The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 3 by Allan Kaster

Author:Allan Kaster [Kaster, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioText
Published: 2019-11-21T07:00:00+00:00

“I thought she was dead,” Bai told her mother on the flight back to the scale-harvesting camp. “But then I managed to handshake with the clunky interface of her suit and found she was in cold sleep. I guess the pod assembled a suit around her after it crash-landed, and the suit tried to walk her toward the refuge. But its batteries were almost exhausted when I caught up with it, and I think its mind was damaged, too. That could be why it attacked me. It didn’t understand that I’d come to help. So I disabled its motor functions and fed it just enough power to keep its life support going until the hopper arrived, and here we are, free and clear.”

There was a pause, a little under six seconds, while this zipped at light speed from Oberon to Titania, where Bai’s clan and most people in the Uranus system lived, and her mother’s reply zipped back. The two moons were presently on opposite sides of the planet, a million kilometers apart, but there was no escaping Bai’s mother, who’d pinged her as soon as she’d found out about the escapade, and not to shower her with praise and congratulations.

“You didn’t know who was in that lifepod, why it crash-landed where it did,” she said to Bai. “And you went chasing off into the forest without telling anyone what you were doing. What were you thinking? But I suppose you weren’t.”

“I was the first to arrive at the crash site,” Bai said. “What else was I supposed to do?”

Even though she knew that things could have gone very differently if her suit hadn’t been so quick and clever, she was convinced that she’d done the right thing. If she hadn’t found her when she did, the woman’s suit might have run out of power. She might have died.

But as usual Bai’s mother had other ideas, saying, “You should have waited until the Gartens arrived.”

“I didn’t need their help to find her.”

“And I suppose you think that you don’t need their help now. Even though their camp has better medical facilities.”

Yes, there was definitely a familiar edge to her voice. Bai’s mother, Wen Phoenix Minnot, was seventy-three years old, a clan elder, grand and chilly and remote. Bai was the youngest of her six children, a late addition to the family after Wen married a second husband. Lately, she seemed to be perpetually annoyed by her youngest daughter’s restlessness, which was why Bai had been packed off to supervise the scale-harvesting camp on Oberon. She wanted to live on another world? Here was her chance. A moon much like Titania, but somewhat smaller and with even fewer people. Where she could gain useful experience in field engineering. Where living in a trailer habitat in the middle of nowhere (almost everywhere on Oberon was the middle of nowhere), with only machines for company would make her realize what she was missing, back home. Where nothing ever happened.

Except that now it had.

“They would have taken all the credit,” Bai said.

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