“Protection from what?”

“Yirella’s right,” Dellian said. “We have no idea what beasts live in these mountains.”

“After sunset, our best tactic is to retreat back into the fuselage and have a fire burning in front of the gap,” she said.

“Oh, for Saints’ sake,” Orellt protested. “We’re not going to be here at sunset! The rescue crews will arrive in an hour.”

“I don’t mind you betting your life on that wish,” she retorted. “But my life isn’t yours to risk. We need a fire.”

“We do,” Ellici agreed. “This is an exceptional situation. We have to adapt to it.”

“There must be an axe in the emergency kit,” Dellian said quickly; he could see Orellt gathering himself to argue. “Janc, Uret, Xante, you’re with me. We’ll fell some of those sleeper trees. The rest of you, start gathering the bigger bushes. I’m going to check and see what else we’ve been left with, especially water.”

They started moving—reluctantly; nobody wanted to consider they would be here for any length of time—but they did it.

Dellian found two emergency cases in the rear of the fuselage. One was a medical kit, which he handed to Ellici to treat Tilliana’s eye. The second contained basic survival equipment. It was mainly thermal blankets and ropes, a couple of knives, torches, and ten flasks each filled with a liter of distilled water, along with a hand-pumped filter. He was disappointed that was the total, but the case did have a small axe.

“Not much water,” he said quietly to Yirella as he walked away from the flyer.

“No rainfall here, check the ground,” she replied, equally subdued. “And the flyer is totally dead. I don’t see how that could happen; everything is supposed to have multiple redundancy.”

He glanced up at the empty cobalt sky. Far overhead, the bright specks of the skyforts shone with reassuring familiarity. Even Cathar, the system’s gas giant, was a sharp spark just above the horizon. “Do you think…”

“The enemy? No. If Juloss was under attack, we’d see the skyfort weapons firing. They’d be as bright as the sun—at least. It’s not that. We’re living in the last days of this world’s human civilization; things are bound to go wrong. I just never thought it would be this bad. I guess we’ve lived very sheltered lives.”

Dellian scanned around to assess the sleeper trees. There weren’t many on the bleak hillside, but at least they stood out.

“I don’t want anyone to go more than a couple of hundred meters,” he told his friends as they walked toward the closest tree. “Once we chop them down, we’ve got to break them apart to drag them back.”