Brenda Cooper
Red alert words bloomed across every screen in the outpost like flames. “Rising seismicity in Fire Rose Canyon. Alert level three.”
Maricella stopped pacing back and forth in the minding room, blinking at the words. She glanced at the image of Harry’s craggy face filling one wall above the small kitchen unit. He was focusing on something other than her; he didn’t look worried. The big otherwise-blank wall showed a view from inside the canyon, the depth illuminated with man-made light. A single rock fell. The wall with the door in it showed the real-time reads from his flier. They looked normal. The last wall was useless; a window to the rock garden that the settlers had built on Schroeder’s planet. Harry loved it, but she never had; today she hated it more than usual. If Harry didn’t love those damned rocks so . . .
She focused on the real-time readouts from the sensors scattered across the cliff-face. How bad was a three? She knew, but she didn’t know right now. She hated forgetting. Alerts were usually ones and twos. Those were okay. Safe. She reached for her cheat sheet in a drawer. Level One: Low risk; be watchful. Level Two; keep communication open; be prepared to evacuate. Level three; Imminent danger. Leave the area. Level Four: Earthquake. “Harry?”
“Yes.”
“I think you should pull up now. Come home.”
He tapped his ear. “What?”
She gestured with her thumb, jerking it toward the ceiling.
He tapped his earpiece again, his head cocked and his eyes twinkling. The bastard had heard her, but he wasn’t having anything to do with leaving. He wasn’t himself, and he was, and both things grated on her. Being old had changed them both.
This whole trip had been a horrible idea. Harry had insisted on going out by himself with no more minder than her. She had made him promise it would be the last time. But there would be another time, another argument, and she would lose again. He was a hero, if an aging one. She was merely the hero’s wife.
She reached the end of the long room and turned, facing the garden now. Sunlight speared the crystalline rocks, turning yellow to brilliant gold and blue to sapphire. “There are swarms of mini-quakes. The next one could be a big one.”
“I see some perfect crystals. If you can’t play chicken....”
“At my age,” she finished for him. “Then you can’t play at all. I don’t feel like rescuing you today.”
“So don’t.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“I’ll be fast.” He goosed the accelerator, far exceeding the guidelines for his aged reflexes.
She winced.
He looked happy, but watching him felt more and more like watching a two-year-old. He was personally responsible for at least a quarter of the rocks in the garden she was trying to forget he’d started, and at least ten percent of the cargo the colony had sent off-planet, but you wouldn’t guess any of that by working with him now. He’d found Fire Rose Canyon when he was twenty, a gash in a boring plateau, its edges crumbling daily and spitting out beauty. He and Maricella had helped build the first off-ship outpost on the closest stable place with a river nearby. He could still find a pretty specimen, but he thought—and walked—at half of his old speed. His balance had gone the way of his strength.
She stopped and stretched, facing the read-outs. Her shoulders popped and complained, but she used slow force to require them to move enough that she could lift her arms above her head.
The ever-shifting information on the wall caught her attention. She dropped her hands to her sides. The frequency bars for the small quakes were bigger and closer together. Schroeder’s was fifty times more seismically active than Earth, usually at what would be threes to sixes on the old Richter scale. They had come here to mine for the crystalline stones; collectors paid well. The multicoloured and largely clear rocks born in Schroeder’s inner fire were exposed by constant sloughing of stone and sand and dirt and moss, by a steady wind and periodic monsoons. The rocks were dangerous to harvest, and she’d spent her career minding miners. If Harry really thought this was his last trip, he’d be looking for something special.
The damned cliff was going to ruin his day. A three.
He had been supposed to land gently on a pad they knew was as safe as anything on this god-forsaken jewel they called home. Walk up a path. Find one rock. An easy one. Something he could lift without hurting his back.
Maricella reached into her belt pouch and took out the override controls. She had the ability to force his flier up. She’d used her power to play goddess twice before, and both alerts had been false.
He’d been furious.
She hesitated.
She bit at her lower lip and stepped closer to the board, staring at a real-time map with hot-spot colours for seismicity. Blue, yellow, orange, slow motion and small. A sudden splash of purple trending toward red. Stronger shaking in the rock surface.
The small icon for Harry’s flier crossed right in front of the purple.
Maricella chose. She pressed the control to open the override.
Red bloomed across the mountain face.
Rock, tumbling.
Maricella pushed, hard.
The loudspeaker screeched, “Level four alert! Level four alert!”
On the screen, rocks and dust obscured her view of the flier.
She snapped her head to the other camera to look for Harry’s face, slamming her thumb back onto the useless button.
The flier’s camera only showed the top half of Harry’s head and above and behind that, through the flier’s window, a constant slide of rock and tumbling crystals pinging off the canopy.
She glanced back to the big view, the volume of falling rock skewering her, both sides of the canyon crumbling down in clouds of glittering dust.
She turned back to Harry in time to flinch as something big slammed hard into the glass canopy. A crack appeared.
She almost screamed. “Your helmet!”
His face had a blank, slightly frightened expression. Behind him, rocks and dust swirled. The flier was still airborne.
“Your helmet!” she screamed. “Put it on. Helmet!”
He blinked. She saw her command register, saw the moment he decided to obey. Thankfully, all he had to do was push a button. The bubble-helmet rolled over his head from behind putting a slightly brown-tinted window between her and his face.
The flier descended, its auto-pilot AI fighting against spin. She felt sick, angry at herself for not pushing the button three seconds faster, for not trusting her instincts. It was useless now; the machine’s AI wouldn’t allow an override when it perceived immediate danger.
She had always chosen fast and usually right. Why had she hesitated?
She let the control fall to the floor, clattering, and then thought better of it and scooped it up.
She needed something to hold.
Harry was out of her hands.
She sat on one of the three chairs that huddled together on a hand-made rug in the centre of the room with her back to his stupid garden. She watched the flier struggle to pull away, flinched as rocks slid and clattered onto it. The crack in the canopy widened, letting dark and sparkling dust dribble into the cockpit. The flier bounced hard as it hit the ground but in a small mercy, it didn’t tip. It settled right-side-up, and the movement stopped. A triumph for its coders and the engineers.
The “man down” tones blatted across the loudspeakers. A human voice called, “Rockfall alert. Flier down. Active rockfall. Stay in cover.”
As if arguing with the frantic voice, the cliffs had stopped sliding. Dust still obscured her view of the flier but she could make out its outline.
Her hands shook. The inside camera must have broken; she saw nothing but black on the wall that had showed his face earlier. “Are you okay, Harry?”
Silence.
“Harry!”
Their granddaughter, Lowri, burst through the door. She wore pajama bottoms and a tank top, and her dark hair fell all the way to the floor in an untidy braid. Trust a college student to be sleeping at noon. She looked frantic as well as frazzled, eyes wide. “Is it Grandpa? Is he okay?”
“Yes, and I don’t know.” Maricella gave her a quick hug. “The flier is breached. He’s helmeted. I don’t know if the landing hurt him.” She glanced up at the readouts. “At least the planet’s quieting.”
“For now.” Lowri clutched Maricella tight, surely almost breaking ribs. “I’ll go check on him. You just keep him sane.”
“He hasn’t answered me yet, and how do you intend to check on anything?” She glanced back at blank wall. “Harry!”
Lowri gave her a wry look, the one that meant she had the situation in good hand. Maricella had learned Lowri knew things; she kept quiet.
Lowri screamed at her grandfather. “Harry!”
After a brief, frustrated pause, she called even louder. “Harry? It’s me, Lowri. Are you okay? Say something so we know.”
Maricella felt lighter as his words filled the room, slow and shaky, but clear. “I...think...we...fell.”
“Just you.” Lowri smiled. “Did you get hurt?”
“I don’t think so. Let me take my helmet off and look.”
“You can’t,” Maricella said. “You’re breached. A rock hit you.”
“That wasn’t...nice...of it.”
Lowri smiled. “Listen to Maricella. We’re sending a rescue drone for you. She’ll use the camera drone to help you out of the flier and into open space where we can get you.”
“Okay.”
“Promise me, Grandpa,” Lowri commanded as she leaned down and kissed Maricella.
They stared at the blank, dark wall together. Lowri’s fingers flew over her keyboards.
After a long time, Harry’s voice said, “Promise.”
Lowri whispered in Maricella’s ear. “The camera drone is on its way to Harry. The rescue drone is ready for me to fly. It will take ten minutes to get it up and thirty to get there. Can you hold him together that long?”
Only the young expected miracles. “I can hold myself together that long. He’ll have to help me.”
Lowri smiled, her eyes bright with something that might be tears or excitement. As she left, she closed the door behind her, leaving Maricella alone with Harry again.
She had managed emergencies before, but not for a long time. Harry was truly old, but Maricella was only ten years younger. She’d already had operations for ears and eyes and knees and hips and one wrist. She could still think well, but not fast. She reached for her lists again, reading. Check for broken bones. Duh. “Harry, can you move your arms?”
“Yes.”
“Can you move your legs?”
“Yes.”
The dust on the canyon camera had cleared enough to provide a better picture of the flier, now only partly obscured with thin crystal dust that caught the light and glittered like a diamond haze. The flier huddled next to a large rock, one wing partly sheared off and the whole glassy bubble that served as protection and window for the driver, gone. A miracle that he’d survived. Now they needed another one. “Can you stand?”
“Yes.” A thud. “Maybe not.”
“Can you see?”
“Yes.”
“The flier’s camera is broken. Describe what you see but don’t take your helmet off.”
“I want to take it off.”
She could never tell when he was joking. “Don’t!”
“No promises.”
Damn him. Schroeder’s air wasn’t exactly poison, but it wasn’t oxygen-rich enough to support a man for more than a few minutes. Stepping outside without extra oxygen resulted in dizziness, headaches, and disorientation. Death, eventually.
“In front of me, the console works. Its lights are on, anyway. To the right, the storage shelves are good. Two fell onto each other, but there was nothing there.”
“Of course not. You haven’t collected anything yet. What about the door?”
“It has a dent.”
“Can you describe the dent?” She flipped through the available feeds, looking for the camera drone that Lowri had sent. No luck. Maybe she was just missing it.
“It comes in.”
Not very useful. “How far in? Is it a big dent?”
“Half the door. I see a tear.”
He wasn’t very strong anymore. There was probably a rock or something on the far side of the door. “What about above you? Why can’t you stand?”
“Let me feel.”
“Feel what?”
“A pretty girl.” He cackled.
“You were nice when I married you.”
“I’m still nice. Feeling above my head. I think it’s just a strut. I can get out.”
“By going up? Out the top?” She started pacing again, restless.
“Yes. I shuffled forward a bit. Now I can stand.”
The black wall bloomed to life with a new feed. It must be the drone camera, finally. Bless Lowri. The view looked out of focus, unsettled.
“Climbing.”
“Wait!” she called. This little drone rocked and moved, the stabilizing software unable to match the uneven flight. She took a deep breath, willing it to focus.
“I’m out now. There’s a lot of new rocks down. I bet I can find a beauty.”
“What do you mean you’re out?” The view still swayed, and then it snapped to focus. Harry stood on top of the shattered flier. “Don’t move!” she called.
“Why not?”
“Did you look down?”
Silence. Then, “Maybe I can’t jump that far.”
“Are you comfortable?” She took in a deep yoga breath, trying to calm her thumping heart. “Can you wait until someone comes to get you?”
He reached toward the button that would open his helmet again.
“No!”
His finger stopped. “You’re always telling me what to do!”
“Someone has to.” As soon as she said the words, she regretted them. He was a stubborn man.
A message from Lowri showed on the read-out wall. We are on our way with the rescue drone.
Had it only been ten minutes? Hurry, she sent to Lowri, and then she asked Henry, “Are you stable? Can you stay where you are?”
“I don’t have to.” He turned in place, standing on top of the downed flier.
What was she supposed to do about this?
“I see a way down.”
“I’d rather you stay put.” She glanced at the seismic readings. More of the cliff could go. Agreeably, the loudspeaker suggested, “Level three alert remains in effect. Please evacuate all unstable areas.”
Maybe she should be telling him to move.
But dammit, he was fragile. He was a hundred-year-old man and she was ninety, and she shouldn’t be helping him collect pretty rocks for the damned garden.
She had known better, but since when did he listen?
He jumped. She saw it on the wall and time slowed for her, Harry leaping from the broken top of the broken machine onto the rock that broke the machine. It was a jagged thing, blues and blacks and browns, the sun glinting on it and glinting on Harry’s helmet and all of it in slow motion. His forward foot landed well, but the second foot missed a flat spot, the toe catching, knocking a small cascade of rock down. He went hard onto his hands. His head slammed the rock, bounced. Momentum carried him close to the edge.
“Are you okay? Why the hell did you do that? Where are you going to go now? I don’t see it.” Words just poured out of her. “Are you okay? Talk to me. Tell me. Why?”
The seismic lights scrambled and flipped on the wall in front of her, yellow, purple, yellow, and red and red and red.
Rocks fell.
The floor rattled under her. No good. No good. They had built the colony on a stable spot. “Harry!” She was a lousy minder. A tear sharpened in the edge of her right eye, and she screamed his name again, “Harry!”
“Yes.”
“Oh, oh. You’re all right.”
“I think I broke my knee.”
She covered her face with her hands. She had to get him down. Think! What were her resources? Why was it so hard to think? She should know what to do. She watched destruction playing out on the walls, willing the dust to re-settle so she could finally see.
She messaged Lowri. Give me control of the camera drone?
Take it when you’re ready. We’re okay. A pause. Nothing hit us.
She hadn’t even been thinking about her granddaughter. What was wrong with her? She could only do one thing at a time, at least anymore. Right now, that was worry about Harry. She sat and toggled through the commands to take the camera.
The vertiginous slam of her pilot VR rocked her. At first, she only saw cliff-face, and then Harry, a puddle of white on top of a brilliant and jagged rock shot through with golden crystals in long veins.
If they could get it out, it would be worth something. She tilted the camera, flew closer.
Neither of his legs looked wrong. A broken knee could be mended, although not out there. There wasn’t any place close to him for Lowri’s rescue drone to land, but she should be able to get the far smaller camera drone close.
She moved in.
He spit out, “Don’t cut my hair with that damned thing.”
“You could use a haircut, old man.”
“Stay away.”
She flew closer, trying to stay in one place while reading the manual for the small camera copter. “I can lift thirty pounds. Maybe I can help you stand up.”
“The camera weighs something.”
Of course. She looked up that specification. “I can lift twenty-five pounds. But I bet it’s really thirty. That will help. You have to stand to find a way to climb down so you can get out in the open.”
“Maybe I don’t want to move.”
“Give me something to lift. Your hand.”
He rolled over and lifted a hand. His suit looked good. Scraped up. No visible tears. It hung loose on him; he’d lost weight and refused to get a new one. Maybe that had helped.
She brought the drone as close as she could, and said, “Guide me.”
“Right.”
She moved.
“Your other right.”
“Damn you.”
“Got it.”
Her drone bobbed, her stomach following it, light and ill. She felt his weight shift in perspective and the whine of her engines. He must have grasped the drone. She popped up, free of him, light and fast and disoriented.
He lay on the wall, on his back.
“I’m trying again.”
“It’s no good.”
“Do you still think your knee is broken?”
“I don’t know. It hurts.”
“Try to move it.”
“It hurts to move.”
“Tough.” She was close again. “Left?”
“Straight.”
“Get a good grip.”
She felt the weight, felt it more this time. She forced the drone to give everything it had, drove it past its specs so it burbled warnings at her. “Help me, Harry,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “You’ve got to help.”
“Got it. I’m standing. Letting go.”
This time she was prepared for the sudden lightness, felt exhilarated by it.
“Can you put weight on the knee?” She took the drone up and a little back, centering her view of him on the video-wall in front of her.
“Yes. Slowly. I see a path down.”
“Careful.” She couldn’t make out where he intended to go.
“Don’t rescue me if I fall.”
“Fuck you.”
“I love you too.”
“Don’t forget where you are on the rock.”
“Don’t forget you’re helping me.”
He shuffled and clambered down, slow, steady, favouring his hurt knee. She gasped once as a piece of stone fell out from under his good foot.
He hung on, stopped.
She requested his vitals. His heart rate was high and his breathing shallow.
“Take it easy.” He had already made it half-way down. “There’s a wide shelf below you. Two feet.”
He started again. Slow. He reached the end of a crevice and the edge of the great slab of rock. He stopped. Even from here she could see his left leg trembling. He took three more steps and then lost it, sliding. Rock slid alongside him, dusting up, making it hard to see him.
“Harry! Harry!” She heard herself screaming. She didn’t have the drone anymore. Maybe she’d flown it into a wall. “Harry!”
Lowri interrupted. “We can see him. He’s moving an arm. Maybe he’s okay. We’re going in now.”
“I lost the drone.”
“No problem.”
“I can’t see you.”
“I’ll transfer you to my cam.”
Maricella sat back and watched as they pulled him on board with the rescue-drone’s arms and settled him in the basket. He was clutching a piece of crystal rock. He mouthed, “For the garden.”
Maricella wanted to scream but instead she laughed, tears streaming down her face. The man had a thousand lives.
She paced in front of the wall until the drone landed at the hospital, watching Harry’s face the whole time. She didn’t have audio to him, but she talked to him anyway, giving him a good what-for. The medical facilities were on the far side of the base. She should go, but she kept watching and talking until medical techs pulled him from the drone.
She gathered her things.
Lowri came for her, looking ecstatic. “We did it!”
It was true. He was okay. “We did. Thank you so much.” Maricella felt dizzy, and almost fell into a chair.
Lowri leaned down and touched her face. “When did you eat?”
“Breakfast.” She’d eaten with Harry, fussing at him to be careful on the trip.
“It’s mid-afternoon. Let me make you something.” Lowri was quick. She returned with a shake of some kind that she’d dialed up from the kitchen unit in no more than five minutes.
It tasted sour, but Maricella managed to get it down. It gave her the strength to say, “I need to see him.”
“I’ll take you.”
Maricella nodded, too tired for words. Lowri would keep her safe.
The next time Harry wanted to go out, Maricella was going to tell him no. She’d have more energy for words by then.
For now, she would just hold him.