Rush, Young thought, struggling to pull himself up out of the pit, was a piece of shit.
He breathed through the last remnants of his anger - as always it had felt damn fine while it lasted but the aftermath was crushing. Like shock after an injury, he could feel parts of himself shutting down, slowing to a stop, while all the space they normally took up was filled with self-loathing.
It wasn't like he didn't already know all the things that Rush had shouted at him. Oh no, he was so perfectly aware of them that sometimes he couldn't think of anything else. It seemed lately that everything had got to be too much for him. He tried - he kept trying. He kept on failing.
He wasn't sure where it had all started, this slow loss of the unassuming competence on which he had once prided himself. Emily had been a big part of it, but surely, if he'd been thinking straight even then, he would have found a better way of reacting to her ultimatums than by cheating on her with TJ. He couldn't possibly ever have thought that would turn out well. So the slide went back before Icarus. A creeping, helpless, unstoppable dissolution of everything he was.
But only Rush would pry it all open and haul it out to rub his face in it like this. Only Rush would think that using it against him like a weapon was somehow going to help the situation. That jab about Scott had been particularly vicious. It had all hurt, but that one he resented.
Pulling himself back together got harder every time, all the separate pieces weighed down with a kind of black, tarlike ooze of regret that made them hard to move. But he did it, slowly, watching Rush's face-down sprawl across the deck go from oddly relaxed back to wired contempt.
The man reacted pretty well to being beaten up. It had been that way last time too, when he came back on board after being left for dead. Yeah, there had been the mutiny, but that was a half-assed affair at best, mostly Camile's doing. Rush could have caused so much more trouble than he had. Instead he had kept the secret, offered a compromise, almost as though Young's ruthlessness or his strength had impressed the man.
So, perhaps physically dominating him was an effective way to get him to cooperate. Good to know. It was not Young's preferred MO, but in the matter of Rush he'd take what he could get.
A reflexive spiral of commentary in the back of his head started up, telling him that he could not trust the conclusion to which he'd just come, but these days every decision he made carried a cloud of nagging doubts. If he listened to them too hard he'd never get anything done. Drink quietened them down. Nothing else did.
But drink was not available, so instead he reviewed his litany of reasons to get up and carry on. There was no one on board Destiny who could do his job as well as he could. Rush had the decision making down pat, but his callous attitude, his secrecy, his lying, and his odd, pointless cruelties meant he hadn't a hope in hell of winning anyone's willing cooperation for long. Camile talked a good game but in practice did nothing useful to justify it. Scott... Scott was shaping up, but at the moment was too callow, too honest, too trusting to deal with any position that involved working with Rush. Besides, if he even tried to hand command to Scott, the boy would give it straight back, probably with a pleading look on top. It wasn't fair to ask.
There's no one else. Suck it up and step up.
Sighing, he shoved away the little voice that rebuked him for having wasted a good five minutes trying not to drown inside his head, while life or death decisions awaited in the real world. He had Rush to tell him he was useless, he didn't need to do it himself.
The gleam was back in Rush's eye by now - the look of a man who had decided the universe was his toy and he didn't want to waste any playtime. "Alone on the planet of the vampire lizards. What next?"
"As you never stop reminding me, you're the genius Rush. So. Ideas?"
"Well, my first thought would be 'repair the shuttle. Fly back the way we came.'"
"I like it," Young smiled, put down a mental plank over the abyss inside his head and stamped on it. But if that was possible I don't think I'd have woken to find you panicking."But..."
"But it cannot be done. I might be able to up the power to the external sensors, so we can see where we are. Maybe bring the navigation systems back online. Other than that, I think you already know it's a lost cause."
Young nodded, beginning to look round the shuttle, take stock of it not as a vehicle but as a resource. "So our way off this planet is the gate."
"Yeah. Once I have navigation up, I should be able to download a map to one of the kinos that'll give us some idea of how far it is and what the terrain's like between there and here." Rush sat up, set his back to the consoles as though he found their presence reassuring. His voice was a smooth musical lilt, laced with dark humour. Nice to listen to if you didn't pay too much attention to the words.
"Of course, that's assuming we don't just sit tight and wait to be rescued. We seem to have adequate life-support in here. I could perhaps rig some kind of distress signal, on the off-chance that Destiny comes for us. But let's be honest about this, that's never going to happen. They're never going to be stupid enough to chance her in that wormhole, when they don't even know if we survived. We're on our own."
Young got up. Not too bad - he was stable on his feet after a moment, though the headache felt like thumbs were trying to squeeze his eyes out of their sockets from the inside. Opening the storage beneath the passenger seats, he pulled out bottled water and a bar of the rancid-tasting trail rations Becker had made by combining alien-deer fat with protein mix.
The food was hard work, but it helped. As he chewed, he thought about Scott and Greer and TJ. Not completely sure about James - she hadn't been with him as long as the others - but probably her too. Eli and Chloe figured in on Rush's side: good kids, passionate, influential and oddly fond of Rush. There was no way that any of them were going to shrug this off and walk away.
"I wouldn't count Destiny out. But we've got the only shuttle, so even if they do turn up, we need to be at the gate."
"Agreed."
"Alright then," Young liked the feel of a plan, the way it turned the endless uncertainty of life into something measurable, achievable. "Here's what we'll do. You get the sensors and navigation up. I'll start prepping what I can find for a cross country hike. Then we'll both get a couple of hours sleep and set off in the morning."
"Oh, it's a fine plan and I hate to be the one who puts a spoke in it, but-" Rush waved an open palm at the animal noises scratching over the walls. "Are you not forgetting a big factor? Did the teeming horde of monsters outside not quite register?"
Young gave a huff of laughter and carried on determinedly ignoring the creatures. "If they could get in, they'd be in already. Let's do what we can here first before we worry about them."
With an exasperated look, Rush conceded the point. He took a screwdriver from his pocket and turned to begin prying panels off the instruments. Young retreated to the rear doors and as he did so he heard the sound of the deck grow hollow beneath him.
"What's down here?"
Rush looked back and away again, dismissively. "Never looked. It shows up on the schematics as a big empty space with a couple of explosive bolts and a couple of ring bolts. Eli calls it the smuggler's hold."
"You got another of those screwdrivers?"
"Is this really the time to be decreasing the structural integrity of the vessel? When we've rapacious leech-lizards trying to get in?" But Rush tossed him a smaller screwdriver anyway, and looked too relaxed for him to take this protest seriously.
"Four kinos and a deck panel makes a kino sled," Young answered, prying up the metal plating, unscrewing a further layer and looking in disbelief at what lay underneath. Three compacted rectangles of scorched cloth, each the size of a bale of hay. It looked like the explosive bolts designed to release them had gone off, but the outer doors had not opened. The force of the explosion had shattered an inner bulkhead, shredding the metal into long splinters, cutting through the neatly packed fabric, until only a small inner core remained undamaged.
He didn't quite have the energy to be angry again so soon, compromised on an unhappy laugh as he lowered himself into the compartment to free the slippery, silk-like fabric, haul it out into the shuttle-bay proper. We had deceleration 'chutes all along? And nobody thought the pilots needed to know?
Like most ancient technology, the chutes were both familiar and disturbingly strange. The fabric was amazingly light for its area. It had an organic feel, less like silk perhaps, more like the stretchy thin resilience of gut. There were no fibres in it when it was cut - it separated more like skin than like cloth. But it was dry and strong and incredibly useful. It seemed like an omen, he felt better already.
The metal splinters looked good too, one as long as his hand would do for a knife, another as long as his forearm for a machete, if he could only make them hilts. The smaller flakes might make arrowheads and spearheads for hunting, allowing him to save rifle ammunition for things that were trying to kill them.
He tipped them out onto the deck, wrapped a remnant of fabric around one end of the knife and began cutting up the parachutes to reshape into rucksacks and bandages, rope, a harness for the kino-sled so it could be dragged behind one of them, hands free. He was half way through cutting out a couple of six by five foot squares of the stuff and sewing them together with narrow strips – using the knife as an awl, in the absence of a needle - when Rush gave a semi-approving noise and the console lights brightened.
Young didn't stop, just sat tailor fashion, sewing mostly by touch and wishing for his reading glasses. "So?"
"Well, we appear to have landed right on top of a nest of the wee buggers, which probably explains why they won't leave us alone even though they must know by now we're not edible. I'll give them this, they're not actually trying to feed on the shuttle any more, just scampering about without a care in the world, enjoying the night air."
"So they're animals," Young ventured, pleased. "We can hope that if something doesn't look like food it won't be attacked."
"And how do you propose we make ourselves look like something that's not food? They seemed distinctly unconfused on that count, last time an away team came here. I seem to recall us all being dead within the hour, if you remember?"
"You got that terrain map?"
"Here." Rush passed him a kino remote, looking suspicious, as though a plan-making Young was so far out of his experience as to make him wonder if he was talking to the same consciousness. It was a little insulting, but then Rush had never known him in the old days, before it was true. Because Young might not know how to read Ancient, or do the work of a computer in his head, but wilderness survival was a different matter. He'd trained for this.
He turned on the map and scrolled, and the sick feeling of pre-emptive despair eased. Some good luck for a change. "How about that?"
Offering the kino remote back to Rush, he elaborated. "There's a ridge of mountains between here and the gate. We already know there are caves. So here's how we'll proceed: Every day we send the kino out to search for caves with small entrances within half a day's march. While it searches, we remain at our previous place of safety and use the time on survival tasks. When it finds a suitable cave, we get there asap, and block up the entrance behind us, walling ourselves in for the night. The creatures don't know we're there, so they leave us in peace. Next day we take down the wall, do the whole thing over, until we're at the gate."
Rush stepped back, looking more startled than he had back when Young had suggested using shuttle thrusters to nudge Destiny away from her imminent crash into a star. As though evidence that Young was not a complete moron defied the nature of his reality. "If they smell us and burrow through anyway, we'll be dead as soon as the sun sets tomorrow."
Young shrugged, less in bravery than in indifference. "You see another choice?"
"I... don't, in fact. But I also don't see why we have to take it that slow. Half a day's march?" Rush looked askance at the distance bar. "It's going to take weeks at that rate. Months even. If Destiny does come after us they'll have given up and gone by then. Why not just push through, fast as we can? I can do thirty miles in a day, we could be there in ten days."
Remembering Greer's account of Rush's behaviour on the lime desert planet, Young smiled to himself. Apparently Rush took on worlds the way he took on people, full speed, impatient, expecting them to yield to his ferocity and bow before the power of his will. It was arrogant and naïve and possibly a little touching. But it wasn't ever going to work.
"We've got margin for sustainability, and we've got margin for error. Trust me on this, we're going to need both."