Castaway Planet (10 page)

Chapter 14

Whips wallowed his body back and forth, feeling the coral-based sand squish reassuringly under him. “Hm. That will be good.”

It had been quite a while since he built a land-nest—years ago, when he and his father had gone on a camping trip with the Kimeis, and that was long enough that he’d had to think about just
how
you did this right. His first attempt, about three meters away, hadn’t quite worked and ended as a loose sort of sand crater. It was supposed to be soft in the middle but still packed at the edges in certain ways.

This one felt right. He thought he would be able to crawl out of it and get back in without it collapsing, which was the way a land-nest was supposed to work.

Night had fallen on Lincoln—well, their part of Lincoln, anyway—while he’d been busy digging. Built-in solid-state lights illuminated the area near the shelter, and Laura was bent over her medikit while Akira cooked on the portable stove that had come with the shelter. Carefully, Whips pulled himself forward and up, and slid from the nest, keeping his anchors carefully pulled in. He glanced back once he was far enough away. It was still intact!

Feeling better at that minor triumph, he began moving towards the stove to see what Akira was cooking; as he slid along, though, he noticed Caroline almost directly in his way, apparently staring upward. “What are you looking at?”

“The answer to one mystery, I think,” Caroline answered absently.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I think I understand why this system could be here, halfway to Tantalus, without it being anywhere in the databases. Because any G-type star would definitely be in the databases.”

“Okay, well, don’t keep me waiting. Why?”

“Look up, about there.”

Used to following human pointing fingers, Whips reared up and gazed in the indicated direction. There were stars of all colors and sizes scattered across the night. “Where, exactly? I see a lot of night sky.”

“Your omni active? Okay, here.”

A set of dim crosshairs materialized in his field of view, and he turned his attention there. “Just night sky and stars there. Well, there isn’t a star exactly there, but—”

“That’s the key. See,
exactly
there is where the Sun should be. At about magnitude 5.8, but with my omni’s enhancement and your naturally sensitive eyes, that should be easy to see.”

“Oh, my,” came Laura’s voice. The tall woman joined them, looking up. “So something is between Lincoln’s sun and ours.”

“And has been for probably a few centuries, at least, so it wasn’t ever mapped out. Lincoln’s star would be pretty dim from Earth-magnitude six, I think, what with being a little dimmer than the sun overall—so naked-eye astronomers might not have caught it regularly. And if our relative motion to Earth’s solar system isn’t big, a pretty small nebula could cover it up for quite a while—a Bok globule, maybe. I don’t know how the
nebula
couldn’t have been seen, though. It should have been one of the most interesting objects in the sky, and any exploration of it should have found Lincoln’s sun.” She shook her head, puzzled.

“But wouldn’t the other colonies have noticed the new star?” Whips asked. “I mean, they’re going to be looking from another direction, so the same cloud of stuff isn’t going to be in their way.”

“Maybe. But like I said, it’s going to be pretty dim from any reasonable distance, and most colonies aren’t going to be looking for new, close-to-home stars that we missed.” Caroline continued staring up. “Maybe, if
Outward Initiative
didn’t get totally destroyed, they’ll check images of that region of space and figure it out, though.”

She glanced down suddenly. “Do you . . . what do you think the chances are that
Outward Initiative
. . . well, didn’t get totally wrecked?”

Whips bunched inward slightly, tense. He knew why they’d asked him. He was as close as they had to an engineer or physicist; he knew more than anyone here about how the ships worked. But . . .

He thought about it seriously. He’d studied those brief, terrifying sequences of images, the fading of most of
Outward Initiative
with only a few ghostly pieces of the hab ring remaining before the disaster, and in the weeks it had taken to get here to Lincoln he had, in fact, spent a lot of time mulling over what had happened, what
could
have happened.

“I can’t give you a . . . well, a good probability estimate,” he said finally. “But I think there’s a chance it survived. The hab ring’s built with a lot of redundancy in the structure, and the ship itself has a lot of safety cutoffs that should cause it to reduce rotation or otherwise adjust if it suddenly lost chunks of the hab ring. If the Trapdoor field wasn’t just oscillating out of control, then it was some kind of glitch that probably only lasted a few seconds on the outer perimeter of the field. There’s some minor instability in the field all the time, it’s just that the wavering of the field is usually kept many meters away from any actual components of the ship. If you got a really huge peak in that instability . . . I think they’d damp it down in ten seconds or so, and after that they’d be okay.”

“Will they come and rescue us?” Akira asked from the stove.

Whips waved his arms in a shrug. “If they survived? They’d have to somehow guess that someone could have survived falling off the interface; I never heard of anything like that, and I think I would have in my studies. Maybe their records will have ghost images of that happening, like we have ghost images of part of the hab ring, but without that . . . maybe.”

“No point in worrying about it,” Akira said firmly. “Our job is to survive, to build this into our home, and if rescue comes, wonderful. If not, we leave for the people who will, eventually, come after us a record showing that we didn’t despair, but we did everything we could to survive and prosper.”

He rapped on the table set a ways from the entrance. “Now come on over and let’s find out if the native food’s going to be a trial or a treat.”

“Oh, wow! That’s what you were doing, Dr. . . . I mean, Akira?”

“Since you’d brought enough to cook up, yes. It’s not much, and we’ll certainly all have to have some rations, but it seems to me that we might as well have a taste right away.”

“Not leaving
me
out of this!” came a sleepy voice from the tent doorway. Despite her heavy-lidded eyes, Sakura was moving a little better than she had when she went into the shelter; Whips felt relieved.

“Me! I want to try some!” Hitomi said excitedly. Melody emerged from the tent as well, but hung back. “I want to see what happens with the rest of you first.”

“Suit yourself, Melody. Though either way we’ll have to eat it sooner or later; our rations won’t last forever, and in fact I’m going to require we stop eating them as soon as we find enough sources of food that we have an assured supply,” Laura said. “I want as many rations left as possible for emergencies, travel supplies, and so on. They’ll last more than ten years, so having them as a backup will be something very comforting.”

Whips looked at the dark fried pieces of meat on his plate, reached out and gingerly picked one up between two fingers. “Warm. All right, here we go!”

The texture was reassuringly meaty—tougher than many vent-dwellers, softer than some patrolling creatures like orekath. Overall it was something like miremaw or, for Earth creatures, beef. The taste was . . . good, actually, now that he tried another bite.
Really
good! It wasn’t exactly like anything else, but . . . “I’d forgotten what fresh meat tasted like after being in
Outward Initiative
so long!” he said finally.

“It’s like . . . alligator, I think,” Akira said slowly, a relieved smile spreading across his face.

The others’ faces wore the same expression, as they realized that not only was there something to eat, but it would be something worth eating. “A stronger taste than that . . . but you’re right, Dad,” Caroline said after a moment. “It’s got that cross between land and sea taste going.”

Hitomi had already cleared her plate and was looking hungrily at the chunks on Melody’s plate. Whips couldn’t help but laugh when Hitomi’s face face utterly plummeted as Melody snatched up one of the pieces and stuffed it into her mouth. As Sakura and Caroline echoed the laugh, Hitomi looked at first betrayed . . . and then suddenly started laughing joyously herself.

Then he noticed Laura. “Laura? Are you crying? What’s wrong?”

Everyone else immediately stopped, staring, worried. “Laura, honey, what is it?” Akira asked softly, going to his wife and putting his hand on her shoulder.

The tall human woman blinked fiercely, but the tracks of shining tears were obvious, and her voice was a little thick when she answered. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, I feel so silly. It’s . . .” She shook her head, wiped her eyes, and smiled brilliantly. “I was just so worried about everything. About Sakura, about having to live on our own, about how many things might be out there waiting to cause another disaster for us, and . . . well, just suddenly seeing everyone sitting here, eating food we found on our own planet, eating
good
food we found here, seeing us all smiling, laughing . . .” She shrugged helplessly and laughed, still with tears in her voice. “I just felt everything let go in me, and I was so relieved, so happy that we did survive, that we’re all here and alive and living
. . .”

Whips felt the strange tight tingle of the same painful, joyous whirl of emotions, knew his skin was shimmering in a clash of colors, and then saw that all around the table, the other Kimeis were also crying in exactly the same way, even little Hitomi.

Akira hugged Laura tight, and suddenly, without any word or gesture, the others all gathered around and hugged, as they had after they knew they had survived and found a destination. Whips enfolded his whole adopted family and squeezed tightly, as he would have twined arms with his mother.
Now we know we
can
survive, that this world is a place
worth
surviving on. And so now, we
will
survive, no matter what Lincoln has to throw at us.

Our family will survive.

Chapter 15

“Can’t I
please
come with—”

“No.” Her mother’s answer was firm. “You seem recovered, mostly, but you were in very bad shape for a while yesterday. I don’t expect to see any more trouble, but for today you’re staying near camp. You’ll have plenty more chances to explore, I promise.”

“Sorry, Saki,” her father said, and gave her a consoling hug. That didn’t exactly make up for it, but it was a hug, anyway.

Akira straightened and beckoned to Melody. “Come on, Mel. You were hoping for an adventure a while back, now’s your chance.”

Sakura saw the momentary excited jump up, and turned away to hide a smile. Melody was normally lazy, and she cultivated the bored appearance at times—why, Sakura didn’t know, it wasn’t like she was old enough to be acting like that—but that was right now clearly fighting a battle with Melody’s curiosity and desire to be one of the people who found something
new
on this planet.

Of course, she suspected that Mel had another reason for volunteering to be the third member of the expedition.

Whips waved to all of them, and the three disappeared over the edge of the landing scar, heading for the shoreline, which they planned on following for a considerable distance to observe what the local sea and shore life was like.

“All right, Caroline,” Laura said briskly. “It’s up to you and me. Sakura, you’re in charge of continuing camp setup and keeping an eye on Hitomi.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“And you call me if you feel
anything
wrong, you understand?”

“I will, don’t worry.” She meant that. She wasn’t going to forget the terror she’d felt as the poison worked its way through her, not any time soon. If there was a slower-acting component to the thing’s venom, she had to admit there was no better place to be than in shouting range of her mother.

And it did, at least, give her an excuse to not be digging the deep disposal pit, which was where they’d put the, well, crap that would eventually have to be emptied from the shelter’s toilet facility.

“C’mon, Hitomi. We’ve got chores to do before we get to play.”

Hitomi made a face, but stopped her run towards the edge of the landing scar and came back.

Sakura first had Hitomi help scrub out the shells she’d brought back with sand, multiple times. Her mother’s tests had shown that the tough little shells were a mix of carbon-based material and silicate, but didn’t have any toxic components of note. The same couldn’t be said for the remnants of stinging land-anemone or whatever that was inside, so they had to get every little trace of the animals out.

This was, fortunately, exactly the kind of thing Hitomi was good at. Get her focused on one task that she could keep doing and that needed a lot of attention to detail, and she could keep doing it for a long time. Sakura didn’t find this task quite as engrossing, but it was nice to see the things cleaning up so well, becoming smooth, shiny white-green bowls. They’d have to rinse them out with water too, but if they got all the hard part done with the sand it’d go a lot easier.

After that was done, she and Hitomi carefully swept out the shelter, using a bundle of frayed wiry fibers from the crash tied to a broken support rod. She glanced at the sun, noting how far it had risen, and checked her omni. “Hey, Mom, it’s been a while—I think it’s lunchtime.”

“Really?” There was a pause, then, “You’re right, Saki. I was thrown off by the sun. Makes it look more like, oh, ten-thirty in the morning.”

“Thirty-two hour rotation instead of twenty-four,” Caroline confirmed. “That’s going to be a little confusing.”

“Yes, we’ll be out of synch with the light cycle,” Akira’s voice came over the omnis. “Our natural cycle will still stay around twenty-four hours, so our “morning” will migrate from actual morning to afternoon to late night and back to morning again over three of Lincoln’s day-cycles.”

“You’re still in range, hon? It’s been several hours, I’d have thought—”

“—I’d have gotten farther, eh? Well, love, first of all we
are
quite a ways away. But we have Melody’s omni, which does have better range, and I moved Caroline’s up to the highest point near the camp so it could be a relay. Also, we’re following the coast. We’re probably about a kilometer and a half from you as the four-winged whoosiwhatsis flies.”

Sakura and Hitomi were getting out some of the rations as her mother and Caroline came trudging up the slope. “So how is the expedition going, Akira?” her mother asked.

“Oh, very well. Unlike the broken area near the ex-lagoon, which got rather well cleaned out by the fall of that mass of rock, most of the shoreline does, in fact, have an extensive mass stretching out underwater—a beach and shore or surf zone. Whips has done some quick survey work and says in places he can scan it can go out two kilometers or more.”

“That should be a good thing for us, yes?”

“Very good, yes. Shallow-water ecosystems like that will be easy for us to harvest from, and will tend to keep the worst predators from getting too close in to shore.”

“How’s Melody doing?”

“Occasional minor complaints, but she’s been taking pictures with her omni and making muttered notes to herself. Whips didn’t encounter anything too large in his quick dips, but he thinks he’s found underwater burrows of creatures similar to the one he caught before. We’ll try to catch a couple and bring them back for dinner when we’re returning.”

“And what have you been up to?”

“Sampling everything I find, of course. There are a couple of tentative observations I have, but I’m going to need a bit more data before I draw conclusions from it.” He paused. “Melody’s calling me; I had better go see what she’s found. Talk later, Laura; love you!”

“Love you too.” Her mother smiled as she put the omni back on her belt. “Oh, thank you, Sakura, Hitomi. That was lovely of you.”

“We’ll need to find water pretty soon, Mom,” Sakura said hesitantly.

“I know, hon. I’m sure your father has an eye out for that, and we’ll keep looking until we find it.”

After lunch, Hitomi and Sakura cleaned everything up. Sakura stopped her little sister before she crammed the plastic wrappings into the disposal at the side of the shelter. “Wait on that, Hitomi.”

“Why? It’s trash. Mommy says to always put the trash in the trash as soon as you’re done.”

“Because stuff that’s trash back home might not be something we want to throw away here,” Sakura said slowly. “Mom?”

She heard her mother give a pained grunt, obviously lifting something heavy. “Yes?”

“Should I be keeping the wrappings from the rations? I mean, I don’t know if there’s a use for them—”

“Oh. Keep them for now. We’ll talk that over when everyone else is together. Now, honey, don’t interrupt me again unless you absolutely have to, Caroline and I are working hard on this together.”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Saki? Can we go up there?” Hitomi pointed up to the land above the landing scar. “I haven’t seen where we are yet.”

I should be doing something useful . . .
Sakura’s gaze lit on the pile of salvaged material that Caroline had brought back yesterday.
There’s an idea
. “Okay, we can, Hitomi. Just let me get a couple of things.”

The route the family was using to climb up to the higher ground was already starting to look like a path. That made it easier to climb, too, Sakura thought as she led Hitomi up, carrying a bundle of stuff with her.

“Wow, it’s so pretty!” Hitomi exclaimed, and started to run.

Sakura dropped everything she was carrying and snagged her sister. “Slow down, Hitomi! You listen to me. Are you listening?”

Hitomi looked slightly hurt, and shocked by the sudden yank. “What?”

Sakura knelt down and looked seriously into her little sister’s eyes. “Hitomi, we’ve just gotten here. We don’t know everything that’s safe, and everything that’s dangerous. You have to stay near me. You can’t go running off by yourself somewhere. Be careful. Watch what you’re touching. We know that most of this stuff doesn’t seem to cause any problem just by walking on it or sitting on it, but,” she held up her arm, where the sting marks still showed, mottled red-brown, “we’ve already seen something else that will kill us if it can.”

Hitomi’s eyes were wide, and Sakura could tell she now had her sister’s full attention. “I’m not saying to be terrified of everything, either. Just be careful, and if anything nips you, stings you, pricks you, you let me know right away. And stay near me.”

“Yes, Saki.”

“Okay.”

Hitomi watched as Sakura took the jumble of wreck materials over to a nearby flat-topped boulder and spread them out. Sakura sat down, and picked through the pieces. She’d chosen a bunch of reinforcement fibers which had been ripped free, a chunk of metal about the size of her fist whose origin was uncertain, and some smaller shards of metal, along with a rod of composite about a meter long and some composite pieces.

Okay, let’s see. We already talked about needing weapons, and if we’re going to protect ourselves and hunt, it’s time to start on that.

The smaller shards of metal were of generally triangular shape—ideal, Sakura thought, for spearheads. But she’d need to get them to a pretty symmetric shape and get them sharp on the point and edges, plus have something—a haft? she wasn’t sure of the right name—which she could use to connect it to a shaft, like the rod she had brought up.

Her Shapetool could of course configure to exactly what she wanted, but if it was strapped onto a spear shaft she couldn’t use it for anything else—and if it got used and the spearhead came off, they’d have lost one of their most versatile tools.
Mom’d kill me. And that would be taking the really easy way out, anyway.

The three pieces she had to choose from were roughly the same size, but one of them actually had a bit sticking out which might be good for the . . . Sakura paused and checked her omni’s database.
Tang
, that’s the word! That should be good for the tang.

The rest of it came to a nearly symmetrical point. One side had a thick edge, the other a ragged but much thinner edge. If she could hammer the one flatter and smooth out the other, it might make a good spearhead.

The hand-sized chunk of steel would make a good hammer. It fit nicely into the palm of her hand. She took a good grip, steadied the putative spearhead on the flat rock, and brought the hammer-chunk down.

There was a sharp, buzzing
whack
, and she could see the impact had left a significant ding in the other metal.
Ha! It’s softer than the hammer!
Encouraged, she hit the thick side several times.
It
does
seem to be flattening!

“What are you doing?” Hitomi asked.

Sakura explained her idea. Hitomi immediately wanted to try, but it was pretty obvious that she didn’t have the strength to hit hard enough; it wasn’t easy for Sakura, truth be told. “So what can
I
do?” she asked.

She’s in a helping mood. That’s good, if I can figure out something . . .
An idea struck her. “You know what? I think there
is
something you could do that would help everyone, especially Mommy and Daddy.” Sakura fiddled with her Shapetool and handed it to Hitomi, now configured into a two-sided tool that was a pair of gripping tongs on one side and a cutting shear on the other. “Go over the local plants and things and get a sample of each one. Pile them in order on that other rock, there. That way Daddy and Mommy can go over them and see what kinds of things we have. The shear will let you cut pieces out and the tongs let you pick them up safely, just in case.”

“I can do that!” Hitomi said proudly. She took the Shapetool carefully and walked to the waving grasslike stuff nearby. Studying the stalks intently, the little blonde-haired girl very methodically selected one, clipped off a stalk, picked it up with the tongs, and carried it to the other rock; without being told, she took another loose rock and put it down on top of her sample, to keep it from blowing away in the light breeze. Hitomi went back, studied the grass, and cut another stalk.

“Isn’t that the same stuff? We want samples of different—”

“This isn’t the same!” Hitomi said defensively. She brought the newly cut stalk over, gripped in the tongs. “See these bumps? They’re not the same on the other one.”

Sakura put down her hammer-chunk and went over to the first sample with Hitomi. Sure enough, the “bumps”—which looked to Sakura sort of like the joints seen on things like horsetails—had a different pattern that really did argue for them being different species.

“Sorry, Hitomi. I should know better than to argue with you.” Hitomi’s attention to detail, when you got her attention at all, was legendary. “You keep doing that and Mommy and Daddy will be very excited.”

Hitomi smiled brightly and skipped back to the surrounding greenery.

Sakura turned her attention back to the piece of metal.
I’ve seen stuff kinda like this on some of the immersives I’ve played, but never really
did
any of it. Still, how hard can it be? Just pound the metal into the right shape, then sharpen it by grinding it down. I’ll bet I could use this coral-rock as a good grindstone kinda thing.

She started pounding methodically, working her way up and down the thick edge so that she hopefully wouldn’t flatten one area much more than another. It took a while to figure out the right angle and force to use to not jolt the heck out of her arm and hand and still get the metal to move a bit on every impact. Sakura paused and checked on Hitomi; her little sister had moved somewhat around the perimeter but was now carrying, very carefully, what looked like a dark green puffball in the tongs and placing it on what was already a fairly impressive array of pieces of plants and, probably, plantlike things.
She’s focused now; she’ll do that for hours, probably, unless something distracts her.

Reassured, Sakura went back to her work.
Now that I’ve figured this out . . .

But as time went on, Sakura found, to her chagrin, that what looked really easy in an immersive sim . . . wasn’t nearly so easy. The side she was pounding on was thinning, yes, but it was also mushrooming out, and parts of the metal were splitting slowly. There was no sign of a nice, clean edge appearing. She thought her Shapetool might be able to trim off some of the edge, but she had to, grudgingly, admit that her cavalier assessment of how easy this should be had been badly wrong.
They make it look easy in the games—smith heats metal, pounds it, grinds it, got a blade. Sometimes just pounds on the metal.