Free Castaway Planet by Eric Flint, Ryk E Spoor Page A

anyway. We skidded along on most of her exterior and ruined most of the thrust nozzles, ripped off her wings, crushed her tail. Took off most of our exterior sensors, too, so right now I can’t get much from outside.
    “But that’s most of the bad news. All that stuff getting ripped off and crunched . . . well, it took a lot of the crash energy, let our harnesses do their work, which is why we’re all in good shape. Internal systems all seem pretty good, and the starboard lock shows all green so we shouldn’t have any trouble getting out. Cargo looks like it all stayed secure.” She looked troubled. “Getting the cargo out, though . . . we’ll have to move LS-5 until we can open the rear loading doors. Right now we’re sitting on them. And this thing weighs tons.Lots of tons, actually.”
    “Worry about that later. Are we close enough to land to be able to get out ?” Laura was particularly concerned about Hitomi, who still needed help swimming.
    “I’m pretty sure we’re in that little lagoon that’s a few hundred meters short of the end of the continent; that was my target, I wanted to set us down near the edge. If we’d come down farther along we’d have been in trouble, but we’re not bobbing up and down, just twitching a little, so we’re sitting on something solid. And the recordings of our path tell me that we were running on solid ground right up to the end when we fell.”
    “We can’t get any information from outside?”
    Sakura shook her head. “The cameras all got wrecked in our cartwheeling across the ground. Radar’s out, too. There’s one working external microphone, but that’s just hearing a lot of wind and rain, and a little thunder once in a while.”
    “Well, that’s all right,” Akira said. “I’m sure we will be able to get LS-5 out of the lagoon with a little work and some of the smaller equipment on board, and once we get into the cargo we should be much better off. I believe we have everything, really, that we could want for this emergency on board, right?”
    As was often true, Melody answered. “We have a Dust-Storm Tech Nanofacturer VII 3D manufacturing system in the cargo, Dad; that was meant for the whole colony. With raw materials and power that’ll make anything we can spec out well enough. Whips can probably run it, and LS-5 ’s reactor has enough power according to the datasheet.”
    A full manufacturing system! Laura found herself grinning. “We’ll be able to make our own little colony easily, then.”
    “Especially since we’ve got you and Dad’s stuff, too,” Sakura said, excitedly. “You’ve got the full medical equipment list, and Dad’s bio research stuff is perfect for this—I mean, really, he was supposed to be doing research on Tantalus, but we’ll have to do the same kind of research here, right?”
    Akira laughed. “You’re exactly right, Sakura. Same kind of research—what’s safe, what isn’t, how all the species interact, that kind of thing.”
    Laura noticed that Melody, oddly, seemed somewhat let down. “What is it, Mel?”
    The black-haired little girl flushed. “Oh . . . Just being stupid. Never mind.”
    She caught a flash of data from Melody’s omni and realized that the girl had been reviewing old books like Robinson Crusoe and some of the outdoor survival shows that had been popular a century or so back, and couldn’t quite keep from smiling. The laziest of her children was still hoping for a big adventure. Thank goodness she wouldn’t get it.
    “So . . . we’re really going to be okay?” Hitomi said, as Whips lifted her back to her seat.
    “Really,” Laura assured her. “Oh, it’ll be a rough few days or even weeks getting everything ready,” she saw Melody make a face, “but we’ll be just fine.” She smiled around at the others. “So let’s sit back, relax, and let this storm blow itself out.”

Chapter 9
    “Okay, Sakura, now cycle the lock again, exhausting to the outside.”
    Whips wasn’t taking