Chapter Two

He could smell smoke. By the time they reached G deck, he could see it, a black cloud filling up the corridor. The door to the engine room was open, although it didn’t seem to have been damaged by whatever had taken place beyond it. Inside, red lights were flashing, and the smoke was so dense the captain couldn’t see where it was coming from, much less how bad the damage was.

Zachery, knowing the engine room like the back of his hand, found his way to his station despite the smoke and started barking questions at the ship’s audio interface program. As he did, the captain heard a voice coming from somewhere in the surrounding miasma.

“Zach? That you, man?”

“Rick?” shouted the captain, making his way towards the voice. “Where are you?”

“Over here. On the floor. Shit, I think I’m bleeding,” Rick called out and coughed.

“Keep talking. I’m coming towards you now,” said the captain. His eyes and throat were stinging. “Where are you bleeding?”

“My hand and…I think, my face? I can’t tell. My head fucking hurts.”

The smoke was so thick in this section of the room the captain ended up almost stepping on him. He was lying against the wall, evidently having been thrown back against it, his right hand cradled in his lap and his clothes singed.

“Hi, Captain,” he said, smiling weakly. The left side of his face was covered in blood, most of which issued from a cut on his scalp—although, to the captain’s disquiet, some seemed to be leaking from the vicinity of his left eye, which was squeezed shut. “How’s it going?”

“All the better for seeing you.” The captain knelt down and checked him for serious injuries before picking him up.

By the time they reached Zachery, the alarms had stopped blaring, and the smoke seemed to be dissipating. The engineer took one look at Rick and went several shades paler.

“Jesus, kid, what happened to you?”

“I got blown up,” Rick croaked.

“Yeah, I see that. What were you doing down here, dummy?”

“Looking for you, asshole. Wanted to let you know I’ve got a new batch of w… of fresh, healthy vegetables,” Rick amended, glancing up at the captain.

“What seems to be the problem, Mister Halberstam?”

Zachery shook his head, patting the control panel as though The Prayer were a sickly pet. “Can’t tell you that until I shut her down and get up inside her. She’s stable for now. The antimatter generator’s working fine, so there’s no danger of us all being oblit…”

“Captain!” came Antoine’s voice over the comm. “Where are you? Something’s happened to the ship. We’ve started descending.”

Rubbing his chin, Zachery said, “Seriously? Huh. That’s weird. The anti-grav systems are still operating, and there’s nothing wrong with…”

“Zachery,” the captain interrupted, “my ship appears to be losing altitude. It is logical to conclude that if this state of affairs continues, it will crash-land. Regardless of the root of this crisis, do you have a solution to the immediate problem?”

Zachery blew out his cheeks. “Not really, Captain. Her emergency systems were one of the things I shut down to make sure she doesn’t explode again. It’s not safe to turn them back on until know what caused the first blast.”

“Right. Crash-land it is, then. Come with me.”

Rick tugged on the captain’s lapels as they left the engine room. “Are we all going to die?”

“Nah,” said Zachery. “Even without any power, the ship’s designed to glide for one hundred kilometres before hitting the ground. We’ll be fine, so long as we don’t land on anything hard.”

That was a very optimistic take on the situation, which the captain decided not to correct.

The elevator wouldn’t work, so they ran up the stairs to reach the medbay on C deck, where the captain left Zachery to tend to Rick. This wasn’t The Prayer’s first forced landing, and he knew from personal experience that the medbay was one of the safest places to be. Sprinting, he made his way to the bridge and found the rest of the crew were already present, talking over one another from their stations while Antoine tried to maintain order.

“Quiet!” the captain roared. “Someone tell me how long we’ve got until we touch down.”

“At this rate, twelve minutes,” said Antoine. “We’re currently over marshes, but there’s solid ground coming up ahead. More good news; the autopilot’s not working. For some reason, Khali is happy about this.”

“It’s nice to feel useful for once,” said Khali from her pilot’s seat, her gaze fixed on the screen in front of her.

“Corporal Bansal, can you get us down in one piece?” the captain asked, sliding into his beloved chair.

“Hope so!” she said. “You should all strap in. It’ll be bumpy.”

It was. If they’d been any higher or going any faster, and if the grassy plain they landed on hadn’t been smooth and devoid of obstacles, it might have been calamitous. The landing gear gave a tortured squeal as it connected with the ground. They bounced, once, twice, and the bridge shuddered beneath them. Anything that wasn’t strapped down—Thomas’s mug, Antoine’s clipboard, Moxie’s chew toy—was thrown across the room. After what felt like hours, they stopped moving.

“Is anyone hurt?” asked the captain.

“I think I lost a filling,” said Irene, her hand over her mouth. Across the room, Thomas and Mehtab were both retching.

“Get to the medbay,” the captain told her. “Take those two with you, and check up on Rick and Zachery while you’re there. Antoine, damage report. Echo, more coffee, please.”

✩✩✩

The damage to The Prayer’s exterior was negligible. Nothing that couldn’t be repaired over the course of a few weeks with the tools they had to hand.

Her engines were a different matter.

“The good news is that I can keep the life support systems operational,” Zachery told them. He stood at the front of the room, having concluded a comprehensive rundown of the sequence of mechanical errors that had led to the explosion, which the captain suspected few of his crew had been able to follow. “The bad news is that I can’t get her spaceworthy. Not with the tools I’ve got.”

“We’re stuck here? Forever?” said Irene, her face taut with dismay. She had been born in space and had spent most of her life on one ship or another. The thought of being permanently marooned planetside must have been bone chilling.

“Not necessarily,” said Rux.

The captain looked towards the latest addition to his crew: a handsome, green-skinned man standing quietly at the back of the room. While the ship had been going down, he’d apparently been dozing in one of his many feline shapes, and had only woken up when their harsh landing had thrown him into the ceiling. He looked no worse for the wear, any injuries he had sustained having healed already.

A remarkable body indeed, thought the captain, his gaze lingering on it.

“What’re you talking about, freak?” Zachery demanded.

Rux pointed to the hologram Zachery had activated: a minutely detailed depiction of the ship’s engines and all their components. “That part—the small one in the shape of an octagon. What did you call it?”

“The DG ring,” said Zachery.

“And—if I have followed you—that is the part that broke, yes?”

“A lot of parts broke,” Zachery said, impatiently. “Or snapped, or melted. The DG ring just happens to be one of the most important, and also the only one I absolutely cannot fix. I couldn’t even fix it if we were on Earth. We need a new one.”

“I believe I know where you might find one,” announced Rux, turning to address the room at large. “As I have mentioned before in passing, my people’s technological capabilities far outstripped your own. Despite our tragic decline, much was left behind. Many of our cities are home to warehouses and laboratories full of marvels still in perfect working order, thanks to the foresight and unparalleled skill of…”

Cutting him off, the captain said, “You believe that there might be something on this planet that could help us? Something that could save my…our ship?”

“Yes. In fact, I know exactly where one such ‘DG ring’ might be. There is a research centre in…”

Rux uttered a string of clicks and hisses the captain recognised as the name of the abandoned city which had been their original destination.

“It was one of our main industrial hubs, and its factories assembled our spacecraft,” Rux continued. “Walking there would take you several hours, but the terrain is not challenging. I would be glad to show you the way.”

After a moment’s internal deliberation, the captain addressed the crew: “The Prayer is our chief asset. We need her for our food, our water, our transport, and our safety. Returning her to full functionality must be our top priority. In pursuit of this goal, half of us will remain here to implement what repairs they can with the tools we have available. The other half, including Zachery and Rux, will accompany me to the city, where we will scavenge whatever parts we can and return with them as soon as possible.”

Thomas had his hand in the air. “I want to come with you, Captain.”

“Very well. Any other volunteers?” he asked, knowing which hands would go up.

In addition to Zachery, Rux, and Thomas, his team ended up including Antoine, Echo, and Irene. Doubtless, Rick would have volunteered himself had he not still been recovering in the medbay.

✩✩✩

“No fair,” Rick whined when the captain visited and told him of their plans.

He lay in one of their two medical pods, a transparent cylinder that allowed the captain to see the full extent of his injuries. His hand had sustained second-degree burns, with first-degree burns up to his elbow. Ugly as it looked, it wouldn’t take the pod much more than a day to heal, if all went well. His cracked ribs and the welt on his scalp would both mend within twenty-four hours. What worried the captain was Rick’s left eye. It had been punctured, and all he could see out of it were murky shadows. Although The Prayer’s medical pods were well maintained, like most of the ship, they were old and second-hand. While military vessels were equipped with Class 1 pods, able to perform any and all operations less complex than brain surgery, merchant vessels were only legally required to fit Class 4 pods, best suited to repairing cleanly broken bones and closing flesh wounds. Working with a limited budget, the captain had opted for a Class 3, which could handle burns as well. He didn’t know how well it would work on an eye.

“Can’t I come with you? I won’t slow you down, Captain. I promise,” Rick pleaded.

The captain lay a hand on the glass separating them, wishing he could touch his face. “That’s not the point. Rick, has it occurred to you that you and Zachery are the only members of this crew who aren’t expendable? No one else can fix our engines, and no one else can grow our food. It would be irresponsible for me to put you in harm’s way unnecessarily.”

“Zach’s going with you,” Rick pointed out.

“He has to. We’ll be scavenging parts; he’ll know best what to look for.”

Pouting, Rick subsided. “How long before you’re back?”

“If all goes well, less than two days. If we’re delayed for any reason, I’ll contact the ship and let you know.”

Zachery stomped into the medical bay, already suited up and ready to go. He leaned against the pod and grunted, “Hey, shrimp. Thought I’d check in on you before we left.”

“Aw. I’m touched. Gimme a kiss, you asshole.”

Zachery’s lips left an imprint on the glass. “You get better quick, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Wouldn’t want you to have to fuck a one-eyed freak.”

“My first boyfriend was a one-eyed freak, I’ll have you know,” Zachery retorted.

“Not as pretty as me, though, right?”

“No. Not half as pretty.”

Rick waved through the glass as they left.

The captain studied his engineer’s face.

“Mister Halberstam, I’m sure the thought hasn’t crossed your mind that you are in any way responsible for Ricardo’s current condition?”

Zachery snorted. “Captain, I’ve got one job on this crate, and that’s to keep her from blowing up in our faces. I fucked up.”

“Actually, the job for which I hired you was to keep The Prayer running for the duration of a one-and-a-half-year journey to Pluto, with regular access to repair stations at which you might be supplied with whatever tools and spare parts you required. I didn’t hire you to keep the ship running for almost five years single-handed, and the fact that you have managed to do that is…”

“Cap, I get that you’re being nice. Could you knock it off? S’only making me feel worse,” said Zachery. Then he pulled him into a tight bear hug. “You want to be nice, tell me that I can fix this.”

“You can fix this,” said the captain, stroking his hair.

The others were waiting for them outside. Rux had transformed into a muscular, ox-sized quadruped, and acquiesced to their strapping various supplies and pieces of equipment to his back.

“Good luck, Captain,” said Khali, who would remain in charge while he and Antoine were gone. “Don’t get kidnapped by aliens again.”

“I’ll do my best,” he assured her, and the seven of them set off towards the city.