Welcome back y'all! I'm @beowulfoflegend - better known as ultra-small-time author David M. DeMar - and thanks to the great response on the first short story I shared this week I've decided to kickoff #freefictionfriday 'round these parts! If you're a Steemit author - whether an amateur or a professional - feel free to join me on Fridays going forward to post some great free content for everyone to enjoy.

If you happened to catch my first short story posted this week, this will probably seem familiar. That's because it's set in the same universe - about 20 years prior to the events in Blowing Off Some Steam.

Well, without further ado, here we go!

image courtesy of Twit Publishing

Landfall

Originally published as a promotional e-book by Twit Publishing

“Aristeia, you are cleared for departure. Good luck, and godspeed.”

“Roger that, Gateway. See you in a couple hundred years.”

The PA switched off with a crackle, and a cheer went up from the crew as the Aristeia detached itself from Gateway Arch. I pressed my face up to the porthole and watched as the massive space station began to recede from view as it orbited the Earth.

“I can’t believe we’re finally underway.” The warning bell chimed, and I reached out to wrap my hand around a nearby guardrail. “Heads up, you bums, gravity incoming.” The whole engineering deck shuddered as the engines spun up in the aft of the colony ship, sending scores of boots settling to what had become the floor. I checked a diagnostic console, swiping my fingers across the touchscreen, and called out. “Five-by-five on power and life support, hull integrity in the green, cargo secure.” I looked up at my CO. “We’re ready, LT.”

Lieutenant Cornelius nodded and rotated the microphone boom down on his headset. “Skipper, this is engineering. Aristeia’s ready for the big sleep.” The burly, ginger-haired officer canted his head and nodded as the response came down. “Aye, Skipper.” He flicked his mike up out of his face and turned to us. “Right, skeleton crew’s on duty until we clear the solar system. Rest of you, to your berths.”

“Alright, you heard the man. Let’s go, you apes!” I shepherded the crew off the engineering deck. Most of them were kids, fresh out of basic. Except for a couple of old fogeys like me, the majority of these teenagers couldn’t even comprehend what it’s like to hit the legal drinking age, much less twenty-five.

Wachowski fell in beside me, dark circles under his eyes. “Last time I drink with those assholes.”

“I warned you.” I shook my head at him. “Don’t worry, you’ll have a nice long nap to sleep it off. By the time we get up, they’ll all be long dead, remember?”

“Right, though I’ve never slept off a 360 year hangover before.” We paused at a landing, waiting for the rest of the crew to climb up a ladder into the cargo compartment. “You know this is crazy, right? We’re all nuts. We could wake up decades too early – or too late – and end up drifting around deep space until we run out of food.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll run out of oxygen well before that.” I grinned at him and made my way up the ladder.

We moved up to the cargo compartment, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the relative dark. Located amidships, sandwiched in between the engineering decks to the aft and the command decks at the bow, the Aristeia’s cargo deck was cavernous. Loaded with everything a colony ship could possibly need, the ship had everything from preserved agricultural seeds and frozen livestock embryos to prefab components for power generators and construction equipment.

Wachowski came up beside me and dusted off his hands. “I don’t know why the CA went with solar generators,” he said. “Gliese 370 b’s got more than fifty percent cloud cover. Can’t we just use the nuclear pile from the engines once we get there?”

“This is supposed to be a sustainable colony,” I said. We began walking through the warehouse-like cargo deck, trailing after the engineering crew. The crowd ahead of us was growing larger as crewmen from higher decks began to filter down as well. “We’re not gonna screw the pooch on this one, especially since we’re likely to be on our own for a few centuries.”

We turned a corner and set out towards the hibernation berths earmarked by the quartermaster for the grease monkeys. “Well maybe the Colonial Authority eggheads will figure out FTL drive while we’re under, and we’ll all be woken up by the New Herculaneum Welcoming Committee.”

“With our luck, humanity will be enslaved by a race of hyper-intelligent dogs or something by then.” We came to a stop alongside a row of enclosed berths, coffin-like except for the clear panels inset in the top of each. I sighed, looking down at the one with my name and rank laser-etched into the side.

“Cold feet, boss?” Wachowski was one row across from me. Like the rest of the engineering crew, he was in the middle of stripping down to his skivvies, the one-piece long john impregnated with wireless sensors and transmitters specially designed for the hibernation berths.

I shrugged. “We’re gonna wake up thirty-six light years from home, everyone we ever knew from Earth will be long dead for hundreds of years, and we’ll be stuck on some planet playing Little House on the Prairie for the rest of our lives.” I peeled off my own duty coveralls as well, stowing them in the storage compartment underneath my berth.
“Hey, at least you won’t have to pay back those student loans.” He reached into his open berth and pulled out a fluffy pink teddy bear with a laugh. “Looks like Ginny left me a present.”

“Someone to keep you company?” I clambered into my little casket, suppressing a shudder. “See you later, Wachowski. Enjoy your berth buddy – just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” I pulled the hatch closed, the inner console coming to life as the sensors in my skivvies started transmitting information to the hibernation berth. My blood pressure readout came back as elevated. Can’t imagine why, I thought.

I laid back and tapped in the sequence that would flood the chamber with the magic happy gas that would knock me out and keep me from turning to dust for three-and-a-half centuries. I knew the technology behind the bed was solid. As long as the Aristeia’s deflector dish kept micrometeorites away while we cruised at ten percent light speed, the colony ship should arrive right on time - and hopefully with her crew intact.

I keyed in the rest of the console commands and settled back into my berth. Hundreds of trillions in development and they can’t make a more comfortable bed was my last thought before slipping into a drug-induced sleep.

Coming back to consciousness was like pushing my way through layers of chloroform-soaked cotton batting. I opened my eyes and shivered as my berth’s inner console started pinging and chiming at me. It took me what felt like forever to focus on the touchscreen; leaning forward to get a better look, I noticed that I was weightless.

The fact that the engines weren’t firing burned through my hibernation fog like a halogen lamp. With an effort, I keyed in the unlock sequence for my berth, my ears popping as the casket unsealed. I gasped from the sudden rush of cold air, and my ears were assaulted by a cacophony of shouts and warning bells. My arms and legs were tingling with pins and needles, and I felt like someone had kicked me in the head, but I clambered from my berth and tried to get my bearings.

Well, the ship’s been repressurized, at least. I took a deep breath and coughed, stopping myself before I spat out a wad of 360-year-old phlegm into zero-g. “What the hell is going on?” I managed to choke out hoarsely as I fumbled into my coveralls with hands that didn’t feel like my own. Lt. Cornelius, his face ashen, came hovering into view. “LT, what-“

“Engineering, Sergeant, on the double.” I nodded, and he pushed off deeper into the cargo hold to help another crewman from their berth. I shook the cobwebs from my head and zipped up, looking over to see Wachowski’s berth already standing open. Must already be belowdecks, I thought.

I braced my feet against the side of my berth. After some quick billiards-hall geometry in my head I kicked off, sending me shooting down the cargo compartment, calling out as I went: “Grease monkeys, you heard the LT! Engineering deck, on the double!”

My three-and-a-half century nap must have thrown my depth perception off; as I was hoarsely shouting out directions, I missed my target and had to scrabble for the next handhold to come along, arresting my inertia with a bone-jarring jerk that made me catch my breath. Lucky break for me, since the Aristeia chose that moment to give a massive shudder as the engines sputtered, sending a pulse of gravity through the ship that turned the cargo compartment into a human pachinko machine. The acceleration settled down, but I could tell from the sickly thrum coming up through the soles of my boots that there was some foul shit going on down in engineering.

I took a few tentative steps along the deck, trailing my hand against a line of racked cargo containers for support until I felt steady enough to walk along on my own. Crewmen were beating feet towards their duty stations all around me, and I joined in the flow of engineering apes as we passed from the cargo deck down further aft.

The place was jam-packed with grease monkeys running back and forth and calling out over the din of dozens of computerized warning bells. I worked my way down to a console, shouldering past a pair of crewmen hauling away a cracked display screen, and took a look – the radiation warnings were going off. I swore. “We’re gonna bake like a potato if this keeps up. Someone tell me what the hell happened.”

“We lost the main deflector, Sergeant.” Cornelius came up alongside me, his headset draped over the back of his neck. “Sheared right off when the Aristeia hit the edge of Gliese 370. Goddamn comet tail, three-and-a-half AU long. No way we could’ve anticipated it.” He tapped the touchscreen, showing the ship’s relative position at the edge of the star system.

“Wait, we’re here?” I craned my neck, trying to catch a look out the nearest porthole. The stars were all different. I felt a shiver go down my spine.

“We’re here, but we’re going to be Swiss cheese by the time we get to 370 b. We’re also cooking like a Christmas ham – micrometeorite hit ruptured a containment vessel, and we’re going to start glowing in the dark pretty soon.”

He pointed to the millisievert per hour readout and my stomach dropped. “How close are we to 370 b?”

“Two weeks, including braking maneuvers.” He swiped his hand across the touchscreen; it changed to display the maximum radiation dose timeline: twelve hours, seventeen minutes. “We have to jettison the ruptured chamber, and then EVA to replace the deflector with our spare.”

I nodded. “I’ll set up the work crew to pull it out of cargo, LT. Anything else we need to worry about?” I ran my hand along the console, calling up systems diagnostics and giving a look at the rest of the Aristeia’s systems. “Oxygen scrubbers look a little wonky - you want me to put a crew on it?”

The lieutenant looked over my shoulder and grunted. “Output’s low, but non-essential crew’s still asleep. We should be all right for now – let’s get that burning cinder off our ass first, Sergeant.” His headset buzzed and he placed it back on his head. “Go for engineering,” he said into it.

I nodded to Cornelius and started bellowing. “Alright, you apes, let’s go! We need that chamber jettisoned before our hair starts falling out in clumps. Fallows, Christiansen, O’Neil, reroute the fuel lines and cut the bastard loose. Don’t forget your radiation tags.” I watched the three crewmembers I’d called out drop what they were doing and head further aft. This is so much more rewarding than shouting at undergraduates, I thought.

Wachowski came into sight, sporting a pressure bandage across his forehead. I waved him over. “The hell happened to you?”

“Goddamn engines cut out earlier, sent me flying into a cargo container. You should see the other guy.” He smirked. “Hell of a way to wake up. Sickbay’s crammed with schmucks with bumps and bruises. How’re we lookin’?”

I gave him the lowdown while we made our way towards the cargo deck. “You’re our best welder, so I want you handling the deflector replacement. We’re still doing ten percent light speed, so pick people who aren’t flailing idiots in a pressure suit. We ain’t gonna be able to just turn around and pick anyone up if they go flying.”

Wachowski nodded, and then reached out to steady himself against a bulkhead as the Aristeia shuddered. The PA went off. “All hands, all hands, brace for containment jettison. Repeat, brace for containment jettison.”

Better late than never, I thought. I shifted over to a terminal to call up an aft camera view to watch the last in a series of explosive bolts push a massive ship component off the hull. The containment vessel tumbled away, and I winced as I saw the micrometeorite damage across its side. “Three and a half centuries to get here, and the first thing we do is start dumpin’ radioactive trash.”

Wachowski leaned over me, watching the debris tumble off. “Yeah, Excelsior my ass.” He turned off the camera feed and called up the cargo manifest. “Alright, uh, components comma deflector dish, here we go.” He tapped in an access code and swore as the console blatted an error message at him. “Boss, I can’t requisition this.”

“Hold on.” I looked over the work order and then tapped in my own code. “Thirty-six light years from home and we still gotta deal with bureaucratic horseshit—what the hell?” The readout displayed ACCESS DENIED. “I’m a goddamn tech sergeant, I don’t need—” I sighed, leaning my elbow on the console and palming my forehead. “I’m gonna have to talk to Ginny.”

Wachowski stifled a grin. “Better you than me – I still owe her some money. I’ll go get my crew together. Where you want us?”

I tapped at the console, bringing up a schematic. “Ventral cargo airlock. It’s a long hump to the bow, but you’re not going to be able to fit those components through any of the other ones.” I traced a finger along the screen, across the underside of the Aristeia and up past the bridge. “Not getting any camera feed from there, either. I can’t tell you if the dish sheared off clean or not.”

“Alright, meet you there, boss. Good luck.” He took off; I heard him start to holler for some grease monkeys before he moved out of earshot.

I sighed and tugged on the front of my coveralls. Goddamn bureaucratic horseshit. I strode through the cargo deck until I came to a crew working to clean up a mess of cargo containers that had come loose when the Aristeia lost gravity. There was a quartermaster’s mate calling the shots, a squirrelly-looking kid with a nervous mouth and dark circles under his eyes. He was directing a small squadron of load lifters in an overly complex ballet of shrink-wrapped pallets. He turned when I cleared my throat, then held up a finger in the universal “one second while I deal with something more important than you” gesture. Where the hell is Ginny?

“No, no, dammit, your other left, Finlay. Christ, did your brain shrink overnight?” He continued haranguing a crewman perched on a load lifter. The crewman waited out the tirade, then went back to work, sporting a bored expression the entire time. The quartermaster’s mate turned around to face me finally. “What is it?”

“Where’s Lt. Havershaw? Computer’s not letting me requisition the replacement deflector.”

“Havershaw didn’t make it.” The quartermaster’s mate picked up a touch tablet and began swiping along the surface. “Her hibernation berth malfunctioned somewhere back around seventy-five years ago.”

I blinked. “Oh God.”

“Yeah, wasn’t much left in there when we cracked the seal earlier. I’m acting quartermaster for now.” He handed over the tablet and I tapped in my authorization code in dumb astonishment. I recognized on some level that it came back clear this time. “I’ll have a crewman pull it and bring it down,” the quartermaster’s mate said. “Where’s it headed?” He paused, waiting for my answer. “Tech Sergeant?”

“Wh- uh, sorry. Ventral cargo.” I handed the tablet back to him, giving him a weak smile. “Thanks, uh . . .”

“Cadlington. Jimmy Cadlington, CA Quartermaster Corps.” He took the tablet out of my hands. “Anything else, Tech Sergeant?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you.” He gave me a brusque nod and I walked off in a daze. I found my way back to a wall terminal, nearly getting flattened by a pair of load lifters, and called up a casualty list. There it was, large as life and twice as ugly, nestled amongst a (blessedly small) handful of names: HAVERSHAW, VIRGINIA, LIEUTENANT, COLONIAL AUTHORITY QUARTERMASTER CORPS.

Better wait to tell Wachowski, I thought. I called up the cam feed for the ventral cargo airlock and I saw a handful of grease monkeys gathered there, checking the seals on each others’ pressure suits. A load lifter pulled up, depositing several crates at their feet, and then rolled off out of view. Wachowski came into frame, looking up at the camera, and swung the boom down on his headset. I switched my own to the EVA channel, hearing his voice in my ear: “Boss, you monitoring?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and gritted my teeth. “Big Sister is watching,” I said into my headset. I ran my hands across the terminal. “Stand by.” I switched channels. “LT, Wachowski’s ready to EVA.”

My headset crackled. “Roger that, Sergeant, I’ll inform the Skipper. Ceasing acceleration in thirty.” The zero-g warning began to chime throughout the Aristeia, giving the crew ample time to lash down anything they didn’t want floating away. I slipped the toe of my boot under a railing as the engines began to cycle down; I felt gravity slip away.

I switched back to the EVA channel. “Wachowski, you’re clear. Turn on your suit feed so I can piggyback.”

“On it, boss.” The terminal switched from a panoramic shot of the cargo airlock to the pinhole camera integrated into the helmet of Wachowski’s pressure suit.

I kept an eye on the whole procedure from my console, watching while the work detail floated the replacement parts into the airlock and cycled it. The crew fastened their safety lines and began making their way forward. “Holy crap,” Wachowski said, as the camera panned with his head. “Boss, you getting this? We ain’t in Kansas anymore.”

I caught my breath as he scanned his helmet cam over the Aristeia’s hull. We were still too far away to see our new home, and Gliese 370, the orange dwarf that New Herculaneum orbited, was little more than a bright red spot off the starboard bow, but the spray of stars across the screen was a wild array of foreign beauty. It was also completely unrecognizable. “Well wouldja look at that. Hey, don’t move, lemme get a shot of this for posterity.”

I started recording the feed and then decided to pipe it out to the other terminals onboard. I could practically hear the entire ship grind to a halt. “Don’t say anything to embarrass your grandchildren, Wachowski.”

He chuckled, panning his helmet cam slowly across the starscape for several seconds. “We’re gonna need all new zodiac signs,” he said. “Ginny is going to love this.”

I winced and cut the feed. “Alright, Sidney Omarr, you’re off the air. Hump your gear up to the bow and get to work.”

“Roger that, boss.” Wachowski got his work detail on the move as I monitored from my terminal. It wasn’t long before they reached the site of the damage; I winced upon seeing the stump of twisted metal that used to be the Aristeia’s deflector dish. Wachowski let out a low whistle. “We’re gonna be here awhile.
”
It took the better part of an hour to cut the old wreckage away and weld the new one into place, then another to re-integrate the electronics and power conduits into the ship. I pinched the bridge of my nose as I tried to initialize the deflector dish from my terminal for the fifth time; when I finally started getting telemetry back from the replacement part I was prepared to hang myself if it took much longer.

“Alright, ladies, we’re green across the board, pack up the broken bits and come on back. Leave the old parts in the airlock and I’ll let . . .” My words caught in my throat. “I’ll let the quartermaster know.”

“You alright, boss?”

I’m gonna have to tell him, I thought. I sighed. “Yeah, just tired. Get your asses back and get some rest. Wachowski, stick around after you get out.” I watched his helmet feed bob up and down while he nodded; I switched channels. “LT, deflector dish’s replaced, telemetry is good. Work crew’s on its way back from EVA now.”

“Reading that now, Sergeant – stand by.” A subtle thrum ran through the Aristeia as Cornelius powered up the deflector dish from engineering. “We’re back online. Good work.” He paused. “You hear about Lt. Havershaw?”

“Yes sir. When are we having memorial services?” I switched from Wachowski’s helmet feed to the newly replaced camera on the bow, panning it to look across the expanse of unfamiliar constellations.

“Once we make landfall. Skipper says she deserves to be laid to rest on planet – same thing with the others who had berth malfunctions. Turns out a whole subroutine failed. We lost four more in her row; lucky the fail-safes kicked in.”

“I hope this isn’t a bad omen, LT.” I switched the camera feed back to the ventral cargo airlock. The outer door slide open as Wachowski’s crew started clambering back inside. “Work crew’s back. I, uh . . . I need to tell Wachowski, LT.” Cornelius let me go; I pulled my headset down to let it rest around my neck and kicked off from the terminal.

Breaking the news about Ginny wasn’t easy. I could tell Wachowski did his best to not let it bother him – I mean we all knew the risks going into this – but it still rattled him bad. I didn’t know whether to drown him in work or give him space to grieve over the next two weeks while the Aristeia made its final approach to Gliese 370 b.

New Herculaneum was right on the inner edge of the system’s Goldilocks Zone, only about a quarter of an AU from its star, which would have been way too damned close if Gliese 370 wasn’t a main sequence orange dwarf and didn’t burn as hot as Earth’s sun. Didn’t stop some joker in the CA naming committee thinking it would be funny to name it after a city that got burned to a crisp by the eruption of Vesuvius, though.

The planet itself was huge – more than three and a half times the size of Earth, though it was only around 1.15 gravities on the surface – and as the Aristeia came closer, New Herc swelled larger. The surface was concealed by swirling clouds about half the time, but the cameras began to pick up some ground details as we cruised closer. By the time we were approaching orbit, we were relieved to see that there was liquid water down there, as well as evidence of photosynthetic plants. It turned out harder than hell to get any detailed readings with the regular lightning storms that accompanied the cloud cover providing awful luck with probes, but we confirmed breathable atmosphere before we lost the last one.

Skipper picked a landing site down low on the southern hemisphere, a nice flat coastal plain about twenty klicks from a coastline that looked an awful lot like Greece. A jagged line of mountains was just to the south which the surveyors dubbed the Hesperus range in honor of its old Earth doppleganger, and after what I’m sure was a few tense hours of discussion up on the bridge, Skipper gave the order to get strapped in for landfall. The Aristeia didn’t have an orbital shuttle, so we had to do things the old-fashioned way: she spun around on her verniers and came down aft-first, her engines firing to slow our descent as she breached the atmosphere.

That had been the plan, anyway. Everything had been fine until the ship suddenly bucked sideways on final approach, and a horrible shudder ran down the Aristeia’s spine. “Uh, LT, we’ve got a problem,” I called out, clearing the engine output levels I’d been monitoring and calling up a diagnostic. “Whatever the hell that was, I’m seeing electronic failures in unshielded systems—” My headset erupted in static and I winced, whipping it from my head. The deck lurched, and so did my stomach – we were starting to tumble end-over-end.

Wachowski shouted out from his nearby station. “Lieutenant, we’ve got ship-wide malfunctions, maneuvering thrusters are firing out of control—” A massive screech drowned out the rest of his words, and one of the Aristeia’s landing fins sailed by a porthole, sending a chorus of panicked shouts through engineering. A moment later, the ship rocked again, and a massive explosion coming up from belowdecks kicked me right in the ass, buckling the deck plates and sending acrid smoke rising up into engineering. The overhead lights went out. Then, so did the engines.

“We’ve lost main and auxiliary!” Cornelius disengaged himself from his station and plunged aft towards the engines. “Sergeant!”

“On it, LT!” I hit the release on my harness and took off after him, stopping by Wachowski’s station and helping him free of his own crash webbing. “Get everybody out of here!”

He nodded and I took off after Cornelius. “Come on, you heard the lady!” Wachowski call out over the chaos. “Get to the evac pods!”

I careened down into the main engine compartment and skidded to a halt. Cornelius was pulling a piece of smoking bulkhead off a crewmember that had been caught in the blast. I ran forward and pulled the body out from under, and the lieutenant dropped the wreckage, letting the steel clatter to the ruined deck. “Engine containment’s toast,” he shouted, surveying the remnants of the engine access compartment. “We need to jettison the nuclear pile or we’ll have a cascade failure, end up irradiating the whole southern continent!”

I checked the body I’d pulled from the wreckage for a pulse, then looked up. “LT, there’s no time, we need to evac!” I wrapped my hands around the body’s dog tags and gave them a good solid tug. They came off in my hands.

“All right, go! I’m right behind you!”

I made my way back towards engineering, turning around to help Cornelius up the access shaft. The Aristeia groaned ominously. We both rushed to the nearest evac pod hatch, pausing to help other crew up and in.

“All right, that’s it,” I yelled, climbing through the aperture. The ship was staggering through Gliese 370 b’s upper atmosphere like a drunken bottle rocket. “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Cornelius looked at me from the other side of the access port. Time seemed to slow to a crawl while I watched the shadows play across his face. He slammed the access panel closed and dogged it shut from his side, and I stared at him through the panel’s window, too shocked to cry out.

“Sorry, kid,” he said, his voice muffled by the closed hatch. “Someone’s gotta jettison the core.” He took a deep breath. “Good luck down there.” He slammed his fist down on the evac pod launch control inset into a nearby bulkhead.

The explosive bolts holding the pod to the Aristeia fired, sending it tumbling away. I was slammed against the access panel, mouth agape, watching as other evac pods fell from the ship in all directions like drops of water being shaken off by a dog. A shiver went down my spine as the engineering section came free in a shower of sparks. Dammit, Cornelius!

“Hey, are you crazy? Get strapped in!” A pair of hands pushed me into a crash couch, and I struggled with the webbing. A familiar face swam in front of me. “Boss, what the hell, is that your blood?”

I looked down at myself. I was smeared with the stuff from pulling that body from the wreck; I was even still holding the dog tags. “No,” I shouted, looking at the name. “It’s . . . it’s Christiansen’s. He didn’t make it.” I looked back up to see Wachowski strapping himself in across from me. “The LT stayed behind to jettison the engines!”

“He did what?” His eyes grew wide. “But—” There was a blinding flash as the engines reached critical mass, safely spreading its radioactive payload far enough from the surface to do any damage. The shock of the explosion set the remnants of the Aristeia aflame.

Biting my lip, I looked towards the forward access hatch to see that we were plummeting towards a massive lightning storm. I had time to think oh what fresh hell is this before we plunged through it, buffeted by gale-force winds. Rain and hail began to beat a heavy tattoo on the evac pod that was nearly deafening.

We blew through the cloud cover at terminal velocity and our drogue chute popped, straightening out our angle of descent. I craned my neck out the aft access panel; the clouds were roiling, and one by one I watched the other straggling evac pods emerge and pop their own chutes. The flaming mass of the Aristeia came after them, trailing smoke and fire, and I winced when some wreckage clipped one of the other pods, tearing it open. I looked away.

The drogue disengaged and we jerked again as the main chute opened. The wreck of the Aristeia was now well past us on its way to landfall, and we watched in horrified silence as it smeared itself across the northern face of the Hesperus range. My heart caught in my throat. I’m sorry, LT.

It was another few minutes before our evac pod came to a rumbling, bone-jarring halt on the rocky surface of New Herculaneum. I struggled out of my webbing and lurched to my feet. “Anyone hurt?”

There was a soft groan and then a yelp. “Just Fallows, boss. Looks like he broke an arm.”

“Alright, don’t move him. We need a medic.” I popped the rear access hatch and a blast of warm, moist air flooded in – our first breath on an alien world – and those of us who could walk streamed out of the evac pod, scrabbling along the rocky gravel under our feet.

I raised my headset to my ears and tried the emergency channel. “This is . . .” I looked at the designation stenciled on the side of the evac pod. “This is Aristeia Evac 56, is anyone out there?” I received a hiss of static in my ears. “This is Evac 56, we have injured aboard, please respond!” The hiss intensified as a peal of thunder rolled across the mountain range, and I pulled my comlink from my head in frustration.

Wachowski limped over to me. “You raise anyone?” He had his own headset draped across the back of his neck. I shook my head and he pulled out his tablet. “There’s something hinky here,” he said, as its screen flickered with every lightning peal.

I retrieved my own from where it had been stowed in my coveralls; it had a massive crack along the bezel but I was able to turn it on for a few moments. I was in the middle of getting our bearings by calling up some survey data when lightning crackled across the sky again, sending the screen dark. Catching a whiff of fried circuitry, I swore. “I think these storms are wreaking havoc on unshielded electronics,” I said, tossing my useless tablet to the ground with a sigh.

“There’s a flare gun in the evac pod,” Wachowski said. “We should meet up with the—” His voice broke. “With the other survivors.” He took a deep breath. “Sorry, boss.”

I shook my head, rolling up my sleeves and trying to wipe the look on Cornelius’s face out of my memory. “Forget it. There’ll be plenty of time for that later - right now, something tells me that we’ve got a whole hell of a lot of work ahead of us.”