Mosaic - Jeri Taylor [91]
She sat up and involuntarily cried out; bones were broken for certain. She moved gingerly, trying to get her bearings, and realized she was sitting on the rear empennage of the ship. A drogue system must have deployed, slowing her plunge to the surface, but even so if she hadn't landed in a soft snowbank she would never have survived.
She had no idea what had brought her to this snowy wilderness. She could remember nothing that led up to her present existence, pain-racked and cold, on an unknown ice planet. How had she gotten here? What ship was now scattered in wreckage all around her? were there other people here, too? Other people. A vague alarm rose in her, but she couldn't identify it. Was she with others? If not, why would she have been flying alone? She wasn't a particularly accomplished pilot, it didn't seem likely that she'd be on a solo mission.
But what was the mission, then? And if there were others, who were they? And where were they?
Dizziness engulfed her and she lowered her head, trying to keep blood flowing to her brain. A vast confusion began to overtake her, and she couldn't think what she should do next. Lie down again, perhaps. It had felt so much better to be lying prone, in the pillow of snow and darkness, than to stare, bewildered, into this milky landscape. She started to put her head back onto the snow when another feature of the terrain caught her eye. An iceberg. A huge shard of jagged ice, jutting from... from... the ground? No, icebergs didn't form on land. There must be water there. Maybe it wasn't an iceberg. Maybe it was just another of the strange icy formations that dotted the surroundings... but no, no, it was definitely an iceberg. She was sure of that, but unclear why she was sure. She became intrigued, then obsessed, with this question. How did she know with such certitude that she was looking at an iceberg? She pondered what she knew about icebergs. They were floating masses of ice, broken from the end of a glacier or a polar ice sheet. They drifted according to the direction of sea current. They most assuredly required a huge body of water to support them. Ergo, there must be water here. Isolated bits of iceberg-information came climbing upward from memory like salmon. Only one-ninth of the mass of ice is seen above water. The Titanic was destroyed after impact with an iceberg. Many bergs are tilted, as the result of wave-cutting and melting that disturb their equilibrium. She glanced up at her berg, and saw it tilted at an angle. It was rapidly fulfilling the requirements of being what she was so sure it was. Nonetheless, it was increasingly important to her that she be absolutely, positively, unequivocally sure that she was looking at an iceberg. She forced herself to her feet, shuddering with the pain that knifed through her with each movement, standing shakily, light-headed. The horizon swam and undulated like silk billowing in the wind, and she knew she was about to faint; but this strange desperation to verify her observation superseded everything. Was this an iceberg?
Gradually the world stopped fluctuating and she forced her eyes to focus on the area around the-the object she was trying to verify.
And, indeed, there was water surrounding it. It protruded from a dark, glassy pool, which seemed to lap and roil around it in unusual agitation.