Dan turned and watched as shuttle six rose a meter off the landing bay floor, pivoted, and smoothly followed shuttle one on its way to the planet. On its way out, Dan saw Victus through the cockpit’s reinforced front window.  Standing behind the pilot, Victus had the man's head cradled in his handpaws. Dan waved, but he didn't really expect a response from either man. He wasn't sure if Victus even noticed him.   

Regardless of the frantic activity surrounding him, Dan couldn’t help but find awe-inspiring the sight of such a huge vehicle floating in the air with no visible means of support.

"Get to your ship, Joe!" he called to the last remaining forklift driver. "It’s time to blow this popsicle stand!"

Joe nudged the last of the remaining crates into place in shuttle eight’s cargo container, then backed his forklift away and shut it down before making a beeline for his assigned shuttle. No sooner had the forks pulled free of the pallet than the shuttle’s group leader started tightening the load straps which would keep them in place during their bumpy descent.  

Seeing an opportunity to help, Dan clambered through the open bay door and double-checked the passenger’s restraining belts.  The faces that Dan saw as he worked were as varied as the ship’s population, reassuring him that the crew had done everything possible to be even-handed when selecting which passengers to save.  He did what he could to make them comfortable and safe, then jumped out of the shuttle and checked them off his list.  “Shuttle eight, your cargo is secure,” he called, into his open comm. “We’ll see you on the surface.”

“Thanks, Dan,” the pilot replied. “See you there.”

The pilot’s response was unexpected but welcome, as was the rush of satisfaction Dan felt.  People certainly seemed to be much nicer after they had accepted that he was doing his best to get them all away from this ticking time bomb of a ship.

Dan worked his way down the line of shuttles, ensuring that each one had its full complement of passengers, and didn’t have extras who didn’t belong.  The procedure was the same with each shuttle; check the passengers, double-check that the doors were sealed properly, then turn the shuttle over to its pilot.  The only shuttle to have difficulty sealing was the one Dan had spent so much time repairing, but even that issue was quickly put to rest using cans of the foaming emergency sealant that each ship carried.

As he worked, Dan occasionally saw flashes of the distinctive, fluorescent orange of prisoner jumpsuits. To a one, the men and women wearing those suits were trying their best to disappear into the background, as if their positions on the shuttles were an act of whimsy which could be withdrawn at any moment.  He could understand the feeling.  One minute they were on their way to a penal colony, albeit a low-security one; and the next, they had been freed and were headed toward a new life.  It seemed astonishingly random.

Dan wished the crew could have found the inmates something less distinctive to wear before sending them down - something that didn’t paint huge targets on their backs by marking them as convicted criminals. Most of the other passengers probably had no idea their cruise liner was also being used to ferry prisoners to a reform planet, and now they were going to have to live alongside men and women about whom they held strong prejudices. Dan would have bet hard money that after all was said and done, those prejudices would cause far more trouble than the prisoners ever would.

Over the blare of the two-minute warning klaxon, Dan heard the sound of his own shuttle’s engines spooling up, and he made a mad dash for the ship with a huge ‘#10’ spray-painted on the nose. He checked in with the passengers before making his way to the cockpit, where Bo already occupied the seat normally reserved for a co-pilot. Dan hoped his mental barriers prevented Bo from knowing that his first impression, upon seeing him strapped into a chair which had been designed for the average sapiens, was to think that he looked like a huge black bear who had gotten himself stuck in a trash drum.

"Thank God," Bo teased, when he saw Dan standing in the doorway. "I halfway expected you to be out on the loading dock pushing the shuttles out with your bare hands!"

Dan smiled, but Bo could tell that he wasn’t in a joking mood. “Passengers are secure,” Dan reported to the pilot. “Close the cargo doors and you’re good to go.”  He pulled out his overworked comm and called the group leaders of shuttles eleven and twelve.  He gave them last minute instructions then tucked the device into a pocket.  Five seconds later it was back in his hand, although he had no use for the device and no conscious memory of retrieving it. “Where do I sit?”

Bo pointed to the seat to his right. Designed for the mission specialist, it folded up into the wall when not needed. It looked like a last-minute add-on, and compared to the other seats in the cockpit it looked neither safe nor comfortable. “Get strapped in,” Bo directed, oblivious to Dan’s trepidation. He attempted to ease Dan’s discomfort with a shot of military-grade bravado. “Get ready for the ride of your life, buddy!”  He grew serious once he caught the undercurrent of tension through their link.

Bo heard something through the oversized, olive drab headphones he was wearing that caught his attention. He held up a single finger to Dan to pause their conversation, then pulled the microphone closer to his mouth. “Confirm, all on board. Locked down and ready for departure.”

Dan noticed that whenever Bo spoke into the mouthpiece, his words were far more carefully formed than they usually were in casual conversation.  Not that Bo was a mush-mouth by anyone’s definition, but his thick lips did tend to slur his words, especially when he was tired.  Through their bond, Dan could hear the other side of the conversation between his mate, the pilot and the liner’s traffic controller.

hatches sealed and everyone strapped down?

“Fifty-six plus three in the tree.”

you’re good to go, ten

safe travels

Dan recognized their pilot from the group of men Tolliver had brought into the landing bay with him to back him up.  That might have only been a dozen hours ago, but to Dan it suddenly seemed like a lifetime. He thought that the man looked a lot more pleasant, now that he was away from that crusty Swede.

“We’re good to go, Jolly,” Bo called, to the man behind the shuttle’s controls. “Let’s get out of here!”  Bo turned his attention back to the radio. “Ten, off-grid. Switching to local traffic two-niner-niner, mark seven-three.” He reached in front of him and flipped a series of switches with an air of confidence borne of past experience.  The battle-varius manipulated the controls, and the crystal-clear communication with the loading dock personnel was replaced by the fainter chatter between shuttles. Bo pushed the microphone out of the way and pulled the cup off of one ear. Dan thought Bo looked ruggedly handsome like that, a thought which made Bo quite happy inside.

Dan put his comm away again, to free up both hands to attach his straps and pull them tight.  “Where did you learn to do all that fancy co-pilot stuff?” he asked, waving vaguely toward the ship’s control board.

Bo grinned. “I only know how to work the radio,” he admitted, “I don’t know anything about whatever else is going on in here. But it looked impressive, didn’t it?” he asked, hopefully.  Dan’s tension had not abated with the subtle push of humor so Bo stopped trying to cajole him.  As similar as the two men might be, their approaches to handling stress could not have been more different.  "What are you worried about?"

“What makes you think I’m worried?” Dan asked.  The cockpit was anything but quiet, and he had to speak up to be heard.

“You’re holding onto that thing like a lifeline,” he said, pointing at Dan’s right hand.

Dan was surprised to see that his comm was back in his hand. He swore and shoved the device into a side pocket of his pants, where it wouldn’t be as easily accessible.  “I just can’t let it go,” he admitted.   “It’s like it’s become my good luck talisman, or something.”  He shook his head. “I’ve just got this awful feeling we’re forgetting something.”

“I’m sure we are forgetting something,” Bo said, amiably. “We’re probably forgetting lots of things.  Most things, even. But we’ve got everything we need to survive, and that’s good enough.”

“I guess.” Dan shrugged as he checked the straps which held him in the thinly padded excuse for an acceleration couch. "I also feel guilty that I'm leaving when so many other people are about to die."

Bo looked at him with conviction. His head bobbed up and down slightly as the vibration from the accelerating engines made its way into the cabin, but his gaze was rock steady. "The people that got first berth on these shuttles were the ones who chose to help themselves. They weren't even sure if this would work but they were still willing to try. I saw you do everything you could to save as many people as possible, and I don't even want to hear you say you gave yourself preferential treatment by taking your rightful place on this shuttle." He reached over, and loosened one of the straps holding his husband in place. “This one’s backwards. Turn it around. And it doesn’t have to be so tight you can’t breathe.”

Dan fixed the offending strap, and none too soon. A few seconds later, he felt the deck beneath his feet slide sideways as the shuttle pivoted on its axis and headed out the door facing the planet. Twelve shuttles, he thought to himself. Four-hundred and fifty, maybe five-hundred people out of - how many? Two-thousand or so?

twenty-one hundred and fourteen

Bo's eidetic memory supplied, unconsciously.

Dan was glad for their link because the roar of the engines in the cargo shuttle was abusively loud. Whoever portrayed space travel as a majestically silent affair had no idea what they were talking about.  It was cold, tumultuous and dangerous, and would undoubtedly get much worse while burning through the atmosphere. The noise would be absolutely deafening.  Be that as it may, Dan thought, the chair he was in really wasn’t as uncomfortable as he’d feared.  It was by no means plush, but the metal had been contoured to fit the human body, and it had just enough padding in the right places to keep his bones from poking through.

“It might not be that bad,” Bo shouted at Dan over the din. Although he could have spoken to his partner through their mental link, Bo had been born and raised by people who knew which end of a fork to stick in their mouths.  Having a silent conversation in the company of others was considered rude, and the thought of chatting up Dan while others couldn’t participate made him queasy.

Bo looked dissatisfied for a moment, then bent to rummage through the cargo compartment under his seat. He found another pair of headphones and handed them to Dan. They were oversized and heavy, and made Dan look like a toddler wearing daddy’s headset, but they covered his ears and made the noise bearable. Bo pulled the cup of his own headphones down over his own ear and made sure Dan saw him pulling the microphone over his mouth, then demonstrated how he adjusted it to one side so his voice wouldn’t pop.  "Remember, there's still a chance the captain can restart the engines."  Dan did not seem mollified.

A few minutes after leaving the landing bay Bo clicked his headphones to the general channel, where the pilot could hear him. “Are we on the track?”

“Yes, sir,” Jolly responded. “You’ve got about an hour and a half before the next major course change.  We’ll start the beverage service in a few minutes,” he joked.

Bo smiled amiably. “Can you spin us back around so we can see the ship?” he asked.  “They’re going to restart the engines any time now.”

Jolly moved the controller yoke with practiced ease, and within a few seconds their shuttle had spun on its axis and was pointed back the way they came, bringing the damaged space liner into view.  Bo cranked up the viewer’s magnification and the three men watched as the last shuttle moved slowly out of the landing bay, gravid with supplies that would keep their group of unwilling colonists alive during their first year away from Earth.

Through the headsets they all heard the cruiser’s captain speaking with his crew, instructing them to begin the restart procedure. Bo held his breath as he listened to the engineers banter back and forth. What they were saying was so far outside his realm of experience that he didn't truly understand what they were doing, but their enthusiasm and sense of hopeful optimism was infectious.

A moment later, they watched with rapt attention as the great nacelles of the ship first glowed softly for a few seconds, then winked out one by one as the reaction failed. Although Dan didn’t understand much of what he was hearing he could feel Bo's tension through their link, and by that he knew that something was very wrong. He stared out the viewport at the floundering cruise ship, and watched in horror as one of the engines started glowing again, but this time it was not with the controlled burn of ignition. The light was jagged and uneven, like lightning deep within a dense cloud bank.

Before he could ask Bo what was happening, the port engine seemed to collapse in on itself, then silently exploded in an actinic flash of white-hot shrapnel. Through the spots in his vision, Dan watched in shock as the last shuttle to leave the ship (shuttle twelve, supplied Bo), the one containing many of the food supplies and almost all of the medical equipment, lurched drunkenly in the blast.  “And that’s why I put Tolliver on shuttle two,” Bo said, more to himself than anyone. “Turn the ship around, Jolly.  If anything else happens, I don’t want to see it.”

After a few minutes delay, a few smaller bits of shrapnel caught up to them and peppered their shuttle.  The men winced reflexively at the hailstone-like banging, imagining what would happen if any of those shards penetrated the shuttle’s thin skin.   When none of the pressure-loss alarms went off and the indicator lights in front of the pilot all remained green, Dan allowed himself to relax a bit.

Dan closed his eyes and thanked whatever gods might be listening that he, his partner and their two new friends had survived.  He knew they weren't safe yet, but so far they'd managed to dodge the same bullets that had killed off one of their fellow shuttles. And fifty two of my fellow passengers, he thought.

HIs mind abruptly ceased its musings when a warning klaxon sounded inside the cabin.

“Fuck me,” Jolly cursed, “I was so busy worrying about that other shuttle that I wasn’t paying attention to ours.  One of those fragments must have busted through, ‘cause we’re losing air.”

“How bad is it?” Bo asked, calmly.

“Bad enough.  We could ride it out if there weren’t fifty extra people sucking down oxygen in the cargo bay.  As it is…” he shot Bo a meaningful look. “We’ve gotta fix it.”

Bo thought for a moment, recalling emergency procedures he’d learned during his deep space training.  “Judging by the rate of pressure loss, will I have to go outside?”

Jolly examined his gauges for a moment before replying. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to be an inside job,” he said. “Gotta lay eyes on it to be sure, but that’s where we should start.”

Bo nodded and looked around the cabin.  His eyes settled on the bright-green plastic box that contained everything necessary to seal minor hull breaches. The kits were highly standardized, so learning how to use one taught you how to use any of them.  He opened the box and pulled out a bright-red box containing detector spheres. “You might want to warn the passengers,” he told Jolly, “I have to cut the gravity plating for a few minutes.”

Bo shut off the air handling systems, then waited for their pilot to make an announcement before turning off the ship’s artificial gravity.  Dan immediately felt as though he’d been thrown down an elevator shaft, and had to work hard to keep panic out of his mind.  Bo tuned out his partner’s distress and pulled a small string taped to the side of the red box.

They heard a small *pop*, and the carton ejected a flotilla of small, multicolored fluorescent balloons about three centimeters in diameter.  The skin of each bubble was only a few atoms thick, so the slightest current of air caused distinct, visible changes in their movement. “Sit very still,” Bo warned Dan, who was craning his neck to watch as the balloons wandered around the cabin.

After a minute or two spent observing the floating spheres, Dan was beginning to believe that the technique wouldn’t work.  Bo counseled patience, and after another minute or so the balloons had indeed started marching en masse to one part of the cabin.  Naturally it was on the side that had been facing the cruise liner, but more importantly they could tell that the air leak must be behind a locker containing the shuttle’s EVA gear.

Bo pulled the suits and tanks out of the locker, then stood back and observed the spheres.  They didn’t seem to want to drift into the closet as much as they wanted to gather around the seam between it and the surrounding panels.  “You got a tool kit somewhere?” he asked.

“Should be in the maintenance locker,” Jolly answered, “unless some grunt stole them before this tub got auctioned off.”

“So where’s the maintenance locker?”

Jolly shrugged.  “You got me.”

Bo looked around the cabin and frowned. Consolidating the military hadn’t kept the different specialties from forming internal divisions, and it hadn’t prevented those divisions from exercising control over its own transport ships.  Bo’s service had been in what amounted to the Army, and in its previous life, this shuttle had apparently been owned by the Space Force. The layout was different in a thousand ways - some gross and some subtle - all complicating the search.  

He made a conscious effort to slow down his eyes and look, really look at the painted stencil marking each panel. Eventually his eyes ran across what he’d thought was an arms locker, but was labeled “SMALL MACHINERY AND REPAIR.”  Gotcha ! he thought. He pulled the cabinet open and rooted around for moment before pulling out a shiny pincer-like device that looked like  a barbaric piece of antique medical equipment.

“What the hell is that?” Dan asked, perplexed.

“Panel remover,” Bo answered, as he turned his attention back to the empty locker.  “Watch and learn.”

Dan did watch, as Bo worked the small end of the contraption into the seam between panels.  When it was deep enough, Bo gently squeezed the handles and, with a popping noise, the locker moved away from its neighbor by a half a centimeter.  He moved the tool along the seam, pulling the handles whenever the tool threatened to jam itself in the decreasing gap.  In no time at all, he was pulling the metal cabinet free and examining the space behind it.  

Bo wedged his head, shoulders, and one arm inside the space the cabinet used to occupy. “There’s an assload of wires back here,” he said, doubtfully.  “I can’t really see…. Wait, there it is!”   Bo would never call getting hit by shrapnel from an explosion a hundred kilometers away “fortunate,” but the fact that the stray bit of metal had punched its way through their hull in one of the few spots not covered in wire and tubes had been damned lucky.  He clicked his fingernails in the varius version of a finger-snap to get Dan’s attention.  “Hey, hand me the foam sealant!”

Dan promptly turned as pale as a ghost, causing Bo to pull his head out of the empty space and stare at him. “What,” he asked, “you’re not going to throw up, are you?  That’s gross, especially in space.’

“I…” Dan trailed off.  He swallowed hard and tried again.  “I…sort of...needed the foam to seal the door in shuttle six.”  

Bo looked at him, flabbergasted. The shock of what Dan had just said sent his blood pressure tumbling. “You…”  He paused and put one skillet-sized hand on the back of his chair to steady himself.  “You gave away our only can of sealant?”

“They needed it,” Dan argued, halfheartedly.

“Fine, but why didn’t you replace it?”  Clear as a bell, Bo remembered the full case of sealant cans that was sitting next to the desk in the dock master’s office, fully visible, for anyone to take for any reason.  Surely Dan had seen them sitting there!

But then he took a deep breath and reminded himself that he’d been trained to look for those cans as soon as he entered a room. Every bit as much as he’d been trained to memorize the location of the air locks and how to put on a vacuum suit in the dark, his instructors had drilled survival skills into each and every grunt during their basic training.  They had practiced them over and over again until they were sick and tired of doing them, and then they did it a dozen more times until they came as naturally as breathing on Earth.  He had gone through that training. Dan had not.

Wary of Bo’s obvious chagrin, Dan continued. “Don’t we have another kind of patch onboard?  Sticky plates, or something?”

He sounded so meek that Bo couldn’t bear to be mad at him.  Dan didn’t know any better, and he was doing his best to help everyone survive in a truly shitty situation.  And even though he might not know what he was doing, he was still doing an amazing job, Bo thought.  

He in a dug around in the green box in case he’d missed something, but came up empty-handed.  “Apparently not. I guess when they auctioned off this boat, they replaced the full patch kit with a snot can and put the savings in their pocket.”  He stared at his partner.  “Do not throw up,” he reiterated. “We’ll figure this out.  Just give me a minute.”  He calmed himself and looked around their cabin for something that might work to seal the small gash in the skin of their ship.   

“Even at one full atmosphere, a hole that small won’t have to hold back all that much pressure, right?” Dan asked, hesitantly.

“About a thousand grams per square centimeter,” Bo supplied, easily.

“But the hole isn’t that big or we’d all be breathing vacuum by now,” Dan countered.  “It must be just a few millimeters wide, so that’s, what, just ten grams per square millimeter of hole?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Bo agreed.  “But your patch also has to stand up to the heat of re-entry without blowing off or catching on fire.”

“Epoxy?  Adhesive?  Double sided tape?” Jolly suggested, his voice still calm but with an icy edge.

Bo shook his head.  “We’ve got none of that.”  Discouraged, he wedged himself into his seat and rested his chin against his fist.  He could think of a dozen common things one could use to patch a hole, but they had none of them.  What was worse, and what he hadn’t told Dan, was that the hole was growing larger by the minute.  Like all ships, the skin of one they were in had multiple layers.  The outer layer was superconductive, channeling the heat of re-entry to every body panel on the outside of the ship.  The middle layer provided self-sealing properties against micrometeoroids, but they’d been whacked by something considerably larger than it could cope with. The substance had hardened before it could completely seal, and was gradually being eroded by the pressurized air rushing past it. As each minute passed without finding a solution, Bo’s sensitive ears could hear the whistle changing in pitch and volume.

The military dumped smaller ships like this at auction because as they got older, the complicated systems on a spaceship became more expensive to maintain than they were worth.  Their assumption was that the new owners would buy them cheap and use the savings to return them to working condition, but that was often not the case.  The new owners sometimes put their acquisitions into service with the most rudimentary of repairs and flew them for another decade or two before relegating them to the scrap heap. Bo thought that the sealing gel in this particular ship’s skin probably hadn’t been replaced since the ship was new, which was probably fifty years ago.

Despite looking comfortable, the too-small seat pushed itself against Bo’s skin in all the wrong places, making him shift uncomfortably.  Underneath his rump, he felt the gel-filled cushion attempt to conform to his new position. The gel…

Bo pulled himself off of the acceleration couch and gave it a good, hard stare.  The cushions were probably a half-century old, so they hadn’t been made with one of the electrically interactive nanomaterials that the military currently specified.  In fact, he’d bet that they were made of the same good, old-fashioned proto-gel that filled a common aircar seat.  

Excitement quickly replaced despair as he pulled the head cushion free from the chair’s frame and gave it a good squish. Encouragingly, the inner padding oozed around his fingers.  It maintained its shape for a few seconds after he released it, then flowed back into its original shape.  He gave Dan a happy smile. “This is it!”

“Your pillow?” Dan asked. “What’s special about that?”

Bo was so engrossed in his task that he didn’t answer.  Extending one of his razor-sharp claws, he slit the cushion’s seams and pulled out the squishy inner pad.

“Can that thing stand the heat?” Dan asked, doubtfully.

“This shuttle was military surplus,” Bo said, as he moved to the cavity where the EVA cabinet used to be. “They never put anything inside a ship that will burn.”  He wedged himself back into the hole and centered the gel pack over the hold.  With a *thwip!* the absolute vacuum outside the ship sucked the pad against the hole.  The pad’s outer skin was pliable enough to conform to the hull yet still kept the gel from escaping through the opening.  

It seemed like a good solution until Bo pulled his hand away.  The weight of the pad pulled it partially away from the hole, resulting in a sloppy farting noise that Bo would have found hilarious under different circumstances.

They had nothing with which to glue the pad in place so Bo did the next best thing.  He retrieved the inner skin of the EVA cabinet and pushed it back where it belonged. The hidden latches engaged, mashing the pad between the cabinet’s skin and the hull, sealing the hole as effectively as any adhesive.  Bo smiled happily at his husband.  “See?” he said, gesturing to his repair. “All better.”

As he watched the varius put the EVA suits back in the storage locker, the magnitude of what he’d done sunk into Dan.  It was bad enough being fucked a billion miles from home without knowing that it was he who’d done the fucking.  Not replacing that can of foam before they’d left had almost killed over fifty people. It had been criminally negligent on his part, an offense against which he had no good excuse.  Hell, he didn’t even have a bad excuse;  he’d just plain forgotten to do it.

Dan heard Jolly making an announcement to calm the frightened passengers but he couldn't wrap his mind around the words. Up until now he’d been too busy running around playing hero to be afraid. Now that their survival was in the hands of fate, the gods, and the pilots of these suddenly fragile-seeming shuttles, he was overcome with the sinking feeling that he was strapped to a padded bench that was one step above a lawn chair, trapped inside a metal tube barrelling through space in a barely-controlled descent toward a planet that he wasn’t entirely certain had been certified as safe for human habitation.

In the sudden vacuum of activity, Dan was finally free to experience the nauseating waves of fear and doubt he’d been repressing. He clung to his link with Bo with ferocious intensity, relying for a few moments on Bo's strength to carry him through the storm of panic until his rational mind could reassert itself. He felt foolish for clinging so closely to his partner, but he felt no recrimination through the link - only compassion, understanding, and an overwhelming comfort that words could never convey.

In that moment Dan felt the way he had when he was four and his mother came rushing to him after he'd fallen and skinned his knee. He remembered the distinctive smell that belonged to her and her alone, the one that reminded him of cinnamon and baking cookies as she wrapped her warm, soft arms around him, his feeling of complete and utter safety as she protected him from the dangerous world and made his hurts go away. What he received from Bo was all that and more.

Dan opened his eyes, and was not surprised to see Bo looking back at him. The look of concern and love in Bo's eyes was enough to take his breath away, and he reveled in it a moment before touching their link again.

I will be okay

thanks

*interrogative*

you okay?

Bo nodded his huge head, and gave Dan an encouraging smile.

we will be okay buddy

as long as we're together

we will be okay

Three times, the shuttles shot around the planet, shedding speed as quickly as possible without putting them in even more danger. As they waited, Bo watched the gauges which measured the carbon dioxide levels inside the cargo hold.  Despite his growing sense of urgency, he maintained strict silence. The pilots were doing everything they could to get them on the surface, and they didn’t need the added pressure of being reminded what was going to happen if they couldn’t vent to atmosphere in time.

He kept his other eye on the altimeter. Each turn of the virtual dial brought them closer to their future. He had few doubts that the pilots could get them to the ground, but he had countless doubts about what would happen after that. Who would lead their colony? Would a rescue team ever find them, or was this going to be their home for the rest of their lives? What sort of social order would evolve between the construction workers, who were willing and able to live this sort of rough-and-tumble existence, and the passengers of the luxury liner, some of whom hadn't worked a day in their lives? A thousand questions, and most of them had answers that wouldn't be fully realized for quite some time.  

And now, perhaps worst of all, he had his partner’s crushing self-doubt to contend with. Bo was well aware that even when the man had done everything right, Dan still imagined that he could have done better.  He would view his forgetting to replace the sealant cartridge as a huge failure, and it might take weeks to dig him out of that hole.  Bo knew that sapiens, many of them, anyway, took the weight of the world on their shoulders, as if deep in their hearts they believed that everything was under their control.  

As a group, varii didn’t view the world that way.  They did their best, and if some external force came along and overturned the apple cart, they did their best to fix the situation then put it behind them.  Challenges were best met with a calm disposition and a positive attitude, neither of which were possible when one felt responsible for the universe and its myriad problems.

Eventually, Bo sat back and closed his eyes. Things would work out in the end - they always did, if you just relaxed, did your job as well as you could, and tried your best to get along.

Their ship kicked as it encountered the first shreds of atmosphere at hypersonic velocity. They bounced off the air like a stone skipping on water, but Bo was expecting it. He sent feelings of calm normalcy to Dan, who was doing his best not to rip off his restraining straps and run screaming around the cabin. He'd just watched as well over a thousand people died, had come close to dying himself, and he had richly earned his fear.  

Bo noticed that in spite of his intense feelings, Dan still looked as cool as spring rain. Someone who’d known him for years might notice the slight tightening at the corners of his mouth, but other than that, the man was a sphinx. Bo didn't think he was managing to look half as calm.

The occasional bump quickly turned into an almost continual bucking as the ship bit into the atmosphere of the planet. They endured ten minutes of stomach-wrenching drops and lurches as the thickening air roared by outside, friction making the shuttle’s skin uncomfortably hot as they struggled to not be driven into the ground.

When they passed three thousand meters elevation, Bo finally breathed easier. The gravity of their new home was only about eighty percent that of Earth and its atmosphere was more loosely held. At this altitude, if the CO2 levels in the cargo hold got dangerously high they could vent to the atmosphere and still have some chance of getting their passengers out alive.

“We’re entering our final glide path,” Jolly announced, through their headphones. “Won’t be long before we’re down. Another half-hour, maybe?” Now that they were in thicker air, the buffeting and turbulence gradually subsided and the roaring of the wind outside began to calm. The colony planners had spent months poring over images sent back by remote probes, tirelessly researching the best landing site on the planet. After much deliberation and debate, they had agreed on the western edge of the largest northern continent, praising its plentiful foliage, temperate climate, and proximity to a supply of fresh water. By all indications it was the perfect spot for the colonists to start their new lives; they just hadn't planned on doing so quite this abruptly.

Dan wished he could tell his descendants what it was like to fly across thousands of miles of unspoiled beauty for the very first time, but unfortunately that wouldn’t be possible. The nose of the shuttle was pointed up so high to scrub off speed that the only things visible through the cockpit windows were clouds and sky.  Cameras under the ship fed views of the passing terrain to small monitors in the console, but that couldn’t substitute for seeing it with his own eyes.

He had trouble feeling any pity for himself, after remembering that all the passengers in their cargo bay could see were steel walls and a bunch of other sweaty, smelly people who were as scared as they were.

Once the cabin began to quiet, the tension and unceasing labor of the past twenty-four hours caught up to Dan, and he was surprised to find himself nodding off. He wanted to stay awake, to experience every moment of this passage into a new life, but his body betrayed him. There was nothing left to do but sit and wait. Now that the rush of adrenaline wasn't there to keep him awake, he slipped quietly into an uneasy sleep.

The clunk of the landing skids deploying and roar of the retro thrusters woke Dan with a start, and he was surprised to find that Bo had fallen asleep, too. A gentle tug on their link brought his partner fully awake, and they both gazed out on their landing site - an Earth-like plain large enough to fit a hundred shuttles with room to spare, if they wanted. Their band of ten wouldn't come close to filling the available space.

As their shuttle settled onto its articulated landing struts, Jolly began shutting down the ship's systems. Not until Dan heard their engines spooling down did he finally believe that their long journey was over, and they were finally safe. He wasted no time finding the release levers for the belts that held him in place. He'd been confined for too long, he was hungry enough to eat a cow, and by god, he needed to pee.

Bo was instantly by his side, releasing his harness but gently holding him in place with one burly hand. "You've been sitting in the same position for hours and you're gonna be sore, so go slow," He helped Dan out of the chair and wrapped an arm around his shoulder to help him regain his balance.  “You need the porta-john?” he asked, after sensing Dan’s discomfort.

Dan grimaced. “I’d rather not. Oh, hell!" He complained as he tried to straighten his back, "I can't believe what that thing did to me. I feel like I've spent days in a torture rack." Bo remained silent, simply glad to be alive.

The hissing of the airlock on the deck below them brought Dan to full alert, then he suddenly relaxed.

"What was that all about?" Bo asked, puzzled; Dan's thoughts had been too fleeting for him to interpret.

"At first, I was thinking that we should be conducting more atmospheric tests before we opened the hatch, but then I realized there wasn't any point. If the atmosphere's bad, what are we going to do? Live in the shuttles forever? There's no place to go and no way to get away from it, so we don't have much to lose, do we?" he asked.

Bo raised one eyebrow. “Optimism worthy of a varius!” he commended, then began to climb down the ladder from the pilot’s roost that they had climbed into five hours and who knew how many millions of miles ago. Four rungs down he turned to Dan and, in the interest of protecting his husband's pride, asked through the link,

will you need help

down the ladder

Dan had a sudden mental picture of Bo behind him on the ladder, encircling his body with his own to keep him safe. The image brought a smile, but he quickly sobered as he tested his muscles and joints.

thanks

it sounds great

but I think I can do it myself

Dan was shaking with both fatigue and excitement, but he managed the climb down with some degree of grace.

Once on the ground, they had an unobstructed view of their new home. The direct sunlight was an insult to their eyes after so long in the darkened confines of the bridge, but it was discomfort they both gladly bore. Dan and Bo took turns helping the older passengers off the shuttle, and within a few minutes their passengers were out and milling about in the open space surrounding the shuttles. The hold stank of fear, a primal smell that Dan would never completely forget.

i think you are smelling vomit

Bo added, helpfully.

and maybe just a little bit of urine

Speaking of which… Dan walked ten feet away and relieved his bladder in the shuttle’s shadow. Anyone could have turned and watched, but he was long beyond caring. That done, he returned to where Bo was standing, at the open door of the cargo bay.  He looked out over the heads of their fellow passengers and felt the unwelcome weight of responsibility settle itself onto his shoulders. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d personally helped so many of them, or maybe it was nothing more complicated than the fact that he was standing slightly higher than they were, but for whatever reason, he felt responsible for them. Every few seconds, one passenger or another would look up at them. Despite all the differences that divided them, no matter whether they were willing passenger or convicted criminal, rich or poor, young or old, the look was the same; What now?

Dan felt ill-prepared to answer that question; he had no idea what to do now that they were out of immediate danger. Despite his feelings of being in some way responsible for these people, the last thing he wanted at this moment was to be the focus of their attention. His discomfort was short lived, eclipsed by the fear he saw in the eyes of the child he’d last seen tucked under Dante’s protective arm.  Again those eyes turned to him, seeking information that he might provide. "How do I find my parents?"

"I don’t know, Clay.  They were with Lucas, right?”  

"No," the boy said, looking worriedly around him. "We got split up. They said they would come find me, but they never did."

"They were on shuttle eleven, right?" Dan prompted gently, hoping against all reason that nothing had happened to Clay's parents during the trip.

"I don't know," Clay said, looking more fragile with every passing second. Now that he had found an adult he felt comfortable talking to, his emotional barriers were beginning to crumble. "I didn't think the number was important, because they were going to find me." A tear slid down his left cheek, followed shortly by one on his right. He scanned the crowd milling around them, and saw a sea of unfamiliar faces. "Lucas promised me he'd take care of them."

At the mention of Lucas, Dan felt cold fear stab through him.  If Clay’s parents were nowhere to be found, then Lucas was probably missing as well.   Nearly frantic for an answer, he reached out to locate Victus.  The instant he touched the slowly evaporating strands of their tenuous healing bond, Victus’ dark agony told him all he needed to know. Instead of the fading pinprick of brilliant illumination he’d felt less than a day ago, the Kenzine’s presence was more akin to the guttering flame of a candle which was burning through the last of its wax.

Lucas was dead.  Dan didn’t know when or how that could have happened, but he was certain of it.

Feeling utterly incompetent, Dan put a hand on the boy's arm for a moment before dropping it back to his side. "I don’t think he made it down, Clay,” he explained, loathing himself for having to be the one to tell the boy this. “And I don’t think your parents did, either."

"They’re dead?" Clay asked, his voice quiet, but still sounding far too reasonable. He didn’t give Dan a chance to answer before he rambled on, his small words filling the space between them. "My grandmother died last winter. She had cancer or something. She was really nice, she made us cookies and lemonade in the summer, and she used to work as a nurse..." he trailed off, having suddenly run out of things to say. The tears rolling down his cheeks fell past his too-thin chest, and soaked into the crusts of the alien dirt beneath his feet.

Dan was at a complete loss, and instead of making up a more palatable lie or giving him the standard platitudes, he told the young child the truth. When he did so, his own voice was none too steady. "I wish I could make it better, Clay, but I have no idea what to do."

Clay didn’t run into Dan’s arms as he’d expected. Instead, the boy stood where he was, alone, shoulders trembling under the weight of his miserable sorrow.