7. Noelle

Everything hurt.I didn't know my hair could hurt, but as I shifted around, I swear every follicle was making itself known.

Where was I?

What happened?

The scorched smell of burning fuel and metal assailed my nose, and it all came back to me in a wave. The escape pod. The ejection.

Nebula.

So that was why my body hurt so much. Real gravity. I hadn't felt that in years. It pulled me down until I wanted to lie flat and let it have it's way with me. I didn't realize how different it was from the artificial stuff we had up on the station until I was experiencing it for myself.

Or maybe I'd bumped my head.

I must have passed out during my fall to land because I didn't remember a thing. The escape pods were programmed to chart a safe path for a landing on Nebula unless they were caught in the tractor field of a rescue ship. It appeared the programming still worked.

I sat up and shuddered as I realized I'd made that entire landing without being strapped in. I could have broken my neck. But I hadn't. I wanted to panic, but if I started, I knew I wouldn't stop. I had to get my bearings and figure out how I was going to get home.

This couldn't have been the first time an escape pod fell to Nebula, right? There had to be some way for the station to come and get me.

I reached for my comm, grateful it was still in my pocket, but it didn't have a signal. It was hooked into the Nebula Outpost system and not set up for further communication. The only people I talked to day to day were on the station, and when I wanted to contact my family, it was easier and cheaper to set up a relay through the station. I couldn't send a message from the ground, not from my comm.

But surely the escape pods were equipped with radios. That was all I needed to send a distress signal.

I would have sprung into action, but it was more of a grunting crawl as I struggled to my feet and tried to ignore the way pain washed over me.

This freaking sucked.

I hoped nothing was seriously wrong with me because the chance of medical intervention was slim.

There were rudimentary controls on the pod, and I checked there for a radio. I could see exactly where it should have been. Unfortunately, all that was left were a few stripped wires. There was also supposed to be a rescue beacon, but it was gone too. I wasn't sure whose responsibility it was to do upkeep on the escape pods, but it was clearly lacking.

I wanted to scream. With no radio and no beacon, I had no way of getting a signal home. Unless … could I somehow wire my comm to the radio transmitter—assuming that was still there—and send a signal?

Give me a wrench and point me at just about any problem on the station and I could fix it, but this wasn't anything I'd done before. I didn't deal with the complex comm systems that were required to keep Nebula Outpost in communication with the wider galaxy around us.

But how hard could it be?

Hard.

First off, I had no tools. I managed to find a small sliver of metal that I used to pry open the back panel of my comm, but I didn't know what any of the components were. And I didn't know what wires hooked into what. There was no way to connect anything. I might have managed if I had a soldering gun, but that wasn't an option.

I slumped down into the closest chair and tried not to cry.

Was I going to die down here?

A sob caught in my throat, and I tried to think of reasons I wasn't about to starve to death on a dead planet.

Pippa would notice I was gone. So would the rest of the maintenance crew. There was possibly surveillance footage in Sector J. And, if not, someone would eventually check there and realize one escape pod had launched.

There was evidence. Someone would try and look for me. Maybe my comm would give off some sort of signal they could track. Or maybe there was some way other than the beacon for the station to find the pod.

I had to hope. Otherwise, I might as well just lie down and die.

Okay. Someone would try and find me. I put that thought firmly in my mind. It had to happen. But it could take a little while.

I'd need food and water.

The emergency stores of the pod were just as ravaged as the wiring, but I found one meal bar and a small canteen filled with water. Enough for a day, maybe, and my tummy would be growling.

There was probably water outside on the planet. The mining disaster had poisoned a good portion of land, but not all of the planet, not by far. And since people didn't live there, there was a good chance that the water was drinkable.

Even better, I found a water testing stick and a small plant and animal identification kit. If I had to leave my pod, I'd at least be able to check things before ingesting them. That gave me a chance of not poisoning myself.

I needed to see where I was.

I had a vague idea of the geography of Nebula. There was a vast ocean, which I obviously hadn't landed in. The mining operation had been on the northern tip of the main continent. That continent stretched for two thousand kilometers from east to west and six thousand kilometers north to south. There was a smaller continent in the middle of the ocean, and it was mostly mountains and active volcanoes with huge lava flows and lava fields.

Saying a prayer to the gods back home that I hadn't landed on the edge of a volcano, I gathered my courage and approached the hatch, slamming my hand over the button to open the door with more force than necessary.

Sunlight nearly blinded me, and I flinched. Then, squinting against the brightness, I looked again.

No lava. In fact, the area around me was so flat it felt like I was looking out into nothingness. The ground was an intense white, which only made the sunlight brighter. But as I squinted, I could make out shapes at the very edge of my vision. Trees, maybe? Small hills? Whatever they were, they were very far away.

There was a chill in the air as I stepped out onto the hard ground. The air tasted sort of salty, and I looked around, wondering if there might have been that ocean nearby. But no, I was in the middle of a great flat expanse.

I looked up, and my eyes widened as I saw a dark shape in the sky. It was no bird.

Had Nebula Outpost already sent a rescue ship?

I used my hand to shade my eyes and tracked the progress of the small craft as it got closer and closer.

And closer. And closer.

I took off running before I could think it through.

The craft was coming in fast and headed straight for me.