A moan rose to her left. Prynn looked that way, still feeling bound by the fetters of sleep. But then she saw Shar. His blanket had fallen from him, and his upper body had come partially off his bedroll and onto the ground. His arms moved in small, irregular spasms. He seemed to be asleep, but also in pain.
Another moan escaped Shar’s lips. The familiarity of it brought Prynn to the recognition that this sound had invaded her dreams, had masqueraded as the voice of her father’s agony. Why not Mom’s?she thought suddenly, not knowing why the question had come, but deciding at once that she did not want an answer to it.
As Prynn made her way over to Shar, the charred, skeletal remains of Chaffee’s bow caught her eye. The flames had stopped burning late yesterday, but even now, narrow strands of smoke escaped the wreckage and drifted upward. The calm of the scene contradicted the awful chaos of the crash.
Prynn reached down beside Shar and picked up the tricorder she had set to monitor his condition during the night; she had wanted to be alerted if he required medical attention while she slept. She had also left a second tricorder near the head of her own bedroll, configured to patrol a perimeter around their small camp. Nothing had triggered an alarm on either device.
Standing over Shar, Prynn reset the tricorder to an interactive scanning mode. Shar cried out again as she held the device over him near his head. She slowly moved it down the length of his body, and saw that he had mended some overnight. His vital signs had not improved much, but they had at least remained level. His dislocated shoulder and bruised ribs appeared better, obviously owing to Vaughn’s treatment, but his horribly splintered leg would demand more than the splint and the simple first aid he had been given. Worst of all, the injury to one of his internal organs would continue to threaten his life if he did not see a doctor before long.
Prynn put down the tricorder, then retrieved the medkit from the survival cache and prepared to administer a painkiller. The hiss of the hypospray against Shar’s neck seemed unusually loud against the backdrop of silence. She stood back up and stayed there for a few minutes, the spent hypo in her hand, watching and listening as Shar’s movements calmed and his moaning ceased. Then, very gently, she eased his upper body back onto the bedroll, pulling the blanket over him and up to his chin.
As she returned the hypospray and the medkit to their places, a chill ran through Prynn’s body. The temperature had dipped during the night, though not too much, and her blanket had kept her warm. Already this morning, the temperature had begun to rise back toward yesterday’s level of low double digits—not exactly comfortable, but not terrible either.
Prynn retrieved a ration pack and a water container from the cache, then returned to her bedroll. She slipped on her jacket, then sat down and consumed what would have to pass for her breakfast. As she ate, she thought about the day ahead. She would continue to work on reconstructing the transporter from the salvageable components of the shuttle wreckage, and she would have to consider reviving Shar at some point. He had neither eaten nor drunk since before the crash, and she had no means of providing him sustenance intravenously.
When she finished eating, Prynn put the water container and the spent ration pack back in the cache, then took a combadge out of a jacket pocket. She set the combadge to maintain an open channel with her own, and placed it near Shar’s head. She had done the same thing yesterday, wanting to keep a comlink open to him while she was away from the camp. She also set the tricorder back to an automated scanning mode to monitor his condition.
Then, gathering the few tools she had, she headed out to Chaffee’s aft section, where she would work on the transporter and an escape from this dead planet.
The bent metal panel seemed to pull free, but then it snapped back into place. A sharp edge caught the index finger of Prynn’s left hand, slicing it open. Pain flared, and she sat back amid the debris of the downed shuttle and kicked out in frustration. Her boot impacted the panel, drawing a loud clang, and then one side of the panel slipped down a few centimeters. A second later, the entire metal piece fell away from the bulkhead.
Prynn looked at the newly revealed circuitry that she had been trying to access, then laughed. The sound was a lonely one in the empty wastes, made more so because she knew that it contained no humor. She peered up through where the roof of the shuttle should have been and regarded the forbidding sky. The clouds, despite their constant movement, stared back like the unchanging and impenetrable walls of a prison.
Her finger throbbed, and she lifted her hand and examined it. Blood flowed from a cut running lengthwise up the tip. She raised her finger to her lips and sucked at the wound, clearing it, then looked at it again. The cut reached deep into her flesh, she saw, and it filled quickly again with blood.
Prynn put her fingertip back in her mouth, applying pressure to the cut. She got to her feet and walked from the rear compartment of the shuttle, out through the path she had cleared through the wreckage. The soles of her boots scraped along the ground as she strode back toward the burned-out shell of Chaffee’s forward section and, beyond it, the camp.
As she walked, she thought of Vaughn, walking himself, trying to reach the source of the pulse. He was out there somewhere, alone, and she wondered what he was feeling right now. And she wondered what she herself was feeling. After he had departed yesterday, she had gone to work on the transporter and, even given the circumstances and the surroundings, that had somehow provided her a sense of normality. Prynn had been able to focus on the work, narrowing her vision and thoughts to the task at hand.
Today, though…
Today had been different. While she had continued to make progress with the transporter, her mind had begun to wander. She had found herself recalling the days after her mother had died, and the terrible sense of loss that, though experienced less often as the years had passed, had never really left her—and never would, she knew. Prynn supposed that such morose remembrances stemmed from facing her own mortality. With rescue from Defiantrealistically impossible during the next day and a half, and Vaughn’s ability to stop the pulse uncertain at best, she understood that the remainder of her life might now be measured in hours. She did not want to die, and she would do everything she could to prevent that from happening, but for all of that, her thoughts dwelled not on her own death, but on that of her mother. The days of despair Prynn had experienced after her mother’s death continued to recur to her, no matter how much she attempted to concentrate on recovering the transporter.
The days after Mom’s death,she thought, are still going on.Seven years later or seventy, each day Prynn lived would be a day lived after that dreadful event. And no matter what happened in the next day and a half, that would always be the case.
Prynn passed the blackened bow of the shuttle, the camp coming into view beyond it. Shar, she saw, had not moved from atop his bedroll. She headed directly for the survival cache, where she took a dermal regenerator out of the medkit. She cleared her wound once more, then raised the device and switched it on. A narrow blue beam emerged from the tip, accompanied by a high-pitched whine. As she ran the healing light across her fingertip, her flesh began to knit together, a pinpoint of heat sparking her nerve endings. Within a minute or so, she finished, and deactivated the regenerator.
Something moved at the periphery of her sight. Prynn turned quickly, and saw nothing. She gazed out at the open land beyond the camp and saw only a barren vista. She peered at the metallic blanket pooled on her bedroll, and then over at Shar—