The Ashes of Worlds - Kevin J. Anderson [85]
The satellite came over the foreshortened horizon and roared past him, so close and so fast that he jumped — accidentally propelling himself ten meters off the ground. At the apex of his leap, he watched the production satellite keep going on its final plunge until it scraped along a line of frozen hills no more than a kilometer away. A starburst pattern of fresh ice and steam marked the bull’s-eye where the satellite had come in for a hard landing.
Caleb bounded across the ice, each leap seemingly carrying him halfway to the small planetoid’s horizon. When he reached the crash point, he saw that the satellite’s metal walls had buckled, but at least the contents weren’t strewn across the cratered terrain. With clumsy gloved hands he pried apart the broken pieces of metal, eager to see what equipment and supplies were inside. Again, he felt like Robinson Crusoe finding a cargo crate washed up on his shores.
The Roamer engineers had thought of everything: spare energy packs, generalized components that could be assembled into any number of useful gadgets, a standard emergency kit with basic medicines, even concentrated rations (though Caleb couldn’t imagine why anyone would really need such a thing out in orbit).
As he looked at the remnants of the large satellite, Caleb thought he might be able to cannibalize some of the structure itself, put a nice addition on his cramped escape pod. If he was going to be stranded here for the rest of his life — however long that might be — he could at least be comfortable.
Knowing he would have to make several trips, Caleb gathered the most vital objects, made one of the flat solar-panel wings into a sled, then happily began his jaunt back to the pod. He climbed up over the low, frozen hills, raced down into the valleys, and skipped around wide, black fissures.
As he approached his small camp, Caleb was startled to see a glow permeating the ice, shimmering as if from an inner fire. The eerie luminescence spread out to the width of a broad lake near his landed escape pod.
He stopped in his tracks, feeling a chill go down his spine. Still moving under its own momentum, the loaded solar-panel sled bumped into his heels, startling him. Something very strange was going on here. . . .
But he couldn’t stay outside to wait and watch; his suit’s battery pack and air tank were already down to twenty-five percent. Gathering his courage, Caleb headed toward the strange glow that surrounded his pod.
* * *
59
Anton Colicos
While the Mage-Imperator remained a “special guest” in the Whisper Palace until Chairman Wenceslas figured out what to do with him, Anton was under orders to take Rememberer Vao’sh to the university. He had no idea what sort of interrogation or debriefing the other professors would inflict upon him, but he supposed Vao’sh could hold his own.
Anton had spent most of his scholarly career here, and this should have been a happy return for him . . . but it didn’t feel that way. “I’ve wanted to show you this place for a long time, Vao’sh. I’m afraid the Hansa’s actions have dampened my enthusiasm for all the things I used to be proud of.”
The old rememberer, though, was surprisingly accepting of the circumstances. “Even in troubled times, a rememberer should always observe and absorb. I intend to learn as much about your human culture as your experts intend to learn from me.”
Anton looked closely at his friend, trying to read his moods from the colors of his expressive lobes. “How are you holding up so far away from the rest of your people?”
“I can bear it, for now. The Mage-Imperator is close, and I know where the rest of my people are. I do not feel entirely alone.” With forced good cheer, the rememberer took Anton’s arm as they walked together onto the campus grounds. “After my previous ordeal with the isolation madness, perhaps I have a greater tolerance than other Ildirans.”
The expansive parklike campus was crowded with earnest young students who were not yet scarred by the cynicism of real life. As a researcher here, Anton had been