He steps forward, pulling a sleek blade from his rags, and with a flick of his wrist my collar falls from my neck. Still, it takes Tayesha’s gentle touch for me to release the leather from my hands. I try to smile back, torn as part of me wishes my master’s vibrating fingers were scratching my back at the moment. The rest of me shakes with the excitement of this new world and what it means for me and mankind.
Tayesha holds both hands in mine and says, “Welcome to the first day of your true life. Welcome to the resistance.”
More About Justin Sloan
Justin Sloan primarily writes military fantasy and supernatural thrillers. He is a video game writer (Game of Thrones; Walking Dead; Michonne, Minecraft: Story Mode), novelist (Allie Strom and the Ring of Solomon; Teddy Bears in Monsterland, Back by Sunrise, Falls of Redemption), podcaster, and screenwriter.
He has written on taking writing from hobby to career in his book Creative Writing Career and its sequel, and how veterans can pursue their passions in Military Veterans in Creative Careers. Justin studied writing at the Johns Hopkins University and UCLA after five years in the U.S. Marine Corps, and now works as a writer and editor for Military.com.
www.JustinSloanAuthor.com
Genre: Science Fiction Thriller
Fall to Earth by TJ Ryan
What happens when technology fails us? Fall to Earth is a short story in the soft science fiction thriller genre that explores the idea of failed space travel. Space can be lonely, so far from Earth. But what happens if we return and no one is there? Can you remain human on a planet devoid of human life? Unfortunately, James Ashton finds out first hand.
The rocking of the ship, changing from its usual gentle hum to a violent shaking that set alarms blaring, woke James Ashton from a long and dreamless sleep.
Warmth returned to his extremities slowly. As his blood began pumping again, the pins and needles sensation grew almost painful in his fingers and his toes. This was the worst part of waking from hypercryon suspension. That, and the way your mind worked as sluggishly as if you’d been on a three-night bender. “Drunk-sleep” was the way his instructors at the Space Exploration Academy had put it. The SEA had prepared him for his twenty-year mission in space. Right now he should be landing safely on the third planet orbiting Alpha Proxima. He should be waking up in his Cryon chamber, gradually coming out of suspended animation, as the ship took an easy path down to the surface…
The ship rocked hard to the side and slammed his head against the padded inside of the Cryon chamber. The flashing red light finally registered in the back of his mind and the harsh buzz of the alarm finally cut through the fog of his thoughts as he realized what was going on.
He was crashing.
It took him a few precious moments to find the inner door controls for the sleeping tube as the ship rocked and shook around him. What happened to the autopilot? This was a one-man probe ship. Advanced recon for the rest of the fleet of ships that would follow in about a year’s time. It was designed to fly itself. It had redundant systems for every backup to every primary system and then some. There should be no way that anything could go wrong.
As he finally got the curved top of the Cryon bed to slide open, he sat up and blinked around him. He was in the little room off the main control capsule for the ship. Lights flashed for his attention. Screens that should have been lit up to give him an exterior view so he could get his bearings were blank. There was definitely something wrong.
James practically fell over the side of the Cryon bed to the hard metal floor but he got his bare feet under him and stood up as the vibrations of the ship resonated up through his legs. He was in his sleepwear, a tight black one-piece that went from his knees to his shoulders, made from a material like skin that soaked up his sweat and urine and used that to keep him hydrated while he was asleep. Technology. It was a wonderful thing. Gross, but wonderful.
Man’s technology had sent them this far out into space. It had sent them beyond the stars they could see from their little planet and made them masters of the known universe.
A muffled sound like metal scraping on metal preceded a tremor so fierce that it sent him to his knees. Man’s technology was about to fail him in the worst way possible.
Stumbling through the automatic door to the control capsule—thank God that was still working—James caught hold of the pilot’s chair and climbed up into it, strapping himself in, legs and waist and chest. “Controls on,” he croaked, his voice raspy from the chemicals that had kept him asleep for the last two decades and from disuse. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I said, controls on.”
The half-circle of flat, black surface in front of the pilot’s chair came to life with touch-enabled controls. The embedded screens and displays told him the status of every system, which ones weren’t working, and his relative position in the universe.
James stared. That couldn’t be right. Those position markers were all wrong. He should be several dozen lightyears away from here.
Because where these coordinates put him was right about the Earth.
“Impossible,” he kept repeating to himself. “That’s impossible. I can’t be here. I just spent twenty damned years as a popsicle to get to the other side of the universe! I can’t be here!”
Pushing in the control sequence on the right side of the panel, he opened the forward viewing pane on the ship. By now the shaking was almost unbearable. It rattled his teeth. It shook his bones. Ahead of him, in the cramped control room, massive buffer plates were retracting away from the ten-meter thick molecular glass. The control room was basically the nose cone of the ship. From here he could see everything in front of him—
Fire.
He was in freefall to the planet below. Earth. Somehow he’d come back to his homeworld’s orbit and now he was crashing to the surface below. All of the screens flashed for his attention. The safety systems that should be slowing his descent and preventing him from dying were offline. Through the viewing pane he could see tendrils of flame bigger than whales burning off the front of the ship as friction created heat created flame. They danced for him, obscuring his view of the round blue orb below. It rushed up to meet him. This was a homecoming he did not want.
Furiously, James worked his hands across the controls. Some of them worked. Some of them had been damaged beyond any sense of usefulness and remained dark under his fingers. Angle…up, he told himself over and over. He had to get the nose up and the reverse thrusters firing and he had to keep himself from dying!
Another violent, turbulent rending sound came from all around him as the ship suddenly began to spin wildly around and around, and spin backward and do flip flops that left his stomach twisted in knots and his heart in his throat. There was nothing he could do. The ship was going to crash. With him in it.
“Dear God,” he prayed. He hadn’t prayed since he was twelve. “Dear God, don’t let me—”
The next thing he knew was pain as part of a control module broke loose and knocked him in the back of the head and he went unconscious.
* * *
He awoke an infinity of time later. When he opened his eyes, everything hurt. So he let unconsciousness slip up and take him again.
When he came to the next time, he forced himself to stay in the real world despite the pain. Silently he concentrated on breathing as he pried his eyelids open and took stock of his situation.
He was lying on the floor. The crash had been violent enough to tear him out of his seat restraints. From what he could see of the control room, that wasn’t surprising. Panels had been blown clear of the bulkheads and hung from wiring that looked like a madman’s rainbow, all different colors, all different sizes, all melted and mashed together. He was near the front of the room, and above him, the viewing pane had cracked.
That was impossible. Every part of this ship had been rated to withstand a meteor strike. Including the viewing glass. It didn’t crack. It couldn’t crack.
Then again, he doubted that anyone had
tried to crash the ship before to see how well it could take that.
Outside the glass, he saw…nothing. It was just black. Night time, maybe. Or they were buried in the Earth’s crust from the force of the impact. He wouldn’t know for sure until he got up and got out.
Bracing his palms against the cold metal floor, he pushed. A twinge ran up his right arm and down his back and he nearly stopped right there, but instead he made himself get into a sitting position. His legs hurt, especially his right ankle. He suspected it was sprained. Maybe broken. His insides felt like he’d been eating molten lead. His head throbbed mercilessly and when he put a hand up to the back of his skull, he figured out why. The crack to his head had left a welt the size of an apple there. His eyes crossed as he probed it with his fingertips and he decided that for now, he’d leave that injury alone.
This could be a problem. If he was bleeding internally or if anything really was broken, then he would need medical attention immediately. The ship came equipped with a tiny med bay, including a diagnostic chamber. He’d have to get there first and get himself checked out before he could see about repairs to the ship.
Wait, he told himself. This was Earth. Someone must have noticed him crashing. There must be emergency rescue personnel on their way to him by now. They’d save him. They’d get him out.
A first shuffling step nearly brought him to his knees again. His ankle wasn’t broken, thank God for small miracles, but it sure enough was sprained. It felt like his whole entire body was one massive injury, all of which was feeding directly into his nervous system. So much pain! If he didn’t do something for himself, now, he wouldn’t be alive for the rescue personnel to save him. If he expected them to do their part, he would have to do his.
It didn’t surprise him that he had survived the crash. The deep space exploration vehicles were intentionally built to withstand the worst of the worst. A meteor strike, or a star going supernova within two parsecs, or yes… a crash landing. He was just glad they were still upright and hadn’t flipped over so that up was down and vice-versa. As he made his way out of the control room, down the short corridor that led to doors marked “supplies” and “engine controls” and “sanitation,” he noticed the damage to the ship. It had survived, but just barely.
Overhead panels hung precariously from thin strips of torn metal. Walls had buckled. Sparks flew from conduit junctions everywhere. Except for the emergency power to the doors and thin strips of white lights along the top of the walls, nothing worked. None of the screens would come to life for him. He was blind in this ship, and would be until someone came to get him.
He wrapped a hand around his midsection as pain threatened to make him vomit. First things first. Save his own life.
One of the closer doors to the control room was marked “medical.” It was this door he went to, this door he tried to open with the simple press of a button on the wall panel.
It didn’t open.
An electronic snap-hiss was the sound of something bursting inside the ceiling overhead. Sparks rained down. The emergency power might still be flowing but it wasn’t reaching all parts of the ship. The door to medical included.
Thankfully he was trained for situations like this. They trained him for every possibility. Although they never did tell him what to do if he found himself back on Earth, crash landing for no reason that he could figure out. That, they hadn’t trained him for.
But opening a door? That he was trained to handle.
Twisting free the two emergency catches that held a panel closed next to the door, James dropped the square piece of metal to the floor and reached inside the opening behind. There was a lever there, a hand crank that would manually open the door with enough time and effort. Gripping the handle, he pulled it right, and then let it snap back up in place again, and then pulled it right, and let it snap back up, pull right, snap up, pull right, snap up…
By the time he had the door open wide enough to even peer inside he was sweating. Minutes had passed, and his pain was just as bad as it had been when he started, only now he was exhausted and thirsty as well. He’d have to check the status of his supplies when he was done getting the medical chamber to do a diagnostic on him…
He stopped that line of thought before it could finish. Now that he could look inside the room, he saw that there wasn’t any point in opening the door any further. Inside the medical room, the ceiling had collapsed. That part of the ship had been crumpled on impact, apparently, and now anything inside that might have been useful to him was just a mangled heap of scrap and wires and supposedly indestructible glass.
There was nothing inside that room that could help him. No diagnostics. No emergency bone setting for his ankle. No pain numbing shot. No antibiotics. Not even a damned aspirin.
He was on his own. At least until help arrived.
* * *
No one was coming to save him. If he was going to get out of his ship, if he was going to survive this, then James knew he had to do it himself.
The supply room had several intact bottles of water. There had been five hundred individual bottles when he started the trip, and the equipment to purify his own wastes and make more, or purify whatever water source he might find on the new world he’d been sent to explore, but all of that equipment was smashed now. Still, the cool water from the two bottles that he drank had restored his strength a little, and five energy bars later he felt like he wasn’t going to die every time he took a step.
With the ships chronometers offline he wasn’t really sure how long he waited, but at some point he had realized there wasn’t anyone coming for him. So he decided to leave the ship himself.
The exit hatch was on the bottom of the ship, accessible through a lower level that held all of the equipment pieces he would need to build a shelter and make a life on the new planet. That entire part of the ship was blocked off now. The hatch wouldn’t open even with the handcrank. It might have been sealed off by the ship as part of the crash procedure, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. With the main hatch inaccessible he was going to have to use the emergency escape tube.
At the very back of the ship, squeezed between the living spaces and the engines, was a cylindrical space that was only big enough for the ship’s only inhabitant to stand up in. The door slid closed behind him, and he sealed himself into the capsule. It was hard not to compare it to a coffin for a dead man.
What was supposed to happen next was simple, even if it made him cringe in anticipation. With a push of a button, the escape capsule was supposed to be ejected out the top of the ship and sent sailing far away from the ship. That was a precaution in case the ship broke up or blew up in space, safety testing notwithstanding. That way the capsule would be sailing far away in space while the ship was destroyed, giving the occupant another two days of oxygen and water to survive on. Every pilot in the space program thought it was ridiculously stupid to even include these capsules in the design specs, because on deep space missions there would be no one there to find you in two days, or two months, or two years. It was just a way of prolonging death.
In this case, it would be a way for James to preserve his life.
He braced himself for what was supposed to happen next, and pushed the button.
Nothing happened.
Taking a deep breath, James slammed his fist against the curved wall of the capsule. Of course it didn’t work. What was he expecting? So far he’d had to do everything himself. Why should this be any different?
All right, he said to himself. This is something else they trained him for. When the backup failed, there was always the backup to the backup.
Above his head, he gripped a hatch-plate and got it to swing loose. Behind it was the manual wheel that popped the top of the capsule off with a loud hiss of pneumatic seals breaking. Then he could reach up and push it aside. He listened to it falling away down into the bowels of the ship. Then it was just a matter of grabbing the handholds, climbing out the top of the capsule, and then climbin
g up the passageway of the launch tube in the same way.
The very top of the shaft was another hatch meant to release explosively whenever the escape capsule was ejected. In this case, James was going to have to press each of the release buttons one at a time and then lean back so that it wouldn’t—
The force of the explosive charges pushed him down the shaft, his fingers slipping, grabbing, slipping again. He screamed as the palm of one hand was sliced open on the edge of a rung and then he had his grip again and even though his ears were ringing loud enough to drown out his thoughts, he was still alive. He couldn’t wait to tell the geniuses at the space program about this flaw.
When his head stopped trying to pound its way off his shoulders he climbed again, sucking in his breath every time he had to use his cut hand or set his injured ankle to a step. Above him, he saw the hatch flipping through the air, end over end, against a clear blue sky. It fell away in an arc. He could care less where it landed. He just wanted out.
He must be in a city, he reasoned. There were hardly any areas of jungle or forest left on the Earth anymore. By necessity the human race had spread out to find more and more space to host their numbers. That was why the deep space missions were so important. Mars had proven uninhabitable after the toxic vents under the surface had been tapped into and turned the surface into a raging fire that scientists predicted would burn for the next two hundred years. There were no other options in their own solar system. The distant planets were their only hope for survival. Ten billion people had to go somewhere.
For now, he just wanted to find one single person who could help him. That was all he needed.
Popping his head up out of the hatch, he looked around him at the cityscape. He was home. Tall buildings of shining metal and gleaming glass, spires that reached toward the heavens and delicate but sturdy walkways that connected them all. He nearly cried, he was so happy to see his world. He was alive, and he could find someone to help him now. The ship had crashed into the street, down on the surface level of the city, and had buried itself halfway down, leaving pieces of itself in its wake. There was a smoke trail rising into the sky against the otherwise pristine lines of the city.
The Expanding Universe Page 17