woke to something scrabbling on his faceplate, trying to get into his helmet. “The fuck!” he said, but it was only his own hand, his fingers digging at the plastic. For a second he was too disoriented to recall which was the bad one: removing the helmet, or leaving it on. When he remembered, he jammed his hands under his armpits to keep them still.
Beanfield’s EV suit was dusted light orange, the same color as the rock. The sky was a dark soup of boiling orange-purple clouds. It looked like the most furious storm he’d ever seen, but it was silent, with no rain.
He crawled out from the shallow cave. In all directions lay cracked orange rock. No vegetation. No sand on the beach. Only thick black water, bulging and withdrawing without sound. His breathing was loud in his own ears. How toxic is this air? he wondered. Pretty toxic, probably. He still wanted to take off the helmet.
“Jackson,” he said.
“Anders,” she said in his ear. “Are you out in the open?”
“Yes.”
“Hide.”
He looked around. Nothing moving as far as he could see. Nothing at all but rock and black water and bruised sky.
“You still have the gun?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
* * *
—
He hunched in the cave with Beanfield. Occasionally their suits exhaled waste like the gasps of drowning children. Whenever he moved, his suit fabric crunched and crinkled; as he sat against the rock, his survival core dug into his back. He hated it even though it was keeping him alive; even though it was sucking in whatever toxic mix of gases passed for atmosphere on this planet and making it breathable, as well as regulating his temperature and monitoring his vitals via an array of tiny pins he couldn’t feel. Once he became dehydrated or malnourished, one of those pins would become significantly more feelable, opening up a line that could feed him intravenously. He’d spent thirty-six hours in one of these suits during a training exercise, and when they let’d him out and asked him how it was, he’d said, “It sucked.” The supply officer said, “Better than the alternative, though.”
Yeah. That was right. “Better than the alternative,” he told Beanfield. Beanfield didn’t respond. He checked Jackson’s location on ping, which was about all his film was good for now. She was a white dot surrounded by emptiness, as if she were moving through space, with none of the usual complementary information the ship provided. He felt a pang at that, a weird twisting in his guts. The ship had been a prison for two years but he missed it, too.
Thirty minutes later, Jackson clambered into the cave, her suit and helmet dusted orange. “Stop pinging me,” she said. She forced her way alongside Beanfield, who squashed against him. “It uses power.”
He’d been thinking about that. “You still have a matter converter?”
She nodded and unslung the metal box from her shoulder. His understanding was that you could feed just about anything into a matter converter and it would accumulate juice, which could be used to charge their suits and the lightning gun. “How’s Beanfield?”
“Hasn’t woken up yet.”
Jackson peered into Beanfield’s faceplate. “The rock is inert. Same with the ocean. The atmosphere contains oxygen but also sulfur trioxide. The whole place is chemically depleted. Like they stripped it.”
“Who? Salamanders?”
She nodded. “I’ve seen fliers. Not many, but we have to keep out of sight.”
“They followed us down?”
“I think they got here first. This could be what a planet looks like once they’re done with it.”
He rubbed his thumb along the gun. “Any solar?”
“Not enough.”
“Maybe the clouds will clear.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. How much charge on that?”
“It switches between zero and one.” He shook it. The readout flipped. “Right now, one.”
“If we want our cores to keep running longer than a few days, we need to find something to feed to the converter.”
He nodded. There was silence. He went ahead and said it. “Any chance of a rescue?”
She said nothing. He couldn’t