by Tristan Vick
“Cutting it a little close, don’t you think?” she spoke aloud to herself, the question being rhetorical in nature. Bringing the ship about, she set her down on the landing bay hangar, the liquid metal door reforming behind her and blending seamlessly into the sleek hull of the ship.
Her landing skiffs clanked down onto the hangar deck with a harsh clangor, and she quickly threw open the canopy. Jumping up, she yelled down at the first personnel officer she saw. “Get a medic up here ASAP!”
The officer, a young man with a white pony tail and a tan engineering uniform with a red stripe that ran across the shoulders and down the length of the pants, nodded his head and raced over to a wall panel. He pressed his hand against the touch-screen and quickly called for a medical team. Once he’d finished that task, he ran back and helped Lianica get Danica out of the cockpit.
Once they had gotten her safely out, Lianica set her on the hangar bay floor and began administering CPR. The med team arrived just as Lianica got Danica breathing again, and whisked her away to sickbay.
As hard as it was to watch Danica being rushed off in such an uncertain condition, Lianica had bigger concerns at the moment, like not getting everyone killed in a firefight against two Imperial destroyers. Easing up to the comm, she tapped the console and said, “Commander Blackstar to the bridge…get us out of here. Right. Goddamn. Now.”
She smashed the palm of her fist against the control panel, fracturing the glass, and cut the comm feed. Pressing her head against the cool glass of the display, she finally let her body relax. The tension melted out of her and, for the first time since she climbed into that cockpit, she felt safe. Exhausted, but safe.
Back from the brink of death, Danica awoke to find herself in her own quarters, in her own bed. She sat up, slowly, and winced from the pain of a throbbing skull. She pressed her palms against her head and moaned, but it did little to help ease the splitting headache.
“Good, you’re awake,” a voice said.
Danica started, covering herself with the sheet, since she wasn’t wearing any clothes, or underwear, for that matter, and looked over to see Lianica sitting in bed next to her. This time, it was Lianica who was reading a book. She had on reading lenses and slowly pulled them off as she looked over at Danica.
“Lianica? What are you doing here?”
“What? I can’t take care of my girlfriend and nurse her back to health?”
“The G-word? So soon?” Danica said, a coy grin spreading across her lips. Danica shook her head and replied, “What I was going to say was, I didn’t expect to find you in my bed.”
“Oh,” Lianica said, brushing a stray lock of white hair behind her ear. She looked down at the pearl white nightgown she wore. “I guess I just wanted to be close to you. After all, you would do the same for me.”
A shiver running through her, Danica looked down at her cleavage as she wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed her skin for warmth. “Out of curiosity, why am I naked?”
Lianica sighed. “Yeah, about that. You’ve been asleep for four days. And, like every other day, I had just given you a sponge bath and dried you off when I was called to the bridge. So, I tucked you in and went and took care of things upstairs. When I got back you were sleeping so peacefully. I didn’t want to disturb you.”
Danica stretched her arms out and wrapped herself around Lianica in a warm embrace. Lianica’s eyes widened momentarily, a bit surprised by the sudden show of heartfelt affection, but then hugged Dani back. “You’re safe now.”
“And what of the empress?” she asked in a feeble voice.
There was a brief silence, then Lianica spoke. “I’m afraid we haven’t been able to locate her. Don’t worry,” she added, watching the anxiety spread onto Danica’s face, “we’ll keep looking until we find her. You have my word.”
“I’m going to hold you to it,” Danica said in a drowsy voice. Then she fell asleep, her head resting on Lianica’s lap.
Stroking Danica’s turquoise hair, Lianica looked down at the perfect lavender face of her sleeping beauty and replied, “I have no doubt you will, luv. Now, rest. Tomorrow is a new day.”
8
Jagged rock formations protruded from the terrain like tilted Gothic cathedrals all bowing before some mighty ancient god. Their tapered summits pressed down to slanted points stuck out at forty-five-degree angles as they pierced a sickly green sky.
Jegra woke herself with a harsh bout of coughing that caused her entire chest to ache and her throat to burn. She spat up excess blood that had flooded into her mouth as internal organs had obviously ruptured in the fierce impact, but also because the air was thick with carbon monoxide, which made it very difficult to stay conscious. Luckily, however, there was just enough oxygen in the atmosphere to keep her alive.
Even so, it was like breathing in the worst levels of pollution back on Earth, and she couldn’t help but cough some more. And more blood came up. When she tried to sit up, fragments of shattered bone ground against one another and she screamed out in agony and fell back onto the dirt. As she lay panting, every breath painful.
She waited for what seemed like hours, allowing her enhanced healing factor to gradually repair her wounds, but every wheezing breath and arbitrary cough racked her body with such immense agony that she felt as though she’d pass out from the pain.
The periodic spurts of asthma and the subsequent jolts of acute pain, like a thousand hot needles slowly creeping out of her from the inside of her gut to the outer edge of her flesh, only sought to remind her of how bad her condition really was. She coughed up more blood and groaned out loud as she shifted her body to try and find a more comfortable position. But no matter what she tried, the droning pain wouldn’t abate. It was torture.
Another three hours crawled by and, with a bit of effort, Jegra finally managed to sit up. When she did, her copper satin dress practically slid off her body. Catching it with one hand, she pressed it to her chest and strained to look over her bare shoulder. A sudden surge of pain prevented her from much further movement and she fell back onto the slope of the crater, panting.
Her flesh was stained with dirt, burn marks, and smears of her own blood. She looked worse than after the most brutal pummeling she’d ever taken in the arena, but she was determined not to give up. She still had enough fight in her to kick this planet’s ass, if need be.
After catching her breath, she managed to sit up again. Still holding onto the dress, she realized that the impact of her fall had shredded the back of the garment to nothing. As such, she began to tear off pieces of it and tie them around her. It took two pieces fitted together to stretch around her chest, and the remaining large piece she tied off at her hips and made a loincloth. Of course, she hadn’t any underwear on, which made it a bit drafty. But at least she wasn’t entirely naked.
It wasn’t quite a two-piece bikini, but it would do. She grunted in satisfaction and slowly shifted her body weight onto her knees then finished tying off the piece at her waist. Looking around, Jegra searched for something she could fashion into a crutch and eventually settled on a metal rod, a piece of debris from the shuttle. She bent the top into a “Y” shape and then pulled herself up. Placing the crutch under her left armpit, she propped herself up and, for the first time since the crash, stood on her own two feet.
With the makeshift crutch firmly under arm, she took a deep breath of the smoggy air and grudgingly trudged up the inner wall of the crater. Arriving at the cusp, she looked back at the debris field that tarnished the mountainside and let out a defeated sigh. There wasn’t a salvageable piece of the ship anywhere. If anything had survived, it would be the black box, but since she didn’t even know where she was, that wouldn’t be of any use to her. Besides, she was in no condition to search for it. Right now, her priority was finding shelter and water.
She shambled down the small mound that encircled the lip of the crater and staggered through more wreckage. Her foot hit something that rattled hollow and she looked down
to see what it was. Her eyes widened when she saw it was the shuttle’s first aid kit and, what’s more, it was still in one piece.
A surprised gasp escaped her lips and Jegra fell to her knees. Tossing the crutch aside, she dug at the dirt with her bare hands and freed the first aid kit. She fumbled excitedly at the latches of the tin box before finally managing to open it. Rummaging through its contents, she found a NeedleAir jet-injector and set the pain-killer setting to maximum. Pressing the jet-injector to her neck, she mashed the button with her thumb and let a hiss of compressed air discharge. She sighed out in relief as a dose of painkillers mixed with antibiotics flooded her system.
Before the effects had even fully taken hold, she jammed the jet-injector into her inner thigh and shot herself with another dose, then repeated the procedure on her other thigh. Still, it was barely enough to mask the thrumming pain that ran through every inch of her battered body.
Jegra sat in a daze as the drugs surged through her system. She was riding a high and didn’t feel like doing anything, lest it interrupt the bliss she was feeling. It wasn’t till the clap of thunder interrupted her nirvana that she decided to get moving again.
In the distance, Jegra heard the faint cry of an animal. From her position, it sounded the like the call of a hawk, but much bigger. Soon after the creature’s cry had abated, the green sky cracked with a discharge of electricity. This was odd since there weren’t any rain clouds–just a general green altostratus that stretched on in every direction with uniform consistency. A perpetual storm.
Another spark of lighting sent her scrambling to gather up her supplies. Tucking the kit under her left arm, she fished for her metal crutch and then rose back up onto her feet. The pain killers were obviously working because she didn’t feel but the slightest twinge of pain.
As the lightening began to flash with more regularity, Jegra knew she needed to get off this rocky bluff and find adequate shelter. Being fried by a lightning storm wasn’t her idea of a good time. As static bursts exploded pockets of earth wherever the lightning struck, Jegra double timed it down the side of the mountain. That’s when she noticed the cliff’s edge.
She planted her foot hard and began to skid to a halt. But before she could stop her forward momentum entirely, she heard a loud crack. Not the crack of thunder, but a bone shattering crack.
Her ankle snapped underneath her as a loose rock rolled away and she toppled to the ground. Tumbling head over heel, she rolled down the remainder of the slope and spilled over the ledge, arms flailing desperately as she tried to grab onto something.
Barely managing to grab the rocky edge as she went, she caught herself and pulled her body tight against the cliff face. She looked down the six-hundred-foot drop as her makeshift crutch and first aid kit shrank away into the distance.
“Balls,” she muttered to herself as her painkillers fell away with the sudden jolt and ensuing adrenaline. With a grunt, Jegra pulled herself back up onto the ledge of the cliff and flopped onto her back. As her knees hung over the ledge, her feet dangling in mid-air, she took a deep breath and then slid herself the rest of the way back onto the cliff. “That was cutting it rather close, hon,” she said aloud, addressing herself.
Without her crutches or painkillers to assist her, she slowly pushed off from her knees and stood up. Even then, she could only manage a hunched posture as the pain was already beginning to overtake her senses.
She was about to head back up the rockface when a sharp blast of wind hit her. She threw up her hands and shielded her eyes just in time to see what appeared to be a massive flying pteranodon with a thirty-foot wingspan, a giant beak, and leathery skin, land directly in front of her. Unlike the toothless dinosaur of the Cretaceous period back on Earth, however, this creature had dual rows of needle like teeth.
She thought it odd that a dinosaur should be so far from home, but, then again, she’d read of convergent evolution. And why not? Why couldn’t dinosaurs, which were just giant lizards, when you thought about it, evolve on other worlds?
The giant beast squawked at her and flapped its wings aggressively. Jegra made a hard right turn and tried to hobble along the cliff’s edge, but before she could even get more than a few feet she felt the creature’s mighty talons clutch her by the waist and hoist her into the air.
As the pteranodon’s wings beat around her, they climbed high into the murkiness of the primordial green sky, electric discharges flashing all around them.
“Balls!” she grunted, trying to pry herself out of the creature’s fierce grip. But her strength hadn’t returned yet and without clean air to breathe, her athleticism was hobbled by short asthmatic wheezing that didn’t allow her to fully recharge her oxygen content. Her body was drained and she was in no condition to fight, let alone fend off a gigantic meat-eating dinosaur.
After flying several kilometers, the creature swooped down and grazed the jagged branches of an outcropping of dead trees. Trees which had dried and withered to a vein like branching of thick hard protrusions, mere skeletal forms of their once fertile selves. And like everything else on this godforsaken planet, the slow decay of death had already consumed the last ounce of life force from them.
The creature came dangerously close to impaling Jegra on some of the branches, forcing her to take a chance to clasp one of the thicker limbs. She managed to snag a branch; it snapped off in her hand and she brought it up to inspect it. About the size of a longsword, she looked up and, holding the shard of dead wood in her hand like a javelin, she thrust it into the neck of the flying beast.
A squirt of blood shot out and splattered across the left side of her face and the beast screeched out in pain.
Not feeling that its prey was worth the trouble, the flying lizard relinquished its grip on Jegra and dropped her from about two hundred feet up. She fell away, branches snapping around her as she plummeted down through the deadwood forest. She watched the beast shake the splinter from its neck and flap away in an erratic pattern, more like that of a bat rather than a bird of prey.
The splintering of a rather large branch against Jegra’s back caused her to turn her head just in time to see a nasty tangle of thorny branches spread out beneath her. She gritted her teeth as she plowed through the fanning array of dead growth, most of it thick as elephant tusks and twice as sharp.
Each spear-like branch snapped under her weight until, finally, she hit a thick enough stalk that it halted her fall. The only problem was, one of its many protrusions had skewered her left thigh. The branch was sticking straight up out of the center of her leg. Gripping it with both hands, she snapped the stem and freed her leg. Without the branch anchoring her to the tree, she slid off on her own crimson slick, and crashed through several more ligneous appendages before meeting the cracked surface of the hardened ground. It was about as forgiving as asphalt.
Winded, all Jegra could do was let her blood-laced saliva dribble from the corners of her half-open mouth as she waited for her body to register the pain of having broken all her ribs along with the gaping hole in her left thigh. As her breath came back to her, she screamed out in a dry, raspy voice and then fell onto her back and stared up at the murky green sky.
“What the fuck is wrong with this planet?” she groaned as she lay on her back, looking up through the hole she’d left in the needle-like skeletons of the dead timber.
Jegra clasped her ribs like an invalid and sucked the sulfuric tasting air through her teeth as she rose to her feet for the umpteenth time today. Hobbling a few steps, she fell against the trunk of one of the trees and rested for a bit.
The high-pitch screech of the dino-bird cut through the air and prompted her to get moving again. He was obviously building up the courage for a second attempt at making her his dinner and she didn’t want to waste any more time out in the open. Although the dead trees could provide enough cover to keep her safe from aerial predation, they’d be pretty useless against one of those electrical storms.
She winced from the pain as s
he pushed her tired body off the tree trunk and limped along a downward slope. It wasn’t long until she found a greenish pool of liquid.
“Water,” she whispered through parched lips and knelt down beside the small pool that bubbled up from below the cracked surface of earth.
Sun baked and barren without a sign of life in any direction for as far as the eye could see, the terrain in this region reminded her of the salt flats outside of Salt Lake City back on Earth. Only, this particular valley had an endless forest of dead wood and numerous green puddles.
Jegra looked down at her reflection in the green pool which mirrored her battered and bruised image back up at her. She cringed at the sight of how broken she looked. As she stared at herself, she thought: I won’t be winning any beauty pageants any time soon, that’s for sure.
She cupped her hands and was about to dip them into the pool when she accidentally knocked a piece of deadwood into the pool. It sizzled and caught fire before sinking into the undrinkable spring of acid.
“Balls,” Jegra said out of the corner of her mouth as she drew her hands back away from the pond of death.
Sitting on her knees, Jegra slumped back on her heels, her arms hanging limply at her sides as though they were boneless bags of meat. Slowly scanning the horizon, she looked around for something she could use as shelter. But everywhere she looked she saw nothing but a wasteland. She knew if there was life enough to support a giant winged dinosaur, there must be drinkable water somewhere; she just had to keep pushing onward until she found it.
Jegra rose to her feet and snapped off a sharp branch. She balanced it in her palm, testing its weight and felt satisfied it was sturdy enough to use against the leathery skin of the reptile. Using the makeshift weapon as a walking-stick, she began to limp off in the direction the pteranodon had flown. If it had a nest or den, there may be eggs. And eggs meant dinner. Sustenance. More importantly, it would mean there’s water nearby.