Titanoboa (Naga Brides #7)

Chapter 1 Falling Stars

ONE

FALLING STARS

Sabrina

“Swerve left! They’re going to hit us!” Tata yells to our captain, Weston, at the front of the ship. She’s in the seat in front of me, across the aisle and to my right, yet her booming voice still makes me wince.

“Stop distracting me! There’s another coming from above, you idiot!” Weston yells back.

“You’re not going fast enough!”

“I'm going as fast as I fucking can!”

“Right! Right!” Annora, our crew’s best navigator and tracker, is currently in the middle of a panic attack, yelling at him from his other side, her shrieks conflicting with what Tata’s shouting more often than not.

I block out the noise of my crewmates, trying to focus on keeping my breakfast from coming up while watching the chaos on the system’s radar.

Navigational numbers flicker across the panel station in the cockpit, resetting each time Weston dodges another ship and it changes our course, almost too fast to keep up with.

Not that that matters. We have our coordinates.

We know our destination. That’s not the problem.

The problem is that it’s everyone else’s destination too.

“We have to get clear of them! Now!” I add into the shouting match. “Slow down!”

“That’s what I’m trying to do!” Weston snaps back at me, then curses. “Dammit, it’s not like there aren’t hundreds of them!”

Our small ship jerks, nosediving downward with an especially low gravity pull as a sudden burst of light blinds us through the viewport.

Annora and Mickie, our chief gunner and an operator like me, scream in unison.

My belly flips and, gripping my buckles tightly, I press my lips firmly closed, fighting another surge of nausea.

“A collision!” Tata shouts out unnecessarily.

With a growl, Weston levels out the ship, and a breathless sigh falls across the group in the momentary lull.

I glance at Blat, our muscle, across the aisle to my right, and find his knuckles white from clutching his straps and his eyes closed tightly.

I look away again before he catches me checking on him. He hates when I do that.

“Fuck,” Weston and Annora expel at the same time.

“I think we’re free of the worst of it,” our captain adds.

Annora sags into her seat in front of me. “I’ll reset our coordinates to someplace close but not too close. It’ll be safer anyways, when everyone starts to land. Not everyone’s going to make it, and depending on how much clear space there is, it might get bad.”

“Well, we fucking will. I didn’t get gravity stabilizers put on The Wreck for nothing,” Weston grumbles. “Though good idea, might as well play it safe until we can get in touch with Mr. Whicker again.”

Glancing once more at Blat, I notice he’s putting his headphones on.

Following his lead, I go back to tuning out Annora and Weston as well.

I’m useless on the ship, just like he is.

He and I are sourcers, procurers, not pilots, navigators, engineers.

Blat and I are on Weston’s crew to do the offship jobs: investigate the leads and interrogate those in our way to the items we need to retrieve.

We handle the dirty work—which is why we also often team up to take care of the cleaning and the cooking too.

Tata and Mickie join us when we need back up on the outside missions, but as The Wreck’s closest thing to a mechanic and engineer as well as not only being the crew’s gunner and operators, their jobs mostly keep them around the ship.

Our home away from home… The Wreck.

Weston, our boss and captain, procured the shoddy spacecraft nearly three years ago, and hired me to his crew on the first day. Since then, nothing’s held me back. Leaving the trudge of a single colony ship to roam the triad of them freely, life’s been better. Even if the work isn’t always honest.

Our main business is procurement. And, on occasion, we smuggle what we procure between ships or between castes—often between castes. Contraband, drugs, the works… At least that’s what we were doing before The Wreck broke down on The Dreadnaut and we got stuck.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, we were stranded at the exact time The Dreadnaut was scheduled to leave the colony ship triad for good. Unable to get The Wreck up and running in time, The Dreadnaut took it—and us—with it on its mission to Earth.

Which is how we ended up… here.

“Everyone, hold on tight! We’re about to enter the atmosphere!” Weston hollers over his shoulder.

I press back in my seat and take a deep breath, trying to ignore the ship’s shuddering and the frighteningly unknown world ahead. Still, a sense of relief—the same relief I’ve been feeling since we escaped from the ancient colony ship—resettles inside me. I hated The Dreadnaut.

Breaking down while on the larger ship had been annoying enough.

But being stuck on it for nearly two full years?

That had been hell. Just waiting and working, taking every job we could find, all of us pooling our incomes to help earn enough back to afford the fuel to fly the ship…

was only one long reminder of my life before getting a job on Weston’s crew in the first place—of being trapped in a place I couldn’t escape.

I spent my childhood stuck on a single lower-caste floor. Eleven long years stuck in several square miles of ship, locked out of others for being a child and, more importantly, for being a child who refused to enter the military.

Sure, the military is one of the only routes an orphan like myself could take to make a better life for themself.

But it’s a better life through slavery, slavery that almost always ended up with a bloody, terrifying death at the front lines.

Even as a kid, I’d been warned against joining, told it was a trap.

Instead, I ran with the other beggars and thieves, desperately surviving until I was old enough to hold down a real job and could afford my own water rations without stealing them.

I was lucky enough to be given a courier position that had me traveling between the other lower caste floors.

I spent years doing that. Once I’d saved up enough money to buy myself passage off my old colony ship, I met Weston.

Right there at the port, both of us ready to start new lives.

Having even a moment of real freedom on Weston’s ship had been life changing. So, while everyone else might be freaking out that The Dreadnaut is in pieces behind us, I’m happy to finally say goodbye to it.

Several more bursts of light flash from outside the windows, and I close my eyes against it. Brightening up the backs of my eyelids, they quickly die out in the vacuum of space. Ships crashing and burning. Rockets launched from one to another.

“Here we go!” Weston shouts. “Get ready for the pressure!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Blat mutters quickly under his breath.

The Wreck rattles, only a little at first, except it builds and builds until it’s shaking violently.

I grit my teeth and hang on, grateful that Weston, the crew, and I managed to earn enough money to repair The Wreck and even make a couple of upgrades on her.

Not because we wanted to, but because we had too.

No one wanted to be stuck on The Dreadnaut for as many years as it took to accomplish its reason for going to Earth. We just wanted to go home.

The last thing and only thing we still need is enough dark material to get us there.

More fuel, in short. Apparently two years was too long and took us too far away to make the return voyage to the other colony ships with what we have stocked up.

We’d planned to be in the spaceways by the end of the season and would’ve been if The Dreadnaut hadn’t gone under.

But it did.

Pressure swallows me, making my legs and arms tremble as the ship croaks and groans. An anxious hush falls that not even Annora breaks, everyone breathlessly waiting to see if we survive the atmospheric transitions or not.

Curling my toes and clamping my teeth, I start counting by fives in my head. I don’t want to die.

Five, ten… Twenty-five, thirty…

“There’s smoke in the back!” Tata shouts.

My eyes snap open and I look over my shoulder, seeing a hazy cloud starting to form at the bottom of the engine hatch door.

Weston jerks around to glance behind him. “Shit! Someone check it out!”

Both Blat and Mickie unstrap their belt buckles and struggle to their feet, pulling themselves toward the engine room by the backs of the seats.

Explosions flash through the narrow viewports on either side as other ships, older or unequipped ones, fail the transition, succumbing to the pressure.

One detonates far too close, and The Wreck shudders directly afterward, sending both Blat and Mickie crashing to the floor with twin cries of pain.

Annora sits forward in her seat. “Weston, pay attention!” she shrieks. “We need to slow down!”

I twist again, worriedly watching Mickie and Blat get their hands and knees under them and start crawling toward the smoke until the strain on my neck is too much. Turning back, I l glimpse tears in Tata’s eyes, and quickly look away as she wipes them off.

Finally, The Wreck’s entry levels out, and we manage to slow down enough to fall behind most of the surviving ships. There’s a collective sigh of relief as Weston successfully changes course inside the Earth’s atmosphere. But the reprieve only lasts a moment.

I cough as the smoke reaches me, glancing over my shoulder once more at Blat and Mickie working at the back hatch. Just as they get it open, The Wreck’s sirens blast my ears, the ship’s sensors catching wind of the smoke.

“Head left! Toward that mass of ruins, not the forest,” Annora says sharply when a large swath of green appears amongst the brown landscape.

“I hear you!”

As we dip lower, ships continue to explode in the distance, illuminating the dark sky.

“Left, I said! More. You’re going to land too far away!” Annora points emphatically. “Don’t keep heading for the forest or you risk crashing into another ship changing course!”

“We’re going to crash anyway!” Weston yells. “Everyone, get back into your seats now! Blat, Mickie.”

Too late. The Wreck judders, the smoke thickens. Everyone starts screaming around me, and, squeezing my eyes shut again, I ask whoever is out there to at least give me a quick death.

“Weston, slow down!”

“You’re going to kill us all!”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—!”

The sound of another explosion hits my ears, closer than ever before, and I’m thrown forward. My body quakes as stars burst behind my eyelids and I fight to inhale through the thick, choking smoke. Swallowing thickly, I pray it’s not The Wreck that blows up next.