Casualty

2029 October 16 06:30
Test Year 3, Day 9, 11:00 CST
Tau, Feynmann Mountains

Melinda Yang’s ultralight had been fitted with radar. She was the only pilot who could fly the craft, despite her relative lack of experience. The others were too heavy and now that Dorman had come back, with the Eagle and the first group of people to be resettled from MIT, she was able to do field work again.

The survey teams had long since worked their way across all the territory within eight hundred kilometers of campus, but now they were searching the terrain again, looking for a six hundred kilogram mass of metal. The last three of Chao’s sympathizers had taken one of the GPS vans when they’d fled, and it hadn’t been found yet. The implication was therefore that it had been abandoned and that the three exiles were either dead or had scavenged the necessities for survival. The van’s maximum range was about eight hundred klicks with the extra gas cans they had piled in, so that was the radius of the search.

Melinda had been flying sweeps for six days now and was seven hundred kilometers west of the coastline, on the far side of the Feynman Mountains from Caltech. These were serious mountains, like the Sierra Nevadas of the original California. The radar sweeps had missed the highest levels, since the ultralight could only fly so high. However, those were covered in permanent snow pack and the van would not have been able to climb that high in any case. The prior survey here was cursory. The far side of the range had been visited only once before. Most of the data was long-distance photographs, nothing more.

Melinda had launched from the temporary survey base in the foothills and flown up the valley belonging to one of the Throop’s minor tributaries, then through a pass that dipped down to 3200 meters. She would sweep with the radar for a hundred and fifty kilometers in the loose dry-environment forest on the back of the range, then return.

She got the ping as she crested the pass. Looking down with binoculars, she made out what might be wheel tracks in the ground cover below. “Something at 15 north of west. Turning.” The tracks ended in a rockslide. But there was still the trace ahead of her. If the van had been wrecked it had remained almost intact and near the surface.

Twenty minutes later, with an hour of reserve remaining, she saw the white of the van, upright and past the base of the slide, with what looked to be a tent beside it. There were scattered trees here, but most of the rain fell on the other face of the mountains. The ultralights could land.

She sent over the coordinates. “Nothing on the radio, no signs of life. I’m going to head down. Send the others behind me.”

Her landing was slow and cautious, ending about fifty meters from the van with the chute spread out behind. She could launch again by herself if she had to. She tied lines to two trees just in case the wind picked up. The ninja’s wits were about her. She was wearing reasonably protective clothes, but if there were any shooting, she’d probably be dead before she could draw the pistol at her belt.

The radio was on approximately continuously. The second and third ultralights had started climbing to the pass. Melinda dictated a description back to the base, in addition to a dozen photos using her phone’s camera. The van seemed undamaged, at least from a distance and on the outside. There were no footprints here, but bristlegrass groundcover wouldn’t keep them. When she cried out a greeting, there was no response except a small type of zard running into a pile of rocks.

She went to the tent first. The smell was what warned her. Most Tau insect analogues had no taste for human flesh, and they also did not buzz. She opened the flap to find two bodies. They looked to have been dead for about a month, but were identifiable. “It’s the two men. No sign of Mackenzie.” She found a book on the floor. “Some sort of diary. I’m taking it with me. I’ll leave the rest for the autopsy.”

She checked the remnants of a fire pit. It had been dead for a long time, and little bits of pede exoskeleton implied that they’d largely hunted out the area before then. Then she came to the van.

In the front seat, the first thing she noticed was the radio. It had been smashed to pieces. Behind, there was a mess of supply remnants: empty food containers, empty gas cans, and in the very back a pile of wadded up blankets, covering a stain on the floor. The fabric adhered weakly to itself as she moved them apart with her gloved hands. The stain was a small amount of earth-mammal blood.

That and a wild mess of tracks, most leading to desiccated piles of human waste, was all Melinda found in the first hour. She moved back to the paraglider and started to look over the diary.

It wasn’t strictly a diary. It started out as Mackenzie complaining about the idea of risking everyone on Earth against the potential prize of negative matter. She had apparently been a follower of Chao, along with her boyfriend Justin (‘take that profilers!’ one page gloated). With Justin’s former roommate, Dan Alman, they’d raided the field supplies before most of the other exiles. They had taken the van, two tents, food, guns, fuel, other supplies, and been on the road for several hours before the ninjas were even aware of the exodus.

Mackenzie had been approving of all of this, and even had some vague plans for ways to strike back against Will and the others at campus. She had listened to the Screamers’ broadcasts, at first considering them just enemy propaganda to be filtered for occasional truths. But she remembered all that she heard – Marriner’s broadcasts, the testimony of escapees, Maness’ declaration of the hostage bomb.

Just after they crossed over the pass in the Feynmanns, the passage of the van had started the rockslide. They had been very lucky to ride it out as well as they had, but the van had been totaled and Justin had been injured in such a way that he could barely walk, after three days of rest. The implication was some sort of permanent nerve damage. He had smashed the radio so that they could not call for help, although Mackenzie and Dan had thought at the time that it was part of the crash.

It had taken them almost half an Earth year to get this far, moving the van by perhaps thirty kilometers every seven or eight days. They had been camping, and Mackenzie and Justin sharing a tent and a sleeping bag. The diary was not graphic, but it was clear they’d been having relatively frequent sex. And two weeks after they had crossed the range, Mackenzie started to suspect that she was pregnant. That didn’t worry her in and of itself, but she didn’t tell Justin at first. She just started to hint that they should try to fix the radio, or try to find another way over the mountains.

Dan had taken over hunting duties, and surveyed the hills and foothills around the crash site. Justin had appeared to try and fix the radio, but later he said it was damaged beyond repair, and by then the seasons of Tau had changed. With the wet season, all the possible passes Dan had been able to find were covered in snow pack.

Mackenzie, now in her third month, might have believed her boyfriend, were it not for the wire fragments she found one day while she was digging a hole for a new latrine. When she had confronted Justin about this, he denied it, and expressed no desire to try to get back to civilization. When she revealed that she was pregnant, it did not end well. He accused her of the baby being Dan’s child. The entries for the next several months were fragmentary and rather confused, but there was a gradual progression visible.

Dan had kept distance for several months, to let the two make peace with each other. He would backpack the smaller tent and one of the guns and come back two days later with an edible animal, killed with a trap more often than the gun. There was some reconciliation but not much: Justin did accept the baby as his own, but he wanted Mackenzie to abort it. She wanted to keep the child, and he eventually accepted that there was no way to safely end the pregnancy. But she started to sleep alone, on the floor of the back of the van.

Six months later, Mackenzie went into labor. The girl was healthy, but the next hour marked her entrance to hell.

“I named her Sarah. Looks like she’ll have to take my last name and no other. Dan helped with the delivery. Justin just sat in his tent. Dan went in there after helping me clean up, leaving me in the back of the van with her, wrapped in a blanket. I did not see what happened in there, and I couldn’t hear them, but there were at least three gunshots. It took me a day before I was able to move well enough to see what had happened. They were both dead.

“It’s been five days now. I think I can walk enough to carry Sarah, the tent, one of the guns and some ammunition, and a little food and water. I’m going to try and find another way across the mountains. I think my best bet is to go north. To the south the mountains seem to get taller. I don’t know if I’ll make it, but it’s our only hope. If you read this, I’m willing to give myself up to whoever you are, as long as we will both be safe. I’d even accept help from the Examiners.” The diary ended.

Calling in the change of plan, Melinda re-launched her ultralight, the parachute bouncing until the wind caught it and swept her aloft. She kept to low altitude, just thirty meters up, and moved forward at only thirty kilometers an hour. She could only work sixty kilometers north before she’d need to turn back or wait for the others to drop a fuel can.

Three klicks up she saw the first campsite. Mackenzie hadn’t been able to travel far. The ultralight passed several more sites, each only a couple of kilometers past the last. Then the ninja saw the orange blanket spread out over something in a clearing ahead of her. If there was sound, she couldn’t hear over the fan. She called it in and started down. When she pulled off her noise-canceling headset, after shutting off the motor, she heard the crying.

It stopped as she moved towards the tent, her gun out. She heard the sound of metal sliding over fabric. “Mackenzie, are you in there? It’s Melinda. I found your diary.”

There was a dull thump and a little more crying, followed by hushing sounds. The other’s voice was strained and her voice wheezed. “Come in. The ninjas are here?” She broke into a fit of coughing.

“Just me for now. Backup is on its way.” Melinda holstered her gun and knelt to the entrance of the tent. Then the smell hit her in the face.

Mackenzie’s right leg had been wounded and untended. The denim of her pants and the muscle down to the bone had been bitten and torn by teeth and spines, and reeked of decay and some form of pede venom. She had dragged herself only partway into the tent, and held her daughter to her chest with both hands. Her pants were fouled, but above her waist she and the baby were clean. Two empty water bottles were sprawled on the floor of the tent. A shotgun lay on the ground next to her.

“It’s been three days. I couldn’t leave her.” The coughing started again. Hearing her mother, the baby started to cry.

Melinda was wearing another set of gloves now, and gently took the child. “What happened?” She didn’t bother to mention that this was all being sent back to the base, but started to take the infant’s vital signs.

“I was out scavenging, once I’d set up the tent and Sarah was asleep. The pede died, but … it got me first. All I could do was drag myself back here. I couldn’t risk getting her dirty, and she needed to be fed and cleaned. The water ran out yesterday.” Painfully, and with a squelching sound from beneath her body, Mackenzie levered herself up. “How is she? … Don’t hand her back. My hands are dirty.”

“She’s dehydrated and starting to get a little shocky. I’ve got some water here and oxygen in a tank outside. That will help, but …” The ninja stopped talking. The shotgun’s barrel was now pointed at her face.

“Leave me to whatever backup you’ve got. Get my daughter out of this shithole and to a doctor and a nurse as fast as you can. Got it?”

Melinda started to back up, slowly, carrying the baby. “Alright. Stay calm.”

The barrel lowered. “I’m more calm now than I’ve been in a long time. When you get there, tell everyone that … I’m sorry. Now get out of here. Go!”

The ninja moved out of the tent and ran for the ultralight, cradling Sarah in her arms. The others were going to be here in less than an hour. They’d take good care of Mackenzie, or at least that’s what Melinda told herself as she sliced the radar scanner off of the bottom of the seat to free up mass. Sarah was weak, but able to cry when Melinda slipped the oxygen mask over her face and thin brown hair. The infant cried when the fans turned on, she cried when she felt them leaving the ground. She only stopped crying when, clinging to Melinda’s harness as well as her little hands could manage, she saw the mountains and snow pack swirl in front of her. Her infant eyes did not properly parse the image, but she nonetheless seemed enthralled.

By the time Melinda had gotten back over the pass and to the base, the other two pilots had landed. They found Mackenzie unconscious but alive. As they moved her out of the soiled tent, they discovered the wounds on her back, contaminated by feces and urine. She should not have been able to move with those cuts, but she had. More equipment was flown over the mountains to support the medics, and one of the vans started for a more stable pass. But Mackenzie had gone into septic shock. She never came back.