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Faint Premonition	By : ehiltebe Category: M through R > Pitch Black Views: 2132 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: In no way do I own any part of Pitch Black, its setting, or its characters, and I make no money from this work. I just get to play with them.

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Well, another Wednesday and another chapter. I'm trying to be quick about posting, as it's thunderstorming like nobody's business outside and I don't want to lose the power in the middle of posting. So please read, review, and I'll have another chapter up next week!

Faint Premonition

A Pitch Black Alternate Universe

Chapter Three

My mind wandered, sifting through my memories. I hate cryosleep, because I don’t sleep. Sure, my body may be at rest, but I’m still fully conscious.

I’d done cryo twice before, on my way to and from Granmoor College. After the first bout, I’d called my adoptive parents and let them know I wouldn’t be coming home until I had my degree. Instead, they and Jamie had taken the time to come see me.

My best friend’s first visit had involved a confession; I’d killed a man with nothing but a stylus. He’d jumped me after dark, muttering his plans to rape and murder me into my ear when he thought he had me helpless. Hell, I’d thought I was helpless until I struck with the blunted tip of the writestick, driving it through his trachea. Then, with the scumbag on the ground, I’d deliberately pierced his carotid artery, allowing him the swift death he wouldn’t have given to me.

Afterwards, I’d dumped the corpse in the river and returned to my dorm room. Never had a single nightmare over it, oddly, but it had been a matter of survival. Jamie said the same thing when I told him, then never raised the subject again. And my later class on motives and ethics—a required course for criminology majors—had reassured me that I was in the right.

Twenty-two weeks had passed so far, according to my internal clock. The engines had quieted a few days into the trip, and the only thing keeping me sane was the faint scent coming from the chamber next to me; richly masculine, with a coppery undertone like that of human blood. I knew I’d never met the man before, but knowing he was right next to me was strangely soothing.

Ping-zip-ping!

Ping-zip-ping!

The unexpected sounds jolted me into full awareness of my surroundings, but it didn’t produce anywhere near enough adrenaline to clear the chemicals out of my body. Immobile, trapped, I could only observe while things went to hell in a hand-basket.

Ping-zip-thwack-ping!

I heard two distinct hisses, followed by the sounds of two people hitting the deck.

“Why did I fall on you?!” The navigator’s voice was a little shrill, panicked.

“He’s dead.” Shock laced the pilot’s statement. “Captain’s dead. Christ, I was looking right at him when—” The cryo-juice being fed into my bloodstream began to ebb, and I attempted to speed up my heart rate through sheer willpower.

“The chrono shows we’re twenty-two weeks out. Gravity wasn’t supposed to kick in for another nineteen. Why did I fall at all?!”

“Did you hear what I said!?!” Feet scrabbled against the decking. “Captain’s dead! Owens, too!”

What the fuck? There were only three of them to start with, now two are talking and two are dead?

“Oh, no. Not Owens, not…” A moment’s pause. “Wait, wait, wait. I’m Owens. Right?”

“Cryosleep.” The pilot put as much disgust into the word as I felt. “Swear to God, it sloughs brain cells.” Footsteps resonated as Owens and the pilot moved around. “Fifteen-fifty millibars, dropping twenty MB per minute… Shit, we’re hemorrhaging air. Something took a swipe at us.”

“Just tell me we’re still in the shipping lanes.” It sounded like a prayer. “Just show me all those stars, all those bright, beautiful, deep-spa—” Owens broke off in mid-word. Only a crash between us and the desert I was prepared for.

“Jesus God.” The ship began to shudder, and I heard someone climb a ladder at speed.

“They trained you for this, right?” Silence, at least of the human sort, answered him. “Fry? Fry?!” A faint howling began, accompanied by metallic snaps. Atmosphere, generating enough friction to rip away any external arrays.

“… Crisis program selected Number Two of this system because it shows at least some oxygen and more than fifteen hundred—” Shrieking alarms overwhelmed the man’s data regurgitation. “Would you SHUT THE FUCK UP!” A loud thump quieted them abruptly. “— more than fifteen hundred millibars of pressure at surface level. Okay, so maybe the ship did something right for a change.” The statement was… less than reassuring.

A series of small explosions sounded from the aft end of the vessel, and I had to choke down nausea as the gravity of the planet seemed to move. Whatever blew had sent us into a roll.

“What the… Was that a purge?”

“Too heavy in the ass! Can’t get my fucking nose down!” I no longer needed to try to get my heart beating faster; it was hammering at my ribs. Mechanical thumps were followed by a return to a relatively normal gravitational position.

“Showing no major water bodies.” Owens picked up his monologue. “Maximum terrain two hundred twenty meters over mean surface. Largely cinder and gypsum with some evaporate deposits.” Another set of explosions leveled the ship out a bit, but I could tell we were still going to hit stern first.

A loud hiss snapped my eyes open and to my left. The airlock to the command module began to close at a snail’s pace. I struggled, but could barely turn my head. Everything below my neck was still paralyzed by the cryo-locker’s chemical cocktail.

Fuck, no. No. Can’t lose the main cabin. Goddammit, Fry, we need what you’ve got in there!

Precisely what we needed, I didn’t know. But without that pod, every person in the passenger section was worse than dead.

“Fry, what are you doing?” Suspicion entered the navigator’s voice. “Fry?! Answer, goddammit!”

“Can’t get my nose down! Too much load back there!”

Fucking BITCH! And me unable to do a goddamn thing…

“You mean that ‘load’ of passengers? Is that what you mean, Fry?”

“So what, we should both go down, too? Out of sheer fucking nobility?! I don’t think so.”

Motion to my right. Somehow, the merc had gotten his chamber set to revive him first after the crew. He wiped condensation off the inside of the clear door panel, and then peered across the walkway at his prisoner. I froze. Him seeing me moving would be Not Good.

The ship bounced on an odd air current, launching the blond up to knock his head on the top of the chamber, then slamming him back down onto his feet. Hadn’t strapped himself in well, if at all, which was a typically stupid merc thing to do. A thread of amusement entered my neighbor’s scent.

He’s as aware of what’s going on as I am…

“Look, Fry, company says we’re responsible for every one of those—”

“Company’s not here, is it? I tried everything else and still got no horizon!”

“Well you’d better try everything twice, ‘cause no way do we just flush—”

“If you know something I don’t, get your ass up here and take this chair, Owens!”

“When the Captain went down, you stepped up, like it or not!” The finality of the statement seemed to end the lovers’ spat. “Now, they train you for this, so—”

“And there wasn’t a simulated cockroach alive within fifty klicks of the simulated crash site! That’s how they train you! On a fucking simulator!”

“Fry…” A deadly earnest warning. “Don’t touch that handle!” Feet scrambled for the first time since the pilot went topside. The ship began to yaw, wagging like a dog’s tail, but hands appeared in the shrinking airlock, holding a wrench that had to be as long as my thighbone. Within seconds, the inside edges of the doors had settled into the open crescents, jamming it open.

“Owens!!” I grinned at the frustrated scream.

“Seventy seconds! You still got seventy seconds to level this beast out.” Knowing that he’d get whatever the passengers got seemed to calm the man in a way nothing else had so far. When a fourth mechanical thump vibrated through the hull, things began to even out, but there was more shuddering than before. More surface area to be battered by unknown air currents.

Metal squealed, and I heard a crash as something hit a viewport. The merc managed to grab the emergency release for his cryo-chamber, and the vessel lurched, hurling him out of it. Another violent heave rolled the blond back that way. He latched onto one of the heavy rib members milliseconds before the starboard hull peeled away, taking his locker with it. I flinched, closing my eyes against the sudden glare.

The tortured structure screeched one last time, and the section I was in came to such an abrupt halt that black spots danced across the backs of my eyelids. My locker door popped open a little bit, and I cracked my eyes to peer through the lashes. The stop had turned the pod just enough to keep it mostly shaded, though the narrow gap between hull and ground was painfully bright.

Releasing the crash webbing that had probably kept me from scrambling my brains, I tumbled through the plexiglas to land on dirt, my duffels thumping down on either side, biometric locks still blinking their red ‘closed’ indicators. My sunglasses were the first thing I reached for, mercifully unharmed. Then I rolled onto my back and looked up at the sophisticated box that could so easily have become my coffin. I didn’t want to think about how many had died already.

When I heard others moving around, calling in a mixture of English and Arabic, I climbed to my feet and heaved one bag onto my shoulder. The effort left me gasping, and part of my mind noted that the air here was short on oxygen. Why I hadn’t needed to buy breathers to go with the package of capsules in my supplies puzzled me, but I knew I’d find out why sooner or later. The second duffel was relegated to being dragged behind me as I went in search of the people I could hear.

As I passed the collapsed blond, it was obvious that he was still breathing, though a line of blood trickled from at least one ear. I scuffed a boot through the sandy grit that had entered during the wreck, adding thickness to the layer of yellowish dust already covering him. But his prisoner had vanished, leaving behind a snapped U-bolt at the bottom of the ‘secure’ locker and broken chains that had secured his manacles to the chamber’s walls. I could still smell him, at least, though it was too diffuse to give me a location.

“Please get rid of the airhead cop wannabe.” My voice was just a whisper. I couldn’t be sure if the deep but equally quiet chuckle that followed was anything more than my imagination.

The pod was in terrible shape, warped and twisted almost out of recognition by the forced landing. Rounding a sharp bend, I stared. The deck was canted nearly sixty degrees off level, and an entire cluster of cryo-chambers had been torn from their mountings, ending the wild ride in a haphazard pile. Several passengers had been able to get out on their own and were trying to free the trapped ones.

The female prospector had gotten a cutting torch from somewhere and was opening the back of one locker as I arrived. I moved to help pull the metal back, but her partner and the Muslim man beat me to the punch. A quick look around showed the three Muslim boys and the balding man seated in various places and panting in an effort to supply their lungs with enough oxygen.

“Something went wrong, huh?” The girl had been in the inverted locker. I was a bit surprised that she’d modulated her voice, lowering the pitch so she sounded like a boy, too. She was either a very good actor or had practice pulling that trick.

I did a quick mental count, including the merc’s payday even though I hadn’t seen him, and came up two short of the thirteen survivors I was expecting. There had to be others alive. No one in this group had been seriously hurt, either—just bumps and bruises—so I trudged back toward the gaping hole at the newly-formed corner and got outside to look around.

By some miracle, the cargo pod had come to ground about five hundred meters away. Stars only knew what was in there that could be useful. The command module was a dozen meters beyond the bow end of the passenger section, and I figured that was as good a place as any to look for the living. Even if the entire rear bulkhead appeared to have been torn away.

The ‘cop’ had apparently gotten there first, emerging from the smaller of the two holes in the mangled section. Trailing in his wake was a petite blonde woman in a very dirty blue shipsuit. Her eyes were wide and blank with shock.

“Are there any others, Johns?” I half-recognized the name and set a portion of my mind to figuring out who he was.

“Twelve, counting you,” I called. The woman jumped a bit. Presumably, she was Fry, and I didn’t really feel a whole lot of sympathy for her.

A moment later, she stopped and changed direction to head for the larger part of the pod in a hurried shuffle. Debris filled half of it, and Fry started flinging pieces out of her way as I followed her in, digging for something. I hesitated, but the scent of blood prompted me to join her. Owens was probably in there somewhere, and he was hurt.

Letting my nose guide me, I uncovered the back of a chair with an odd bulge in the metal. The two of us pulled on it and found the man—strapped in, with a piece of electrical conduit through his chest. The blonde audibly swallowed a sob and reached out to touch the dead man’s cheek.

“… Out, out, out! GET IT OUTTA ME!” I flinched away at the sudden yell, then scrambled toward my bags. Eight figures cast shadows from the torn bulkhead and babbled suggestions.

“Pull it out of him.”

“No, it’s too close to the heart.”

“You gotta do it, just do it fast.” The pilot put out a hand to grab the metal.

“Don’t touch it!” She nearly leapt out of her skin, pulling her hand back toward her chest like it’d been burned. “Don’t touch that handle!” Her gray eyes flicked up to my shades. I only cocked an eyebrow in response, letting her wonder whether or not I knew what Owens’ words meant.

“You’ll kill him, I’m tellin’ you.”

“Shit, just leave him alone!”

“Delirious.”

“Don’cha got some drugs for the poor man?”

“All right, all right…” Fry collected herself. “Okay, somebody—there’s Anestaphine in the med locker in the back of the cabin.” As she spoke, I retrieved Drift’s kit and popped it open.

“Not anymore, there’s not.”

“Here.” I held out one of the pre-filled, labeled syringes, and she accepted it with a grateful look I ignored. I’d gotten it out for the man who saved thirteen lives and was losing his own, not for her. Closing the case back up, I returned it to my duffel and stood. The scents of fear and pain ebbed.

“Get out,” the smaller woman rasped. “Everyone.” The small crowd dispersed as quickly as it had gathered, except for the girl. She had frozen up in horrified fascination, and I had to put myself between her and the scene before she moved at all. Then she looked down and shuddered as she turned away.

Most of them, I found, had migrated to the top of the passenger section. As tired as I was, I dragged myself and my bags up to join them. Then I sat, legs dangling over the edge where the hull had been torn away, and surveyed the smoking trail of debris.

Somewhere out there, my thirteenth survivor waited, possibly injured.

“Anyone else having breathing problems?” I winced slightly at the whine in the weedy little man’s New British accent. “Aside from me?”

“Feel like I just ran or somethin’.”

“Yeah, I feel one lung short.” The free settler appeared rather attractive in the orangeish light from the twin red and yellow suns, with long, dark hair, pale emerald eyes, and a way of moving that said she enjoyed being admired. Not that I swing that way. Her New Australian accent carried a rough-around-the-edges quality. “All of us.”

“I’ve got O₂capsules, but no breathers.” My offer was met with a silence that held for a few minutes. But they were nine people trying to process an unexpected predicament. Not a complete surprise for me, but I hadn’t known any specifics until now. The particulars of what we would face before getting off the barren rock of a world were still a mystery to me, especially with the weapons packed in one bag. Then Fry trudged up, a defeated slump to her shoulders and blood on her shipsuit.

“There was talk of a party looking for other survivors, but then we saw this.”

“Should at least try to do some scrounging, see what we can find that’ll be useful.” I wasn’t about to give up on that last man or woman. The stocky prospector shot me a thoughtful look.

“What the bloody hell happened?”

“Could have been a… a meteor storm, a rogue comet, maybe. I don’t know.” At least the pilot would admit that much.

“Well, I, for one, am thoroughly fucking grateful. This beast wasn’t made to land like this, but I think you did well.”

Two-thirds of the crew and nearly three-quarters of the passengers dead, and she DID WELL?

I huffed quietly in frustration.

“C’mon, you lousy ingrates, the only reason we’re alive is ‘cause of her.” At that, I actually snorted. The real hero was poor Owens.

“I s’pose you’re right. Thanks very much.” The other free settler didn’t sound terribly enthusiastic.

“Yeah, thanks for saving our dicks.” I turned my laugh into a cough, both to spare the girl’s feelings and to hide that I knew her secret.

The spire-covered hill to the right of the wreckage drew my attention as an uneasy feeling settled into my gut. A glance at the suns seared my eyes even through my heavily polarized shades, and I quickly averted my gaze to focus on the debris field. Time to rally the troops for a search-and-rescue.

“So are we just gonna sit here and wait for rescue?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I twisted around to face the kid. “Too exposed out here. Ideally, we want somewhere with shade and a water source, at the very least. I’ve got some water in my bags, and some other stuff that might help, but it won’t last long, not with this many of us.” Then I paused. “I really do think we need to check some of this mess, see if there’s anything we can use.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Forget the wreckage already, woman!” I scowled at Johns, knowing that a mere glare would go completely unseen.

“She’s right.” The brunette crossed her arms over her chest. “There’s a lot can survive a high-velocity crash. We’re gonna need every possible resource to get outta here, and not checking cheats us outta those resources.”
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Faint Premonition