Hayden awakened on his belly, the earthy aroma of salt and clay filling his nostrils. Something tickled his hand. He opened his eyes to a strange, six-legged cross between a lizard and a beetle crawling up his arm.
Disgusted, he shook the creature off and watched it scurry away and dig itself into the sand.
He peered around, confused, until he gradually realized he was in the middle of a desert.
His head and ribs hurt, and his face felt burned. He passed his hands over his torn and scorched uniform searching for any other injuries. Finding none, he sat up.
A synthetic body lay five metres away, face down and inert. He crawled over and rolled it to its back. Its artificial skin was burnt away, revealing the mechanism beneath. The body’s torso and limbs showed extensive damage as well, with one leg missing.
Confused, his eyes followed a path of disturbed earth leading to a small crashed ship, half-buried in a dune and tilted on its side. Smoke rose from the blown hatch. The hull exhibited heavy carbon scoring, suggesting it had been fired on.
Kaine struggled to piece together his fragmented memories. They’d been in a battle, and there was an explosion. He recalled being strapped into the emergency escape pod.
Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to recall more through the dull throbbing in his head. He vaguely remembered a screaming noise, the rush of air around him, and violent shaking.
His gaze returned to the scorched hull of the vehicle to confirm his recollection. Who would do such a thing?
Grasping his head, he shut his eyes to try to remember more.
Pavlovich ordering the ship abandoned was the only reason he could imagine why he now found himself here. His eyes were drawn to the damaged synth.
He recalled one of Cora’s synths entering the bridge.
His eyes widened at the realization that the one he now stared at was her.
With his heart racing, he examined the android, calling out to her, but she gave no response.
Desperate to save her, he painfully stood. Gripping his bandaged ribs, he realized Cora must have administered first aid to him before she collapsed.
He stiffly walked to the burning pod. After tearing a strip from his shirt to tie over his mouth, he entered the blown hatch. Locating the extinguisher, he put out the smouldering fire in the control console.
The smoke stung his eyes, and he couldn’t breathe as he searched the wreckage. Finding what he sought, he exited the vehicle and dropped to his knees in the sand, coughing.
After taking a moment to recover, he rose and hurried back to the fallen android with his prize. He turned her over and inserted the portable storage module he’d retrieved into the back of the machine’s head, hoping he wasn’t too late. The unit’s display indicated something had transferred, but he couldn’t verify if he got everything.
He needed to find a proper computer interface to find out, but smoke still billowed from the destroyed ship, so he had no choice but to wait before he could enter again to determine if anything remained functional aboard.
After putting the storage module on the dog-tag chain around his neck, he sat in the sand and assessed his surroundings. The pod’s survival pack was next to where he awoke, and its medical kit lay open beside it. Tears ran down his cheeks as he imagined Cora devoting her last moments to his care.
He looked out to the surrounding desert, flat and dun-coloured, broken by red rock outcrops worn into tortured shapes by aeons of wind and blowing sand. The air grew cooler as the sun began to vanish behind the distant mountains.
In the fading light, the smoke coming from the ship was diminishing. Rummaging through the pack, he found a flashlight.
Returning to the wreckage, he confirmed his fear. The fire had destroyed everything inside. A steadily beeping distress beacon sent out an automated signal, so he still hoped he might be rescued by the locals.
He swallowed the lump in his throat.
What happened to Scimitar? What provoked the attack?
They were not strangers to the suspicion they encountered in other systems they visited. The isolation imposed on every planet in the Confederation following the failure of the jump gate network served as the perfect spark to ignite decades of built-up discontent into conflict. But fifteen years had passed since the collapse, and most of the former colonies had long since resolved their issues in one manner or another. The ongoing open hostility here was exceptional.
His ribs ached, and from the way the skin on his face felt, he’d suffered radiation burns. He dug through the medical kit to find antiradiation drugs and ointment for his skin.
He didn’t know where he’d crashed; he wasn’t sure which planet he was on. Scimitar was on approach to the inner colony world of Oberon when the attack happened.
Fatigue suddenly overwhelmed him. He found an old imperial jacket in the survival pack, giving him an idea of when the last time was that anyone performed maintenance on the ship. Too tired to retrieve the survival gear and rations from the undamaged exterior storage compartment, he decided to retrieve what he needed in the morning.
Pulling the coat’s collar up against the chill, he used the bag as a pillow and settled in for the night inside the smoke-tinged cabin. A shrinking part of him hoped Scimitar survived and Pavlovich was searching for him. But his spirits wavered. The captain would not have launched the escape pods unless the situation was dire. The chances of Scimitar’s survival were not good.
Concern for his friends and worry he might be found by the same people who shot him from the sky kept his mind buzzing. But exhaustion and the pain medication began to make him groggy, and he drifted into a deep sleep.
