Page 270 of Every Almost

Korallis Minor was heavy.

That was the first thing Charlie noticed when she came down the shuttle ramp into a gravity that grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her straight down. Every step after that was a negotiation. Her suit compensated, as it was meant to, but her knees didn't seem to care what her suit did.

Ninety seconds on the surface and she'd already recalculated the ramp load twice, because eleven thousand kilos on Earth is exactly that, but here it’s a number that makes you want to sit down.

"You okay, kid?" Tavi said through comms three meters behind her. Of course he was unbothered, because Tavi Breck was built like a tank and this planet could do no harm to him.

"I weigh six hundred pounds," Charlie whined.

Tavi laughed. "You get used to it!"

"I don't want to get used to it! I want to file a complaint."

Then the ground moved. Not much, almost like a shrug that lasted two seconds.

"That's the shelf," Maren said. "South of us."

"Feels closer," Charlie remarked.

"It always does. The crust is dense here. It carries everything."

Almost nothingon Korallis Minor was broken.

In the residential ring, one structure had come down. It was a low wide building at the end of a row, folded in on itself from when the ground dropped out from under one corner. Charlie noted it and walked past. On a world that had moved four hundred times since yesterday, one collapsed building was the least interesting thing she had seen all day.

Everything else was immaculate.

The doors were shut. The equipment was stacked and strapped.

Somebody had gone around and closed every window in a whole town on their way out, and there were chalk marks on the loading bays where the crates had been sorted by weight.

In the middle of one street, a kid's ball sat with a note pinned under it. Charlie's Voxlink turned it intoWE WILL COME BACK FOR YOU.

They hadn't panicked. They'd packed.

Four hundred people had walked out of their homes in an orderly line, carrying everything they could, and every single one of them had known exactly what they were leaving behind.

"Charlie," Maren said. "The gate. Look."

The enclosure was on the north edge, and the Palus were standing inside.

Charlie had seen the file, but as she looked at these creatures now, she realized the file had not prepared her in the least.

The Palus were the size of a delivery truck each, low and wide and armored in overlapping plates the color of wet slate. They were standing perfectly still in a paddock with the gate hanging wide open, doing absolutely nothing about it.

"They could leave," Charlie said. "The gate's open. Why aren't they leaving?"

"Where would they go?" Maren said gently.

And that was a hell of an answer.

Charlie got to work.

The hinge assembly on the shuttle was the problem. That was the reason Charlie was here.

The shuttle was reinforced to take the weight and size of the Palus, but the hinges hadn't been serviced prior to the drop. They had gone from a beacon to a drop in under forty minutes, which meant nobody had put a hand on that ramp assembly before it left the bay. No service cycle or inspection, just relying on a stack of numbers in a log somewhere that had been true the last time anybody checked. And eleven thousand kilos walking up an incline at this gravity put a serious load on it.

Charlie got down on the deck plate and ran the scanner. Then she put a boot on the hinge housing and rocked her weight onto it, twice, and listened.