by Sonia Nova
A few emergency shuttles still sat in the back of the platform, but as she watched, three of them lifted off and entered the circular vacuum in the side of the spaceship. That left only two more.
An E’lania crewmember wearing the distinctive blue and white uniform waved a few people into one of the shuttles. The crowd started to gather around the last shuttle.
“That one’s under repair,” the crewmember yelled over the alarms. “Go to the emergency shuttle platform in the passenger quarters. I repeat. There are no more available shuttles here. Go to the passenger quarters.”
The people around the shuttle looked dejected, but quickly turned on their heel and started to run. Hazel was right behind them, about to do as she’d been told, but she paused when she realized the soldier hadn’t moved.
“Come on! We have to go!” she called to him, but the man shook his head.
What kind of an idiot…?!
The crowd moved around them toward the exit, and once the second-to-last shuttle with the crewmember had taken off, they were alone on the platform.
“I know the layout of this ship. The next shuttle platform is too far. If the Krezlians truly are on the ship, it’s a risky move,” the soldier said, striding quickly to the last shuttle. “I have some basic training in mechanics…”
Hazel now turned to look at the remaining emergency shuttle. She realized that there were straps over it, clipped to metal hooks sticking out of the concrete platform floor. How had she missed that before?
The soldier pressed something on the side of the shuttle, and a panel opened up to reveal a mess of wires. “It’s mostly so I can do maintenance on my speeder, but if I can figure out what’s wrong with this one, we don’t have to go anywhere.”
Hazel felt her jaw drop. Was he serious?
She hesitated, her gaze shifting between him and the doorway the rest of the passengers had just disappeared through.
Should she trust him? She watched as he stared blankly into the guts of the shuttle, the seconds trickling by, and decided that she would try her luck on her own. No matter how far the next emergency platform was, it was probably still faster to get there than to repair a shuttle!
She started to head back toward the exit of the platform, when she heard something in the hallway some distance away. The sounds were sharp and metallic, almost whizzing. It was like nothing she had ever heard before and it made her heart freeze in her chest.
The sounds echoed through the corridors outside the platform and recognition hit her as she realized just what made those sounds.
Gunshots.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered quietly, her voice sounding as panicked as she felt. “What do we do?”
The soldier didn’t look up from the side of the shuttle. “I hear it,” he snapped. “I’m trying to focus. One second.”
Hazel rushed back to the shuttle and hid behind it, pressing herself against the side that wasn’t visible from the doorway. She wasn’t going to take any chances.
“I can’t find anything wrong with the shuttle. All settings seem to be right,” she heard the soldier say from the other side. “It’s possible it was already fixed and the crewmember was wrong. He must have seen the straps and thought it was still in repair.”
“Okay,” Hazel said, her heart nearly stopping when she heard more gunshots. They were even louder now. Closer.
The memory of all those people who had run into the hallways after the crewmember told them to leave flashed into her mind. Had they made it out? All those gunshots…
Nausea at the thought began to make her stomach ache, and she shut her eyes to keep her wits. No, she couldn’t think about that. She had to stay focused. Remain calm.
“As long as it flies, I’m in,” she said, mostly to herself. “And if there’s anything wrong with it, someone can just pick us up once we’re out there.”
She didn’t wait for the soldier to confirm her thoughts. She opened the door to the cockpit and climbed into the co-pilot’s seat. There was a loud clang outside the shuttle as the soldier tossed the binding straps off it. A moment later, he jumped in and took the seat beside her, taking a look at the controls.
“Have you ever flown an emergency shuttle before?” Hazel asked.
The soldier frowned. “No, it’s all automatic. But even if it wasn’t, the controls are the same as in a battle speeder. Just in different places.”
She let out a deep breath, trying to will her heartbeat to slow down. Having some kind of panic attack wouldn’t help anything. She had to just trust that she had made the right choice to stick with this Alliance soldier.
The soldier pressed a button and lights cascaded across the control panel. The engine whirred and began to vibrate.
“That’s a good sign, right?” Hazel asked, but the soldier didn’t answer. He pressed a few more buttons, a concentrated frown marring his face. When nothing more happened and the shuttle didn’t take off, Hazel started to worry.
“Is it not flying? Can we not take off?” Her heart pounded in her chest, and she glanced back toward the entrance of the platform, in the direction the gunshots had come from.
“Hold on,” the soldier gritted, pressing yet another button and grabbing the controls. He pushed upward at a sharp angle, and finally, the shuttle tugged forward and moved smoothly toward the exit.
The soldier grinned widely. “Yes! I had to set it to manual, but it should work now.”
Hazel released a heavy breath as the shuttle finally entered the vacuum and shot off into space. She turned in her seat and looked behind them, back onto the platform they had left behind. Through the windows of the platform, she thought she saw the shadowy form of something vaguely human pass by the entrance. Vaguely human… but with a long, heavy tail.
She quickly snapped back toward the front windows of the cockpit, her heart racing in her chest. All around them, emergency shuttles filled the space, and in the distance, Hazel could see a few Alliance speeders – and thankfully, no Krezlians. She gripped the arms of her seat so hard that her knuckles were white.
They had escaped. They were going to be okay.
Just as the thought entered her mind, the shuttle started to wobble. It was like turbulence in an airplane, and the wobbling quickly turned to swaying. Before Hazel had the time to ask the soldier what was wrong, the craft did an entire three-sixty.
Thankfully, the gravity was still on in the cockpit, so Hazel didn’t fall out of her seat, but the sensation had done nothing to help her nausea.
“What the hell are you doing?” she snapped at the soldier. His gray skin looked a shade paler than before.
“Nothing,” he said. “I think… I think we’ve been pulled into the initial space fold of the E’lania. The Fold Drive was deactivated, but not before it managed to create a hole in the universe… And now we’re headed straight toward it.”
“You’re kidding,” Hazel said, but had to stop talking as the shuttle spun again. And again. Panic threatened to rise within her once more. “What’s going to happen now?”
“As long as we stick close to the ship, we’ll be fine. If the E’lania passes through, so will we. And if it doesn’t, we’ll stay right where we are.”
“But the Krezlians are bombing the ship!” Hazel was done trying to hide how panicked she was. She gazed around in worry, noticing a few Krezlian ships in the distance, fighting against the Alliance speeders.
“Do you see any ships closer than a kradet away?” the soldier asked sharply. “The Alliance is holding them back – No. We’ll be…” The ship spun again. “We’ll be fine,” he finished. But at least to Hazel’s ears, he didn’t sound nearly as reassuring as he had before.
Oh, god… They were going to die.
Hazel shut her eyes, hoping to reduce her nausea as the shuttle continued to spin. She couldn’t tell how long they were spiraling around; it could have been minutes, hours, or seconds. But eventually, when she opened her eyes again, she saw that they were getting father and
farther away from the E’lania. She could see the round, lit up windows of several levels of the ship. They were farther away than they had been a moment ago.
“We’re floating away,” she breathed in horror.
“I know,” the soldier said. She watched him jerk the controls to the right, but the shuttle did nothing in response. “The controls are fucking jammed.”
“Can’t you–can’t you activate the comm?” she asked. “Tell someone what’s happening?”
The soldier shook his head. “It’s dead. I’ve been trying.”
Hazel could feel her heart sink in her chest. She shut her eyes again, wondering if this was a nightmare she would wake up from. But the sick feeling in her stomach and her growing headache told her it was horribly, painfully real.
She opened her eyes again – and saw a pinprick of white light in front of them. Her heart leaped at the sight. “Is that a ship?”
It got larger and larger as she watched. It was coming toward them! Or, no, she realized: they were spinning straight toward it.
“A star?” she asked, looking at the soldier when he still didn’t respond. His expression was grave and his black eyes so dark that she almost didn’t want to hear whatever he was going to say next.
“A planet,” the soldier said finally. Hazel shut her eyes again, tears now streaming down her face as they spun faster and faster. The faces of her family members and friends flickered through her mind.
She could barely hear his voice over the rushing sound in her ears as they catapulted through space.
“Hold on tight.”
CHAPTER 4
ZERIQ
Those fucking lizard bastards.
Of course, the Krezlians had attacked while Zeriq was on a passenger ship, unarmed and unprepared. If that human female hadn’t clung to him, he would have gladly run back into the hallway, stolen a gun from a Krezlian, and joined the fight.
That human female… She had been the same one he’d been staring at in the café, the one he’d been unable to take his eyes off of…
She had clearly tagged along with him because she trusted him to get them out of the E’lania alive. And maybe it had just been the military uniform that had caught her attention, but no matter what, Zeriq wasn’t used to humans implicitly trusting him. His looks hardly ever encouraged trust.
And although she had annoyed him by questioning his every move, earning the trust she had put into him had felt like his duty. He just couldn’t leave her alone, to try to survive on her own. A strange feeling inside him had made him want to ensure her safety, to protect her.
It had started the moment he’d laid eyes on her, and despite trying to ignore the feeling – and her, when they’d walked side by side in the corridor and she’d tried to get his attention – he hadn’t been able to rid his thoughts of her.
And now…
Pain shot through Zeriq’s skull and the base of his horns ached. There was darkness all around him, and his eyelids felt like they were made of lead. He couldn’t open his eyes. In fact, he couldn’t move at all. All he could do was feel the pain that was now emanating down his spine.
Where were they? What had happened? He tried to remember, but the memories didn’t come easily.
There was the shuttle that was under repair; he remembered that. He had flown them out of the ship and straight into the beginnings of the E’lania’s space fold. The shuttle had become unresponsive, and then…
The crash.
He remembered the bright white planet growing in size in front of them as they hurdled straight toward it. There had been nothing he could do except hope that somehow, even though the controls were unresponsive, the rest of the shuttle would function normally.
Apparently, something had gone right if he was still able to think – and feel.
Experimentally, he tried to move his fingers. At first, he felt nothing, as if he didn’t even have them anymore. Then, slowly, a horrible tingling sensation burned down from his shoulders and into his fingertips. Zeriq groaned at the uncomfortable feeling.
But at least now he could feel his hands, although they were sore and aching.
A good sign.
He tried to open his eyes again, and this time, he was able to move his eyelids just enough to see a brilliant white light all around him. The brightness hurt and he wanted to shut his eyes again, but he forced himself to open them, to try to see something.
In a moment, the brilliance of the light faded. It wasn’t as bright in the cockpit as his brain had initially told him, but he was surrounded by the color white. The white of the shuttle’s emergency airbags.
The plastic of the airbags was so close to him on all sides that he could barely move his head, even if his muscles could move normally. It was no wonder his body ached so. He was stuck, and there was no telling how long he had been like this.
There was an inflated partition between him and the human female, so he couldn’t see if she was okay either. He could smell her though – the fresh, clean scent of hers that had messed with his head since the beginning.
This wasn’t going to work.
Straining his muscles forward, Zeriq was able to crane his neck and bite the airbag that blocked his view in front of him. His sharp teeth easily pierced the plastic and the bag deflated with a soft whoosh of air.
Condensation had made it impossible to see out of the cockpit windshield. He leaned over, surprised that he had now regained most of his movement, and wiped off the fog with one palm.
The view out of the shuttle wasn’t much different than when he had been surrounded by airbags. About a quarter of the window was stuck in a pile of bright, crystal white snow, and the rest of the view was just that: more snow.
It looked like they had nosedived straight into a snowbank.
Thank the gods that the shuttle hadn’t simply burned up as they’d passed through the planet’s atmosphere. The shields were still working properly then, which is also why landing on the surface of the planet hadn’t left them in a crunched ball of metal.
What else on the shuttle was still working?
Zeriq was about to start a full systems check when he heard a low moan from the other side of the still-inflated airbag between him and the co-pilot seat.
Shit…
The human female.
He cursed himself for not checking on her the moment he had regained movement in his limbs. She was human, which meant that she was fragile. While Zeriq’s body had been created to withstand the violence of war, this female was just a breakable human and a civilian at that.
He ripped through the airbag with his hands and saw her slumped in the co-pilot’s chair, her head resting against the airbag on her other side. Her curly black hair was in a mess, and she was still completely unconscious. But that moan had been a good sign.
Placing the back of his palm against her diaphragm, at the base of her rib cage, Zeriq felt shallow breathing. A quick check of her pulse indicated that she was alive, just still suffering the effects of the physical trauma of the crash. There was a slight bruise on her forehead, but he couldn’t see any other injuries.
Thank the gods…
A deep breath escaped Zeriq’s lips that he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. If something had happened to the female in the crash – if she had put her faith in him for nothing and he hadn’t been able to protect her – he didn’t know what he would’ve done then…
Zeriq pushed the hair back on her forehead. He told himself it was to take a look at the bruise on her face, but the truth was: she intrigued him. Her lips were full and her nose was small. The way she leaned against the shuttle’s airbag, slowly breathing with her eyes closed, made her look so peaceful, so delicate…
Her alluring scent filled his nostrils and he brushed her cheek gently. Zeriq had received a crash course in emergency medicine during his training, but he’d only had to use the skills once or twice in his entire time with the Alliance military. If there were broken bones or concussions i
n his vicinity, it was because he was inflicting them on the enemy.
And he’d never been this close to someone so fragile as this female. He knew enough from his training to tell that the human female was… okay, though. At least for now. He would be able to tell more about her condition once she regained consciousness.
Zeriq dropped his hand away and turned back to the front of the shuttle. Hopefully, the female would awaken soon. But for now, he needed to see what the shuttle could tell them about where they were.
“Computer,” he said, his voice coming out weak and cracked. He cleared his throat but it didn’t help much. Thirst suddenly hit him. How long had they been out? He looked at the time on the shuttle’s control panel, but it only showed 00:00, like it had completely reset.
“Computer,” he repeated. “What’s our location?”
Silence.
He tried again, but the computer didn’t answer.
“Fuck,” he swore, mashing the buttons of the comm panel with a fist. But still, there was no response. Of course not. The damned comm hadn’t been working even when they’d left the shuttle platform on E’lania.
Zeriq grunted in frustration.
There was no way to make any contact with the outside world.
With no hope that it would work, he pressed the button to bring up the environmental information panel.
To his surprise, the holographic panel flickered into view above the flight controls. Zeriq stared at the panel. Environmental information was about the least helpful function of the shuttle’s emergency utilities, but it was better than nothing. And it meant that there was still some life left in the shuttle, somehow.
Zeriq swiped through the graphs and charts, taking in the information the shuttle’s sensors had gathered about their surroundings.
Oxygen atmosphere. Air temperature of negative twenty-one degrees Celsius. Cold. No air toxins detected. In fact, the air here was cleaner than the air of many major Alliance planet cities.
