Alyssa Redd's Arc

Chapter 5 of 15

The cut comm hissed once and went dead. Alyssa stared at the flat panel where Sasha's voice had been. Six minutes to entry. Earth filled the glass, blue and close enough to see weather move across it. Someone on Shrumella had reached into the channel and killed it. She did not know who. She did not know what they had done to Sasha after. Marla unclipped her harness partway and leaned forward. "Was that the Bureau?" "Or worse," Alyssa said. She keyed the back channel again. Nothing. She tried the ship's open band. Nothing. She looked at her hands on the yoke and made them stop shaking. A second light blinked on the console. Not the comm. The nav crystal cradle. The crystal Noel had grown for her was pulsing out of rhythm, faster than the descent clock. Alyssa pulled it from the cradle. It was warm. Inside the lattice, faint lines of color moved that had not been there before, thin threads of pink and green sliding through the diamond. "Noel said this could fail at the end," Alyssa said. "She said the lattice can collapse." "It's not collapsing," Marla said. "It's doing something." Alyssa held it under the panel light. The threads inside settled into shapes. Not shapes. Characters. Rows of them, stacked, small enough that she had to squint. A language she did not know. Under the characters, a shape she did know: a coastline. The coastline scrolled. Another coastline replaced it. Then a third, thinner, with the sea eating into the land. Her stomach dropped. "Marla. This isn't just a nav crystal." "What is it." "It's a record." She turned it. More text. More coasts. "Noel didn't tell me. Maybe she didn't know. Someone put something inside it before she grew it, or the growing pulled it in." The entry alarm chimed. Four minutes. Alyssa clipped the crystal back into the cradle. The ship shuddered as the first thin air kissed the hull. "We can't read it now," Marla said. "Suit up." Alyssa reached for her helmet. The biosuit's chest panel woke green: air good, radiation low. Her hands stopped shaking. She sealed Marla's gasket, then her own. "Listen," she said through the helmet mic. "Whoever cut the signal knows we made it. Sasha may be gone. When we land, we're on our own. No one on Shrumella can help us and we don't know what's down there." "We know it's not empty," Marla said. "No. It's not." The hull began to glow. The panel counted down. Alyssa put one gloved hand on the crystal cradle and one on the yoke. The ship tipped, caught the atmosphere, and started to fall. Whatever Earth was now, it was about to be under her feet.