Written in the Stars: Science Fiction Romance Anthology

by Megan Alban

  I rushed out the lecture hall doors and into the office area. “Is the Captain on base?” I asked the Fuzzario assigned to him.

  The yellow fur ball looked at me with a raised eyebrow. It responded with clicks in one ear and the translation in the other. “I am afraid his life signature is not on the grounds. He is with the other humans fighting the meteor showers.”

  My ears rang. The sound of Carrera and the miners rung around me. I imagined whatever was happening in the mines, I didn’t have time.

  I had a mind to take a buggy and go after Carrera then. But I needed to think two steps ahead. What if anything happened to me? I needed to at least try for backup.

  I rushed forward past the change rooms toward the dark radio tower and climbed the ladder. At the top, I worked the communications panel. Ahead, below eye-level, I saw the artillery lasers blasting and the men in white atmospheric suits manning them. One of them had to have their communications on.

  I entered my credentials quickly; my fingers shook. I pulled the flexible microphone toward my mouth. “Captain Darner, marines. This is Alyse Pepperfield. If you can hear me, please respond.”

  C’mon. How likely was it they were listening to the emergency frequency while fighting the meteorites? From the deafening silence, not likely at all.

  “Please, if anyone is listening, Carrera’s miners ran into some trouble. They have sent a call for help. I need to put together a rescue operation immediately.”

  I waited a few more seconds. Damn it. I slammed my first into the table and tried again with the same message. Then I tried again, and again, each time switching the radio channel. Each attempt made my heartbeats race faster and faster until I had exhausted them all.

  Time was too precious to waste. The meteor strike probably destabilized the mines, I thought. The way they screamed and ran about and the violent jerking of the camera before the transmission cut out told me it was a mine collapse. Or perhaps something more sinister, like an awakening alien presence?

  I was out of patience, but I knew what backup I could rely on. I retreated back down the comms tower ladder and rushed toward the office cubicle beside mine. There I panted in the doorway. I watched as the Fuzzario, Aippaq, hovered his spider-like skullcap that gave him the digital interface to the computer. He was taking a break with a bottle of water.

  “Aippaq, I need your help. What are you doing for the next few hours?” I asked.

  “Eek!” He swung to me, his eyes telepathically lowered the water bottle onto the table. “Miss Pepperfield. I was just calculating the algorithm for the most optimal dig path through Dig Site Eight. What is it?”

  I shook my head. “Something very important’s come up. People need my help. I need you to come with me on the outside.”

  His face drooped. He looked at me with large eyes. “Miss Pepperfield?” The translator asked in my ear, “What do you mean on the outside?”

  I breathed deep, “Darner gave me a mission. He gave me authority to go to the mines. But Carrera and the miners need our help faster now than before. They sounded like they were in trouble.”

  “Congratulations! But…” the Fuzzario shook his head. “I’m not so sure about this. The Captain has not given me authority. You know we Fuzzario aren’t allowed out of the office environment under any circumstances. Those are the rules.”

  His words sounded just like me three hours ago. I pursed my lips together. “But this isn’t a normal circumstance, Aippaq. You’ve always wanted to learn more about humans, right? This is an extremely important mission that only we can do. The others won’t make it back in time. I need to run a rescue mission, and I can only do it with your help.”

  “A mission? An extra special mission? With you?” His black eyes twinkled.

  I nodded, “Yes. And if anything happens and Captain Darner gets pissed off, you tell him to talk to me.” I didn’t mind wearing it at this stage. My priorities were to save Carrera and the men. To hell with the job, anyway.

  His eyes were wide open and brimming with the sparkling of both the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. “OK! I’ll do it,” Aippaq said.

  “Good. Now drop that spider headset and come with me.”

  Chapter 5

  Moments later, Aippaq and I were in the changing room.

  I put the suit over my head. A technician’s suit, which was more flexible and less puffy, like the military style ones the boys wore out on the purple amethyst field.

  Once the fishbowl helmet was on, I turned to Aippaq, the Fuzzario. I noted how his striped blue and black fur glowed with electric excitation. “A human mission? With a human partner, I cannot believe it!” he squeaked.

  I nodded, “Yes, Aippaq, a rescue mission for the miners. Chief Miner Carrera is with them. You remember him, don’t you?”

  “Yes I do. He is the kind Hispanic man who is working in Mine Site Four, and he always brings in the lovely choc-lates.”

  Mine Site Four. The pattern of the excavation sites started closest to the station, and fanned out farther and father. Mine Site Four wasn’t more than thirty minutes by rover. “Good. And they’re called cho-co-lates,” I corrected him, putting on the orange miner’s suit.

  “Chocolates, of course! The other Fuzzario don’t like the human sweets called chocolates, but I like them very much. And so I like Carrera, too.”

  I positioned the glass bowl helmet over my head. “Before I put this on, I’ll test that we can communicate still.”

  I clicked it on temporarily and touched the radio switcher on my wrist. “Can you hear me, Aippaq? I’m on the broadcasting frequency,” I said.

  Aippaq replied, “Yes, Miss Pepperfield, I hear you loud and clear.”

  I scoured the hooks for another helmet. “Here, you’ll need this, too; there’s no atmosphere or gravity out on the surface. Not like in here,” I said.

  But Aippaq shook his head. “Miss Pepperfield, you forget that we Fuzzario do not need to breathe as you do.”

  I blinked blankly.

  “Indeed. We also don’t need to eat, although I do enjoy your species’ chocolates. It is because of our obvious lack of limbs. We don’t need that much energy to function. Our fur reacts with energy from light sources, and so we can extract all we need from the twinkling stars, suns and galaxies,” Aippaq explained elegantly.

  “Of course,” I said, reminding myself of the biology of the furry things. I was definitely losing it if I was forgetting basic alien facts. I pulled myself together again and led Aippaq to the prep area.

  ***

  Beyond the garage door would be untouched transport rovers that came out during various missions. After the gate hissed and rolled up, I noted all of them were in docking, but only one of them was green-lit and in full supply. I thanked the stars it was a reasonably quiet period.

  I pulled on my training day memories and raced to Rover Four and jumped in. Aippaq hopped in the other side. When all checks were double-checked and we were strapped in, I motioned to Aippaq before hitting the second door like I’d always wanted to. The door to the outside space.

  My jaw dropped as the gate opened upward, revealing the purple ground, and then star-by-star, the galaxy and hurtling meteorites in the sky.

  “Aippaq, I’ll need you to tap into the meteorite radar system and help me navigate these sling-shotting rocks. Can you do it?” I asked quickly, with my hands on the steering wheel and my foot already on the accelerator.

  His eyes turned a little pale, and then I knew we were ready to go.

  “All right, here goes. Hold on Carrera,” I whispered, then stepped on the pedal.

  The rover and its treaded tracks jerked forward. The driver’s compartment rocked and swayed as it inched forward off the smooth concrete onto the crunchy planet’s surface. With each inch, my determination firmed up. I was out on the field now, and I had a very important mission to undertake.

  Once we were past the range of the Station’s floodlights, darkness came over the entire rover’s windscreen. Th
ere were only stars ahead. Beautiful, distant starlight that had travelled to our eyes from billions of miles away.

  The ground vibrated with the nearby pulsing of anti-meteorite artillery lasers, bringing me back to the present. We were entering the meteorite shower field.

  “I am correlating incoming radar data with the planet’s surface model,” Aippaq exclaimed in his habitual way.

  “Thank you,” I said and stepped harder on the acceleration pedal. “I know all the mine entry points run in the same direction from base. I’m heading that way right now.” I poked the map by the touch panel to confirm it.

  We approached the first sign of human conquest. Sticking out of the ground against the black starry distance was the first red flag, frozen in time and space. It indicated the first of the amethyst mines’ excavation entry points. A quarter of the way there, I thought.

  “Turn the vehicle around,” Aippaq’s volume in my translator ear boomed, “turn the vehicle 150 degrees to port!”

  I cursed in panic. I swung the steering wheel about as fast as I could and dug my buttocks into the pleather seat. Every muscle in my body tensed to anticipate the strike. Then it hit. The graying, car-sized rock struck several yards before the rover to the left of the window, where the rover would have been had I not changed my course.

  “Correct course now,” Aippaq threw out another command.

  “Got it!” I didn’t question myself anymore. The rover spun in the opposite direction to straighten up and missed another close call to my right. Shards hit the metallic side of the vehicle just as the next red flag showed up in the distance.

  “So far, so good!” My jaw clenched.

  Then Aippaq jumped up and down in his seat. “One big one, turn 90 degrees to your right! It’s fast and almost on top of us!”

  “Got it!” I engaged the steering wheel as far as it could go, making our bodies lean to the left, but right before I could complete the maneuver, Aippaq yelled again, “No, go straight, go left!”

  My heart raced. My logical companion, Aippaq, was spitting out gobbledygook. “Aippaq, what on Mars is going on?” I cried out.

  I glanced at him. His eyes were still glazed over as he repeated mixed messages. He was in a trance. Shit, I spat to myself and stuck my head forward to look up. But there was no sign of a meteorite.

  “Meteorite incoming in ten seconds...” Aippaq repeated quickly.

  I shouted into my microphone, “Aippaq, where should I go?”

  Aippaq’s tone changed. He spoke in rapid succession. “I’m sorry, Miss Pepperfield, my computational abilities aren’t working. It does not compute. This planet is small. And with each new meteorite strike, the rotation and aspect is changing. I cannot compute. I’m sorry!”

  My jaw was open, my eyes still ahead. I couldn’t lose it. Not when I could hear Aippaq in distress. The starlight above me turned dark. Our time was up.

  Just as I’d done during my training, I snapped into emergency meteorite patterns and made a hard swerve to the right and then to the left. I knew it was almost useless, and my chances were like playing the lotto, but something about a random, almost zig-zag path helped me feel like I could avoid what was coming. The player who picked her birthday every time.

  When the ground shook up through the rover’s tracks into my foot, I made a prayer. The first point of the meteorite had hit, and it was strong. The rover jerked into the air a good two feet, striking my head against the ceiling of the vehicle. My body swayed right, and so did my grip on the steering wheel.

  Time stopped. I grabbed for the wheel and pressed it hard back into center, but it was useless. The treads were already off the ground. The rover tilted, sending our once-forward momentum into a sideways lurching. The rover tumbled, once, twice, and a few more times, making my breakfast want to come out. Then, as I looked up, I saw the rover’s ceiling crater inward, straight toward my face.

  Chapter 6

  A hissing roused me into consciousness. When I felt my body was still in one piece, I opened my eyes. The sensation running all over my skin was a chill, and when I willed my hands and fingers to move, thin snowflakes flaked away from my gloves.

  I shimmied my shoulders forward and glanced about at the broken glass around the window. A giant dent in one top edge had me counting the lucky stars. Outside, the white hiss of a gas in front of the shattered pane of glass. An inch closer and we would’ve been dead.

  My breaths quickened. Was Aippaq okay?

  I glanced about and saw him on the other side, shaking. Terrified.

  “Aippaq, are you okay? Can you move?” I asked in a whisper.

  I back handed the safety belt from my chest and reached for Aippaq on the other side of the vehicle. His bright blue and black stripes were a timid lake blue. Shards of glass were dotted over his protective fur coating. Dotted, but thankfully not impaled.

  He looked over to me, and his eyes twinkled a little. “Miss Pepperfield? I-I am fine. A little unsettled, but fine.”

  “Aippaq, we need to get out of here. There will be more meteorites...”

  Aippaq shook his head quickly. A human custom he picked up from me. “The radar data shows that the meteorite shower is over. We received the biggest and the last of the meteorites, but now it looks like we are in the clear.”

  The translator’s words in my ears were pure relief. I let out the remaining breath in my lungs and took the first full breath of refreshing oxygen through my expanding ribs. We were okay, for now, but the rover was not in such good condition. There would be mountains of paperwork back at the office. How many protocols had I broken in responding to the miners’ calls for help? And how angry would my boss, the ever-right Captain Darner, be?

  I let out a sigh. The thought of him made me nervous. I recalled that just an hour ago he was endorsing me for a new mission. And now here I was, the reason for one of his destroyed rovers. If he was around, I’d apologize to him and make sure I handed in that resignation immediately so he wouldn’t need to look at me again.

  A crackle of sound came through my ears, reminding me of Carrera and the sounds of his men screaming from the transmission. I switched my radio off at my wrist and wondered if Captain Darner would’ve done the same as I had done so far.

  I looked at the loss around me. A rover, a few scratches and bruises. But what of the lives that were in danger on Mine Site Four? If the planet was shifting about on the surface from meteorites, what horrors were the miners having underneath?

  My clumsily gloved hand unclicked the red buckle chafing my chest. Free then, my body floated with the planet’s feather-light gravity toward Aippaq.

  “What should we do now?” he asked as I saw my reflection expand in his glassy, black eyes.

  My hands pushed hard on the dashboard, keeping me suspended in the center of the car above him. “Come on, let’s get you out of there.”

  After I patted the glass off his fur, Aippaq hopped onto my open palm. Detecting that up was toward the driver’s smashed window, I straightened up. Then with one foot on the smashed-in ceiling of the rover and the other on the passenger’s headrest, I launched upward.

  “Here we go,” I said. We emerged from the vehicle, floating back down onto the crystal surface of SH-17.

  I let Aippaq down, then turned to the rover. As I’d guessed, the vehicle was flipped onto the passenger’s side. Around it, pieces of torn-off metal, bolts and shards of meteorite were still spinning and floating about in the air.

  The rover was no use to us now.

  “Darner’s going to hate me,” I muttered.

  Aippaq rested by my foot. “You do not know that. What are you doing?”

  I clicked the dial on my radio wrist control into SOS broadcast mode. “If the meteorite shower is over, the boys will be back. I’ll tell them I’m on my way to Carrera, and they can send backup.” I sounded confident, but in reality, I was not sure what the SOS procedures were.

  I snapped another button on my chest and watched a red LED light up o
n the inside of my fishbowl helmet. Then with my other hand on another transmission switch placed near the suit’s wrists, I slid it to the first emergency channel, where I heard a crackling through my echo chamber helmet.

  “Emergency. Emergency,” I panted. “I repeat, this is an emergency. This is Alyse Pepperfield from Alpha Station. Hello. Alpha Station radio, Captain Darner? If you can hear me, please respond.”

  I waited and looked down to Aippaq, whose nonexistent eyebrows still looked like they were concerned. I glanced onto the green back-lit status on my chest and made sure it was on.

  “Emergency. Emergency. Can anyone hear me? Please, if you can hear this, please pick up. Rover Four has been hit by a meteor storm somewhere in the middle of the mining fields.”

  I looked over to the horizon and tried to orient myself to the Milky Way galaxy and Andromeda, a swirling speck far in the distance on the other side of the sky. Nothing came back.

  “We are located past the second field entrance...” I stopped and scanned the horizon clockwise, then counterclockwise. My throat was caught. I didn’t know where we were. We were lost.

  I hissed curses to myself. Why Alyse, why did you do this? Why didn’t I just stay in my office job? Maybe then Darner would pull me up one day by the cafeteria coffee hub. Maybe if I’d not been so pushy, he might even see me as more than a colleague.

  But the thought of the miners stuck down below the crust of SH-17 again brought me full circle. It was a lie to think I wouldn’t have tried to help Carrera any way I could. I wasn’t the kind to let anyone go.

  I let out a breath. It created a wet, misty fog on the inside of my fishbowl helmet. I clenched my eyes tightly in defeat. “Aippaq, I’ve let you down. I’m afraid I don’t know where we are…”

  Chapter 7