ground. They had nothing but the suits they stood up in, save for Don who carried a canvas bag.
The bus sealed itself up and pulled away, tailed by the other vehicles. Holle wondered where the surveillance eyes were. They would be watched constantly for security, and backup would never be far away.
The Candidates looked around at the wreckage that littered the ground, the twisted metal and plastic panels and the tangle of cables and pipes. Boxes of supplies, toughened to withstand impact, were strewn about. Somebody had started a fire where plastic popped and melted, creating that pillar of black smoke. Gruesomely, dummies dressed up in environment suits had been thrown over the ground, their plastic limbs broken back in unnatural angles. Some of them were children-sized, like seven- or eight-year-olds perhaps, and there were a couple of bright orange sacks, like holdalls, that were baby shelters. Children being an element of exercises like these was a new thing, and followed the social engineers’ newest pronouncements about breeding and demography which had shaken everybody up.
Don pulled a plastic splint out of his pack, and beckoned to Zane. “Good news, buddy, you’re a casualty.” Resigned, Zane rested one hand on Don’s back as he slipped his leg into the splint, which inflated rapidly.
Don stepped back, leaving Zane on the ground, his “bad” leg stuck out in front of him, and addressed the group. “OK. Your shuttle has crashed, here on Earth II. You can see your gear scattered around. You’re far from the other shuttles and there are no comms; there’s no rescue possible in the short term. Air pressure is normal, gravity is high, but the air is unbreathable-acidic. Keep your suits sealed up. You can see you had casualties, Zane here with a broken limb, some deaths. I was told that the rest of you ought to improvise injuries, and generally remember how beat-up you’d be after a crash.”
Kelly nodded at that. “Sensible enough.” Always eager, she bent down to one of the dummies, used a pocketknife to cut away a strip of environment-suit leg, and wrapped it around her upper body as a sling, improvising a broken arm.
Don said, “That’s all I know. I’m not here. Exercise starts now.”
“Suit integrity check,” Kelly said immediately. “Double up.”
They didn’t need her to say it; the first priority was to keep the living alive. They quickly paired up, Holle with Mel, Kelly with Matt. Susan, Venus and Zane worked together, the two women huddled over Zane down on the ground.
Holle ran a quick visual inspection of Mel’s suit, seeking obvious damage, and checked his chest display. For verisimilitude she slapped some sealant from a tube taken from her own leg pouch over a nonexistent rip at the back of his neck, and topped up his air-scrubber compounds with a sachet drawn from Mel’s own backpack and dropped into a slot over his chest. Mel did the same for her; he faked a remedy for a suspected slow leak by tying off her suit just below the elbow on one arm.
Standing there with her arm in a sling, Kelly looked around, checking they were all done. She naturally assumed the role of leader in situations like this. “OK, so nobody else is going to die in the next ten seconds. Matt, will you take care of that fire? Now the injured. Susan, why don’t you see what you can do for Zane? I see a first- aid pack over there, under that heap of blankets. The rest of you, let’s take a look at the other casualties in the wreckage. Watch out for any injuries you’ve sustained yourself.”
“Yes, mother,” said Venus Jenning, and they laughed.
Holle clambered into the “wreckage” of the shuttle. She had to avoid the pockets of flame, and flinched back from the sharp edges that seemed to have been artfully positioned by the exercise designers to catch an unwary arm or leg. As the Candidates immersed themselves in this latest in a long line of puzzle-exercises Holle heard chatter, subdued laughter. But she found the experience oddly uncomfortable. Sometimes she thought she was plagued with an excess of imagination. She could envisage a scene like this being played out in the first few seconds after arrival on a hostile Earth II, under a lowering alien sky, with all of them badly shocked and loved ones lost, and knowing that death could be seconds away, the consequence of a single careless act. There would be none of the brisk confidence then, no muttered jokes.
She found the body of a woman, lying facedown, impaled on a shard of metal through the belly. Holle checked the woman’s suit monitors, which were mostly functioning but showed no sign of life. She slipped off her outer glove, so that her hand was covered only by a delicate skin-tight inner glove with fine fingertip pads. She dug her fingers into a rip at the woman’s suit neck; she could find no pulse. Then she pulled off the woman’s own glove and tried feeling for a pulse at her wrist.
She stepped back, and tried to roll the woman on her back. The “body” was heavier than she had expected, maybe weighted to simulate the supposedly higher gravity. She dug her hands under the woman’s torso, straightened her back and tried again. This time the woman rolled, and Holle had to jump back as the bit of metal on which the mannequin was impaled swung upwards. The twisted sliver of hull was thrust straight into an obviously pregnant belly. “Oh, Jesus.” Just for one second she felt her throat tighten, a foul-tasting liquid push into the back of her mouth. But she swallowed hard. She took a pocketknife and slit open the suit over that pregnant belly. Then she pressed the palm of her bloodied under-glove to the woman’s undergarment and let the fingertip pads work as a stethoscope.
Kelly was beside her. “You OK?”
“Yeah. Got me for a second.”
“Those sim designers are bastards, aren’t they? Always trying to catch us out. But you seriously do not want to throw up in one of these face masks. I should know; I lost my breakfast yesterday morning, back in the NARC.”
“You did? How so?”
Kelly shrugged. “I guess just something I ate. They shouldn’t give us pregnant women to deal with. There won’t be any pregnant women when we make planetfall.”
Kelly was a stickler for the plan, whatever the plan was at a given moment. It was a strength or a weakness, depending on circumstances. Holle said, “No pregnancies if everybody obeys the rules.”
“OK, OK, you sound like Harry. We have to train for all contingencies. You found a heartbeat in there?”
“No.” And Holle was thankful they wouldn’t have to go through the gruesome procedure of getting the body into a blowup shelter and performing an emergency Caesarean.
“Then you’d better give me a hand with this kid over here. My arm, you know, trust me to break the damn thing…” She led Holle over to another “victim,” one of the child-sized mannequins.
Their exercises had begun to include children because the social engineers had suddenly decreed that women pregnant at launch time would be allowed on board the Ark. The idea was to increase genetic diversity at little additional cost in terms of volume, weight and life support at launch; the births could be handled during the cruise to Jupiter with remote support from doctors on Earth. The net result would be, if they followed the nominal mission plan, a small echelon of seven- or eight-year-olds on their hands when they got to Earth II. This drastic new ruling, coming out of the blue with only a couple of years left until launch date, had led to wild speculation and sexual jockeying among the Candidates.
The dummy child lay over a hull strut, his back surely broken, and his upper body was pinned by a tangled mass of wreckage. “The sim designers went to town on this poor kid,” Kelly said. “They ought to provide a few real-life eight-year-olds in these sims; they won’t all be killed on planetfall.”
Holle laughed. “Who’d entrust their children to us?” She crouched down by the “boy.” His chest was crushed, and his pelvis seemed smashed too. She began the grisly ritual of checking for signs of life.
At length all the bodies had been checked. The corpses were moved out of the wreckage, lined up on the ground a few meters from the main crash site, and covered by a bit of cowling.
This time Mel took the lead. He looked around at a featureless lid of sky. “If the timing here on Earth II matches that on Earth, it’s late afternoon and we ought to think about shelter. In the morning we can strip the bodies and dispose of the remains. Anybody volunteer to speak for the dead?”
“I’ll do that,” Susan Frasier said mildly.
Kelly glanced around. “I’d say we should stay close by the wreck. There’s wind shelter here, and we won’t have to move our gear-the water, the air recycler, the food boxes. Matt, you got that fire out?”
“Yeah. No toxic leaks, no fuel spill-we’re pretty safe here.”
Mel nodded. “So we set up the shelters here. I’ll lead one party-Venus, will you take the other?”
“Sure.”
The rule on the ground, as in space, was always safety through redundancy. So though just one of the big
