by Sophie Stern
Gone.
Destroyed.
Lukanterao was tired. He was ready to return to his ship and get back to normal. He didn’t want to be a soldier anymore. He wanted to be a traveler, a pilot. He wanted to go back to transporting cargo and flying around and being free. He didn’t want to deal with things like death and fighting and doing the right thing.
He wanted to be alone.
He was a broken man, a tired man, and he was ready for the fighting to be done.
“Lukanterao,” someone called out to him, and he turned. He was in the middle of camp, which was being torn down. The Reslenoauan soldiers were ready to return home. They’d seen enough fighting for one day, for one lifetime, really, and he was tired.
He ignored the voice and kept moving. The tents needed to be torn down and the weapons gathered. Tanayemms and Reslenoauans were working in unity to get the hell off this damn planet. He didn’t have time to be social with someone.
“Lukanterao!” The voice was more urgent, and he stopped.
“What?” He growled, not turning around.
“Something has happened. It’s a ship: a cruiser from Mars. It crashed.”
“I don’t know what this has to do with me,” he muttered, but he turned. The man speaking to him was one of the Taneyemms. He was royalty, if Lukanterao was correct. Daniel. Dane. Something like that.
“I want to launch a rescue mission,” the man was insistent. He was big, too. He wasn’t as big as Lukanterao, but then, few men were. “There won’t be many survivors, if any, but it’s worth checking. It would be bad for interplanetary relations if we didn’t.”
“I don’t give a fuck about interplanetary relations, Dick,” Lukanterao growled.
“It’s Dane, actually,” he said.
“It’s Dick, and fuck you,” Lukanterao marched away and didn’t look back.
Three hours later, he found himself standing side-by-side with Dane, looking at the wreckage of what must have once been a beautiful cruiser. Despite the small fires burning and the damaged exterior, Lukanterao could appreciate the craftsmanship of a good ship.
“Nice of you to join us,” Dane said nonchalantly, surveying the wreckage.
“I stand by my ‘fuck you,’” Lukanterao said. He was only here because his right-hand man had taken the keys to his ship and refused to return them until they’d helped the Taneyemms out.
Again.
Fucking dragons. Shouldn’t these creatures be able to do something – anything – for themselves? For damn dragons, they sure came across as fucking useless, at least in Lukanterao’s opinion.
“The bottom floors are completely destroyed,” Dane continued, ignoring Lukanterao’s bad attitude and grumpy frown. “We aren’t even bothering trying to canvas those.”
“Looks like a clean landing, for the most part,” Lukanterao observed the ship.
“It was. Pilot sent out a distress call on the way down. Looks like he had some warning and knew what he was doing. Couldn’t save him,” Dane said, almost sadly. “Looks like it was a problem with the fuel line. Second cruiser this has happened to this month. Both Mars liners, too.”
“Think someone’s damaging the ships on purpose?”
Dane shrugged. “Never know.”
“Aren’t these cruisers supposed to be equipped with emergency pods?” Lukanterao looked out at the damaged vessel. It was big: he’d guess 20 floors, at least. Maybe more. Standard cruise ships were typically 10 or 12, but Mars cruisers were always different. People on Mars had money. Plus, most Mars inhabitants were immigrants from Earth, and Earthlings loved nothing as much as they loved impressing people.
“It is,” Dane said. “There was some sort of malfunction. Came in over the distress call. Craig took it.” Dane jerked his head toward a thin, emaciated-looking man with large glasses.
Lukanterao turned to look at Craig, and Craig nodded.
“That’s correct, sir. The captain realized they were going to have to try to land and he followed procedures to alert passengers and launch the pods. There was a malfunction with the rooms, though.”
Of course there fucking was.
As if he hadn’t seen enough death and blood and destruction to last a lifetime, now Lukanterao was staring it in the face once more. How many people had been on this ship? 10,000? 15,000? More?
“What was the malfunction, Craig?” Lukanterao had to ask. He didn’t want to, but he did.
“During an emergency, the doors to each chamber automatically open and a loudspeaker system guides patrons to escape pods. They’re then released and the pods have a direct course set for Mars. They don’t even have to pilot the pod. All they have to do is sit in the darn things, eat some snacks, and get home. In this case, the chambers didn’t open.”
“What do you mean, ‘they didn’t open’?”
“The doors stayed locked, sir. No one was able to get out of their room. None of the pods were released.”
“So everyone was essentially locked in their rooms to die?”
“Basically,” Dane cut in.
“How are we doing this search, dragon?” Lukanterao didn’t meet his eyes. He didn’t want to look at Dane anymore. He didn’t want to think about war or death or saving people. He just wanted to go home. Was it too much to ask for some normalcy? Was it really so bad to want some damn peace and quiet?
Lukanterao had spent the morning before killing people and the afternoon facing the widows he had created. The children of Tanayemm had been returned, but at what cost? Thousands of Dreagleans were dead now. Some of them had done nothing wrong except fight for their home planet. Could Lukanterao really hold that against them?
He hated himself for what he had done to save the dragon children.
He hated himself and he didn’t want to look at Dane.
“Heat sensor scans. Should take a couple of hours.” Dane pressed a small eyepiece into Lukanterao’s hands. Lukanterao placed it over his left eye and the device instantly suctioned to his face. He hated the fucking thing. Dragon tech was top-of-the-line, but weird. He didn’t like things sticking to his body. What if it didn’t come off later?
“The whole ship is red,” Lukanterao muttered, looking at the ship through his new heat sensor.
“That’s why we’re going floor-by-floor. If there’s a cold area with a small amount of heat, it could be a body. The ship’s only been down a few hours. There could still be people alive in there.”
“Guess we’ll see,” Lukanterao said. He stared up at the big ship. “Guess we’ll see.”
Chapter 5
When Willow opened her eyes again, the ship was silent. The screams had stopped, the tossing and turning had ended, and the lights were off.
All of the lights.
She stood, fumbling around her tiny room. For a second, she wished she had sprung for an exterior room. She’d wished that so many times. She’d be able to see the stars, she’d be able to see the planets, and most of all, she’d be able to get out of her damn room.
Oh, Willow knew that everyone with a window was probably dead. The windows would have burst open, spraying glass everywhere. No one could have survived that, no matter how big their suite was.
Yeah, the people with windows were gone.
Definitely dead.
Willow hoped it had been quick and painless and everyone had passed out before it happened. She hoped they hadn’t suffered. She hoped they had died happy. It was just a dream, like everything else in her life. It was just a futile wish that didn’t mean anything.
Willow wondered if anyone else was alive. Her body hurt as she rose, trying to stand. Every muscle felt bruised, damaged. Everything was sore. The bedrooms needed seatbelts. Fuck.
She had been in her bed when the ship crashed into Earth and even she had been flung across the room. Luckily, her suite was tiny, so she hadn’t gone too far. She’d hit her head on something, maybe the wall, and it still throbbed. It was difficult to think straight, difficult to move, but at least she was
alive.
Only, she might as well be dead because there was no way out of her damn room. The walls seemed to all be standing, but her furniture was all over the place and her luggage had been strewn about. Willow stepped over different things, stubbing her toe several times, before she made it to the door.
She felt around the edges of the door. Everything was harder, more challenging in the dark. She didn’t realize until now just how much she really depended on the light to get through her day. Even something as simple as leaving a room became impossible, just about, when you couldn’t see.
Carefully running her hands along the wall, she found the panel that opened the door. She waved her bracelet in front of it.
Nothing happened.
“Please,” Willow whispered, her heart suddenly sinking. “Please, come on.”
She waved the bracelet again.
Still, there was no light or indicator to show the door was active. Of course it wasn’t. The ship had crashed. With no electricity, the doors simply wouldn’t function. She waved her wrist again and again. It had to work. She couldn’t die down here. She just couldn’t.
She had been through so much, tried so hard to escape, worked so long to be able to make this trip happen, and it was going to be how she died. This was it. This was how Willow’s life ended.
It couldn’t.
This couldn’t be all there was for her.
Willow pressed her hand to her head. It was wet. Blood. Her hair was matted around the wound. She had hit her head harder than she thought during the crash. Now, it ached. Her head hurt, pounding, and she knew it was only a matter of time before the pain made her pass out again. She had to try to escape.
If she could get to safety, if she could get away, maybe she’d have a chance of surviving. Dreagle was a big, dark, ugly planet, but it was in the middle of a war, right? Maybe the other side, the good guys, maybe they’d help her.
Maybe someone would rescue her.
She tried to take her bracelet off, but it required a special key. She remembered them telling her about it when she first got on board. The bracelet was designed to stay on your entire trip. This way, no one would trade bracelets. It was supposedly to prevent underage consumption of illicit products, but Willow knew it was really to keep the poor travelers in the poor area and the wealthier travelers in their own private spaces.
She waved the bracelet again.
And again.
And again.
“Come on,” she whispered, but she knew it was no use. This was it. She was going to die down here. She started to cry and wished that she was braver, smarter. She wished she had been bolder in her life and that she’d taken more chances. She was 25-years-old, and she had nothing to show for it.
Nothing.
She lived on a planet she didn’t like doing things she didn’t care about with people who didn’t care about her.
And wasn’t it fitting that the first chance she’d taken to actually escape, to actually go somewhere, to actually be somebody, would be the time that killed her?
How completely typical.
Willow sunk to the floor and cried. She cried for the life she didn’t get to finish having and for all the time she wasted on Mars. She should have left years ago, but she didn’t, and she hated herself for that. She cried until she thought she was going to choke on her own damn tears, and then she got up. She moved quietly through the room, stumbling over a fallen chair and her suitcase. Then she stepped on something sharp that stung, tearing into her flesh.
Glass.
She reached down and yanked the shard from her foot. Even though it was pitch black in the room, she knew she was bleeding. She could feel the liquid bubbling on the bottom of her foot, could smell the metallic scent as it filled the air.
She wondered what had broken. There wasn’t any glass in the room that she remembered. There hadn’t been a flower vase or a bowl or anything out at all.
Except the mirror.
There had been a mirror.
She realized it as she stepped on another piece, then one more. Finally, Willow gave up trying to navigate the floor of pain and dove toward the bed. She wasn’t sure how she had made it to the door in the first place without stepping on the glass, but somehow she had, and now her feet were bleeding. She felt around her skin and pulled the pieces from her feet as well as she could. She thought she got them all. Willow’s blanket was somewhere else in the room at this point, so she pulled her shirt off and pressed it to her feet. It was black, like most of her clothing, so the blood wouldn’t stain.
Stained shirts were the least of her worries, though.
She wondered how long she could survive in a place like this. She had no food, no water, and no hope. The air would run out soon. Without ventilation, she would eventually stop breathing. How long did she have? She didn’t even know.
It didn’t matter.
Nothing did.
Willow pressed the shirt harder to her bleeding feet. They hurt. Her head hurt, too. Even her breasts, exposed to the heat in the room, hurt. Why was it so fucking hot in the room? She was sweating, dripping. Willow felt like she was at the beach on the hottest day of the year. Only this wasn’t fun or interesting or something she’d tell her friends about. This was a nightmare that was growing worse the more she had time to think about it.
The ventilation system, she realized, squeezing her eyes tightly shut. Even though the room was pitch black, it felt wrong to have her eyes open. It strained them to try to peer out into the emptiness of her bedroom. The ventilation system must have been blowing not just air, but cold air, almost constantly. Plus, wasn’t Dreagle one of the warmest planets? There was a reason most humans lived on Mars. It was way better for frail human bodies than a planet like Dreagle.
Willow closed her eyes and leaned back on the bed. An instant burst of pain shot through her scalp when she did, reminding her once more of her injury.
She should have stayed home on Mars.
She should have kept in touch with her sister.
She should have married fucking Anthony Weathermore.
She should have stayed safe.
With her heart full of regrets and her body aching in pain, Willow closed her eyes once more.
Chapter 6
After two hours, they still weren’t done scouring the ship for survivors. They’d found around three hundred people still alive, and as horrible as it was, Lukanterao wondered what the point was. These people were going to have insane PTSD and serious disabilities that would cripple them for the rest of their lives.
Call him a coward, call him evil-hearted, but he hated the idea that they were rescuing people only to give them shitty futures and shitty lives.
He’d seen enough war to last him forever. He’d seen what happened when a man went home broken.
Some of these people were going to be very, very broken.
Dane had brought a huge group of guys and many of the Reslenaouans were helping, too. There were more people searching than Lukanterao thought possible. He was surprised at the camaraderie they all showed. Dragons, humans, and aliens alike were working side-by-side to free the travelers from Mars.
For some reason, that visualization gave Lukanterao’s cold heart just the slightest bit of warmth: warmth he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time. He had been all but dead inside since he lost his family, but today, Lukanterao began to think that maybe not everyone was bad. Maybe not everyone was evil. Today, maybe not everyone was dark hearted.
Still, seeing the workers didn’t mean he felt any more hopeful that their mission would be worth it. He simply began to feel like not all people were bad. Not everyone was out to get everyone else. Sometimes, people did just do things out of the kindness of their hearts. Sometimes people just wanted to be good.
Slowly, they were making their way through the wreckage, but this wasn’t Lukanterao’s first time on a search and rescue. He knew it would be hours more. He knew even if they spent ten hours, even if they spent
ten days, there would be someone they missed. There would be survivors who had managed to live, but who were trapped inside. There would be people who simply wouldn’t get to be rescued.
He tried not to think negatively.
He should be more positive, at least for Dane’s sake. The dragonman looked just giddy each time a survivor was brought out. He would rush over and greet the person and offer them words of encouragement and Lukanterao just didn’t understand it. He didn’t get how Dane could see these horrible things happen, yet still believe in the future.
He didn’t understand clinging to hope when there was none to be had.
There were medical tents set up outside the ship and the doctors who had been treating the soldiers during the previous days’ war were now treating the Mars crash victims. Word had already been sent to Mars about the ship and the Martians and humans would be sending more doctors and medics immediately.
They would come to claim their dead and their wounded.
They would come to see what had happened to their people.
If the situation between Dreagle and Tanayemm hadn’t already been completely strained, Lukanterao wondered what would have happened to the victims. What if he and the other Reslenoans hadn’t been there to help? What if it was just the Dreaglans?
Would Mars have launched an attack on the planet? Would they have assumed Dreagle had shot down the cruiser? Would they even have tried to search for survivors? He wasn’t sure. He was just glad it seemed like things were going smooth politically, at least for the moment. Mars would send their ships, get their people, and get off Dreagle.
Hopefully, it would be for good.
Lukanterao sure as hell didn’t have plans to come back.
“Let’s go,” a voice called out, and Lukanterao started walking again. He carried the limp and bleeding body of a wounded woman to one of the medical tents and gently laid her down on one of the makeshift cots.
“Thank you,” she groaned.
He looked at her, patted her hair. She was going to be fine. She was in shock and most likely dehydrated, but she’d be fine.