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Amena paused in munching the nuts that topped her breakfast of uji. Her interface was showing her an alarming notification for the weather forecast on the west coast of the southern continent. It had been revised from 'stable, severe cold; moderate gusts possible' to 'severe cold; high winds; extreme gusts; blowing snow; limited visibility' with additional directions for evacuation in areas in the path of the sudden weather event and shelter-in-place warnings for those unable to get out of the path of the wind front.
There had been an unexpected ionospheric dump from the terraforming engines, causing a front or a cascade or something. From the language being used, it was dangerous. Two of her mothers were there, along with one of second mom's survey friends. That was why she'd had the alert set up.
She glanced over to see that Thiago had paused in helping Emee collect the peas they had spilled. He was looking at Amena with a reserved expression, the sort adults wore when they didn't want you to worry but you really, really needed to be worried. He was monitoring it, too.
Her attention sharpened on the feed again. She pulled up the weather map and super-imposed her mothers' group's last known position on it. They were right on the edge. It would be sweeping over them now, or in the very near future. Did they know? Surely, they'd have received the same warning, but on the other hand, one of the alerts was about possible disruption to communications. She refocused briefly to Thiago but she couldn't see his face now. He was on his hands and knees, retrieving errant bits from under the table. Did that mean things were okay and she shouldn't worry?
She was going to worry anyway. If there was one of her two mothers involved who would understand the knot of tension she was feeling from nothing but a weather report, it would be second mom. Amena tried sending her the most basic text communication. Hey, Mom? Are you there? I heard there was a weather notice for where you're at. There was no response, so now she really did have something to be concerned about. Maybe. She blew out air tensely and took her unfinished porridge to the sink. Her stomach was too upset to eat more.
Thiago met her there, tossing a handful of peas into the compost bucket. "We'll hear from them soon, I'm sure."
She chewed her lip, knowing an empty reassurance when she heard one. "Yeah," she said glumly. But what if we don't? she thought. SecUnit wasn't around to ride to the rescue this time. Even though Amena knew there would be emergency response personnel equipped and staged to respond to disasters or accidents, would that be enough? Thiago spread his arms and she accepted the invitation for a hug, trying to block out the fear that welled up inside.
Thousands of kilometers away, Bharadwaj's head snapped to the south. "Ayda? Is that- What's that noise?"
Mensah looked up from where she and Farai were wrestling a soil core into the land vehicle. They gave the heavy, frozen cylinder one last shove and then she looked past Bharadwaj and their dig site. The world beyond was a uniform grey in a way that looked viscerally wrong. The terrain here was mostly featureless, no vegetation to speak of, but there should have been a horizon line out there, at least. It was gone, though. She could hear what Bharadwaj meant. Now that the digger was off, it should have been silent. There was a low, dull roar instead, slowly rising.
Next to her, Farai said, "There's no signal."
Mensah checked her own feed. Their cold weather environmental suits were still in contact with one another and the vehicle, but the outside world might as well not have existed. Those channels held nothing but static. They were isolated.
The greyness past Bharadwaj looked closer even without any landscape features to judge it by. The sound was threateningly louder. Mensah had a flash of memory of watching a rain front approach, manifesting as a wall of water – dry where she was, but with pouring rain coming toward her. In a sharp tone, Mensah said, "Bharadwaj? Come here, now." With one hand, she grabbed the edge of the vehicle and with her other she reached blindly for Farai. The storm hit before she made contact.
It was like gravity turned on its side and 'down' became parallel to the ground. Farai and Bharadwaj fell away and past her, pushed by the enormous force of more moving air than Mensah had ever experienced. A second later, she was wrenched from her grip on the vehicle and followed them. She rolled and tumbled along the frozen surface, wind howling past. The air turned opaque with particulates; visibility was abruptly reduced to barely more than the length of her arm.
"Farai!"
She could hear Farai and Bharadwaj over the suit's speakers. They were yelling and calling out. Farai made a sound of pain just as Mensah slammed around and across one of the few rocks that protruded from the otherwise flat plain. Her suit was tremendous protection against many things, but not being slammed over unforgiving, jagged surfaces. She hurt her arm and side in the same impact and then the suit tore as the whipping wind forced her around the side of the obstruction. Icy cold air flowed inside the suit, cutting along her stomach like a knife.
Under the suit, her garments were light. They were only a comfort layer between skin and suit, preventing chafing and wicking away any sweat. They were not intended as insulation. That was the suit's function – a function which was seriously compromised now.
Much more of this would kill her. She knew that with a flash of certainty. She kicked her legs and clawed with her other arm, throwing herself down as much as possible, tucking her hurt arm over the tear in the suit. She managed to get herself into the lee the stone provided, meager though it was. She'd no more done that than something huge and black flew through the air at the edge of her vision, so close it would have smashed her into oblivion had she still been out in the open. A corner of the stone the size of her head disappeared with a pop as the shape scuffed it. Then they were both gone.
She stared after it in the howling dark that was everywhere. "The fuck?" she whispered. She was almost certain that had been their land vehicle.
"I've- I've stopped moving!" That was Bharadwaj. The channel was heavy with static, but Mensah could make out the words. "I'm safe. I'm okay. I think."
"Farai?" Mensah called. There was no answer. What if the vehicle had hit her? Mensah started to raise her head on instinct to see, but the wind caught the top of her suit and nearly sent her tumbling again. It was only with great effort, clawing the ground and digging in her heels, that she wasn't sent flying. She scrambled back into the small shelter the rock provided from the torrent of air, dust, and everything else. There was nothing to see, anyway.
Her side ached from impact and her belly felt like it was giving truth to the term frostbite. She might be injured there, too, since anything able to tear the suit could have done damage underneath. It was too cold to tell. She was shivering. Shock was threatening her. It was cold, so cold. She tried to shove together the edges of the rip. As soon as she caught her breath, she repeated, "Farai?"
"I can't see her," Bharadwaj said. "Her suit signal-" The rest of what she said was eaten by static, simultaneous with an even greater gust of wind. The atmospheric ionization must be everywhere. Abstractly, Mensah knew what must have happened. The terraforming engines had 'belched', as it was colloquially called, emitting a surge of ionized particles. In normal weather, these dispersed harmlessly in the upper atmosphere. In times of severe cold or temperature inversion, the mass of charged vapor could fall to the surface, displacing other air and causing a localized front. She'd never heard they could be this extreme.
Mensah checked for Farai's suit signal. It was there, then gone. It was there, then gone again. It was too unstable to give her distance or vitals. Speaking of vitals, Mensah took stock of her own suit. The rip was twice the length of her hand, which was the first good thing she'd seen because it was small enough for her patch kit to cover. That was on her thigh and because nothing was easy, of course it was on the side where her arm continued to not work right. She didn't think it was broken, but the fingers were numb and the elbow felt jammed.
She reached down anyway, breaking the seal on the pocket and getting a grip on the kit inside. She pulled it out. She didn't know what happened next – one moment it was in her hand, the next it was gone. The wind had taken it and she hadn't had enough sensation in her fingers to feel it happen. "Well," she said with the calmness that comes when one thinks they're about to die. She already had her other hand clapped over the rip. Now, she put both hands there.
This was the point when she would have expected to have a debilitating panic attack. There didn't seem to be a point, though. She was debilitated to uselessness already. Maybe that was why she didn't feel 'panic' so much as just numb. Or maybe all that therapy had done some good.
She took the moment to let herself do nothing at all, aside from breathe. She lay on her back, staring up at a pitch black, starless 'sky' that should have been a clear afternoon. How had this even happened? This season had been the coldest on record, so there had been scientific curiosity about how the seeded micro-organisms of the soil were coping. She was a terraforming researcher, after all. She'd put together this little group to investigate. Bharadwaj was a geochemist. Farai was a soil scientist. Their specialties intersected perfectly for this. Sure, there was always a danger of freak weather near the terraforming engines, but they'd all agreed they were far enough away to be safe.
Too bad the weather hadn't agreed with them. No matter. This was what she had to deal with.
She swallowed and got a grip on herself more easily than she'd expected. The breather had helped. She still hadn't heard from Farai. The wind seemed to be lessening a bit, or at least wasn't getting worse. "Bharadwaj? Are you alright?"
"Yeah. Scraped up, but okay. My ankle's-" something staticky, "-don't know if I can walk."
"Alright," Mensah said. "I'm-" she hesitated to admit this, but it might be important for Bharadwaj to know, "injured, but not badly. I need a patch kit for my suit. I've lost mine. I'm going to come your way. Please stay where you are."
They were close enough that most of the time, she was getting a direction and distance to Bharadwaj's transponder. Mensah was fairly sure she was the furthest upwind of the three of them, so by her going to Bharadwaj, it would put her closer to where Farai must be. Also, it was easier for her to scoot along the ground, letting the still-howling (but not deafening) wind push her, than it would be for Bharadwaj to come to her with an injured leg.
"How far out is rescue?" Bharadwaj asked as Mensah made slow progress. There was already less static, although whether it was because she was getting closer or the ionization had blown past, she couldn't tell.
"Under perfect conditions?" Mensah panted shallowly. Breathing hurt, and it hurt more as the initial wave of adrenaline wore off. Her suit wasn't keeping up with the frigid air that inevitably got in when she moved. Her chest was freezing, her torso chilling. Her muscles were shaking. Given how much the earlier pause had helped, she took another moment to rest. It let the suit's mechanisms reheat her without having to struggle against leaking air as she moved.
With a slightly shaky voice, Mensah said, "A half hour, maybe more." They'd wanted the most remote, pristine, and uncontaminated of samples. Even though there were staged rescue vehicles (Preservation wouldn't do things any other way), what mattered most was the mobilization time of the human teams for them. And in any case, these weren't perfect conditions.
"Even if they don't have our signal now," Bharadwaj said, "they know we were out here. They'll come."
Rescue would have to wait until it was safe, though, and they might not be the only research crew who needed help. They could be on their own for hours. Was Farai alright? Having collected herself again, Mensah pushed to move faster, going in an awkward, three-legged crawl with her injured arm holding shut the suit.
The wind was definitely less, no longer helping her out as much, but visibility was still awful. On her heads-up display, she could see she was nearly to Bharadwaj. It still scared the crap out of her when she heard Bharadwaj say, "Oh!" and then something hit her ankle. "Ayda, I'm here!"
Bharadwaj was in a shallow ditch, half her height and sharp-sided. Mensah had almost missed her. The intermittent precipitation on the continent carved these gulleys, which the blowing wind filled with dust within weeks of forming. She was lucky to have found one. Mensah huddled with her, facing her and thinking to get the patch kit immediately. Bharadwaj grabbed her upper arms and pressed the faceplate of her suit to Mensah's instead. The illumination inside the helmet showed her eyes were shut.
Mensah paused and let herself relax for just those three seconds Bharadwaj needed. If Farai weren't in danger (and Mensah wasn't freezing), then she might have stayed longer – breathing, recentering for a third time, taking comfort in survival. Bharadwaj had had too many near-fatal misses and so had Mensah. But this time, she couldn't wait. She fumbled at Bharadwaj's thigh. "I need your patch kit."
"Oh, yes, of course! Let me do it."
Mensah had opened the pocket (with her good hand, this time) then let Bharadwaj take over rather than risk another loss. Her 'good hand' was not her dominant one and she was shivering all over. She couldn't afford to be clumsy. They hunkered down out of the majority of the wind and Mensah did her best to hold the edges of the rip together so Bharadwaj could tape them shut. The back of her suit made whirring sounds as everything inflated properly. The relief was immediate.
"Can you walk?" Mensah asked as she shifted her shoulders. With a pressurized suit, it was easy to get the heating element off her back as it normalized the temperature. It had become uncomfortably hot while the rest of her had been freezing.
"In this wind? I don't know. It hurts." Bharadwaj gestured at her ankle. "But Farai … We have to …"
"I know." This was another thing she wouldn't wait for. "I'm going after her."
"Then I'm coming with you."
At that determination to help, Mensah loved Bharadwaj all over again. Bharadwaj was being a trooper, being the friend she and Farai needed. She wouldn't let Bharadwaj endanger herself, though. "If you can't walk, then you can't come with me."
"You got here without walking."
It was a good point, but Mensah wouldn't allow it. "You have to stay here so I know how far I've gone. We won't have satellite coverage until this interference blows out, which might be immediately or hours from now. When I get to the edge of reception with you, then I'll stop, come back a little, and sweep to either side. When I'm sure she's not in that area, you'll come to me and we'll repeat."
It was a plan Mensah had come up with on the fly. She had no idea if it was a good one. Farai might not be immediately downwind of them. She might be a long way away. Standard advice for lost people awaiting rescue was to stay put, but she couldn't stay put without knowing where her wife was and if she was okay. That sound of pain had been the last thing she'd heard from Farai. What if it was the last thing she heard from her at all?
Bharadwaj nodded uncertainly. "Oh. Okay." She knew what the standard advice was as well, but like Mensah, she wasn't willing to sit tight until rescue came with their scanners and aerial vessel to find Farai. They would find her now. "Are you warm enough? I saw you shaking."
"Yes," Mensah said, going up to her knees and testing the wind. The world had lightened from black to dark grey, with the upward direction glowing slightly as the worst of the stirred-up dust had passed over them. "If I'm careful, then I can walk in this. Stay here and keep your head down." One good thing about the empty plain was the lack of large objects for the wind to throw into them but as she'd seen with their land vehicle, that was no guarantee of safety. It was better for only one of them to do this at a time.
"Be careful." Bharadwaj was feeling over her ankle. "Shouldn't we have satellite contact? What do you think happened?"
Mensah finished getting to her feet, bracing herself against the wind and the steady pinging of small stones or ice against her. She didn't have time for a full explanation and even that was guesswork on her part. "It's the ionization from the terraforming engines. It should blow out soon and we'll have contact then." She started forward, clambering up the side of the ditch and then staggering when a gust tried to knock her over. She could not fall while Farai was lost.
The effort of staying upright made her side hurt, though, as did her stomach even now that it was warming. Her arm hadn't gotten any better, either, but at least nothing was worse. Breathing hurt but she didn't think her ribs were broken. She wasn't sure what broken ribs felt like but she'd heard you couldn't walk around like that. Even though every gust of wind felt like someone was punching her in the side, she was able to walk. She had to. She had to find Farai.
"Farai?" There was no answer. There was no transponder signal yet. Mensah would probably see that before they managed audio contact, but she called out anyway.
She went downwind, following the direction Farai would have been blown. With the lights of her suit helmet, she could see the ground. She could see a step around her in every direction, not that there was anything to see. The rest of the world was lost in a glowing greyness of snow and dust. Bharadwaj's line was open and they kept up a steady stream of reassurances and check-ins between them.
By the time static began to swallow the signal, Mensah was too glad to sink to the ground and wait while Bharadwaj hobbled and crawled to her. It took so long, with so much panting and occasional pained noise that Mensah worried she should have gone back and helped. She was supposed to have swept to one side and the other, which she remembered very late, too late. She was tired but still determined.
She rose and met Bharadwaj, helping her up and providing balance as together, they moved forward a little further. She hadn't marked where she'd reached so she just kept going. Bharadwaj was hobbling well enough. They couldn't have gone much past where Mensah had stopped before when she had a blip of signal from Farai's suit.
"What was that?" Bharadwaj said. "Did you see that?"
"I did." Mensah's breath caught. She repositioned her arm. "Let me set you down here."
Bharadwaj made a protesting noise but let her go, saying, "I'm going to keep moving forward. I'll follow you."
Mensah nodded. That could have been a great idea or a terrible one - she didn't spare a thought for it. She was moving forward decisively, faster than she could with Bharadwaj hanging onto her for support. A new surge of adrenaline energized her. Another blip. She had to stop herself from wanting to run. The signal phased in and out indecisively as she paused to get her bearings. "Bharadwaj?"
"I'm fine. If you're getting something, go!"
She went forward. The signal steadied. "Farai!" No answer. Direction and distance came in. Finally! She almost tripped as she discovered she was off-course. Farai was to her right and even though she could see for several meters around her now, she would have missed her if she'd kept going downwind. She corrected and hurried.
"She's alive!" she called back to Bharadwaj, or perhaps just said it to herself. A moment later, talking over Bharadwaj's reply, she said, "I see her!"
Farai was huddled in a shallow depression. "Farai? Farai! Darling." Mensah went to her knees next to her. Farai jumped like she hadn't seen her coming. She turned her head too slow so Mensah reached up- She stopped short of touching her. The lights on Farai's suit were off. Even knowing Mensah was there, Farai was slow to orient to her. Her wife reached a hand to her, but it didn't take hers or press flat on her body. It just shook up and down against Mensah's knee.
"You're freezing," Mensah said – to herself, she realized – "Your suit's power is cut."
"What's that?" Bharadwaj said, reminding her she wasn't alone in this.
"Her suit-" Mensah climbed in the shallow hole with Farai and wrapped around her, breaking the wind even if there was no easy way to share warmth. The suits were expressly designed not to shed heat (that they conserved it well was the only reason Farai wasn't further into hypothermia). But maybe Bharadwaj knew something. "Her suit's power is off. That's why her comm is down. But the transponder is still working-"
"That doesn't use suit power," Bharadwaj interrupted, panting irregularly as she kept moving toward them.
Mensah knew that. She wanted to snap at Bharadwaj, but she reined it in. "Yes. Right. She's freezing. She might be hurt. I don't think she can hear me over the wind." She put her faceplate against the side of Farai's head covering (it wasn't a helmet, but there was an internal framework to hold it away from the skin and hair). She cut her comm for a moment. "Farai!" she shouted, hoping the vibrations transferred over the noise of the wind. "Can you hear me?"
She got back something that might be a nod, but no eye contact, no turning to her. There was no reciprocal holding. Farai was just there. This wasn't like her. It wasn't like anyone, really, unless they were injured. To Bharadwaj, she said, "I think she's more than just cold. She's not responding much to me."
"But she's responding?"
"Some, yes. A shallow nod. She tried to touch me earlier. But other than that, she's just sitting here." Without the suit power, there weren't the usual vitals. Even if there had been, Mensah wasn't sure what they'd tell her. Farai was obviously breathing and had a heartbeat.
"I'm coming up on you. I see you."
Mensah turned her head, seeing Bharadwaj crawling along the ground, one leg extended behind her. Visibility was better. Their comm signals between one another were crisp. She toggled the area network. It was still full of static, but she called out: "Hello, this is Dr. Ayda Mensah. We have a medical emergency- We have three medical emergencies. One is critical. Urgent. We need evacuation. And rescue. Please respond."
There was no response aside from the erratic, swishing white noise. Bharadwaj reached her, taking one of Farai's gloved hands in hers and rubbing it. "Farai? Farai?" She let go and waved a hand in front of Farai's visor. Farai turned toward her but gave no other response.
"Yeah, there's something wrong with her." Bharadwaj leaned close and Mensah thought she was going to do the same of pressing her face to Farai's suit and shouting. She didn't, instead directing her headlamps into Farai's face – rude and annoying, but Farai's only objection was to turn away slowly. Bharadwaj looked to Mensah. "She must have a concussion. This looks like brain injury."
They both examined the head covering of Farai's suit. It was intact, but with all the dust and tumbling, it was impossible to say if she'd taken an especially hard blow to the head. Mensah fingered a bit of it that felt thicker than it should have been – hard to tell through gloves – but her imagination told her Farai might have bled on the inside of the suit, where they couldn't see. The back of the suit was where the power cells were and the filters, tubing, and mechanisms that made it work. In her own suit, functioning, this was where heat and cool emanated, usually flush with her back to efficiently manage her core temperature.
In Farai's case, it was damaged, the semi-rigid plastic dented and broken like it had been folded and then warped back. Mensah picked at it, trying to find a lifted corner or other opening to peel it up and look at what was inside. Maybe there was a loose wire or a way to fix it, although she knew almost nothing of environmental suit internals. It wasn't designed for field maintenance anyway. The edges were evenly and firmly sealed to the suit and the stiff material of the housing – although dented – could not be pulled apart. She didn't have any tools, either, not even a sharp rock.
"I don't have anything I could use to pry this off," Mensah said. "Do you?"
Bharadwaj replied, "No. I don't know what to look for if I did. Do you know what's wrong with it?"
"No. We have to get her warm." She wondered if she could get Farai out of her suit and into her own. Would Farai follow directions? Would the biting cold and blowing wind chill her even worse, losing any benefit of switching? What if she fell or wouldn't put on Mensah's suit? And in the meantime, Mensah would be exposed to the cold as well, and then follow it by climbing inside a non-functional suit. On the whole, would this put them in a worse position than having Farai in a slowly cooling suit but Bharadwaj and Mensah both warm enough to think?
Bharadwaj had also been thinking. She offered, "Could one of us get face to face with her, and unzip the front of our suit and the front of hers, then seal the edges somehow to share our suit's warmth with her? She still has her patch kit, right?"
Mensah looked at the front of Farai's suit. Many things on Preservation were intentionally designed so they would only work in one configuration. The idea was to make it impossible to use incorrectly. With the zippers on the wrong side, they wouldn't mate up. That meant they'd have to use some other kind of seal for every centimeter. "But we only have one patch kit between the three of us," Mensah said. "We'd have to have a small opening. Would we tear it loose if we shifted position wrong?"
"The patch is pretty durable once it sets." Bharadwaj fiddled with the part of Farai's zipper where it met the one that sealed around her neck. She talked to Farai while she did, although Farai didn't answer her.
Mensah's eyes caught on Bharadwaj's wrist. "No, not the front of the suit – the hands. The gloves are detachable." They took the most wear and no one wanted to lose an entire suit just to replace a glove. As a side benefit, you could take them off when you needed unusual sensitivity. The important part was that sealing a wrist was something Mensah imagined as doable in a way that several chest panels of uncertain geometry wasn't.
"Oh!" Bharadwaj said with a sharp intake. "You're right. Is your suit working fine? Should we do mine or yours?"
"Mine. It's holding pressure. If there's enough patch material, we could do both of us." Mensah turned to her wife. "Farai, darling? I'm going to look for your patch kit in your leg pockets. Just hold on a little longer. We're going to take care of you." The kit was right where it was supposed to be. Mindful of the still-blowing wind, she used her good hand and held it low for Bharadwaj to take.
Mensah tested her suit by unsealing the glove and detaching it a centimeter before putting it back on. She tugged on the arm of the suit, shifting her shoulders to one side to get the wrist coupling over her knuckles where it would need to be for an equal join to Farai's suit. The things were auto-sizing and tried to adjust so she had to shift back to normal for the moment. "Bharadwaj, if you can take her glove off, I'll do mine and hold them together while you finish the patch, okay? The suits are going to fight us but it should give up once the patch is in place."
"Yeah, hang on." Bharadwaj had the strip of patch material out and tucked it under one of her knees. Then she helped with getting Farai's glove off. The moment the even colder air hit Farai's hand, she made a terrified, pained noise they heard without the comm, despite the rush of the wind. Mensah swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, pushed off her readied glove, and grasped her wife's hand.
"Now!" she said to Bharadwaj, shifting her shoulders to give more slack on the arm. Bharadwaj shoved the wrist couplings together. Mensah held them as best she could as Bharadwaj let go and took up the patch material. Mensah's fingers were half-numb and still tingling on this hand, but she could feel how icy Farai's hand was. "Hold on, baby. Farai? Hold on."
"Ayda," Farai said. She could see Farai's eyes had locked onto her finally and some small recognition gleamed there. She squeezed Mensah's hand, which made it hurt from her palm to her elbow.
Even so, Mensah made an exaggerated nod. "Yes, yes!"
Bharadwaj trimmed off the seal around their wrists. "Now … don't move. Is it holding?"
The line of icy chill around her hand was dissipating the same way it had across her front after that had been patched. Mensah's suit had pulled its wrist back most of the way to where it was supposed to be on her body. Farai's suit, unpowered, hadn't resisted it. So now Mensah's hand was inside Farai's sleeve. Farai's hand was still icy.
Mensah nodded. "Do you think you could do her other hand? She's very cold. Too cold." She turned her suit to maximum air circulation and temperature but it didn't have good airflow into and out of the hand. The thermocouple in the wrist had reported the reduced temperature on that arm, though, which meant valves were opening and efforts were being made within the limits of the suit's mechanical capability. They were remarkable devices and her time with SecUnit had forever changed how she saw the machines that assisted them. It was doing its best.
"Let me see how much material is left." Bharadwaj hadn't scrimped when she'd patched Mensah's suit earlier (and that had been a longer tear). She loosely wrapped around her wrist what she had left, measuring how much she'd need. "I think so. There might be a little bit of a gap, but I'll hold my other hand over it with the patch package."
Mensah regretted going first because if one of them was going to risk frostbite to their hand, she would have rather it had been her. But what was done was done. "I think we need to," she said. "My suit's not doing enough here."
She could smell Farai now, along with sweat, urine, and something else that was difficult to describe but put Mensah on edge. She suspected it was blood. Also, Farai wouldn't have lost control of her bladder if she was well. She'd obviously been slammed around just as they were and been damaged differently. Rubbing Farai's hand hurt Mensah's forearm, but she did it anyway, hoping it would boost circulation.
"I can't do this one-handed," Bharadwaj said.
Mensah chuckled. "I know. None of us can. We're all together here, holding hands." She helped as she could in disengaging Farai's other glove. Everything felt opposite-handed but at least it didn't hurt. Farai said something indistinct and watched them with a bewildered expression.
When Bharadwaj took off her own glove and then finished taking off Farai's, there was a moment where air was sucked out the open wrist. It pulled the warm air from Mensah's suit to backfill. Farai made a sharp inhalation and an expression that flickered to relieved before turning tense.
"Now, now!" Bharadwaj said unnecessarily, using her free hand to peel off the backing of the material Mensah was holding up for her. "Patch it now." Mensah was doing it as she spoke, wrapping the tape around their wrists. The join wasn't as good, as they were less successful at fighting Bharadwaj's suit's auto-sizing feature, but it still worked. There was a gap that Mensah put the patch kit wrapper over and then Bharadwaj pressed it flat with her free hand.
"Have your maxed your suit?"
"Yeah."
The way the open wrist had pulled warm air through Farai's suit gave her an idea, though. Mensah said, "You have a little gap there, right? The suit thinks it's leaking and it can't keep pressure. So it pulls in more air, heats it, and pushes it through our suits, through Farai's. It's a way we can get a little more air circulation, as long as we don't do it so much it overloads one of us."
"Or gives my wrist frostbite," Bharadwaj said. "But yeah, let's do that." She lifted off the patch.
Mensah could feel the slightest breeze inside the suit, which was all they needed to get more warm air flowing from her suit and into Farai's. She blew out her breath. They'd done all they could for the moment. "Farai, can you hear me?"
"Mm."
"Can you," she tried to remember even the most basic test for mental function, "count to three?"
There was no answer. "That's okay, darling," Mensah soothed. "We're together now. It's going to be okay." She gave her hand another pain-inducing squeeze.
They sat together, close and huddling, literally holding hands, sharing both air and warmth. Mensah was grateful Farai was alive and apprehensive that head injuries this bad could be fatal if not addressed quickly, before the brain swelled. The weather was clearing fast now, with the wind slowing further and the sky brightening. Bharadwaj had noticed as well and said, "Maybe you should try raising rescue again. I'm listening to the satellite connection and there's not much static on it."
Mensah nodded and toggled her comm.
Amena jolted at the comm chime. She'd been on edge for more than an hour now, watching for news of the southern continent. Satellites had tracked the ionizing plume, a feature which usually stayed in the higher levels of the atmosphere, but the unusual cold weather and low pressure system had forced it to the surface. The technical details of the outflow were fascinating to meteorologists and terraforming scientists, whose conversations filled the forums she had accessed. The excited nerd-fest was aggravating to Amena, who only wanted to know if her moms and their friend were safe.
She answered the comm immediately. Second mom's face filled her screen. She was in a transport of some kind. "Mom!"
"Amena. Baby. We're fine. We're going to be fine. We're … We're on our way to the nearest rescue station, I think that's-" Mensah looked off-screen, but the audio had been set so it picked up no other voices. Amena frowned at how intentional that was. She wasn't a baby. Mensah came back, "It's Juleton. We'll be there in seven minutes."
"Is everyone okay?" First mom wasn't on the call.
"We will be. Yes." She swallowed. There was a hesitation there that Amena wouldn't have noticed a year ago. Or maybe her second mom wouldn't have shown it. A lot had happened to both of them. They were each growing into how to manage the stress, for themselves, and for the others they cared about.
"Mom." It wasn't a question or an accusation. It was more an observation, a comment that she'd noticed what was being implied but not said.
"We will be," Mensah repeated. Then, as if thinking of something, she admitted, "It was frightening." She smiled – a little painful, a little fragile, an edge of vulnerability Amena had so seldom seen.
She felt herself relax. "You'll tell me about it when you …" She wasn't sure when. She didn't want to wait for them to get home – that might be days, or a week if they'd lost their research and needed to do more.
"I will tell you about it," Mensah nodded. "But right now I need to help with Farai. She has a head injury. The rescue medics assure me they got to it in time and she'll have a full recovery. Please tell Tano, Thiago, and anyone else who is asking after us not to worry. Can you do that for me? I'll call back in an hour and we can talk then."
Amena drew in a breath to blurt out a question – had she really been the only one second mom had called, and no one else? She blinked back tears that she hoped were relief and not due to something stupid and irrelevant right now, like how much she was being trusted. She nodded instead. "Yes. I can do that."
This was what adults did – they communicated and shared what was really going on. She was in that circle now. Maybe her second mom had had time for only one call and had made that to her, knowing she would pass it on to others. In an hour, she'd know more and until then, she had something important to do.
With one last brief, brittle smile, Mensah signed off. Amena leaned back and sighed with relief.