Prophets

“Getting you some light.” He picked up the flashlight and turned it on, still amazed at how quickly his new eyes adjusted from the monochrome dark to the starkly colored cabin interior.

“Shit, warn someone, would you?” Kugara held her hand up between her and Nickolai, shading her eyes. He noticed he was pointing the light right at her. He moved the beam away and pointed it at the door to the lifeboat.

“Thanks,” Kugara whispered as she undid the harness holding her down.

Nickolai stared at the door. It was now oriented horizontally. The floor he stood on, with the acceleration couches, had been the right wall when this cabin had been part of the Eclipse. It was hard for him to tell, but it looked as if the frame had warped outward with the same impact that had dented in the bulkhead above.

Kugara stood up next to him, shaking her head. She looked at the debris on the floor, and the unpleasantly curving bulkhead above them, and said, “That was one rough mother of a landing.”

“Seems like it.”

“Don’t you remember the descent?”

“No. I blacked out.”

She nodded. “Me, too. Right after the chute gave up.”

“What?”

“Sometime between reentry and the ground, the chute cut out and we hit free fall again.” She rubbed the bandage bonded to her temple.

Examining the door more closely, Nickolai could see that the frame was warped, bowed outward nearly five centimeters. The door itself had buckled a little, becoming very slightly concave. There was no way it was going to slide back home, even if there was power left.

“How do we open this?”

“Well, first we should get some heads-up on what it’s like outside.” Kugara walked to the door and pulled open the emergency control panel for the door, the same one that had shown the schematics of the lifeboat’s launch. It was one of the few panels that hadn’t popped open during landing, and for a few moments it looked as if it never would. She strained against it, and the warping bulkhead seemed to have jammed it as badly as the main door.

Just before Nickolai stepped up to help her with it, the panel opened with a nasty screech that hurt his ears. It also released the smell of burned electronics.

“Damn,” she said. “It’s dead.”

He wasn’t surprised. However, he smelled something beyond superheated metal and roasted ceramics.

“Okay,” she said, “Maybe one of the other boats can give us an idea.” She hunted around on the floor and found the handheld comm unit. When she picked it up, half the unit stayed on the floor. “Damn it!”

Nickolai took another deep breath. Under the smell of the dead lifeboat, he could smell cool air, the woody, earthy smell of some sort of plant life.

Kugara stared at the fragments of the comm unit and repeated, “Damn it!”

“I think it is safe to open the door.”

“What?”

“The skin’s already been breached. Can’t you smell the air?”

She wrinkled her nose. “All I can smell is my own blood gumming my nostrils.”

“By the panel you opened.”

She stepped back over to the door and bent down. “No, I can’t smell—” She froze a moment. “Well, what do you know? I can feel a draft.” She stood up. “We must have hit hard enough to crack the shielding. The leftover heat from reentry must have been enough to fry the circuits in this thing.”