Second Chance (10 page)
She didn’t speak for a while, just looked at me. I couldn’t read her expression. “I’ll never forgive him,” she said at last. “And you... you look just like him. But I’ll try.”
“That’s all anyone can ask.”
I held out my hand to her, and after a moment she took it and squeezed it.
Nuru broke the moment by clearing her throat. “There is another thing. Even harder.” We all looked at her, and though I knew what was coming my heart still pounded in my throat. “The communication problem with Earth... is not on our end.” A deathly silence settled over the crew. “Earth... Earth was struck by a meteor, forty-seven years after we left. There hasn’t been any signal since then.” She raised her hands against the gasps and curses. “There may be survivors. But they aren’t in any position to contact us.
Yet
.” She pointed at me. “Chaz has figured out a way for us to survive until they can.”
Everyone looked at me. I swallowed. “It isn’t going to be easy...”
-o0o-
When the noise and movement finally stopped, it took me some minutes to decide whether or not we’d survived. It had been a bad landing. We hadn’t expected a good one, but the sheer brutal pummeling we’d taken was still a shock. One of my shoulder straps had pulled loose; the other had bitten so deeply into my collarbone I knew I’d be bruised for weeks. “Is everyone okay?” I asked.
A chorus of groans answered, but no one seemed to be seriously hurt. I offered up a brief prayer of thanks.
Then I tried to sit up, and let out a groan myself. Even a tenth of a gee was more than my abdominal muscles were ready for. Mari had been right—I should have been doing more crunches. I rolled over onto my side and used my arms to force myself to a sitting position.
All through
Spirit
, the others were doing the same. Tien was already on her feet, wobbly but vertical.
Walking. A new concept for us.
At least she could do it. We hadn’t been completely certain that bodies that had never walked would be able to manage the skill, even when directed by minds with years of walking experience.
Eventually I struggled upright. The appalling effort it required was cruelly mocked by my balloon-like low-gravity gait. My sinuses felt as though they were full of lead shot.
Nuru’s arm fell heavily across my shoulders, and we both nearly collapsed from the weight. But when we got stable again I saw she was grinning like the sun. “We made it,” she gasped.
“We made it,” I concurred, and I found I was smiling the same crazy smile.
Supporting each other, we shuffled to the airlock—the one that had been Epsilon sys lock before we’d torched it off and joined it to the growing assemblage of hardware that we called
Spirit
. There we found, to our surprise, that we were already breathing Bianchon’s atmosphere. The crude welded seam joining the lock to the hull had parted from the stress of the landing.
It was a chilling reminder that our margin of safety had been almost nonexistent. But one good landing was all we’d needed.
The lock’s doors were warped and distorted, and it took both Bobb and Matt to force them open with a raucous screech. We all ducked through and stepped outside.
Spirit
lay on a long gentle slope of gray rock, scattered with rough stones ranging from boulder to fingertip size. Overhead Balzac’s ringed and banded form loomed huge, and the tiny red disk of Tau Ceti was just rising behind a fog bank downslope. The white fabric of the parasail, which lay on the ground for hundreds of meters along the scrape marks of the lander’s final descent, flapped desultorily in the wind.
Wind.
There was
wind
here.
The air was thin and cold and very dry—even here at sea level it was barely dense enough to sustain life—but there was so
much
of it. And it smelled... clean. No plastic solvents, no leakage from the greenhouses, no unwashed bodies. I opened my mouth and drank in the air like fresh cold water, shuffling in a circle and marveling at the openness of it all.
The rock-littered gray slope extended up, and up, and up—out to a horizon closer than Earth’s, but hundreds of times more distant than anything I’d seen in this lifetime. It hurt to focus that far away. I trusted my eyes would learn to cope. And in the other direction, lost in fog...
“Listen,” said Kyra, breaking into the excited babble of conversation. We listened.
Yes. There it was, coming from downslope. Surf. The low rumbling hush of waves on a shore.
The sound of the ocean that covered the whole equatorial region of this moon. An ocean teeming with microscopic life, devouring each other and excreting the oxygen we needed to breathe. In an atmosphere whose density was maintained by an improbably high level of outgassing from the planet’s core.
Surely this highly-unlikely alien biosystem was a gift from God. Humbled, I lowered myself to the ground and said another prayer of thanks.
Nuru watched over me while I prayed. “You might want to hold some of that gratefulness back,” she said when I was done. She waved a hand, indicating the cold lifeless rock all around.
Indeed, this rocky slope looked pretty inhospitable, and the cold was already beginning to bite through my foam-insulated parka. But after eight years of planning and building and testing and improvising we all knew it was our best alternative. No one had seriously suggested that hanging around in orbit, waiting to get clobbered by a passing meteoroid or suffer a blowout or lifesystem failure, was a viable long-term solution.
“We’ll make this place into a home,” I said. “It’ll be a lot of work, but we’ll do it.”
Bobb was peering into a handheld monitor. “Lander nine’s just over that ridge,” he said, pointing. All the pieces of
Cassiopeia
that we thought would be useful on the surface—including the greenhouses, the bioprocessors, and the materials fabricators—had been sent down ahead of us, to test and refine the ablative atmospheric entry shielding and the parasails. Some of the landers had failed, and some were a long walk away, but there was more than enough nearby to get started. Only Alpha module, which hadn’t completed assembling itself, remained in orbit to act as our weather satellite and meteoroid warning system. “Lander seven’s about two kilometers beyond it. Three’s that way, about six kilometers.”
“There’ll be time for that later,” said Mari. “I’m going for a swim.” And she burst into a clumsy, loping run, headed downslope.
“You’re crazy, girl!” I shouted, and she slapped me on the ass with a raucous laugh as she passed. “Those alien microbes will eat you alive!”
“If they’re going to do that,” she called out over her shoulder, “I’d rather find out sooner than later!”
“Oodle oodle!” I called back, meaning “good luck.”
Nuru and I leaned on each other, watching her go. “We’d better haul in that parasail before it blows away,” Nuru said to me after a while. “Start setting it up as a tent.” Her arm was warm across my shoulders. I’d forgotten how much taller she was than me.
“In a minute,” I said. “I’m enjoying the view.”
We stood side by side, watching the sun rise over our new home.
David D. Levine has sold over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories to all the major markets, including
Asimov’s
,
Analog
,
F&SF
, and
Realms of Fantasy
. He’s won a Hugo Award, been nominated for the Nebula, and won or been shortlisted for many other awards as well as appearing in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and the revised version of
Wild Cards Volume I
. He is a member of
Book View Café
and his web page is at
www.daviddlevine.com
.
-o0o-
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www.bookviewcafe.com
.
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Second Chance
Copyright © 2013 by David D. Levine.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form.
First Published in
Alembical 2
, anthology edited by Arthur Dorrance and Lawrence M. Schoen (May 2010, Paper Golem LLC).
Book View Café Edition July 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-282-2
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover designed by Leah Cutter.