by Mel Braxton
Illiam
by mel braxton
Copyright © 2019 by Mel Braxton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission by the author, except as provided by copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Events, locales, characters, names, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is a coincidence.
for Josh
…and our seemingly endless conversations of how this story could be written
prelude
Illiam rounds the sun again and again. It has circled many laps around the familiar star. It had been alone for years and years but never knew of loneliness.
Instead, it had new mountains to shape, fantastical animals to create, and complex ecosystems to manipulate. There would be another project for it to complete. An entire world receptive to its ever-developing imagination, captivating its whole being.
Then the small independent mammals came.
They showed Illiam that it was alone and that newfound loneliness became everything.
Illiam
rounds the
sun again...
I
The starship dropped from hyperspace with a lurch. It flung across the planet’s sky, moving out of control.
Elysa startled awake in the pilot chair that doubled as a bed. Her body pressed against the straps holding her in place while the ship maneuvered wildly.
Her readouts explained that an asteroid had crashed into her ship, and its impact had shaken her to the bones.
The Onyx’s anti-grav reactor had failed. It was the sort of problem that wouldn’t have a quick solution. That problem would have to wait.
Her top priority was to fly the broken starship.
She was a capable pilot, but flying in these conditions was hell-and-a-half. The Onyx lurched unnecessarily as Elysa handled the controls. Or, worse, didn’t respond at all.
She fought against the gravitational pull of the planet, but without the reactor, she was limited to thrusters that were half-responsive, at best.
The Onyx slipped downward, and she needed to adjust her strategy. Elysa steadied the ship into a low orbit.
The orbit was less than ideal, but she needed time. Time to figure out what the hell was happening to her ship.
She loaded the accelerated self-diagnostics program and tapped her fingers, waiting for the results to load.
Elysa considered the planet visible through the front window. A vast ocean glittered, reflecting the sun. A giant continent sprawled below, green.
A pass through the planetary database gave her one entry: a routine report published by a mining company’s survey team. The report didn’t say much. It called the planet 3XCT. It had a breathable atmosphere, water. Plants and animals. No intelligent life. A distinct lack of valuable minerals.
“Pretty world to be so empty,” Elysa said, scanning the planet’s glistening surface. One day, it would make for an exotic vacation planet.
The Onyx signaled her, the diagnostics were complete.
“Damn.” She was screwed.
The anti-grav reactor was, as expected, completely non-responsive. Worse: the thrusters were glitching.
Elysa double-checked the scanner, but nothing had changed. Nobody was nearby. No surprise. After all, she was flying through uncolonized space.
“Double damn.” Communications were non-functional too.
She closed her eyes, muttering her remaining options under her lips.
Another alarm reverberated through her small cabin. This time, life support.
She could always land on the planet.
Even if it was desolate, the planet had an atmosphere and water. She could do repairs from the surface.
Landing wasn’t a decision to take lightly. Glitchy thrusters would make landing tricky. And once she accomplished that, repairs would have to be done with the parts she had on hand. Even if everything went perfect, lift-off wasn’t trivial.
The most likely outcome of landing on 3XCT was that she would be stranded until she could fix the communication array and signal for help.
The ship creaked. The ship’s readouts showed increasing temperature as she began skimming through the atmosphere. She had to make a choice before control was taken from her.
She looked towards 3XCT again and saw a lush continent growing bigger in the planetary horizon.
To hell with it. She would land on the planet and deal with the consequences.
—(|-|)—
—beep—beep—beep—
Elysa flickered her eyes open but failed to see through her haze.
She inhaled, steadied herself, and tried to clench her fists and flex her feet. It was harder than she’d hoped.
But she wasn’t dead. Hopefully, that was a good thing. She tried to stir her body but drifted back into unconsciousness instead.
—beep—beep—beep—
She opened her eyes again. Minutes could’ve passed. Hours, maybe.
This time she could see the flashing red lights on the console. There were so many of them, glowing in and out of existence…they were almost pretty…
—beep—beep—beep—
Elysa woke a third time and tried to wiggle her fingers. She was relieved when they responded.
She shook her head, trying to push the fog away. It made her headache worse.
Elysa reached for the ship’s control and scanned the diagnostics log. The errors were color-coded, and a single red-error would ground the Onyx. She had four. Furthermore, there were 23 orange alerts and 143 yellow ones.
In summary: the Onyx was going to hell in a handbasket.
But there wasn’t any time to panic, not now.
Elysa examined her body a second time. She was bruised, but nothing was broken. Given the way her head throbbed and worsened as she tried to study the dashboard, Elysa guessed she was concussed.
But she'd survived.
She’d crash-landed on a deserted planet far from approved transit zones. She was alone, and her transmitter wasn’t functioning.
There would be time to panic. Right now—she had to live.
She leaned forward to rest her head against her hands. It ached to move and think, but she needed to focus.
She needed air, sustenance, and shelter. In that order. Normally, none of these would pose an issue. Between Ulani’s insistence and her own common sense, she always kept the Onyx stocked with enough filters and crude food to last for months.
Elysa reviewed the environmental systems, and the results were bittersweet. The main chamber was intact and atmospheric systems were fully functional, but the outer hull had a breach, and the water supply was leaking. All the water recyclers in the galaxy couldn’t save her if she couldn’t contain the liquid.
She sighed, deciding that this issue was big enough to warrant leaving the safety of the ship.
All she had to do was get to her environmental suit, put it on, and hope that the main hatch barring her way was still functional. Then it was just a matter of stepping onto an isolated planet, finding the leak, and somehow stopping it.
Simple, right?
Her head throbbed at the thought, but Elysa swiveled the pilot’s chair towards the rear of the ship.
She wouldn’t have to walk far. The Onyx was a small transport ship with an oversized reactor. There was a storage bay, a command center that doubled as living quarters, and a few secret compartments. When it was working, it was the perfect starship for a quick and dirty ride out of dodge.
Regardless, the Onyx was still Elysa’s prized possession. She had begun working on the ship as a teen and acquired it from her bos
s a few years later. It wasn’t only her source of income; the ship was her home.
Or, it had been, before Ulani had asked Elysa to move into her apartment on Aquila Station. The war was over, after all, and Elysa was beginning no to most of the jobs that came her way.
With a sigh—part defiance and part exhaustion—Elysa rolled from the pilot’s couch, landing on her hands and knees. The simple movement made her lightheaded, and her stomach protested, threatening to hurl.
She rested on the floor, waiting for her heart rate to steady. Then, slowly, she rose to her feet, holding onto the couch for support.
Elysa waited for the throbbing in her head to stop. It didn’t.
She shifted her feet, searching for balance in the planetary gravity. She hadn’t been planetside since...since that vacation with Ulani. How many years ago had that been? Two?
She stumbled to her medkit and located her syringes of Panacea. The drug would help with the concussion and give her the focus needed to fix the leak. She couldn’t use the medicine indefinitely, but it would buy her time.
Her fingers hovered over the black pill. The Onyx had always carried one, just in case a quick death became better than any alternative.
It wasn’t the first time she worried she might need to use the pill, but it was the first time she thought she deserved it.
Sighing, she cleaned her skin, injected herself with the Panacea, and pocketed a spare vile of it. The headache didn’t vanish, but it became tolerable.
She reached for her environmental suit and began the careful process of donning it. She started with the boots and worked her way meticulously to the helmet. There was no reason to rush the process, no reason to risk mistakes.
She latched the helmet and took a breath through its well-aged canister. The air tasted faintly of apples, and Elysa leaned into the familiar sensation. The suit, like the ship, had seen her through plenty of near-disasters.
She’d find her way through this misadventure, like she’d done on all the others.
Elysa stepped into the airlock and cycled it. Once equilibrium was reached, she tried to open the hatch, but those electronics failed too.
She opened it manually, crying out with discomfort as the hatch rose upward. She stepped from the familiar safety of her starship and onto the planet’s earth.
From the airlock, she could see that a vast jungle spanned out before her. A canopy of trees rose high above, and a bright sun glittered in the gaps between leaves. Lush low foliage covered the ground.
Her lenses detected scores of living creatures around her, but none of them appeared sentient. They flagged a bug and a plant as ‘likely dangerous,’ and Elysa guessed they were poisonous.
She toggled the auditory source on her suit, allowing it to retransmit the external sounds into her helmet. Her ears were met with the universal sounds of life: chirps, croaks, and the rustle of shifting leaves. She thought she heard the sound of running water...but it may have been static.
Elysa instructed the spacesuit to begin the air composition analysis while she explored the perimeter around her starship.
The Onyx hadn’t looked this bad since that time she’d squandered repair money. A teenager’s mistake.
But if she’d gotten the ship to fly after that mishap, she could make it operate again this time too. She had to.
There was a long gash in the earth behind the ship. Further away, she could see how broken branches formed an opening in the canopy forming the scars from her landing. The evidence suggested that the Onyx had fallen through the tree line before skidding to a stop. Elysa couldn’t remember.
All things considered, it was a miracle the ship was in one piece. By all rational means, she should have been dead after such a landing.
But she was alive and planned to stay that way. The pill be damned. She couldn’t afford to doubt herself.
She reached the anti-grav reactor. The panel that protected it was supposedly impenetrable. At least, that was what the salesman had said.
Regardless, there it was—raw and exposed on the side of her ship. Normally, the reactor glowed a healthy red, but today it was dull.
Elysa pulled the reactor from its socket and found it was cracked right down the middle.
It was dead, and without it, the Onyx was grounded.
She had thrusters, sure, but they were only for fine adjustments. The reactor was what made hyperspace possible.
Elysa cursed.
Ulani had insisted that Elysa should purchase a back-up reactor, but she’d never found the money. Not only were they expensive, but safely storing one was a logistical nightmare. As usual, Ulani’s ideals for safe space travel were rooted in inexperience. Except now, Elysa would do anything for even a low-grade reactor.
A beep signaled that the air composition program was done running. It confirmed that 3XCT had a breathable atmosphere. She reinitiated the scan to double check the results.
Elysa found the leak in the water line next. The leak was small and would be relatively straightforward to fix, but she had already lost more water than she liked.
Maybe she could find water on the planet. Repairing and refilling the water system needed to be her top priority. One of many.
Elysa evaluated the communication array and began by clearing the debris that had collected near the transmitter. It had been dinged during the crash, but nothing she couldn’t work back into shape...
Another beep sounded, signifying that her second atmospheric scan had finished. A perfect match to the previous one. The air was okay to breathe.
She unlatched her helmet, bringing it to her hip, and exhaled. No itchiness, no reaction.
She inhaled. Hesitated. Exhaled.
As she began to breathe normally, she could finally begin appreciating the fresh air of an untouched world. The smell of was reminiscent of hydroponic bays and artificial forests but far more potent. It was exhilarating. Even the carefully preserved vacation worlds smelled dull in comparison to the complexity of 3XCT’s atmosphere.
Elysa checked her vitals, relieved to see there were no surprises there.
Satisfied, she returned to her ship and changed into a fresh jumpsuit. She tied back her hair and injected herself with a second shot of Panacea.
If she was going to survive this, it was time to get to work.
II
Elysa repaired the communication systems first and was pleased to find that she had been right: it was an easy fix. She began working on her distress signal.
Maybe someone else was nearby...But if they weren’t, the message would reach the local ansible. The ansible would instantaneously retransmit the message across the universe. Everyone would hear her.
But first, her message needed to leave the planet’s atmosphere.
“This is Elysa Briggins of transport vessel ONYX-5PJ1. My ship was damaged, and I was forced to land on planet 3XCT. My reactor is damaged beyond repair, assistance required.”
She couldn’t be sure if friend or foe would respond to her request, but it was a calculated risk. Fortunately, only a desperate pirate would risk grounding their ship for her.
With any luck, a ship from the frontier patrol would be nearby. They would be pissy, especially since she shouldn’t have been flying here in the first place, but it would be their job to help her.
Her console chimed. She had a response already. That had been far too fast, but she played it anyway.
A playback of her own message resonated within the ship. Her transmission had been reflected back to her.
She ran a different set of diagnostics on the communications system. Her hope vanished with its results.
As if she wasn’t damned enough, apparently 3XCT had an unusually thick outer atmosphere. That layer of gas was mirroring her signals. By comparing the strength of her outgoing message to the incoming one, she confirmed that her transmission had never left the atmosphere.
Elysa couldn’t suppress the loud sob that escaped her. Disappointment choked her throat.
She couldn’t expect anyone to receive her distress signal. Moreover, since she’d lied about her flight path, nobody would know where to search for her.
She didn’t have anyone to blame but herself. She had turned a 23-day trip into a seven day one by crossing uncolonized space. It had been a decision driven by a combination of arrogance and her desperate need to apologize to Ulani in person.
Elysa couldn’t change any of that now.
Instead, she set the message to repeat. She opened a data log and started collecting information on the returned signal. Maybe, if she were lucky, there would be a pocket of thinner air for the transmission to pass through.
Once she was happy with the program, Elysa paused to reassess. She needed to address the water leak. She was tiring but didn’t take another shot of Panacea, not yet.
The repair was more complicated than the transmitter had been, but she was still able to finish the work quickly. The part needed replacement, but she built a patch that would hold for now.
The total water volume in the system had been greatly depleted. Fortunately, she’d heard the sound of water outside and guessed there was a water source nearby.
Elysa rummaged through a compact sack labeled planetside emergencies and confirmed that there was a water reservoir-purifier within.
Hopeful, she checked the transmitter one last time, but nothing had changed. She removed her holster from its safety locker and placed the pistol inside.
Sighing, she took another shot of Panacea—She had to sleep soon—and shouldered the sack around her shoulders.
Elysa stepped through the airlock and back onto the planet’s surface.
She held her breath and, listening carefully, scanned for the direction of the falling water. Satisfied, she chose her direction and began walking away from the Onyx.
She swallowed, suddenly uncomfortable as she left the ship behind. The Onyx had a long history of keeping her safe, regardless of her circumstances. She was stepping away from her good luck charm.
Her legs wobbled as she walked, and Elysa wondered if this journey should’ve waited for morning. She kept moving. Despite her doubts, she really was eager to explore the uncharted planet.