The Retreat (The After Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

“Please don’t throw me out,” Deimos begged.

“. . . brace and open the chutes before landing, using the landing engines to do the rest,” Elara declared triumphantly. She stared at the controls for a few seconds. “We don’t have any landing engines!”

Phobos attempted to soothe her from his position behind Romy.

She ignored them, unable to take her eyes from panel above her.
172 kilometres
. She was frozen, unable to take her gaze from the gauge, barely able to breathe as various forces decided their fate—to die, or to live.

“Velocity is dropping fast.” Thrym flicked a series of switches. “We just need one damn thruster to work.”

“I’ve tried everything I can think of.” Elara fell into a panic.

Not a good sign, Romy thought.

Thrym and Elara’s arms were a blur in Romy’s peripherals. But even she couldn’t look away from the gauge.

168.

“We’re nearly coasting.” Elara’s voice broke. “Come
on
.”

They just had to lose the extra velocity. Then they would survive. Orbit would save them.

163.

Romy didn’t want to watch anymore. She squeezed her eyes shut. There were still eleven more years in her lifespan! She’d nearly died once today already; twice wasn’t fair.

“We’ve lost the extra velocity,” came Thrym’s quiet voice.

They had? Romy’s wrenched open her eyes and peered at the gauge.

Her heart sank.
158 kilometres.

“Just too late,” she responded in a hollow voice.

It began as a small pull in Romy’s abdomen. But the immediate follow-up was exponential as gravity rapidly took hold faster than her mind could comprehend. Soon, it wasn’t just that they were dropping; it was like a gigantic hand was throwing them to the ground.

“Two lousy kilometres. Someone must hate us,” Deimos shouted over the groan of their craft.

“Earth Protocol!” Phobos called.

Their voices cut in and out, distorted in the hammering and wild descent. Knot 27 hurtled towards Earth.

Still
they picked up speed. Romy’s mouth was bone-dry, her eyes wide as the battler rolled over endlessly, disorientating the knot inside. They were still in the black of space, but she could see the whites and greys of clouds below. How many times had she stared at them from the orbito’s windows?

“I’m getting rid of the guns!” Elara shouted. Romy was thrown from side to side as the floor of the battler vibrated beneath her feet. With a groan, the three guns disengaged from the craft, one after the other. Head knocking in her helmet, she stared outside as they entered into the clouds.

Earth loomed before them. And there was no doubt that Romy was about to get her dearest wish.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

Romy’s heart thundered in her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut. All of their training was based on surviving in
space
. She gasped for air.

“Honey. You need to breathe,” Deimos called to her.

She obeyed and drew a long deep breath through her nose. Upon doing so, she opened her eyes the slightest crack.

There was fire outside her window, a bare two metres from her face.

“Fire!” she screamed.

Elara’s voice was tight with focus. “I think that’s normal. From the friction.”

Romy didn’t care what anyone said; you couldn’t be sitting inside an object writhing in flame and think the situation was
normal.

Had they really just been celebrating mere minutes ago? Romy heard the cries of her knot as they were battered relentlessly.

She was going to die. Her knot was going to die.

Metal screeched and the heat was intense as their craft continued to burn. She could feel the heat even through the padding of her suit. Romy pushed back, gripping her harness tightly as she turned her head away from the scorching fire outside. Her eyes met Thrym’s, and held. The only serenity in the urgent chaos assaulting them on all sides—his blue eyes.

As they said their silent goodbye, her heart broke into a million pieces.

The keening of buckling alloy was unbearable, overriding all except the peeling heat. Romy was going to melt alive. Eyes streaming, she squinted through the tiniest of gaps in the flames.

Earth.

Her breath caught as she saw it, truly saw it for the first time. How beautiful their world was. The swirl of blues and greens.

All of this could have been theirs, in time.

But life on the orbitos was a daily lottery, after all.

The battler let out a splintered scream and all the air was crushed from her as she was hurled to one side. A network of cracks splintered the visor of her helmet with the immense pressure. Her head throbbed, a sharpness stinging at her right temple.

Black edged her vision.

Where were the others? She hadn’t told them how much she loved them.

Romy was at the mercy of the descent with no idea of up or down. Her world was blistering pain; her orientation shredded, her calm obliterated. Tears streamed from her eyes until what remained of her sight was blurred beyond use.

Soon it would be over.

And then, as her awareness of the anarchy around her faded to the background, Romy smiled, remembering her knot. Who she had loved from the beginning.

T
he first sound Romy remembered after cultivation was that of the watery gel from the tanks dripping from her body to the white floor of the spaceship. In her memories it was a soft trickling; a pattering as it hit the floor. Not at all like the hissing, sparking noise assaulting her senses now.

She must still have memories from the last life cycle.

Though . . . she couldn’t recall feeling pain the last time she woke. And right now, her entire being was in agony. Her right ankle in particular was an inferno.

Her sense of smell made her aware that not all was well. Not
what
she could smell; rather, that she could smell at all. It took several days of sneezing to remove the gel gunk from your sinuses after the tank.

But she could smell—smoke and fuel.

Blinking several times, the first thing Romy saw was red. Blood coated the inside of her very cracked helmet—her own blood. The cracks must not be allowing Earth’s air in, or Romy would already be dead.

There was only a small section clear enough to see through.

Head spinning, Romy peered through the clean patch.

And saw . . . 
green.

She gasped at the sight and shut her eyes briefly before redoubling her efforts to focus her vision.

Yellowed grass. And trees! Dirt. They were basic words Romy had learned from her nanopad, but never believed she would use.

She groaned as her head throbbed viciously. 

The destroyed Critamal battle craft, the failed thrusters, the lost altitude. Their battler had been hurtling towards the ground. She didn’t dare believe they’d survived.

But there was no other explanation. Romy’s mouth dried. Knot 27 was on Earth.

Her knot!

“Hello?” she called, wincing at a flash of pain through her skull. “Dei? Pho?” They’d been closest to her on the battler.

There was no reply. Why weren’t any of them speaking?

Romy gasped—they were injured.
Maybe dead
. Rational thought flew from her mind as terror took its place. Her knot. She had to get to them! Romy thrashed against her constraints.

She couldn’t be alone! They couldn’t be dead. She screamed, throwing herself around in an effort to escape, despite the pain warning her to stop.

Finally, panting from exhaustion, she admitted defeat.

Romy twisted as far as possible in her seat, squinting through the small blood-free patch of helmet as hope and dread warred for top spot. She froze, stomach lurching at what lay behind her.

It turned out there was a good reason why the others weren’t responding. If Romy
had
to guess, she’d say it was because most of the ship seemed to have disappeared.
The next few moments rendered her incapable of thought, but eventually she decided on relief. Her knot had landed somewhere else. They weren’t dead.

They weren’t dead.

Romy’s side of the battler must have torn away during landing. Only a few shredding battler walls remained. It was as though her side of the ship had been ripped off like a chunk of bread from a loaf.

The floor underneath her was gone, leaving her legs dangling. Romy herself was suspended by the harness, which dug into her torso. It was the only thing keeping her from falling three metres to the dry grass.

The bottom part of her battler segment had embedded itself into the ground on an angle. Romy’s end of the segment was immobilised in the air, forty-five degrees to the surface.  She looked to have landed at the edge of a grassy clearing. Or maybe a forest, she amended, judging by the multitudes of trees before her.

Behind her, the ripped walls were flayed wide open, smoking, sparking, and hissing.

She took in the vast splash of colours before her with unseeing eyes. She was on Earth. Hanging above real ground.

Quite alone. And if her knot hadn’t . . . survived . . . she was quite possibly the only person, or being, on the planet. A numbness set in so deep that Romy could no longer feel the harness. Her head drooped as she struggled to regain her calm. She had to find her friends. That was an absolute. They were alive. She had to believe it was true.

She waited, willing her shaking hands to still until eventually they obeyed.

Inhaling sharply, Romy looked around once more.

The question was: How far did her section of the craft land from the others?

If it were a matter of hours, that would be okay, but anything more and she would require food and water. A post-global-warming Earth meant the food and water here wasn’t safe. The yellowed plant life confirmed that. The battler held supplies, but did she have any in her
part? And how much oxygen was in her suit? Romy’s heart began to quicken once more, and she forced the unfamiliar fear away.

First priority was getting to the ground. Under normal conditions she would take the chance and jump the three metres, but the injury to her ankle and the extent of the damage to her head caused Romy to hesitate. If only she could take her suit helmet off . . . but the air conditions had to be terrible. She wouldn’t last five seconds.

No, she decided. She’d pull herself up onto the back of her seat and see if there was an easier way out from the back of the smoking wreckage.

She sighed in weary exhaustion, not sure she had the strength to move a single finger. But that wouldn’t help her friends.

Romy released one half of her harness. Holding tightly to the strap, she released the second half of the harness—

Something gave. Not the harness, but whatever it was attached to, or attached
with
. For a moment Romy thought she might be able to salvage the tatters of her plan and still climb up. Until, with a loud ripping, the harness tore free from the rest of the chair.

It only took seconds to remember where she was when she woke this time.

The white-hot pain in her ankle helped.

Romy lay flat on her back, staring up at the remnants of the battler.

It took longer to realise the cracks in the visor of her helmet were larger. A hole the size of her thumbnail was directly in front of her mouth. Her eyes widened, though she lay unable to move.

She’d been breathing the air since she fell unconscious! And there was nothing she could do.

Would she feel it? Death? Or would she just slowly succumb to the lack of oxygen in the air?

Romy waited.

And waited.

Five minutes later, she sat up. She was very much alive—with very little idea as to why. She knew in the beginning that humans took a while to succumb to poor air quality. But Romy assumed the situation to be much worse in the current time.

As in, immediate-death-upon-breathing worse. Clearly, she was mistaken—and so were the researchers.

Her death was set in stone now, regardless. . . .

Screw it,
Romy thought; the suit was coming off.

Taking a firm grip, she twisted one glove clockwise and shook it off, repeating the process on the other side. It was glorious to stretch her fingers. She groaned with the pleasure of it. A faint tickling sensation danced along the back of her hand. Romy yelped, swatting at the digits to dislodge whatever caused the feeling. The tickling faded, and she raised both hands to her face. Was it acid vapours?

She shrieked as the feeling started once again, worse than before! But there was nothing on her hands.

The answer came as soon as she let the panic go and glanced at the yellowed bush. The trees were swaying.

A
breeze
, she sighed. What an idiot. A small wind. Something they didn’t have in space. Of course, it was just a breeze. A hysterical giggle left her mouth, and she clamped down on the sound.

Every interlocked panel she removed took a huge weight off her shoulders—literally. But at the same time every action was harder here with the force of Earth’s gravity. Romy knew it was only a difference of 20 per cent compared to the orbitos, but it made everything more difficult, on top of being injured, panicked, and dehydrated.

She took a deep breath and searched for the calm she was engineered to possess. Her mission was to find her friends or die trying. Her chest rose and fell evenly once more.

Romy took off the whole spacesuit, including the boots, and sat in the orange ventilation garment. Leaning forwards, she ripped a hole in the end of the orange booty encasing her right foot and rolled the spandex up, staring at her very unpleasant-looking ankle. Her head already felt much better thanks to her nanotech. However, a few prods and attempts to move the foot told her the ankle was broken. A break was better than a ligament, but it would still take at least a week for her nanos to repair the damage. She needed a crutch and a splint.

A medical kit would be ideal to compress the joint. She eyed the battler.

Wait. What was she thinking? A week? A human couldn’t survive on Earth for a week. Romy laid back down to contemplate her next step, tired beyond belief.

At least she had a diaper on.

The sun was so bright she raised a hand to shield her eyes. Comets, it was hot. Sweat trickled down her temple just from lying there. She wondered where she was.

Romy rolled on her side and stood, careful to rest her whole weight on her left side. The trees had long limbs, which could form a makeshift crutch. She recalled that wood was a popular material from Old Earth. It always seemed odd to Romy, to cut down the very plants that gave you oxygen. Just another thing about Earth humans she’d never understand.

Hopping with some difficulty, she entered the tree line. One type of tree seemed more common than the rest. Its trunk was a greyish-white, the leaves a pale green. It made sense that the acidic water would cause changes in the plants, though not all seemed to be affected. Many showed patches of greenery amidst the pale yellow. She had no idea what it meant. Phobos was the one with the interest in agriculture and botany.

Tree limbs were strewn everywhere. And now that she was closer, Romy noticed a glorious smell—it was sharp and cleared her head. It came from the grey-white trees.

Romy reached down for a branch.

A sudden burst of movement from under her hand sent her reeling to the ground with a choked scream.

She pushed to stand on her good foot just in time to see a long, thin
something
sprinting off into the bush. No, it hadn’t sprinted—it slithered. A shudder vibrated through her. If that species had survived or evolved through global warming it was probably dangerous and very tough. And the slithering creature blended with the tree limbs as if it
were
one—she’d have to be careful.

In no time Romy had two crutches and a splint. With nothing to strap the splint to her leg within easy range, she made do with what she had. Romy had shoved the thin pieces of wood inside the skin-tight ventilation suit, on either side of her injured ankle. It would do until she got to better supplies.

Able to mobilise,
she checked off mentally. Now to search her part of the battler.

When she hopped back to the ruined piece of the ship, she marvelled for the first time that their knot had survived the crash. The craft was shredded. Was it luck, or excellent design?

The battler was much easier to get into from the back. Romy pulled herself up over the serrated side, avoiding the curled pieces of aluminium. Adding a laceration to her list of injuries would be the last thing she needed.

The battler was a mess.

Romy had never seen a true mess. Even the knots where they were developed, with the jumble of tubes, tanks, and wires, were a
systematic
mess, all attached to medi-tech in the centre.

This was a chaotic mess. 

It was strange, but she didn’t have a clue where to begin. What did you do with a mess? Even the orbito kitchens were ordered.

She frowned. Finding water had been her secondary plan. She’d start there.

Romy headed for the emergency food panels, picking her way over with painful hops on her crutch. Her section of the wreckage only held one of the emergency panels. The door sat wide open. Abandoning any logical order, she searched on hands and knees and found—to her heartfelt relief— the medical kit, water, and some dehydrated fruit lodged beneath the remains of the docking clamp. It was more than Romy had hoped for.

Back out on the grass, she took two small sips of warm water. Bafflement edged her thoughts as she wondered why she wasn’t already dead. Not that she was complaining. Was it her nanotech? Or was the strange smell from the trees cleaning the air?

She pushed that aside for now. The thought was immaterial when her knot was out there, possibly injured. All she could bear thinking about was that the others were alive and together. Her mind wasn’t capable of processing any other outcome of the crash. And that was why she was up and gathering supplies. Otherwise, she would be incapable of moving,

Romy would find her knot no matter how long it took. Or until she died from breathing the air. Or drinking acidic water. Or as the victim of slithering post-global-warming creatures.