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He caught it, balancing it in his palm as he absently assessed the weight. “Feriq, you’re a sneaky bastard, I’ll give you that.” He blew out a hard breath. “Fine. I was planning on detouring that direction anyway, before taking the shuttle back to Antana’s Luck.”
“Excellent,” he purred. His grin widened. “You know, Nox, that which you put out into the universe always finds its way back to you two-fold. Remember that.” He tapped the side of his nose and spun on a heel, snapping his fingers at his two helpers, who jumped in the back of the rover with the crates.
Shaking his head, Nox watched him climb into the vehicle and speed away, a cloud of reddish dust eddying in his wake. “Crazy cat-man,” he muttered, tucking the bag of credits into the pocket under the thin armor chest plate he wore under his leathers and settling into his lightweight, two-seated skimmer. “Navi, meet me at the base of the ridge. We’re off to do our good deed of the decade.”
“Copy that.”
Nox still hoped for a decent salvage to make this worth his time. But in a dusty and forgotten corner of his mind, young Lennox was excited about the chance to be valiant once again.
2
LIS
As crash landings went, it wasn’t her worst.
“Far from my best, though,” Captain Fidelis Flynn muttered as she kicked out the cockpit’s shattered windshield and slid down the nose onto the red dune it was buried in. A hiss and a shower of sparks vented from the shattered console housing the main computer.
Lis let out a low whistle, taking in the extent of the damage. The experimental spacecraft she’d been test piloting was well and truly fucked. The wings sheared off, the fuselage cracked in half, and the pieces of the ship’s back end lay scattered along a flaming furrow carved through the shifting sands.
It was a miracle she was in one relatively unbroken piece, considering how screaming hot she came in and how many bounces the ship took before finally skidding to a halt. Lis took a deep breath of the recycled air pumping through her space suit, wincing as pain spiderwebbed across her torso with each inhale.
What in the hell happened? The launch was textbook perfect. With Earth in her rearview, she completed a slingshot around the moon, got the ship up to speed, and flipped on the T-drive, all well within specs.
Frowning, she remembered the lights on the front panel flashing red, and the space in front of the ship rippling before what felt like a giant hand grabbed them and flicked them away like a flat stone skipping over a lake. Then… nothing. G-forces must have knocked her out because she couldn’t remember a damn thing between going into a spin and plunging back into the planet’s atmo.
No matter what led up to the crash, Todd Hammond, owner of the ship and tech bro extraordinaire, was going to be pissed. He’d been so certain this latest design would be the one to carry him to his utopian bubble colony on Mars in a fraction of the time the trip currently took. She got the impression he had plans to rule the colony like his own personal kingdom, free from any outside interference. Whatever. Todd’s weird life choices weren’t her problem, as long as she got to fly.
Heaving a sigh, she went to rub her face, only to smack a hand against the helmet’s mask. She cursed and pulled a clear tablet from a pocket on her thigh. It was cracked, but still able to check the atmosphere, giving her a welcome message:
Air quality within acceptable parameters
“Well, thank fuck for that.” She popped the seal at her neck and pulled off the helmet and fitted communications cap underneath. A gust of dry desert wind immediately sucked the sweat from her skin, leaving behind a salty crust. Scrubbing a hand through her shaggy blonde bob, she tousled her flattened waves and inhaled the sweet scent of fresh air. It held an unfamiliar weight and thickness that puzzled her. With the red sand dunes and formations as far as the eye could see, she guessed she crashed somewhere in the Namib Sand Sea. But with gravity pulling on her harder than she was used to, doubt tickled the back of her brain. A heated flush of worry swept through her.
When she first came to, telemetry and guidance were fried. It was all she could do to get the nose pointed down so they wouldn’t burn up in atmo. So, where in the hell am I? she thought, a racking cough catching her off-guard and bending her double. She cleared her throat, wincing at the rough scratchiness. Water first, then the rest.
Poking through the wreckage, she muscled back a piece of metal, uncovering a case of emergency rations with a little fist pump of success. She unfastened the top and drained half. The liquid was warm, but it tasted damned good on her parched throat.
She unzipped her formfitting space suit, shrugging off the top portion and tying the arms around her waist. An innovation of one of Todd’s partner companies, the deep navy blue fabric, comprised of multiple thin layers, was surprisingly stretchy and comfortable. Usually, the cooling technology was pretty damned good at keeping body temp regulated, except it seemed, under the hot desert sun. Something else to pass along to the design team.
She kicked at a scorched side panel. This mission was a bust. Now, all she wanted to do was take a long shower, pop a couple of ibuprofen, and have a cold beer or three. She took another swig of warm water, trying to pretend it was an ice-cold beer. Alas, her imagination failed her.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, warning of an impending storm. “Great. That’s just what I need.” She shaded her eyes and peered into the sky, now tinged pinkish-purple from the setting sun. Suns. As in multiple.
Her heart skipped a beat. Two suns? No way. Obviously, she had a concussion and was seeing things.
But a growing worry squirmed at the back of her mind. What if…? She shook away the preposterous thought. The closest Goldilocks planet was at least twenty-two light years from Earth. There was no possibility she’d traveled that far, not in two lifetimes. Besides, she was currently helmetless and breathing oxygen-rich air rather than atmosphere that was mostly nitrogen, helium, or carbon dioxide. Logic said she had to be on Earth.
Right?
She dropped her water bottle to the sand and focused on her tablet. Its processing power was miniscule, but it also functioned as a redundant system, storing a backup of the last hour in flight.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Tell me what happened. Or where I am. Something.”
The tablet emitted sad little beeps as it struggled to do as she asked.
“Finally,” she said, flicking through the data it provided. She blinked hard, trying to process what she was reading. Her heart dropped. “‘Sensors detected an anomaly .00014 milliseconds before loss of function’,” Lis read aloud. “‘...anomaly appears to fit the parameters of an Einstein Rosen Bridge’.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Fuck. A wormhole? Seriously?”
A sandy, hot wind whistled around her, ruffling her hair. Though there wasn’t a cloud in the pink-purple sky, the unceasing roll of thunder grew louder with every passing second, reminding her she seemed to no longer be on Earth or even in her solar system. Possibly no longer even in the Milky Way. There was no telling where the wormhole dumped her.
