“It should’ve cooled enough to touch by now. That reminds me…”
“Thermal?” John swiped his optics setting. Indeed, he could see through the hull now, though the massive blob of red didn’t render the scene much clearer. He increased the sensitivity and reestablished the baseline temp higher. He flinched at the new view. “Oh crap. Turn up your sens—”
“Already on it… oh crap!” she echoed.
The enhanced picture picked up the minutest detail—eyes, mouths, skin lines, and just how far back the horde went. He could see Hynka pushing and shoving, clawing and biting at each other.
“Hang on!” Minerva shouted, and John grabbed a handhold just as the EV was slammed from her side.
A few seconds later, another smash, and the EV rolled completely over, loose objects raining down, Minerva’s back crashing into John’s chest.
“There went the stabilizer legs! We need to strap back in!” John shouted. “They’re going to bowl us all over the damned continent!”
Minerva rolled off of him. “Not going to happen just yet.”
John reclaimed his bearings and peered around. The seats now hung upside down above them.
“Just hold on,” John said. “I have a feeling they’ll help us out any second.”
Sure enough, a crash from behind, instantly followed by another. Handholds yanked from tight grips and they crashed once more into each other, John’s head banging into Minerva’s cheek. She released a small peep of pain, but quickly jumped into her seat as it rolled beneath her. John followed suit and fastened his waist restraint.
“Grab your helmet!” Minerva yelled. “And hang onto your SSK. Nothing loose. And open your visor. My audio went inop.”
“Right.” John pulled on the helmet, raised the visor, then used his feet to lift the battered survival kit into his hands.
But the EV didn’t move.
“What are they waiting for?” Minerva looked at him, her shadow-filled face lit only in blue.
“I don’t—whoa!” He thrust a finger toward his porthole, a large, bronze eye staring in, surveying the cabin. A nictitating membrane slid over the eye from one side, then retracted. “Don’t move.”
“It’s looking right at you.”
The dark, leathery face shifted side to side beyond the porthole, the creature aiming its jutting snout downward and alternating between eyes for the best view. John glanced at the other porthole and saw two more faces fighting to see in.
“You’ve got some over there, too.”
Minerva turned to her porthole to see the two pairs of large eyes looking her over. A sound began outside the hatch. A scratching, like a large saw taken to a metal pipe. The noise was joined by a rhythmic thud—something striking the other side of the hatch.
Minerva whispered, “Do you think they can get in? If they work at it enough?”
“I’ve seen Ish’s vids. Seen a sciuromorph chased into a tree the Hynka couldn’t climb. Three of them spent two days taking turns chipping away at the trunk with claws and sharp-edged rocks until the tree fell. These pods aren’t made to keep determined things out.” John reactivated the thermal view and took a sweeping look around. “I don’t think any have left. There’re more, if anything.”
“That’s great.”
John chewed his lip. “If only the skimmers were stored inside the EVs. We’d wait for the hatch to roll on top, then blow it out and fly away.”
“Skimmers are way wider than the hatch and ‘if only’ statements are the opposite of helpful.”
“I know. We just need to figure something out. I don’t know… maybe some way to detonate the EV.”
“Really?”
“Well, not with us in it. We have to get away somehow, but use it as a distraction. I don’t know.”
Minerva fished around in the surface survival kit as she spoke. “Your out-loud thinking doesn’t offer me much confidence. I was just imagining if they accidentally rolled us into a lake or something. We could float away…” Minerva extracted the standard multiweapon from the container and inserted a 40-round pack.
“Hynka swim.”
“Are you serious? We’re screwed! Maybe detonating us in here isn’t such a bad idea.”
“No. There’s a way.” John felt confident in his words, and continued to search around the cabin. There was always a way. He’d kept this conviction as a sort of mantra for as far back as he could remember. It was why people always thought him arrogant.
Aether had frequently advised him, “Fake doubt. Say ‘there might be a better approach, but who knows?’ Like, we’re all in this together, you know? We’re all just trying.” But she also had to remind him that he was on a station full of brilliant people, each with different strengths, and many stronger than his. “Don’t let their accomplishments escape you,” she’d said. “Don’t attribute breakthroughs to luck.” He insisted that he didn’t, but knew that he’d been guilty of it, at least once. And here he was with Minerva, widely considered the best thinker of the lot. Where were her inspired suggestions?
“She’s trying,” Aether’s voice corrected in his head. “Ask her.”
He turned to her. She was staring at the multiweapon in her hand. “Minerva?” Her despair-heavy face moved to look at him. “Do you want to survive this?”
She swallowed. It looked like she hadn’t actually considered it a choice. The sounds of prying and cutting and banging outside the hatch grew more pronounced. Her shoulders tightened, forehead compressed.
He went on, louder, “Because I want to survive. But I can’t do it without you. You probably wouldn’t agree, but I feel fortunate to have been assigned this EV with you rather than anyone else. Can you save us? Tell me what to do… if you want to live. If not, let’s agree now on an optimal suicide.”
She blinked at him for a beat and swallowed again. He could see the screws turning in her head. Her tense expression began to shift and change to one of determination. Her sad eyes reverted to the intense scowl to which he’d grown accustomed.
She cocked her head. “You’ll listen to me?”
“Of course.”
“First, we need to start at the end. Our goal. Where is it we’re trying to go?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“Right. Brilliant. No, I mean, our real goal is to make it off this continent, and somehow to the other side of the planet, right?”
John suddenly felt stupid. Of course she was right. They were thousands of miles from their real destination, and escaping the mob around them was only the immediate concern. He nodded for her to go on.
“To make it there without some kind of vehicle, in a place as dangerous as this, is unlikely. And to blow up the EV, our strongest power source, with two skimmers stowed in the chassis, and full of other materials and resources, wouldn’t make a lot of sense, right?”
“Right.”
“Our first and most pressing concern is leaving the vehicle and reaching a location without being followed—ideally in such a way that they lose interest in the EV. Either way, we need to get out of their crosshairs. We can do that by distracting them, killing them, or negotiation.”
“Negotiation?”
“Yes. We know they have a rudimentary language.” Her speech was speeding up. He motioned for her to keep it steady. “Sorry, we don’t have a lot of time. Keep up. Communication should be our first approach. Not because it’s moral, but because I’m pessimistic of our chances with options one and two. We have two weapons, three packs each. If we somehow got out of the EV into a position to fire at them, we’d have two hundred and forty shots in total. I’m also dubious of the multirounds’ effectiveness on animals that size.”