Wait a second…
She expanded the beacon signal’s details and found ID info. It wasn’t EV6; it was EV5.
MINNIE: John?!
JOHN: Wow, I see it!
MINNIE: She’s 11K away. I’ll route the course and head straight there.
MINNIE: How were Angela’s SP scores?
MINNIE: If her beacon’s active, they probably didn’t find her.
MINNIE: Or maybe our landing distracted them for her.
JOHN: Angela didn’t evac in EV5. I guess I never told you. Ish stopped her, volunteered to trade spots so Angela wouldn’t have to be alone. She let her go with Tom in EV4.
MINNIE: Oh.
Minnie remembered the clang of EV4 launching into open space. She remembered the recroom and Angela hugging Tom from behind, her cheek smushed up between his shoulder blades. Angela giving Minnie a pedicure with probably-toxic enamel paint. “Now if only we could cut the tips off some old runners and glue on a high heel,” she’d joked as she fanned Minnie’s toes. “She won’t be able to resist you.” An early date night with Aether.
At least Angela got to be with Tom.
MINNIE: Well, how thoughtful of her in the middle of exigency.
Could Ish have known in the midst of all that chaos that the EVs were launching askew, and deliberately sent Angela to die in her place? Minnie just couldn’t see Ish doing something for her fellow humans in a time of crisis. She simply didn’t like people.
Or what if… was she that crazy?
MINNIE: John, how was Ish’s last psyche eval?
JOHN: You know I can’t talk about that stuff.
MINNIE: Honestly? Even now? Think for a second. Really think about it. I bet you that looner blew up the station on purpose. Killed more than half of the crew. How would she accidentally guide the pod in on a collision course without Qin noticing? It would take more than a little planning and strategy to hide what was really going on. No way he left her unsupervised for 2 effing hours.
JOHN: If she was suicidal and meds didn’t help, there were numerous systems in place to detect and report anomalous behavior. But she evac’d with the rest of us. She didn’t even hesitate. She didn’t have a death wish.
MINNIE: No, she didn’t have a death wish! She wanted to be down here! With her real people. Surface evac was the only way. Did the supply pod hit the tube to the BH first?
John didn’t respond right away. She knew it had, and she knew he was mulling it over. Minnie paced around the scene, kicking Hynka bones out of the way. Every passing second solidified her suspicions. Ish guided the supply pod to impact the escape tube, and then to destroy the engineering sub-bay. Exigency procedures went into effect and she got her surface evac. As mission psych, though, how could Aether have missed the warning signs? Weekly one-on-ones were as non-opt as group.
JOHN: If she didn’t establish superiority via violence like we did, the Hynka would kill her in an instant.
MINNIE: And you know she wouldn’t dream of hurting of her babies. My question is, would she expect an attack from them? Or do you suppose she might have built up some grand illusions about communicating with them? Establish peaceful relations? Join the tribe?
JOHN: What are you going to do? Won’t it be dark soon?
MINNIE: I have 3.25 hours of daylight. I’m going to find EV5 and, if she’s not dead, I’m going to find Ish.
1.7
Minnie’s stomach ached for food, a dull pain joining the piercing stabs of her colon. Running through the forest along the red line, she hoped the adrenalin would ease her discomfort. Tomorrow, she pleaded with her gut. Halfway to EV5’s beacon signal, she certainly wasn’t going to stop and go back to the cave to eat.
ALERTS: Terrain 0.5K – 3rd order stream
She ducked beneath a pair of supershrooms and wondered how those babies would taste on a giant grill, drizzled with butter.
Everything’s food now, eh?
An image of John lying in the heater’s glow, his body slowly morphing into a roasted chicken, like an old-timey cartoon.
“Depth and flow?” she asked her fone, unable to navigate the menu and run simultaneously.
“One to two meters at crossing point!” Superhero emphatically replied in her ear.
She hadn’t used audible prompts in ages and couldn’t remember why she’d changed it away from the hilariously sexy, breathy Domino voice she always used. The only times she used Superhero was when John sent out long, rambling messages she wanted read to her. It always dampened her irritation to hear his words read in Superhero’s deep, melodramatic yell. That must’ve been why audible was set to him. A fresh dose of guilt.
Superhero went on, “Twenty-three C-F-S flow! Bank soil rigidity unknown!”
“You are advising against jumping an obstacle?”
“Rephrase!” Superhero demanded. The mapping system wasn’t programmed for idle banter like some of the others. And Superhero probably didn’t know he was a superhero, or all that that entailed. Well, Superhero didn’t actually know anything. He was one of thousands of voices that could speak for her fone.
Minnie dismissed the warning as the river came into view. It was definitely too wide to jump without getting wet, but she was able to walk through without much effort. Beyond the stream, forestland gave way to a relatively flat plain and a wide, distant view. In the distance, a purple mountain overlooked the land, apparently coated in the same mossy lichen that blanketed the plain of river-smoothed rocks around her.
She focused on the center of the mountain and expanded the tiny details icon that appeared. The station’s sensors had scanned and mapped the mountain several times a year since their arrival in Epsy orbit. Dormant volcanic, 14 major caves, 29 minor caves, nickel, copper, platinum, and rhodium, and though it wasn’t in the files thanks to Ish apparently erasing everything, Minnie remembered a little something about this mountain.
Ish had done a report on it for the team a couple years back. The Hynka called it Duchroch and it was apparently their equivalent of Mount Olympus, or any of Earth’s other geographically based origin-of-life legends. Minnie had irritated Ish by calling it “duck rock,” but now she was glad she’d actually paid attention in the briefing. Though there were signs that early Hynka occupied its caves, it had been considered sacred and untouchable for as long as modern-day Hynka knew.
Minnie resumed running along her guide line, cutting left at the mountain’s shrub-littered foothills. 2K to go, and the last leg would have a 300m elevation rise. Peering “through” the mountain in her map overlay, she could see EV5’s flashing beacon signal coming from a saddle between a low-lying foothill and the mountain.
Halfway up the rocky slope, 15 minutes later, Minnie paused to catch her breath on a small landing. The next rise wore an apron of rocky debris she wasn’t looking forward to climbing. Her abdominal pain had subsided for the time being, but her chest burned. She closed her visor and sucked in a lungful of pure oxygen. John had been silent a while. Asleep, she guessed, as she curled her tongue around her helmet’s water tube, pulled it to her lips, and watched her fone’s gauge count off as she gulped down 500mils.