Zirat
Ellory had been five light-years out from Freecloud when her prowler’s comm picked up Harper’s distress signal. A quick course correction had been sufficient to help her get a lock on the beacon, which her sensors had said was on the surface of Zirat, the starship graveyard.
As soon as she had confirmed the distress signal she had called it in. Fenris was sending reinforcements, but they were hours away at best, and there was no way of knowing how long Seven and Harper had been in trouble. Every second mattered now.
She kept her prowler in a hard dive through the dense storm cells that covered the planet’s surface. Her lock on the mayday beacon remained strong and clear, even as wild twists of violet lightning bent around her ship while dancing from cloud to cloud.
Hang on, guys. I’m almost there.
Her prowler shot free of the storm head into the wild downpour beneath it. Even free of the clouds, visibility was near zero. Dawn was many hours away on this slow-turning rock, and the persistent storm cover made its night side as dark as a grave. But the real hazard was the cyclone-level wind and the inescapable freezing rain, which even now had started to glaze the prowler’s fuselage and canopy with ice.
Unassisted landing is definitely out. Instruments, it is.
Ellory engaged the holographic terrain wireframe overlays in her HUD and set her bird’s sensors for a wide range of proximity alerts. There were hills, tree clusters, lakes with dangerously thin ice coverings, and more starship wrecks than she could count. She knew that finding a place to land without damaging her prowler in the process might prove challenging.
Then she confirmed the distress beacon was stationary and less than ten kilometers ahead of her, and she no longer cared about what might be in her way. She pushed her ship’s thrusters to full burn and reached the site in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.
As she had expected, the irregular spacing of trees in the area near the beacon, as well as the presence of several derelict ship hulls and great swaths of swirling mist roaming the surface like ghosts, had left her without a safe place to land.
Let’s make a landing pad.
Ellory raised the tail of her prowler until its nose was pointed almost straight at the surface. She raised her shields, set them for double-front, and then she rotated her ship slowly around a fixed central point while using its particle cannon to vaporize all the trees and melt the defenseless metal debris into discrete pools like a scattering of silver mirrors.
That’ll do.
She leveled the prowler and guided it down to a feather-soft landing. As soon as the struts touched the surface, she released the cockpit’s canopy, grabbed her field medkit, a palm light, and her scanner, and scrambled out of the ship and down the ladder.
Once down, she switched on the palm light and moved quickly away from the ship. The ground was searing hot there, having been swept bare by her particle cannon and left steaming from the boiled permafrost beneath the topsoil.
Where are you, guys?
Ellory kept one eye on her hand scanner and the other on the path ahead, which was lit by the broad but still intense white beam cast by her palm light. Ahead she saw signs of recent battle. Damaged trees. Scorched patches of ground. Banshee winds howled as she pushed ahead.
And then she saw blood in the snow.
She sprinted to it. A footprint about the same size as Seven’s. Traced in crimson. Ellory cast her palm light upon it and followed the trail to a ramshackle lean-to of ship debris that had been arranged to look random. Industrial camouflage—a skill one might expect in an ex-Borg.
Circling around it, she found its entryway wide-open. “Seven? Kee?”
Her palm light’s beam found Seven and Harper, and Ellory gasped.
Seven and Harper sat huddled together beneath their meager cover. She was shivering violently. Her face was pale almost to a deathly gray, and her blonde hair was stringy, wet, filthy, and matted to her head, some of it crusted with ice and flecks of sleet. Her fingertips, clutched so tightly around Harper, were blackened from frostbite, and so were her lips. An ugly wound in her side was wet with fresh blood, as was her tunic around a chunk of metal wedged in her gut.
It was clear to Ellory that Harper had been dead for hours. His face was coated in ice from the rain and bitter wind, but beneath his frozen mask he wore a serene expression.
Ellory clambered inside the lean-to and checked Seven’s vital signs with her scanner. “Seven? It’s Ell. Can you hear me?” Seven didn’t respond, not even to look at Ellory, so the young Trill woman continued her scan. “Seven? You’re hypothermic. You’ve got frostbite on your extremities, and you’ve lost a lot of blood. We gotta get you outta here.”
Quaking from her plunging body temperature, Seven finally looked at Ellory. Her voice vibrated with her tremors, but her resolve was unmistakable. “We. Bring. Harper.”
“Damn right we bring Harper.”
Ellory fumbled through the medkit for the right ampoule to load into the hypospray. Once she had it, she put the device to Seven’s throat and delivered the injection. “That’ll bring your core temperature back up at a safe rate and stop your bleeding until I can get you to a hospital. Can you walk?” Seven shook her head no. “No worries. Get your arm across my shoulders. I’ll put you in the prowler, and then I’ll go back for Harper. Okay?” Seven nodded.
She was about to stand when Seven rasped, “Thank you… for… finding me.”
Ellory couldn’t hold back her tears of relief and sorrow as she gently kissed Seven’s brow, then touched her own forehead to Seven’s. “Anytime. Every time. I promise.”
A mad gust of wind slammed into them, and Ellory knew it was time to go. She helped Seven out of the lean-to, and once they were clear of it they both stood. Watching Seven limp while cradling a broken arm above the metal debris in her abdomen filled Ellory with anger, but also a need to protect. “Easy steps, love. It’s about thirty meters straight ahead to my prowler. Just put one foot—”
Ahead of the duo, at the edge of the palm light’s effective range of illumination, something small, cylindrical, and metallic arced down out of the night, clinked as it bounced off the hard ground, and rolled beneath Ellory’s prowler.
Then it exploded.