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Miranda waited for that moment when her life would flash before her eyes. She had read about it on holos, heard about it from friends who had slipped beneath the ice, skating on the ponds, and been rescued by a dry out team. She'd never thought that she would experience it. Life on Oreilly 13 was hard, but not necessarily deadly.
Well, at least it hadn't been before. Before the rebels. The rebels took a hard but rewarding life and turned it into an impossible one. One full of danger and death for no good reason.
Instead of her life flashing before her eyes, she saw a warm table, comforting food, and the work of being a farmer's wife evaporate in front of her. Everything she’d spent her life dreaming about becoming slipped into a mist of planetary debris. Then nothing.
She waited. Nothing happened. She could still feel her breath pouring in and out of her lips. She opened her eyes.
The ship was fine. Dented in places, but whole and holding. She had eyes to see through, ears to hear from, and a mouth to scream. Not that she needed to scream in that moment. They glided over the planet, no longer stuck in the upper atmosphere.
“Take this piece of useless junk out of my seat,” Eric shouted back at the crew. The other Ironside slipped wordlessly up, grabbed the pilot by his shoulders and pulled him back to where the rest of them were in the shuttle. He strapped Rycer into a seat before strapping himself back in.
Eric took over the pilot’s place at the helm. Miranda smiled. An uncontrolled giggle erupted from inside her. The laughter was caught by Cash. Soon everyone in the craft was laughing uncontrollably, the tension gone.
“Shuttlecraft to base. Shuttlecraft to landing base, do you read me?” Eric said into the coms. Something dinged back.
“Welcome travelers. Shuttle bay 6 is ready and waiting for your arrival,” said a sweet-sounding voice. It had the broken gate of a prerecorded AI track, with just a tinge of inhumanness that came from old system controls. Eric typed up the trajectory and started the system into the run.
Miranda watched as they descended towards the landing pad. Sludge clouds cut like butter as they moved closer to the planet’s surface. Then it parted into a dark rain. A lightning bolt split the sky, revealing landing pad 6. That’s when she noticed it: the disarray of broken pieces of shuttle craft littering the landing bay.
Eric swore. He tried to lift on the controls to get out of the landing pattern, but it was too late. The Autopilot Landing System on the shuttle had kicked in. For the second time in less than 20 minutes. Miranda feared for her life.
“Was this what military life was like,” she wondered out loud. A series of life and death situations where one thought everything was going to be ok only to find out that it wasn’t. Regret coursed through her.
Miranda watched the world tear apart in slow motion.
As she turned, end over end, pieces of the craft broke apart. Shattered glass shards sprayed the air, lacerating her face. She fell forward with the motion of the shuttle. Up, then down, then forward, up and down again. Bits of crushed vid screens whipped past her head. Metal gears and tubing sprayed streams of dangerous chemicals. She leaned back enough for one to shoot past her. The green liquid melted a hole in the side of the ship.
Chunk.
The spaceship hit something, momentarily freezing the spinning wreck. Then there was a large screech that felt like it came from her very bones. Miranda hung upside down, held in by her straps. She watched in horror as the other half of the ship split in front of her eyes. Down into the darkness it went. The knocked unconscious pilot, the other Ironside, and the second gunner unit fell with it.
There was another long groan as the ship settled into its new weight. Mirand flipped back over with it as it rested on the platform. She sat back, panting,
“You're still alive,” she told herself. “You're still alive.” When she felt like she could breathe again she unhooked herself from the harness that kept her from being a pinball inside an oxandon machine.
“Eric,” she called into what had once been a cockpit. Now it was scrap metal.
“Oscar,” she cried. Her little droid had not been secured. He had gone up to bother Eric during the landing. She lifted random pieces of metal and scraps of things to see if he was trapped or hiding. She stopped every couple of feet to listen for his whine or the others breathing. Oscar was nowhere to be found.
At the cockpit, Miranda found Eric still sitting in the pilot seat. His harness had kept him in place. But his helmet had come off in all the shuffling, and he had a laceration across his forehead.
She searched him for any other bumps and bruises. But he seemed to just have been knocked out by something. There were multiple puncture marks through the shuttle craft’s front window, so it could have been anything.
Miranda made her way over to the gunner seat on what was left of her side of the craft. Cash lay there in a pool of blood, a trickle of it coming from his mouth, his eyes wide in shock.
A piece of the craft penetrating through the middle of his chest. Miranda suppressed a gag by covering her mouth and stepping back. It was like looking at her parents’ dead bodies all over again.
She turned and put her head between her legs, trying to breath, trying to get a semblance of normalcy back. She needed to get over this she needed to overcome death. At least Eric was still alive, even if he was unconscious.
She looked for the other Ironside and the pilot. And the other gun’s gunner. All three of them had been on the other side of the craft and gone down wherever it had gone. Miranda made her way out of the debris.
"Oscar!” She cried, not remembering any of the other names of her companions.
She should have known. At least then she could have prayed for them or mourn their loss.
She stood there on the tarmac looking out over everything that just happened. The only conscious survivor of the crash.
She was so wrapped up in her need to find Oscar, or someone that could help her with Eric, that she didn't notice the phaser fire until she felt the shock of it hit her body, followed by the wave of pain as she passed out.
...
Miranda's eyes felt glued shut. The kind of stuck that hours and hours of sleep building up on the edges and corners could only accomplish. Her head still hurt from the blast that had knocked her out. The bruises and cuts from bouncing around in the shuttle craft had every area of her body transmitting pain to the point that her brain had just blocked it down to an overall dull ache. She felt bruised and battered. She just hoped she wasn't bleeding anymore.
Slowly, she lifted her fingers and rubbed them against the salt on her eyes. She opened them to the world around her.
White filled her vision. Miranda blinked again.
There was nothing. Had she died and gone to heaven? Or was this hell?
Miranda hope that she wasn't in hell. She'd been a believer her entire life. She had never questioned the prophecies or the reality of the galactic transmission. And now all around her was proof of something. She just needed to find out what.
The white was bright, almost blinding, with just enough dark to cause her to squint but not have to shut her eyes again. She removed more sleep. She picked out the bigger chunks from the corners, then blinked a couple of times to get used to the new light. Then she tried to look around again.
‘Well, if this is Heaven, it is pretty lonely,’ she thought. She had always been told that all her friends and family, all the people that she loved most dear, would be with her there. They were all believers, too. That was her one comfort in all of this. That when the rebels got her, she’d be with her family again.
Miranda started walking ahead into the light to see if she could find someone.
Bam. Her face collided with something hard. She put her hands forward to see what her eyes had missed. It felt solid under her touch. She ran her hands up and down as far as she could reach. It remained the same unmoving surface. She counted back her steps. She had taken about five steps before she had hit the wall.
There was no way to tell what kind of wall it was she had run into. Everything around her was endless white in all directions. She thought she could have walked for hours. But no; there she was, pressing up against something. Her hands felt around for a panel or a door. Anything that would separate the white from the white. But there was nothing.
She turned around and walked the other direction. A little less than 10 paces later she hit another wall. She could feel it under her fingertips. Smooth as plastic and bright, but not cold or particularly warm. Nor did it shock like the force field on the ship during decontamination. This was something different. Like being trapped inside a light bulb.
Miranda thought about it and walked five paces to what she now considered the middle of the room, turned, then headed in the other direction.
Five paces. She ran dab smack into another wall. This time she did it at a good pace and smacked her forehead into the thing. The force of it sent her back onto her butt, where she sat staring up at the blank whiteness, realizing that it had no depth, even though it looked out onto eternity.
“This is definitely not Heaven,” she said to herself; and she hoped, very, very badly, that it wasn't Hell, either.
"Is anyone there?" she yelled into the blankness. No response. "My name is Miranda Farmer, and I would like to know where I am." Still sitting on her bottom, Miranda used her heels to turn around again, and looked back at another blank white space. She leaned her head back against the wall.
“How do you know if you're dead or not?” she asked the wall. She had this growing suspicion that if she were dead, she wouldn't feel like a big bruise. Somehow, she had always envisioned death with a perfect body. One that never aged, never got cuts, never got hurt, stayed whole. And, well, it might have pain, but not like this.
No; she believed in Heaven that there wouldn't be any pain because you couldn't get scratched or cut or bleed out or hurt yourself. And she looked down at the bloody mess that was her new uniform. She had been cut to shreds in the crash. She was 100% sure that this was not an afterlife.
“So where am I?” she thought out loud. She knew for one thing that this place was made to look endless, but was in fact, a 10 foot by 10-foot square. And the only thing that she knew that was 10 foot by 10 foot and looked like eternity was a prison cell. They had been part of her holo lessons. Massive planetoids good for nothing else but storing the living dead back before the Enlightenment.
Now, anyone who committed a serious crime was punished in one way.
Reprograming. Miranda had never been to one of the public whippings. Before, when a person was found to have taken more than one life simply for the joy of it, they were paraded out in front of the entirety of the vid screens of the Empire and given a chance to repent for their sins against humanity and the lives that they took needlessly. Then they would be promptly sent on to the next life. Two wrongs, and all that.
The Enlightenment and the invention of mind reprograming changed all that. Prison planets like this one where decommissioned. Whipping gave people a chance to redeem themselves.
Once programed with a new identity they were given the option to go into service for the Empire. This could include builder work, military work, mining, or even terraforming. All were dangerous and deadly jobs. The likelihood of coming back before paying off a debt was small, but at least it was a life. It was sad, really, she thought. There are some people who take life from others and not seek to atone for it. But with the new system they had no choice.
She shook her head. The Empire had gotten rid of prisons over 200 years ago.
During the great Age of Enlightenment, it was determined that there was no crime that was unredeemable. In fact, every crime, every act of violence against another, had been laid out in a code and given a price value that the person would have to pay back to the individual in question. If the person was unable to pay it back, that's when service to the Empire was instituted. It would provide the person in question a job to pay the other person back, a roof over their head, food on the table, and oversight so that they could redeem themselves for their actions. And no dollar amount was ever set higher than the life of the person who was meant to pay it. That's why prison planets like the one that they were traveling to had gone empty and into disrepair.
So, to be in a prison cell was something Miranda never thought would happen to her in her life. It just couldn't happen. But here she was.
“Hello, is anyone there?” Miranda called at the walls. She was tired of pacing them. But she wasn't tired anymore. She checked the cuts and bruises around her body. Nothing was bleeding. They must have been shallow wounds because all of them were scabbed over.
“I would really like to know where I am,” she asked again. No noise reached her ears. If this kept up, she would start to think herself mad. She sighed. She was getting nowhere. Whatever this light was, whatever this room was, it dampened all her senses. And it was starting to drive her insane.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and focused on her breathing. Who knew how long she had been here? Maybe everything had become hopeless. She checked her body again.
Underneath her shredded clothing her cuts had healed to a light red. Her bruises to pink dots. It was possible that she had been here for hours, or days, or even weeks, judging by how closed her cuts were. Or the other possibility was that whatever this place could heal the human body faster than normal. It could have been designed for that, but there was no way for Miranda to know. If this was a med pod on a prison planet, these things were meant to torture and to keep their occupants alive. But if that was the case, where was the food and water?
Miranda looked around. She was thirsty. She ran her tongue against her lips. Her mouth was dry, and her lips were cracked and bleeding from dehydration.
“I miss you so much, Oscar.” she said in Droid. The lights seemed to dim, and then return to its off-putting whiteness. Miranda tried to stop the tears that were sitting at the corners of her eyes. But there just wasn't enough moisture in her body to cry.
Her stomach growled. Who knows how long it had been since she had last eaten? If they didn't feed her or bring her drink soon. She stopped that thought. Well, there might not be a body to find. Miranda shuttered at the thought. No, she wasn't going to die here. Not when she had survived the crash. Not when she had survived the interrogation of that droid. Not when she had survived the rebels who had killed all her family. The rebels deserved to pay for what they had done. And she was the only one alive left to do it. She would find a way out of here. She would find her droid. And she would kick those rebels back to their planetary home worlds.
Miranda took a deep breath.
“Close your eyes and think,” she said. There had to be commands, had to be some way to feed prisoners and let them in and out of the room. She hadn't gotten here all on her own. Even if she had fallen through the ceiling, which she was now betting was only 10 feet above her head, there still had to be some sort of entrance into this place. Miranda felt around the walls again, searching for any edges or cracks anything that might even feel like a door, or drawer, or something. She painstakingly went around every inch of the room, her fingers lightly gliding in all directions. At last, after what seemed like hours, she had still found nothing.