A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [221]
“Look, you’ve got to come down now,” he transmitted to the ships. “If we don’t get rescued within the next few minutes, then you’ve wasted all your time and stardrive fuel coming to help.”
When Jess Tamblyn had taken him here in the first place, six years ago, the daredevil Roamer had flown his ship in, dodging the corona activity and flouting the perils of the unstable sun. That survey mission had convinced Kotto that it was possible to build a functional facility on Isperos. Since then, the solar storms had grown worse, as if something terrible was happening deep inside the sun itself.
“All right, we can have one big party or one big funeral. Me, I prefer parties,” Anna Pasternak transmitted to the other captains. “You all perform regular maintenance, don’t you? Let’s see just how good those tolerances really are.”
The Isperos survivors stood outside in their suits, a desperate group sweating from fear and heat and the dregs of oxygen in their airpacks.
“Abandon all equipment and supplies,” Kotto said, “though a few datawafer records might be valuable, if you can carry them.”
The rescue vessels dropped like angels from heaven, scrounging for a safe touchdown point in the crater. The communication links echoed with cheers. Before the first ship landed on the uneven ground, Kotto had broken his crews into teams, organizing the evacuation so that those with the most serious life-support emergencies got on board first. “Nothing wastes time more than a panic. Let’s not embarrass ourselves.” Indeed, Kotto was already embarrassed enough that his dream of a productive colony had failed so completely. He hadn’t been able to hold it together.
By the time they climbed aboard the rescue ships, Kotto did a tally, learning to his dismay that he had lost twenty-one of his people. A second rover vehicle had broken down out in the day-side heat, its treads mired in an unexpectedly soft pool of molten stone; when the heat ate through the fuel cells, the resulting explosion killed the refugees before anyone could go back to help them. The last victim was a woman who had died from a massive suit failure only a few minutes before the first rescue-ship landing; on the intensely cold dark side of Isperos, she had actually frozen to death in less than a minute.
His face red and blistered, his body exhausted and dehydrated, Kotto made his way to Anna Pasternak’s cockpit. The old woman glanced over her shoulder and cut off his words of gratitude. “Don’t thank me yet, Kotto. We’ve still got to get away from that stellar hurricane. All our ships are far too crowded and heavy. We didn’t have time to put together a formal evacuation team.”
“I’m glad you didn’t wait,” Kotto said, “even though I expected to have more time to keep my crumbling colony together.”
“The universe likes to play jokes. I always thought my daughter Shareen would outlive me, and I’d get to spoil a dozen grandkids, but the drogues had other ideas when they wrecked her skymine on Welyr.”
“Don’t the Roamers have any happy stories?” Kotto wondered with a sigh.
Flying by instinct, Pasternak took the ship out of the planet’s shadow—and then the sun itself seemed to declare war on them. Arched flares rippled out into space, as if trying to reach the orbit of Isperos. Coronal discharges battered the fleeing ship like a series of clubs.
“Never seen activity like that!” the captain cried. “Do you think it’s going supernova?”
“Of course not,” Kotto said. “It’s the wrong stellar type—”
On her control panels, status screens had already edged into the red zones. Pasternak wrestled with her cockpit systems, but the overloaded rescue ship rocked erratically. Some of the other Roamer vessels were in even worse shape, straining like drowning men. Tidal waves of solar wind roared at them. Bullwhip flares thrashed about.
“It’d sure be a shame to rescue your people and then burn up on our way out the door.”
“Yes, that would be a real kick in the teeth.”
Crackles of static burst across the ship-to-ship communication systems, other Roamer captains declaring