Starquake.pdf

"That's the last of the HoloMem storage crystals, Pierre," Jean said as she turned away from the
communications console. "Most of the material on that one was encrypted. I hope they have the
crypto-keys." She swiveled back as the image of Sky-Speaker flashed on the screen.
"Keys obvious," said Sky-Speaker. "Goodbye."
"I liked the old Sky-Teacher better," said Pierre. "He talked so verbosely that it gave you time to think."
"We have plenty of time to think now," Jean said quietly as she shut down the communications console.
She reached under the counter and extracted the HoloMem crystal that had come from the library and
replaced it with the regular console crystal that kept a log of everything that went through the console.
"Too much time," said Pierre. He followed Jean as she ottered her way down the passageway to the
crew deck. Jean went to the library console and restored the HoloMem to its place in the storage rack.
Pierre, driven by his command responsibility, returned to the galley and stared at the listing of the food
supplies on the food storage lockers. There was food for eight more days at normal rations, sixteen days
at half-rations, thirty-two days at quarter-rations ... only one month. It would take five more months after
that before Oscar returned from its long elliptical orbit around Egg. His eyes didn't look at the bank of
lockers with the blank label. Bouncing lightly in the low gravity, he passed Jean at the library console and
turned into the lounge. Doc was talking
with Seiko and Abdul was looking pensively out of the viewport in the floor.
"HoloMems done?" asked Abdul, looking up.
"Yep," said Pierre, floating lightly to the cushion beside him.
"Anything left for us mere humans to do?" Abdul asked.
"The cheela don't need us anymore. They should be well on their way to recovery by now." A tiny
white-hot speck appeared outside the viewport window and stopped.
"Smile," said Abdul. "You're about to have your picture taken by some tourists."
The speck released a shower of sparks. There was a flickering of light, then the sparks rejoined the
glowing speck and it sped away.
"What are your plans for the rest of the mission, Pierre?" Seiko asked.
"I have no plans."
"You must!" Seiko sounded disturbed. "We must not waste our lives doing nothing until we die!"
Pierre raised his gaze from the viewport. The anguish in his face showed through the ragged, unkempt
beard.
"I can't find a way to save us," he said, tears starting to well up in his eyes.
"Of course you can't," said Seiko. "Thereis no way to save us. It is simple mathematics. There are five
people to feed and only eight days of food rations. We might be able to stretch that out using our body
reserves, but we will be out of food in a month. We could even consider eating Amalita's body. At best,
we could only get about 50 kilos of meat from it." She turned to Doc Wong.