. “It wasn’t my fault, and you know it.”
“I assume you performed a full preflight check?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Of course I did.”
“And it checked out? Everything was functional?”
“Yes,” I said, exasperated. “That’s why it’s not my fault. You can check the logs.”
“As a matter of fact,” Wallace said, drawing a sheet from the ever-present yellow plastic folder, “I have the pertinent section right here.” He slid it across the desk.
Like the yellow folder, the paper was holographic, so I couldn’t pick it up. It was a printout of the shuttle’s logs, or at least a small portion of them. About a third of the text was highlighted in yellow. It confirmed that I had run the preflight check, and that everything had been hunky-dory.
“Okay,” I said, “so why are you making me pay for it?”
He sighed and reclaimed the paper, tucking it back into the folder. “It seems,” he said, “that our insurance refuses to pay.”
“What? Why?”
Wallace shrugged. “They say pilot error isn’t covered.”
“Pilot error!” I shouted, leaping out of my chair. “The damn collision avoidance didn’t warn me there was a frickin’ rock in the way. That’s the goddamn error!”
Wallace folded his hands and regarded me calmly as I loomed over him. The moment stretched, and I began to wonder what kind of pills he was popping when he reached over and pressed something I couldn’t see on the desk.
“Jackson,” he said, “please come in here.”
There came the sound of a door sliding open about ten seconds later. A hologram of a small, grizzled man in white grease-stained coveralls, wielding a wrench half as big as he was popped into existence near the office door.
“Yeah, what the hell you want now?” he growled.
“In regards to shuttle two,” Wallace said, “have you determined if there was any kind of mechanical failure or the like?”
Jackson scowled. “No,” he said, as if speaking to a small, slow child, “’cause I been up here, installing your bloody sauna.” He pointed at me with the wrench. “Besides, there ain’t much left of it after she got through with it.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “If the collision avoidance had been working, it’d have screamed at me, and it wouldn’t have let me land, right?”
“Yeah,” Jackson said with a shrug. “Course you coulda turned it off yourself.”
I put my hands on my hips. “And why the hell would I do that?”
Jackson shrugged again. “Gotta go. I’m busy,” he said and vanished without even a nod to Wallace.
I rounded on Wallace. “Why would I do that?”
“No one has said that you did,” he said. He spread his hands in what was probably meant as a conciliatory gesture. “But the fact remains, someone has to pay for the damage.”
“But I’ll be in debt forever,” I said, trying to keep the whine out of my voice.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “but that’s the way it is.”
“Oh, screw you, Wallace.”
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by Ronald Linson
