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She woke to rain spattering her face, disrupting the array of refracting modules she had set up around her before she slept. She looked up into the canopy of trees, green feathery branches at soaring heights dripping fat drops to thud against her jerkin. She was alone.
The rain fell harder as she gathered the modules and stashed them in her sack, slung the heavy pack of parts and rations over her shoulder and picked up her walking stick and moved on. She could not go back to the wreckage. It had been a risk to return there and it no longer felt like the home it once was without her family. It was too burned and too broken and she had salvaged all that she could.
For three cycles she had walked, higher up into the hills where the foliage was denser, the meager primary lingering overhead slower and dimmer than her world's. She had seen the underground, the skeleton of a civilization dead and buried, walls crumbling as plates shifted and the drones sniffing at the dense air, eager for Krall's command. There was nothing for her there either.
When the rain stopped she rested near a ravine, pulled out a dry cloth from her pack and dried her face and sat on the wet, stone ground. She drank from a spring in a fissure in the rock and made a face and a quiet sound and shook her head. The water, like all other water on that planet, had a bizarre tang she thought she would never get used to.
At the edge of her vision she noticed something she had not before. It was the color of the rocks, that's how she missed it. It soared above her like a jutting cliff, too smooth to be naturally occurring. She left her pack and her modules and climbed up the nearest escarpment until she could see the saucer.
The characters across the face of it were familiar, she had seen them on debris in Krall's camp, his prison, stamped across broken or repurposed technology alongside other languages she did not know. Nothing came or went from it. Grasses had begun to grow from places in the hull, moss covered much of it in mottled green patches, but it looked intact. It looked safe.
Another cycle passed before she found a way inside, stumbling through the close darkness with only the dim glow of one of her holo generators to guide her through narrow halls and long ladders. She couldn't read any of the printed controls or emergency manuals, but the symbology of schematics was a language she knew well and in the center of the ship she found the helm. A wide window let in daylight and she could see the mountains out ahead and the sky above as she set about repairing the broken modules and the broken ship and anything else that was broken which, for her, was everything.
___
In twenty cycles she had power to the bridge and the computer, when she started it, said to her, "Computer starting. Stand by."
After a while it spoke again and she spoke to it in response but it only said, "Command unknown." She pressed on the display. The interface was intuitive even without the right words to understand it. Most of the functions did nothing without power to the entire ship, many of them only brought up cryptic analyses, flashing red to emphasize a malfunction, but in the corner of each display a small green word would take her back to the beginning and the computer would speak to her. 'Home,' it said.
She found the ship's logs by chance and began watching them. Half of a cycle passed that way before she realized she had not eaten or checked the modules which cloaked the ship. When she knew the ship was still cloaked she sat on the bridge and ate a portion of her dwindling rations and some berries she had gathered and watched more of the family that had once lived in that place, on the very bridge where she sat just then, like ghosts from another time.
As night fell, she lay on the deck in the dark and watched the stars. After a while she took out one of her holo generators, the one that had been her father's. She turned it on and he stood motionless over where she lay, the light of him flickering against the bulkhead. She told him that she was safe, that she was going to lay traps, that she would get this vessel flying again and return home. Then she turned off the holo and wiped her face and something occurred to her. She spoke again one of the words she had said to her father and thought of glowing green letters and the voice of the computer.
She looked around the bridge, her pack and her modules and her father's holo generator and her rations, all grey in the pale light of the rising moons.
"Home," she said.
___
In another forty-two cycles she saw the first ship come crashing down out of the blue, a hazy, smoking thing, pointed like an arrow and smaller than her house, smaller even than her family's ship, soaring together with broken star-stuff from the nebula and smaller shapes that might have been escape pods, snatched violently out of the air by Krall's swarming drones. It pierced the planet some great distance away, still near enough that she felt the ground shudder, and a plume of ash and dust hung in the air throughout the long path of the day star.
The computer scanned the surface under her instruction, using the words she had learned from it, but when the drones cleared away from the site there was no sign of life. It was probably wrong, she knew. She knew where the survivors had been taken, to Krall's camp in the rocky canyons where the scanners could not penetrate.
"Home," she said to the computer, and the computer complied.
"Computer," she said later, after the sun had set. "What is Krall?" She had asked it before.
"Identity unknown," the computer said, its pleasant voice matter-of-fact.
___
She searched the ship in sections. By the ninetieth cycle there were still parts she had not yet seen. Her flashlight beam led the way as she shouldered her way through doors and shimmied through tubes. In various crew quarters she had found boots, pants to replace her torn ones, a bottle of something that smelled like it was meant to clean engines, and another bottle that smelled strongly of flowers. She found belts, books, games, combs, pictures, data tapes on language and biochemistry and martial arts, broken watches and working gyroscopes and music.
"Computer, what means fight the power?"
"Fight the Power is a song by North American hip-hop musicians know as Public Enemy, released in 1989 on Motown Records.
She frowned, somewhat disappointed.
___
The next ship didn't come for almost another hundred cycles. She was deep in the belly of the engine when she felt her house tremble and when she reached the helm several of her alarms had been triggered. This time, when the computer scanned the surface for life, it found two individuals, far from the crash site.
She packed a satchel with food and water and carried the plasma rifle she had made across her back on a harness she had also made from old belts and buckles and set out toward where the computer had shown her something was alive, farther than she liked to go, closer to Krall's camp. She tracked prints through the forest, several sets, nearly lost them in the rocks, and when she found them she watched from a distance. There were two, large and blue, standing on four legs each, arms waving in the air as if catching a scent. Their heads were small, their bodies huge, and they frightened her, but they were drawing closer to Krall's camp.
Quietly, quickly, she moved closer. They smelled her before they saw her and called out something that might have been a plea for assistance or might have been warning, but she stepped out of the brush anyway, her hands visible at her sides.
Do not go that way, she told them in her language as they chirped in their own bizarre staccato, waving their upper limbs in her direction. "Is danger there," she said in the language of her house and they didn't understand that either. She said it again in the language of the traders but they only clucked and waved and shook their tiny heads so she motioned with her body, pointed toward the camp, beat her fist against her palm and waved her arms in the other direction. The larger one, a darker blue with a shield on its belly, stepped back but stood quietly for a moment, considering her with small amber eyes, until at last it motioned toward Krall's camp and sniffed at the air with its limbs, then moved in that direction.
She tried once more by standing in their way, but the largest one picked her up easily in its sticky, spindly arms, and set her out of the way, high up on a rock, and headed the way that she would not go again. They understood her, she thought. They understood the danger. She thought she understood, too, why they would ignore her warning. Nothing would stop her either if her family were still there.
When she climbed down she did not follow, and when she returned to her house there were no more signs of life.
___
More ships came, all shapes and sizes, crashing onto the surface. Few were close enough that she could investigate and sometimes the life signs would last longer, but most would disappear, either taken by Krall or by the ice at the poles or injury or starvation.
Of all that she investigated, every one of them disregarded her warning, even the ones who spoke a common language. She found a pack of traders huddling in the rocks, their clothing and faces scorched, and warned them away.
Are you here to save us, child?, one asked her, leering over a handful of beetles it had dug from beneath a rock, then shoved them into its crooked mouth.
I tell you so that you may save yourselves, she said, and stepped back. One of them moved closer, another moved around behind her.
You can help us in other ways, the beetle eater said and the two nearest lunged for her, but she shot one with her rifle and it fell to the ground. The others backed away.
She watched them overnight, climbed a tree and looked down on their camp as the one she had shot cried now and then. At dawn they cut its throat and ate it in pieces charred over their campfire.
___
"How much life are there?" she asked the computer one night as she lay in the crew quarters she had taken for herself. On the shelf above her sat her father's holo generator and a printed book she was learning to read. She had lost count of the cycles, the days. The computer could tell her. She never asked.
"Specify," the computer said, its tones now soft and familiar.
"Everywhere."
"Unknown."
"In Altamid."
"Thirteen life forms detected in scannable regions."
She went through the list mentally: the three cannibal traders, the two serpentine individuals she'd found in the dry ravine warming on rocks, another seven she'd never met, scattered too far for her to walk, and herself.
From the shelf above she pulled down the book and flipped to a marked page. "Continue reading," she said.
The computer beeped an affirmative, then began. "Continuing program: reading of Art of War by Sun Tzu. Move swift as the Wind and closely-formed as the Wood. Attack like the Fire and be still as the Mountain.”
___
Tahn landed on Altamid in a small spherical pod that rolled down from the higher peaks and wedged itself between two trees, the hatch pinned shut against one of the great trunks.
She watched the silver ball for most of a day, sitting on an outcropping above, adjusting the circuitry on a device that had once synthesized proteins but she thought could be used more effectively. The computer had told her something was alive in there. She waited.
Before the sun set she heard the first sound, a pounding and then a shout, piercing and high-pitched. The voice called in several languages before there was one that she recognized.
"Help!" It said.
It was nearly dawn again before she had managed to cut through the hull with the hand torch she had fetched from the ship.
"Use caution," she shouted through the dense steel as it glowed red hot, until at last it fell away and she stood back in case whatever was alive wished her death. But when the daylight poured in through the square in the steel there was only a creature waving away the smoke, dressed in a suit the color of the morning sun. They had the same amount of arms and legs as she and the same number of eyes and mouth and ridges running from their nose up over their head and around their ears. They coughed and she reached out her hand.
"No," they said, but pointed to their leg which was bent awkwardly to the side. "Help, please."
She tied the leg in a splint and helped them out of the capsule.
"I do not know why our ship crashed," they said, their voice small and pained. "I do not not know where is our crew."
"Many things land here," she said in reply and nothing about Krall or the likely fate of their crew. She stripped broken branches to make long poles. "I have a house. You must come there; it is safe."
"I am not able," they said.
The pod had a parachute and she took a knife to the ropes, leaving them as long as she could, then set about lashing the canvas to the poles.
"I will take you."
"Thank you," they said, and laid their head tiredly in the soft earth. "I am called Tahn. What are you called?"
She paused. She had not heard her own name for longer than she could remember. Not since her father.
"I am Jaylah," she said, and stabbed at the canvas.
___
Tahn could not climb the ladders into the helm or the crew quarters, so Jaylah brought blankets and lanterns and food into a corridor and there the two of them slept and ate until Tahn could move about more, their leg bound tightly in steel and canvas and belts carefully stitched together by Jaylah.
Tahn's family, her crew, was lost, too. Jaylah did not say that she knew where all of the lost could be found, or that none of them survived, but she did say that some parts of the surface were not able to be scanned and that perhaps Tahn's family was there.
"I must find them," Tahn said sitting in the sun one morning, stretched out in it like it might be a cure. Jaylah had noticed that they looked healthiest in the sunshine. She had never been very impressed by this planet's small star. "They will search for me also."
"You are not well."
"I will be," Tahn said. "Very soon." They had told Jaylah of their people's fast healing.
Jaylah stood and began foraging in the nearby brush, still within the perimeter of the cloaking modules that hid the ship. Tahn watched her.
"How long since you have arrived?" Tahn asked.
"I have lost count. Many cycles--many days. I have outgrown some of my clothing." She stepped out of the bush and stuck out her arms to show where she had added an inch of fabric.
"You are good at many tasks," Tahn said. Their voice was soft and pleasant, with a hum beneath like the sound of an engine or wind through trees.
"I am not as good at fighting. I have seen learning programs, but there is no one to fight."
Tahn smiled. They had sharp white teeth. "I am good at fighting!"
Jaylah looked at them. They were quite small; a head shorter than Jaylah. Tahn seemed to understand. "Being small makes us faster. More difficult to hit."
"I am not small," Jaylah said.
"You are smaller than some."
"Also larger than some."
Tahn smiled and laughed. It felt like a song even more than it sounded like one.
"You will teach me," Jaylah said.
"I will," Tahn said.
____
As Tahn promised they healed quickly, climbing up through the decks almost as fast as Jaylah within a dozen cycles. They taught her how to use the skills the computer had shown her and added their own. They were right; they were fast.
In a mossy clearing under the shade of the soaring trees they circled one another, came toe-to-toe, danced over soft earth and slippery rotting leaves, striking just enough to count at first, then hard enough to bruise. Jaylah could not blink or Tahn, even still recovering from their injury, could be behind her as quickly as they could be across the clearing, a bright yellow blur like a star passing overhead.
"I must be in many places at once to fight you," Jaylah said one afternoon as it began to rain.
"That would be a great trick, my friend."
When next they fought, Jaylah flung something out to the side of her and there was another of her and another and another. Tahn squealed, a sound that could have been either fear or delight but they were laughing as they attacked one holo after another until Jaylah could only stand by and laugh as well.
"From where did you acquire such a device?" Tahn asked, catching their breath as the two of them sat together in the damp grass hip-to-hip, shoulder to shoulder.
"We use them for communicating," she turned the small module in her hands carefully. "This one was my father's."
"Is the image of your father there also? May I see them?"
Jaylah shook her head. "I had to remove it."
"To win a training fight?" Tahn asked, and Jaylah would not look at them.
"Not only that."
"What else could be so important?" They asked, and touched Jaylah's arm, speaking softly, so near. "Why do you fight so hard, Jaylah? What is out there?"
Jaylah shook her head. "I will leave this planet. I promised my father, and you must come with me."
Tahn took their hand away. It felt to Jaylah the same as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. "I must find my people," they said.
___
When Tahn was well enough to walk long distances, they hiked out together to the nearest canyons where the computer could not scan to search for Tahn's crew. Always Jaylah would choose the path, plotting wide circles through the rocky terrain, climbing with grapples and spikes she'd made from salvaged parts, never covering the same territory twice.
"Why do we not search here," Tahn asked, their face lit greenish from the glow of the computer screen, their brow pinched, their eyes soft and deep as starlight. Jayla sometimes felt that they might see inside her.
"It is not safe," she said.
"How do you know?"
Jaylah fetched the long rod she had bored and threaded to hold the modified synthesizer. It also made an effective weapon.
"There is danger there."
Tahn frowned and left the helm computer to stand nearer to Jaylah.
"It is time for you to tell me what you know, my friend."
Jaylah hesitated, looking down for a long time, then she said, "You will leave and then you will die."
"How do you know this?" Tahn asked, and when Jaylah still would not look at them they took her by the arm, their grip strong.
"I was there. My father died there. He did not die in our crash."
"Did something kill him?"
"It is called Krall. It held us in a place in the rocks, and it took us one by one. It killed him and it will kill you also."
Under the dim lights of the bridge Tahn's face seemed to change, to grow a little sharper, to change colors, from pale grey to deep blue.
"Is my crew there?" They asked, flashing white teeth.
Jaylah nodded and looked away. After a moment Tahn's grip on her arm lessened and then left her. When Tahn spoke again they were back at the helm computer and their voice was so soft Jaylah almost did not hear it.
"It was unkind of you to keep this from me. Yet you have saved me and now I might save them."
"You cannot," Jaylah said, dragging the rod behind her across the bridge toward Tahn, the noise of it too loud, louder even when she dropped it and it clanged against the deck.
Tahn would not look at her. "Would you not also, if your father were still there?"
"He is not. He is dead."
"I do not know that of my crew."
Slowly, Jaylah reached out, touched her fingers against the ridge of Tahn's shoulder. "Please," she said.
____
Tahn left before dawn as Jaylah slept. When she woke she asked the computer to scan for life and found that she was alone. She did not pack a sack with rations or water, only took her rifle and staff, sliding recklessly down ladders, rushing through the corridors and out into the morning fog and the dim sunshine. Her feet pounded the soft earth, slipped on wet rock and by the time she stood at the perimeter of Krall's camp she was panting and sweating and the day was nearly complete. There had been signs of Tahn's passing, earth disturbed in the shape of those small feet, so fresh that Jaylah felt that Tahn must be just ahead, only around that stone or that next clump of trees.
She waited in a narrow place in the rocks and watched Krall's camp, wishing she had brought a refracting module to hide herself. Little came or went. Mostly drones moving in predictable patterns from one area to another, and noises from the underground, voices pulled up from the deep by smooth stone walls.
When the sun set she back-tracked to the place in the woods where she had found the beetle eater and blackened her face and hands and hair with soot from their campfire and at darkest night, just before dawn, she returned to the place where her father had died.
There was no sign of prisoners in the makeshift cells, no sounds of screams as she picked her way carefully amongst the gravel between patrolling drones and squat buildings and the cave mouths to the underground. She wished that she could call out. She wished that she could see below the ground without going there. She wished that she could leave her friend as she had left her father. It seemed to her, in the darkest places, that he might still be there, that he might yet live, perhaps waiting for her to return, that she might find him there by chance, protecting Tahn as he had done for her.
Near the mouth of the largest cave, where the prisoners were taken never to return, she crouched in the black shadows and hid her face against the rock and waited and listened. When it was quiet for long enough she slipped around the rock face and down inside where it was darker than she thought possible, but lights ahead, along the wall, led the way deeper, her back flattened against the cold rock face as she moved slowly, silently, deeper, deeper.
Dawn was coming outside. A series of reflectors left by the ancients caught the light from high above and brought it down inside so that as she descended the dark brightened to a dull, murky grey, slowly picking out shapes against the blacker stone. Jaylah did not at first notice the shining yellow fabric, too like the rising sun that she mistook it as a trick of light, or of the mind, which did not want to believe the wasted body hanging there could have ever been her friend.
She nearly cried out, but held her hands over her mouth to keep in the sound. The climb back to the surface seemed longer, harder, so that her feet could not keep quiet, scrabbling over rock, certain that she was buried there forever with her friend, her father, her family, and however many more had been brought to that place.
In the sunlight she fled without thought of detection, almost without thought of direction, her body knowing the way instinctively to safety, and the primary felt hotter and brighter and nearer the farther she moved into the forest, away from the dark.
___
Long after Tahn was gone she had most of the systems up and running but she could not decipher the problem of the engine. She had no idea how she would ever achieve lift either. Nothing in the computer manuals described such a procedure.
Her quarters began to pile high with salvaged parts, weapons in mid-design, small whirring motors awaiting a purpose. If she had nothing else, she had purpose. Ships still fell but she no longer searched for survivors. She no longer warned anyone away. She searched only for salvageable parts.
Most nights she linked the holo of herself to the computer's training program and she fought against herself until she collapsed with numb fatigue and often fell asleep there, her own face watching over her, looking down at her, waiting to throw another punch.
___
The day that the Enterprise fell to the surface she was gathering food. The sky went dark overhead, something enormous moving between the star and the world. She could not see past the cover of trees so she climbed up onto the rocks, to the place where she had first looked down upon her house. Out against the blue a great smoking disk sailed closer, larger than any ship she had yet seen. Silently, it flew, slowly at first, faster as it approached, nearer, larger, impossibly large, hissing then screaming as it cut through the atmosphere. Then it touched down, breaking a mountain with its nose, felling trees and pushing up earth like it meant to bury itself there, fire and dust pluming before and behind it. The ground shook with such force that she fell to her backside and sprawled against the outcropping, clutching at the shuddering rockface.
More followed, capsules or debris, shining red in the blue light of the day as they burned on entry, smoke trailing in their wake. Some landed with great crashes, some with distant pops, some she did not hear at all. One came sliding down the cliffs above her, near enough that she had to roll out of its path, a silver pod scraping its way toward the ravine below, and as it passed something painted on it caught her eye.
"Unidentified Starfleet vessel," the computer said when she returned to her home. The familiar word shone bright on the helm screen. It was written in faded lettering on control panels. It was printed black and white in emergency manuals. It was there in the flaking paint on exterior hatches. Her home was Starfleet.
She asked the computer to scan for life and there were four more than there were the day before. One was headed toward the pod that had fallen into the ravine.
The computer glowed up at her, points of data flickering out over the landscape, waiting.
She set out with her staff and holo module and a cloth over her mouth. The primary would not set for some time but the light was dim from the dust clouds and she hurried over wet rock and plush ground, paths too familiar now.
She was not searching for survivors but there was someone left she still had to rescue. She had promised her father. She had promised herself. 'Home' had been the first word she had learned from her house, but it had been wrong.
This was not her home.
There were voices in the forest when she neared the crash site and she paused to listen outside of a clearing, crouching in the low brush as a cool wind began to blow the smoke and dust away, to clear the air, the sky, from grey to blue. She pulled the cloth away from her face and looked up to the little star that, for the first time in a long time, seemed newly strange to her.
She fished out her holo module and held it in her hand, stood out of the brush and pulled her staff from across her back. She stepped into the clearing.