The Pioneer Page 8

  Chris takes a big step back from the roots.

  Beth rolls her eyes. “You’ve got two hundred and six too many bones for Chorulux neon’s taste, Chris.” She activates her tether. The line snaps out and bonds with her anchor.

  As she rappels into the cave, I notice something in the ashes of the fire pit. It’s a crumpled flexible tablet. I smooth it out. It’s probably long dead, but I swipe a finger over the fire-scarred surface just in case.

  To my surprise, the screen flickers to life. The wallpaper is set to that same picture of Dr. Brown and Dr. Pasha in the lake. It must be her personal flex. It has a ton of games and books and music stored on it, as well as three folders full of files labeled Backup, Pictures, and Maps.

  I open the Maps folder and tap on a file labeled Diamond Range. A topographical map of the mountains flows over the singed screen. It’s way more detailed than the map in the survey report. We already knew the Rangers were planning to stay on Tau a few extra weeks to do more research. I guess part of that research involved an additional survey of these mountains.

  Dr. Brown has the flex set to link the geotags on her pictures to locations on the map. Dozens of images pop up for almost every named location. The picture of Dr. Brown and Dr. Pasha is linked to a lake the Rangers named Reflections. It’s about one hundred klicks south of here. They named a bunch of other landmarks too—rivers, mountains, valleys. Even this tiny ravine has a name. Jannah. I don’t recognize the word, so I access the flex’s dictionary and discover it’s a name for paradise in some of the Islamic traditions. The Rangers must have really loved it here. No wonder Dr. Brown chose this place to bury her friends.

  I’m so absorbed that I don’t notice Chris coming to look over my shoulder. “Wonder why they bothered to build hot spots out here,” he says, pointing to a scatter of bright-green plus signs on the map that indicate wireless network hubs. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just carry sat phones while they were out surveying?”

  “Judging by how closely they’ve mapped the area, the Ranger team spent a lot of time up here. It would have been practical to establish a few permanent campsites near points of interest, so that they didn’t have to return to the Vulcan every night,” Beth points out without looking up from the sample of glowing root she’s collecting.

  “Makes sense to me,” Jay says.

  “We should check them out,” Chris says eagerly. “There might be stuff there that’d tell us more about what happened to the Rangers.”

  “I’m sure the commander will send teams to recon those sites,” Jay says.

  “You’re going to show the commander this map?” Chris says. “How are you going to explain where we found it without getting us in trouble?”

  “We have to tell her the truth,” I say. “She needs to know what’s out here.”

  “We’re going to be on KP forever,” he moans.

  “Probably,” Jay agrees. “But hey, kitchen patrol means we get first dibs on the grub.”

  Does nothing put this guy in a bad mood? You’d think constant cheerfulness would be annoying, but there’s something about his unflappable good humor that makes the idea of sharing KP duty with him palatable. I think I might even be looking forward to it.

  Thankfully, Chris’s flex bleats a reminder alert before I have time for too much self-examination.

  “Time for your vitamins?” Jay teases.

  Chris rolls his eyes. “I set that to alert me when the Wagon was scheduled to depart the Pioneer. If we head back now, we have just enough time to get back to the Landing before my mom makes it dirtside.”

  “Clever,” I say.

  “Not that it makes any difference now,” he grumbles.

  “Into every life, a little KP duty must fall,” Jay says. With that, he jumps up and hooks his hands over the lip of the cave entrance, then hauls himself out with no visible effort.

  “Showoff.”

  “What is that saying about pots and kettles that Dad likes?” Beth says, tapping her harness again. Her tether flashes out, autoconnecting to her climbing spike.

  Beth rappels up the side of the cave and pulls herself up and out. I make Chris go next. He tethers in and then retracts the line at full speed, hooting with joy as it swoops him off his feet and tosses him out into the sunlight.

  The sun is getting low in the sky by the time I climb out of the cave. On Earth, this canyon would be drenched in shadows, but that isn’t how dusk works in the Diamond Range. The light catches in the prismatic cliffs, bending and bouncing through the ravine. It’s blindingly bright, like the sun is melting all over us.

  Beth and Chris are already walking toward the flyer, but Jay is just standing there soaking in the riot of light.

  “This planet is something else, isn’t it?” he says, as I retract my tether and retrieve Beth’s anchor spike. There’s something about the awestruck reverence in his voice that makes little nervous butterflies dance in my stomach. His joy in this place is so unfiltered that sharing it feels intimate, somehow.

  An impossibly loud snap blasts through the mountain air, followed by a flat boom.

  “What the hell was that?” Jay says.

  “Oh no,” Chris shouts, ripping his flex off his arm. “No, no, no.” He shakes his flex into tablet form and holds it up over his head. “Telescopic tracking mode,” he snaps. “Seek and lock on to flying objects.”

  Abruptly, my brain places the sound. I’ve heard it before, during the first year of flight training. It’s the sound of an out-of-control shuttle falling through the atmosphere. There’s only one shuttle on this planet.

  The Wagon is crashing.

  Five

  “Object located,” Chris’s flex intones. An image rises on its screen. Even magnified, the Wagon is just a glimmer of silver in the brilliant blue. Chris double taps to triangulate its location and track its course. A bright-yellow line streams out behind it on the screen as the flex records the shuttle’s descent into the uneven horizon of the mountains. The Wagon disappears behind a high plateau, putting it out of view just before it actually crashes.

  Chris drops to the ground, cross-legged, his fingers flashing across his flex as he calculates the Wagon’s likely trajectory from the point where we lost visual contact. After a few seconds, he says, “Got it. They went down within five square kilometers of these coordinates.”

  “I’m sure the Landing is already tracking their emergency beacon,” Jay says.

  “Will it work in these mountains?” I say.

  “We should report Chris’s findings,” Beth says. “In case it does not.”

  “We can’t,” Chris says. “No long-range comms yet, remember?”

  “Isn’t there a sat phone in the flyer’s supply kit?” I say numbly. I can’t believe this is happening.

  He shakes his head. “There is no supply kit. I tried to tell you, but you walked off too fast. We haven’t printed any of the usual gear for the flyers yet. The commander ordered us to build a dozen assault rifles and body armor for the whole squad first. We had to postpone everything else until they were done.”

  “The Wagon, however, has a full kit on board, including a satellite phone,” Beth says. “I’m sure the survivors will call their location in to the Landing immediately.”

  “But we can get to them faster than anyone at the Landing,” Chris says, shoving to his feet. “We have to go.”

  “We may not be able to help them,” Beth says. “We don’t even have a med kit.”

  “There were fourteen people on the shuttle!” Chris’s voice cracks on the words. “Mom, and Leela, and Miguel, and Dr. Lovejoy, and Lieutenant Gibbons and—”

  “It wouldn’t hurt anything to go start triage,” Jay says, gently cutting off Chris’s list of the probably dead.

  “Yes!” Chris says, “They might be injured or, or, or . . .” He trails off, scrubbing away hot, anxious tears. “Please, you guys.”

  Jay throws me a questioning look. “What do you think?”

  Dread and grief s
queeze my chest. Why didn’t I just finish building the school and spend my night off sleeping, like a normal person? I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. But our friends are out there. They might be dead already, but they might not be. They might need our help. We can’t just give up because I’m afraid to add to my store of nightmares.

  “I think we have to try.”

  It feels like it takes forever to get back to the flyer and power up. Once we’re in the air, Jay programs in the fastest possible route to Chris’s coordinates, but the flight computer has to stay well under the flyer’s maximum speed because of the jagged mountain terrain.

  We could go faster on manual. I could, at least. But Jay isn’t me. He hasn’t put the flyer in manual once the whole time we’ve been out here.

  “Do you think Mom’s okay?” Chris asks very quietly. He sounds so young. He is so young. It’s easy to forget that he’s only thirteen, since he started at the academy the year after I did. Chris is brilliant, but he’s still the little kid who needed Teddy to check his tent for spiders every night when we were doing equipment tests in the New Amazon. That was only three years ago, even though it feels like another lifetime in another universe.

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” I say, trying to sound like I mean it. “Leela’s a good pilot, and there are all sorts of emergency backup systems.”

  “I guess,” he says, but he doesn’t believe me. I don’t blame him.

  Abruptly, the flyer dives, shooting under a pair of enormous crystal spikes that slash across each other like the mountains are fighting a duel. The maneuver drops us into a deep, narrow box canyon. We shoot forward between spiky, crystalline cliffs that hug the banks of a black-blue river. It’s like flying up the center of a geode. The cliff walls are so close, it looks like I could reach out and touch them.

  “Jay . . . ,” I start to say, but I don’t have to finish the thought.

  “Computer, manual control, please,” he says, planting his hands on the nav app.

  He starts to drag his fingers upward to move us out of this canyon.

  “Stop!” The word snaps out of my mouth of its own accord. It takes me a few precious seconds to figure out what I’m reacting to. Then I see it. The canyon is narrowing above us. Ragged spikes of crystal jig-jag overhead like closing teeth. We’re trapped.

  “Damn,” Jay mutters, jerking the flyer lower to keep from hitting the sides of the canyon.

  “We’re going to have to turn back,” I say.

  “How?” he counters, swinging the flyer wide around a bend. “There’s no room to—”

  “Look out!” Chris shouts, pointing at the forward screen, while a huge chunk of crystal fills the canyon ahead of us. It’s twice the size of the flyer, and there’s no way around it.

  Jay slams his hands flat on the piloting app and shoves downward. I snatch at the scream that explodes in my chest as the flyer hurtles under the boulder with centimeters to spare.

  Sparks explode through my vision. The engines scream and water sprays around us as the flyer’s belly brushes the surface of the river. Jay manages to keep us airborne. Barely. I can hear him swearing through the roar of blood pounding in my ears.

  Ahead, the canyon is getting wider. I suck in big breaths, fighting to stay conscious. The river drops away below us, tumbling down a set of steep cliffs as we shoot out into the open air of a wide, green valley. It’s enormous, compared to Jannah. The towering cliffs look like huge crystal wings thrown wide from a rushing waterfall spine. A forest of the thick-bodied Chorulux neon trees we saw around the Rangers’ graveyard grows at the base of the waterfall. The trees thin out after about a klick and fade away into thick, black-green grass that fills the rest of the valley so completely, it looks like deep water.

  What’s left of the Wagon is scattered across the green expanse. In an emergency landing, the Wagon is designed to break apart into individual pods, each with its own parachute to help slow descent. The cargo pod is sitting on its side, its bright-orange rescue chute flung out behind it. It detached like it was supposed to. The engines didn’t. The huge cones of the fuselage are sprawled across the shattered remains of the Wagon’s passenger section. The orange fabric of the pod’s rescue chute is melted all over them like neon cheese.

  Jay circles the wreckage until he finds a safe place to land. I reach back and swipe up the flyer’s lock screen to open the rear doors. The ramp unfolds as I untether from my seat.

  I go to the top of the ramp and look out over the wreckage and the valley beyond. It’s absolutely still in the dying sunlight. Nothing’s moving out there. There’s only one thing that could explain the intense quiet.

  They’re all dead.

  I think I might be sick. I want to scream. But I can’t make this moment worse than it already is for Chris.

  “Mom!” He shouts, pushing past me and starting down the ramp. “Mom?!”

  The only reply is his own voice echoing off the cliffs.

  “Maybe we should head back to base after all,” Jay says as he and Beth join me at the top of the ramp. “Get help.” And make sure Chris doesn’t have to find his mother’s pulverized body. It’s a nice thought, but . . .

  “Too late now,” I say, watching Chris plunge through the field.

  We follow him out into the waist-high grass. The stalks are thin and flexible, but dense. Moving through them is more like wading than walking. A soft white haze diffuses the light and makes the air taste like steel wool and rotten lemons. That’s rocket fuel. The engines must have caught fire after the crash. If there are any survivors out here, they’re lucky the fire went out. If the core had exploded, this whole valley would be charred.

  “Am I the only one who’s got a bad feeling about this?” Jay says quietly.

  Before I can answer, I trip over something soft.

  Not something. Someone. As I scramble to my hands and knees, the person I just tripped over moans my name. My stomach flips inside out. I know who it is, even before I see her face.

  “Chief!” The scream rips through my throat before I can snatch it back. Jay is already on his knees, helping me ease Chief Penny over onto her back. She groans again. It’s a deep, wrenching sound that vibrates with pain. Her abdomen is soaked in blood, and her intestines are spilling out, onto the grass.

  “Mom!” Chris shouts, barreling toward us.

  “Careful!” I say, catching him against my chest before he stumbles and falls on Chief Penny. I try to turn his head into my shoulder so he doesn’t have to see, but he pushes me away.

  “No,” Chris says, scrubbing at his eyes like he can wash away the sight. “Mama! No!”

  Chief Penny groans again, her wordless agony striking a terrible counterpart to Chris’s denial.

  “We need to get her to the flyer,” Jay says, rapidly tapping commands into his flex as he pulls it off his wrist and drapes it over the chief’s neck to track her heartbeat and blood oxygen levels. It pulses red. That means there isn’t enough oxygen in her blood.

  “I don’t think we can move her,” I say. “Not like this.” My brain feels like it’s frozen solid, and I have to chisel out each thought individually.

  “I have a small first-aid kit in my sampling box,” Beth says, crouching next to Chris. “It’s in the flyer.”

  “I’ll get it,” Jay says, and sprints off.

  “You’re going to be okay, Mom,” Chris says, easing Chief Penny’s head into his lap. “We’re going to help you. You’re going to be okay.”

  My eyes find Beth’s. She doesn’t think Chief Penny is going to be okay either. But she says, “We’re going to do everything we can.”

  Beth pulls out a thin plastic sample bag as I peel Chief Penny’s harness back from her wounded abdomen. Her Scout badges are shredded in bloody tatters.

  “First, we need to seal the belly wound,” Beth says, kneeling beside Chief Penny and pressing her sample bag over the gash. She’s being gentle, but the chief groans again at the touch, like her pain is overflowi
ng and spilling out of her. Chris gasps, clutching her hand as tears pour down his face. I suck back a sob. He doesn’t need to see my heart breaking for him.

  “GET OUT OF THE GRASS!”

  That’s Leela’s voice! My heart leaps as I snap to my feet and spin to find Leela and Miguel standing on top of the cargo pod. They’re alive!

  “Get down here!” I shout up to them. “Bring a stretcher if you’ve got one. The chief is hurt!”

  “RUN!” Leela screams back. “RUN! NOW!”

  With that, they disappear through the emergency hatch on top of the cargo pod.

  What the hell?

  I spin, scanning the valley around us. I can see Jay slogging back from the flyer, clutching Beth’s first-aid kit, but there’s nothing else out there. Just a whole lot of grass swirling like it’s being whipped by a restless wind.

  Oh crap. There’s no wind.

  “We need to go,” I say, grabbing Beth’s arm and pulling her to her feet.

  “What about Mom?” Chris says. “We can’t just leave her!”

  My eyes dart to the chief. Blood and sickly, greenish bile is seeping around Beth’s makeshift bandage, and I can hear the rattling rasp of her breath. If we move her, she’s going to die. If we stay here, we’re probably going to die too.

  I can’t make this decision. I won’t.

  I think I have to.

  “Joanna,” Beth says, pointing behind me. I turn and see a tidal wave of grass rolling right toward us. A totally inappropriate blast of relief rushes through me. I don’t have to decide whether or not to abandon the chief. There’s no time to run.

  That’s when I remember the laser welder in the pocket of my utility harness. I rip the palm-size welder free with shaking hands and crank it up to high. Then I aim just ahead of the approaching swarm, and hit the power button.

  A narrow beam of white light explodes from my hand, slicing through the grass. There’s a deafening shriek, and whatever was charging at us veers away.