The way Finn kept looking at Winnie, Edie could tell he wished he was in the driver’s seat. Not that Winnie was doing a bad job in the appalling conditions, but it was a hair-raising ride. The skidder slid down the mountain, half the time carried along by the river of sludge, the rest of the time grinding against rock. The sheer wind slammed into them, never quite spinning them completely out of control. Edie’s e-shield dulled the sting of the wind in her face, but she felt every jolt of the skidder. Ramirez sat up front with Winnie. Edie and Finn crouched in the back of the vehicle. Its sides were low enough that they were in danger of being pitched overboard.
Someone was yelling over the vehicle’s comm. Winnie was too busy dodging boulders to notice. Edie hit the commlink on her belt and redirected the message.
“This is Hueber at base camp. Can you hear me?” Edie vaguely recalled the name—one of the utility tecks on the ground team. “Where are you?”
“We’re on the skidder, about a kilometer from base camp,” Edie yelled over the howling wind.
“The landslide is right on us.” The link crackled and died for a second, then came back. “…four generators down, the rest struggling…”
Edie peered through the murk in the direction of the compound. It should be visible by now but she saw no lights. She dragged herself to the front of the skidder and leaned over to yell in Winnie’s ear.
“Where’s the compound?”
“It’s out there. I’ll find it,” Winnie screamed through the wind.
“I think they’re in trouble.”
“More trouble than us?” She threw Edie a grim look.
Edie felt Finn’s hand at the scruff of her jacket. “Get back here. Stay low.”
She hunched down with him, her fingers wrapped around the railings. With her free hand she tapped her commlink, trying to reconnect to base camp.
“Hueber, are you there?”
The line spat and hissed. “…to evacuate…lose the perimeter…”
“It’s the perimeter shield,” Finn said. “Sounds like the storm has downed some of the generators. The others can compensate, but only so much.”
If the shield failed, the entire compound would get washed away. Edie raised her head to search again for the lights of base camp. She saw something at last—a bobbing white glow. It wasn’t the light that was bobbing. The raging river beneath them buffeted the skidder so violently that the misty gray world around them seemed to be shaking.
To her horror, Edie saw a sharp drop-off to their right. Winnie was no longer able to keep the skidder on anything resembling a straight path and she turned around suddenly, her face pale with terror.
“Jump! Jump!” she yelled over and over.
Ramirez looked around in panic, as if trying to figure out the danger. Finn reacted more instinctively. He reached out for Edie. They locked hands and clambered to the back of the vehicle. The skidder careened to the left, the engine screeching, and they were flung to the floor, but they kept a hold of each another. Then pulled themselves up and jumped blindly into the mud.
Edie slid along slick rock, her hands scrabbling for purchase. The skidder’s taillights filled her vision. It careened down the incline and over the edge. It wasn’t a deep drop-off, but the torrent of mud raged twice as fast, quickly carrying away the skidder. As she clung to a rough outcropping, Edie watched the skidder bob and spin in an impossible dance and finally crash into rocks. It upended and rolled down the mountainside.
She hadn’t seen Winnie or Ramirez jump. There was no sign of them. She twisted her head to search for Finn, her mind still reeling from their dizzying leap. Then her commlink crackled.
“…your ETA?…Tanning! Ramirez!…emergency evacuation!”
Edie fumbled for her commlink. By the time she had it, the line was dead again.
“The comm tower’s down.” Finn emerged out of the gray, a dark shadow in the rain. Visibility was so poor she hadn’t seen him approach. He pointed to the compound in the distance. “I just watched its lights go out.”
“Did Winnie and Ramirez jump out?”
“No. The skidder’s gone. There’s nothing we can do for them. Come on.”
They clasped hands again and got moving, keeping to the rocks and the remaining islands of land where possible, and to the edges of the rivulets where the flow was slower and just about manageable. Edie kept her eyes on the compound lights. To one side, the landing pad was brightly lit and she could make out the shape of the skiff. The sound of an evacuation alarm reached her ears.
“They’ll think we’re dead,” Edie said, suddenly aware of the very real possibility that they’d leave without her and Finn.
Finn moved faster, pulling her along now. Edie’s legs ached from the effort of keeping her balance while bracing against the streaming mud, but she kept up. As they drew closer, the building outlines took form. On the near side of the compound, mud and rocks and uprooted vegetation crashed down the mountainside and hit the invisible shield. The debris piled up while the mud spewed out to the sides.
The shield hissed and flared. The ring of generators, visible only as a dotted line of green lights, had gaps here and there where the power had failed. More gaps appeared randomly as the generators died under the battering, one by one. At any moment the remaining generators would no longer be able to sustain a cohesive field…
A high-pitched siren wailed over the lower grunt of the evacuation alarm as the shield failed.
A wall of mud and debris crashed down, dousing most of the remaining lights. Instinctively, Edie and Finn pulled up and watched the disaster unfold. A long, low rumble vibrated through the air as a river of sludge rolled through the compound. Relentlessly the sludge surrounded and crushed the prefabs. They wilted, buckled, and ripped apart like wet cardboard, to be carried away on the black tide.
Edie checked her e-shield and saw Finn doing the same. There was still time to get to the skiff.
Together they looked across to the landing pad and saw the bobbing lights of the skiff. Half submerged in the deluge, it was attempting to take off.
“They’re leaving!” Edie cried.
“We’ll find emergency flares and call them back,” Finn said. Edie didn’t ask where they might find flares when most of the compound had already been swept away.
The skiff was being dragged along. The engines fired in a burst of light and it ascended, trailing rivulets of slime, belching smoke. It choked, banked sharply, and staggered. One engine blinked out. Edie heard the desperate whine of the other engine, a shocking addition to the sirens already wrenching the air. The skiff clipped a power generator on the edge of the compound, plunging it into near darkness. Only a few emergency lights remained, a sprinkling of glowing red hearth fires on those buildings that still survived.
The skiff nosedived into the side of the mountain. It turned a cartwheel, sparks flying, and the hull disintegrated. An explosion, painfully bright, agonizingly loud, swallowed up the remains of the vessel.
In shock, Edie turned to Finn. His face was a hard mask, lit gold by the fierce flames less than a hundred meters away. They had no way off the planet. They had no way of contacting the Learo Dochais. And, more than likely, they were considered dead.
Despite the catastrophic collapse of the compound, it was the safest place to be, at least for the next few minutes. The mudslide moved slower here, devouring buildings and clearing away ruins—but a couple of buildings, including the lab, still stood. Their buckled walls redirected the flow, leaving some areas above ground.
“We need to find a skidder,” Finn said.
“And go where?”
“We’ll find higher ground and wait for rescue.”
The ship would send a rescue squad—when the storm passed, they would come looking for survivors…surely.
“There’s a driveway on the other side of the lab, near the maintenance sheds,” Edie said, drawing up a mental image of the map she’d once seen of the compound. “I think that’s where they park the skidders.”
When they got there, the sheds were gone. The driveway had been swept clean and now funneled the onslaught of mud flooding the compound. Only one skidder remained, caught up in debris from the buildings collapsing around it. It was on the far side of the driveway.
Finn surveyed the scene. “We need to get upstream.” Trying to cross here would sweep them away before they could reach the other side.
They climbed over the prefab ruins to keep out of the worst of the mud. At a loud cracking sound, Edie glanced over her shoulder. The lab building had finally succumbed. Its demise opened up the floodgates. The river rushed through, bringing with it crushed walls, walkways, and broken crates and furniture.
In seconds, that flood would cover the ruins they were on. Finn didn’t waste time. He locked hands with Edie and pulled her into the river. They splashed and struggled across while the irresistible current washed them downstream and nearly past their only chance of survival. They threw themselves at the skidder and grabbed it, pulling themselves over the side. The mud sheared off their e-shields, leaving them clean.
Finn took the driver’s seat. He brutally kicked at a cabinet that had fallen and trapped the skidder in place. When the cabinet finally slid off, the skidder floated free. Finn switched on the engine, taking control.
“What about the crash?” Edie had to shout to be heard. “There might be survivors.”
Finn nodded and steered the skidder toward the area where the skiff had come down, vainly sweeping its headlights back and forth. There was nothing but mud and slime burbling past, to be replaced by more mud and more slime.
After a few more minutes of searching, Finn turned the skidder and gunned the engine, heading away from the remains of the compound. Of those killed in the crash, Edie had known only Caleb. She hadn’t known him well, she hadn’t liked him, and he hadn’t liked her. A part of her recognized that, numb as she felt now, his death would hit her later. If the children were her past, he might have been her future—his arrogance and ego, his desperation to maintain the illusion that he could continue to fulfill whatever impossibilities the Crib required of him.
Buffeted by the currents, the small craft rode the river that cascaded along the valley floor. Finn maintained as much control as he could, dodging flotsam. Edie held on to the rails of the skidder and concentrated on keeping her balance.
After twenty minutes of working cross-stream, they began to escape the collapsing region and followed the river down through the widening valley. The sides of the valley seemed to be melting inward as organic sludge rolled downhill to join the river. Eventually the mud became shallow enough for the skidder to gain traction.
Finn drove like he had a plan, but there didn’t seem to be any stable higher ground around. Still, the worst of the danger was over.
“I don’t think we’ll make it,” Edie said. She meant their e-shields. It was unlikely they’d last until the Learo Dochais sent a rescue vessel. Even a few seconds’ exposure to the retroviruses on Prisca would kill them.
“No, we won’t.”
Edie couldn’t believe the finality of his statement. She’d expected him to come up with a plan, or at least give her hope that he was working on something.
He looked over at her. “You took me to hell and back once before. Can you do it again?”
Edie’s mind was blank. Then the last image in her brain came back to her—the map of the compound. She pieced together the rest of what she remembered, zooming out. The local area, the topology of the mountain, the little dot that marked the location of the BRAT. The valley, the coast, the ocean. And another little dot…
“The skyhook. It’s operational, right?”
He grinned. “They’ve done a couple of test runs. Where’s the ocean platform in relation to here?”
“I don’t know exactly, but this valley runs right to the coast, which runs north–south. The platform’s a hundred meters offshore. It’s out there somewhere.”
Three hours after arriving at the coast, they still searched in vain for the skyhook platform. Edie only had an approximate idea of where exactly along the coast it was—probably twenty klicks or so in one direction or the other. So they’d pulled the skidder into the water and set out south, keeping parallel to the shoreline and a hundred meters out. Edie kept her eyes on the ocean, dark under a moonless night sky, searching for their sign of hope.
The night was silent, the ocean calm but for the steady hammering of rain disturbing the surface. It was starting to look like they’d gone the wrong way.
“How’s our fuel?” she said. A pointless question because she knew Finn was watching it.
“We have enough to turn around, get back to where we started, and go about the same distance in the other direction.” He scanned the horizon intently. “You want to turn around now?”
It was pure guesswork—the platform might be up ahead. But they’d never know if they chose this moment to reverse direction. They could miss it altogether and still be sitting here on the water when their e-shields died and Prisca’s retroviruses invaded their bodies.
She did not want to die on this disastrous world.
“Your decision,” she said.
“Then let’s keep going.”
A few minutes later, he looked over at her and said, “There’s something I didn’t tell you. The shootout in the hangar…there’s a rumor that some of the Molly Mei’s crew was killed. A man—must be the navpilot Ganesh—and a woman.”
“Valari?” That would explain why Finn had lost contact with her.
“I don’t know any details. I heard it was crew, and Valari wasn’t crew.”
Edie’s throat tightened. “Not Cat. She can survive anything.” She stared at the skidder’s headlight reflections dancing on the black water. The weight of another death was almost too much to bear. “There’s something you should know, too,” she said. “After what happened here, I suspect Colonel Theron will get his way. I’ll be transferred to Scarabaeus. And this time, you’re not coming with me. Natesa had petitioned for your freedom. Then you need to find your own way out of here.”
He didn’t say anything and the silence stretched out between them. Then, suddenly, he turned the skidder hard to port. Edie peered into the darkness and saw what he had seen—a faint unnatural glow on the water up ahead. The skyhook platform.
Finn moored the skidder alongside a narrow pier jutting out from the platform’s vast scaffolding. They left the skidder and climbed a long ladder off the pier, up into the structure. Edie felt much safer with that distance between her and the water. Finn seemed to know where he was going—he’d worked on the skyhook from the other end, so he must know his way around, more or less. As she followed him, her energy sapped away and her legs became heavy. She thought about the people who had died on that skiff, and about Winnie and Ramirez. Cat might be dead, too. And Prisca—this world would soon be nothing but a rock covered in a rotten skin.
They arrived at the control room, which had its own comm uplink. Finn went to the console and called the Learo Dochais. Voices washed around Edie as she waited at the door. Finn told them to activate the skyhook and someone on the other end seemed to be protesting.
Then came the harsh authoritative tone she recognized—Natesa, taking control.
Two minutes later, Finn and Edie were in the climber. Its small central cabin was the only area suitable for passengers. On either side of the cabin were matching bins, flanking it like wings, each built to carry tons of crops—crops that Prisca would never produce now.
As Edie sat on the floor in the corner of the cabin, she heard Finn talking to a meckie on the Learo Dochais, who told him how to disconnect the bins. No point taking those up the nanoribbon with them. Then Finn sealed the cabin and adjusted the environmentals so they could switch off their e-shields. The climber gave a gentle lurch and began its ascent.
Finn slid down the wall of the cabin beside her. “Always wanted to ride one of these.”
His everyday comment had the instantaneous effect of making Edie relax. She leaned against him and they rode in silence. The cabin had one narrow strip window, high up on the side. Edie had no sense of how fast they traveled because the gravplating kept the gravity constant. The dark cloudy sky outside merged into black space and stars. The long haul to the ship had just begun.