Serpents of Serant, Volume One

Chapter 1

Charlie

When you think you died you don’t expect to wake up on some kind of primitive, alien planet.

You don’t expect heaven, or whatever passes for the afterlife (if you believe in something like that), to look like a bad set for a Sci-fi holo-vid.

That’s what I woke up to though if that’s what you called arriving in the afterlife?

I wasn’t sure what was up and what was down right now, but I was fairly certain that something was terribly wrong.

I felt nauseated, the kind I always got after I had my birth-control shot. There was a kink in my neck and my body felt cold and clammy where it rested on the strangely purple, mossy ground. Why the heck was the afterlife all purple anyway?

Sitting up, my head spun crazily, the world seesawing around me until I clasped my head with both hands.

The fingers of my left hand grazed across a bleeding cut on my temple, which finally snapped me out of my weird, dazed, silly thoughts.

I wasn’t dead, I was injured and I was on a strange planet, this was not the afterlife.

I felt like an idiot for even thinking that.

Holding my head as still as I could, I searched around myself with a growing sense of unease.

There was a long piece of metal hull sticking out of the ground at an angle a couple dozen feet to my right.

On my left, a stasis pod was tilted on its side, mangled and broken, with the plex glass pane hanging off it.

The hardened plas was spider-webbed from impact so much that it had gone nearly entirely opaque.

I’d been launched out of that thing upon impact, but the pod had broken my fall because I was only a little bruised and scratched.

My head hurt the most, the small cut bleeding and my head pounding.

My thoughts still struggled to stay coherent, which made me fear I had some kind of concussion.

That was bad. I had crashed on a strange planet, with no idea how I got there. With a concussion.

Testing out my strength, I slowly clambered to my feet.

Searching the strange new sky to figure out how much daylight was left.

The glowing sphere of the pale blue sun was too alien for me to tell if it was morning or afternoon.

In the distance, I saw the peaks of huge, snow-capped mountains rise into the air.

Their flanks looked purple and a forest crowded up against that mountain, I also saw a big plume of smoke coming from that direction.

Was that the rest of the ship? Because that piece of hull sticking out of the ground was only a small portion of whatever ship I’d been on.

Away from the mountains, where I was, huge wetlands stretched out in every direction.

I’d managed to land on a somewhat dry strip of land, but reeds waved their purple, heavy plumes on the wind, channels of water running crisscrossed every which way.

This was a swamp. I was stuck in a damn swamp. At least it didn’t smell.

Now what? On Earth, swamps had crocodiles or alligators, it wasn’t exactly safe to stick around.

This alien planet probably had its own version of a predator hanging around in these waters, I needed to get out of here.

Find dry ground. Only those mountains looked so very far away.

They were clearly very tall because they had snow, but they didn’t look nearly big enough for that.

It was going to take me days to reach those.

Getting a little more panicked and scared, I searched for something I could use as a weapon.

Finally settling on a piece of sharp scrap from the broken stasis pod to clutch tightly in my hand.

It wasn’t the best of weapons, but it was pointed, I could stab something with it if I managed to do that without cutting up my own hand.

Approaching the piece of hull, I searched for a better option, but it was just a broken panel from the outside of the ship.

With a sick feeling, I spotted the curves of a U in white paint emblazoned on the edge of the big piece.

Even without the other letters to complete it, I knew what that said.

UAR or United Alliance of Races. The name of the big ruling faction that had control of nearly the entirety of the Alpha Quadrant.

It was made up of three different species, including humans, and they controlled everything.

So, I’d been condemned to death and ‘executed’ by the UAR for defending myself against a creep of a boss.

Then the UAR had put me in stasis instead and sent me somewhere only for the ship to crash.

I wasn’t sure if I should be angry or grateful for a second chance at life right now.

If I ended up being eaten by an alien crocodile I was going to be so pissed.

Determined to somehow stick it to them by surviving against all odds, I pulled up one of the reeds in the hopes I could use the slender stick to test my footing.

There was nothing here for me, and I wasn’t desperate enough yet to try and make fire on this wet, soggy mess that passed for ground.

I was also not going to drink this swampy water.

I just needed to get moving. Find higher a safe place higher up, right?

My survival skills were basically non-existent, I was a complete and total city girl, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull this off.

Something rustled behind me in the tall reeds and the skin on the back of my neck prickled with awareness.

I spun around, waving my stick and brandishing my makeshift weapon.

Something huge and scaly was stalking me.

I did the sensible thing; I screamed and back-peddled as fast as I could.

Tumbling ass-over-teakettle into the murky water.