less blood than she’d thought. Most of it seemed to be coming from a single cut on her forehead, and the cold rain was already slowing the bleeding. She managed to clear her eyes well enough to look about her, and her relief vanished.
Her brand new glider was smashed. Not broken: smashed . Its tough composite covering and struts had been specially designed to be crash survivable, but it had never been intended for the abuse to which she’d subjected it, and it had crumpled into a mangled lacework of fabric and shattered framing. Yet it hadn’t quite failed completely, and she hung in her harness from the main spar, which was jammed in the fork of a branch above her. The throbbing ache where the harness straps crossed her body told her she’d been badly bruised by the abrupt termination of her flight, and one of her ribs stabbed her with a white burst of agony every time she breathed. But without the harness—and the forked branch which had caught her—she would have slammed straight into the massive tree trunk directly in front of her, and she shuddered at the thought.
But however lucky she might have been, there’d been bad luck to go with the good. Like most colony world children, Stephanie had been through mandatory first-aid courses . . . not that any training was needed to realize her left arm was broken in at least two places. She knew which way her elbow was supposed to bend, and there was no joint in the middle of her forearm. That was bad enough, but there was worse, for her uni-link had been strapped to her left wrist.
It wasn’t there anymore.
She turned her head, craning her neck to peer painfully back along the all too obvious course of her crashing impact with the treetops, and wondered where the uni-link was. The wrist unit was virtually indestructible, and if she could only find it—and reach it—she could call for help in an instant. But there was no way she was going to find it in that mess.
It was almost funny, she thought through the haze of her pain. She couldn’t find it, but Mom or Dad could have found it with ridiculous ease . . . if they’d only known to use the emergency override code to activate the locator beacon function. Or, for that matter, if she’d thought to activate it when the storm first came up. Unfortunately, she’d been too preoccupied finding a landing spot to bring the beacon up, and even if she had, no one would have found it until they thought to look for it.
And since I can’t even find it, I can’t com anyone to tell them to start looking for it , she thought fuzzily. I really messed up this time. Mom and Dad are going to be really , really pissed. Bet they ground me till I’m sixteen for this one!
Even as she thought it, she knew it was ridiculous to worry about such things at a time like this. Yet there was a certain perverse comfort—a sense of familiarity, perhaps—to it, and she actually managed a damp-sounding chuckle despite the tears of pain and fear trickling down her face.
She let herself hang limp for another moment, but badly as she felt the need to rest, she dared do no such thing. The wind was growing stronger, not weaker, and the branch from which she hung creaked and swayed alarmingly. Then there was the matter of lightning. A tree this tall was all too likely to attract any stray bolt, and she had no desire to share the experience with it. No, she had to get herself down, and she blinked away residual pain tears and fresh rain to peer down at the ground.
For all its height, the near-pine into which she’d crashed wasn’t a particularly towering specimen of its species, which could easily run to as much as sixty or even seventy meters, without a single branch for the lower third of its height. It was still a good twelve-meter drop to the ground, though, and she shuddered at the thought. Her gymnastics classes had taught her how to tuck and roll, but that wouldn’t help from this height even with two good arms. With her left arm
Her brand new glider was smashed. Not broken: smashed . Its tough composite covering and struts had been specially designed to be crash survivable, but it had never been intended for the abuse to which she’d subjected it, and it had crumpled into a mangled lacework of fabric and shattered framing. Yet it hadn’t quite failed completely, and she hung in her harness from the main spar, which was jammed in the fork of a branch above her. The throbbing ache where the harness straps crossed her body told her she’d been badly bruised by the abrupt termination of her flight, and one of her ribs stabbed her with a white burst of agony every time she breathed. But without the harness—and the forked branch which had caught her—she would have slammed straight into the massive tree trunk directly in front of her, and she shuddered at the thought.
But however lucky she might have been, there’d been bad luck to go with the good. Like most colony world children, Stephanie had been through mandatory first-aid courses . . . not that any training was needed to realize her left arm was broken in at least two places. She knew which way her elbow was supposed to bend, and there was no joint in the middle of her forearm. That was bad enough, but there was worse, for her uni-link had been strapped to her left wrist.
It wasn’t there anymore.
She turned her head, craning her neck to peer painfully back along the all too obvious course of her crashing impact with the treetops, and wondered where the uni-link was. The wrist unit was virtually indestructible, and if she could only find it—and reach it—she could call for help in an instant. But there was no way she was going to find it in that mess.
It was almost funny, she thought through the haze of her pain. She couldn’t find it, but Mom or Dad could have found it with ridiculous ease . . . if they’d only known to use the emergency override code to activate the locator beacon function. Or, for that matter, if she’d thought to activate it when the storm first came up. Unfortunately, she’d been too preoccupied finding a landing spot to bring the beacon up, and even if she had, no one would have found it until they thought to look for it.
And since I can’t even find it, I can’t com anyone to tell them to start looking for it , she thought fuzzily. I really messed up this time. Mom and Dad are going to be really , really pissed. Bet they ground me till I’m sixteen for this one!
Even as she thought it, she knew it was ridiculous to worry about such things at a time like this. Yet there was a certain perverse comfort—a sense of familiarity, perhaps—to it, and she actually managed a damp-sounding chuckle despite the tears of pain and fear trickling down her face.
She let herself hang limp for another moment, but badly as she felt the need to rest, she dared do no such thing. The wind was growing stronger, not weaker, and the branch from which she hung creaked and swayed alarmingly. Then there was the matter of lightning. A tree this tall was all too likely to attract any stray bolt, and she had no desire to share the experience with it. No, she had to get herself down, and she blinked away residual pain tears and fresh rain to peer down at the ground.
For all its height, the near-pine into which she’d crashed wasn’t a particularly towering specimen of its species, which could easily run to as much as sixty or even seventy meters, without a single branch for the lower third of its height. It was still a good twelve-meter drop to the ground, though, and she shuddered at the thought. Her gymnastics classes had taught her how to tuck and roll, but that wouldn’t help from this height even with two good arms. With her left arm
Similar Books
