Valley of Destiny (Return to Destra #3)

Chapter 1

Cleo

The alarm’s shrill wail cut through the escape pod like a blade, and I was already cataloging everything wrong with our situation before terror caught up and tried to claw its way up my throat.

Red emergency lights strobed across the cramped interior.

The hull rattled hard enough to make my teeth ache.

These were designed for the worst, I reminded myself.

They were made to withstand things a ship could not, but I couldn’t keep my gaze off the readout on the control panel in front of me.

It showed at least six critical systems already in the red, with more flickering toward failure every second.

“Dr. Vasquez?” Mierva’s voice cut through the chaos, steady as she held the straps of her safety harness. “You’re right next to the control panel. What’s our status?”

I forced myself to focus on the numbers scrolling across the screen instead of the memory of Zara’s eyes on the comm screen.

Her expression had been grim as she pointed to the atmospheric readings.

We need to land before the storm reaches full intensity, or we could be caught in an electrical discharge that will fry every system on this ship.

Which was, of course, exactly what happened.

It was right around then that all hell broke loose.

Captain Torven Korvath tried to take the ship down before the storm tore us apart, since there was no getting out of it at that point.

Between electromagnetic interference, an insane electrical storm, and good ol’ gravity, we were definitely going to visit the surface of the planet that could be the original Destran home world.

It just wasn’t clear if we’d be alive to see it.

The captain ordered everyone into their escape pods.

Three to a pod. I’d been assigned to number three with the two Destrans who might be the last people I’d ever see.

I probably should have conjured something affirming and positive.

“Thruster control is shot,” I said, keeping my voice level through sheer force of will. “Life support is holding for now, but the heat shielding took damage during launch. And our trajectory…” I swallowed. “Well, it’s not ideal.”

“Not ideal.” Baleck’s deep voice held a note of dark amusement from where he was strapped in across from me.

The orange and yellow patterns on his skin shifted with stress, but his expression stayed calm.

“That’s one way to describe plummeting toward a planet through an electrical storm in a pod held together by optimism and outdated technology. ”

“At least if we die, we won’t have to file incident reports,” I muttered, fingers already moving across the panel to try rerouting power from nonessential systems. Not that there were many of those left. “And it’s not that outdated.”

Baleck actually laughed at that, a short bark of sound. “I like you, human. You’ve got a practical outlook on mortality.”

“Years of therapy and a healthy distrust of corporate safety protocols.” I frowned at the scant control access and managed to get the secondary stabilizers online, though they immediately started whining with the strain. “Baleck, right? Communications specialist?”

“Yes.” His skin flickered with streaks of red, the Destran equivalent of high anxiety. “Though I was not on duty for this shift. Not that it matters. If Benda couldn’t get a transmission out, I couldn’t have, either.”

The pod rocked violently again and a small ceiling plate flapped open, showering us with sparks and bitter-smelling smoke. Mierva coughed and shook her head.

“We need to seal that panel before we lose atmosphere,” she said, unbuckling her harness despite the way we were being thrown around like dice in a cup.

“Mierva, no!” I reached out to stop her, but she was already moving. She pulled a maintenance kit from the wall storage and grabbed hold of the overhead handrails to steady herself.

“I’ve been on ships since before you were born, child.” Her skin was a calmer blue-green despite the circumstances, her voice carrying the kind of authority that made you listen. “I know how to patch a leak.”

The pod lurched again, hard enough that my stomach tried to relocate to my throat.

Through the small viewport, I caught a glimpse of the planet below.

Dark, churning storm clouds covered most of what I could see, lit from within by constant flashes of lightning.

A mountain range loomed, looking like teeth waiting to bite.

“How long until impact?” Baleck asked. His hands moved to check his own harness, testing each strap with methodical precision.

I glanced at the readout and felt my mouth go dry. “Three minutes. Maybe less if we hit another atmospheric pocket like that last one.”

“Three minutes.” Mierva finished sealing the sparking panel with practiced efficiency and pulled herself back to her seat. “Plenty of time.” She licked her lips. “My mate, Derrin… We quarreled before I left. And now, I’ll never see him again.”

“Don’t say that,” I said firmly and automatically. She was probably right, but I was a “defiant little shit,” according to my father, and did not give up easily.

Mierva smiled weakly. “We’re both historians on Zurian’s Sola. I was excited to study what might be ancient Destran architecture, lay the foundation of an archaeological expedition, not…” She gestured at the chaos around us. “This.”

“Yeah, well. This wasn’t what I had in mind, either.” I fought with the controls, trying to adjust our angle of descent. The pod responded sluggishly, systems degrading faster than I could compensate. “I specialize in not dying in escape pods, but I’m a little out of practice.”

“First time?” Baleck asked.

“Sort of.” I didn’t mention that the “first time” had been vastly different, but no less harrowing, and it had also involved Zara.

She’d kept me calm by reciting atmospheric composition data until rescue arrived.

Thinking about Zara now, wondering if she’d made it to a different pod, if she was somewhere out there in this storm, made my chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with the failing life support.

The pod bucked violently and began to spin. Well, we’d lost the secondary stabilizers. I clenched my jaw and concentrated on trying not to vomit.

“We’re going to hit hard,” I said, abandoning the useless controls to grip my harness straps instead. “Brace for impact. I swear to fucking god, this is not how I planned to die.”

“You had a plan?” Baleck said dryly, but I saw him helping Mierva double-check her restraints with gentle efficiency. For all his sarcasm, he clearly cared about the older researcher and historian.

The viewport showed nothing but clouds now, dark and roiling.

Lightning flashed close enough that I could feel the static electricity raise the hair on my arms. The pod’s emergency systems screamed warnings that I couldn’t do anything about.

Altitude dropping. Speed increasing. Hull integrity at forty percent.

“Cleo.” Mierva’s voice cut through my spiral of calculations. When I looked at her, she gave me a small smile. “Whatever happens, it’s been a pleasure being on this expedition with you and Dr. Rivers. Until now, that is.”

“Same to you, Mierva,” I said, forcing the words past the fear lodged in my throat. “Destrans and humans make a good team. At least, we would have.”

Baleck closed his eyes and appeared to be trying to calm his mind. For whatever good that would do. “We’re not dead until we’re dead.”

The clouds broke.

For one crystalline moment, I saw what we were falling toward. Mountains, sharp and unforgiving, covered in ice and snow. The peaks looked like claws reaching up to snag us from the sky. And we were spinning too fast, coming in at the wrong angle, the pod’s belly exposed and vulnerable.

“Hold on!” I shouted, though there was nothing else any of us could do.

The impact, when it came, was everything I’d feared and nothing I could have prepared for. Metal screamed. The harness cut into my chest and shoulders hard enough to steal my breath. My head snapped forward and back, and somewhere in the chaos I heard Mierva cry out.

We hit once, bounced, hit again. The world became a confused blur of noise and motion and pain. Something shattered. More alarms joined the cacophony, if that was even possible. The pod tumbled and rolled, and I lost all sense of up or down.

Then stillness.

My ears rang in the sudden quiet. The emergency lights still flickered, casting everything in hellish red. I tasted blood where I’d bitten my tongue.

“Everyone alive?” I managed to croak.

“Define alive,” Baleck groaned from somewhere to my left. “I’m conscious but reconsidering that as a positive development.”

“Mierva?” I fumbled with my harness, my fingers clumsy and shaking. The buckle finally released and I nearly fell as the pod’s angle became apparent. We were tilted at roughly forty-five degrees, nose down. “Mierva, answer me.”

“I’m here.” Her voice sounded strained, pained. “My arm. I think it’s broken.”

I pulled myself toward her, using the seats and wall panels for handholds. The pod’s interior was a disaster. Broken equipment, scattered supplies, a thin haze of smoke that made my eyes water. Through the cracked viewport, I could see rocks and sky that looked wrong somehow. Too clear. Too quiet.

“Let me see.” I reached Mierva and carefully examined her arm. It was definitely broken, the forearm bent at an unnatural angle. She was breathing through her teeth, her skin flickering with vivid distress patterns. “I’m going to need to splint this before we move you.”

“Where are we?” Baleck had managed to free himself and was checking the control panel with single-minded focus. “And please tell me we have heat, because I can already feel the temperature dropping.”

I glanced at the environmental readout and felt my heart sink further. “We’re in a mountain range. Our heat system is running on emergency backup, which gives us maybe six hours before we freeze.”

Six hours to figure out where we were, assess our injuries, and find shelter. Six hours before the cold killed us just as surely as the crash could have.

“Perfect.” Baleck’s skin patterns had settled into grim determination. “So we survived one disaster to die slowly in another. Consistent, at least.”

I found myself smiling despite everything. “You’re a real optimist, you know that?”

“It’s been mentioned.” He moved to help me with Mierva, his large hands surprisingly gentle as we braced her arm. “What do you think, Cleo? Any chance that some of the communications equipment can be fixed?”

I looked at the dark control panel, then at the hostile landscape beyond. Somewhere out there, maybe, was the rest of the crew. Zara. People I cared about, people I needed to know were safe.

But first, we had to survive the next six hours.

“I can’t fix it,” I said, reaching for the emergency kit and hoping it wasn’t as damaged as everything else, “But they’ll send a rescue team. All we have to do is not die until they get here.”

Baleck laughed again, that dark, amused sound. “How will our rescuers have any better luck landing on this cursed planet than us?”

“That’s their problem,” I said. “We have more than enough of our own.”