Page 1 of Crash Landed: The Daranthiki

Chapter 1

Daisy McGillin wasn’t where she was supposed to be. She didn’t know much about what was going on, but she knew that much. The digital brochures her travel agent had offered her had promised a comfortable journey to Galaxoros Colony, during which she would sleep as her data implant absorbed the information stream on the world she was traveling to. For extra security, her agent had arranged for her to travel via cryopod on a private cargo transport flight to avoid pirates who targeted luxury ships to acquire passengers for the galactic slave rings. One could not be too careful, after all, especially after what happened to The Wandering Star. Granted, that was in the outer sectors, but a girl couldn’t be too careful.

As far as she could tell, this wasn’t the height of safe, luxurious travel that her money had paid for. It wasn’t like she hadn’t shopped around either. Daisy was no easy mark for a swindler. As a representative of her family’s corporation, she had vetted her options with the same careful scrutiny she gave everything.

She was supposed to have woken from cryogenic sleep in a lab orbiting the colony, surrounded by medics helping her transition to wakefulness. Instead, she was in a cramped room where the lights flickered dangerously every few minutes, accompanied by erratic sparks from pops of electricity on a damaged panel on the cryosystem’s control unit a few feet away. That probably explained why she was awake instead of still sleeping. Something had damaged the unit. Sitting in her cryopod, she jumped at a particularly large spark that lit the room in a flare of blue and violet. As the light came back on, she was able to see the large medscan unit that had apparently fallen from where it had been anchored on the ceiling.

That wouldn’t have fallen for no reason. Surely the medic or someone among the crew should have noticed and came to investigate. Where was everyone?

Her fingers fisted around the sheet that she had tugged up over her bare breasts, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She couldn’t stay there. The fluctuating power notwithstanding, the panel was bound to catch something on fire. She didn’t need a fancy degree to know that sticking around faulty electrical equipment was stupid.

Daisy slipped out of the pod, but her legs immediately threatened to buckle beneath her for several terrible minutes as she clung to its side. She cursed as she stumbled over to a nearby table, abandoning the sheet. She’d been told that there would be some side effects. This was a lot worse than a side effect, in her opinion. There was no way she was going to be able to hold the sheet up and keep herself upright. Good thing there was no one around to witness that she was as naked as a babe as she hobbled her way across the room to the door.

Stumbling the last few feet to the door, she was grateful when it slid partially open at her approach, though not enough to keep her from careening into it first. Hitting her pelvis against the side of the door, Daisy grunted painfully. That was going to bruise. At least it was open, though not as much as she would have liked. She slid one arm out and gripped the door with her opposite hand as she began to work on wiggling her way through. It was a tight fit. Although typically described as strong as an ox by her siblings, those muscles weren’t doing her much good. They just added to the thickness of her frame, helped by her generous curves that were impeding her passage.

Fuck! Just how long exactly were the side effects supposed to last?

With a groan, she turned her hips and, with half her body freed, pulled hard. The metal bit into her belly, but she smiled victoriously as her other hip slid free and she slipped into the corridor. Stumbling forward, she managed to catch her balance in the middle of the hall before slowly straightening and looking around, peering through the lank ropes of brown hair falling around her face. She shivered, her body and hair still wet with residual moisture from the cryopod.

Like the room, the lights flickered randomly, casting the hall into inky darkness. Paired with the empty stretch, void of any signs of life, the overall effect was creepy, like something straight out of a horror vid. All that was missing was the scent of popcorn and her elder brother leaning forward, running a feather up the back of her neck at the exact moment they watched some horrifying insectoid come around the corner to attack the hapless heroine. But he wouldn’t be. Jaren had died far too young while away on a business trip in their father’s stead, stealing away the only person in her family who had truly loved and cared about her.

“Very funny,” she croaked to herself, her voice thin and hoarse from lack of use after months in cryostasis. “If this is a setup for a horror vid or some kind of practical joke, I am so not down for it.”

Her words were met with silence. She really wasn’t expecting any other result, but she had hoped that maybe there had been a slim chance that someone was fucking with her. No such luck.

Her limbs shaking already with exhaustion, Daisy made her way to the wall where a data screen was mounted with an interactive schematic of the ship. With the power fluctuations, the interactive shit wasn’t working, but it lit up just enough that she could make out where she was in relation to the command center on the flight deck.

Surely there would be someone there, and it seemed a safer bet than her other option: to descend into engineering through what looked like an emergency access port. Nope. No tight corridors for her. Going into the cryopod had been bad enough with her claustrophobia, but at least she had been knocked out quickly. She wasn’t sure how well she would handle climbing down through the narrow confines of an access tunnel.

The flight deck, however, was marked in a clear path just down at the end of the corridor. Squinting in the distance, she could make out the door. It was sliding halfway open and then shutting again before sliding open again in a cyclic glitch.

Slowly, using the wall for support, she made her way down the hall. Her footsteps, though muffled by her bare feet on the walkway, sounded eerily loud in the silence. At her approach, the door slid all the way open, allowing a large shape that had been leaning against it to spill through. She didn’t even look down at it; her eyes were staring in fixed horror at the sight that greeted her.

“Fuck me. I never should have left Earth,” she whispered.

Chapter 2

Throughout the command center, bodies were strewn about, slumped where they had passed their last moments of life. The putrid musk of decomposition sideswiped her, and Daisy blinked back the stinging tears that sprung painfully to her eyes. The modest-sized crew of the merchant ship lay in various stages of decay.

She grimaced. With her extremely rudimentary knowledge, she knew that, with the environmental controls in place on the ship, they had to have died some time ago to be so deteriorated. Daisy gagged as her foot brushed one of the bodies. She could have done without witnessing any of this.

Despite the worries that people had of traveling to Earth colonies, she knew that there were a number of protocols that were closely followed in order to make the transition as safe as possible. For this situation alone in which there was ship failure or some other catastrophic event, the cryopod had enough power to keep them going for hundreds of years in wait of rescue. It was all outlined in detail in the pamphlet she had carefully scoured over the days leading up to her departure.

Something like this shouldn’t have been able to happen!

She should still be asleep. According to the pamphlet, in a situation in which the transport crew was killed, she should have slept through retrieval and transference to a rescue unit, where she would have been carefully revived by medics.

This was... impossible.

Gingerly stepping around a body slumped over the console, she squinted at the system display. She had no idea what she was looking at but hoped that the flashing light at the station was a good sign.

Please let the AI be operational.

“Starship... Delfor IX?” she rasped.

“Unknown passenger. Please identify yourself,” the AI replied dutifully.

“Daisy McGillin. I am the sole passenger on route to Galaxoros Colony.”