《Crash landed》 Pirate attack 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. Woman from the sky Jecca Ogden had acquired her name from the label on the outside of the pod she had arrived in. The label had said ¡®Ex.No.00381 Name: Jecca Ogden Ex.Sc.ID:0064512¡¯. Jecca didn¡¯t know what that meant. She didn¡¯t know much of anything. The label was one of two things in the pod that Jecca had not repurposed, disassembled, or otherwise destroyed in the time she had been here. The other thing was the tablet. Inside the pod had been a plastic box, which was currently in three pieces, serving as a table, chair, and smaller box. Inside the plastic box had been: a knife, which was currently more like an axe; five packaged meals, long since digested; a water filter bottle, which was currently part of a much bigger water filter tank; and the tablet, which was still a tablet. Whenever Jecca turned the tablet on, which she did far less often than she once had, a pleasantly green screen announced ¡®Survival Assistant¡¯ before loading a list of tasks, about half of which Jecca had done. The first three tasks had been simply Shelter, Water, Food. Jecca had lived under a grass roof with no walls for fourteen days. She had worked out that if she put snow into the bottle, it would melt into water after a few hours, and that if she spotted an animal there was a good chance she could chase it down and kill it for food. After fourteen days, Jecca had diverted from the instructions on the tablet for the first time. It had felt wrong, but she had been driven by curiosity, not malice. After the task called Pottery, Jecca had wondered if there might be some way to build a structure from similarly made parts. Her current house was not made from any of those same bricks, but she had been right. And it had been freeing to be right. Since then, she had been wrong quite often, but she always remembered that she could be right, and so she tried things and wasn¡¯t too bothered if they didn¡¯t work. Nearly a thousand days ago, 931 days ago, Jecca had completed the task called Salvage. From time to time, things fell from the sky. Very often, those things were made from metal. Sometimes, people fell with them. In the 2471 days Jecca had been wherever she was, no one had ever survived falling from the sky. When, around noon, Jecca had heard a familiar rumbling and screeching from above, she had gone outside. She had shaded her eyes and looked up at the sky just in time to see a space ship explode. For a few seconds, she had watched the pieces of the space ship break apart, and then she had gone back inside. Jecca had been here for 71 days when she had first heard a similar kind of rumbling, screeching noise from the sky. She had gone outside and shaded her eyes and looked around, not up. Had she not gone outside, she might have died when an impressively solid metal sphere that turned out to be full of wires and wheels smashed through her brick house. Since then, Jecca had had a lot of practice looking up, and judging whether or not the burning metal raining from the sky would destroy her house again. In the case of the crumbling space ship she saw on day 2471, she was quite safe. Only when the first crash rumbled up from the southwestern slope did Jecca pick up some of her equipment and leave her house again. She carried her small pack with some food, her large metal shears, her newest water bottle, and her twelve-metre length of chain, with one of her few guns that she still had bullets for in a holster at her waist. According to a watch Jecca had acquired 378 days ago, it took three hours and twenty-two minutes to walk from her house to the closest pieces of the exploded ship. She couldn¡¯t be completely sure, given the state of the various pieces of metal, but she felt those first pieces might be parts of a giant gun. Because of past experiences, Jecca was drawn to any pieces of fallen salvage that resembled spheres. So she had ignored the giant gun parts for the moment to investigate a much larger piece a few dozen steps down the slope: three quarters of a large sphere, with a jagged hole facing up into the sky. Jecca had climbed up the side of the sphere, and she had been disappointed. And then she had felt that she shouldn¡¯t be disappointed. Inside the sphere was a woman who didn¡¯t look like Jecca. So far, Jecca had not seen anyone who looked like her. It had been a source of tension. The woman had had her eyes open, bleary gaze focused on the stars, and what looked like a piece of bearing rail stabbed through her middle. The woman had looked a Jecca, her bleary eyes almost focusing. ¡®You seem to be alive,¡¯ Jecca had said, feeling that she should say something. The woman had opened and closed her mouth a few times in the way that people who had been pierced through the guts often did. Then she had nodded. ¡®I¡¯m glad you agree,¡¯ Jecca had said, fairly sure that she was being honest. She had climbed back down the broken sphere to frown at it in a way that she suspected was thoughtful. It would be a bit of a struggle, but she was fairly confident that she could drag it back to her house. Jecca had remembered that the woman was alive, and climbed back up, doing her best to look sympathetic, though she had no reference for what that might feel like. ¡®This will probably hurt,¡¯ she had told the woman, just so that she knew, and then climbed down again to loop her chain around the broken sphere. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. She might have heard a groan from the woman when she started pulling, but it could just as easily have been from the metal of the broken sphere. As she dragged, Jecca wondered if the woman would survive being dragged all the way back home. Jecca was quite good at surviving things, but over the last 2471 days she¡¯d noticed that most people who didn¡¯t look like her weren¡¯t nearly as good at surviving things as she was. Once she¡¯d reached home, she¡¯d turned on the lights and climbed back up the partial sphere to check on the woman. The woman¡¯s eyes had moved to look at her. ¡®Still alive,¡¯ Jecca had said. Then she had had a thought she felt she ought to share with the woman in the interests of openness and honesty. ¡®I imagine this will hurt a lot more.¡¯ Jecca hadn¡¯t been very surprised when the woman gasped and went limp in her arms as she pulled her free of the bearing rail stabbed through her liver. Even Jecca had once lost consciousness from pain. It had been very inconvenient. This woman was not the first person, other than herself, that Jecca had given medical aid to. She had completed the task called Surgery 1642 days ago, on behalf of a young man who had not been very happy about the experience. The crucial ingredient that Jecca was still missing was anaesthetic. Luckily for both of them, the woman did not wake up during the relatively quick process. Quite luckily for the woman in particular, the bearing rail had only pierced her liver, stabbing far enough to her right side that it had missed almost everything else of vital necessity. A few arteries and veins were oozing quite profusely, but Jecca had all the other supplies needed for a such a scenario, including a myriad of mirrors for when she needed to do similar operations on herself. Once she was done, there was no doubting that the woman had experienced major surgery. The synthetic skin patches hadn¡¯t shifted to match the woman¡¯s tan complexion yet, and there was a chunk of her liver in a dish not far away. Jecca wasn¡¯t sure what to do with that chunk. For all she knew, the woman would want it back. But she didn¡¯t know how long the woman would be unconscious so she wasn¡¯t sure what to do with it in the meantime. 1123 days ago, Jecca had completed the task called Refrigeration. 1110 days ago, she had disassembled the small fridge for parts when she failed to use it. If she really needed to keep something cold, she had a pair of ice-boxes that she periodically refilled with the almost endless snow outside. After a bit more indecision, Jecca put the dish of liver in the cool box, nodded to herself like she¡¯d done the right thing, and went outside to investigate the gyroscopic pod that the woman had been impaled in. It did not take long to determine that all of the bearing surfaces were useless. Not only were they warped and discoloured from the heat of the fall, they were all clearly worn and chipped to begin with. At least most of the actual ball bearings seemed in good condition. Jecca was struggling to cut the bearing rails into manageable lengths with her hacksaw when she heard a coughing fit inside. She resisted the urge to rush, and wasn¡¯t sure why she resisted that urge. According to her watch, it had been an hour and eleven minutes since she finished surgery on the woman. The woman in question was sitting up on Jecca¡¯s operating table, panting, frowning, and poking at the synthetic skin that was getting closer to matching her natural tan. ¡®Oh,¡¯ the woman looked up, turning her frown on Jecca. ¡®You¡¯re not imaginary. That makes much more sense.¡¯ With another cough, she lay back onto the table. ¡®No, not imaginary,¡¯ Jecca said. That felt too certain. ¡®Not that I know of.¡¯ The woman took a deep breath and shifted up on the table to prop herself up slightly. ¡®Thanks for¡­ rescuing me and apparently doing surgery on me. Would have been very undignified to die because of Rukan.¡¯ It was Jecca¡¯s turn to push her eyebrows together. Surely one of the other people she¡¯d helped had thanked her? This felt different, if not completely novel. She remembered to reply. ¡®You¡¯re welcome. What¡¯s Rukan?¡¯ The woman sighed. ¡®If I wasn¡¯t missing part of my liver right now, I¡¯d go out and make sure he¡¯s dead,¡¯ she muttered. ¡®He was the captain of our ship. Absolutely useless.¡¯ ¡®Um¡­ you can have it back, if you want,¡¯ Jecca said, for want of something else to say. The woman frowned. ¡®Hmm?¡¯ ¡®The piece of your liver,¡¯ Jecca clarified. ¡®You can have it back¡­ if you want.¡¯ The woman kept frowning. ¡®Oh, I don¡¯t think I need it for anything,¡¯ she said. ¡®It¡¯ll grow back at some point.¡¯ Jecca nodded. That had been the wrong thing to say. ¡®I hate to keep imposing on you,¡¯ the woman said. ¡®Could you spare me some food and water?¡¯ Jecca nodded too much. ¡®Oh, no problem.¡¯ She scurried from the room to track down her second-newest water bottle. She filled it from her tank and brought it back to the woman. ¡®Do you¡­ what do you eat?¡¯ The woman drank a lot of water. ¡®Just about anything,¡¯ she said. Then she had a thought. ¡®I prefer it cooked.¡¯ Jecca nodded. She scurried away again, put her pan on the stove, opened a bag of pemmican, poured the whole lot in, and almost just stood there, waiting for it to warm up. She could do it. Jecca let herself back into her surgery room, opened the cold box and pulled out an onion and half a cabbage. Normally she would just eat the vegetables frozen if she ran out of meat or if they were starting to go bad. But she had completed the task called Cooking on day five. Before the woman could say anything else, Jecca fled again to chop the vegetables with her cleaver, her only cooking knife. She added the chopped pieces to the slowly bubbling pemmican, stirred once, and stood there at her electric stove to wait. What if the woman didn¡¯t want to leave immediately? That¡¯s what people usually did. She patched them up, they looked at her sideways and, as soon as they could walk again, they left. Something about the way this woman was acting was different to usual. Jecca wasn¡¯t sure what it was. She wasn¡¯t even completely sure it was there at all. And yet her foot tapped and her fingers wriggled as she watched the bubbling fat in her pot. Once the cabbage and onion was translucent, Jecca filled her large bowl and took it back to the woman, who was sitting up on the operating table again. The woman smiled, she had more teeth than most people, not as many as Jecca. ¡®Thank you,¡¯ the woman said, accepting the bowl. ¡®I really appreciate all of this. I¡¯m Laila, by the way. Laila Williams.¡¯ Jecca nodded. Then she realised what was happening. ¡®Oh. Nice to meet you,¡¯ she said. ¡®I¡¯m Jecca Ogden, I think.¡¯