I did not know that the pilot-thinker would obey my orders, but there was no other explanation for the craft’s wild antics, unless the thinker hoped to throw the locust away from its case.
But the locust would not be thrown. An insectoid limb flew past me, black and gleaming, but despite the loss, the locust clung to the front bulkhead and continued to probe the thinker’s case. Above the roar of stressed engines and the crashing of luggage and awful slapping of bodies, I heard a drilling whine.
I pulled myself into a seat with all the strength I could muster. Jacques slid past me and spattered my leg with blood. The shuttle rolled again just as I locked the harness.
Before assuming crash position, I glanced forward and saw the pilot thinker’s case ripped open, gelatinous capsules spewing forth.
The locust became the center of a spinning nightmare.
We hit.
My shins pushed painfully against the rack in front of me. For some immeasurable time I felt nothing, and then another slam. Bones snapped and I blacked out, but only for an instant. The shuttle was still sliding and rolling as I came to, tumbling across the ground. I heard plastic and metal scream and the hiss of departing air, instinctively shut my eyes and mouth and pinched my nose, felt the touch of vacuum as my skin filled with blood — and the pressure canopies ballooned around our seats, sucked down against the cabin floor, filled quickly with compressed air hot as the draft from an oven door.
The shuttle stopped rolling, slid with a shudder and a leap to a nose-up angle, and lurched to a halt.
I sat strapped in my seat, wrapped within a canopy like a lizard inside a rubbery eggshell. My rib cage had become a plunging of knives with every gasping breath. I gritted my teeth to keep from screaming. My vision shrank to a hand-sized hole of awareness. Going into shock. Fighting to stay conscious, I glanced through the foggy membrane at Dandy’s seat. He had slumped to one side. I couldn’t figure out why; then I realized he had unstrapped the upper portion of his harness before passing out.
I could not see forward. Debris blocked my view. I could not see the locust.
I pressed my head back against the seat’s neck rest. I could stand the pain now; shock numbed me. I felt cold and sweaty. Battle over. Earth wins.
With some irritation, I felt small emergency arbeiters wrap their tendrils around my wrist. The shuttle’s tiny little life-saving machines had scrambled to check us out. I tried to pull my wrist out of the way. The tendrils tightened and a tube of medical nano entered the arteries at my wrist. The silver and copper arbeiter, barely as large as a mouse, tied to a shining blue umbilicus, crawled up my chest and exuded a cup over my mouth and nose. I tried to shake my head free but sweet gas filled my lungs and the pain subsided. The chill lessened. I grew calm and neutral.
The little machine hung on my chin and projected a message into my eyes. You are not badly injured. You have three cracked ribs and ruptured eardrums. Torsion units will reset the ribs and wrap them in cell-growth and sealant nano. The ruptured eardrums are being sutured now. You will not be able to hear for at least an hour.
I could feel the action in my chest, specked little fibers growing from bone to bone, rib to rib, tightening inexorably, torquing the ribs back together.
“All right,” I said, hearing nothing.
The shuttle cabin atmosphere has been breached. Integrity cannot be restored. No rescuers have responded to our emergency signal. The pilot thinker is damaged, perhaps destroyed. We will soon exceed our programming. Do you have any instructions?
I tried to look at Dandy again. The fog on my canopy had cleared a little and I saw him still slumped forward. “Is Dandy alive?”
One seated passenger is alive but unconscious. He will regain consciousness soon. He has a minor fracture of the tibia and minor concussion. There are two dead passengers. We cannot repair the dead passengers.
“What about Aelita?”
Copy of thinker “Aelita” condition unknown.
Dandy lifted his head and raised an arm to wipe the inside of his canopy. He peered at me groggily, plugs of nano sticking out of his ears like muffs. “Are you okay?” He mouthed the syllables extravagantly and signaled with his free hand.
“Alive,” I replied.
“Can you move?” He waggled his hand.
I shrugged.
I caught part of the next message: “… move with me… Get out…” But he could not coordinate his fingers to unhitch himself. He shook his head groggily.
I would have to rescue my guard.
I knew in theory how the canopies worked. They could stretch and roll with my movements, keeping a tough membrane between me and the near-vacuum of Mars’s atmosphere. I unhitched and stood, feeling the nano shift within me, the edges of my broken ribs grinding.
The cockpit of the shuttle had been torn off and the nose lay open to the sky. Part of the cockpit bulkhead panel, cut by the locust and pushed aside in the crash, stuck out at a crazy angle. An emergency safety symbol decorated a small hatch on the panel. Pushing forward in my canopy, I wiped at the moisture inside the membrane, trying desperately to see where the locust had gone.
No sign of it. Perhaps it had been thrown free, or smashed into the dirt with the pilot thinker and the cockpit.
I pushed my hand harder against the canopy. With a worrisome sucking sound, the membrane switched functions and formed gloves around my hands. The panel hatch popped open at my touch. I felt inside, half-blind, and brought out two cylinders and two masks with attached cyclers.
Flesh creeping, expecting to step on the locust or have it rise in front of me at any moment, I pushed out of the shuttle and slowly rolled my canopy to a higher spot on the rough terrain. I peered through the translucent membrane at the rocky, nasty surface, all knife-edge shards and tumbles of flopsand. We were two or three kilometers from the southern boundary of the station. We had enough air for five hours of exertion.
I returned through the jagged hole, nearly having a heart attack when the membrane snagged on a sharp pipe. I carefully lifted the membrane free and proceeded up the canted aisle.
Next I would expand my canopy and merge it with Dandy’s. I carried the cylinders and masks to the rear and dropped them at my feet. Then I bellied up against Dandy’s membrane. The two surfaces grew together with another sucking sound. I cut through the common membrane with a finger as it purposefully rotted, spread the opening, and crawled through. The medical arbeiters had stacked themselves neatly on the next seat, their work finished. Dandy raised his head and looked at me with some puzzlement. His eyes focused. His expression of pained gratitude didn’t need words.
I pulled my slate from a pocket to communicate with him. The emergency suits are gone. We still have some skinseal and masks. We ‘re about three kilometers from Preamble. We’re going to walk.
We sprayed each other with the bright-green skinseal and put on the masks and cyclers before climbing out of the shuttle’s wreckage. It had plowed in head-first, rolled for half a kilometer, and come to rest on a smashed tail. The upthrust broken nose leaned by chance toward Kaibab station, toward Preamble. I tried to find our position on a map through a navsat link but couldn’t get a signal.
I showed Dandy my slate again. Links are down. No navsat.
He nodded grimly. I climbed on top of a rock and used a pair of binoculars to survey the landscape. Dandy climbed up beside me with difficulty. The crack in his tibia made walking rough for him.
We huddled in a smooth patch of sand. Dandy held up three fingers and bent one halfway. Two and a half kilometers. He mouthed, “Trail… clear about half a klick north-northwest.”