Rock: Fiction by Joanna Lees

       

“MUD!”

The mud matched the flat grey of the desert plain so well that we were half a dozen steps into it before Lee shouted. It closed around our ankles and slid over the tops of our boots, tepid and clinging as we scrambled back to solid ground. Horace got out first and stood like an anchor, giving us each a hand out of the suction that threatened to pull us under.

Lee was the first one in and the last one out. The second his feet touched the cracked earth again he dropped his pack and fell flat on his back. “I hate this planet,” he muttered, his chest heaving from the narrow escape. “I mean it. All it’s done for five days is give us the finger.”

Mack leaned over with her hands on the knees of her grubby, tan flight suit. “I’m not complaining yet,” she muttered. “We got out of the ship in one piece, didn’t we?”

Horace unhooked the dented metal canteen from his belt and unscrewed the cap. Fine sand grated in the threads. “Mack’s right,” he said, taking a sip and passing it to me. “It coulda been a lot worse.”

I took the canteen and sat down next to Lee, feeling the sides of my boots squish where mud had gotten into the laces. “At least we can see the beacon now.” I gestured with the canteen at a hump of rock about two miles out into the mud, then drank and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “That’s a start.” I handed the canteen to Mack and considered: Five inhabited continents on this planet, and the Audrey went down over the sixth.

I leaned back on my hands and studied the horizon. Besides the rock and a shallow stream a few yards away, the landscape was empty of any natural features. There was only the mud, stretching left and right in front of us as far as we could see. Here and there it bubbled, stirred from beneath by things with useless eyes and too many legs. I tried not to think about it.

We sat on the dry dirt like sunbathers, hemmed in by an ocean no ships ever sailed. A line of tall silver poles, at least ten meters high and topped with blue lights, marched ahead of us into the mud towards the rock. We knew they led to a rescue beacon, and we knew that the captain had gone ahead of us to activate it. If he hadn’t returned to the ship within thirty-six hours, we were to follow after him and assume he made it.

That was three days ago.

Horace eased himself down to a sitting position, stretching his thick legs out in front of him. “I don’t like the way that thing’s eyeballin’ me,” he said, squinting at a carrion bird perched on one of the poles. “I hope it knows how to wait its turn.”

“It’s just picking out the best meal,” Lee drawled, and rolled over onto his stomach with his head pillowed on his arms. “You’ve got more meat than the girls put together.”

“Hey!” I protested. “I’m not that skinny.”

“Yes you are,” Mack grinned, her black eyes twinkling. We were both small, but she was birdlike -- ninety-five pounds at most and could stand under Horace’s arm without bending her knees. I was just, well, skinny. She dropped her pack from her shoulders and sat down on it, kicking up dust that blew back on her shoulders, boots and ash blonde hair. She brushed at it, irritated. “Stupid dust.”

“At least on you, it blends in,” Lee grumbled, rubbing his own hair so some brown showed through. Despite a wicked case of windburn and four days without a shave or a wash, he looked good. He had very straight, white teeth. “I’ve got the opposite problem.”

Horace pulled his sleeve over his hand and rubbed at his shoulder until the crimson freight corps patch started to show through the dirt and fuel stains. “So do we still follow the lights now, or what?” he asked. “They wouldn’t put them where there isn’t a path.”

I looked up at the nearest bulb, glowing dull aqua against the white, hazy sky. “I don’t get it,” I said, shading my eyes and following the line where it marched into the muck at six-meter intervals. If I tilted my head I could see them follow the curve of the planet’s surface. “What are they anchored on?”

“Who cares?” said Lee. “We can’t follow them.”

Horace raised his hand. “Mack? Question.”

Mack sat up straight. “What?”

“What’s the itinerary from here?”

We all turned to look at her. Lee was second-in-command on paper, but that was only to ease things along in certain communities. Mack had been with the captain the longest, and in practice they split the role. Lee didn’t seem to eager to fight her for control in the captain’s absence. She stood up and looked out over the mud for several minutes, hands on her hips, chewing the inside of her bottom lip. Then she sat down again. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’m going to need time to think about it.”

“Well, don’t take too long,” Lee advised. He licked his finger and held it up into the wind. “Something tells me we shouldn’t hang around here for more than a day or two. My two cents, we should go that way.” He pointed north, to our left.

“Noted,” Mack muttered, and pulled a file out of her pack and started reading. “Just give me some time to think.”



One day later, she was still thinking.

We set up a campsite a little ways from the edge of the dry ground, four sleepers arranged in a square with our packs in the center. We had no fire, although it was warm enough we didn’t really need one. There wasn’t anything to burn, anyway.

The beacon on the rock twinkled and glowed, a brightly-lit spark that teased us from far away like lights at a party where we hadn’t been invited. We all knew how it worked and what it meant; the rescue system had been in place for a good forty years on the inhabited worlds, and it expanded every year. It worked well; fatalities and cargo loss numbers in a given area always went down significantly within a year of installation. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it got the job done -- provided there were no barriers in the way.

Being stuck on the path was starting to wear on us. Horace was absorbed in his Bible, moving his lips as he read. It was opened to somewhere in the middle, but I couldn’t tell what part he was reading. Mack stood at the edge of the mud, staring out toward the rock and occasionally counting on her fingers. Lee sat cross-legged against the wide base of one of the poles, watching her and marking with a pencil stub in a pocket-sized notebook. I looked down at my doodles in the dust, wiped them out and walked over to him. “What are you writing?”

Lee snapped the notebook shut. “Nothing,” he said, and slipped it into his breast pocket. “Do you have anything to eat? I’m getting hungry.” He patted his hip pockets. “I’m out of everything.”

“Everything? Even jerky?”

“Since when does jerky count as food?” He grinned up at me, thin and forced, eroded by the constant wind and sun.

“Point taken.” I plopped down next to him and sighed. “This wasn’t what you promised me when you got me this job,” I said, poking him in the shoulder. “You said I’d have adventure and security. My mom’s gonna give you hell if she finds out about this.”

“If she finds out,” Lee said under his breath. Then, louder: “Who puts a beacon in the middle of a mud flat, anyway? Is there another way over?”

I looked south, to our left. “Looks like more of the same,” I said. A sudden gust fluttered the thin leaves of Horace’s book and threatened to wreak havoc with our camp site. “What’s that you said about not staying her too long?” I asked, scanning the sky. It was calm, although the eastern horizon looked a little smudgier than yesterday. To the north, the sun was a bluish circle behind the haze. “At least the weather’s better than -- well, than a few days ago.”

Lee looked at me sideways. “You think the weather caused the crash?” he asked. “You think it was that gust front we flew into?”

I held up my hands. “You’d know better than me,” I said. “You’re the navigator. I just handle the paperwork.” I sighed. “It’s just -- Horace said it was a really familiar run, and that the captain never had any trouble flying it. So ... I wondered.”

Lee shifted in his seat, then stood up. “Sometimes it’s the familiar runs that get you,” he said, looking at something over my shoulder. Another gust came through, kicking up billows of dust like waves, and he turned to walk back to his sleeper. “People get careless.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, rocking back to look up at him. “But Wagoner’s not careless,” I said. “He’s always careful. Even when he doesn’t have to be.”

Mack, standing at parade rest with her hands behind her back, turned her head a fraction of an inch toward us. I caught the glitter of her black eyes before she turned back and called, “Horace, could you bring me the map printouts, please?”

Horace put away his Bible and reached for his pack, fumbling with the clasps and drawing out a manila folder stuffed with clearsheets. “Got it,” he grunted, lumbering to his feet.

“Thanks.” Mack met him halfway, taking the folder before he had to get completely to his feet. “Don’t get up. I know your knee’s bothering you.”

“Eh, it’s all right,” Horace mumbled. He was a bad liar. “I can make it.”

Mack just smiled, wide on her narrow face, and went back to her post, flipping through the contents of the folder. She selected a clearsheet and held it up to the light, showing a line map of the crash site. When she pressed the lower right corner between her thumb and finger, the lines dissolved and reformed themselves into a wider view of our current position. A line of blinking dots marked our track, and I saw that it led straight out over the mud. Mack frowned and pinched the next corner, but she lowered the sheet and I could no longer see what she was looking at.



Horace went back to his book. Lee looked at him, at Mack and at the rock on the horizon, then flopped down on his back next to me. “You’d think that the Audrey would be the safest ship in the gather,” he muttered. “What with Wagoner’s record.” He put one arm across his eyes and the other beneath his head. “Although that’s a bit of a double-edged sword, now that I think about it.” He moved his arm so one eye peeked out at me. It was grey, the same color as the mud. “You ever see his medals?”

I shook my head that I hadn’t. “Horace told me he was a division leader in the Cluster War, but that’s all I know,” I said. “And Mack told me not to ever ask about it, so I didn’t.”

Lee raised three fingers without lifting his hand. “Two red stars and an outstanding conduct,” he said. “Plus just about every flying award you can get. He should be running a base ship somewhere, not some crummy one-eight freighter. No offense meant to the dearly departed,” he added, tapping where the ship’s name was stitched on his breast pocket. “But it’s ... incongruous, I guess is the word.”

I shrugged and rocked back on my rear. “Maybe,” I said, squinting up at the sun, now smeary and indistinct behind the haze. “When you got me on here, you acted like all that was a good thing.”

“Hey, you could’ve said no,” Lee said, punching my shoulder a little harder than was necessary. I winced, and he turned his head, looking out across the flat plain. “I can’t imagine we’re supposed to follow the lights out into the mud like that. There has to be another way across.”

“Captain would have marked it if he’d gone another way,” I pointed out. “He never changes his instructions without letting us know somehow.”

“Oh, so now you know the captain better than me, huh?” Lee laughed. “You’ve only been on the Audrey for eleven months.” Everyone on board still referred to me as the new kid, but it stung when Lee did it. “You can’t build that much trust in less than a year.”

“Some people can’t build it in twenty years, either,” I said under my breath, glancing sidelong at him. He didn’t hear me. “Wagoner would have left us a mark or a signal if he changed course,” I asserted. “He wanted us to follow the lights, and I haven’t seen anything to make me doubt that. I trust him.”

“Again with that,” Le snorted. “Why?”

“Because he’s the captain,” I said, and pulled out my ponytail to buy some time to consider. “And we’re supposed to follow him no matter what.” I drew my hair over my shoulder and tried working out the tangles with my fingers. The reddish-brown color had been bleached dull and greyed by the environment, and I tied it up again so I didn’t have to see it. “And ... I guess because he hasn’t given me a reason not to.”

Lee’s face was turned away from me, but I saw the corner of his eye crease. He didn’t like my answer. “Sometimes I forget that you’re younger than me,” he muttered.

“Only by two years,” I replied. I stood up, stretching my back. “Next time we’re home I’m definitely telling my mom you got me into this.”

“Why?” Lee snapped, and sat up straight in a single, quick motion. “What do you mean?” I froze in mid-stretch, taken aback, and he jumped to his feet. He was six inches taller than me. “How is this my fault?”

I leaned back on my heels. “Be ... cause you signed me on?” I said. We were all used to close quarters, but I still felt crowded. “What did you think I meant?”

“Hey hey hey!” Horace stuffed his book into his pack and scrambled up off the ground. “What’s up with you two? Ow.” He winced and leaned over, massaging his knee. “Oh, ow.”

“Lee!” Mack barked, snapping the folder shut. “She didn’t mean anything by it. Stand down. Horace, are you all right?”

Horace shook his head. “I’ll be fine,” he muttered. “Really. I’m trying to save my meds.”

“That’s a good thought,” Lee said, turning his head to speak to Horace but keeping his position. “We don’t know how long we’ll be out here.”

I ducked away from Lee and went to my sleeper. “Yes we do,” I said. “The beacons are only good for so long. I may be the new girl, but I know that much.”

“Ellis is right,” Mack nodded. “Horace, do what you need to get yourself through to the beacon, and pack up. We’re moving out.”

Horace picked up his pack and cradled it in one arm while he dug through it. “When?”

“As soon as possible.” Mack jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the clouds. “Eat, hit the head, whatever you need to do, do it now. We need to go before the weather hits.”

Horace stopped digging through his pack long enough to raise a hand. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just stay here?” he asked. “If we leave the lights in a dust storm, they’re even less likely to find us.”

Mack looked down at the folder in her hands. “I know,” she said softly. “But we’re not leaving the lights.”

Lee raised an eyebrow. “We’re going back to the ship?” he questioned, sounding testy. “Do I get a say in this?”

“No.” A blast of sand hit, pressing her suit against the outline of her thin frame and sending us grabbing for our goggles. “We’re going to follow the lights.”

I jumped to help strike camp, rolling and stowing my sleeper. Mack and Horace worked quickly beside me, and we had our packs on our shoulders in less than a hundred beats. “Sound off,” Mack called as we followed her to the edge of the mud. “Horace!”

“Aye!” Horace barked.

“Ellis!”

I choked on the dust and rasped out, “Aye!”

“Lee!”

There was no answer. Mack froze in place, one foot suspended over the mud, and made an about-face. “Lee! Let’s go!”

Lee stood beside the second-to-last pole before the mud, holding his pack with both straps over one shoulder, not moving. His blank, black goggles stared at us without blinking, and he said, “No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” Mack’s mouth dropped open. “Don’t be an idiot. We’ve already wasted a day out here.”

Lee’s hand tightened around the straps. “I’m not going that way.”

“Why on earth not?” Mack gestured widely to the expanse of nothing on either side. “There’s nowhere else to go! You’ll die out there!”

“You already cheated death once this week,” Horace rumbled. “Odds like that don’t come up often.”

Lee flinched. The sudden motion snapped things into focus for me. “You kept trying to get me to doubt the captain,” I said quietly, or as quietly as I could manage without the storm front drowning me out. “And I think I just figured out why.”

Lee’s upper lip curled. “And why’s that?” he sneered. Mack started to protest, but he waved her off. “I want to hear the kid’s great insight.”

He only called me kid when he didn’t want me around. Mack and Horace both looked at me, and I looked at my boots. “You said familiar runs can turn into ruts,” I mumbled, and cleared my throat. “But I figure they can be just as bad for navigators as for pilots.”

The sneer flickered, and Lee stepped forward, speaking through his teeth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he seethed.

I wanted to duck behind Horace and hide, to let the scouring wind scrub it all away. Lee always knew better than me; what was I doing questioning him? He was my last line to home. The edge of the hard earth a few steps away broke off and fell into the mud with a plop, and I spoke stronger. “I know you. You’ve been backbiting and planting seeds ever since the captain left, and now you want us to change course. ” Dust rasped against the back of my neck and inside my collar. It felt ... clean. “I know you. You hate taking chances. The only time you take risks is when you think it’ll save you from something you know you’ve got coming.”

Two sets of dark glasses turned from me to him. Lee dropped his pack and started toward me, but Horace put his hand on my shoulder and he stopped. My chest felt tight, and not just from the billows of dust pressing hard against me. I stared down the tunnel formed by the sides of my goggles, trying to catch my breath.

Mack put down her own pack and crossed to Lee. He loomed over her, but when she spoke it was low enough that Horace and I couldn’t hear it. Lee’s response was similarly muted, but whatever she said next sent him into a rage. “You have no idea what’s under that mud!” he screamed. “You don’t know how far that land bridge goes, or if it’s even there! For all we know he sank in the mud himself! We’ll just follow him down! It’s suicide!”

“We don’t know that,” Mack replied, audible through a lull in the wind. “But I do know that leaving the path is the worst thing we can do right now. I can’t lead the others into that.”

“And who made you the leader?” Lee shot back. “We’re even on that count. I’ve got just as much say as you do.”

Once again Mack was drowned out by the wind, but when she finished speaking she returned to her pack. “He’s going north,” she muttered, setting it back on her shoulders. “Anyone wants to join him, you’re free to do so.” Setting her right foot into the mud, exactly in line with the lights, she sank an inch into the surface and stopped. Carefully she brought her left foot in beside it, then set out with careful steps toward the next marker. Horace gave my shoulder a squeeze and followed her.

Lee gathered up his pack and put it on. “Decision time, Ellis,” he called, adjusting his goggles against the growing storm. “Are you coming or not?”

It took everything I could manage to shake my head.

“Fine,” Lee said, and turned north. After a few long strides he stopped and turned back. “Look up the crash of the Kyrie Eleison!” he shouted back to me, his words torn and broken by the wind. He was leaning forward with his arms straight at his sides, like a schoolboy screaming a final taunt when everyone else was already gone. “See what you think of your captain then!”

The others were waiting for me at the next light. I turned on my heel, head erect, and started after them. When I looked back, he was swallowed up by the storm.

Joanna Lees is a cubicle monkey who goes home to a cat and a journalism degree. She is currently saving up to buy a bicycle. She blogs when she feels the urge at http://quartofsoup.blogspot.com.