Schism

     From high orbit Verdant looked anything but. The mossy gray-green of the bi-lobed landmass stretched from the southern hemisphere to the northern pole region in a long graceful curve. Paul wondered if everyone had the same tendency to liken the continents of strange planets to the familiar ones of their homeworlds. The shape suggested an italicized 'S' with thickened curves. Large regions lacked even a slight green color. Deserts, he assumed, but geology wasn't his area of specialty.

     He watched the distance viewer glaze and refocus indicating an incremental change in relative position. Overlay graphics indicated a startlingly low power signature. He touched the input tab and the monitor removed the background radiation sources leaving only the sites of most probable human concentration. Six locations passed the computer's defined parameters and a couple dozen minor spots blipped, which - Paul decided - were ore-rich deposits of some trans-uranium or isotope.

     He glanced over the printout of the Guild's sum knowledge of the original colony manifesto. The organizers had recruited highly skilled technical people with the intent of creating a world of ease and bounty. Inferred but not stated was the additional goal of breeding a 'better' human. Paul grimaced - he had trouble imagining such a society or egotists. Variety would always be the spice of life.

     But the reality of the world below denied the achievement of the colony's mission. There was no evidence of an advanced technology. Population estimates, based on historical averages, predicted a population of around one million. The energy signatures refuted any possibility of that many inhabitants. Paul wondered what catastrophe had befallen the colony. Did any remember that they were immigrants from Earth? Had any lived to remember?

     Two of the seven worlds with which the 'Kirkpatrick' had been assigned to make diplomatic contact had been designed as agricultural retreats. Technology had been eschewed as the root of societal woes. The colonists had built an economy around barter and favors owed. Finfelz (a degenerate form of Fine Fields - the name of the farming conglomerate that had partly funded the endeavor) had considered the notion of a homeworld a child's fairytale until the Terran diplomats had made landfall. Negotiations there had required a delicate touch.

     Meadow had retained knowledge of Earth and welcomed contact. They proudly demonstrated their ingenious farming methods. Ingenious in that no automatic mechanical devices were used and power sources were limited to solarcells, the muscles of draft animals or the sweat of human toil. The air of Meadow and Finfelz lacked hydrocarbons, making them smell the least like home.

     Each planet became a new puzzle to unravel and solve. Building a historical database was as important as re-establishing contact. Knowledge of the myriad methods of failure and success would only increase humanity's long-term chances of survival.

     Paul sighed and stretched and then bent to manually examine the data, hoping to find a promising site for first contact. His monitor fizzled and died.

     "Dammit," he whispered. His hand found the call button and he tapped out the code for maintenance and engineering. He hoped… But a familiar voice answered -confirming his conviction that fate was a bitch goddess with a malicious sense of humor.

     "Duty Tech Pavlovich. What's your malfunction?" The soft accent stirred him, even after all the rancor at the end of their relationship.

     "Hello, Lieutenant Pavlovich." He would try to keep this on a professional basis.

     After a prolonged silence Milla replied, "Hello, Mr. Kennedy." Her voice squeaked slightly on his name. Fraternization between crewmembers was not encouraged but since Paul was, technically, a para-military diplomat they had ignored the disapproval. "What is your malfunction?" The question was tinged with sarcasm, but Milla was an officer and would behave as one.

     "My monitor died."

     "How unfortunate. I'll assign a technician for first of shift call."

     Eight hours away, he thought.

     "Milla…"

     "Lieutenant or Tech, Mr. Kennedy."

     "Fine. Lieutenant, I need ASAP. I haven't ID'ed a contact site. That's triple-A priority once we make low orbit."

     "Low orbit will be achieved in six hours, sir. I'll process your request at the stability notification."

     "Don't be a hard-ass, Milla." He could have five or six sites examined and discarded by then.

     "I warned you. The paperwork will require about two hours," she said, coolly. That corresponded with the end of her shift, no doubt, which would save her from having to have further contact with her ex-sleeping partner. "Try the library." The contact went dead.

     "Dammit." The library was a good suggestion, and one she hadn't had to make. Maybe she didn't completely hate him. He piled his notes and snagged an extra stylus.

     After struggling for a couple hours with the low-end systems in the library, Paul wondered if Milla's intent had been charitable or wicked. Each command took minutes, instead of seconds, to load and process. The resolution barely met the requirements for his purpose, and the printer was possessed of some demon of heathen torture. In desperation, Paul tapped out the code for maintenance.

     The static continued, so he tapped the number sequence, again. Finally, Milla's harried voice answered.

     "Maintenance, talk fast." She spoke to someone at her end of the horn. "No, that's secondary. Annoying not dangerous. Major malfunctions first."

     "Tech Pavlovich - Milla, come on. I need my computer."

     "Where the hell have you been, Paul? Half the ship is experiencing primary systems failures. Your goddamn computer is the least of my problems. You should return to quarters." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Be ready, zoe. Things are not getting better down here." She ended transmission while answering another somebody at her end.

     Paul stared at the call box for a long moment. She had called him zoe - her pet name for him during cuddling. It took a lot to rattle Milla - her self-assurance had been something that had initially attracted him - then subsequently repelled him. He gathered his notes and ran back toward his quarters. Halfway there, the lighting failed.

     Klaxon warnings wailed and the red arrow lights indicating the route to the escape decks flashed. Lifeboat drills had been religiously performed, and the well-conditioned response guided him toward the assigned pod. The duties of the first arrival were to start the pre-drop checklist. A wine steward from the ambassador's party was whispering the instructions to himself. Though Paul ached to grab the list from the man's hand, he picked up the personnel assignment list and put an X next to his name.

     "Who are you?" he asked the steward.

     "Ben Gordon." The man never paused in his procedure and Paul began to feel more confident of the skinny man's abilities.

     Two female civvies arrived. Paul recognized them as sociologists. Paul had to ask twice for their names before they could hear him. He pushed one toward a jumpseat and the other took the hint and managed to puzzle out both harnesses without his help.

     "Checklist complete," Gordon said, an air of finality in his tone, as he turned to look as his fellow passengers. "Where is everybody?"

     The calmer woman said, "The lifts went out. Everyone is trying to come through the ladder wells. We had to force the doors on ours, one floor up."

     "Deck," Paul said, almost automatically. Gordon shot him a quelling look.

     Minutes passed. Each pod was assigned a mech-tech and another crewmember from the lower decks in addition to the score of diplomatic or sci-tech personnel. The bridge and upper decks had separate escape bays.

     "We gotta drop," Ben whispered.

     Paul laughed. "I can't land this thing. We have to hope someone comes who can."

     The emergency lights began flickering, causing the panicky sosh, Kayla, to squeal in fear, but she stopped crying as the bulbs steadied at a much dimmer setting.

     Another man turned the far corner and began limping toward the hatch. Paul dashed to meet him and half carried him to the pod. He lost consciousness as they stumbled through the door.

     "Great. I wonder who this is?" Ben had the list and examined the remaining six names.

     "He's a bio-tech, I think," said the older woman, Liz. Paul rolled the injured man over and grimaced. What he thought was a wound was actually a nasty burn covering the thigh from hip to knee. The synthetic material had melted onto the surrounding area spreading the damage. The shoulder patch confirmed Liz's guess, but didn't solve the question of identity.

     Ben grabbed the medi-kit. He rummaged through until he found a palm-doc. In a trembling voice he described the man's injures until the little device began splashing specific questions onto the miniature screen.

     The palm-doc recommended removal of the jumpsuit, and then a soaking spray of disinfectant and anesthetic. Where the jumpsuit had melted, they had to tear away the skin. Liz took over as Paul and Ben both backed away. She pulled the fabric away quickly, ignoring the unconscious objections the man mumbled. She sprayed the wound with medicine and applied a light gauze bandage. She forced a dose of sedative into his mouth and held his lips together until he swallowed. She clambered to her feet and lurched to the hatch and into the corridor, where she vomited quietly.

     "The palm-doc didn't say anything about a sedative," Paul said.

     "Shut up… Sir." Ben took a bubble of water to Liz. Paul could hear her gargle and spit.

     Paul dragged the man to a bulkhead and rigged a harness to extend under the seat.

     "We have to drop. Crew or no crew. We gotta go." Ben said as he and Liz stumbled back into the pod.

     Paul looked out the hatch. Smoke curled at the end of the corridor and trickled up the ceiling toward the escape pods. A smell of burning sealant and fabric wafted ahead of the actual flames.

     Reading the list again, willing a uniformed crewmember to appear, one name finally registered. Ludmilla Pavlovich. Milla would come. She would find a way around any obstacle. "Wait." Paul said. "Be ready."

     They waited. Only the wet-sounding breaths of the wounded biologist, and intermittent sobs from the young woman broke the silence. Paul watched the corridor, whispering Milla's name and urging her to hurry. The ship, popping and whining, shifted. The floor leading to the pod chamber crumpled into a series of V's, bending at the welded edges of each plate.

     "What is that noise? It sounds like the ship is screaming!" Kayla cried covering her ears. Paul was glad she couldn't see the corridor from her seat.

     All around them the sound of grinding metal had gradually risen, until it could be ignored no more.

     "We're entering the atmosphere. Breaking up. Now?" Ben's finger poised over the hatch release button.

     The once parallel walls of the hallway were visibly twisted and warped out of true. The artificial gravity no longer oriented down toward the floor. Paul pushed himself into a seat and strapped on the harness. "Yeah. Go."

     A faint voice reached them, "No… Wait."

     Paul leaned to his harness's limit and could see a figure climbing - the far wall now felt like down - toward the pod using the V's of the floor to hoist herself closer. Coughing and choking the woman rolled under the descending hatch, and lay panting on the floor. "Go now, release the cradle clamps."

     Milla. Not even in the days of their greatest infatuation had Paul been as glad to see her. He reached out and dragged her into the seat beside him. Ben hit the drop button as she snapped her harness and the pod half rolled and half fell from the deteriorating hulk that not four hours before had been the pride of the Guild of Worlds diplomatic fleet.

     Each of the passengers watched the view screen as the once pristine and seemingly indestructible flagship crumpled against the thicker layers of Verdant's atmosphere. Assembled in lunar orbit, christened at the Europa space station, and launched from her berth minutes later, the 'Kirkpatrick' hadn't been built for the stress of reentry. The ship sloughed off strips of her metal skin like a huge lizard, writhing with the effort. Several spherical shapes angled from the sides and belly. One, hit by a glancing blow of a large chunk of debris, careened wildly away from the planet surface.

     Paul glanced at Milla's face. The knowledge of the chances for that pod making it to the surface safely clouded her eyes with tears.

     "Retros?" Ben asked, still in the pilot seat.

     Milla shook herself and cleared her throat. "No, in fact, turn off everything except life support and guidance. The virus only attacks active systems."

     "Virus?" Liz asked. "Out here? Why didn't the sampler detect it?"

     "Cuz the first thing it infected was the sampler systems. The sensors that would have told us the samplers were down followed immediately after." She sighed. "Actually the redundancies hurt us. Each time a backup system was triggered by the primary failure it, too, became infected and passed the bug on to the auxiliaries. Ad infinitum."

     "Is the pod infected?" Kayla asked in her breathless way.

     Milla shrugged. "Probably. I'm only hoping our enhancements aren't." Military personnel frequently had internal tools designed for covert observation. Diplomats, like Paul, had translators and recorders implanted to smooth the difficulties of first contact. Scientists rooted calculators or sensors. Paul noticed Ben's startled look and assumed that even stewards also had found a use for some sort of bionic enhancement. "Ben, keep the little blue sphere centered on the screen. That'll keep the floor down and the pod from starting a roll." Ben concentrated on his new assignment.

     "Can you land us safely?"

     Milla closed her eyes and slumped down as far as her harness would allow. "I'm sure as hell going to try." She opened one eye. "Wake me up before we crash. Don't fire the retros, don't use the sensors, and don't turn on anything bigger than the palm-doc."

     The drop trajectory angled each pod at a decaying spiral. In the distance a rare few comet-like objects followed similar paths through the atmosphere. Paul couldn't tell if they were pods or debris. The S-shaped continent passed beneath them three times before the proximity alert buzzer awoke Milla. She coughed a few times, spitting a bloody wad of phlegm into the disposal unit. Paul sent her a worried look but she shook her head.

     "I'll be okay. Things were - bad in some parts of the ship," she said, before joining Ben at the controls. She gestured at him to remain seated.

     "You're doing fine. I may have to pull some mechanical wizardry until this is all done. You steer, I'll improvise."

     Paul glanced at Kayla to see how she would take Milla's predictions. Liz had applied a new dressing and given the injured man another dose of sedative. At some point or other, the resourceful woman had found time to slip her frightened friend one too. The younger sosh was humming softly and, apparently, watching pink flamingos dance with slightly out-of-focus eyes.

     Milla started pulling supplies away from the bulkheads. "Stow this stuff somewhere else. The relays to the retros are under these sections." She flexed her wrist at the newly exposed flooring and an all but inaudible ringing indicated her implant functioning properly. She pulled a tool from one of her pockets and removed a few rivets from each of the panels, and then loosened the others.

     "Say a prayer, folks. Ben? Fire the left retros at full and right retros at twenty-five percent."

     "At the same time?" Ben asked with his fingers poised above both tap pads.

     "Yes. Now, please." Milla's voice remained calm but Paul knew the expression all too well. The Lieutenant was fighting to not lose her cool professionalism, but her strings were pulled as tightly toward the breaking point as he's ever seen them.

     The ungainly vessel fought the change, rocking and trying to tumble, but Ben managed to prevent the roll. Milla scanned the relays continuously.

     "Shit," she said and yanked out a couple of rivets to remove the panel. "Kill the retros." Ben repeated the order as he complied. Her hands found the corrupted relay and replaced it in a matter of seconds. The pod steadied. She glanced up at the display and yelled, "Forward retros full, left and right twenty-five percent." She monitored her repairs, panting each breath.

     Paul wondered why until he felt the heat of the rockets through the soles of his shoes. Liz drew up her feet and wrapped her arms around them. She looked at the man under the end seat with a helpless expression. Noise rose as the heat did. He could only just make out Milla's shouted instructions but Ben seemed to anticipate them and only checked over his shoulder for her nod of approval. Paul speculated from which systems she had pulled the replacement relays. Cooling and noise suppression were the obvious ones. Finally, she stopped scrounging and rummaging, sending an apologetic look at the other passengers.

     Milla dived for the seat closest to Ben and reached for the controls. The former pilot reached across her and grabbed the hip harness, snapping it shut as the lieutenant finessed the settings. The forward retros failed first. The pod rolled but Milla fired the rear rockets and the vessel stabilized, upside down, but not out of control. The shaking rattled the pod until Paul bit down on his sleeve to prevent his teeth from shattering.

     Through the ports, which now showed the planet rather than the sky, the blue of ocean glimmered. Paul watched Milla's long fingers weave a delicate pattern of retro blasts. Still only ocean showed above - below (?) - them. Water would make a better cushion, but in its present state would the pod float or sink? The curve of a beach flashed by, and then a sharp edged mountainous ridge - frighteningly close - followed by a plateau of gray-brown pebbles. Or boulders? Paul couldn't see the altitude display and ground rushed past too quickly to make out any details to judge size.

     Milla screamed, "Bad one coming. Hold on!" Kayla's laugh reached Paul's ears and he realized that Liz hadn't sedated the girl. The younger sosh, unprepared by previous experience or any formal training for traumatic circumstances, had retreated into a comfortable madness to cope with her fear. The injured man, now lying on the bottom side of the jumpseats, opened his eyes and looked around in horror - for his pain or their probable fate, Paul didn't know.

     On the first bounce, Paul's head slammed against the hatch cover. A rapid darkening followed a bright flash of light. He missed the rest of the crash landing - which was probably for the best.