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

any chances. Before letting anyone step out of the shuttle, he wanted Dr. Kimei and her husband to check the air readings. So they’d put Laura Kimei’s omni, which had a lot of built-in sensors for medical purposes, into the starboard airlock, let it open to the outer air, and left it there for an hour to gather data. The omni hadn’t been able to communicate well through the lock, so they had to bring it back in to check the results. Everyone was accordingly in environment suits.
    It had better be okay, Whips thought. Because they couldn’t stay in environment suits the whole time.
    Laura reached into the lock as it opened and brought out her omni—a Scanwise Gold Five that looked like an Egyptian bracelet. “Well, it looks all right.” She tapped into the local net and checked the data.
    A few minutes later he saw her pull off her helmet and knew the answer. “All clear, everyone. Oh, there’s some pollen and other such things in the air, but nothing immediately toxic.”
    “Did it see anything through the open lock?”
    “Not terribly much. Mostly a lovely blue sky and a few distant flying somethings.”
    Dr. Kimei tied back her hair tightly. “All right, I’m going to take a look.”
    No one argued. Whips knew that Laura Kimei was not only the tallest and strongest of the humans, but much more agile than he was out of the water. If he remembered right, she was also the daughter of a policeman and trained in some hand-to-hand weapons, overall making her the best choice for first person outside. In her hand she held the only ranged weapon that had been available outside the cargo storage: a SurvivalShot 12mm, designed for use on worlds with no ammunition manufacturing in place.
    Not that she was going far. They saw her go to the lock, look out cautiously, then lean out farther, looking down, around, and up, then back down and out for several minutes.
    She turned back to them, smiling broadly and holstering the pistol. “Well, Sakura, we can see exactly where we came down; there’s a big trench cut through the landscape pointing right back to the heart of this continent.
    “Better news is that I can see a shallow ridge below us. I think the water there is no more than a meter deep, so we can wade to shore, though someone has to carry Hitomi.”
    “Very good!” Akira said. “What’s our plan, then?”
    “First we need to scout out some temporary headquarters. It has to be near to the water, for Whips’ comfort, but high enough that we’re not going to get caught by waves and tides. It also needs to be sheltered, so that wind and such won’t get in too much. Everyone take some of the rations with you. We’ll probably be camping outside the LS-5 until we get her out of this lagoon and lying flat instead of mostly on her tail.”
    Akira nodded. “Whips, since you’re the strongest, if you don’t mind I’d like you to carry the winch?”
    “And the carbon-composite cable and block-and-tackle, yes, sir.” The compact high-powered winch was a standard piece of equipment in the shuttles, available to install on the nose or the rear loading ramp or into the standardized sockets on the colony work vehicles. And, with enough mechanical advantage—like the block and tackle—it might just be strong enough to pull LS-5 out of its current inconvenient position and up onto the land. The carbon-composite cable, of course, was more than strong enough for the job. From his engineering work he knew that he could probably suspend three or four shuttles from that single cable.
    “Good.” He smiled down at Whips. “I’m very glad you’re with us, Harratrer.”
    “So am I,” he said quietly. Inside, he wondered if any of the rest of his family, his pod, had escaped. The thought that all of his family—little brother Pageturner with his eyes always in a book, so much like Melody that at times he’d wondered if they could somehow be related despite all the obvious biological impossibilities; his father