McCoy laughed. “In-law trouble again?”
“No. Kids. Kory’s turning out too much like me, and the school’s nagging at us about him and my so-called parenting style. I just need some time away.”
“Lost prime signal,” Jamie said from the station behind them. “Right on schedule.”
“What’s happened?” Depeche said. He twiddled some controls, scowling at the displays.
“It’s all right,” McCoy said. “We won’t have satellite contact for the duration, but Jamie’s a great navigator. Besides, in this weather it’s dead simple. Miksland to port on the way out and Miksland to starboard on the way back. Just stay in sight of the coast.”
“But what happened to the satellite?”
McCoy shrugged. “Something about Miksland, they told us. Sounded like a lot of hand waving to me, but after all—it is a terraforming failure. For all I know it’s made out of giant magnets or something, but unless you’re way, way high, nothing works right. Jamie, are you running the nav string? What’s the weather and fuel situation?”
“Yes, sir. Tailwind now, and headwind coming back,” Jamie said. “You want sixty-three percent of the fuel for the return trip, or we have to cut overland, and we don’t like that.”
“Why not?” Depeche glanced back over his shoulder.
“Instruments don’t just fail to connect to anything, they go crazy,” Jamie said. “If there’s ground fog or clouds, you can get mixed up easily. Some of the mountains are high.”
“You’d think someone would put a landing strip on that place, even just an emergency one,” Depeche said. “I’d feel a lot safer if they had.”
“Floater!” Seth called from the starboard side. “Debris.”
LRR’s recorder, Van, brought it up on the screen. “Code matches what you found before. Different piece?”
“Looks like,” Seth said.
“I’ll do a circle,” Depeche said. They spotted seventeen pieces of debris, none that looked like a body or a part of a raft, and recorded every marking on them.
“Back on original course,” Jamie said finally. They flew on another hour. This time, Lili Vela saw something first.
“Floater. Orange. Could be a body.”
When Van brought the image up on the screen they could see that it was, at least, an orange survival suit. Missing part of one arm.
“Floater Two,” Seth said, from the other side of the plane. “Appears intact… no… foot missing.” In the next half hour, they found two more bodies. All were clearly dead, all in survival suits, all damaged by either the shuttle crash or sea creatures, and without retrieval capability they could not tell which.
“I don’t suppose there’s much reason to keep going,” Commander Depeche said.
“Do we have enough fuel?” McCoy peered out the cockpit window.
“Yeah, for another hour, about, but why? We’re not going to find anyone alive.”
“We don’t know what happened yet. If there’s more debris—a raft, even empty or damaged—it shows some might have made it down, deployed the rafts.”
“Sure. Fine.” They flew on in silence.
“Floater. Orange. Might be a raft.” Seth pointed; Van zoomed in on it. Oval, the right shape for a raft as they came nearer. Flotation chambers mostly full. Canopy down, water sloshing—he felt cold to the bone suddenly. That water sloshing inside the raft wasn’t a layer over the raft floor; the floor hung down in two ragged—partly ragged—pieces, as if someone had sliced through it.
“Debris got it,” Lili said, peering at the screen. “Puncture marks—shrapnel from an explosion maybe—and then something sharp, some part of the shuttle or personnel module—some of that may be sea life, too—it’s a wonder it’s still afloat.”
“If they had only one raft in the water, that would explain the bodies—whatever did this would’ve killed some, knocked others overboard. The cold would’ve done the rest.”
As the plane circled, Van recorded every detail he could.
“Time to go,” Depeche said. “Have you got what you need?”
“Got it,” Van said. And under his breath, to those in the rear compartment, “I hate this kind of flight.”
“Do you mostly get the bad ones?” Seth asked.
“We’ve had some saves. Found people in rafts, then could tell a ship where they were. But this—without the proper navigational aids—nobody takes a ship through here, do they?”
“Not in my lifetime,” Seth said. He leaned back against the hard seat. “No nav help, no satellite contact, and the water’s cold enough to kill you in less than an hour, even in summer. Ice on it in winter—solid off toward the pole, windblown chunks of it here. Shipping all stays north of Pingat Base, and mostly north of Miksland altogether.”
“And you actually run SAR out here?”
“Practice runs,” Seth said. “This is the first emergency—nobody’s crashed while I’ve been stationed here. So our usual routes are north and west of Miksland. We come here to practice navigation without modern instruments in case we need it somewhere else.”
“You found bodies? How many? Who?” Grace felt her heart skip a beat, start again.
“We don’t know.” Admiral Hicks sounded depressed. “They saw five, and the remains of one raft. This was the Long Range Recovery plane—it can’t land on water and can’t hover; there’s no way to retrieve anything. The bodies had damage; they filmed everything but there are no facial features and we can’t tell if injuries preceded the crash or not.”
“And the total number on the shuttle when it left the station?” She had been told that, but she’d gone blank on it.
“Twenty-eight, Rector. If they were alive and able when the passenger module landed, I’m sure they’d have tried to launch two rafts. If they were all in one, it would be overloaded; the storm that hit the area shortly after they went down could have caused it to fail.” He cleared his throat. “We must consider it likely that no one survived. The weather, the water temperature—no one could survive in it for more than an hour at most. Five bodies—others could have sunk, been taken by sea life—”
“Fish?”
“Most likely, yes. Or cetaceans. If the crew or passengers survived, if they made it into more than one life raft, we would still expect some communication, some transponder signal.”
“And there’s nothing.”
“Nothing at all. I know your particular interest—”
“My primary interest is that Spaceforce personnel, from Private Ennisay to the Commandant of the Spaceforce Academy, were aboard a shuttle that crashed and we haven’t found them,” Grace said. “That my grandniece was on the same shuttle is unfortunate, and yes, of course, I am concerned about her as well. But my duty, as Rector, is to Spaceforce. Five dead we know about but that leaves twenty-three who might be alive. We must not abandon them.”
“Rector, the winter storms are lined up now and we do not have any bases nearer than Pingats to fly from.”
“One more search,” Grace said. “One more, the next day they can. I take your point; I’m not going to insist on risking crews after that, but—”
“One more. We will do that.”
It was over. Grace leaned back in her chair and stared through the solid wall into her imagination: giant seas, tiny rafts rising and falling on them, rain or snow or sleet, howling winds. If they were not all dead, what would they be doing? How long could they survive in that cold, with just the resources in the rafts? Even if they caught a lucky current, and it swept them north out of the polar circulation, that was still winter, still cold. Suppose all twenty-three were alive, and in two rafts—thirty days’ rations for forty would feed twenty-three for… fifty-two days. That would not get them even to midwinter, let alone to spring.