She didn’t know what to do.

5

She stood there for an undeterminable stretch of truly awful minutes, locked in a kind of mindless, paralyzed panic, aware that time was passing but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. It was bad, and she often thought back on that moment later with the idea that that had to be at least some of what Hell was like, if there was a Hell worse than this, but eventually Amber looked down and saw Nicci below her, huddled small against a twisted flap of metal in the torn hull. Smoke poured through this wound so thickly it formed a solid wall behind her, but Nicci just sat there. Like it was a safe place. The other woman had left already but Nicci was waiting for her. Nicci needed her, just like always. She had to be there.

“Okay,” whispered Amber, and started back down the ledge. “Time to suck it up, little girl. Let’s do this.”

She dropped her duffel bag over the side and tried to dangle herself over it, but her arms gave out before she even had both legs free of the ledge. She fell with a yelp and landed mostly on her back, missing her stupid duffel bag entirely. She lay there for a second or two, dazed and breathless, needing Nicci to come tug at her arm before she could pull herself together enough to try and stand.

“Are you okay?” she managed, rubbing at her back.

“No.”

Amber looked her up and down. “You’re fine,” she said, and picked up Nicci’s duffel bag, shoving it once more into her sister’s arms. “Where’d the other lady go?”

Nicci looked helplessly around. “I-I don’t know…”

“Nicci, we have to stay together,” Amber said firmly. “I know you’re scared, but we’ll get through this. Now I need you to pull it together. Which way did she go?”

Mutely, Nicci pointed across the smoky wreckage.

“Okay,” said Amber. She shrugged to feel the weight of her duffel bag more securely against her shoulder. She took her sister’s hand and squeezed it. She was fine. They were both fine. She started walking.

When they reached the edge of the hull, there was another drop, but the buckling of the Pioneer’s metal skin when Mod A had broken off made for a fairly easy descent. Not as easy as walking down a set of stairs, but there weren’t any more painful landings and when they reached the bottom, they were standing on the ground. True, the ground had melted and cooled again into a mass just as rigid and uneven as the crumpled hull had been, but it was the ground and that made her feel better. She was off the ship and she’d gotten Nicci off the ship. Now she just had to find the others.

They walked, hand in hand, around the side of the Pioneer and as soon as they’d navigated the corner and were out of the smoke and most of the wind, there they all were. And at first, she thought it wasn’t that bad. People were screaming, crying, and hysterical, sure, but there were a lot of them. They’d survived. That had to count for something, right?

Her relief at seeing so many survivors was a kind of second shock, and its bolstering effects wore off much more quickly. Even as she was taking that first reassuring look at the crowds, her vision seemed to double, and suddenly the hundreds of people before her shrank back into the miniscule fraction of fifty thousand colonists and crewmen that it really was. She staggered on her feet a little and then turned slowly around and looked at the ship.

This time, she really saw it.

The Pioneer had scraped over the skin of this alien world for miles, sharpening itself like a knife; family housing and the rest of the forward compartments were gone, rubbed away, and the pointed tip of what was left had ultimately struck something unyielding in the ground and stabbed itself in. This was what had created the steep angle of the ship’s final position, which had in turn created the awful weight that had caused not just Mod A but also Mods B and C to break away and fall. All the women’s dorms were gone. The men’s mods were still there, jutting crazily into the sky and spewing fire from every opening. Virtually everyone was dead.

The world got oddly lighter. This time, it wasn’t the clouds. Amber realized with a start that she was trying to faint and so she sat down and leaned forward to put her head between her knees as far as her bodily dimensions made possible. She really didn’t want to faint. Whatever was going to happen next, she wanted to be awake when it happened. Bo Peep’s little girl was not about to die with her eyes closed.

The warmth and soft press of a body beside her told her Nicci had sat down too. Amber raised her head a little and looked at the Pioneer some more. This was what she’d spent six days bullying her baby sister into. This was what she’d lost her apartment, her job, and sixty pounds for. This was it.

She leaned forward again and opened her mouth, but apart from a groggy belch, nothing came out. She hadn’t had anything in her stomach for years, after all. Maybe a lot of years. Like…hundreds.

That made her want to throw up again, but since that was just futility, Amber made herself look around some more instead. She could see a cluster of uniforms standing apart from the rest, close to the biggest gash in the smoking side of the ship, and a little ways from them stood just two—one crimson and gold Manifestor and one military grey Fleetman, close together, deep in conversation.

She stood up.

Nicci caught at once at her hand. “Where are you going?”

The last thing Amber wanted was to start a mob. She bent over to speak softly against Nicci’s ear. “To see if I can’t find out what’s going to happen next.”

“Next?” Nicci’s hand tightened painfully. She didn’t seem aware of it. Her eyes were huge, glazed, pleading. “We’re…Someone’s going to come, right? Someone’s going to come from Earth and rescue us? We’re going home now, right?”

A few people looked their way. Amber made a point of patting Nicci’s hand, trying to look as if she were comforting someone. She wasn’t sure if people really patted other people’s hands for comfort or if that was just in books, but no one paid them too much attention, so she guessed that was all right.

“Keep your voice down,” she said, once she was fairly confident they had privacy again. “And don’t freak yourself out. Panicking can’t help anyone.”

“Amber…” Nicci’s staring eyes became a wondering, glassy gape. “Amber, the ship crashed! We crashed here! People are dead!”

“I mean it, Nicci, calm down.”

But Nicci either wouldn’t or couldn’t obey. Her voice kept rising, sending shards of panic through every quavery word. “We crashed here! Half the ship is gone! Amber, the ship is broken! We have to be rescued! We have to be rescued right now!”

Amber grabbed a fistful of Nicci’s shirt and yanked her to her feet, thrusting her face right up close. She hissed, “Shut up or I’ll slap the shit out of you and I guaran-goddamn-tee I’ll be better at that than you are! Shut! Up!”

Nicci did, trembling. She blinked and tears came bubbling out of her, but they were silent tears for now. Her lips pressed together, turned downwards in a clownish exaggeration of sorrow.

“If you panic, other people are going to panic and once that starts, we are not going to be able to stop it, so you take deep breaths or do whatever you have to do, but you keep quiet, do you hear me?”

Nicci nodded. The action tipped a few more tears out of her. They trickled sideways across her cheeks, blown off-kilter by the wind, and fell into her hair. “I’m scared,” she said. Little Nicci, like she was all of six years old again.

“Go ahead and be scared all you want,” said Amber, releasing her. “Just do it quietly.” She looked back at the uniforms. They were still talking. She took Nicci’s hand (cold jesus how cold is it going to get when the sun goes down i don’t see any animals no birds not even bugs maybe it gets like a hundred below and nothing can live here) and started walking, trying to look aimless so she wouldn’t get too much attention, but movement has a way of attracting the eye and people were staring.