Chapter 2 Aftermath
TWO
AFTERMATH
Sabrina
Rubbing my brow with my right hand, unbuckling my straps with the other, I cough up what feels like a whole lung. But hell, after that wild landing, I almost can’t believe I'm still alive.
The ship is still, and as I bow out of my seat and my knees hit the floor, Tata comes over and grabs my shoulder. “You okay?”
I nod weakly, hacking out, “Yeah. I’m fine.” Shaken, suffocating, but unhurt. “You?” I peer up at her through the smoke.
Her thick black hair was in a ponytail at her shoulder but most of it is now frizzy and tangled down her back. “I’ll be okay,” she says, forcing a rattled smile, then offers me a hand and helps me to my feet.
“Everyone okay?” Weston asks from the cockpit, materializing with Annora under his arm. She leans into him, and I see a big bruise forming on her brow.
“Yeah.” Tata and I nod at him.
“Fine,” Mickie groans from somewhere in the back. He doesn’t sound fine.
“Blat?” Weston calls past us and out toward Mickie’s voice, into the smoke-clouded back of the ship’s bridge.
The dense fog is too thick to peer through. Weston hands Annora off to Tata and pushes past me, heading into it. “Blat, you okay?” he calls again.
I follow him into the gray murk, lifting my shirt simultaneously to cover my nose. Looking around, from what I can see, besides a few plates of metal from the walls and a pile of open drawers and papers, the interior of the ship appears okay.
“Shit,” Weston says as he kneels on the floor ahead of me, waving away the haze.
Blat’s body emerges, and my heart sinks.
Weston swears as he searches for Blat’s pulse, going quiet and holding his fingers to his thick neck.
Minutes seem to pass as I wait for him to say something.
I sense the rest of the crew gather behind me and hold back a curse, refusing to let myself get emotional all of a sudden.
It wouldn’t do anyone any good. And Annora already has emotions covered anyway.
Finally, Weston looks back at us with a raw grief in his eyes. “He’s gone.”
“No…” Annora whispers to my right.
I turn away from her, not wanting her to see my face.
“We’ll put his body in the cold storage down below until we know what to do with him. Poor lug. He was one of the good ones. Mickie, help me,” Weston huffs, threading his fingers through his wavy brown hair.
Blat dying… Well, it sucks. I was closer to Blat than anyone else here, except maybe Tata, and that’s saying a lot.
I don’t get close to anyone. But he was my partner.
I might be strong and wily and able to hold my own, but Blat always kept me safe, watching my back, using his large size to intimidate others away from me.
It was also a lot easier not to see me coming when Blat was provoking all the attention.
I’m going to miss him.
I avert my eyes as Weston and Mickie pick up his body and move him out of the bridge.
Taking a minute to collect myself, I quietly head back to my station for the water and meds under my seat.
No one yet speaks on the predicament we now face.
No one is ready for that, all doing the same as me, heads down, afraid to look at the windows in case the smoke has cleared enough to see out of them.
I push Blat’s death out of my thoughts. It wouldn’t be good for me to dwell when we’re far from safe. We may have survived the skies, but we’ve got a lot more ahead of us if we ever want to get home.
The ship’s vents turn on. I uncap and take a long drink of water from my bottle as I wait for the smoke to clear, and I can breathe without coughing again.
Weston and Mickie return from below a minute later, coughing themselves but looking okay.
“How is it down there?” I ask.
“Except for some overheating in the micro reactors, the ship will be fine,” Weston says.
“What do we do now?” Annora is the first one to ask what no one wants to address. Tata, in the meantime, dabs her brow with an antiseptic cloth, cleaning up the little bit of blood along her hairline. “We should contact Mr. Whicker.”
“We’ll do that next, but first we need to see how badly the ship is damaged outside. We’ll need to fix it for a return trip home.”
“Trip home? Do you think that’s still possible?” Tata asks. “All of our resources are gone!”
“It’s still possible. If we can get enough dark material gel to fuel us,” Mickie argues.
“The Dreadnaut’s gone…” Tata says, trailing off. “Where are we going to get more?”
“Mr. Whicker, obviously.” Annora flips her shoulder-length brown hair back—then, remembering the wound on her brow, pushes her hair forward again. “He was our seller before. If he escaped with his fleet, he might still have some left to trade.”
“Trade for what?” I ask, finally chipping in, twirling my finger around.
“We’d be lucky enough if we could bargain ourselves as hired help on his ships, we all know he uses his artificial intelligence for everything.
It’s more cost effective. Everyone who’s on this planet without juice is going to sell all they have for a seat off of it, especially if help’s not coming for months, if not years. ”
Weston kicks some debris out from under his seat.
“Yeah, well, one thing at a time. I’m with Annora about Mr. Whicker.
We’ll listen to the radio and reach out to him and the others, see who responds, who’s survived.
But like I said, first we need to assess the ship.
Mickie, Tata, with me to the engine room.
Annora, take a moment to get cleaned up, then maybe pick up the shit that’s fallen.
As for you, Sabrina, I want you to put an ear to the channels and see if you can gather more intel on what’s happened.
Someone must have survived. Who knows? The more we know, the better we all are. Let’s get on with it.”
Orders from the boss have us scattering.
As the rest of the crew leaves the bridge, I haul my tense ass to the captain’s seat and drop into it with a huff.
Weston isn’t a big guy, though he’s still bigger than me.
Most people are; I had the luck to be born with a slighter, lither frame.
In space, less mass is almost always a good thing.
It’s saved me from dying through a few episodes of food shortage, that’s for sure.
My legs are my best asset. They’re long and my feet are booted with soles embedded with razors. One kick from me equals agony.
Because of this, Weston’s seat has been molded into a frame that’s comfortable for me.
Throwing on an earpiece, I tune in on the radio and shift through the myriad of signals, receiving mainly static. After a few minutes of nothing, my pulse jumps when I hear the first voice.
“Help! Our ship is on fire, and we’re trapped—”
I pull the earpiece out and squeeze it in my fist. I have to force myself to put it back in.
Except when I go back to listening, the voice is gone. All that’s left is static.
Slowly more voices come through, reaching out, looking for others. Flicking through the channels, I’m inundated with all sorts of people and emotions, each one giving me more of a clue as to what happened. Well, what's happening now. I already know what happened on The Dreadnaut.
A naga happened.
As the smoke finishes clearing and my lungs ease, I risk looking up at the window before me.
A vision of dust, rust, and concrete fills my eyes.
Pulling the earpiece out, I stand and lean forward, my lips parting at what reveals itself beyond the screen.
Old human structures rise on metal shafts and crumbling walls on every side.
The ground we landed on is broken and crammed with debris.
Huge slabs in all shades of gray jut from the ground at diagonal angles, split apart by the impact of the ship.
My gaze rises back to the dilapidated structures.
As far as the eye can see, they span out in every direction, blocking out the sky.
Like jagged peaks, all that’s left of Earth's civilization has been rendered into nothing more than eroded rubble. Having expected to see a forest of green trees, bushes, and plants, I don’t know how to react to… this.
“Rickton City,” Annora announces from behind me, making me jump. She leans forward, joining me in staring out the window. “If we’re going to find what we need to trade our way home, it’s going to be here. Where no one else is looking.”
I peer at her and give her a smile, impressed. “Always thinking one step ahead, aren’t you?”
“I’m the navigator, that’s my job.” She places her hands on her hips. “I pulled up some old maps of this place once we got the coordinates. I wouldn’t be good at my job if I didn’t have several backup plans outside of Weston’s at any given moment. We both know how valuable I am to him.” She grins.
“Cool, but you mean your pussy, right?” I tease.
She pushes my shoulder. “Sabrina!”
Weston and Annora have been sleeping together for months, and although they’ve been trying to hide it, everyone knows. It’s hard to hide something like that in a ship as small as The Wreck.
She sobers again when we both look back out at the enormous, ancient structures our ancestors built. “I hope this plan works,” she murmurs.
“It will,” I reassure her… because what else am I going to do? Like her, I’m hoping for a good outcome. There's no future in giving up. Ever.
“I’m going to miss Blat,” she whispers.
“I…” I swallow and my shoulders fall as my heart clenches. I don’t want to say the words out loud, though do it anyway, for her sake. “Me too.”
Me too.
I’m going to miss him too.