Crash Land on Kurai – Chapter 3

My room comes alive with the jarring blares of warning klaxons. My hands instinctively fly to my ears to block out the noise, but one hand is a bandaged, aching mess, and the other is caught on something.

“Stop! Stop!” I yell, at the dark room pulsing with red light. The swirling flashes trigger a wave of nausea. I hold it down by closing my eyes and sinking into my bed away from the lights.

What time is it? How long have I been out? What’s going on?

I have no answers.

“This is not a drill. This is not a drill. General quarters. General quarters. All hands man your battle stations.”

General quarters. That’s not good. And my station is on the bridge.

I reach for the zipper of my sleeping bag and peel the cocoon open, wincing at the pain in my arm. It’s my IV, biting into the skin in my elbow. I follow the line to the IV device docked to the wall and pop the cover open. The bag inside is almost depleted, but I have no idea if this is my first bag or not.

Pushing myself across the room, I hit the lights with my left elbow, and the room’s illumination comes up to fifty percent. The call button blinks at me, so I depress it with my elbow as well.

“Please be advised that we’re being approached by unknown ships.” The voice of the captain is time stamped as of three minutes ago, nearly sixteen hours after my lunch fight in the mess hall. I’ve been out for a while. Ayamé’s probably already been here, slept, and been back to work by now.

I unwrap my right hand and flex it. My fingers ache, but the swelling is gone. Good. That means I don’t need the IV anymore. I strip off the medical tape and extract the needle from my own arm. Watching the metal come out of my skin makes my head whirl, so I look away.

“What the hell are you doing?” Kazuo Uchiyama, my family’s resident ex-assassin and head of security, floats in the doorway.

I chuck the IV line away from me and put pressure on the puncture site. “What do you mean, what am I doing? I’m obviously getting ready for something big.” I wave at the flashing lights. He brings the control panel to life and taps until the flashing lights cease. “Thank you. I was afraid they’d bring back my migraine, and I have work to do.”

“Please, Yumi, you know you’re confined to quarters.” Kazuo tends to baby me as if we’re twenty years in the past. When I was just a kid, he used to carry me on his shoulders, and I would grab his long hair and pretend to ride him like a horse. Now his hair is short and shaggy, floating around his head in zero gravity. He’s not an old man, but forty-eight is ancient to me. He’s always been the one who was involved in my life, more than Dad. Dad had meetings to attend and trips to go on. Kazuo is more of a father. I have a lot of guilt over that.

I wave him off. “Confined to quarters? What does that even mean?” I smirk at my own brand of humor.

“It means you have to stay here. Unless you have to go to the bathroom.” He angles his head at me and the IV floating behind me.

I pause in the motion of getting my tablet. This tablet is my baby, specially made with a high definition 360-degree camera that can detach and go anywhere within a two-kilometer range. I was the first to get the prototype. Pretty much all technological advancements are made in my hometown on Orihimé and kept there. Yamato is the center of advanced technology on my world. Everywhere else on the continent is trying to come out of the stone ages.

“Right. I do have to pee.” I slip the tablet into the front pocket of my flight suit. I hate wearing the stupid thing, so I wear it over a pair of shorts and a t-shirt.

“You know what I think happened?” Kazuo asks, coming forward to grab my arm. “You had to go to the bathroom, so you left your quarters. And while you were in the bathroom, the warning bells went off, and you thought you had to report for duty.”

My head clears in a flash. “Yeah. Yeah. That’s definitely what happened.”

“It’s a good thing you also pulled back your hair, grabbed your knife, and put on your boots too before you left.”

I utter a rueful laugh as my boots come floating towards me. “I thought you’d be mad at me. Haven’t you saved me from enough scrapes already?” I open my locker, pulling out my favorite knife, the only weapon I could bring on the mission. We’re allowed only one personal weapon, and it has to be stored unless the ship is at battle stations.

He shrugs. “You’re not half as bad as I was as a kid, you know that. And what you do actually helps people whereas Gen is just a sadistic bastard who loves to insult people and watch them squirm.” He puts the IV back in its dock. “I’m pretty sure he tortures animals in his spare time.”

I shudder to think it. Animals are our most sacred treasure on Orihimé. If this mission to Hikoboshi hadn’t been my destiny, I would have the animal-translation chip and be paired with my own animal back home. Instead, I’m here doing my life’s work.

Or trying to.

“Let’s move,” Kazuo says, pushing me to the door.

I use the bathroom and follow him through the ship. We’re one of only a few people moving about the corridors, so I’m able to slow down at a small Buddhist shrine and offer up a prayer. Through open doors, I spot people strapped into seats and continuing to work on their tablets.

This is what we expected, right? We’d cruise into Hikoboshi space, settle in at the only planet we know that’s capable of sustaining life, and see what we see. Though I kinda figured we’d reach the Hikoboshi system and there would be nothing left. Spaceships like ours were way down my list of possibilities.

When the Great Exodus from Earth happened millennia ago, two generational ships from Japan settled our world, Orihimé, and another settled in this solar system. Orihimé is coming into the modern age finally, now that new settlers from Earth came and tore up the last tyrant who ruled there. He was dethroned before I was born, though, and before I published my exposé, I never felt the empress did us any favors. I was annoyed with her and the whole government. They didn’t listen to us, the people. They didn’t give a crap about what we wanted. I was constantly protesting and publishing investigative work into their nepotism and favoritism. I was an “angry little girl” according to the empress, and it showed in my work. So much for being unbiased. Spending time in jail and really listening to what she had to say changed everything. Now, I’m trying to make up for being stupid and childish by doing my job on this mission.

I wonder what kind of ships are approaching, and my heart rate increases as I imagine the possibilities. Hmmm, they could be star travelers like us. Or maybe they have commerce routes between their planets and moons. Or…

“Where’s your head?” Kazuo asks me, his standard question when I’m too quiet. He’s usually fearful I’m planning something that will get him and the family in trouble.

“Have you ever given any thought to why they never messaged us back?” I grab a ladder rung and propel myself forward behind Kazuo. We’re about twenty meters and three floors from the outer bridge.

“Hmmm, I have given it some thought, yes.”

He slows down in front of me, and I crash into his feet. I’m about to yell at him, give him a good cursing, when I see what he sees.

“It’s possible our signals never made it here,” he continues, his eyes following the object in front of us. “I also thought maybe they didn’t believe us. It could have been that they got our messages, but they didn’t know how to respond or were incapable of responding.” He points to the discarded water packet as it arcs through the air across the corridor. Its lazy tumble seems to meander with no outward force.

“Yeah, it could be anything,” I say, following the packet with my eyes.

That’s not good.

“Are we turning? I don’t feel anything.” This was something they taught us during our training in space, to watch for objects moving erratically. Thrust will cause everything in the ship to shift if it’s not strapped down and will also play with our sense of balance. “We must be moving really slowly for me not to notice. My head is still sensitive from the migraine.”

“Yeah, but you also have a lot of painkillers in your system.”

With the threat of approaching ships, and now our ship moving when we had been parked, I have a very bad feeling about this.

Sirens blare again, and this time I’m able to cover my ears fast enough to stop any deafness. Kazuo looks past me down the corridor to where we just came from. Is he considering going back?

“Strap in and prepare for acceleration. Strap in and prepare for acceleration.” The voice over the ship-wide com is from the commander this time.

“Oh shit.” Kazuo reaches for the ladder along the wall. “Grab on!”

It’s been two weeks since we last had thrust, and I had gotten used to the long, open corridor. Below us, bulkheads begin to close, sealing off levels, and turning us into a giant tower again. The sensation of weight returns to my body, and my feet find the ladder rungs as gravity resumes on the ship… or just the illusion of gravity. Thrust only gives us a fraction of what we usually have. The bulkhead about a meter away closes and becomes a floor.

“I guess we climb the rest of the way,” I say, tapping on Kazuo’s foot.

Making it up two more levels requires us to climb the ladder, open the ladder section of the bulkhead, climb through, close it behind us, and keep going. Little bits of trash and equipment stick to the floor, and my hair lies limply in its ponytail. I miss gravity. I can’t wait to get back to it.

My tablet slides down my front as the thrust increases. I grunt as I pull up to the outer bridge level next to Kazuo and re-orient myself to up and down.

The bridge is sealed, but he’s frantically pressing the call button anyway.

“They’re not going to open the door,” I say, my ‘I told you so’ voice cranked up to high.

Kazuo leaves his hand on the palm scanner, the read-out blinking “Unauthorized” over and over.

“Unauthorized, my ass,” he grumbles. “Who do you think paid for these damn ships, huh?”

I lean against the wall, saving my energy. Who paid for the ships? All the Terrans who had to live on that crap planet before they finally picked up and left. Though my dad always talks about Earth and Nishikyō with such fondness, I can’t help but find the idea of living under domes to be repulsive. Confined places make me nervous. This ship is hard enough to bear.

The door to the outer bridge hisses open and my boss, Chieko Mori, stands in the way.

“Can I help you with something, Uchiyama?” Her gravelly voice drawls over Kazuo’s last name. Between years of talking non-stop fourteen hours a day and smoking the local herb we call ‘cake,’ Chiéko’s voice sounds like someone dragged it through a stone driveway sopping wet. Her sun-worn skin could easily be used to upholster furniture, and her hair turned white ten years too early. She’s a piece of work. Of course, I love her.

I peek out from behind Kazuo, and her face lights up.

“Perfect.” Her lips curl up into a smile, revealing her newscaster white teeth. “You brought my protégé.” She points her finger at me. “I thought you were confined to quarters?”

“When has that ever stopped me?”

Kazuo sighs as Chieko laughs.

“Never. Okay, you stick by me. Shit’s going down, and it’s about to get fun.”

Yes!

I jerk my head at Kazuo, and he gestures for me to lead the way.

It’s time to get back to business.