His suit heater wasn’t working. Controls smashed? Heating circuits broken? Battery knocked loose? He did not bother to look. Whatever the problem, without tools and spare parts he could do nothing about it. If he’d still had a knapsack, he couldn’t have afforded the time.
A few meters downhill from that group of rocks, a silvery glint caught his eye. A rope clip!
His hands had frozen to the rock slab; when he released it, it took skin with it. A sharp tug drew a few centimeters of red nylon line up out of the snow—and the frigid clip from his grasp. More palm skin went with the clip. Here, too, the snow was firmly packed.
He stared for a while, stymied, at the brightly colored nylon line. Then he studied the raw, red, angry flesh of an injured hand. As painful as the wound looked, he couldn’t feel it. Of course he couldn’t feel anything in either hand. Now what was he doing here…?
He was looking for Rikki! How could he have forgotten that?
As through a fog, he did know: hypothermia from the cold. Hypoxia from the thin air, the altitude, and the exertion. Maybe shock from the pummeling of the avalanche.
Clutching the rock slab with numb fingers, Blake pushed in among the boulders. Rikki would be at the base of the tallest rock. If the rush of snow hadn’t swept her down slope. He began digging frantically.
Digging, digging, digging….
Confusion overtook him again; he lost sight of what he was doing until—with a jolt—his improvised shovel hit something. Something that twitched.
He threw aside the rock slab to burrow doglike with his hands. He found—a leg. Why had he dug so far from the boulder? “Rikki,” he called.
If she had heard him, he couldn’t hear her answer.
The bit of pant leg he’d exposed looked to be just below her knee. If she still leaned against the boulder, then her head would be…he struggled to puzzle it out…here.
Minutes later, his hands—stiff and blue—rammed the hard plastic of a breather mask.
And she moaned! She was alive! Ten interminable minutes later, he had uncovered her to the waist. He unclipped her from the safety line, meters of which remained buried deep in snow.
Only then did he raid her knapsack for her spare mask, oxygen tank, and gloves. The oh-two jolt cleared his muddled thoughts enough to slam one of her spare battery packs into the empty, lid-torn-off compartment of his flight suit. Blessed warmth began to flow, except in one sleeve, in which the heating elements must have broken.
“Blake?”
Her eyes were open! He said, “I thought I’d lost you.”
“I did, too.”
“I’ll have you out of there soon,” he promised. With the folding shovel from her knapsack, finishing the job was a matter of minutes.
An hour later, bone-weary, they stumbled into their snow-covered shelter.
*
They took off before nightfall for Endeavour.
“For replacement equipment,” Blake radioed to Dana: a partial truth. The absolute truth, if hands counted as equipment. Under the gloves he hoped Rikki didn’t notice he continued to wear, knuckles screamed at every motion, and the skin was pale and blistered. He suspected severe frostbite on his feet, too.
Soon enough, Li confirmed his fears—extending the diagnosis to nose, ears, and random patches on his legs. The thawed areas hurt like hell, sometimes also managing to itch, until Li pumped him full of painkillers.
As nanite swarms labored to repair the damage, Blake focused on an ever-growing supplies list. They still needed to find a home for the colony.
On his next flight to Dark, he would be better prepared.
24
Dana floated at the forward end of cargo hold three, beside a datasheet magneted to the bulkhead. The comp projected an orbital view of Dark. “Whenever they’re ready,” she told Marvin.
“It should be only another few minutes,” the AI said.
Three of the crew waited among the cold-sleep pods. Antonio poked at something on his own datasheet. Carlos whispered unintelligibly at Li, who silenced him with a hard stare. She looked…distracted? No, preoccupied.
Please, God, Dana thought. Not more squabbling about names.
“Blake says he and Rikki are ready,” Marvin announced.
The orbital view vanished, displaced by a close-up of Blake and Rikki—both grinning from ear to ear. Behind them, seen through the clear wall of their shelter, extending to the horizon, was an inland sea.
“You two look so disappointed,” Dana deadpanned.
“Well, we didn’t find the Fountain of Youth,” Blake said. “Is everyone there?”
“As you requested,” Dana said. “Okay, it’s your show.”
Blake nodded. “Hi, everyone. We surveyed three candidate sites this trip. Any of them would meet our specs. This one is damn near optimal.”
Rikki added, “We’re at landing zone three.”
“Tell us about it,” Dana said.
Rikki nodded. “It’s located at about twenty-five degrees north latitude, almost within the tropics. The seasons won’t be extreme. This near the equator cyclonic storms won’t be common and shouldn’t be severe. It’s local spring, so we can try farming without a long wait. Caves, sea, river delta, the works. Bottom line, it satisfies all our requirements.”
“To provide an overview, we made a vid,” Blake said. “Marvin, if you’ll project it up there.”
On the hold bulkhead, the display switched to a wide-angle, outdoor shot of the sea. The camera panned along the shoreline, paused to admire gentle waves lapping at a white sand beach, then swept up a rock-strewn and furrowed slope to a range of low, rounded hills. A crescent moon, daylight ghostly, hovered over the hills.
Nowhere, apart from slimy green film on the undulating waters, did Dana see any color.
Their perspective returned to the shore, where Rikki, her breathing mask dangling on her chest, mugged for the camera. The shuttle and an inflatable shelter stood nearby.
“Pause,” Blake said. “Our campsite, of course. The sea offers more than ample water as a deuterium source, and something like algae mats as feedstock for our synth vats.”
“If this is so perfect,” Carlos muttered, “why didn’t you land there first?”
Antonio looked up
