1. Skylar

1

Skylar

Could this day get any worse?

Why would I ask myself something like that? I press my index and middle fingers to my heart to beg mercy of the stars. Not that I'm religious outside of a life-or-death crisis. It's just that my short twenty-two years of living have taught me things can always get worse.

That said, this is bad. Like ‘skimming the shockwave of an explosion in a low-budget escape pod' bad.

My once home, the cargo ship Titan, does the explosion-implosion thing you only see in deep space disaster vids. Which I guess makes sense. This is a deep space disaster.

"Fex," I cuss to the empty pod, "Fexity fexing fexer!" Swearing is supposed to make one feel better, right?

It's not working.

As the Titan crunch-burn-snuffs, I can only pray to the stars my sister Ishini made it out alive. She'd have been on shift in the galley when the alarms sounded, and she'd have had the sense to run.

I bet she's floating and cussing along in one of these escape pods, just like me. Except she knows more cuss words.

Ishini made it out.

And if she didn't—?

No. I can't think about that. Not now.

I press a few buttons and after a few scratchy sounds and flickers on the display surface, a navigational model of the area around me comes up.

Thank the stars! It wasn't a sure thing. The lowest bidder contracted everything on the cargo ship Titan that I, until the exploding part, called home.

But now I have eyes on the outside world. I grin as I tap at the surface, calling up the transponders for the other pods. It takes a few tries. Then I look at the swarm of escape pods and swear again.

Where are they going?

More importantly, why am I not going with them?

My pod is spinning at a vector 167 degrees off from the others, which is basically the opposite direction.

The distance between us increases by the second. That's physics.

I look around the pod frantically, trying to recall the escape pod training. I'm a navigation officer. I can read the display. Or I could with the proper star charts. Which I don't have. Escape pods don't have great piloting systems. They're supposed to know where they're going. But mine has a flashing red light over the programmed coordinates.

"Stupid, stupid, Skylar," I mumble to myself, tapping at the flashing red warning.

Error: AIC5974-328 pops up.

That's helpful. Not.

As the second navigator on my now-exploding cargo ship, I should know all the codes, right? But this is my first posting in the Federated Universal Alliance. It wasn't as glamorous as I'd hoped, but being with my sister made it bearable, better than the Caliban colony we'd left on the run.

Luck might still be with me because as I look around, I find an emergency pod tablet floating in the third cabinet I search. I grab it like my life depends on it, because it does.

I search Error: AIC5974-328.

Warning: Off course. Adjust course to rejoin other escape pods.

No shit.

"Changing course." I scan the tablet for the essentials on how to get back to the others. "Oxygen levels, rad system, comm system, nav system—changing course," I read the words, then reread them. It's nothing like the Titan's main nav system, but it's doable.

Following the button sequence, my pod sluggishly turns toward the other pods. Even on the right course, I'm way behind them. I read about adding speed and the necessary fuel consumption needed to accomplish this.

"Fex," I conclude. Speeding up might catch them, but I risk running out of fuel. They're disappearing off my radar as they move beyond my pod's tracking range. "Things just keep getting better and better."

I close my eyes to think, then reopen them with a plan. Skirting the Mangrel neutral zone isn't ideal, but according to the charts in the pod's system—which were probably updated sometime around the year I was born, but what's a couple of decades?—there is a habitable planet just on the other side.

And this is a FUA escape pod, so my codes will get me through the minefield without setting anything off.

I hope.

Please, please let me come up with a better solution.

A soft bleep interrupts my thoughts. My oxygen is one-third depleted.

Of course, it is.

There's no way I ran through thirty percent of my oxygen in less than twenty minutes, which means someone didn't do their job in refilling the oxygen and I didn't have time to check it before launching it.

Low fuel. Low air.

I'm out of good options, so we're going with the bad one. I just have to make it to the closest habitable planet and hope there aren't any Mangrel out there waiting with knives and forks to eat me alive.

The oxygen light blinks, urging me on, as I turn the pod toward the Mangrel neutral zone. I'm terrified, but I have no choice. I'll get though this. One tiny escape pod is nothing in the vast depths of space. Once I'm on the planet, I'll be able to hide.

I'm at 55% oxygen when I cross the minefield. I'll be at 20% when I reach the planet. I can see it growing closer on the display. And then I see the battlecruiser.

It's monstrously large and way too close. The jamming technology on that ship must be incredible. Either that or the scanners on this escape pod are awful. Probably some mix of the two.

Maybe it doesn't see me. Maybe I'll just drift by, safe .

I have three breaths to hope. Then the pod lurches as the battlecruiser latches onto me with a tractor beam, and I know I am going to die.

Die fexing horribly.

I spend the next ten seconds or so searching for a place to hide. Nope. This isn't an adventure vid where escape pods have nice little cubbies and hidden blasters under convenient bulkheads.

As the ship grows on my viewscreen, my horror is matched only by rising panic, the terror of how my life will end.

The massive Mangrel battlecruiser has its main, secondary, and tertiary batteries all pointed at my tiny escape pod.

Overkill, but that's what Mangrel are known for. Maybe they'll blow me up and put me out of my misery. But Mangrel eat other sentients. We're a delicacy for them, so they won't vaporize me unless I can show myself as an actual threat.

Maybe I should vent my O2? Death by vacuum is at least fast. I flip through the manual, but nope, there's a safety lock. And I don't have time to figure out how to get around it. Ishini could do it, but I'm not as good as my sister at jerry-rigging stuff.

Is there anything I can use as a weapon?

There's a plastic cup. I could break it. Use one of the shards? Like a fexing action vid except I'm about twenty pounds of muscle out of shape and the closest I've gotten to a physical throwdown was a slap fight with Emmy Tigelius when we were nine.

I could stab myself?

Pulling in a deep breath, I stomp at the plastic cup. It slides across the deck to tap against the bulkhead and spin.

Fex.

"I am going to die." Nightmare holovids are playing behind my eyes. Mangrel eat people, and I'm helpless to stop this, caught in the grip of a force far beyond my control. "Please, let it be quick," I plead silently, hoping they won't torture me for information I don't have. Or torture me just for the fun of it. For flavoring. I've seen the vids. They're fictionalized, which means the truth is worse .

As the pod enters the landing bay, I dive for the cup. Maybe I can bludgeon someone with it.

The pod's hatch hisses open.

"Here goes nothing," I whisper to myself, gripping the cup like it's going to do something besides hold water.

Framed in the widening circular opening of the pod's entrance stands two monstrous armored aliens. Their armor is ink black, framing thick legs, a wide torso, hands tipped with steel claws, and are those wings? A tail? I look up, up, and up into dark faceplates with glowing red eyes.

Shadow armor, glowing red eyes, wings—yeah, I'm fexed.

One holds a massive blaster. Or disrupter. The barrel crackles with blue energy.

I drop the cup.

Tap.

The barrel whips toward it, then back to me.

The other shouts out something I don't understand, but waves his hand—yes, the armored hand has claws—in a gesture that looks like, "come here."

I stand, debating the relative merits of staying put and getting blasted or walking out and getting eaten, and I stay put.

The one with the blaster growls out something else and his companion gives something like a shrug and holds the blaster up on me.

I close my eyes. Yes, it's braver to die with your eyes open, but if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not that brave.

Then one of them grabs me by the arm, and I'm half stumbling, half getting dragged out of the pod.

Don'tpanicdon'tpanicdon'tpanicdon't —!

They may rip me to shreds, but I'm going to maintain my dignity.

Yeah, right . I scream, twist, kick, bite, and scream some more. This is about as effective against giant armored monsters as you'd think.

As the gigantic guards drag me through the ship's labyrinthine hallways, I catch glimpses of lights and bulkheads and some smaller aliens, most with colorful scales: green, blue, bronze. They wear shipsuits, and none of them are covered in blood, which is maybe hopeful until I realize that humans also wash their hands after messy meals.

So, I roll with the terror. I scream. I bite. I shriek. My voice will give out eventually, but not yet.

If nothing else, I'll be the world's most annoying appetizer.