Chapter 2
Dana
The cave smelled like fear and desperation, with a sharp undertone of scorched metal that never quite left my nostrils.
I pressed my palm against the rock wall, feeling the residual heat from the day's burn still radiating through the stone.
Fifteen hours until the sun rose again. Fifteen hours until the surface outside became a literal hellscape, temperatures climbing past two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt the soles off our boots if we stayed out too long.
"Dana, the beacon's dying again." Jalina's voice cut through the darkness, high and tight with barely contained panic.
I didn't turn around. Couldn't afford to let them see my face right now, see the way my jaw was clenched so hard my teeth ached. "I know."
"Can you fix it?"
Can I fix it? The question of the hour. The question of every goddamn hour since we'd crashed on this burning rock three weeks ago.
Could I fix the emergency beacon cobbled together from salvaged parts and desperate hope?
Could I fix the water reclamation system that kept coughing up rust-colored liquid?
Could I fix the fact that we were stranded in a galaxy we'd never heard of, on a planet that actively tried to kill us twelve hours a day?
"I can try."
I pushed off from the wall and turned back to face the cave's interior.
The emergency lighting we'd rigged cast everything in a sickly blue-green glow, throwing shadows that made the sixteen women huddled in our makeshift shelter look like ghosts.
Maybe that's what we were, ghosts of the Liberty mission, haunting this miserable excuse for survival.
The beacon sat in the center of our camp, a Frankenstein's monster of technology that had no business working at all.
Three different power sources, wiring from four separate systems, and a prayer that the electromagnetic interference from the planet's mineral-rich crust wouldn't scramble our signal into meaningless static.
I'd been nursing it along for days, rerouting power, bypassing burned-out circuits, basically performing electronic CPR every time it flatlined.
I dropped to my knees beside it, ignoring the way the movement pulled at the half-healed burns on my thighs. Souvenirs from our first night outside, when I hadn't understood just how hot "hot" could get. The medkit had barely enough burn gel left to matter, and we were rationing it like gold.
"Talk to me, you bastard," I muttered, pulling open the access panel. My hands moved on autopilot, checking connections, testing voltage levels. The multimeter we'd salvaged from the crash gave me numbers that made my stomach drop.
Power output was down to thirty percent. At this rate, we'd be broadcasting silence by morning.
"Well?" Bea appeared at my shoulder, her botanist's hands surprisingly steady as she held the work light for me. Tall and rail-thin, she'd lost weight we couldn't afford to lose. We all had.
"The primary cell's shot. I can reroute through the backup, but it's going to drain our remaining power reserves faster."
"How much faster?"
I did the math in my head, wished I hadn't. "We'll have maybe four days of signal. Maybe less."
Bea's breath caught. Four days. Four days of broadcasting into the void, hoping someone, anyone, would hear us. Four days until we'd be sitting in the dark, invisible to whatever rescue might be searching for Liberty's scattered survivors.
If anyone's searching at all.
I shoved that thought down deep, locked it away with all the other thoughts I couldn't afford to have.
Like the memory of the wormhole opening in front of Liberty like a hungry mouth.
Like the sound of the hull tearing apart, metal screaming as physics we didn't understand ripped our ship into pieces.
Like watching escape pods scatter in every direction, knowing some of them were already tumbling toward the crushing gravity of stars we couldn't name.
"Do it," Bea said quietly. "Four days is better than none."
I nodded and got to work, my fingers finding the familiar rhythm of repair despite the tremor that had started living in them.
Stress tremor, I told myself. Not fear. Engineers didn't get to be afraid.
Engineers got to be focused, methodical, and utterly convinced that every problem had a solution if you just thought hard enough.
Even when the problem was being stranded on a planet where the ground would literally cook you alive.
"I've got it," Elena called from deeper in the cave, her voice echoing off stone walls.
Our pilot, former pilot, now that we didn't have a ship, had been working on expanding our livable space, chipping away at the rock with salvaged tools.
Pointless busy work, maybe, but it kept her from staring at the cave entrance like she could will a rescue ship into existence through sheer force of desire.
We all had our coping mechanisms. Mine was fixing things.
Elena's was movement. Bea cataloged the local plant life during our nightly scavenging runs, as if understanding the ecosystem would somehow make it less hostile.
Jalina, our medic, sketched in a salvaged notebook, the cave walls, the burning landscape, the faces of the women slowly losing hope.
And the others? The other twelve women whose names I'd forced myself to memorize, whose skills and quirks and fears I'd cataloged like spare parts in an inventory? They survived however they could.
"Power reroute complete," I announced, watching the beacon's indicators flicker back to something approaching stability. "We're broadcasting again."
A collective exhale rippled through the cave. Small victories. We lived on small victories now.
"How long until nightfall?" Harriet asked. I checked my salvaged chronometer, one of the few pieces of tech that didn't care what planet we were on. "Three hours. Then we can make another supply run."
Three hours until the temperature outside dropped enough that we could venture out without our skin blistering.
Three hours until we could breathe the cooler air and feel rain on our faces, because of course this hellhole had rain at night, as if the universe was mocking us with the one thing that made this rock almost habitable, then snatching it away every sunrise.
I settled back against the cave wall, feeling the smooth stone against my spine. My hands were still shaking, so I curled them into fists in my lap where no one could see. Had to keep it together. They looked to me for solutions, for fixes, for the reassurance that someone had a plan.
I didn't have a plan. I had jury-rigged equipment and desperate hope.
"Dana." Jalina dropped down beside me, her dark hair escaping from its braid.
She'd been beautiful once, back on Liberty.
Hell, she was still beautiful, but now there was a hardness in her eyes that hadn't been there before.
Survival did that. Filed away all your soft edges until you were nothing but angles and sharp corners.
"Yeah?"
"We need to talk about rationing."
Of course we did. We always needed to talk about rationing. Water, food, medical supplies, hope, everything was running out, and running out fast.
"How bad?"
"Three days of food. Maybe four if we stretch it." She glanced around, making sure no one else was listening. "And that's if we stop feeding the injured."
My stomach clenched. The injured. Five women with burns, broken bones, and internal injuries from the crash were slowly getting worse because we didn't have the medical equipment to properly treat them.
We'd done what we could with the medkit and improvisation, but there were limits to what band-aids and prayer could accomplish.
"We're not doing that."
"Dana—"
"I said we're not doing that. We'll find more food."
"Where? We've scavenged everything in a safe range. Go farther, and we risk not making it back before sunrise."
She was right. I hated that she was right. But I also knew that the moment we started making those calculations with who deserved food, who was worth saving, was the moment we stopped being human.
"Then we take the risk," I said flatly. "Tonight. We go farther."
Jalina stared at me, and I could see her calculating, running the numbers in her head the way I ran power consumption calculations. "You're willing to bet our lives on maybe finding food?"
"I'm willing to bet on not starving to death while we sit on our asses waiting for a rescue that might never come."
The words hung in the air between us, sharp-edged and too honest. We didn't talk about that possibility.
The possibility that no one was coming. That Liberty had been so thoroughly destroyed that we were nothing but a rounding error in a disaster tally, names on a memorial list, forgotten survivors in an unmapped corner of a galaxy no one had heard of.
"I'll come with you," Jalina said finally. "Someone needs to make sure you don't do something stupid."
"Too late for that. I signed up for Liberty, didn't I?"
She almost smiled. Almost. Then the moment passed and she was standing up, moving to prep our gear for the nightly run.
I closed my eyes and let myself have exactly thirty seconds of weakness.
Thirty seconds to remember Earth, to remember the life I'd left behind.
The failed engagement I'd been running from.
The environmental engineering job that had felt like a slow death.
The way I'd seen the Liberty mission advertisement and thought: Yes.
This. Something new. Something different.
Careful what you wish for, some wiser part of me whispered.
When I opened my eyes again, Elena was standing at the cave entrance, silhouetted against the slowly darkening sky. She was watching the horizon the way she always did, looking for something that wasn't there.