36. I’m Sorry, Captain #2
Borran decided feeding the Palus would be the whole trick.
He'd brought a sack down from his own galley that he didn't even tell anybody was with him.
When he brought it out, surprising Charlie and the team, the male Palu ate out of his six-fingered hand almost immediately.
Then it proceeded to follow him right out of the paddock.
"Are you seeing this?" Tavi said quietly.
"Yeah," Maren said while Charlie nodded.
"Gentle giant recognizes gentle giant."
"Tavi," Charlie muttered. "I swear to God, if you make me cry in this suit..."
The three of them watched the first Palu walk up the ramp onto the shuttle, and Charlie's hinge assembly held at seventy-one percent of its tolerance.
"See?" Tavi said, bumping his shoulder against Charlie's hip. "Walking micrometer."
The female Palu took a bit longer. Being the female, information stated it would be difficult for her to want to leave.
Borran stood with her in that paddock for eight minutes doing nothing that Charlie could see, but then the female put her head against his chest and let him take her out.
"We can't let this go to his head back on ship," Tavi said.
"Why not?" Maren asked.
"We'd never hear the end of it."
"We'd never hear the end of it from a man born of a species that barely says four words at a time and grunts for most conversations?"
Charlie watched Tavi try to think of a reply.
"Fair."
The female Palu went up the ramp. Charlie listened to the metal on the hinge complain but it held.
"Alright!" Tavi shouted. "Team Bad Ass strikes again! Time to pack up and head home."
Home.
Because that's what it had become, hadn't it? Almost without Charlie even knowing it. She would always miss Katie, wondering how her life was going, what she was doing, who she was with. It was a loss she knew she'd never recover from.
But with her appointment to Chief, the jobs she was getting to do, and the people she called her friends and not just her crew, she began to realize that this was exactly where she was meant to be.
And Reyna...
Charlie had spent the whole shuttle ride down running the broken sentence Reyna had last left her with through her head like a tape she couldn't switch off.
Charlie, I—
She was going to find out. She'd made that decision before they'd landed on the planet. When she returned, she was going to walk onto that ship with two rescued animals in the hold and go find that woman and make her finish it.
"Bay's secure," Maren said. "Both Palus are stable. Vitals nominal."
"Borran, get in here, you magnificent bastard," Tavi said, tugging on what looked like Borran's leg. Then he turned to Charlie, smiling broadly. "Charlie, you good? We're wheels up."
"Yeah." Charlie was standing at the bottom of the ramp, looking back at a town where nothing was broken. "Yeah, I'm coming."
She reached into her utility pocket and keyed the scanner one last time.
It was a habit. It was always the last thing on a checklist, the one she'd created years ago in a garage in Indiana, where Frank Beckman had told her that the job is never done until you've checked one more time. So, she did as she was taught and ran the scanner once more over the town.
The scanner came back.
It showed three red dots.
Charlie stood absolutely still.
The dots were inside the colony's residential ring, about four hundred meters from where she was standing.
They were clustered, not moving.
She keyed it again. And the same three appeared.
"Charlie?" Tavi's voice. "We're wheels up, come on."
She looked back at the paddock, then at the scanner, then at the paddock again.
And suddenly it made sense, the whole situation.
Twenty-two thousand kilos of Gravhorn Palu had been standing in a paddock next to those dots for nine hours.
With layered cartilage, bones like tree trunks, and muscle dense as stone, it was clear that an animal evolved on a high-gravity world would be so structurally impossible for nothing to get through it.
Including a scan.
And then Charlie turned around and looked at the building at the end of the row.
Four hundred meters away, next to the Palu paddock. It was folded in on one corner.
It had come down in a tremor while the people of the town were carrying their lives out to the transports.
And it had been shaking ever since. Every one of the tremors were shifting a pile of rubble another fraction of an inch.
"Tavi," Charlie said. Her voice came out low.
"Tavi, they didn't get everybody."
REYNA
"Bridge, this is Breck." Tavi's voice came through the Bridge speakers, worried. "We have three signatures. Residential ring, four hundred meters from the shuttle site. Captain, they're alive."
Reyna was on her feet.
"Torvax?"
"Confirming." He was already reading. "Three humanoid. Confirmed from orbit, Captain."
"We ran it three times up here before we called it—"
"The colony reported zero," Reyna said.
Torvax pulled up the record. "Breck, Nine hours ago, full sweep was confirmed, certified, filed with the beacon. Signed by their evacuation coordinator."
"The colony was wrong, Bridge." Tavi replied. "The Palus were sitting on top of the read. Twenty-two thousand kilos of armor between the scanner and those people for nine hours. The colony ran the same sweep we did. They got the same answer."
A pause on the channel.
"It was a good sweep."
Nobody on the Bridge said anything.
The colony had run the scan, and the scan had been clean. But it had been clean because of the two animals they were leaving behind.
"Kess," Reyna said. "Read."
"Three humanoid. Two stable." Kess looked up from her station. "One is not. Captain, that reading is consistent with sustained compression. Whatever is on top of them has been on top of them a long time and it has not been idle."
Reyna looked at the display.
"Torvax. Tell them to get those people out and get off that rock."
"Yes, Captain." He keyed it in. "Breck, the Captain directs full team recovery. Get them out and clear the surface."
"Bridge, this is Wickett. Negative on that."
Charlie's voice, and it was flat.
Reyna had heard it flat once before, ninety-two seconds from the wrong end of a cascade, while a woman with her arms inside a live conduit talked her through what she was doing.
Reyna's hand closed on the arm of her chair.
"The Palus are loaded." Charlie was walking.
Reyna could hear her breathing between the words, every step labored on a world that heavy.
"Bridge, that shuttle has to go now. The Palus have been in that hold eight minutes.
It's only rated for one hour of transit, not an hour of sitting on a planet.
Every minute they're on the deck compresses their joints under their own weight.
They're already at the edge of it. If that shuttle sits here while we dig, we save three people and we lose both animals. "
"Bridge," Tavi's voice again. "Charlie's not full of shit."
"Thank you, Tavi," Charlie stated over the shared comms. "So the shuttle takes them up. It comes back for me and the colonists. And while it's gone, I dig them out."
"Like hell you are."
She said it out loud at full volume on the Bridge. No one on Korallis Minor heard a word of it.
How could they? There was one voice from this Bridge to the ground, and it was Torvax.
Reyna Solas had written it that way herself, years ago, in a directive that was still filed under her own name.
One channel. One voice. A ground team under load does not need four people in its ear and a captain does not clutter a working line.
She had enforced it for years. She had enforced it on people who had wanted to say something to somebody.
Torvax glanced at her.
Then he keyed his console and said, measured and precise, "The Captain requires your return, Wickett. Your remaining in that area is highly inadvisable."
That was when Orion walked onto the Bridge.
Reyna registered him at the edge of her vision. She'd never seen her archivist on the Bridge, especially during an emergency mission.
"Captain, I have something I think you might want to see," he said, holding out his datapad.
"Orion, unless it is an absolute emergency, now is not the right time."
"But, Captain—"
"Understood, sir," said Charlie. Her voice came across the Bridge and Orion stopped talking. Reyna turned away from him. "But I'm still going to take that chance. These people deserve that."
"Torvax," Reyna said, still standing. "Ask her what she intends to do alone in a debris field."
"The Captain asks for your intent, Wickett."
"I'm going to dig."
"Ask her how."
"And how will that be completed?" Torvax questioned.
"Carefully."
"That is not an answer," Reyna remarked.
Torvax keyed it. "The Captain requires specificity."
And Charlie's voice came back, fast.
"That pile came down nine hours ago and it's taken every tremor since.
Four hundred and eight of them as I count now.
It's not stable and it's not going to get stable, it's been sitting down on them all day, a fraction at a time, and it hasn't finished.
Forty-one minutes of that shuttle trip to and from the Emberkind isn't forty-one minutes of nothing happening. It's dangerous."
"Then Breck stays with her."
"Breck, the Captain directs you to remain on the surface with Wickett to dig out the colonists."
"No can do, Cap." Tavi didn’t sound happy about it.
"We’re at minimal crew as it is because of the Palus.
Tavi's got two animals in a hold that are going to panic at pressurization," Charlie stated.
"He's the only one who can handle the slow increase to keep them from ripping the shuttle apart.
Borran's the only reason they'll be able to stay calm, so he's needed. And Maren has to fly."
Everyone speaking on ground channel was correct. Every number on that display was correct. She had built this crew and manned this ship so well that there was nobody left over. Efficient and effective with minimal crew.
"Bridge." Charlie's voice again. "There's nobody left. It has to be me."