The Great Escape Chapter 2 Part 1 of 3
The Great Escape
Chapter 2 Part 1 of 3
The power on Ezra's spaceship failed immediately after it emerged from its final hyperspace jump. The lights, engines, navigation system, and central computer were down. Ezra was in a dark, dead ship traveling in who knew what direction and who knew what speed with no means to arrest his motion.
Suppressing his urge to panic, Ezra punched every button on the piloting console, seeking to regain control and begging the emergency power to come on. At last, the computer display flickered, some buttons lit up, and wailing alarms and flashing lights suddenly assaulted Ezra's ears and eyes.
After he had canceled the alarms, Ezra found that his hyperspace engines would not come back on, no matter what he did.
"It's no real problem for the moment," he encouraged himself, pressing buttons and waiting for a response, "just so long as I'm not headed toward anything solid. " However, the navigation system did not provide any reading.
Ezra had already wasted many minutes with the engines; he could not waste time with Navi-comms. Cursing his ship and himself, Ezra navigated the old-fashioned way by looking at the stars.
He slid down the ladder into the forward observation bay, a Perspex bubble with an optical telescope. It turned out he didn't need the telescope. When he turned around at the bottom of the ladder, his entire visual field was filled with a blue, white, and green planet, Samothea.
"Fuck!" Ezra exclaimed and rushed back to the piloting console.
"Fuck!" he repeated. Now he knew where he was - in a crippled ship, heading at high speed to a challenging and messy impact on a planet only a few hundred miles away.
If his engines would not work, and he could not power up the rocket thrusters, then Ezra knew he was dead.
"Work, damn you! Work!" he repeated like a mantra, punching the control buttons, hoping to awaken some driving power. It was no good. The rocket thrusters were dormant. Ezra tried again—still nothing. The third, fourth, and fifth attempts were also fruitless. Again and again, Ezra adjusted dials, pulled levers, and thumped switches until, at last! He felt a kick as the starboard rocket lit and began slowly to spin the ship around. Five seconds later, the port rocket also ignited. Not powerful enough to escape the gravitational pull of Samothea, Ezra could use the maneuvering rockets to slow his descent and possibly come to a safe landing.
After three good burns on the rockets, Ezra had slowed considerably and, from the smoothness of his trajectory, judged he was still above Samothea's atmosphere. He made another long burn and rested the rocket motors again for a few seconds. Now, the buffeting began. He had breached the atmosphere and slowed down even more, but the ship was more challenging to control. A half-minute burn and the ship hurtled through clouds, maybe five miles from impact. Ezra prayed the clouds would not descend to the surface and risked a longer burn on the rockets to back up his prayers.
The clouds dispersed to reveal a blue-green ocean with a coastline about ten miles to the East. He descended under control, using half-burn on the rockets, hoping they would last long enough for him to touchdown on land rather than crash into the sea.
With about two miles to fall and six miles to the shore, Ezra steered his craft steeply in, slowing under power as much as he could. It seemed to be working. She was gliding gently. He was at two thousand feet and a mile from the shore in another minute. It was an excellent final spurt on the Rockets, and it looked like she would make a gentle touchdown on the beach.
Ezra slapped the piloting console a last time and shouted in relief.
"Your beauty, I knew you wouldn't let me down!"
It was the wrong thing to say, of course. A second later, the overheated starboard motor coughed and gave up. The ship turned on one side and fell, spinning out of the sky. It hit the sea hard, throwing Ezra sideways against the rear of the bridge, where his head hit a spar. He passed out.
The ship floated for ten minutes before it began to sink. Water was pouring into the bridge. It woke Ezra, who felt excruciating pain in his left arm when he tried to push himself up. There was blood on his shirt, and he felt light-headed, but he knew that if he wanted to live, he must get out of the flooding ship. Drowsy and weak, nursing his arm, Ezra sloshed his way to the airlock and grabbed at the escape lever. The mechanism worked, and the hatch opened, letting in more water and pushing Ezra out with a bubble of air.
He swam one-handed toward the beach, only a hundred yards away, but it took a lifetime and all his energy to reach. Forcing himself to go on, he felt relief when his feet touched the sandy sea bottom, after which he half-swam and half-scrambled onto the shore, where he fainted again from exhaustion, pain, and blood loss.
Some hours later, while Ezra was lying on his side in the surf, he was woken by hands gently lifting him and pulling him up the beach. He screamed in pain as someone pulled his left arm. The pairs of hands shifted to his shoulders. A minute later, he was lying on his back, the low morning sun on his face, his rescuers kneeling beside him.
They were two girls: a skinny wraith who looked to Ezra, about ten years old, and a more substantial girl who would have been about Earth on Earth. The wraith offered Ezra a bladder of water, which he gratefully accepted, but he found he could not drink it lying flat. The older girl knelt behind him and helped him sit up. Ezra greedily drained the bladder. The bigger girl pushed her backpack behind Ezra and gently helped him lie down again. He tried to say 'Thank you' but fainted again.
The next time he awoke, the skinny girl had been talking to him.
"Uh, sorry. I missed that," he said.
"I said, my name is Tamar, Madam. What's yours?"
"Um, Ezra, Ezra Goldrick."
Ezra was feeling stronger, though he ached all over. His left arm hurt like hell, and the bright sun was in his eyes, but he was alive.
"Thank you both for rescuing me. Am I on Samothea?
"You are, Ezra. How did you get here? Why were you in the sea?"
"I crash-landed here last night or this morning. My ship is on the sea floor somewhere over there," Ezra said, indicating the sea with his good arm.
Tamar stared out to sea, but the older girl grunted at her. She turned back to Ezra.
"What kind of ship?"
"A spaceship."
"Oh!" Tamar said, addressing the older girl, "You were right."
"What is your friend's name?" Ezra asked.
Tamar started to speak, but the other girl shushed her.
"It's OK," Tamar assured her. "I wasn't going to say." To Ezra, she said:
"My friend doesn't use her name. I talk for her."
Ezra had only heard the older girl grunt or hiss, never speaking words. If this was strange, Ezra was too tired to wonder.
He took a good look at his rescuers. Tamar, the skinny wraith, wore a cotton slip under a woolen cloak tied around her waist with a coil of rope. The other girl was dressed in raggedy trousers, shirt, and jacket, a mixture of cloth, leather, and ancient synthetics. Both girls had leather sandals tied by straps to their ankles and calves. The older girl had a large, fierce-looking hunting knife in a holster strapped to her thigh. They both had substantial backpacks.
Tamar was beautiful to Ezra: coltish, with long, straight blond hair and large brown eyes. The other girl was taller and more athletic, with curly black hair and captivating light green eyes. She was tanned where Tamar was fair.
"What's wrong with your arm, Madam?" Tamar asked.
"I think it's broken. It hurts like blazes every time I try to move it."
"What's a 'blaze'?"
"I mean, it hurts a lot."
"Oh! Can you walk? We need to leave this place. This is Mariner territory, but they can't keep the Herders away, and if the Herders catch us, then we will all hurt like blazes."
"I can walk, but I'm drained. Will we go far?"
Tamar and her friend consulted in whispers and grunts.
"We're taking you to the forest. It's on our way, and the Woodlanders there probably won't kill you. It is quite far, Madam."
"Well, I'm in your hands," Ezra said stoically. He struggled to get up and did so only with the girls' help. "Meanwhile, Tamar, can I ask you a question?"
She nodded.
"Why do you call me 'Madam'?"
Tamar was puzzled. "What else should I call you?"
However, her friend made a snorting kind of laugh and pointed to Ezra's groin. Tamar said, "I don't know what you mean," but her friend laughed again and mimicked an action. Before he could prevent the girl, Tamar pulled Ezra's trousers down and saw firsthand that he was a man.
Embarrassed, Ezra endured a painful moment pulling his trousers back up one-handed, but neither girl was the least ashamed.
"What are you doing?" he exclaimed. "Haven't you ever seen a man before?"
"No," Tamar answered with simple honesty. She stared earnestly at him, delighted to learn something new. "I read about men in a book once, but I've never seen one before. Where are you from?"
"Earth," Ezra answered automatically while he tried to digest what Tamar had said. What did she mean that she had never seen a man before?
"What about you?" Ezra asked the bigger girl. "Have you ever seen a man before?"
She shook her head.
"Please explain?" Ezra asked. "Are there no men at all on Samothea?"
"None that we know of," Tamar assured him. Her friend nodded in agreement but then grunted to Tamar, who understood her with seemingly psychic power.
"We must go, Ezra Goldrick. We'll answer your questions, and you can answer ours when we stop for a rest, but we must leave now."
Propped up at first by the older girl, whose strength he was learning to admire, Ezra managed to walk reasonably up the beach and onto the patchy grass that gradually gave way to a well-watered prairie. The grass stretched an unguessable distance ahead to a band of grey-green forest framed above by white-capped peaks of a distant mountain range. Behind them was the shimmering blue-green sea. A heat haze blurred the view left and right, suggesting the prairie stretched forever.
Many wayward streams ran gently to the beach, dividing the grassland into irregular strips of lush meadow and muddy puddles. Tracks worn by cattle and horses showed where the feared Herders came and went. Both girls kept a lookout as they walked. Once, they stopped and crouched down near some fresh dung, but soon, the older girl gave the 'all-clear,' and they were on the move again.
Ezra had little strength for talking. He resolved to keep his head down and plod on until he could no longer do anything.
After a few hours of walking, they stopped by a small clear stream. The girls filled their water bladders, and Ezra knelt to submerge his overheated head in the cool, sweet water. It was a delightful relief, but he needed the bigger girl to help him up again.
They rested there for ten minutes. The girls sat cross-legged on the ground while Ezra was propped against a clump of pampas grass. The older girl pulled a long strip of dried meat from a leather pouch in her sack, cut it into pieces with expert swipes of her hunting knife, and passed the pieces around. Seeing the girls had such measly rations, Ezra tried to refuse the food, but they insisted he eat, and because he was painfully hungry, Ezra gratefully accepted. The meat was intensely flavored, salty, and hard to chew but seemed nourishing. Soon, Ezra felt he had enough strength to ask questions that burned in him.
"Tamar, how come all the people here are women?" he said.
"We're all clones," she answered. "Occasionally, someone goes to the Cloner City and returns with a daughter. She always has a daughter. At least, that's what everyone says. I've never seen the Cloner City. I will someday after I've visited the mountains."
"Clones! Of course!"
Ezra knew the terraforming engineers built laboratories to clone animals for release into the wild. After whatever catastrophe had interrupted communications between Samothea and the rest of the galaxy, maybe something caused the engineers to start cloning themselves.
"Why are you going to the mountains?"
"To see the Miners," Tamar answered. I was a Miner, but the Herders snatched me. Then, er ... my friend rescued me, and now we're going to the mountains to find my family."
The older girl shushed Tamar at this, but she replied, "It can't hurt. She—I mean he—is an Earther. He won't tell the Herders. Anyway, they'll probably kill him first."
The bigger girl snorted as she had done before at Tamar's naivety, which the younger girl ignored this time.
The sun was now high in the sky, and Ezra felt it strongly. He was exhausted but wanted to go to the forest for shade.
"Will we make it to the forest today?" The band of trees seemed as far away now as hours ago when they were at the beach.
"No, we must settle down before the night rain comes. We'll probably reach the forest tomorrow."
"Rain?" asked Ezra. It seemed unlikely. They appeared to be in the tropical zone of Samothea, and Ezra could see no clouds. The only clouds Ezra had seen all day were over the sea. "Rain would be very welcome," he said.
"You won't like night rain, Ezra," Tamar said with youthful sagacity.
Betting to himself that she was wrong, Ezra kept silent, and they set out again.
Three hours later, they stopped again, this time on the forest side of a grassy hillock. Although it was still daylight, Ezra saw the girls were settling down here for the night. They undid their backpacks and spread out two leather sheets, pinning them together through eyeholes with pegs pushedEarth the Earth, and the upper sheet formed into a roof with bamboo sticks. Meanwhile, Ezra looked back at where they had come from, and the most noticeable thing was that the sea was invisible, entirely obscured by a dense grey cloud.
"I may lose my bet," he wisely admitted.
Having gone far away to relieve himself and wash in the nearby stream, Ezra felt much better despite his fatigue. It was suddenly dusk, as happens on Earth.
When Ezra returned to their makeshift camp, Tamar held a tent flap open, and he crawled wormlike inside. She climbed unceremoniously over Ezra to lay against him on his excellent right side. The older girl pulled the flap closed as she came in and did the same to lie beside Tamar. Because of his height, Ezra's feet were forced outside one end of the tent. He didn't mind. It was warm inside the tent, and Ezra did not like heat.
He decided it was time to ask some more questions.
"Tamar, how old are you?"
"Fourteen, Ezra."
"And your friend?"
"She's seventeen."
This was amazing. Ezra saw from their clothes that life was hard on Samothea, and now he guessed that undernourishment, combined perhaps with side effects from cloning, had slowed their development.
"So why can't your friend speak?"
"Of course, she can speak!" Tamar said defensively, "She just doesn't like to."
"And you can't tell me her name?"
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