Laila was in a bind. Or she was in a pickle.


    She was experiencing adverse conditions.


    Laila had been on, so far, over a hundred different ships over her many years of doing shit jobs for terrible pay. This was far from the worst ship she’d found herself in over her illustrious career. She might have been experiencing the most adverse conditions so far.


    On the outer rim planet officially named H-197-T, and colloquially called Hialt (written HIALT in all caps in the hopes that people would make the connection), there were a number of threats of an orbital trade ship. Some of those threats came in the form of pirates, certainly. More of them came in the form of dismal official shipping lane designations. The biggest threat to orbital traders came in the form of the sorts of ships that were willing to employ Laila Williams.


    Laila wasn’t a pirate, most of the time. She wasn’t even a criminal, most of the time. She had simply had the misfortune of being born in a little town in the middle of nowhere, where people didn’t bother registering with the colonial administration, to parents whose genetics were completely fucked.


    She could have stayed in that little town in the middle of nowhere and become a farmer, like her parents, or maybe a builder, or a fabricator. She could have lived a simple life, never gotten married, never had kids of her own, and probably died at some point from old age, or tax collectors.


    That had not appealed.


    So Laila, aged thirty-three, was on a ship called Friendship, somewhere near the south pole of Hialt, being thrown around by the screeching gyroscopic motors of one of the ship’s guns, trying her best to hit a pirate ship with an extremely limited supply of kinetic ammunition while said pirate ship was doing an exceptional job of tearing pieces off the Friendship was a possibly unlimited supply of plasma.


    Laila was experiencing adverse conditions.


    To top it all off, Laila had not been hired as a gunner and, in her official capacity as the ship’s engineer, had diagnosed the escape pods as non-functional, the ammunition supplies as laughable, and the ship’s thrusters as ‘on the verge of explosive death’.


    Had she been hired as the Friendship’s human resources manager she would have diagnosed the crew contingent as concerningly minimal, the leadership style as completely absent, and her own sudden reassignment to gunnery as improper at best.


    No one had been hired as the Friendship’s human resources manager, of course. That would have put the budget for wages well above Rukan’s typical ‘less than the cost of accommodation for our next stop-over’. Rukan did not stay in nice places.


    Laila was good at maths. Or she was good enough at maths. She was sufficiently good at maths that she could count backwards from seventeen. She reached three with the first shot that actually made contact with the pirate ship.


    The side of the pirate ship emitted a flurry of sparks, and the close-up camera showed a black mark on the armour plating.


    Laila hit the intercom. ‘You’re going to want to enter the atmosphere, Rukan,’ she said.


    ‘Did you say the engines would explode if we did that?’ Woll asked.


    ‘Is he in his fucking bunker?’ Laila groaned. ‘I said they might explode if we did that. You wanna know what will definitely make them explode? It rhymes with flasma.’


    Woll groaned back.


    ‘Woll, the escape pods are not vacuum tight. The ship, right now, is.’


    Presumably out of spite, the next glob of plasma hit the rearward plating of the Friendship and finished the job of the previous shot. A lot of red lights started flashing, a siren started screeching. Air started leaking out of the gunner’s pod.


    ‘And get Shae back here as fast as her little legs can carry her.’ Laila turned off the intercom before Woll could compound upon the plasma’s spite.


    Laila successfully counted down to two, leaving another scorch mark on the pirate’s hull.


    In a technical sense, the pirates had just done the Friendship a favour. If the engines did explode on re-entry, most of the blast should be diverted out the massive hole that had just melted open very close to the thruster bay.


    Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    In another, equally technical sense, the pirate had just done the Friendship a great slight. Regardless of the direction of the explosion, if the engines did go off the ship would entirely fall apart.


    The small crew of the Friendship was in luck that Woll was currently the pilot, rather than Rukan. Rukan was notoriously thick, money-hungry, and vibrantly green. His being green presumably had little impact on his thought process, but he was notorious for it regardless.


    Laila counted to one and turned one of the scorch marks into a small dent.


    The Friendship managed to screech even louder as flames engulphed Laila’s viewports. She hit zero with no idea if the shot had reached the pirate ship, and very little concern about the matter.


    If the deliberate swinging and scaping of the gunnery servos had been annoying, bordering on painful, that was nothing compared to the rattling and screeching of unplanned, rapid re-entry. The Friendship had never discovered the luxuries of gyrostabilisation. Atmospheric entry was unpleasant at the best of times.


    This was not the best of times.


    As we know, Laila was experiencing adverse conditions.


    Laila didn’t have extremely strong feelings on the subject, but she didn’t want to die. Among the things she wanted less, though, was to be captured by pirates. Even if they didn’t do anything horrific to her, dealing with colonial administration fighters would be much worse than what the Friendship had just been through.


    The engines exploded.


    Pirates would still have been worse.


    For perhaps the third time in her life, Laila lost consciousness. It was a much more sudden and painful experience than the previous two times, once for surgery and once for fun.


    As with the surgery and the fun, Laila was not unconscious for long.


    She got flashes of fire, red-hot metal, and deafening shrieks. Much more concerning, she got flashes of the ground, then the sky, then the ground again, through a large hole that had opened in the gunnery pod.


    Laila knew from experience that snow is not as soft as it looks. She also knew from experience that it is, at least, softer than stone. There was an unpleasantly clear dividing line in the ground below. One side was snow. One side was stone.


    It had not been dark the last time Laila had seen the sky. It was dark when she regained consciousness. It was, however, not the pitch black of having landed face-down. It was the pleasant, bright darkness of a stary night sky somewhere away from civilisation.


    Liala’s whole body hurt. This was not a surprise. She was almost certainly bleeding from somewhere. This was also not a surprise. She appeared to be alive. She wasn’t sure if that was a surprise or not.


    What Laila was certain was a surprise was the sudden appearance of a face.


    She was still trying to decide if it was more or less surprising that she didn’t recognise the face when the face opened its mouth and spoke.


    ‘You seem to be alive,’ the face said, in a quiet, slightly disappointed tone.


    Laila opened her own mouth to speak. It didn’t work. She closed her mouth, then opened it and tried again. It still didn’t work. Experimentally, she tried nodding. The face swam about, merging with the stars in the glowing night sky behind it for several seconds.


    ‘I’m glad you agree.’ The face disappeared. Then the face reappeared. This time it had an expression. Laila didn’t think either of them knew what the expression was supposed to be. ‘This will probably hurt.’


    And it did hurt. Quite a lot.


    The gunnery pod shifted just slightly, the seat tried to adjust for the movement and got caught on the piece of something that felt very much like it was stuck through Laila’s liver. Or where Laila’s liver had once been, if she was to judge by how it felt.


    Laila didn’t look. She didn’t need to know. Either she would die of it or she wouldn’t and there was nothing she could do either way. There was certainly no first-aid kit in the gunnery pod, much less any kind of real medical supplies.


    Then the pod started shuddering, scraping, and lurching, as it was apparently dragged across the ground, presumably by the owner of that face. Laila’s brain and or body made the decision on her behalf that she didn’t really need to be around for this part, and she blacked out again.


    From time to time, Laila blacked back in for a moment or two and caught another glimpse of the bright stars above, blotted out a few times on the right by those rocks that Laila seemed to have missed on her way down.


    When she regained conscious for more than a few moments, she seemed to have stopped. And it seemed to be getting light. There was a faint glow coming from ahead of her, from the bottom of her field of view.


    Laila showed great restraint not flinching when the face appeared again. She wasn’t sure she could have flinched, even if she wanted to. But either way she didn’t flinch.


    The reason Laila might have flinched was that, closer to a light source, she was getting a much better look at the face than she had the first time around. Either that or she was just now taking in details that hadn’t pierced her brain earlier.


    What must have thrown Laila initially, apart from falling from the sky and being impaled, was that the face was grey. Not in a sickly, or ‘spends too much time inside’ sort of way. Their skin was grey, like stone.


    Their mouth protruded in a way that reminded Laila of a fish. Their lips were narrow, but protruded like they were trying to hold back a lock of teeth. Their eyes, already too large for their face, were grey from their eyelids all the way to their pupils, though unlike the very stony texture of their skin, their eyes had the shiny, vaguely wet look that eyes have.


    When they opened their mouth to speak, it turned out that their protruding lips were, in face, holding back some quite large, sharp teeth.


    ‘Still alive,’ they said, with only slightly less disappointment than the last time. ‘I imagine that this will hurt a lot more.’


    Laila’s brain and body decided to not even let her find out this time.