by Dinah McLeod
“Ah, well…”
“In fact, isn’t it possible that you’ve actually made them worse? I mean, what if everyone wakes up with stiff necks and feeling exhausted? What then?”
“Um, that’s actually not my department…”
“Oh, I see.” She nodded sagely. “Pass the buck. That’s really the first thing they teach you in Research and Development, isn’t it?”
She knew she should stop, there really was no point in continuing to humiliate the man, but Sarai was just having too much fun. Chris, however, who was turning a shade of red that was tinged with purple, was clearly looking for a polite way to exit the conversation.
Which, it turned out, came in the form of a tall brunette who, at that very moment, bumped into him. “Oh!” the brunette was all wide-eyed apologetic. “I am so sorry. How clumsy of me.”
“It’s not a problem,” Chris magnanimously replied.
“Did I get my coffee on you?”
He looked down at his outfit and shook his head. “Nope.”
“Darn. I was hoping to help you make a getaway. What do you say you get out of here anyway?”
He looked between the new girl and Sarai, muttered a quick, “I better get to the, uh…cockpit” and took off.
“Yikes, girl. You didn’t take your Midol this morning?”
Sarai at least had the decency to blush. “I…I’m not usually so…”
“Bitchy?”
If anyone else had said it, the hairs on the back of her neck would have stood up, but this woman said it matter-of-factly without judgement and, surprisingly, a huge dose of compassion. “No, not usually.”
“Sounded to me like you were making that poor pilot pay for another man’s sins.”
Sarai winced. “That might not be too far off the mark.”
“Can I offer you a piece of advice?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Wherever we’re going, it’s a new start. Be sure to leave what’s-his-name behind you, like everyone else on Earth.” Then she leaned over and gave her a hug.
Sarai was caught off guard by the friendliness of the gesture, but hugged her back just the same.
“And, you know, if you happened to run into Chris again, an apology would probably go a long way. Who knows—he was a cutie and we are going to have a planet to populate.”
She snorted a laugh. “I think it’s safe to say that he’s not interested in that. Not with me, anyway.”
“What is it that you do?”
“I’m in communications. It’s a lot of boring details, but suffice it to say I’m going to be working on the technology that, hopefully, will allow us to communicate with our home planet.”
The brunette looked impressed. “That takes degrees in math and science, right?”
“A few sciences, actually. Applied physics, mostly.”
“Well, no wonder you weren’t impressed that he only worked on the shuttle!”
“Stop it!” she protested, grinning ruefully. “I really shouldn’t have been mean to him. You were right—I was thinking of someone else.”
“Well, look at it this way—you never have to see his face again, and in the meantime you can work on figuring out how to send a giant ‘screw you’ into the future for him to read.”
“Huh. I hadn’t thought about it like that.” Sarai brightened a little.
“That’s what friends are for, right?”
“I’m Sarai.” She offered her hand.
“Nice to meet you, Sarai. I’m Kelley. Now, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t slept in at least a week and my last five-hour-energy shot is wearing off. I think I’m going to catch some shut-eye.”
Hmm. Sleep sounded good, and from she’d heard, the cryosleepers were new and improved.
***
Sarai had no idea what was going on. It felt like an earthquake. Or, what she’d always imagined one would feel like, anyway. Having never felt one she couldn’t be entirely sure, but when the ground was moving beneath your feet even when you were standing stock-still, that was an earthquake, right? Except that they weren’t on Earth. Not anymore. Their shuttle had launched hours ago—had it been hours? Her hair was longer and she felt like it might have been days, weeks, even, but she had no way to know for sure. Either way, her internal sense of time told her that it had been far too few for them to have landed on solid ground yet.
But regardless, the ground was shifting beneath her feet and while she was still trying to make sense of this, the door to her cryosleeper slid open. She screeched as she was thrown from the compartment. She turned her head frantically, searching for others that had been similarly dumped from their rooms. When she saw no one, only rows and rows of shut doors, she knew she had to be dreaming.
It felt real enough, that was true. It certainly seemed that the shuttle was shaking and burping along at an alarming speed. Her pulse was racing frantically, her heart felt like it was about to come out of her chest. But it was just a dream. And only natural, really, that she should have a nightmare about the plane going down. It would quite literally send her dreams up in cinders, which she’d nearly done herself when she’d planned on staying with a man that never would have made her happy. Clearly, her subconscious was just trying to make sure they were clear on that point.
“Sarai? Is that you?”
She turned in the direction of the frantic voice and was very nearly hit in the face by a clock that had dislodged and was hurtling toward her. It was Brinley, the girl she’d met earlier.
“Sarai! Why are you just standing there? The shuttle is going to crash if we don’t do something to stop it!”
Clearly Dream Brinley didn’t know that they were just trapped inside her subconscious, which would account for the frantic level of her voice. Oh, well. Better play along. She had nothing better to do before they reached Zeta 12.
“I don’t know how to fly a plane!” She called back. “I mean, I suppose it wouldn’t be that hard to figure out given that the—”
“Okay, could you just get to the damn cockpit already?!”
Someone was testy. “Sure. You got it.” Getting into the spirit of things, Sarai began to hurry along the corridor, noting that she could see the dim outlines of sleeping people inside the cryosleepers. That was odd. She would have thought that her subconscious would have made the scene more realistic by having people spit from their sleep-tubes one after the other in mass hysterics. The only one who seemed hysterical was Brinley.
Or so she’d thought. As she raced along the hall—moving too quickly now to observe the closed cyro-sleepers—she heard other voices. Raised, panic-stricken voices that led her own heart to beat triple-time.
“Sarai! Over here! We need your help!” As soon as she had followed Brinley’s voice she saw that Brinley herself was disappearing down another corridor at lightning speed. She recognized one woman from when she first boarded, a blond named…Mira, Sarai thought, but the other two weren’t familiar to her at all. Nor were they shapeless voices that the strangers in her dreams usually were. One was a redhead and she wore a scowl on her face as she jabbed frantically at buttons on the control panel. The other was plump, curvy and blonde, with a petrified look on her face.
“What’s going on?” she shouted as she saw Sarai. “Do you know?”
She didn’t have the faintest clue. That was odd. Usually in her dreams she had at least a vague sense of what was going on or what she needed to do.
“The cockpit is closed!” the blond yelled. “We need to get it open to see what’s going on in there? Does anyone know how to fly a plane?”
Without answering, Sarai began to move forward. She had never flown a plane, but as she’d begun to explain to Brinley, she was sure that she could figure it out. Surely her knowledge of mathematics and applied physics would help her to determine what needed to be done. Of course, having never studied aircraft seriously before—she’d looked at one or two manuals in her spare time—
As she moved toward them, Sarai bumped her leg on the edge of a table as it slid across the room. She paused, frowning as pain shot up her leg. Damn, that hurt.
Her eyes widened as recognition dawned. It would seem that she wasn’t dreaming after all. “Oh, shit,” she muttered under her breath before she pushed past the pain and kept moving.
***
She’d thought that things had been going so well. Okay, so maybe “thought” was too strong a word. But Sarai had been at least moderately confident that she could figure things out in time, and perhaps she would have been able to if the computers had been functional. But they hadn’t been, and they’d run out of time before she could figure out the reason why. Amidst the screaming of her fellow crew members and all-out panic, they’d lost Brinley. They hadn’t had a choice, not really. They’d had to detach from the rest of the vessel if they were going to have any hope of surviving. That was what it had come right down to—and they’d bought their own slim thread of hope at the loss of her life. It had been necessary for self-preservation, but that hadn’t made it any easier. Nor did Sarai think she’d ever be able to sleep soundly again without seeing the look of regret Brinley had given her, just before she pressed her hand to the pane of glass that had separated them, before vanishing once more into the bowels of the failing shuttle. That look would haunt her dreams.
Not that she’d had time to dwell on it. Almost as soon as she’d realized that Brinley’s fate was sealed, she had to go back to trying to ensure their own. She’d managed to get the cockpit to open only to discover that the autopilot couldn’t be overridden. She’d done her darndest. No one could say that she didn’t. But Sarai had just been able to ascertain that there was a planet in their path before she had to try and land the sucker. There was no time to check for life form, no way to know the conditions of the planet and how much they would differ from the atmosphere on Earth. They had one single shot and she had had to take it the best she could. If there had been another there to fly the plane when she passed out, someone to step in and take her place, then perhaps they might have found a better course. But she was it, and she knew it. So she set the course as best she could, navigating them past debris and space junk as the shuttle hurtled toward the unknown planet.
This is it, was the last thing she remembered thinking. All of my life is down to this one moment. I have to land this shuttle, or die trying. And even if I succeed…we probably still all die.
She would never know if, as the shuttle touched with a loud, crunching crash if it was the landing itself or the fumes that made her pass out.
Chapter 3
Sarai struggled to open her eyes. Her vison was blurry, as though nothing in the world had a proper shape anymore. She couldn’t be sure if that had to do with the strange planet they’d accidentally crash-landed onto, or if something had happened to her eyes. She’d been through so much, her body might just be flat-out rebelling and poor eyesight was its way of showing it. It was truly unbelievable, the mishaps they’d had since leaving Earth. And mishap was too weak a word—this was right up there with the Greek tragedies.
They’d managed to get the auto-pilot off at the last possible second, just in time to crash the nose of the SS Reconnaissance onto a crowded freeway. That had been bad enough, but the way they’d been responded to with nothing but fear ever since. In the last however many hours it had been, Sarai had been shot at, chased, and finally caught. And by “caught” she meant that she’d been darted while she ran through the mall. From the very moment it hit her, she’d lost her ability to move--which was a damn shame, because she was in the worst possible place for it. She’d fallen over the side of the second-floor balcony and her body had crashed onto a food court table. Her mind registered all of this before the world had gone mercifully black.
Only now, she was back, and her head was pounding so hard that her eyes were filled with tears. She could feel the desire to let blissful, painless sleep claim her, but there was something else trying to claim her attention, forcing her to stay awake, pain or no. What was it? Something was dancing on the edge of her thoughts, trying to make her remember. She was forgetting something…someone? Something that she needed to do. God, why couldn’t she remember? A sense of urgency gripped her, the only thing that was keeping her eyes open as she struggled to focus on the shapes moving in front of her.
There was whispering all around her. She could hear it, though she couldn’t for the life of her make out what they were saying. Her ears strained, but hard as she tried, she couldn’t detect any words, only speech that was so soft that, for all she knew, it might not be people at all. Perhaps it was only the wind she was hearing.
Or maybe her ear drums had burst in the crash. The frustration of two vital senses not working, combined with the pain in her head, made the tears in her eyes spill over. She’d been stupid to come here—stupid! Peter had been right, damn it all to hell. She supposed the one advantage of being on this god-forsaken planet was that he never would find out.
Focus, Sarai, she told herself. Take deep, slow breaths and think. Yes, she needed to stay calm. That was her first priority. And she needed to think. She inhaled deeply and mixed scents of smoke and charred…something…reached her nostrils. Which meant that her sense of smell, at least, was intact. That was something, though she’d much prefer being able to see properly.
Next, she slid her tongue out and licked her lips. They were dry and tasted faintly of ashes. Yummy. Two out of five. Things were looking up.
Then she flexed her fingers. She instantly regretted it as searing pain shot through her digits and traveled through her hand. Almost without realizing it, she screamed.
“I think it’s awake.”
What? Had she just imagined hearing that? And “it”? What a strange thing to say!
She could make out the dim outlines of a shape leaning over her. Then she felt the slightest bit of pressure on her arm. It felt like…a needle. She realized it even as it slid into her skin.
“What are you doing to me?” She wasn’t sure if it was the needle and whatever it had contained or another side effect of the impact the crash had had on her body that her voice came out sounding like an unintelligible squeak. But before she could even try to puzzle it all out, her eyes were closing. They felt like concrete and trying to keep them open was futile. It frustrated Sarai, she wanted to stay awake, damn it! She had to figure out where they were, make sure that the others were all right and figure out what—if anything—they could do next! But sleep rose up to claim her and after a few agonizing moments of trying to fight it, she knew that she had no choice but to give in.
***
Binnix faced the magistrate with his arms crossed behind his back. Though he was the chief of police, it was still a sign of respect afforded one in Rowth’s position.
“I want to make it clear that you do not have to do this,” Rowth was saying. “I know that these creatures have impacted all of us with their unwanted presence, but you perhaps feel even more strongly that they shouldn’t remain here.”
“According to what you say, they may have nowhere else to go.”
“That has yet to be seen. And until we may know for certain—I have the feeling that these creatures are not telling all that they know—we need to foster them out to be certain that they’re cared for.”
“Instead of killed,” he stated softly.
Rowth was one of the rare few that knew him well enough to know that the softer his voice, the more his soul raged inside of him. It was with this in mind, he suspected, that Rowth responded, his voice equally soft. “I know that you would not be the only one to wish that sentence upon them. But it is my thinking that these creatures are in need of our guidance and protection. They are young yet, and by our laws that warrants leniency we would not show with our own kind.”
“Our own kind would not think of going to another planet unannounced, much less crashing into it and killing others.” Binnix kept his voice low, calm, the way his kind liked things. It was only his voice that was calm, however. The rest of him vibrated with a myriad of emotions: anger, guilt, betrayal. However, he, like the rest of his species, had been taught from an early age how to feel these things while ensuring that they never surface to be seen by another.
“I know,” Rowth replied steadily. “I’m only saying that if you have any…reservations on the matter, then it is perfectly acceptable—”
“I’ll do it.” He did his best to keep his growing anger at bay. Rowth knew as well as he did that it would not be acceptable for someone in his position to turn down such a task without good reason. While Rowth would perhaps feel comfortable in excusing him, he knew that it might appear to others that he was shirking his duty, and he couldn’t have that. His image was very important to him—indeed, it was the only thing that kept him from keeping the anger he felt at the whole situation stuffed down deep, never to emerge. He couldn’t help feeling that releasing it might allow him some relief from the raging tumult inside, but even that possibility was not excuse enough to risk it. He considered Rowth a friend, but even a friend would be loath to be around someone who could not control their emotions. It just wasn’t the Pra’kiran way. His mother would come back to life just to lambaste him in maternal fire if he should ever forget himself.
“You’re certain?” Rowth asked, giving him his patented penetrating stare.
Binnix met his black eyes without flinching. “Of course. Will she be sent here, or will I be needing to retrieve her?”
“She is currently being held in prison. I will make the arrangements, but you will need to collect her yourself.”
“Consider it done.”
Rowth gave him a brief smile and then clasped his forearm in thanks. Not another word was said between them. It wasn’t needed.
***
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