Crash Land on Kurai – Chapter 5

Am I dead?

“You’re not dead. Shift to the right.”

Huh?

“Your other right, Yumi. Wake up! Open your eyes!”

My eyes fly open as a shock of pain rips through my leg. I cry out, and Kazuo jerks his hands away from a giant piece of metal sticking out of my thigh.

“Okay, that’s not going anywhere.”

“What the…” I swallow and try to concentrate on the world swimming around me. My leg is numb except for the pain, my hands are bleeding and I have no idea why, and I taste the copper of blood in my mouth too. Lights flicker through the bridge, emergency lights on but not illuminating enough. In the station next to me, the crew member in charge of life support is dead, her head slumped forward, her red hair around her shoulders, which means we still have forward thrust. Her name pops into my head, Christina. She loved karate, coffee, and chocolate ice cream.

I’m in shock if I can even assess a situation like this. What about her family? Her friends? She’s dead, and I’m alive, and we’re less than a meter from each other. How does that even happen?

“Hey!” Kazuo snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Stay with me.” He puts his face right in front of mine so I can lock eyes with him. I want to return to the state of a five-year-old and throw my arms around his neck so he can carry me off to the beach for sandcastles and kite flying. “Stay with me, Kako.”

Now I cry — not a lot of tears but a few for the kid I left behind. Kazuo always said I was like a baby deer, a kako, until I turned a teen. It was his pet name for me. My mother loved it. My father tolerated it. I always got the feeling he didn’t trust Kazuo fully though he gave him free rein to watch his children. There’s a lot I don’t understand about my parents. It probably has something to do with Kazuo’s past as an assassin and his rocky relationship with the empress. But I don’t know for sure.

“Don’t cry,” he says, a command with no sympathy. This is how he deals with all emergencies. The sympathy will come later when we’re safe.

“I can’t… I can’t think.” My thoughts are everywhere but in the present.

Kazuo runs his index finger along my forehead, and it comes away bright red. “You probably have a concussion. Look around you. Focus on the now while I get you mobile.”

He pulls a knife from his zippered pocket and cuts off the straps from his seat, wrapping the webbing around my leg above the injury and twisting it tight. I wince, and my head lightens, which is an even worse sensation in low gravity than you can imagine.

“I need comms back now,” Nagaoka says to Mari at the Communications Station. Even from across the room, I can see Shien’s head is bleeding, his eyes unfocused and far away. His boss leans over him to access the console.

“I can’t bring it back until I get power. Looks like we’ve lost connection to the relay. There’s not much I can do from here.” She pushes up her sleeve, revealing a bloody forearm that she’s ignoring. I think I’m going to be sick. “We need to leave the bridge. The only way we’ll know what’s going on in the rest of the ship is to leave here and investigate. Tablets are down which means the network is down too. I’d get better intelligence looking out a fucking window.”

I don’t see Chieko until I focus on a station where a crew member moans with pain, and she’s at his feet attending to his broken leg. Another crew member is in the medical station stores, ripping medkits from their holders on the wall and tossing them across the room. They flip over and over and land in someone’s hands.

“Here!” Kazuo calls out, and one of the medkits flies to him.

“I feel detached.” My lips bumble over the words.

“You’re in shock, and you still have pain killers in your system from that migraine.” He pops open the medkit, grabs a pre-primed needle and jams it into my leg. “Antibiotics first since I have no idea when we’ll get this out.”

“Wait, do you hear that?” Nagaoka holds up his hand, and everyone falls silent.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Someone’s knocking, sir,” I say, pointing toward the bridge door. “Maybe it’s help?”

“Maybe it’s the enemy,” Kazuo says, and I swallow to keep the bile down. We have already elevated these foreigners in their spaceships to enemies. But I suppose that happened the moment they fired on us.

Despair floods me from head to toe. We were supposed to come here and find our long lost brothers and sisters. Clearly, we should have left this branch of the family tree to wither and die.

Nagaoka reaches to the area behind his chair and pulls out a wakizashi, a short katana sword perfect for close quarters fighting. Chieko grabs a stun gun from her cubby above her station. I hold my breath while I fumble for my knife. But it’s zipped into an inner pocket, still in its leather holder.

They wait in the leeway of the door, while another crew member taps into the airlock mechanism with a battery (pretty smart engineering, if you ask me) and triggers it to open.

“Sir, Gen Miyazawa reporting in from the rest of the ship!”

Oh, great. He lived. Not that I really wanted him to die or anything, but yeah. If my brother is dead and that asshole survived, I’m going to be really angry.

Gen edges in through the partially opened door, the swollen cheek I gave him covered in blood.

“Sir, where’s the captain?” Gen’s eyes focus past the commander to the captain strapped into his seat, deader than space. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and I believe it, probably the first ever sign that Gen has any kind of soul.

“Report,” Nagaoka says, putting his wakizashi away.

“Um…” Gen’s Adam’s apple bobs as he makes eye contact with me. I don’t blink. “It looks like we’ve been breached on decks seven through ten.” He pulls his tablet out. “We got the network online below deck three, and I was able to check in. It’s fair to say we lost about sixty people in the four decks that were breached, including the hydroponics labs and food stores there. The drive is online and working intermittently. It comes on and off, so there may be a short in the system. There are a lot of injuries, but our system of redundancies on each deck have worked in our favor. Anyone injured is getting first aid. Life pods are available at your command.”

Nagaoka thinks this over, his hand resting on his short beard. Hydroponics and food stores. Does that mean Ayamé is dead? Those were her areas. Tears slip in behind my eyes, but I push them away. Please don’t let Ayamé be dead.

“Miyazawa,” I call out, and everyone in the room draws a quick breath. “My brother? Ayamé? Where are they?”

He shakes his head. “I’m not sure.”

I close my eyes and count to ten. I have to hope they’re alive.

“The digital telescope is on deck two. Is it online?” Nagaoka asks, and Gen nods.

“I just came from there. The lab is a mess, but we have power.”

“Let’s go.”

Nagaoka leaves the bridge with Gen, and the rest of us stare into space for a moment, not sure what to do or even say.

Chieko takes the battery from the airlock interface and drags it across the room to the communications station. I watch her as Kazuo’s fingers probe my head. He pushes on a soft and tender spot on the back.

“Ah, there it is,” he says, pulling his hand away. This time it’s not bloody. “Good. I don’t know if there’s damage to your brain, but maybe we can get a cold pack on it soon. Not like it matters since your brain is already messed up.”

I blink at him until a smirk crosses his lips. “Ha, ha. How can you joke at a time like this?”

“How can I not?” He opens a bandage, a tube of ointment, and a package of second skin. “This one’s going to leave a scar.” He pinches along my forehead, administering first aid on the gusher of a cut I have there. Head wounds are always worse than they look.

“What about my leg?”

“You’re going to have to suffer that one for a while. I could tear it out and stitch you up, but I’d rather have a doctor do it.”

Chieko curses, lifting a camera and addressing it directly.

“This is Chieko Mori, YNS Director of Public News, and I’m reporting in from the bridge of the Murasaki. We’ve been attacked by native ships in the Hikoboshi system. Communications and navigation are down. The captain is dead. We’re attempting to bring systems back online. Please send beta one backup. I repeat…”

My body cools as I realize what she’s doing. She’s programming the distress jump beacons.

“Bear witness that I am officially declaring an emergency situation aboard the Murasaki, and I’m launching the first distress beacons on my mark. Three, two, one.” She hits a button on the console, the screen beeps and flashes, and a thunk rings through the bridge followed by a hiss. “Beacons one and two are away.” Arc lines shoot out from the outline of the ship on the monitor, going in opposite directions. “Both are on their way to jump distance. Reporting back…” She checks their diagnostics. “And reporting back. They’re away from the gravity well.”

I breathe a sigh of relief, but it doesn’t last long.

Nagaoka races through the door at lightning speed, coming to a screeching halt at his station, and hitting the alert.

“All crew to life pods. All crew to life pods. Evacuate the ship!”