Crash. The echo of metal scratching on the surface of an alien planet, destroying everything in its passage. A far, almost imperceptible voice in the back of her head was telling her something she couldn't understand. People murmured, the buzzing was too incomprehensible, like thousands of people talking at once from darkness but his eyes, the eyes of the man that was talking were green and eerie. Goosebumps.
It felt like being in a dream, everything was out of focus but shadows were clearly there, to understand was impossible.
The far echo of the crash was resonating into her brain as if it just happened and maybe it had. And just like that an impervious sound and then it was darkness.
A girl woke up still strapped to her chair, the cockpit was in pieces. One of the branches of a tree had penetrated the windscreen and was now lying between her and the other pilot. The whole place was floating in a red flashing alarm beeping so loud that she would have wanted to beg the computer to stop it.
The screens were flushing a red alert after another one and, for what she could know, they were all gibberish at the moment since her mind was still clouded
Structural integrity failure - 2:15:43
Alert! Atmospheric breach. Toxic atmosphere detected.
Alert! Gas leak. External reactor shield compromised.
Alert! Radioactive leak. External reactor shield compromised.
Alert! Possible radioactive exposure.
Everything was falling apart and yet she had this feeling growing on the length of her spinal cord that things were even worse than they seemed. The vague and terrifying idea that she was alone on the ship, that everybody else was dead. After all, how could somebody survive that?
Erik, the other pilot, was sitting on her right but the branch of the three that, as she just noticed, had the commonsense to avoid both her and him, was so big that it covered the entire view of the other half of the cockpit.
When she was finally able to see she screamed at the horror in front of her. His head was cut in two from a sliver of metal that had been probably scraped out from the front of the ship and had finished its run just on Erik’s head. That wasn’t the first time she had to deal with a catastrophic injury.
The word DECEASED was pulsing red on his bio monitor. On his face though, just where a piece of metal had cut the face, the first sight of alien life came to be. A small firefly was walking on his blood, probably trying to use its nutrients. Are firefly carnivores? That was not something she was familiar with. Biology wasn’t her strength at school.
There were more fireflies outside, it was as if they were the main ecology of the area, they were attacking the windscreen, as if they were attracted by those aliens that came to explore their planet.
This was raising an interesting question: Were they contaminating the planet or was the planet slowly digesting the Okamba into its own ecosystem? Probably the second was the better answer, probably. In a matter of years, nothing would have remained of the ship, of their bodies, of their lives. In a thousand years, where the environment would have consumed that entire ship, when the reactor would have been consumed, the amount of energy that this would have been released, it could either destroy the environment or to give it enough energy to grow in a way undreamed of.
Another couple of fireflies entered through the whole left by the tree branch, the force fields had sealed a good part of the damaged hull but when something is so deeply inside the ship, like a branch, the force field finds difficult to adhere to changing surface cause by the movement of the tree itself and so it leaves a small unclosed section from which the atmosphere was still leaking out.
The safety belt was doing its job, it was keeping her safely attached to the chair but it was time to get free, unfortunately it was stuck. If only there was a way to remove her belt. She had the tool, at least none that was up to the job and in reaching distance of her arm.
“Problem solving.” This was one of the pillars of many of the courses at the academy.
She could use an electric shock from some of the broken cables to bypass and override the safety mechanism of the lock but that could go wrong in any possible way. It could even bring her death and she wasn’t sure she had enough knowledge of engineering and physics to know how to use it.
She could use a sharp piece of metal to saw the lock itself but even this required a level of precision that she wasn’t able to bet on herself and her ribs. The last thing she needed now was to open her own chest.
She opened the drawer under her console to find something useful and the answer was there lying on the bottom, a laser cutter. It was most probably the best tool in the entire ship and she didn't even remember she had it.
The cutter had three different settings according to power. The higher would have been surely enough to destroy the lock but she had to be sure it wouldn't cut her body in half.
After a quick look around, a dummy target suddenly happened. A piece of metal was just hanging from a closeby console. The laser beam cut through the metal in about five seconds and left a hole that was smaller than the lock itself.
Yes. It was safe enough to risk it.
Goosebumps, a deep breath, now the laser was aligned with the lock, away from her body.
The beam needed a few seconds to cut through the width of the metal but soon she looked and saw the invisible laser was cutting a closeby cable. That meant that it went through.
The smell of smoking melted metal was filling the air and it would probably have triggered an environmental risk if the ship wasn't so damaged. Once the final piece of metal was scrapped out she was finally free.
Behind her the captain was unconscious and still locked to his chair, still knocked out from the impact but alive. His belt was way easier to open. It wasn’t jammed. He was now lying on the floor.
His hand moved, the sign that there was still life in that body but that she would have been able to talk to him anytime soon, it was another matter.
She caressed it and softly she kissed his forehead. Lucky for her, nobody was there to see the act of a forbidden and clandestine love, she wasn't ready to let the world know and he wasn't either.
She started crying even though she knew that he wasn’t really dead. It was her fear that maybe that was the end of everything. To die on an alien and hostile planet wasn’t the plan she had in mind but it could have been .
She always dreamt of retirement on some beach on one of the planets of the council but there wasn't light at the end of the tunnel.
The main console of the cockpit was showing the data of the ship and it wasn’t good.
PROPULSION:
Warp drive: Offline
Subluminal: Offline
Thrusters: Offline
RCS: Offline
COMMUNICATION:
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Internal communication: Offline
Coms: Online
Communication array: Online [No external connection]
SENSORS: Online
WEAPONS:
Laser bank: Offline
Torpedoes
Banks from 1 to 4: Offline
Bank 5: Online
It was still loading systems in an endless list but she wasn’t bothered to look at it all. After all, they crashed and there was no way to expect anything else than the ship being in pieces.
The communication array was unable to track the geostationary satellites they parked in orbit. The layer of clouds was probably too thick to allow the Okamba to communicate with the mothership in the system. Nonetheless she tried and recorded a message:
“I am Haila Abercrombie from the exploratory vessel Okamba, this message is directed to the ISV Kashmir. We crash landed on the fourth planet of the system and we are unable to fly. We need immediate rescue.”
Message sent: Failure!
Message sent: Failure!
Message sent: Failure!
“Fuck!” She exclaimed, punching the screen.
A memory came from hours before when they were approaching the planet. A vision that made no sense whatsoever. Something impossible for the knowledge of atmospheric science. The whole planet was covered in thick clouds.
How could it be? How could an entire planet be covered?
The only thing that came to her mind was a documentary about Earth that she saw at school when she was a wee girl. It was a documentary about geology and an island in the north hemisphere of the planet. The island was stunning and beautiful but it was very geologically active and there was a volcano whose ashes could cover a considerable chunk of the atmosphere. Was it? Volcanic activity?
She initiated a scan of the planet but since there was no chance of getting satellite readings, it would have been difficult to have accurate readings but something could have come up with a bit of luck.
There was in fact a weird reading from the geological activity, it was like if the planet was way older and colder than it should be. It had way less geothermal energy than a usual planet of the same size and age but there was no way to know for certain without satellites.
But that wasn’t the weirder thing. Something else way more ominous and terrifying catched her attention.
Alarm! Antim radiation detected!
What? Antim radiation? Was there antimatter on the planet? A series of incongruous ideas passed through her mind.
How advanced was the civilization on this planet? The answer to this question was both reassuring and terrifying.
What if they crashed on the planet of a warmonger race? What if somebody was coming now to reclaim the ship? What if there were weapons pointed at them? Was it the antimatter that produced this climate disaster?
With all the dots coming down to a string of answers she decided that there was only one thing she had to do. They needed to leave ASAP.
An alert appeared on the screen. The computer just finished the analysis of the system and the future wasn’t so bright after all.
Structural integrity failure: 2:07:39
It just kept coming. How was it possible for a mission to have this level of chain reaction? And this was way worse than she could possibly imagine, in a bit more than two hours, the all ship would be nothing more than a glorified and irreparable wreckage resting on an alien planet forever.
Even though the diagnosis was sending all hopes to die, she knew that there was a hope to survive and go home but it would have required an unimaginable amount of time and energy and yet Haila pressed the enormous red button on the screen, the button that would have activated the self-repair.
Self-repair will require a level II personal code or superior
The voice of the computer was so comforting since it was the first voice she heard from the moment she woke up. And even there it was annoying to hear what it had to say and make her roll her eyes.
“Why do I need a code to repair a ship? Is an emergency,” she pointed out since her code was class III.
It will produce a massive energy spike from the fusion reactor
The very nature of this protocol can put the ship in danger
“More danger than being stuck on an alien planet where everything can possibly kill us?”
The protocol cannot be overridden
Trying to remember the course of computer science at the academy, the hope to prove the computer wrong, the hope that she could code her way out of it but she didn’t need to dig within her own memory to remember that she never learned how to code properly. In fact it would have required coding ability that Haila was sure nobody on the ship had.
Nobody on the ship but, was she the only one on the ship?
“Is there anybody alive?” she asked via the shipwide communication channel.
Silence.
Then she remembered that internal com was still offline but nonetheless thrice in the hope that something good could come but there was only darkness.
The sounds of the deserted ship cracking under the pressure of the external environment was giving feels of horror, it sounded like it was being crashed by the atmosphere but really it was just simply falling apart.
But something even creepier was in front of her, outside of the ship the two eyes of some enormous animal were staring at her. They were reflecting the light of the fire outside and yet it was difficult to identify what kind of animal it was.
She could bet it was like some kind of bison but it was too malnourished to be a threat, it was looking toward the ship, vaguely interested in what was happening inside that enormous weird thing in front of him and then he came back into the forest.
So that’s it, there was life on the planet. She could have understood it by the fact that there was vegetation and if there was vegetation there were macro animals, that is the fundamental basis of every ecosystem.
Now to hope that something a bit more sophisticated and anthropomorphic wouldn’t approach the ship, she couldn’t bear the sight of a man pointing her at a fire gun with some weapon.
In the thought of better be safe than sorry she checked the ship for any point in which an intrusion could occur and one of the two cargo bays was open as a tin of beans. It had been lacerated so badly that the arrays for the forcefield couldn’t make one that covered the entire breach.
The only thing that separated the external world from the ship was an airlock that she promptly secured with an impenetrable digital lock, unfortunately there was a weapon crate in that bay and now the only hope was that nobody and nothing could ever find it and understand how to use the guns inside.
Some of the guns were quite difficult to operate even for people who know how they work, not the military of course, they are very good at it, but the other guns, the ones that works with gunpowder and mechanical components, they could have been used by a child and there was an high chance that a species that knew about antimatter, they could know how to operate guns.
Maybe it was better to put the security of that crate on a to do list, not pretty low on the list itself, it could climb its way to the top in case something bad happened.
If only there was a way to know if there were people alive on the ship. I mean, every single member of the crew has a bio monitor and yes, how couldn’t she think about the bio monitor?
She was probably so used to technology that she didn’t think that the same thing that she used to check if Erik was still alive regardless of the massive chunk of metal cutting his head in two, could be used to locate other survivors on the ship.
A beacon of hope lit in front of her as four different signs of life poured on the monitor: Kornelius Van Dijk, Haila Abercrombie, Giordano Faci, Trevor Monroe.
The amber flashing alert on Van Dijk and Monroe pulse was very disturbing, she knew about the captain but the fact that the doctor was incapacitated was no walk in the park, nonetheless it was warming to see that other two people were alive, even if it was on a crew of thirtytwo.
And most importantly, who on Ghodia is Girodano Faci? It was easily discoverable that was a new engineer on his first mission. Such a great maiden journey to do, he would be the hero of every port when, by coming back home, he will have to teach the story on how he repaired the ship and brought everybody back home. Who knows how many women he will be able to catch with this, but her mind was flying away and forgetting the part where they weren’t even near the chance to take off that bloody dark planet.
The infirmary and the engine room were on the opposite sides of the ship so she had to choose and give a priority to one of the two plus the access for the loading bay 2 that was just a few meters under her now, was at the bottom of the small corridor just outside the door so she could just go there while on the way and give a quick look inside evaluating if it was the case to put the crate in safe or not.
Lying on the floor, the laser cutter ready to be used as an offensive weapon after she changed the now depleted battery that had been consumed by her need to freedom minutes before. In the same way it wouldn’t be of an incredible use, with just a so limited amount of fire power but it was just in case some animal found its way through some undetected breach and she could imagine that there were plenty since the ship sensors were so deeply damaged they couldn’t see anything as the almost endless list of damaged systems she saw earlier could indicate.
The chance that the ship was partially blind wasn’t a comfortable thought and she had to be ready for everything. Until she didn’t grab some real and better weapon, the small laser cutter had to do the job.
And yet, even though it was difficult for something to enter the ship unnoticed, she wasn’t aware of something that was walking in its own habitat, the pair of black eyes of the anthropomorphic figure that now standed where the other animal standed earlier. With an extremely rudimental spear made and the body destroyed by age he was looking at the woman through the window of the enormous spaceship whose nature he had no different clue than the animal he took the place of.
