Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [6]
The vessel was as big as some older Federation starships, though she never would have been mistaken for one-and not just because she was a strange coppery green in color. With her flattened-cylinder shape and closely gathered warp nacelles, she was unlike any starship Beverly had ever seen.
“Putting down,” said Amihai Zippor, the handsome, dark-haired botanist in charge of the colony.
Manipulating his helm controls, he executed a looping descent that put them on the far side of the downed vessel. Then he opened the hatch, allowing them to join the grim-faced men and women who had preceded them in the colony’s other suborbital craft.
In the light of urgently cast palm beams, Beverly could see the damage the ship had taken in her fiery descent and hard landing. Her hull was charred in spots and badly dented in others, and there were places where it looked as if it had been clawed by some colossal predator.
But for all that, the vessel was still intact-both inside and out. Her warp core had been of particular concern to the colonists, but their sensors had already assured them it was stable and uncompromised. It wasn’t going to blow up, taking the ship, the colonists’ rescue team, and a considerable hunk of the surrounding landscape with it.
The best news was that there was life inside the vessel-a surviving complement of nearly two dozen beings, all representatives of the same unknown species. But in some cases, they were on the knife’s edge between life and death. If they were going to see the dawn on Arvada III, they would need medical attention-and quickly.
Which was where the colony’s rescue teams came in.
“Look for an entry hatch!” barked Zippor, his voice thick with concern for the crash victims.
It turned out to be a difficult item to find, thanks to the beating the ship had taken. But after a minute or so, Dar Xarota-whose people, the Ondu’u, had notoriously sharp vision-gave a deep-throated cry of triumph.
Using his light beam as a pointer, he played it over a rectangular shape just forward of the ship’s nacelles and a couple of meters off the ground. The hatch cover had been obscured by a long stretch of carbon, but Beverly could see it easily enough now that she knew where to look.
“Phasers,” said Zippor.
The colonists who had been entrusted with the devices took them out and trained them on the hatch cover. Then they unleashed their beams, constructing a gaudy crimson display in the dark of night, and began gouging a hole in the metal alloy.
Thick as the hatch cover was, it held for only a couple of minutes against the force of the colonists’ barrage. Then it buckled in the center and gave way, exposing the space behind it.
Zippor allowed a minute for the edges of the opening to cool off. Then he and two others, their faces strained with anticipation, used broad-backed Xarota as a stepping-stone to clamber inside.
Beverly glanced at her grandmother in the spill of light. The older woman was frowning deeply, as intent on the rescue effort as if it were her own family in the ruined vessel.
The girl was proud of that, though she couldn’t quite say why-almost as proud as she was of her grandmother’s insistence that Beverly be allowed to take part in the rescue operation. But then, Beverly wasn’t a little kid anymore, and Felisa Howard was too respected a figure in the colony for anyone to balk at her granddaughter’s inclusion.
“We’re in a main corridor,” came Zippor’s voice, received by the com system in one of the open suborbital craft and amplified so everyone could hear it. “There’s no sign of any survivors yet.”
As the botanist and the others pursued their search, they reported to their colleagues each step of the way. Apparently, the vessel had been a cargo hauler, built with an emphasis on storage capacity rather than creature comfort.
Beverly tried to visualize it, but she had little to go on. After all, she had been on only one spacegoing vessel in her life, and that was the one that had brought her to Arvada III.
Suddenly,