36. I’m Sorry, Captain #5
Charlie was on her knees in some poor colonist's remains of a house with her hands under a beam.
She ignored the chime because, right now, there was nothing on that datapad that she needed.
She'd cut comms. Whatever was transmitting on the datapad was probably just a system notification.
Or Tavi could have hacked the system already and found a way to mess with her, or a—
The datapad chimed again.
"Oh, come on."
She set the beam down onto its seat, slowly with both hands, and waited to see if it was stable.
It didn't budge.
She sat back on her heels and fished the datapad out of her pocket.
NEW TRACK ADDED TO YOUR LIbrARY VIA TRANSMISSION
Charlie's heart stopped.
Did Tavi send her 'kick ass' music? He'd had never once sent her a song. Nobody had. Since when did his program send songs? But this was her library, she was the only one who added anything to it.
She stared at a notification and could not make her brain produce a single explanation.
Instead, she tapped it open.
"Heroes" — David Bowie.
SENT BY: SOLAS, R.
Charlie was suddenly all the way down in the dirt. It was completely involuntary. Her legs quit and she went down onto the deck plate. But now, she just stayed there, in the dust of a colony that was coming apart around her, looking at a name on a screen.
Months ago, Charlie had sat on the floor of a library and told that woman about a wall.
She'd gotten going, too. Hands out, doing the thing where she talked with them, Berlin and the guards and the guns and somebody drawing a line down the middle of a city to tell every person on both sides of it who they were allowed to love.
And then the part about how they went to the wall anyway, because the alternative was living the rest of your life without your person over a line somebody else drew.
Charlie remembered hearing her own voice alter as she said it, about a beat after Reyna did.
In the moment, she'd looked at her hands. But when she looked back up, Reyna's face had changed.
It was gone before Charlie could fully read it. Then Reyna sat back a little and it was over. Charlie thought again now that she'd never found out what it'd been.
But it had been there.
Charlie had spent the better part of the time since convincing herself that Reyna had reacted to the story. That was all. I mean, anybody would. Of course a Kaelari captain's face would do something. Charlie convinced herself it had nothing to do with her telling it.
That held right up until she made the mistake of remembering that Reyna's face had changed before Charlie even got to the part about the wall.
Now, Reyna was sending it back.
Charlie stared at the screen. Reyna had gone and found the song Charlie told her describes love on a library floor and put it directly in her hands.
"Oh," Charlie said, her heart beating frantically in her chest. "You heard me."
"Charlie?"
The voice of one of the colonists came out from under the pile, somewhere left of the beam.
"Yeah." Charlie put the datapad down in the dirt, face up. "Yeah, I'm here. Sorry. Give me just a second."
"Who are you talking to?"
"My captain," Charlie said softly.
And then she put both her hands back on the beam.
She got the first colonist out in six minutes.
His name was Feodar and he'd been under a section of roof. But he was fine, he was fine. He did have a broken arm, but the second Charlie got the weight off, he sat up and started trying to help her, which she had to yell at him about twice.
"Sit down."
"There's two more—"
"I know there's two more, that's my job. Now sit down."
He sat down and watched her work.
The second colonist took nineteen minutes to extricate.
Her name was something Charlie's Voxlink turned into Wren.
She was pinned at the hip, conscious the whole time.
But she never made a single sound, which was somehow worse than screaming.
Charlie went at that pile holding her like a surgeon.
Two pieces at a time, testing them, taking the load onto her own shoulder and holding it while she cleared the seat underneath.
The tremors came the whole time, and every one of them put another fraction of that building onto the woman under it.
When Wren came free, she grabbed Charlie's wrist and held on hard enough to leave marks.
"Yeah," Charlie said. "Don't worry, I've got you. Go sit with Feodar."
The third one, the one that fell first and below the others, was the one in bad shape.
She was under the last of the debris pile near a load-bearing corner, the whole northeast section of the structure had come down at an angle and stopped against a scaffolding still standing.
It had been stopped there all day, and Charlie spent four minutes running the scanner over it before she even touched it.
There was exactly one way to take this apart and about nine ways to kill everybody sitting around her, including herself, with one wrong move.
She found the seat. She braced it. Then she got her shoulder in and lifted, the whole thing shifting a quarter inch and holding. Charlie let out a sound close to an exasperated laugh.
"Okay," she said, looking down at the last colonist, whose eyes blinked open as Charlie stood above her. "Okay, hi. I'm going to go ahead and get you out now. Would that be alright?"
The colonist gave the slightest of nods.
"Sounds good to me."
As Charlie started to move down into the threshold, she caught sight of the datapad still lying in the dirt with the screen lit.
Charlie looked over at it for exactly one second.
Okay, Charlie thought. Okay. One more, and then I'm getting on that shuttle, and I'm going to find you, and you and I are going to talk about what you just did.
Then she got her hands under a woman's shoulders and started to pull.
Charlie felt the tremor start in the soles of her boots.
She had time for one word.
No.
Her arm was already around the woman. She hauled her out from under it and got her clear.
Charlie tried to scramble up and out of the trench when the brace let go.
The corner came down the last quarter inch it had been leaning on all day and slipped.
And it caught Charlie Wickett hard across the side of the head.
She was on her back.
That's interesting. I don't remember agreeing to that?
She felt very heavy and the sky above her looked very brown. She heard somebody screaming a long way away.