Chapter Text
The minutes before The Zoic's escape craft docked aboard their rescue ship seemed to stretch into an eternity.
Koa’s face was pressed against the glass of the shuttle viewport, her eyes alight with the fire cascading down towards the planet. Mills could feel her fingers gripping his, but his body was beginning to numb. The shuttle rocked with a jolt as their rescue ship latched onto them with stabilizing cables, and Koa said something hopeful under her breath in her native tongue as the shuttle began to turn.
Mills felt his breath go.
In, out. Slow. Like this hiss of a carbine repulsor, the same noise he’d heard aboard The Zoic for the last seven months in space when he had just lay there awake at night staring at the storage rack above his bunk. His entire right arm was immobile, the swelling from his dislocated shoulder rendering the entire limb frozen. The crawling burn up his left arm and side wasn’t a good sign. The wound he’d hastily patched upon crashing had done internal damage that the last forty-eight hours hadn’t done much to help, and even breathing hurt now. His leg was fucked, he’d felt something snap. Couldn’t move it.
“Mills? Mills?”
Koa was asking his name, clutching his hand, her eyes wide and worried.
He’d listed off for a moment. He was just so damn tired.
“I’m okay,” he told her, summoning what little was left of his grip strength in his right hand to give her fingers a comforting squeeze. “I’m okay. We’re going to dock. They need to do decontamination and then that hatch will open…”
He didn’t know why he was saying all this, she couldn’t understand anyway. But she nodded like she could.
“Move?”
“Move. When… that hatch opens.”
“Mills?”
“I’m okay. Koa. I just… need to close my eyes for a minute.”
The lights from the ship vanished as they were thrown into darkness, the shuttle pulled into the belly of their rescue craft.
Mills didn’t remember much after that. Bright lights, all of a sudden, a strip of white running above him like a rotary belt. Faces above him, talking to him, the stale smell of oxygen in his nose. The hallway swaying dizzyingly. Someone saying his name, over and over again. It might have been Nevine, her voice in his ear…
When he woke again it felt like he had a head full of cloud vapor, and he immediately tried to move. His right arm wasn’t responding to him, and as he tried to sit up his side ached so fiercely that he just had to lay there and breath a while. He heard a distant clatter, something metal hitting the ground behind a door, and his eyes snapped open. He could see it, the tiny lizard creature rushing at him over the bluff. Teeth in his arm, the glow of eyes in the dark.
He dragged himself upright, pain lacing through him white hot and unforgiving, his chest heaving as he gazed around the dim room. He had a hard time seeing shapes in the darkness, his heart hammering so hard he thought one of those monsters might hear it.
Instead of a monster, he heard footsteps, and low lights flickered on.
He could hear a low beeping of machinery nearby, feel the steady thrum of an engine below. A curtain beside him was quickly brushed aside, a medic appearing by his bunk.
“Commander Mills, you’re all right, you’re safe. You’re aboard The Varos, I need you to relax.”
Mills gazed around him again blearily, taking in the sterile infirmary room, the two other medics who entered. White walls, white floors. Immediate noise.
“Sir, you need to lay back. Anzen, tell command he’s awake.”
Mills leaned back against the raised bed gingerly, the effort to sit up at all leaving him shaking. His right arm was bandaged and braced, held in place over his stomach, and his ankle was encased in a cast.
“Where am I?”
“Aboard The Varos. Population three hundred and twenty-eight, transport frigate en route from Korbal Sev. We were able to respond to your distress signal, and altered our course to rendezvous with your escape craft just outside of the meteor shower’s destructive range.”
The medic talked slowly and calmly, but he still needed a moment before he could get it through his head.
“Koa? The girl I was with?”
The medic’s gaze softened as she replaced an IV line, turning up his dose of painkillers.
“She’s just fine. She insisted on staying with you the last two days, we finally convinced her to see the rest of the ship. I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear you’re awake.”
“Two days?” he croaked, frowning. The medic checked her watch.
“Two and a half standard cycles, to be exact. Not that I’m surprised, you took quite the beating. Fractured ankle, bruised ribs and lung, severe swelling in the relocated shoulder, perforated pancreas from shrapnel… not to mention, whatever got its teeth into you.”
She withdrew a small vial from her pocket, holding it out.
“I dug this out of your arm. You two must have had quite the adventure.”
Mills held it up gingerly, staring at the jagged tooth tip. He gave the vial a small shake and the bone rattled like glass.
The medic gave him the rundown of what had happened after. He’d been unconscious, a mix of exhaustion and creeping shock, when they’d pulled him out of the escape craft. The planet below had been hit with a cataclysmic meteor shower and the ship had pulled safely out of orbit, headed back on course.
Koa had already told them her story, so the ship commander wasn’t surprised when she arrived in the infirmary to get his side of things. She just listened stoically to his account, making some notes on her data chart.
Her name was Anzarin, tall and sharp-boned. She told him she’d served in the Castellan wars, which he had guessed by her bearing and scarred hands alone. Most pilots these days were veterans from either Castellan or the mining coalition rebellion.
“I understand you have family back on Somaris, Commander Mills.”
“My wife. Alya.”
“Well, The Varos is on course to arrive on Nestran in three months, before making landfall on Somaris in six. We have a mix of long-term cryo passengers aboard as well as short-term waking passengers, you and Koa will be well taken care of on the trip home.”
“Does she have family? Out there?” Mills asked, and Anzarin gave a small sigh.
“Right, she mentioned you two weren’t able to communicate much. The two people she was travelling with were her aunt and uncle, her legal guardians. She’s Temaran, and speaks a northern Tui dialect. They were headed from a Temar colony on Sebrak towards Novosk II with a guild ticket. Another poor family trying their luck jumping systems... kid’s been through a lot. She’s only twelve, thirteen in a couple months.”
“Parents?”
“A grandmother on Novosk II, and some cousins. We’ve sent word of what happened, but it will take some time to get a response. Best we can hope for is to get her to Nestran, then arrange a transport to Novosk.”
“She knew the word ‘run.’”
Anzarin lifted her head, brown eyes searching.
“What?”
“She knew what ‘run’ meant in standard,” Mills murmured. “Only word she knew.”
At that moment the door hissed open and Koa bounded inside, her hair tied back, dressed in a clean blue crewman’s flight suit that was a few sizes too large.
She ran over to him and buried her face in his side, and he hugged her awkwardly with his mobile arm.
“Hey. Good to see you, kid, you okay?”
She nodded, giving a loud sniff, and withdrew to look at him critically. She held out a small translator shell, which he put into his ear.
“You were asleep forever.”
He smiled, huffing out a laugh that pinched his ribs uncomfortably.
“I was tired.”
“I’ll let the two of you catch up,” Anzarin promised, standing and smoothing down her commander’s uniform. “If you would like to send communications to Somaris, it can be arranged.”
Koa watched her leave, keeping an eye on the medic who came to check Mills’s vitals.
“What’s the ship like?” Mills asked her, and she shrugged.
“Big. Bigger than the one we took to Sebrak.”
She pulled at a stray thread in the blanket, biting her lip as she glanced at his bandaged arm.
“I’ll be fine,” Mills reassured her. “Just need to keep it still while they fix me up.”
She nodded absently, leaning her head against the rail.
He had no idea what she was feeling in that moment—family gone, a distant home getting farther away by the minute, everything they’d had to do to survive the last days weighing down on her …
He could see her ramming that piece of bone into the monster’s eye, lifted off the ground like she weighed nothing… a twelve-year-old.
Nevine would have been fifteen this year.
Another panicked thought followed. What the hell was he going to tell Alya?
His commission would be cut short, that was for sure. His insurance was up to code for the ship so he wouldn’t lose anything there, but he’d failed to complete the trip. Fourteen months, out of twenty-one total. If he’d just waited three months to take on another long haul, he could have been with her when she—
“Mills?”
“Yeah?”
“What is that?”
He handed her the vial with the piece of tooth in it, and she stared down at it for a long minute.
“What were they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think they’re all dead?”
“Hope so.”
He shifted on the bunk, wincing, before settling back down.
“What about the escape pod?”
“They jettisoned it. Above the planet.”
Mills nodded. He would have done the same, no need for any extra weight to drive up fuel use. The thought of what was left of The Zoic hurtling down to the surface of that planet, burning it up along with those meteors, was slightly satisfying. One last fuck you to those toothy, overgrown bastards.
“Mills?”
“Yeah?”
He could already feel his eyelids drooping, the drugs pulling him back under.
“What’s going to happen now?”
“We stick together,” he murmured. “It’s gonna be okay.”
She said something back, too quiet to hear.