Crash Land on Kurai – Chapter 4

“I told you to stay in your quarters for forty-eight hours,” Commander Nagaoka says, blocking my way onto the main bridge. I jump against the weak gravity from acceleration and glance over his shoulder. The bridge is busy, half the staff clustered over the central information display and the rest at their stations.

“I did go to my quarters, but duty calls.”

“We need her,” Chieko interrupts. “She’s my right hand, the person I’ve trained for eight years to do this job. I trust no one else on the bridge. Do you?”

“I don’t trust her period. How can you?”

Chieko scoffs. “You must be joking. Yumi has gone to jail to protect her sources. She’s the first person on the scene for every story. I trust her with my life.”

My chest rises, and I smile. Hearing my boss go to the mats for me is the best confidence boost.

“I’m the only one on staff that understands the bridge and what will happen in here. Please, Commander.” I swallow. Gotta bring out the big guns. “I apologize for causing such a ruckus in the mess hall. I… I should have kept my hands to myself.”

Both Chieko and Nagaoka stare at me with their mouths open.

“What?” I look between them both. “I can apologize when I’ve done something wrong.” It was wrong to hit Gen in the mess hall. I should’ve jumped him on his way to his quarters instead.

Nagaoka moves aside. Victory! I edge past him and make my way onto the bridge. During training, I was coached on what each bridge station did, how the crew members operated each console, what data they were in charge of, everything. Honestly, if I had to run the ship, I could probably do it with a manual, not that I had the desire to do so. All the people here are my schoolmates, and they trained to do these jobs, not me.

My role is to capture what happens here for the archives. It’s one thing to determine how a mission went based on data and the accounts of people involved, but it’s another to see the action unfold on video. We can watch footage from static cameras, and there are many all over the ship, but my point of view is important. I know it is. I can ascertain importance faster than any computer. I can be where the story takes place.

Taking stock of the situation from the sidelines, I pull out my tablet and camera. I make a mental note of everyone at their stations, repeating their names in my head — Ryoko, Mari, Jonathan, Shien, Christina… On and on until they’re stuck and I can say them without stumbling. Chieko hops over to the captain’s station where she’s expected to be, stopping to peer over his shoulder at his console.

The navigation station is where I begin my tour of the situation. We had been turning and moving at a slow acceleration, so I wasn’t wrong about that. The read-out on the navigation display shows us nearing the third planet of the system, with two ships inbound. We’re between the third planet and its moon, arcing along in a slow crawl.

“Where did those ships come from?” I ask, zooming in on Ryoko, the crew member here. She and I go way back to elementary school. Though we didn’t run in the same circles, we always smiled at each other and said hello. During one of the many interviews I did during our two-month haul to get here, she laughed and talked about her family’s farm in the central part of the continent. She was a natural at storytelling, relating how the goats escaped the fence, and her poor parents, transplants from Earth, had no idea how to handle them. They’d grown up under domes, never having seen the sky or even an animal.

“They both came out of orbit from the third planet of the system.” She swipes the screen and shows me more data. “We detected a distress call from the planet’s moon about three hours ago.”

“A distress call? Do we have it saved in memory?” I curse at my bad luck. If I hadn’t been confined to quarters, I would have been here to know this!

Ryoko jerks her head across the room at Communications. “They’ll have it. Looks like both the planet and moon are inhabited, and we thought it was only one.”

Another mystery solved. One ship came to this system hundreds of years ago, so like our own system and planet with two moons, we figured the planet would be inhabited. But as we neared the system a month ago, we obtained more data on the two moons. One of the planet’s moons can sustain life too and has its own atmosphere and ecosystem. The planet it circles is bigger than both Earth and Orihimé, the moon a little smaller. I can only imagine what the tidal forces here are like.

“So, we have two ships inbound and that’s it. Is that right?”

“Yes. And we’re on our way to the moon.”

Moving now is such a bad idea. We should stay in one spot so we don’t look threatening, but I’m not the one captaining the ship. I’m just here to get the facts.

I turn, being careful to hold onto the railing since thrust gravity is low, and make my way to the next station. Here, the crew member checks life support functions and prepares the life pods just in case things get dangerous quickly.

I slink around the outskirts of the bridge, skimming over other stations and stopping at Communications. Positioning the camera over everyone’s head, I angle it to point down at this station’s monitor. Shien, the communications crew member, is running through algorithms, trying to clean up an incoming signal as much as possible. He was in my algebra classes, his long fingers always flying through problems faster than the teacher could follow.

On his screen, he’s split the incoming calls, one on each side. To the left, a Japanese man wearing a blue kimono, his hair long and wild, his face broad, stutters and stops, his lips moving in jerks. At least we’re in the correct system. To the right, two younger Japanese men dressed in red kimono address the camera in the same fashion.

“Why can’t we hear any audio?” I ask Mari, the head of Communications, but she ignores me, pointing to an area of data on the console.

“Here. Try that one.” She crosses her arms and turns her head to me. “We’re trying to clean up the video feed. We’re only getting a few frames a second, and it’s causing the video to stutter. If we can’t get it to work, we’ll freeze it.”

I glance from the signal waveform on the screen to Shien’s fingers dancing over the console. I can see there’s audio, and I’m desperate to hear it. What are they saying? Will I even understand them? This is the kind of thing Shintaro loves though his specialty is genes. He was always great at learning other languages, spending time in the European quarters back home and wooing the old ladies there with his broken Italian.

“What’s the delay? How long has it been since they’ve responded to us?” I wish I hadn’t been confined to quarters. I’m running to catch up.

“We haven’t said anything yet. They’re too busy arguing with each other to listen to us.”

My skin cools, and a million questions bubble up in my head. But both Shien and Mari are consumed with their work, and if I butt in now, they’ll only be angry.

“Can you send me all the audio? Including the distress call?”

She pulls her tablet from her front pocket, taps a few times, and my tablet responds with the ping. I leave my camera where it is and pull off to the side to look at the data. First the distress call. There’s audio plus a translation line.

“To the new ship that’s entered our system, please come get us. We’ve been exiled on Kurai for twenty years. We need food and protection, but we can provide technology in return. Please. We cannot stay here any longer.” And it repeats. Chills course down my back. Exiled? How and why? I can hear the desperation in his voice, and though the words are accented differently, I understand the meaning without needing to read the translation line. Good.

A burst of static and activity catch my attention. The video and audio at Shien’s station are working.

“Yes! I’ve got it fixed,” Shien says, a wide smile replacing the look of pinched concentration. But his smile fades quickly.

“I can’t believe your lies,” the man in red yells at the camera. “I can see your new ship with my very eyes. How dare you go against the treaty and build warships?”

“We did nothing of the sort,” one of the men dressed in blue responds, the translation scrolling across the screen in real time. “Do you deny this is your ship? We’ll blow it to pieces if you don’t come clean right now.”

“Shit.” Mari steps away from the console. “Sir? I think we have a problem.” The captain rockets our way, coming up short just a few centimeters from slamming into us.

“Open a channel,” he says, pointing to Shien, but he freezes as one side starts up again.

“Go ahead and blow up your own ship. That would finally show us that you keep your word.” The man in red scowls. “Have you no honor? You break the treaty. You continually lie about your corporation’s advancements. You can take your ship and shove it up your ass. In fact, we’ll be happy to blow it up ourselves.”

“Wait!” Shien dives forward at the console, opening an outside line and broadcasting on the same frequency. “This is the Orihimé science vessel, Murasaki, hailing the two ships of the Hikoboshi system. Please stand down.”

“What is this new lie? Orihimé? Murasaki? Ancient stories will not dissuade us from enforcing the treaty.” The man in red leans into the camera on his end, and I hold my breath, my heart racing in my chest. His eyes widen. Is he looking at the video we’re sending to him? What does he see?

“Too late.” The men on the other end of the conversation switch off, and sirens in the ship blaze to life.

“Incoming!” Jonathan, at Operations, screams. “Two missiles of some kind on approach. Prepare for impact!”

The captain rockets for his post. “Battle stations. Full thrust. Get us out of the gravity well.” He slams into his seat, strapping in. My head swivels around as I watch everyone get into their seats as quickly as possible.

My seat is across the bridge with Kazuo.

“Go!” Mari yells at me as she straps in.

Panic surges through me as I grab my camera in one hand, tablet in the other, and push off from the wall, making a giant leap in the low-thrust gravity.

“Full thrust,” Ryoko calls out.

My body slams into the floor, my head hitting the central operations command station and something in my chest cracking. The bridge is a circle which is supposed to make it easier to get from one area to another. But at full thrust, I weigh almost twice what I weigh planetside, so my fall from grace straight to the floor is enough to stun me briefly.

“Give me a view outside!” the captain shouts, and I turn my face from the floor, peeling it off the smooth plastic composite centimeter by centimeter. I open my fingers and allow my camera to roll from my hand.

On the central screen, the moon looms up in front of us. We’re not going to escape the gravity well.

Shit. This is the only ship heading to this system for five years. We’re supposed to arrive, observe for a month or two, and return to Orihimé with data. The empress herself wanted to be here for the first landfall. How did this happen? This is a science vessel with limited armaments.

Limited, as in none.

The captain punches the console on his chair, talking straight into the camera there. “This is Captain Imoto of the Murasaki. We are a peaceful science vessel here to observe and speak with the citizens of Hikoboshi. Call off your missiles now! We cannot defend ourselves.” He waits as the screen shows the incoming missiles bearing down on us.

I reach out to the central command station and pull with all the strength I have in me. One meter. I secure my feet against the console and push. Two meters. I’m only one meter from Kazuo. He unstraps from his chair, his arms moving incredibly slow, his cheeks drooping in the thrust gravity. I struggle to a crawling position, forcing my knees forward, reaching out for his hand.

No answer.

“Brace for impact in twelve, eleven…”

I hear someone sob; I don’t know who.

Kazuo’s hand meets mine, and he pulls me to my chair.

“Eight, seven..”

I sit in my seat, struggling with my arms to at least get the shoulder restraints on.

“Four, three…”

“Remember the plan,” Kazuo says to me as his buckle clicks back in place. I breathe out as my buckle misses and brings up a hysterical fit from my chest. One side will have to do. I grab the shoulder straps with all the strength I have left.

“Stick together. Family first.”

I scream as the ship shifts sideways and the power goes out.