Our mission was to go
past the edge of the map and make new ones, leaving behind dozens of 'bots, to
build communication devices and teleportation pads. Every month we were to jump
back into range to send a report. We weren't even out that long. I wonder what
they thought on earth, how we disappeared before making our first report. They
must have thought we were swallowed by the blackness of space suddenly, and
without a single sound.
We had parked the
Blob in the orbit of a likely-looking planet, and prepared to land. We
shouldn't have all gone, but we were too excited to be held back. Captain
Jeppson was the oldest of us and had actually been in the Air Force before our
mission. He had agreed before we left Earth that the first planet likely to
support human life we could all explore together. None of us could be held back
at that moment.
So we all piled into
the shuttle, and joked to cover up our nerves as we shook our way through our
first successful atmospheric entry, the thick safety harnesses the only thing
keeping us in our jostling seats. And we made it through the atmosphere. We
were coasting down. We were ready to see what the universe had to offer.
I'll never forget the
scream of metal as one of the engines collapsed and suddenly the entire control
panel lit up like the 4th of July, all the alarms overlapping in a jangled
cacophony. I shot out of my seat and lurched toward the engine room, the
shuttle rolling wildly beneath me. I think Captain Jeppson screamed at me to
stay put, but I didn't hear any words. By the time I had wrestled opened the
hatch of the engine room, I was walking on the wall.
The engine room was
crowded mass of metal designed to do everything automatically from a control
panel, never meant to have more than two people in it at a time. I had only
just reached the seized engine when the shuttle crashed and everything around
me exploded into flying metal and wires. One of the loose wires, spelling death
in its sparks brushed across the broken engine casing. The shock sent me flying
through the crowded space. I crashed into the condenser; smashing my right hip
and breaking my arm and cheekbone, too winded even to scream. I fell to the
narrow catwalk that passed for the floor, smashing my knee and ankle on my
useless leg and spraining both wrists. The condenser fell toward me and stopped
six inches above my head, held up by a line of pumps.
I think that's when
the shuttle stopped moving, but I couldn't tell for certain because my head was
spinning like I was caught in an enormous gyroscope. I tried to get to my hands
and knees, but my wrists gave out in a fire of agony and I collapsed. I managed
to turn my head in time to throw up before blackness swooped in from the
corners of my vision and overwhelmed me.
Time happened,
slipping all around me in my unconscious state. When I came to, I was lying on
the ground thirty feet outside the wreck. People had come to pull me from the wreckage
and had patched me up. Someone saw that I was awake and forced a horrible spicy
drink into me while others carried the bodies out one at a time and laid them
in a neat line.
That’s when I felt
time freeze, when I saw them lying there. People I'd worked and lived with for
three years, people I had competed with fiercely and worked together to learn
real teamwork. My second overcrowded, mismatched family. And they were gone. I
never got to see their faces, never got to see anything more than their
outlines in the dimming light as evening came. I was too far away, and by the
time I managed to sit up, they were already being wrapped in great long lengths
of suffocating cloth.
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