The car hovered for a thoughtful instant, then dropped and settled.
The outside air was cool enough to breathe, if only in quick little sips. Following the mission’s protocol, everyone took samples of the burnt soil and likely rocks, and they cut away pieces of things alive and dead. But mostly this was an excuse to experience this hard landscape, once strange and now, after weeks of work, utterly familiar.
Promise and Dream were examining a broad white tree stump.
“Asbestos,” Promise observed, fingers rubbing against the powdery bark. “Pulled from the ground or out of the air, or maybe just cooked up fresh. Then laid around the roots, see? Like a blanket.”
“The trunk and branches were probably lipid rich,” her brother added. “A living candle, practically”
“Meant to burn.”
“Happy to burn.”
“Born to burn.”
“Out of love.”
Then they giggled to themselves, enjoying their little song.
Washen didn’t ask what the words meant. These ditties were ancient and impenetrable; even the siblings didn’t seem sure where they came from.
Kneeling beside Dream, she saw dozens of flat-faced shoots erupting from the ravaged trunk. On Marrow, blessed with so much energy and so little peace, vegetation didn’t store energy as sugars. Fats and oils and potent, highly compressed waxes were the norm. Some species had reinvented batteries, stockpiling electrical energies inside their intricate tissues. How much time would it take for chance and caprice to do this elaborate work? Five billion years? At the very least, she guessed. There weren’t any fossils to ask, but the genetic surveys showed a fantastic diversity, implying a truly ancient beginning. They were in a garden that could be, perhaps, ten or fifteen billions years old. With that latter estimate verging on the preposterous.
Whatever was true, leaving Marrow was wrong.
Washen couldn’t stop thinking it, in secret.
To the siblings, she said, “I’m curious. Judging by their genes, what two species are the two most dissimilar?”
Promise and Dream grew serious, unwinding their deep, efficient memories. But before either could offer a guess, there was a hard jolt followed by a string of deep shudders, and Washen found herself unceremoniously thrown back on her rear end.
She had to laugh, for a moment.
Then somewhere nearby, two great masses of iron dragged themselves against each other, and piercing squealing roars split the air, sounding like monsters in the throes of some terrific fight.
When the quake passed, Washen stood and casually adjusted her uniform.Then she announced, “Time to leave.”
But most of her team was already making for the car. Only Diu waited, looking at her and not quite smiling when he said, “Too bad.”
She knew what he meant, nodding and adding, “It is,”
their eight-day-old map was a fossil, and not a particularly useful fossil, at that.
Washen blanked her screen, flying on instinct now. In another ten minutes, maybe less, they would reach their destination. No other team would travel this far. Drawing a sturdy little satisfaction from the thought, she started to turn, ready to ask whoever was closest to check on their champagne.
Her mouth opened, but a distorted, almost inaudible voice interrupted her.
“Report… all teams…!”
“Who’s that?” asked Broq.
Miocene. But her words were strained through some kind of piercing electronic wail.
“What do… see…?” the Submaster called out.
Then, again, “Teams… report…!”
Washen tried for more than an audio link, and failed.
A dozen other team leaders were chattering in a ragged chorus.
Zale boasted, “We’re on schedule here.”
Kyzkee observed, “Odd com interference… otherwise, systems nominal…”
Then with more curiosity than worry, Aasleen inquired, “Why, madam? Do you see something wrong?”
There was a long, jangled hum.
Washen linked her nexuses to the car’s sensor array, finding Diu already there. With a tight little voice, he said, “Shit.”
“What—” Washen cried out.
Then a shrill roar swept away every voice, every thought. And the day brightened and brightened, fat ribbons of lightning flowing across the sky, then turning, moving with a liquid purpose, aiming straight for them.
From the far side of the world came a twisted voice:
“The bridge… is it… do you see it… where…?”
The car lurched as if panicking, losing thrust and lift, then altitude, every one of its AIs failing. Washen deployed the manual controls, and centuries of routine drills made her concentrate, nothing existing now but their tumbling craft, her syrupy reflexes, and a wide expanse of cracked earth and burnt forest.
The next barrage of lightning was purple-white, and brighter, nothing visible but its wild seething glare.
Washen flew blind, flew by memory.
Their car was designed to endure heroic abuse. But every system was dead and its hyperfiber must have been degraded somehow, and when it struck the iron ground, the hull was twisted until its weakest point gave way, and it shattered. Restraining fields grabbed helpless bodies. Then their perfect mechanisms failed. Nothing but padded belts and gas bags held the captains in their seats. Flesh was jerked and ripped, and shredded. Bones were shattered and wrenched from their sockets, slicing through soft pink organs, then slammed together again. Then the seats were torn free of the floor, tumbling wildly across several hectares of iron and cooked stumps.
Washen never lost consciousness.
With a numbed curiosity, she watched her own legs and arms break and break again, and a thousand bruises spread into a single purple tapestry, every rib crushed to dust and her reinforced spine splintering until she was left without pain or a shred of mobility. Lying on her back, still lashed to her twisted chair, she couldn’t move her crushed head, and her words were slow and watery, the sloppy mouth filled with teeth and dying blood.
“Abandon,” she muttered.
Then, “Ship.”
She was laughing. Feebly, desperately.
A gray sensation rippled through her body.
Emergency genes were already awake, finding their home in a shambles. They immediately protected the brain, flooding what was living with oxygen and antiinflammatories, plus a blanket of comforting narcotics. Trusted, pleasant memories bubbled into her consciousness. For a little moment, Washen was a girl again, riding on the back of her pet whale. Then doctoring genes began rebuilding organs and the spine, cannibalizing meat for raw materals and energy, the captain’s body wracked with fever, sweating perfumed oils and black dead blood.
Within minutes, Washen felt herself growing smaller.
An hour after the crash, a wrenching pain swept through her. It was a favorable, almost comforting misery. She squirmed and wailed, and wept, and with weak, rebuilt hands, she freed herself from her ruined chair. Then on sloppy, unequal legs, she forced herself into a tilted stance.
Washen was twenty centimeters shorter, and frail. But she managed to limp to the nearest body, kneeling and wiping the carnage out of his face. Diu’s face, she realized. He was injured even worse than she. He had shriveled like old fruit, and his face had been driven into a craggy fist of iron. But his features were half-healed. Mixed with his misery was a clear defiance, and he managed a mutilated grin and a wink, his surviving gray eye focusing on Washen, the battered mouth spitting teeth as he lisped, “Wonderful, you look. Madam. As always…”