The Disasters

by M. K. England

  Genius Girl’s jaw tightens, too caught up in her own fear to notice mine. “Yeah. The yaw control mechanism is out.”

  “Okay,” I say, wiping my palms on my thighs and checking my grip on the controls. “I’m fine. This is fine.”

  The ironic thing is, my first reaction to stress has always been to go blow money on flight sim time. What am I supposed to do when the stress happens while flying?

  I close my eyes and picture the HUD as a video game screen, then study it again. “Okay, from our current angle, we should still hit the planet. Not literally hit, I hope, but I mean . . . I should be able to land. I think.”

  Super-inspiring leadership there, Hall. “I’m pretty sure I won’t screw this up! You’re okay with that, right, y’all?” Asshat.

  Rion unbuckles himself and leans forward to look out the front viewport, his hand pressing into my shoulder where he grips the back of the pilot’s chair. I glance over at the other two; Genius Girl has gone pale, and Eyeliner is unconsciously bouncing her legs again. We need to refocus.

  “Okay, I don’t want to keep calling you Dr. Eyeliner and Genius Girl in my head,” I say, my voice light. “Don’t suppose I could get some real names before we try to not crash this thing?”

  “Dr. Eyeliner is a terrible nickname,” Eyeliner says.

  Very helpful. I blow out a slow breath.

  “Well, give me something else to work with, then.”

  Eyeliner studies me with those cool green eyes and stills her fidgeting, her mouth playing at a smile as if she gets what I’m trying to do. “Zinaida. Call me Zee,” she says.

  “Case,” Genius Girl says without looking up from her display, the name offered like a bullet. I shrug and look up to meet Rion’s eyes.

  “And you I already know, I suppose.”

  “Do you, though?” he asks, a playful lilt to his voice. “Well, you have one up on me. Do I get to know your name?”

  Hello, now we definitely have to live through this. I put on my most charming grin and offer him my hand, which he takes in a firm grip. “Nax Hall, at your service.”

  Rion squeezes once, a tiny quirk at the corner of his mouth, then releases my hand.

  “So, yeah, nice to meet you all and everything,” he says, “but I’d still prefer to not die if at all possible. What can I do to help?”

  The naming exercise has just the effect I’d hoped. The others look to me, and I nod to bolster my confidence.

  “Okay, um, Case,” I say, trying my best to cement “Genius Girl = Case” in my mind. “Do you think the manual yaw will still work, or was the entire mechanism blown off?”

  She taps the screen a few times, then shakes her head. “I can’t tell. The computer can’t see the yaw control, so I don’t know if it’s because it’s not there, or because the connection to the computer was damaged. We’ll just have to try it.”

  “Right.” I look over my shoulder. “Rion, the manual crank should be—”

  “I got it, hotshot,” he says, clapping me on the shoulder as he ducks out the door. Doc Eyeliner—Zee—unstraps herself too.

  “I’m going to see about parachutes and medical supplies. Good luck, friends. You’ll be fine,” she says, and disappears after Rion, muttering something under her breath in Russian with a shake of her head.

  “Did you catch that last part?” Case asks me, shaking out the tension in her hands.

  “I think I get the general idea,” I say, though Russian isn’t one of my languages. Swear at me in Pashto, then we can talk.

  We sit in silence while al-Rihla, the jewel of the colonies, gradually takes over more and more of the viewport. It looks exactly like it did on the pages of my textbooks, only so much more. I let my eyes linger for a moment, taking in green continents outlined in rich red sand and huge, intensely blue oceans that glitter below. I know we’re in a life-or-death situation, but it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the view. I can see why all the anti-exploration crap went away once a few humans actually got out here. Who could look at all this and not want it? It’s bizarre—I’ve only seen Earth from space once, and I was busy trying not to die at the time. Now I’m looking down on a completely different planet, in person, in space, while flying a ship I stole.

  I’m actually here. This is all I’ve ever wanted, though I didn’t get it in the way I wanted.

  And in a few painfully long minutes, I’ll find out whether I get to live to see the other seven colony worlds one day, or if I get to die in a dramatic crash and kill all my new friends instead.

  Fantastic.

  Case interrupts my thoughts with a harsh laugh out of nowhere.

  “Crashing in slow motion is the worst,” she says, the bright edge of panic tearing her sarcastic words to ragged pieces. “My brain really doesn’t need more time to list every possible thing that could go wrong. When we’re doing stuff, it’s fine, but now it’s like, are you sure you rerouted the power correctly? Better check again. Okay, back to the main screen. But are you sure it was okay? Better check again. God.”

  I almost chuckle, though she probably wouldn’t appreciate that, because I know exactly what she means. Those obsessive thoughts—Don’t screw it up, you’re gonna screw it up, just wait until you screw it up. It’s torture. Her hands twist and writhe in her lap, and her breath is getting worryingly labored. Maybe I should intervene.

  “The slow motion thing, yes. It’s like, hey! Wanna know if there’s a fiery crash in your future? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, please enjoy an in-flight beverage. The latest SkyMall catalog has been uploaded to your tab.”

  A surprised laugh bursts out of her, the sort that’s already halfway to a sob. I look over and catch her gaze, her dark eyes wet and lovely and defiant.

  “Hey.” I hold out my hand to her. “We got this.”

  She holds my gaze for a beat too long, her expression unreadable, then reaches out and gently squeezes my hand. “We got this,” she echoes.

  And she smiles, just a little bit, but it makes her hand in mine feel suddenly intense. I run my thumb over her knuckles, once, twice.

  She’s quiet for a moment, then squeezes my hand once more and drops it. She goes back to tapping on the display like nothing happened, swiping a map over to my screen with a quick gesture. “It looks like our present course will take us over the beach right outside the founding city, Saleem. No casualties on the ground if we can manage to aim there. Just a little help from the manual yaw should do it.”

  “I can think of worse places to crash than the most beautiful beach on the best of the colony worlds. Assuming we don’t overshoot and land in the ocean, I mean, but it’ll be a nice view on the way down.” Silver lining, right? Maybe we’ll get really lucky and they’ll bury us here.

  Case hums her agreement. “My moms always wanted to retire on al-Rihla, actually. They were planning to pack up and move as soon as I graduated the Academy. They’ll be pissed I saw it first.”

  Then the comm crackles to life. “Unidentified shuttle, you have entered al-Rihla airspace. Flight is restricted to those who have filed an approved flight plan with the Air and Space Travel Control Commission. Please state your affiliation, cargo, and intentions immediately.”

  Case’s gaze snaps to mine, her eyes wide. My mouth hangs half open, but my brain hasn’t supplied it with any words to speak. A high-pitched warning tone pierces my skull, and I check the HUD: surface-to-air missiles locked on.

  Shit.

  I yank the controls sharp to the left, then remember. No yaw. We won’t be avoiding any missiles unless their aim is incredibly terrible. Gotta do something, gotta . . .

  “Say something!” I hiss to Case.

  “Uhhhh . . .” She looks all around the cockpit as if it might provide a magic solution. The comm crackles again: “Unidentified shuttle, we have a missile lock on your vessel and will fire in fifteen seconds if you do not identify yourself. Now.”

  Case slaps the control and shouts through a burst of static. “
Mayday, mayday, mayday, our yaw control mechanism has been damaged and we are coming in for a hard landing. Please clear our approach vector. We’re aiming for undeveloped terrain and will avoid collateral damage as much as possible.”

  “Negative, shuttle, break off and maintain orbit. We will send a transport up to—”

  “Sorry, control, but we can’t do that. We’re leaking atmosphere, and asphyxiation is a really terrible way to go,” Case says, and I snort. It wasn’t funny, not really, but as the ship enters the outer atmosphere and begins to shake apart, I find it hard to keep a grip on myself—or the controls. My eyes burn with welling tears, but my breath keeps hitching like I’m about to bust out in hysterical laughter or start sobbing. Gotta pull it together. Gotta keep them safe. No fancy piloting, no sudden maneuvers. Do. Not. Mess. This. Up.

  The nose of the ship glows a dull orange as we hit the atmosphere in earnest, and the ship gives a violent shudder beneath us. There’s an awful creaking sound, slow, then faster, faster until the metal shrieks, and clangclangclang, fwing!

  “What the hell did we just lose?” I shout, my arms shaking with the effort of holding the ship steady.

  “You don’t want to know. We need that yaw control now if we’re going to avoid taking a bunch of people out with us, though!”

  “RION!” I throw my weight forward onto the controls to keep the nose of the ship from tipping backward. The atmospheric drag desperately wants to send us tumbling end over end, burn us alive, and rain our ashes over the kindly people of Saleem. “Rion, I need yaw to starboard, fifteen degrees!”

  “Aye!” Rion calls back, and slowly, slowly, the nose of the shuttle eases to my right.

  The rudder pedals are fighting me, so I stand up, bringing my full weight down on the right one as we careen into the mountainous region bordering the shoreline. Dark smudges of lush green foliage and riverside agricultural settlements whip past as the ship kicks onto its side just enough to slip between two peaks, but then the nose drifts, drifts. . . .

  “Stop yawing!” I shout back to Rion, not even slightly sure that yawing is an actual word, but also not giving a flying, crashing fuck. The ground rushes up to meet us, a hard-packed wall of beach sand that may as well be steel at the speed we’re going. At least we’re going to miss the city. No civilian deaths on my conscience today. Who the hell decided I should be the pilot for this party of losers? Did we seriously survive the slaughter of the entire Academy only to die on the most beautiful colony world without ever getting to see it?

  The ship gives a violent shudder as the landing gear snaps into place below us, but it won’t do much for us on our makeshift landing zone. We’re coming in way too hot.

  This is going to hurt. Oh, it’s going to hurt so bad. If I’d flown better once we left the station, we wouldn’t be this damaged, we wouldn’t be crashing at all, and this is my fault—but maybe I can at least give us a fighting chance.

  “Strap yourselves down to something!” I call out, give them a count of five to comply, then haul back on the wheel, bringing the nose of the shuttle up. The viewport is all red-orange sand now, racing up to punch me in the face, and I have a sudden thought.

  Red sand.

  At the last second before impact, I thumb on the magnetic coils, and then CRASH, CRUNCH! The nose of the shuttle rushes back toward the cockpit in the second right before the impact cushions deploy with a deafening POP, blocking the viewport. The shuttle tips sickeningly, screams fill the cabin, and shattering glass tinkles like tiny bells. Then we’re bouncing once, twice, then smaller bounces, over and over until finally, with one last scraping crunch, the ship skids to a stop.

  Silence. I lie with my head pillowed on the inflated airbag, sprawled at an angle that wouldn’t work if gravity were in the usual place. A slip-slide on my cheek—am I crying? I lift one shaky hand, and it feels like someone else’s flesh as it presses to my cheek, gathers the wetness. I pull back, holding the hand in front of my half-lidded eyes.

  The hand—my hand—is red.

  Three

  THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES AFTER the crash are a blur. A few distant sounds clang and thump their way into my skull, but it’s all so far away. Muted. Like the sound of the goats bleating at mealtimes, the volume cut by my closed bedroom window. Is it my turn to feed them? Make Malik do it. There’s something glorious simmering in the kitchen, the air heavy with the warmth of sautéed onions and chiles and garam masala. But the taste—it’s gritty, not spicy, and the peppery smell mingles with sweat and the rough pressure of strong arms wrapped around my waist, hauling me up—

  Light bursts into my skull, and I stumble back. The scent of spices disappears. My heels sink into the ground and my arms pinwheel at my sides, but I fall anyway, my ass landing in a puff of red sand. Rion steps into my field of vision and holds out a hand, grinning.

  “You all right, mate?”

  His hand blurs into two for a moment, but I reach out and manage to take it, my head spinning as he pulls me back to my feet.

  “You know,” he says, grabbing my shoulder to steady me, “I can’t tell if it’s the height of captainly self-sacrifice or absolute bloody stupidity to tell everyone to strap in and not do it yourself.”

  “My vote is stupidity,” Zee says from somewhere behind me, but I don’t feel quite steady enough to turn around and look.

  “Case?” I ask. A shooting pain lances through my skull when I talk, so strong I feel it in my teeth. I lean into Rion until the pain recedes, hoping he won’t mind my grip on his bicep.

  Zee sets a bag down in the sand and leans in to inspect my face. She must have found the shuttle’s first-aid kit. Lucky me.

  “Case is fine, too,” Zee says, dabbing a stinging antiseptic wipe over my forehead with cool confidence, utterly unfazed by the blood staining the cloth. “You’re the only casualty.”

  My head goes light again, and Zee catches me by the shoulders as I sway. She keeps up a steady stream of chatter as she sprays the gash with liquid bandage to stop the bleeding, but her voice is as vague and wavering as the heat rising off the beach around us.

  They’re all okay. I didn’t get them killed. It was a near thing, though, and the giant weight on my chest won’t quite let up.

  “Is it going to scar?” I ask Zee, gesturing weakly at my forehead.

  She smirks and strips off her glove. “Never fear, hotshot; it takes a pretty deep cut to leave a scar these days.”

  My vision finally begins to clear, and I’m glad it does, because this place is gorgeous. It was horrifying when it was rushing up through the viewport of the shuttle, but now that my feet are on the ground, the contrast between the red sand beach and the crystalline blue water in the near distance is stunning. Saleem sits bright and golden just a bit downshore, right up against the water only a mile or two away. The rhythmic rush of the waves drifts on the breeze, along with a sweet sort of perfumy smell that’s probably coming from the flowering scrubby bushes we crushed with our ship. A ship that’s making an ominous ticking sound. Hopefully just the engines cooling down. Yeah. That’s it.

  Case emerges from the shuttle with a cargo duffel looped over her shoulder and a focused, determined expression. “I grabbed the shuttle’s emergency supply stash and pulled the flight recorder from the nav console,” she says, setting the bag down and dropping to the ground beside it. “The data evidence, right? Of what we saw. All the comm recordings, nav data . . .”

  She trails off, and everyone falls silent at the reminder of the station, of the lives lost. In all the excitement of nearly dying, I’d almost forgotten. I can’t help but be impressed, though, that she both thought to grab the recorder and knew how to take apart the console to get it. Glad someone here has a brain.

  She continues, subdued. “The Earth Embassy should be our first stop. We tell them what we know, get a message onto one of the Earth-bound courier ships, and beg forgiveness for ignoring their traffic control. These are extenuating circumstances, right? Maybe they can waive the no-ret
urn rule or something.”

  Zee raises an eyebrow with a cool expression. “You can do what you want, good girl, but I’d actually rather not go back. Leave me out of it.”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Eyeliner, who’re you calling ‘good girl’?” Case snaps.

  “I’m not going back,” Rion says with finality, cutting off Zee’s retort. “Besides, there were insiders at the Academy who helped the attack happen, remember? Everyone who wasn’t born on this planet is an Academy graduate. Who’s to say some of them aren’t somehow in on it, too?”

  Case rolls her eyes. “Bit paranoid, don’t you think? Besides, I don’t think we’ll have much of a choice. We can’t just decide we suddenly have colonial citizenship. What are you going to do, hide in the sewers for the next ten years?”

  They both have good points. I take a few cautious, experimental steps on my own, stretching my legs while Zee aggressively repacks the medbag.

  “Maybe we should lie low for a bit,” I say, choosing my words with care. “Get to town, find a place to stay, and see if a courier ship has jumped in-system with a news update. I know these murdering assholes tried to cover it up, but do you really think they could kill off that many people and keep it quiet? Then, if it looks safe, we can get the flight recorder to the authorities and try to negotiate over visas—whether for staying or going, as we each choose. And we’ll try to get a warning back to Earth no matter what. Fair?”

  Rion’s fists unknot at that, and his face smooths into a neutral expression. “Fair. Once we know more, we can make a real decision.”

  “Assuming they don’t arrest us the second we set foot inside the city limits,” I add. “I’m guessing they won’t be wild about us landing-slash-crashing illegally in their desert. They might be flying out here to arrest us right now, for all we know.”

  Case wraps a hand around her tied-back hair and pulls, her face drawn tight. She bites her lip, then shakes her head.