"The Captain is dead. So is the Pilot, First Officer, and Chief Engineer. It's... Pretty bad. You might not want to look." His voice is shaky. "Some of the juniors seem okay, but their pods didn't wake them up for some reason. I've started the process manually. I... I think you two are the highest ranking officers left."

"...Navigator outranks co-pilot. Lucy. I think this means you're in charge."

"No, that can't be right- No. I know the regulations as well as you do, yes, but- Dammit! How did this happen? I entered the course myself! It would have been a perfect equatorial circularization-"

"And I double-checked it! But- Figuring out what happened can come later. Right now we have an emergency on our hands. We need to start moving, not panic."

"Right." 

Leadership in a crisis situation is two thirds momentum, she vaguely remembers from somewhere... 

She sees figures emerging from one of the other lifepods, their helmet lights casting eerie, shifting shadows and streaks of light over the dark, blasted landscape.

"Okay. Anjay, supervise the rest of the bridge crew waking up and help everyone else into their EVA suits. Navigator's orders. Find me when they're all ready, including yourself. Shen, start making radio calls. Get a list of pods that survived the landing. Tell- Tell everyone to get their EVA suits on and report their status. I'm going to put on my EVA suit and inspect the pod exterior. We meet back in - fifteen minutes and report."

The rest of the day is a long blur of talking and movement, stress and muscle strain and the lingering effects of stasis combining into a miserable mélange of heartburn and nausea. The EVA suits are insulated against the cold, and have interior batteries to resist the wind's attempts to wick heat away, but the helmets stay cold and the gloves are fairly chilly too.

They're still lucky in a lot of ways. The radios are working fine, getting them an accurate head-count of the survivors and injured, and simplifying the searching and inventory. The atmosphere is breathable, which is a massive blessing. No relying on air tanks and sudden death due to suffication.

It's just very very cold. Whatever intact batteries people can find are draining quickly. Half of the important equipment is destroyed or frozen in ice.

And then there's the matter of shell-shock. Trapped on an arctic glacier, during a crash landing, with many of their friends and comrades dead... So many people spent their time wandering about in a daze. Shen felt it too, the urge to wallow in shock and figure out what the hell went wrong- But his job is to yell at people over the radio, and repeat things over and over, until there's some semblance of order.

She's good at swearing and shouting. She swears every other word into the radio, calls people reprehensible names, and says it's their own fault if they die from being too lazy to help in an emergency. It's the stress, really. Being rude and abrasive will probably come back to bite her. If they don't all die. It certainly gets everyone moving in mostly the same direction, at least... A swarm of fireflies, over a thousand helmet lights bobbing over the night-dark ice sheet and milling around in confused pools.

"Hey, anyone listening on this thing? I got one of the transport vehicles unboxed! You can see me waving around a flashlight on the roof of it. All vehicle team members, head this way! We're gonna get this baby up and running so we can set up that habitat module the bridge crew found! Warm beds are just a couple hours' work away!"

"Shen. I've noticed something alarming. The stars haven't moved. It's been hours- They should have changed position by now. Even if we were at a pole... The only thing I can think of is that we're on a tidally locked planet, some fucking how. We'll be subjected to eternal night, the solar panels will obviously be of no use..."

"If that's the case, we're going to need a reactor module... We've identified two habitat modules, a hydroponics module, a recycling module, and an entertainment module of all things- That one can wait. But nobody's reported seeing one yet."

"Put out a call, ask if anyone sees signs of it. And then let's head over to Mr. flashlight-waver so we can get on a vehicle and scout faster."

"Mary Hersch, Warrant Officer. I have bad news about your reactor module... I'm looking at it, but my geiger counter is going crazy even a hundred meters away. It's venting steam like crazy, and there's a big, obvious crack. This one is a no-go. If I remember the manifest correctly, there were three in total..."

"Shit! Mary, Lucy Carver here. We're in no shape to try and- Assess or contain that. Just avoid that whole area. Back off as far as possible. Make sure everyone around you knows to stay away! Do you have some way to mark it? Without getting close!"

"I'll... I'll figure something out. Hersch, out."

"Daniel Montero speaking. Command team, please switch to channel seven."

Shortly after, on a less public if not unpublic channel,

"An exclusion zone of one kilometer should suffice for immediate precautions. Long-term, we're going to need to evacuate the entire impact area. I can see the module in question where I am as well, and given the radiation signatures and fires, it will be carrying radioactive particulate into the atmosphere. If you'll indulge a historical reference... We're looking at a Chernobyl or Fukushima situation here."

"Mr. Montero, you're a physicist? Do you have any idea how far the radiation will spread?"

"Not primarily. I'm a medical doctor with degrees in several supporting sciences, including physics, biochemistry, and agronomy. You could say I'm a bit of a polymath- I have an eidetic memory. It's very difficult to guess. The winds here seem to be lower than on Earth's arctic but I have little information on the upper atmosphere, and I'm not a climatologist. Perhaps we could improvise some sort of weather balloon out of the survey satellites, but in the absence of more information... I would establish the habitat module at least twenty miles away, and ideally further."

"...We'll take that into account."

They don't find another reactor module in the next hour. At gentle prompting from Shen, Lucy makes the call: Evacuate, east (or, well, ""east"" is a guess at best) to a large flat plain of ice, gently downhill, against where the wind is currently blowing. The salvaged Transport Vehicle is able to- At length and with copious amounts of effort, chip away at the ice around the landing legs and cargo door of the first Habitat Module, and use its powerful crane to load the massive prefab bulk onto the crawler. The gravity here is earthlike, when much of the equipment was designed for something a little lighter... But they manage it.

They light beacons, recovered searchlights mounted on improvised poles, each one pointing in the right direction, towards the habitat. Their systems will run off of chemical generators, batteries, and power cells for at least a couple of days. Everyone needs to rest, and needs shelter from the cold. 

The prefabricated structure rises steadily from the landscape, the exterior lights seeming more comforting and beautiful than almost anything else could, in that moment. A steady stream of confused survivors trudges their way along the trail of lights towards the base... Shen organizes a team to take a quick census of the survivors and their skills as they trickle in. The number quickly reaches over a thousand. Given that the habitat module was originally designed for four hundred people, this presents some crowding problems...

Bass's crew have found a grand total of four exploration rovers, and gotten them all running just fine! They spend their time ferrying the least mobile survivors to the beacon on the horizon- The injured, and the children.

Dr. Montero quickly seizes a storage room in a convenient location as an improvised medical bay, and conducts a staff of nurses and volunteers like an orchestra.

The filtered air tastes stale and slightly bitter as the scrubbers choke on almost three times as many people as they were designed for. There are a lot more relatively intact modules out there... But that's something that can be dealt with tomorrow.

Or after eight hours of sleep. Whatever you call it when the sun doesn't rise.

Warrant Officer Hersch is kept up all night fielding question after question about what happened, and whether they're all going to die, and what they're going to do next, and so on. These people are going to grow sullen and resentful before too long, she can't help but think... That's how disaster situations always end up. All she can do for it is maintain order and let Lucy Carver and her team do their best. She's read their bios. Lucy can handle it, if anyone here can.

Oh my god, the situation is utterly screwed. FUBAR. The excrement has well and truly hit the air distributor.

There is ICE on her precious air intakes. The weight of the habitat module will slowly make it SINK down below if they don't figure out something clever. And what's this she hears about salvaging another reactor module? The first one has contaminated dozens of miles of ground! They can rely on solar panels, once the sun rises.

...What? Tidally locked? The sun isn't going to rise?

WELP.

"Boys, let's investigate the feasibility of building some WIND TURBINES, or perhaps some kinda geothermal tap! I know I saw some wind generators on the walk over here, but we're gonna need something to deal with the cold and icing, so get your brainstorming hats on..."

...Crew transponders active: 1103/1500.

...Bridge reserve power running out. Exodus AI will shut down momentarily.

Saving logs to disk.

Good luck... Everyone...