‘The hell?’ Lante repeated, clearly audible now they’d all decided to do the dumb thing together. The other two looked as though they’d already got it, Baltiel decided – Rani definitely, Lortisse just piecing it together now.
‘We were shut down.’ Because it needed to be said and he was in charge. ‘An attack, from home. An attack from thirty years ago. The war . . .’
‘We need to get comms back,’ Rani said. ‘The module . . .’
‘We need to survive.’ Baltiel was already taking inventory. They had food here. They had water, though they couldn’t reprocess waste until they were able to restart that part of the system. They had limited air. Could they get the scrubbers and the pumps online? Could they get access to the suit tanks? Again, he tried to link to the others, to throw the problem to them and have their minds work on it in that virtual space between them. Denied, again denied.
‘Air first, comms second,’ he decided. ‘Perhaps the shuttle comms survived, if they weren’t being used.’ Except the sanest, grimmest part of his mind was pointing out that the comms on the shuttle were open all the time; of course they were, why wouldn’t they be? What’s the worst that could happen?
‘Why us?’ Lante moaned.
Maybe it wasn’t just us. But there was time for that kind of speculation later.
In the end they were able to jury rig the suits to get the tanks pumping again, which was fine except they could barely communicate unless they touched faceplates. The habitat’s pumps remained stubbornly silent. Rani reckoned she could get them working, circumvent all the parts of the system that had clenched and died at Earth’s faraway command, but perhaps not in a time frame that would be useful.
Baltiel had volunteered to go out and try the shuttle. They lost a roomful of atmosphere letting him out and he was wondering whether he would ask to be let back in. The shuttle was as dead as everything else, he discovered with no surprise. The airlock was locked down, even the manual release wouldn’t shift it. He hammered on the metal of the door, indulging his fury on the inanimate so he could go back and be reasonable for his fellow human beings. When he was done ranting for the sole audience of his own ears, he looked round to see several of the tortoises watching this spectacle, this doomed alien invader come to their world to die. They had simple eyes at the lower edge of their shells, his memory reminded him, but complex stalked eyes that emerged from the blowhole in the apex of their shell, because they needed to watch out for the fliers. Now those eyes were goggling at him, making him feel that he was letting the side down. Just moved in and what would the neighbours say?
So, he marched laboriously back to the habitat and banged on the airlock until they let him in. By then, Rani had performed miracles with her suit battery and an antenna array and had what she claimed was a working transmitter/receiver. Except nobody out there was transmitting or acknowledging receipt of anything they were sending. The module was silent; the Aegean was silent; the shuttle Senkovi had sent his colleagues off in was silent.
The non-functional habitat was a ticking clock on their lives, but they were on a planet, within atmospheric pressure. If the module’s systems had shut down, how long would Skai have? Baltiel was acutely aware that every single part of their life in space was mediated by computers.
‘Keep trying,’ he told Rani. ‘The rest of us, let’s get the habitat air up.’
How much later was it, then? No clocks, an alien world (the day-night cycle ran to just short of thirty-four hours and seventeen minutes, Baltiel recalled). No suit gauges, either, and so he made the command decision that they’d run out of air soon, as though it was a choice, a thing he could mandate. They hadn’t managed to unfreeze the air system. One emergency tank had been hauled inside, tapped, used up. Lortisse’s frustrated brute-force efforts had resulted in another tank venting its contents into the heedless alien atmosphere beyond. Without the scrubbers and recyclers online, none of it would matter. It wasn’t as though the habitat just had huge reserves of air; it was supposed to keep churning through it, turning CO2 into O2 with a side of C. As they hadn’t managed to – Lante’s desperate pun – breathe life into that system, none of the rest of it really mattered.
And so Baltiel had made his command decision. He would take the plunge, be the guinea pig. Partly he was responsible: his ship, he’d go down with it. Partly, though, he would be first. His penance but also his privilege.
Here he was then, another airlock-full of stale, used-up air vented by the crude manual levers. His suit, smelling of sour Baltiel even to him now, smelling of sweat and even more of the urine it no longer recycled. The interior of the habitat smelled a whole lot worse. They’d all used the facilities but whatever psychotic electronic weapon had been unleashed hadn’t spared the plumbing. His suit was hot and cumbersome, the servos fighting his every movement, designed to protect him but now just a tomb in waiting.
He looked towards the orange sun as it sank towards the mountains in what had just been another direction once but, now humans were here, would forever be west.
Or maybe not forever. Just as long as we’re here. So not that long, most likely.
The others were watching him, not through screens and cameras with complex readouts of his health, but through the darkened glass of a porthole they’d wrestled the cover from.
He took a deep breath, regretted it, reached up and unlatched his helmet. The lack of warning alarms was a curious relief. One dead system he wouldn’t miss.
He lifted the helmet off and placed it, with groaning effort, on the ground. That done, he stared up at the dimming orange sky and took a deep breath.
Salt; ammonia; ozone; but beyond all of these a melange of smells he had no names for. Things decaying by unfamiliar biological pathways, sharp living perfumes, hot smells, red and black smells. He wished more than anything in the world to be synaesthetic right then, so he would have some extra way to process the information his senses were giving him. He had expected the alien air to be pungent, ghastly. Instead it was heady with odours his body could do nothing with. They smelled like something, like nothing. They were cocktails of molecules his nose had never needed to identify before.
He heard peeping like miniscule baby birds from around his feet. A flier flailed overhead, clacking angrily at him. Something keened shrilly from far off. The tortoises gurgled as they moved, as though their innards were churning wet rocks together. He had not known. The drones and remotes had never heard these songs, smelled these weird odours. The atmosphere was heavy, dense and humid and hot like the tropics, save when the wind gusted from seawards and the acrid salt reek enveloped him and cooled him and stung his eyes.
His breathing was speeding up; he felt the panic point of hyperventilation at his shoulder and forced himself to slow. There was less oxygen, but there should be enough, according to the numbers on the dead computers. A human from Earth could breathe unaided. Long exposure would result in a build-up of various chemicals the human body couldn’t process, but better than suffocating, eh? And he could detox later when he got back to the . . . back to the . . . Well, there was nowhere to get back to, was there?
He fought his lungs again, as they grasped for more sustenance than the Nodan atmosphere had to offer. His muscles were aching, too, working with that just-too-strong gravity. But he lived. He breathed in alien air, the same air that all these myriad little monsters depended on for their own incompatible metabolisms.
He turned back to the others, or to the porthole behind which he must trust they still were. It was hard even to make a thumbs up signal in the suit but he did it. They must have been able to see his grin. He was going to die, but he’d done it now. He was Nod’s first citizen castaway. He felt a crazy streak of hilarity rush through him, and then panic because what if that was the atmosphere getting to him? Yusuf Baltiel was not a man given to sudden attacks of irrational joy! And yet he owned it, claimed it as his own. He had found the aliens; he had saved them from the depredations of his own mission, and now he would die amongst them, now or later or in a hundred years, a mad hermit at the end of the human universe, talking to the tortoises and the little peeping things that lived in the black sand.