intact molecule. Even a near miss would have left nothing recognizable to the unaided human eye. Only something tiny — perhaps not a warhead at all but just something moving fast — or a more distant miss, would leave wreckage.
I must remember that, hold on to that. However bad I may feel, I am still alive, when there was every chance that I would never get this far, even as a cinder, let alone whole and thinking and still able to walk.
But damaged. Both of us damaged. I am injured, but so is the suit, which is worse, in some ways.
It is running mostly on external power, soaking up the weak sunlight as best it can, but so inefficiently that it has to rest at night, when both of us have to sleep. Its communications and AG are wrecked, and the recycle and medical units are badly damaged too. All that and a tiny leak we can’t find. I’m frightened.
It says I have internal bruising and I shouldn’t be walking, but we talked it over and agreed that our only hope is to walk, to head in roughly the right direction and hope we’re seen by the base we were heading for originally, in the module. The base is a thousand kilometres south of the northern ice cap. We came down north of the equator, but just how far north, we don’t know. It’s going to be a long walk, for both of us.
'How do you feel now?'
'Fine,' the suit replies.
'How far do you think we’ll get today?'
'Maybe twenty kilometres.'
'That’s not very much.'
'You’re not very well. We’ll do better once you heal. You were quite ill.'
Quite ill. There are still some little bits of sickness and patches of dried blood within the helmet, where I can see them. They don’t smell any more, but they don’t look very pleasant either. I’ll try cleaning them up again tonight.
I am worried that, apart from anything else, the suit isn’t being completely honest with me. It says it thinks our chances are fifty-fifty, but I suspect it either doesn’t have any idea at all, or knows things are worse than it’s telling me. This is what comes of having a smart suit. But I asked for one; it was my choice, so I can’t complain. Besides, I might have died if the suit hadn’t been as bright as it is. It got the two of us down here, out of the wrecked module and down through the thin atmosphere while I was still unconscious from the explosion. A standard suit might have done almost as well, but that probably wouldn’t have been enough; it was a close run thing even as it was.
My legs hurt. The ground is fairly level, but occasionally I have to negotiate small ridges and areas of corrugated ground. My feet are sore too, but the pain in my legs worries me more. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep going all day, which is what the suit expects.
'How far did we come yesterday?'
'Thirty-five kilometres.'
The suit walked all of that, carrying me like a dead weight. It got up and walked, clasping me inside it so I wouldn’t bump around, and marched off, the wispy remains of its crippled emergency photopanels dragging over the dusty ground behind it like the wings of some strange, damaged insect.
Thirty-five klicks. I haven’t done a tenth of that yet.
I’ll just have to keep going. I can’t disappoint it. I’d be letting the suit down. It has done so well to get us here in one piece, and it walked all that long way yesterday, supporting me while I was still rolling my eyes and drooling, mumbling about walking in a dream and being the living dead… so I can’t let it down. If I fail I harm us both, lessening the suit’s chances of survival, too.
The slope goes on. The ground is boringly uniform, always the same rusty brown. It frightens me that there is so little variety, so little sign of life. Sometimes we see a stain on a rock that might be plant life, but I can’t tell, and the suit doesn’t know because most of its external eyes and tactiles were burned out in the fall, and its analyzer is in no better condition than the AG or the transceiver. The suit’s briefing on the planet didn’t include a comprehensive Ecology, so we don’t even know in theory whether the discolourations could be plants. Maybe we are the only life here, maybe there’s nothing living or thinking for thousands and thousands of kilometres. The thought appals me.
'What are you thinking about?'
'Nothing,' I tell it.
'Talk. You should talk to me.'
But what is there to say? And why should I talk anyway?
I suppose it wants to make me talk so I’ll forget the steady march, the tramp-tramp of my feet a couple of centimetres away from the ochre soil of this barren place.
I remember that when I was still in shock, and delirious, on the first day, I thought I stood outside us both and saw the suit open itself, letting my precious, fouled air out into the thin atmosphere, and I watched me dying in the airless cold, then saw the suit slowly, tiredly haul me out of itself, stiff and naked, a reptile-skin reverse, a chrysalis negative. It left me scrawny and nude and pathetic on the dusty ground and walked away, lightened and empty.
And maybe I’m still afraid it will do that, because together we might both die, but the suit, I’m fairly sure, could make it by itself quite easily. It could sacrifice me to save itself. It’s the sort of thing a lot of humans would do.
'Mind if I sit down?' I say, and collapse onto a large boulder before the suit can reply.
'What hurts?' it asks.
'Everything. Mostly my legs and my feet.'
'It’ll take a few days for your feet to harden and your muscles to tone up. Rest when you feel like it. There’s no sense in pushing yourself too hard.'
'Hmm,' I say. I want it to argue. I want it to tell me to stop whining and keep walking… but it doesn’t want to play. I look down at my dangling legs. The suit’s surface is blackened and covered in tiny pits and scars. Some hair- fine filaments wave, tattered and charred. My suit. I’ve had the thing for over a century and I’ve hardly used it. The brain’s spent most of its time plugged into the main house unit back home, living at an added level of vicariousness. Even on holidays, I’ve spent most of my time on board ship, rather than venture out into hostile environments.
Well, we’re sure as shit in a hostile environment now. All we have to do is walk half-way round an airless planet, overcome any and all obstacles in our way, and if the place we’re heading for still exists, and if the suit’s systems don’t pack up completely, and if we don’t get picked off by whatever destroyed the module, and if we aren’t blown away by our own people, we’re saved.
'Do you feel like going on now?'
'What?'
'We’d better be on our way, don’t you think?'
'Oh. Yes. All right.' I lower myself to the desert floor. My feet ache intensely for a while, but as I start to walk the pain ebbs. The slope looks just the way it did kilometres back. I am already breathing deeply.
I have a sudden and vivid image of the base as it might be, as it probably is: a vast, steaming crater, ripped out of the planet during the same attack that downed us. But even if that is the reality, we agreed it still makes sense to head there; rescuers or reinforcements will go there first. We have a better chance of being picked up there than anywhere else. Anyway, there was no module wreckage to stay beside on the ground; it was travelling so fast it burned up, even in this thin atmosphere, the way we very nearly did.
I still have a vague hope we’ll be spotted from space, but I guess that’s not likely now. Anything left intact up there is probably looking outwards. If we’d been noticed when we fell, or spotted on the surface, we’d have been picked up by now, probably only hours after we hit the dirt. They can’t know we’re here, and we can’t get in touch with them. So all we can do is walk.
The rock and stones are getting gradually smaller.
I walk on.
It’s night. I can’t sleep.
The stars are spectacular, but no solace. I am cold, too, which doesn’t help. We are still on the slope; we travelled a little over sixteen kilometres today. I hope we’ll come to the lip of the escarpment tomorrow, or at least to some sort of change in the landscape. Several times today, while I walked, I had the impression that for all my effort, we weren’t moving anywhere. Everything is so uniform.
