Enter the Sandmen

by William Schlichter

  Reynard clips his eyepiece to his ear in time to witness Scott sprawled at the bridge doors. Conscious, he frees a panel at the base of the door frame.

  “Formulate a plan.” About the most captain order Reynard gives. He is unsure of what to do to sustain his crew.

  “Get outside before the breathable air inside the bridge stagnates.” The panel opens, and Scott jabs the durasteel bar into a cylinder. With labored breathing he pumps the bar.

  How? The cargo ramp has to be underwater at best, and the side airlock will be too high to scale down without climbing gear. Reynard assesses the situation to himself. None of his training has prepared him for this. A starship’s captain should be more experienced. Not some kid—fresh from the farm—who possesses a cool starship. Flash Gordon was at least a Yale graduate, Buck Rogers was already an astronaut, and Luke Skywalker was a natural pilot, who could target wamprats in his T-16. All of them better prepared to deal with a starship crash.

  “All exits are beyond the bridge doors. They need power to open,” Amye snaps. “Whatever hit us fried everything.”

  “Shouldn’t we have insulation and fuses to prevent overloads?” Reynard hopes he asked a valid question.

  “The blast overrode all fail-safes. Everything’s shut down and cooked. A ship with this damage should have exploded.” Scott, pumping the door release, slows as pressure builds inside the release mechanism.

  “Are we all alive?” Good question for a captain to ask?

  “Australia’s unconscious,” JC takes an emergency supply pack from under the first officer’s chair.

  Amye pulls a second emergency pack from the seat across from hers. “How many emergency bulkheads are between us and the airlock?”

  More electrical haze hangs before Reynard’s eyepiece. His lungs struggle as toxic air replaces cleaner.

  Unbreathable air belches from the reclamation system.

  “The bridge door and one more, plus getting the three airlock doors open.” Scott’s next pump cracks the door seals with a deafening—whoosh! The pipe drops to the deck with a clank as he digs his fingers in between the door’s seams. He flexes his pecs until he can drag the doors open along their tracks. Fresher air wafts over Scott. The small compartment meant to prevent catastrophe atmospheric decompression will only add a few minutes of breathable oxygen to the bridge.

  “Commander, we don’t have enough breathable air. Not to get the next set of doors open,” Scott reports.

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Australia needs the medical bay. Without scanners I’m only guessing at her internal injuries,” JC declares.

  Coughs emanate from the two cadets finding consciousness.

  Amye tosses Doug a survival pack, pointing to the cadets. She crouches down next to the captain’s chair. “I noticed in the bay for the hidden shuttle there was a hatch in the ceiling, but there’s no corresponding hatch in the bridge floor. The way the shuttle was hidden I thought it was more like an escape pod than a ship-to-surface shuttle.”

  “Extreme atmosphere condition cases require a shuttle over a transporter,” Reynard concurs. “If we find the hatch?”

  “With the shuttle gone there is only the living skin between us and fresh air.”

  Now would be the time to have more light. Reynard crawls around his command chair as does Amye. Like most of the ship, the floor panels are seamless. Preventing easy access to the Dragon’s hidden hatchways and compartments.

  Amye touches the underside of the armrest. The chair designed to form-fit the person assuming command will move to fingertip position. This is a near-magical transformation to the untrained eye, but gears and levers instantaneously do the job. Under the armrest Amye fingers a button embedded in the smooth material. She slides it up and inside.

  Several clicks from under the chair echo throughout the bridge.

  “Help me.” Amye lifts on the chair arm.

  Reynard does the same on the opposite side. The chair slides back on hidden tracks.

  “I assume this would be automatic if the ship had power,” Amye pushes down on the floor under the chair’s station. It flops down.

  Fresh air blasts her in the face before the electric haze drifts down the hole.

  Amye snaps a glow stick from the emergency bag and drops it down the hole. It bounces on the Dragon’s swimming skin.

  “If it doesn’t let us pass through to the ground, we can still reach the cargo bay—more air to work with.”

  Reynard nods. He never figured to perform evacuation drills. Something else a more experienced captain would have instituted. A hand signal activates his sword brother. The four-armed warrior slips through the hole, landing with ease on the hull skin now acting as the floor for the shuttle bay.

  The skin swims around Joe, never ceasing to be solid. The skin parts, forming a slide and allowing access to the outside clean air.

  Joe leaps back to the hatch opening. He suspends himself with one set of arms while Scott and Reynard lower the unconscious Nysaean to his second pair. Once secure, Doug escorts the cadets to the hatch.

  “Get out.” Reynard lowers Leahla down the hatch. He nods at JC, who follows.

  “We don’t have much air left.” Amye waves the rest of the crew to their only means of escape.

  Hauser and Mark drop through.

  Electrical smoke chokes the bridge. Without the air recycling unit constantly scrubbing the confined atmosphere, the level of toxins multiplies exponentially. Reynard tastes the pollutants in his mouth filter.

  Reynard lowers Doug through the hatch, leaving only himself and Amye on the dark bridge.

  Frantic, Amye searches every corner.

  “I’m not a fan of ‘the captain goes down with his ship’ philosophy. We need to go,” he coughs.

  “I’m not leaving without Kymberlynn,” Amye protests.

  “How hard did you hit your head?”

  “I spoke to her before the crash. Find her!” Amye kicks over some of the couch cushions. “She didn’t slip out with Scott. Those two were always together on Tartarus.”

  Limited to what miniscule explanations a high school psychology teacher gave him his senior year, Reynard has enough to cope with having woken a stranger in a strange land. His own fantasies of the glamorous gun fight were destroyed during the casino shootout. He only survived because of the woman he must help. He doesn’t remember the label given to her delusion. Does he play along to get her out of the oxygen-deprived bridge, or does he shatter her by revealing cold facts?

  “Amye, she’s not on the bridge.” Getting her to clean breathable air seems the best course of action.

  “She was sitting next to me before the impact. She should’ve been at the helm,” Amye mutters. “She should’ve been piloting. She’s such a great pilot. If she’d been flying, we wouldn’t have crashed!”

  “I won’t argue.” Nothing in his limited training allowed him to prevent the crash. “But, Amye, I’ve never seen your sister pilot a craft.”

  “Sure you have. Why else was she assigned to your crew? You wanted an ace pilot, and you allowed her worthless sister to tag along.”

  “The sister is far from worthless. She’s saved my butt more than once. I wouldn’t be standing here if not for you, Amye.”

  “Don’t placate me. I know you only brought me along so you could have your perfect pilot.”

  “I wanted you in my crew. Current job be damned, you’re a genius. I wanted the best in my crew. So what if one question, on one test, didn’t allow you to advance in rank? You’re a part of my crew because you’re expertly qualified.”

  “So’s Kymberlynn. She has the highest pilot rating.”

  “She had the highest.”

  Amye pauses at the tense shift Reynard made. “Had. Had? HAD! She’s not dead.”

  “Amye, I’ve never met your sister.”

  “I was there when you invited her to join your crew. She was there when I sniped those Mokarran. She was there when…”


  “She died on a shuttlecraft accident before we ever met, Amye.”

  “No. Impossible! She’s…she’s.” Amye reaches into her jacket pocket, producing the ticket stubs from the Dracon Arena. Only one has been torn. The second remains unspent. Amye collapses under the pressure of reality as her air-deprived brain craves more oxygen.

  Reynard scoops his arms under her pits and drags her to her feet. As he moves her toward the floor hatch, she asks, “She’s dead? Then who’ve I been talking to for months?”

  “You figured out this hatch was in the floor. You saved us again from dying a horrible asphyxiation death.”

  “I need a drink.” Amye staggers to the bridge doors. “You’re just saying she’s been dead to get me off the bridge.”

  “Would such a lie work? You need off this bridge and to clear your thoughts. Kymberlynn died on Tartarus in a shuttle accident.”

  Amye pounds on the first sealed bulkhead in the main corridor. “Smerth’n hell.”

  “Is a drink more important than breathable air?”

  “Why won’t you tell me where’s she at?”

  “She’s already outside the Dragon.”

  Amye flies at her captain, tackling Reynard. They spill over a control panel in a mass of flailing limbs. Reynard shields his face while Amye pounds on his forearms. He works his foot under the console for leverage, flipping her mass off of him. They both draw into Calthos defensive katas.

  “Amye.” He flings the broken air breather from his mouth. “I only have a minute to breath.”

  “You just want me to step off the bridge and accept she’s dead?”

  Reynard coughs. “Yes.”

  Kymberlynn materializes from the smoky haze blanking the bridge. “Amye. Remember…” She disappears.

  Rarely did she make the trek to the surface of Tartarus, but Kymberlynn earned her first command. As the hyperspace transport shuttle lifted off the landing pad, it exploded. “By the gods.” She collapses into Reynard’s arms. “She’s really dead.”

  “Sometimes we want the people we care about to be there so bad, they just are when we need them.” Reynard coughs.

  Amye draws away from him, plopping down in order to swing her feet over the open hatch. “Your explanation’s crazier than apparently I am,” she says as she drops through the hole.

  Reynard pops up from the bottom of the makeshift slide of hull skin. “How’s Australia?”

  “JC’s convinced she’s got internal injuries, but without a scanner she has no way of knowing for sure.” Scott asks, “What took you two so long getting out of there?”

  “I think Amye hit her head in the crash,” Reynard lies. He realizes Amye’s delusion was ongoing for much longer. “She wanted to search for her sister.”

  Scott lowers his voice. “She died before you ever came to retrieve me on Tartarus.”

  “We need JC to check her for bumps on the head.” Reynard also doesn’t need Scott questioning Amye’s abilities. It will take Scott, Doug, and Amye to get the Dragon to a semblance of flight status.

  “What about you? The seatbelt had to dig into your new kidney.”

  “It healed fine.”

  JC uses several emergency insulation blankets to make Australia as comfortable as possible before joining her captain.

  Joe arranges thin twigs in a pyramid formation on a base of dried leaves and grass. Maintaining his skill at fanning a flame until it consumes enough of the twigs to add larger logs. Joe ignores the flares in the emergency kit.

  “Damage assessment?”

  “The Dragon’s ass end is under that lake, but it’s fresh water and not deep enough for any kind of pressure damage as long as the intake values held—”

  “She’s still space-worthy?” Reynard’s grateful for one small favor.

  “We were near the ground when...whatever...took out the electrics, reducing the impact, but I won’t know without a full diagnostic scan since I can’t visually inspect the underbelly.”

  “Whatever hit us felt like a controlled mental blast,” JC says.

  “No single person produces such immense telepathic power,” Amye says.

  “It would explain the extreme damage. Some of the Dragon’s components are organic,” Scott says.

  “I need a working med scanner,” JC pulls the one from the emergency kit.

  “It looks as if someone cooked it in a microwave.”

  “Aus needs medical attention.”

  “As far as we know, all the bulkheads are sealed. Without power we’ll have to spend hours opening each one by hand to even get to the areas in need of repair first, let alone the medical bay.”

  “We’ve other issues.” Amye unwraps an emergency insulation blanket. The remains of a battery crumble in her fingers. “I pulled this out of the independent backup lights. They should’ve come on the instant the bridge lost power. Whatever weapon hit us cooked these, too.”

  “When did you find time to pull batteries?”

  “Before I gave you air breathers. I felt light would be helpful.”

  Scott’s lack of poker face assures Amye of his belief that the Dragon won’t fly. “These kinds of repairs will require months in dry dock, and who knows how long to find replacement parts for a ship this advanced. If systems are even repairable.”

  “The Dragon has self-repair systems.”

  “Correct. Some systems replicate themselves, but not with this much damage.”

  “Priorities?” Reynard requests from his crew.

  “Medical,” JC says.

  “Engines,” Scott offers.

  “Engines, in order to limp to smerth’n repair her,” Doug votes.

  “Ki-Ton has the princess,” Reynard’s oath to protect her weighs on him.

  Unnoticed, Joe joins the group as fire crackles behind him.

  “I’ll cannibalize the shuttle to repair enough of the computer to get us into orbit, if you don’t mind losing the shuttle.”

  “A shuttle we didn’t even know we had.” Reynard needs his ship back. “How do we locate it without sensors?”

  “The holoemersion unit I bought. It’s still packed away in insulated crates,” Doug reminds them. “If we get into the cargo bay, I’ll pull some sensors and replace those in a scanner. If you find one not as damaged.”

  “Not every part of the ship received the full blast effects, or we wouldn’t have had a soft landing.”

  “Soft? Maybe I need more flight school time, but it was anything but soft,” Reynard sneers.

  “Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing,” Doug quips.

  “I concur, or we would have exploded. We cannibalize what we need. The second deck was well away from the blast point. We don’t use it,” Scott offers.

  “Scott, Doug, and Amye, get me a working scanner and Australia into the medical bay. Do whatever it takes to get us off the ground. Joe, JC, and I will retrieve Michelle and the shuttle.”

  “Kill Ki-Ton while you’re at it,” Scott requests.

  “Not until I find out why he worked so hard to sabotage my crew.”

  “You seem to have forgotten us.” Hauser steps forward with the two UCP cadets.

  “Mecat pilots perform basic repairs.” Mark adds, “As part of the crew, give me a duty.”

  “Clean out destroyed systems.” Scott nods at his captain.

  “I’ll take Hauser and Leahla to recover Michelle.”

  ••••••

  AMYE DUMPS AN armload of burnt and damaged components into a pile beside the cargo landing ramp.

  Reynard fills a canteen with lake water.

  “Don’t forget to add the distillation microbe,” she says.

  “A microbe designed to kill the microbes dangerous to us. Got to love science.” He drips clear liquid from an eyedropper into the water.

  He slings the strap to his backpack over his shoulder. “You going to be okay?”

  “Your ship’s a total loss. With any luck, we’ll find a few more areas where medical packs ar
en’t totally cooked.” Amye pets the top of the loading ramp hatch. “But she’ll never be the same again.”

  “I meant you.” He draws in closer so their conversation becomes private.

  Amye refuses to meet his eyes, “I need to grieve—I guess. I feel like I just realized she was gone. I don’t think I ever…”

  Australia limps down the ramp, “You will repair her. The Dragon’s far from gone, Amye.”

  “You need more bed rest,” Amye snaps at her.

  “I concur.”

  “You need help finding Ki-Ton. You are losing three of your crew to repairs. Not to mention two unknown crew members accompanying you.”

  “I’ve seen Hauser in action. You need to recover. Wounded, you’ll slow us down.”

  “Commander, I appreciate your concern, but my skills will best serve you on an unfamiliar alien planet instead of asleep in the medical bay.”

  “If you’re unable to keep up, you’ll have to make your way back to the Dragon—alone. I’m going to need Joe and JC and the cadets in order to stop Ki-Ton.”

  “If I am unable to travel, I will know quickly.”

  ••••••

  “AS HER CAPTAIN you could have ordered her to stay behind,” Leahla pushes her way through the stalks of brown grass. “She’s a UCP officer and a Nysaean. She’d follow whatever orders you give her—without question.”

  “I understand the chain of command, Cadet.” Reynard stresses the girl’s rank. “You get the scanner to operate?”

  “Equipment in the cargo bay seemed unaffected from the blast, but the shuttle engine signature frequency remains locked inside the mainframe computer, so I don’t know how we’ll locate the shuttle.”

  “We keep moving in this direction. Scan for humanoid life signs.”

  “As long as he didn’t veer from this course. I think he was hit with the same blast we were.”

  “Then the shuttle would be just as useless as the Dragon.”

  “If it was hit, wouldn’t it have crashed by now?” Hauser asks.

  “It could have crashed. This grass is taller than Joe. We could have missed it.”

  ••••••

  REYNARD COCKS THE hammer of his magnum. The weapon molded from durasteel operates just as a .50 caliber from his home world. In a galaxy of energy weapons, even the modern materials make the gun primitive, but Reynard finds it a comfort and quite effective. The advancements he had made to the normal seven shot weapon have kept him alive. Extending the clip to a fifteen-shots clip marks just one feature of the weapon.