This is the latest chapter, written on the fly. The basic idea has always been in mind, getting it on paper, or onscreen, is the problem.
and remember, blog entries run bottom to top, the oldest posts at the bottom of the page.
It was well past midday when John and Julia reached the base of the high plateau. Over time, rocks and boulders from higher up the slopes had rolled down and settled into a ring around the base, and small trees and bushes were growing between them in thickets stretching up the side of the slopes. The hillside itself was just that - a steep hill, but one the dunerail could climb if they could find a break in the rock and brush around the bottom.
"Well," Julia said, after finishing the last of her meal. She stood looking up towards the top of the hill. "This is no plateau, or mesa, as we've been calling it. It's just a very big hill, almost a mountain. The bare dirt and the color of the vegetation made it look like it had a high, striated wall from the distance."
"And it was twice as far away from the route we're taking as we thought it was. It's probably closer to a thousand meters high. The dunerail can make it though. At least it isn't straight up." He stopped to stow the box containing their food in the back seat. "We can do things two ways, Doc. Either we split up and look for a break in the rocks while the rail recharges or we both go in one direction. Your call."
"We stick together."
"You sure? We can cover more area separately, save a little time."
"We stick together."
He shrugged and started rummaging in the back seat again, muttering to himself as he did so.
Julia turned and looked at him, shading her eyes from the sun as she did so. "What was that? I didn't quite catch it."
He straightened up, a mag pro in his hands. "I was just saying a feeling of deja vu washed over me like a wave of chlorine."
She couldn't help smiling. "I always thought Devon had the right idea. Cracking the whip around you is the only way to keep your attention. You have an irritating habit of thinking yourself invincible and right all the time."
"Because I usually am."
"In your dreams, Danziger."
"Ha. Speaks the woman as anxious to get up this hill as I am."
"It doesn't mean you're always right. Just, maybe, this time."
He sighed loudly. "One day I'm going to meet a woman who doesn't think the greatest sport in two solar systems is to make John Danziger feel like an idiot twenty four hours a day. Sorry thing is, I've gotten so used to being face down in the dirt that I probably won't know what to do with her when I find her."
Julia laughed and went around the dunerail to get the canteens and a small bag of her first aid materials, should they need them. "I guess you're too confident in yourself, John. It just makes a woman want to knock you down a peg or two. Speaking from personal experience, trying to work with you can be as irritating as hell. Do you want to know what really bothered Devon about you? The ops team didn't start listening to her until you did. The colonists long ago accepted her as their leader, but after the crash she found herself trying to lead a group made up of fifty percent ops crew, and none of them accepted her leadership until you did."
"I kind of figured that. She wasn't real subtle about her anger and hurt feelings in the beginning. That woman had one hell of a sharp tongue."
"Can I ask you why you let her be the leader of the group, instead of taking it for yourself? You could have, you know."
He nodded, watching her fill their canteens. "I know, but she wanted it more than I did."
"That's it!?"
"What?"
"Just, she wanted it more than you?"
"That, and I had my own kid to worry about. After I thought it over, reaching the comm dish was the best chance my daughter had to leave this place. If it meant following Adair, that's what I would do to be certain my kid survived. Besides, she thrived on the pressure, and I never did."
She gaped at him. "Could have fooled me."
"Like you said yesterday - we aren't building a ship here, Doc." He pointed to the east. "Let's try that way. I've been looking at the area below the gap all day and haven't seen a break anywhere. I wonder where all the debris came from? Maybe we'll find something over there."
"Okay. Let's go."
The break in the rocks and foliage they found some time later was the first indication there might be water on top of the hill. At some time in the past a torrent of water had rushed down the hill and swept away anything in it's path. An ugly scar marked the hillside all the way to the top, a three hundred meter wide gash of bare rock from which all soil and plants had been stripped away to a depth of seven meters. It continued across the flat ground of the meadow for several hundred meters before losing it's force and spreading out.
"Where have we seen this before?" Julia asked with a sarcastic smile at Danziger. "It reminds me of the holo Yale showed us of a flash flood. The water came down a hillside and left nothing in it's wake. Not even the hill."
"Yeah," John agreed. "Let's get up there."
"Uh huh."
Though they considered it, walking up the gash was out of the question, even though climbing the rocks would have been easy considering how often they'd done so during their travels across the planet. They didn't want to leave the vehicle behind. They decided to drive the dunerail at a westward angle up the hill and try to end up in the gap they'd been looking at all day. While Julia went back for it, John cleared away some of the smaller rocks and vegetation to form a pass.
Nearly an hour later they crested the hill at the extreme left side of the infamous gap and they were greeted by a sight as unexpected as it was breathtaking. They would never forget it as long as they lived.
The hill was, in fact, the edge of an eroded volcanic crater several kilometers across and the almost perfectly circular caldera was filled with water - but the beauty of the lake was completely lost on the duo. Their attention was riveted to a beauty of another kind - a manmade thing of beauty to two grounded space travelers.
A second catastrophe, an impact in this spot had occurred a split second ago, in geological terms.
The ship that had brought them to this planet, their ship, as intact as it could possibly be, (impossibly be!)rested in the water close to the eastern shore of the lake. It's huge, blackened mass was partially covered by the wind tattered parachutes of at least three cargo pods. Still connected to the ship by some miracle and reaching for the sky was the twisted, blackened remnants of one sensor arm, just as John had imagined it.
Julia sat behind the wheel of the dunerail, transfixed by the sight ahead of them as they bounced and rambled toward the shore of the lake.
"Vehicle, stop!" John ordered from the passenger seat and, when it did, climbed out of the dunerail to stare at the end result of his quest. "Will you look at that? She made it down!"
Julia got out, too, and stood and stared. Somewhere in the back of her mind she was aware she'd almost driven the dunerail into the lake, so surprised was she by the sight of the ship on the ground, but all she could think about now were the implications of the great thing before her. She looked across the rail at John.
"You were right," she said, and ran around the front of the vehicle to throw her arms around his neck. "You were right! You found the ship!"
He whooped and swung her around in a circle, both of them laughing like children. "Right, hell! I was looking for a piece of the sensor arm!"
"But you found the ship!" she shouted into his ear again.
"We found the ship!" he corrected. "Alonzo's goin' to marry you on the spot as soon as he gets here!"
"I told you there was a good reason for me to come along!"
After waiting impatiently for most of the day to hear from her father, True Danziger was startled by the sound of his voice in her ear when the call finally came. Walking behind the transrover with Uly and Yale, she was thinking of climbing aboard the big vehicle and taking a nap, but her father's voice caused her head to turn quickly to the north. Two bright specks of light, flares, hung in the sky above the plateau. She flipped the eyepiece of her gear into place.
"What did you find, Dad?" she asked excitedly.
"Are you ready for this, True girl?" he answered with a smile. "Take a look."
He turned his eyepiece away from himself and she saw a blur of trees, rocks, water (water?), and something enormous she couldn't identify at first. True heard Julia's voice telling John to stop and focus. The picture being sent to her sharpened, and she screamed. Then she was running as fast as she could to the head of the small caravan.
Yale and Uly, startled by her reaction, watched her with consternation.
"What's going on, Yale?" the boy asked.
Yale turned on his gear unit and winced as the sharp pitch of True's excited voice met his eardrum. He gave Uly a small shove. "Let's go find out," he said and began to run after the other child. Uly streaked past him.
"Alonzo! Alonzo!" True called. "Stop! Put on your gear! Everybody put on your gear!"
Hearing his name being called, Alonzo swung his ATV in a tight U turn and barreled toward the little girl waving at him.
"Put on your gear and look, Alonzo! My dad found your ship!"
"My ship?" he repeated as he skidded to a stop alongside her.
On the lip of the extinct volcano, Danziger and Dr. Heller listened and laughed as the excitement among the rest of the group escalated with each person who joined the gear conference.
"John! Is that really it? The ship?" Alonzo's voice exclaimed over the gear.
"Stay cool, okay?" Danziger cautioned. "Yes. It's the ship and in better shape than it has any right to be, but she's never going to fly again, pal. Got that?"
"Oh, man! Oh, man!"
"Lonz? Jake?" he pressed, getting no reply. "You two understand?" He glanced at Julia. "Maybe you'd better talk to them."
She nodded. "Right." She walked a short distance away to switch to a private gear frequency.
"Yale? Can you hear me?" John said, still looking at the ship with his gear optic feed sending it's image to the others.
"Yes, John. I hear you quite well. What a spectacular find you two have made."
"You can say that again. Yale, stop the group right where you are and set up camp. Don't try to follow us today, start out as early in the morning as you can. We drove without taking any breaks and it still took us this long to get here. You should reach the hill by evening and we'll tell you where to set up a camp then. For now, put Zero, and only Zero, on one of the ATVs and tell him to get over here as fast as he can. There is a cargo pod here he should be able to enter. We can start salvaging whatever is inside it as soon as you arrive."
"I understand, John," the older man said. "How many cargo pods came down with the ship?"
"Near as I can tell from the ?chutes, only three didn't break away. One is still attached to the ship, and I'm guessing two were thrown clear on impact. They're either in the water or on land somewhere close by. Chances are they've been looted if they hit land.."
"Danziger. . . I notice the parachutes deployed even though the cargo pods were still attached to the body of the ship. Is that correct?"
Danziger was silent for a moment. "That's right," he confirmed quietly. "They definitely did."
Yale sighed audibly. "I shall send Zero immediately."
"Thanks. I'd appreciate it."
There was a brief silence as both men considered the implications.
"John, can you tell which cargo pods they are?"
"No, not from here. We'll try to get to the ship tomorrow and get a look at the one still attached."
"All right. I'll send Zero on his way while the others are preoccupied with your video feed."
It was nearly dark by the time Danziger and Heller could power down their gear and begin to think about setting up a campsite of their own. The others had been reluctant to let them go, and were now in pretty much the same fix as the two on the crater lip were. Night was falling and tents still needed to be erected.
It took only a few minutes for Heller and Danziger to fashion a simple but functional lean-to from the materials stored on the back seat of the rail. There was plenty of wood around to build a campfire in front of the lean-to, both for the light a fire provided and to deter any wild life that might be in the area from trying to investigate the campsite while they slept later. With dried fruit and meat for their meal, they didn't need the fire for cooking. Perhaps the rest of the group could see it from the meadow.
John and Julia ate quietly in the dunerail as they watched the ship fade from view as the sun set. The moons would not rise until an hour or two after sunset and until then the ship and the lake were lost to sight in the glare of a lumalight.
"John, what was the last conversation you had with Yale about? Something about the parachutes?"
He took a drink of water and looked at her for a long time.
"Are you going to answer me or just stare like that?"
"I don't know if I should tell you. It might be better to wait until tomorrow."
"Better for me or you?"
"You. I'm pretty sure I won't get any sleep tonight because of it."
"I have enough sedaderms for both of us if it comes to that."
He sighed. "All right. Okay." He leaned his head back against the seat and looked at the stars. Still, it took a while before he began. "When we found the third escape pod. . . Well, I didn't tell Devon, or any of you, everything I learned from Les and Alex. Firestein was still lucid enough to tell me who made it aboard the pod before it launched. Julia, at least twelve people didn't make it off the ship." He shifted position and glanced at her for a moment before looking back at the sky. "There are twelve bodies inside that ship out there. From the look of it, one or more of them lived long enough to tap into the programming for the cargo pods still attached to the ship and instructed the chutes to deploy as usual after entry. Those parachutes were only meant to open automatically if the pod was released from the ship. The release command activates the programming. There's no way those chutes out there could have opened unless someone changed the programming and told them to."
Julia looked horrified. "Doesn't Baines know this?" she said softly.
"I didn't tell him. He was asleep in the tent you'd sent down when I talked to Les. Remember what it was like back then, as a group? We were all still fighting with one another over small stupid things. So I wasn't sure if the Martins, if Morgan would be safe if I told anyone we lost twelve crew and colonists because Morgan took the first pod for himself."
"You've known this all along?"
"What good would it have done to tell anyone? It was bad enough I had to know twelve of the people I worked alongside for six years had burned to death in the ship. Do you think Morgan would still be alive if I had told the rest of you?"
"I. . . I don't know." She looked in the direction of the craft in the water. "That's why you and Yale want Zero here ahead of the others. So he can go inside the ship first."
"Of course. Whatever he finds won't be pleasant."
In the following silence they each avoidedlooking at one another. After a time, Julia seemed to collect herself.
"We'd better get some rest, Danziger. Tomorrow is going to be a tough day." She climbed out of the rail and pulled more of the materials from the back seat. "There is more than enough old parachute silk here. We can use it to sleep on. The ground will still be hard, but not as bad as it could be."
John turned in his seat. "What else is back there? Anything useful?"
"Just the med supplies I brought."
Her shoulders fell and she looked at him helplessly. Her expression seemed to crumbled.. "Oh, god, John, I didn't bring nearly enough medical gear with me! How can I examine the bodies? How are we going to get them out?"
He reached between the seats and grabbed her wrist gently. "Worry about it tomorrow, okay? Who knows? We might find medical gear in the cargo pod out there."
"It's been in the water over a year, John. Do you really think there will be anything salvagable in it?"
"As far as I can tell, yes. The ship's floating, right? Unless this is a shallow impact crater, and I doubt that, the pod is still water tight." He pulled his hand back. "Can you handle that stuff yourself? I want to talk to the kids before I try to sleep."
She nodded. "Sure. Go ahead."
It didn't take long for either of them to say their good nights to their own particular loved ones at the larger camp, and Julia was grateful when Danziger relayed the news Yale had sent most her medical equipment on ahead with Zero.
After moving the dunerail to a position where it was directly across the campfire from the opening of the shelter, she and Danziger settled into the lean-to for the night, adding enough wood to the fire to keep it burning for hours.
Sleep didn't seem to want to come in a hurry despite how tired they were from the drive.
"John, can I talk to you?" Julia finally broke the long silence between them. They were bedded down alongside one another, their heads close to the fire.
He looked over at her. "No, I think since there are only the two of us here, we should be as silent as possible. Preserve the pristine environment in any way we can."
Julia gave him a look of mock disgust, but he wasn't aware of it. He had closed his eyes. "I'm serious, Danziger. I've wanted to talk to you about something for a long time."
"This isn't about Adair, is it? I've already told you she and I made. . ."
"This is something else." She rolled onto her side and rested her head on her arm.
"All right. What?"
"Well, it goes back to when the group found out I was working for the Council and they left me behind. Later, Alonzo told me when the group was deciding the matter, you and he were the only ones who refused to vote. Was that because of what happened between us, you and me, after the crash?"
"Maybe a little," he admitted, "but it wasn't all of it. I was in the military for ten years, Julia, I knew mind conditioning when I saw it - especially when yours started to unravel. I knew what was happening wasn't all your fault. That, and you were a part of the group. I couldn't take a hand in voting anyone out of the team."
"Lonz said later, too, it was the way you treated me when he brought me back that helped make becoming a part of the group again a lot easier than it could have been. You acted as if I'd never been gone."
"If you recall, Doc, you kept me from blowing up by making Adair get the ZED's worm bullet out of me."
She laughed shortly. "That didn't take much doing. She would have ripped it out with her bare hands if she had to. I mean, you'd have thought it was Uly who'd been shot the way she worried about finding you."
"We're not talking about Adair, here, remember?"
"I know. Sorry."
"Well, to be honest with you, Julia, I went on reconnaissance that day because I thought it was going to be a tough sell for you to rejoin, and I just didn't want to see it." He gave up pretending to try to sleep and raised both hands to lace his fingers behind his head. "I was already angry with everyone, and I didn't think I could handle watching them try to vote you out one more time. I doubt if I'd have had any friends left afterward if it had happened that way."
"I've always wanted to thank you for doing what you did, but I never knew how to go about saying it, so I've tried to do it in other ways. It did, it does, mean a lot to me."
"You're part of the group, Julia. Always have been, always will be. You know what happened with us after the crash had more to do with being glad to be alive after facing and overcoming so many challenges than anything else. Besides, Alonzo hadn't turned on the charm yet."
She smiled. "Actually, he had, but it happened anyway. I could see what happened to Uly affected you as much as it did me. I needed someone to share that with. Plus, you believed in me. You trusted me to be able to keep the group together while Devon and Yale were preoccupied. I was always glad it happened then before anyone had a chance to really find their niche in the group, because after you stood up to Devon about letting the group vote on major issues, I could see she was interested in you and trying not to be. I think you were the first man to ever yell at her in her whole life and be right about what you were saying. And you were a good father. After we started to travel she started pulling you away from the rest of us."
"She was never really interested in me, Julia. She might have been attracted, against her better judgement, but her better judgement made sure it never went farther than that."
"Did she tell you that, or are you deducing it on your own?"
"We talked."
"Then she lied."
"Why would she lie - even when she knew she was going to die?"
"John, she knew about you and Eben and how far back your history went with one another. She watched you grieve for E, just as you watched her grieve for Shepard. You stepped back and gave her space after Shepard, maybe she was stepping back and giving you space after E died."
"We talked before Eben died, Julia. Before any of us started getting sick."
"She knew about E since the day you quit. She lied to you, even at the end. She was letting you go so you wouldn't grieve for her."
Danziger drew in a deep breath and, finally, turned to look at the doctor. "Is that what you're trying to do, Julia? Make me grieve for her?"
"You should, John. You can't hold it in forever."
"I'm not holding anything in. Take my word for it, I've had my moments. I haven't been taking the ATV to scout ahead alone just for the good of the group. I've had my moments." He turned to look back at the stars.
For some reason Julia couldn't comprehend her eyes were full of tears. "Good," she said, wiping her face. "I was worried about you." She turned onto her back and looked at the stars, too.
"I didn't want True and Uly to see me," John continued. "I don't want them to be any more frightened than they already are. I don't see happiness in True's eyes anymore when I come back from a scout. I see relief. I'm just trying to put the happiness back in my little girl's eyes."
Julia sat up and turned to him. "John, don't put too much meaning into this. Just accept it for what it is."
She leaned over him and kissed him.
To be continued. . .