Tour complete, Minnie got busy loading Ish’s treasure trove of supplies.
Moments later, with all the gear strapped to the pad or secured inside the skimmer’s in-floor storage bin, Minnie clipped the safety lines to her suit, and activated flight controls.
On Earth, skimmers had grown more common than cars and cycles for short-distance personal transport, along with other vehicles both open and enclosed, broadly referred to as threebs—an odd simplification of “Below 3000,” for their flight zone. Legally, you had to be 16 and licensed to fly a threeb. Minnie had just turned 16 when she entered mission training, and besides a short-lived joyride on a homemade rig, she’d only been able to operate a skimmer during a few obligatory exigency classes. The training center’s vehicles had all sorts of limiters and could be remotely controlled by instructors. No opportunities to “open them up,” as they say.
Minnie wrapped her fingers around the thick, cushioned handle grips, testing the steering devices’ ranges of motion. She could twist both grips like throttles, rotate the whole assembly like a steering wheel, and move it back or forth a few centimeters. There was, of course, no ID scanner on the dashboard, so Minnie simply activated flight with a tap on the screen, and twisted the altitude grip toward her. The ionic drive engaged with ghostly silence, lifting the skimmer slowly off the ground. She twisted harder, then engaged forward propulsion.
Within seconds, cool wind stung her unprotected eyes and blared in her ears. She quickly locked the altitude to free her left hand and slapped her visor shut.
Much better.
In the starlight, the skimmer whizzed noiselessly over the plain and the river and the epsequoia forest. Minnie’s head was a rush of pleasure and guilt. Her mission had been a major success—a first taste of things actually working out as planned (and more!), yet the stars above haunted her.
Tiny white dots in space.
It didn’t feel right to celebrate anything. To enjoy seemed offensive.
But she couldn’t help it. As she neared the spire and sinkhole, slowing and descending for landing less than two minutes from leaving Ish’s pod, Minnie decided she’d just have to take the pleasure with a side of shame. She’d made it up the rope, nourished her lungs with energizing fresh air, they had a skimmer now, they could leave the damned worm cave, and they had comms. She remembered she even had a dead bunny hanging at her thigh, its chickenality level yet to be established.
Perhaps, every now and then, it was okay to have a good day.
1.8
John wouldn’t wake up. Water dripped from Minnie’s suit onto his face and he didn’t even blink. At first she stifled panic, stripping away his survival bag and checking his body for new parasites, then scanned the inside of the tent. But none were present. They didn’t have to be, though, did they? The damage had already been done.
Minnie’s multisensor showed the same readings it had earlier: John’s circulation was poor, blood pressure low, but normal temp, electrolytes, and brain activity. She’d repeatedly sprayed down his wounds with antiseptic before applying organic wound sealant. The goop worked on large gashes, acting as a temporary skin while stem cells regrew flesh at an accelerated rate. She’d watched vids on managing similar-but-lessor wounds and precisely followed the instructions. He hadn’t gone into shock, and fever never arrived, so she thought she’d done everything perfectly. It’d simply take time for him to get better. And now that they had a skimmer, they wouldn’t be anchored by his inability to walk.
If only he’d wake up.
“John.” She patted his cheek. “Come on now, wake up. I’ve got good news.” She flicked his forehead and he uttered a pained groan. “John? Wake up now! Hey! Rise and shine! I found Ish’s EV! And we’re going to have us a bunnyque for dinner!” He let out an extended whine, as if trapped in a nightmare. She hushed and stopped touching him and he seemed to calm.
She sealed the tent door behind her, rolled back to sit on her empty survival bag, and held her face in her palms.
She whispered, “Please don’t leave me… Don’t leave me here alone.”
She sniffed and gazed at him through blurring tears. A quick swipe with the back of her wrist. He looked best through biomag at its lowest intensity. His unnerving jaw and neck wounds disappeared behind a contrived flesh tone. An illusion of perfect health. His usually close-buzzed hair had grown out a bit and was painted a solid black. The simplified features and estimated colors evoked a doll or action figure and Minnie heard Superhero in her head, but the voice had been drained of humor.
“John?” It hardly left her mouth. Even if he was awake, he wouldn’t have heard her. “I’m sorry.”
She touched his hand through the survival bag. He emitted a standard sleep sigh, as if he’d just rolled from one side to the next in a regular old bed in a house at two in the morning.
Sleep was good for him. Why was she even trying to wake him up? Let him be. Not moving sped healing, right? He’d wake as usual in the morning, right?
Well, what if he didn’t? This wasn’t normal. She’d always been able to rouse him before. She hadn’t changed his pain meds dosage. If he didn’t wake up in the next 24 hours, he’d obviously need water. There were, no doubt, hundreds of walk-throughs on setting up an IV drip—she growled suddenly and flushed such thoughts from her mind. Premature. Unnecessary. Unhelpful. Let him be.
She had comms to set up.
Maybe after a quick nap. It’d been a long day. A prosperous day. She deserved a break. It was warm inside the tent. She could curl up next to John and pretend he was Aether.
She shook out her head, her cheeks flapping like a hound’s. Pretend he was Aether? Cave fatigue was setting in again.
No… you can sleep any time! You have comms gear outside! There could be messages waiting! This could be last chance to say goodb—
No need to go there either. She just needed to set the damned things up. One thing at a time. More fresh air would be nice, anyway.
She stepped out, zipped the tent shut, and decided to rouse him tomorrow morning.
Back outside, Minnie pulled the Primary Comms Unit out of the skimmer and rigged a probably-unsafe hookup to the heater for power. Separating the laser emitter from its unit proved incredibly easy, and she plugged it into a universal port on the PCU. With the emitter propped up on the flattest section of rock, she enabled autotracking, and let the PCU run through signal establishment protocols.
The little screen scrolled through a series of targets, even listing Earth as an option.
That’s interesting.
Could she send a message to Earth from the surface? Even if aimed absolutely precisely, would the beam maintain cohesion on the way out of the atmosphere? Its intensity couldn’t possibly be strong enough. The comms tower on the station, the one used to exchange data with Earth, was 50 times more powerful than this little laser.
The lime-green beam turned on, streaking past her and into the sky. Start-up GPS instantly failed, so it proceeded on to constellation ID for its current position, then began searching for orbiting supply pods. The beam ticked side to side like a high-speed metronome, rapidly scanning 10 million cubic kilometers of the planet’s exosphere over the course of a few minutes.