http://scitechdaily.com/new-herschel-images-of-the-andromeda-galaxy/
LetsGo was a stupid name for a robot.
To say that LetsGo was a triumph of Form at the expense of Function would be only half correct. It was the epitome of the tin-can tinker-toy, puttering about the frozen fields in seemingly arbitrary directions. “Skitter” was probably a more strictly accurate term, as the device’s twenty legs were decidedly spiderlike: delicate, multi-jointed, fine-tipped, and simultaneously disturbing and whimsical. All the same, as he watched the blue-and-bronze cylinder move purposefully a meter or two in one direction, then stop and rotate, only to move another meter or so in another unpredictable direction, the word “putter” invariably leapt to mind. It teetered both in motion and at rest, its rounded faux-trapezoidal head rotating like a satellite dish atop its segmented neck, regardless of direction, and several times it seemed likely to tip over. A drunken robot. Or deranged. Or senile from disuse.
Perhaps “lurch” was a better term.
Doctor Andromeda was still shaking, and watching LetsGo wobble about was not helping. Not that he could imagine anything that would help. He sat upon a stool-sized promontory of ice outcropping from the ground (as-it-were; there was nothing but frozen seas as far as he beheld), contemplating the enormity of their folly. They were dead; all of them. Shortly after the SS Icarus burst into the atmosphere, the entire bridge of the ship had snapped apart from its body, hurdling like a discus toward the moon’s surface. In the wild turbulence of his view, Andromeda felt certain he had seen the rest of the ship pulled wholly back up out of the atmosphere. Tendrils of lightning seemed to descend from that inky blackness and wrap about the ship, like some devil of cyclopean proportion drawing their souls into perdition. The irony of imagining a devil as something above him was lost on Andromeda in his musings, as was the unusually poetic mindset to which his fancies were suddenly turned by the wreck.
The Pilot was dead. No one could find Daedalus “Deuce” Divine as they prepared to breach the atmosphere. Why he had left his post, where he had gone, and where he now rested were mysteries. Most of the crew remained in the body of the ship and had no doubt suffocated. The imbecilic Titan and Sponde had been safe inside the bridge, but the Captain had sent them out to search for Divine, and now they too were gone. Andromeda wondered briefly how Gonzales felt about sending those two simpletons to their deaths.
Resting his chin in his hands, Andromeda glanced over at Gonzales. She stood feet apart and fists on hips, as was her habit, no doubt inspired by the music-hall heroines of their youth, staring off into the shifting vermilions, chartreuses, and crimsons of the horizon. Presumably, she too was listening to LetsGo rattle off insubstantial statistics about the atmosphere and environment. Yes, the air was breathable; thank you LetsGo. Yes, the gravity was only slightly weaker than standard; thank you LetsGo. Yes, the terrain was composed of hard-frozen fresh-water; kindly piss off, LetsGo. The robot’s predictably monotone, retro-fashionably tinny voice only exasperated further. There was a visible, even palpable tightness in the Captain’s shoulders. Clearly, she too felt that the robot’s comical capering was undercutting the severity of the moment.
Perhaps inevitably, LetsGo chose that instant to trip over one of the corpses.
There were only three; three crewmen who were still on the bridge when it broke apart, and each one had foolishly decided to try leaping from the bridge as it fell. What possessed them to carry out such an idea was beyond him. Ensigns Santez, McMahon… he couldn’t remember the third one’s name. They were only ensigns.
First Mate Ferris was conspicuously absent. The last to jump ship before impact, one would expect his body to be closest to the wreckage. Perhaps he had survived. Inwardly, Andromeda shrugged. Ferris would benefit no one in life, nor sorrow anyone in death. He was gone for whatever that was worth, but his whirligigging foppery lived on in the ambling LetsGo.
“LetsGo,” the Captain ordered in a surprisingly firm alto, “begin a search for signs of life.”
Actual bells and whistles sounded within the tin-can, before the robot’s monotone responded, “But Captain, I have not completed my soil analysis. Soil analysis!”
“There is no soil.”
More bells. More whistles. “Analysis complete. Beginning analysis for signs of life.”
There was more scuttling, lurching, and puttering to ruin the funereal silence. At length, Captain Gonzales finally said the inevitably and thoroughly unhelpful. “We have to bury them.”
Several cruel responses came to mind. ‘Do you have an icepick?’ or ‘I’ll not stand in your way,’ or of course ‘Burial at sea; how fitting.’ Andromeda said none of these things, as the Captain had no doubt foreseen them and had a suitably acidic response for each. Even though she wasn’t looking at him, he raised his eyebrows inquisitively. “Within the wreck, perhaps?”
The bridge was largely in good order, though it was incapable of doing much when separated from the rest of the ship. It had independent lighting and access to most of their navigational records and history, but there was no food to be found there. It could certainly serve as shelter from the elements, but despite the biblical storm that raged miles above them, their immediate environment was idyllically calm. Still, sleeping in a chair was preferable to sleeping on grooved, twisting ice. Much of it was smooth and even elegant in its flow and warp, but it was still ice. There was no telling how long they might spend marooned on Europa, and Andromeda had no desire to give up his comfort to a trio of insensate bodies. Hopefully, the usually-pragmatic Gonzales felt the same.
The Captain was still standing, staring. “We will bury them.”
This was becoming tiresome. “Perhaps–”
A particularly loud collection of bells and whistles sounded, and LetsGo nearly fell over again as it announced, “Signs of life located, Located! approximately two-point-seven kilometers north-by-north-east.”
Gonzales looked over her shoulder, just barely catching the Doctor in her eye. “What do you think?”
Andromeda paused and took stock of himself. He was no longer shaking. “You are the captain.”
At this, she turned to face him fully. “You, Doctor, have been uncharacteristically laconic since the maelstroms first struck my ship. What reason have you, I wonder, to set yourself so morosely. Was Ferris a close friend of yours? Was Divine or Titan? Sponde? Did you have any bosom companions on this voyage, Doctor? What is the genesis of this newfound depression?”
For the first time since impact, they looked at each other: squarely, directly, and completely. Gonzales’ gown was an electric blue with gilded crinoline and cuffs, and bronze-colored embellishments along the hems; but the cut and even the colors were not particularly unusual for a starship captain. Even her silver tatted collar and bodice, while a touch showier than one would expect from a woman of such stern and direct demeanor, were well within the bounds of modesty. Her face, though a trifle less painted than other highborn ladies, and certainly more drawn with cares and set with the strength of her office than (say) the madam of some estate, Elena Gonzales’ appearance was not so unusual as to arrest such a prolonged stare from the Doctor.
Nor, likewise, were the Doctor’s garments so bizarre as to cause the Captain’s eyes to widen. His frockcoat and double-breasted vest were a muted crimson and rich burgundy, respectively. They, combined with his black boots and charcoal breeches, did make him somewhat resemble a vaudevillian ne’er-do-well, but his pomposity was of such a demure and reflective nature as to dispel any such superstitious assumptions. Even his black top hat, forgotten for the moment by the still and skull-like remains of the bridge, could inspire fear and wonder only in the most unimaginative of spectators. Pale where Gonzales was dark, grey-eyed where she was blue, and fair-haired where she was ebon, they cut contrasting but beautiful pictures. All the same, there was nothing in either’s visage to justify such gawping.
No, the unusual thing was that, in spite of the hellacious crash, their garments were in flawless condition. Neither passenger had suffered so much as the proverbial scratch. Not even a single hair seemed out of place.
Andromeda thought back to the horrific, gut-displacing sensation he felt just as the bridge had, with a teeth-rattling twang, separated from the body of the Icarus. Both he and the Captain had flung themselves into nearby chairs. Or been flung, he wondered to himself. It was difficult to separate the impulses of adrenaline from the happenstance of gravity (such as it was), and of course memory of such a harrowing few moments could hardly be trusted. He was fairly certain one of the ensigns had been seated as well.
The Doctor hummed. “Wasn’t Ensign… Ensign… Thingy there… wasn’t she seated?”
Gonzales made a face at him commensurate with having been asked for intimate knowledge of the mating habits of midshipman fish. “Ensign Thingy,” she spat, not unlike a king cobra, “was desperately trying to stabilize the gyroscopes.” After a silent second, in which multitudes of articulate disdain were communicated, her face fell and she looked over to one of the corpses. “Hardly her area of speciality,” she added mournfully, “but I appreciate the effort, nevertheless.”
“I’m sure she appreciates the appreciation.” It had been a thoughtless platitude, bereft of inflection and meant more to conclude the conversation than offer comfort. Gonzales, sadly, took it in neither in the spirit in which it was offered nor the design in which it was constructed. Rather, she took it much the same way a terminally ill stonemason might take a demand to just stop with the vomiting already and get back to marble-cutting. If looks could kill, Andromeda would surely not be around to contemplate the vastly differing sentiments a trio of dead bodies can arouse. Far more likely, he would have been incinerated into fine dust and blown into the snuffbox of one of London’s more mucus-prone dilettantes. Fortunately for the Doctor, looks could not kill. Nor, evidently, could starship crashes; at least not with one-hundred-percent reliability.
There was another voluminous, verbose silence. It was eventually punctuated by more bells from the tottering third wheel of their party, for which Andromeda was absurdly grateful. He turned away and looked at the corpses, finding the sight of them infinitely preferable to his Captain’s latest baleful glare. “Was anyone else sitting?”
“No,” she answered instantly, “to our shame. Or to mine, at least.”
Tiring of human company, both mobile and inert, Andromeda turned his gaze to the bridge. It resembled an enormous vulture’s skull with the brainpan removed. The cataclysmic destruction of its working parts, coupled with the faintest scent of early decay in the frozen air, served only to magnify this impression. About where the ocular cavities would rest on this fictional, avian death’s-head, there rested four comfortable chairs: two in each eye, as it were. There was another pair of seats at either right or left extreme, in the pouches of the bird’s “cheeks,” facing the readouts. Rather, there were chairs there once upon a time, in the halcyon days of yester-hour. Now there rested a collection of torn metal and leather shreds imbedded in said metal. Most of what had been the chairs was probably still jostling about in the particolored atmosphere above. In fact, the chairs of the vulture’s right eye, while in considerably better condition than their outlying cousins, showed significant signs of damage. Who knows what might have happened if the Doctor or Captain had collapsed into any chairs other than the specific two in which they had fallen?
The entire event smelt of predestination, which (to Andromeda’s palate) carried a heady aroma of manipulation. He was unsure if it bore further thinking on or if it bore hiding under a rock with one’s fingers thoroughly in one’s ears.
Fortunately, whatever the Captain had been thinking solved the problem for him.
“LetsGo,” she called, apropos of nothing, “how far away is the life form now?”
The bells. The whistles. “Closest signs of life now lay three-point-one kilometers north-by-north-east.”
Gonzales nodded at nothing. “LetsGo, memorize our current coordinates, then lead us to this life form.”
The ambulatory android bobbled and whirred for several seconds, then began lurching along in what Andromeda assumed to be a roughly north-ish-by-north-wobbly direction. The Captain favored him with another over-the-shoulder glance.
“Well,” she said, “let’s go.