“So? How do we open the door?”
“There’s a manual emergency release that should blow out the whole door mechanism,” Kugara said. She knelt and opened a red-and-yellow-striped panel to the left of the dead control panel. In a recess behind it was a T- shaped handle. She grabbed it and pulled it out to the right—which would have been up had the lifeboat been docked on the
He took a step back and found his back against a bulkhead.
“Okay,” she said. She turned away from the door and pushed the lever to the left, toward the original floor.
The whole lifeboat resonated with a rapid series of bangs that rocked the cabin briefly back toward Nickolai. In a moment, he could smell freshly vaporized metal drifting in from outside.
The door still hung in place.
Kugara stared at it, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. There shouldn’t be anything left holding that door in place.”
Nickolai stepped up to the door and pushed.
The metal creaked, then a massive shudder gripped the bulkhead in front of them. The door leaned outward and the whole outer skin of the bulkhead seemed to slough off in a cloud of ceramic dust and an odor of heated metal. In its wake, the falling door revealed the bark of a massive tree trunk.
A cool wind blew into the lifeboat, carrying the odor of a living forest.
The lifeboat had come to rest on the edge of a hardwood forest. From the divots in the ground and broken trees, it appeared that it had actually made landfall on a small rocky mountain about two thousand meters above the tree line. It had then bounced, slid, and rolled down a 40 percent grade and a couple of cliffs until it slammed to a stop against a massive tree with a fifteen-meter-diameter trunk.
The impact hadn’t killed the tree, but it now tilted at a perceptible angle away from the lifeboat, which had recoiled and rolled to its final stop about ten meters away in the direction from which it had come. Judging by the scar burned in the tree’s trunk, and the orientation of the lifeboat, Nickolai suspected that slamming into the tree was what had dented the bulkhead.
Another twenty meters downslope, and the other side of the lifeboat would have slammed into it; the bulkhead where they’d been strapped in. That might have been the most heavily-shielded portion of the lifeboat, but if it had been that bulkhead taking the brunt of the impact, the two of them might not have survived.
At least not in shape to crawl out of the lifeboat.
“The beacon’s still active,” Kugara said, “but that’d survive anything. Comm’s for shit though.”
Nickolai stood between the tree and the wreck of the lifeboat staring up at the bluest sky he had ever seen. A tiny yellow flare of a sun heated his face, especially the leather of his nose, way out of proportion to its size.
He wondered why he was still alive.
“Nickolai?”
He turned around to face her. She was crouched down, the broken comm unit spread out on sheet before her. It was in a half dozen pieces. “Are you listening to me?”
“Can you fix it?”
She laughed. “The main circuit snapped in half. Even if I had an electronic repair kit and knew exactly what I was doing, we’d still have to replace the thing. This is pretty much a disposable unit.”
“We set up a rendezvous at lifeboat five.”
“Yeah, but no telling where they landed without this.” She tossed the part she was holding into the pile. “They could be two klicks away and we’d never find them.”
“So what do we do?”
Kugara stood. “We got two choices.” She looked at the wreckage. “We stand pat and wait for our dubious comrade Mallory, or someone else, to catch up with the emergency beacon.” She looked back at him. “Or we strike out independently to find civilization or another lifeboat with a working comm.”
Nickolai nodded. “There’s a third choice.”
