Asha's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Asha stood seven feet tall in a field of pink-lashed trees, holding a copper divining rod that had told her nothing for six weeks. Her ship was down here somewhere. She had watched it break apart in the upper air and streak across the ridge before she hit the ground herself, and every day since, she had walked this valley with a tool meant for finding well water on a planet that was not this one. The locals used steam. Steam for their mills, steam for their carts, steam for the little whistling kettles they hung outside their doors. No one on Akatosh had ever needed to find a buried alloy hull, so no one had built a thing that could. Asha had asked. She had traded three of her curly horn-shavings for a brass compass, and the compass spun for iron nails and nothing else. Her ridged palms were raw from turning soil with a borrowed spade. She sat on a battered shipping container half-sunk in the moss, the last piece of her cargo she had managed to drag free. Rust bloomed across its side. The paint peeled in strips. She pressed her forehead to the warm metal and tried to think of what her ship's crew would have done, if any of them had come down alive. A small brown bird landed on the container's edge. Its beak was the wrong color. Silver, blunt, capped in red, like a tool someone had welded to its face. It hopped down into the dirt, stabbed once, and came up with a nail stuck to the tip. It shook the nail off and stabbed again. Another nail. Asha did not move. She had seen these birds tearing at the ground near the mill yards. She had thought they were eating grubs. She watched this one pull a bent screw from the moss, then a flake of tin. She reached into her satchel, tore off a strip of dried meat, and set it on the container's lid. The bird watched her with one flat eye. It hopped up, took the meat, and did not fly. "You," Asha said. Her voice came out rough. "You are going to find my ship." She set out before dusk, the bird riding on the container's edge as she dragged it behind her on a rope. She built a shelter near the ridge where she had seen the wreckage fall — a low dome of bent branches and living leaves, tied with vine, big enough for her folded knees and the bird's crate. She fed it another strip of meat and a bent horseshoe nail she had pried from a fencepost. By morning the bird was following her without the rope. By the third morning it dug on command. On the fifth morning, in a patch of loam under the pink trees, it drove its silver beak into the ground and came up with a curl of hull plating still warm from her memory.