Reid Malenfant:
Ten minutes before lunar orbit insertion the cabin grew subtly darker. Gradually, as his eyes dark-adapted, Malenfant caught his first true view of the stars, a rich spangling carpet of them, glowing clear and steady.
They had fallen into the shadow of the Red Moon.
Malenfant and Nemoto were both strapped into their couches. They had a checklist to work through, and settings on their various softscreen displays to confirm, just as if they were real pilots, like Borman and Anders, Armstrong and Collins. But the insertion sequence was completely automated, it either worked or it didn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing Malenfant could do about it — nothing save slam his fist into the fat red abort button that would change the engine’s firing sequence to send them straight home again. He would do that only in the event of a catastrophic control failure. Or, he mused, if somebody down there started shooting…
He glanced up at his window. There was a disc of darkness spreading across the stars, like an unwelcome tide.
It was, of course, the Red Moon. His heart thumped.
What were you thinking, Malenfant? Are you surprised to find that this huge object, this vast new Moon, is in fact real?
Well, maybe he was. Maybe he had spent too long in Shuttles and the Station, going around and around, boring a hole in the sky. He had become conditioned to believing that spaceflight wasn’t about going anywhere.
Passing behind the alien Moon, they abruptly lost the signal from Houston. For the first time since launch day, they were alone.
The cabin was warm — over eighty degrees — but his skin was cold where his clothes touched him.
Emma Stoney:
The river’s broad body ran from west to east, so that the setting sun glimmered above its upstream sections, making the water shine like greasy tarmac. Thick black volcanic clouds streaked the glowing sky. And when she looked downstream, she saw the Earth, nearly full, hanging low over the horizon, directly above the dark water, as if the river were a great road leading her home.
The raft drifted over the brown, lazily swelling water, rotating slowly, heading roughly east. In fact it was scarcely a raft, Emma thought, just a jammed together collection of branches, held together by no more than the tangle of the branches and twigs, and the powerful fingers of the Runners. Every so often a chunk of foliage would come loose and drift away, diminishing the raft further, and the Runners would huddle closer together, fearful. And the raft drifted: just that, with no oars or rudder or sail, completely out of any conscious control.
The Runners did not speak to each other, of course. Where humans would have been shouting, crying, yelling, debating what to do, comforting or blaming each other, the Runners just clung to the branches and to each other, silent, eyes wide and staring. Each Runner was locked in her own silent fear, almost as isolated as if she were physically alone. Emma was frightened too, but at least she understood the fix they were in, and her head whirred busily seeking plans and options. All the Runners could do was wait passively while fate, and the river, took them where it would.
Emma, surrounded by naked, powerful, trembling bodies, had never been so forcefully struck by the Runners” limitations.
And meanwhile those “Hams” had looked for all the world to her like picture-book Neandertals. What was going on here?…
The river crowded through a section of swamp-forest. Here the trees were low, and the purple spikes of flowering water-hyacinths crowded close to the oily black water. They passed an inlet crowded with water-lilies, their white flowers cupped half-closed. Their leaves were oval, with serrated edges bright green on top and red-brown underneath. As Emma watched dully, a red-brown body of a bird unfolded from its well-concealed place at the base of one lily-pad. Its neck and collar were white and gold, and it unfolded long legs and spindly toes, watching them suspiciously.
…Not a bird. A bat, apparently incubating its young on nests built on these floating weeds. She had never heard of bats behaving like that. As the Runner raft passed, the bat stepped with a surgical precision across the lily-pads, its leathery wings rustling. Then it scuttled back to its nest of weed, settling with an air of irritation.
Though the meal of the lost child seemed to have satisfied the huge creature that had first stalked them, Emma glimpsed ridges of skin and yellow eyes everywhere. The crocodiles watched as the raft eroded, inevitably approaching the point where it would dump all its hapless inhabitants in the water.
Sally turned her head. With a cough, she threw up. Pale yellow bile splashed over Emma’s lap, stinking.
“Shit, oh shit.” She got hold of Sally’s leg, behind the knee, and strove to pull her over on her side.
The raft rocked, its component branches rippling, and the Runners hooted and snapped.
Emma ignored them. At last she got Sally on her side. She pushed Sally’s good arm under her head, with her broken arm on top of her torso, and one knee bent over so she wouldn’t roll back. She tipped Sally’s head back, hoping to ensure she wouldn’t choke, and was rewarded with another gush of vomit that splashed over her hands.
And now she became aware of another problem: a fresh stink, a spreading patch of moisture over Sally’s behind. Diarrhoea, obviously.
Fire hooted and held his hands over his prominent nose.
There wasn’t anything Emma could do about it, not for now. But it sure wasn’t a good sign. Perhaps it was blood poisoning: one touch of a filthy Runner finger in a wound, one splash of river water, might have done the damage. Or it might be something worse, some disease such as hepatitis or cholera or typhoid, or even some virulent nasty native to this ugly little world; she didn’t know enough about the symptoms of such things to be able to diagnose, one way or another.
And even if she did know what Sally was suffering from, what could she do about it? Her pocket-sized medical kit was gone, lost with the rest of her meagre kit as they had fled from the huge skin-clad creatures called Hams. She began to go through the pockets of her ragged, filthy flight suit, hoping to find even a single antibiotic tablet that had gone astray.
Sally convulsed again, and her vomit turned more clear, just a thin, stringy fluid.
Maxie, squatting with the other children, watched all this in wide-eyed dismay. He had been silent since they had left the shore, and now he watched Emma wrestle with Sally as if she were a side of beef, no doubt storing up more problems in that tousled, bewildered head. Later, Emma; one patient at a time.
After an hour of random drifting, the raft began to approach the river’s far shore. Shallow beaches strewn with purple-black pebbles slid by. More by chance than design, the Runners were completing the crossing of this huge, sluggish waterway.
Sand glimmered rust-red, a few feet beneath the surface, and it was snagging the raft’s branches. The raft creaked and spun. It began to break up, its component branches drifting apart. The Runners cried out. One skinny woman fell into the water with a fearful hoot.
“Emma!” Maxie came stumbling to her, his little feet plunging into brown river water. He threw himself into her arms, and she clutched him close.
More of the Runners fell into the water, or leapt away from the raft towards the shore, splashing noisily and yelling with fear. They seemed to have a lot of difficulty swimming, and Emma wondered if their heavily muscled bodies were denser than humans’. Wading clumsily, grabbing onto each other and their children, they began to flop out of the water and onto the beach, where they lay like sleek, muscular seals. They shook their heads to rid their tightly curled hair of water; droplets fell back to the river with eerie low-gravity slowness.
Emma felt cold water seeping into the legs of her track suit. Maxie cried out and squirmed higher up her body.
There was simply no way Emma was going to be able to get both Maxie and his mother across those few yards of deeper water.
Fire was one of the last to leave the raft. He actually stood upright on the raft, precariously, and its branches cracked and parted under his feet. Then, hooting, he leapt feet-first into the water. He staggered as his feet sank into the mud, but kept his balance. He looked down at the water lapping around his waist, as if amazed.
Emma called, “Fire! Help us. Fire. Fire Fire Emma Maxie!”
He looked around dully.
Emma held Maxie up above her head. The kid squealed and kicked; Emma wasn’t going to be able to hold him like this for long. She cried, “Fire Fire!”
Fire reached out with a liquid motion. With one hand he grabbed Maxie under his armpit and lifted him away from Emma, as if the child was as light as balsa wood. Then he turned and began splashing his way to the shore, holding Maxie high.
Without allowing herself to think about it — without even looking out for crocs — Emma pushed away the last branches, the last of the raft, and let herself and Sally slide into the water. Sally lay face-down in the water, passive, but Emma managed to roll her onto her back. The makeshift sling was filthy, stained by blood and the muddy river water. Emma got the inert woman’s head against her belly, and cupped her fingers under Sally’s chin. Then, working with her feet and her one free arm, she began to swim backwards, towing Sally’s floating form.
She was soon exhausted. Her soaked clothes were heavy and clinging, and her boots made her feet feel as if they were encased in concrete. It seemed an age before her kicking feet began to sink into a steeply rising river bottom. She stood up, gasping.
Sally was still floating, so Emma grabbed a handful of cloth at her shoulder and, still supporting her head, began to drag her out of the water. Nobody came to her assistance — nobody but Maxie, and he was more hindrance than help.
At last she got Sally out of the river, far enough that her feet were free of the lapping, muddy brown water, and she fell on her back with exhaustion.
On this side of the river, there was less evidence of the ash falls that had plagued the Runners for days. But beyond the narrow, pebble-strewn beach, the shore was heavily wooded. The Runners huddled together in suspicious silence, peering at the dense green banks above them.
Night was coming.
With barely a word exchanged, some of the Runners crept cautiously into the woods. Others walked down the beach, tentatively exploring, and Fire and a couple of the women began to drag branches from the edge of the forest, building a fire. Fire cast shy glances at Emma; evidently he remembered, in some dim way, how she had managed to start a fire even when he had lost his treasured handful of embers, probably a key moment in his tortured young life.
First things first, she thought.
She pulled Sally further up the beach. She turned Sally over once more to the recovery position, unzipped Sally’s trousers and with some difficulty wrestled them off her, followed by her panties. The clothes were filthy, of course, from faeces and river mud, and they clung to her flesh; but Emma was reluctant to use her knife — this was Sally’s only set of clothing in the whole world, after all. When she had the pants off she used handfuls of leaves to clean Sally up as best she could, and covered her with her own T-shirt, briskly stripped off.
Then, leaving Maxie with his mother, she walked briskly down the beach. After fifty paces she came to a small stream, decanting from some source in the forest. It had cut itself a shallow, braided valley. Two of the children were playing here, splashing and wrestling. Emma walked a little way upstream of them and began to rinse out Sally’s trousers and underwear in the shallow, sluggish water. When she was done she cleaned off her arms and hands, splashed cold water over her face, and took a deep drink. Then she dug her plastic bag out of her pocket — one of the few artefacts she had yet to lose — and dipped it to the stream to fill it with water.
More barely remembered medical lore came back to her. Diarrhoea and vomiting led to dehydration, which you ought to treat with sugar and salt, a teaspoon of each to a litre of water, if she remembered right. Fine, save that she had no sugar or salt, and no teaspoon for that matter…
She glanced up the beach.
Stone was squatting beside Sally. He had removed the T-shirt from her lower body, and was running his hands up her thigh. Maxie had cowered back to the edge of the woods, watching the huge man grope his mother.
Emma put down the water, straightened up, and began to walk back to Sally. She felt around her neck for her Swiss Army knife. She got to within a foot of Stone without him noticing she was there.
So where are you going to stick your blade, Emma? In his cheek, his rock-hard penis, his back? What makes you think this tiny little bee-sting blade will do more than goad him anyhow? He’ll kill you, then do what he wants with Sally anyhow.
