Rocks and Shoals Pt. 01 of 04

Dawn broke over an alien world.

A battle was being fought in orbit. Two capital ships. One human, the other a territorial species known as the dirz. The battleships were broadside facing opposite directions. The human rail guns were at full power, at risk of overheating. The rounds slammed against the dirz hull. Spaced armor kept the internal damage to a minimum. They were returning fire with plasma charges. Short range, but accurate and potentially devastating. It was a brutal encounter. More so for the Earth ship.

In desperation to change the momentum of the battle, a squadron of fighters was deployed. They dipped into low orbit. Their objective was to swing beneath the dirz ship and attack from below taking out a power relay and silencing the plasma guns on that side of the ship. The dirz knew this and deployed a squadron to intercept.

A dozen earth fighters engaged with an equal number of dirz in the upper atmosphere. The fighting was close range and fierce. The humans seized the early advantage and pressed their assault.

Colonel Shan Reddings led the mission. Her gunner was a green private named Devin Welke. She ordered half the fighters, Red 7 through Red 12 to advance on the target, while Red Leader through Red 6 engaged with the enemy.

Red Leader dipped deeper into the upper stratosphere and found the tail of a dirz fighter that was itself on the tail of a friendly. Red 3 in the lead was leaking coolant and appeared to have a lost a thruster on its starboard side. The dirz was taking potshots, it had little chance of scoring a direct hit due to the turbulence and the clouds but was keeping Red 3 from disengaging and returning to the main engagement. However, eventually the dirz would get lucky.

Reddings flew in close. "You wake back there Welke?"

"Sorry Colonel." The nervous private aimed the rail guns and squeezed the trigger. The shots clipped the port wing. Damage but not a kill.

Then the dirz banked hard and Reddings overshot.

"Shit." She had come in too fast. She was too eager to close the gap. It cost her. But at least the dirz was no longer on Red 3.

"Get out of here, Browder. You're hit pretty bad."

"Copy Red Leader." The damaged fighter climbed to the mesosphere. As soon as the cloud cover broke, the dirz pounced and opened fire. Red 3 exploded in a fireball. A split second of fire and the oxygen was burned up and the debris scattered and fell.

"Shit!" Reddings slowed and banked and dropped back into the clouds. She thought a moment, considered the angle. Should be about there. Though of course she could see nothing for the clouds.

A moment later the clouds broke and the dirz fighter came into view. "Fire!"

Welke did. And the shots raked across the fuselage and starboard wing. A moment later the engine exploded and the fighter spiraled.

"Ha!" She turned to her gunner, just for a split second, and in that time missed the wing plating saucering through the thin air and smashing into the cockpit.

A dozen warning lights turned red throughout the cockpit and there was a hiss of air escaping the cracked canopy.

Reddings fought the controls, did her best to level their descent. But they were coming in fast. When they hit the crest of a ridge, Shan was knocked unconscious. The fighter skidded down the slope. And in a flurry of blows the ship was pummeled by the rocks and shoals of this alien shore.

*

Sometime later Shan woke. Pain lanced through her side. She opened her eyes to soot and ash and a dark grey sky. Heat blasted the side of her face. She squeezed her eyes shut. Tears streaked her cheeks. She moaned.

She lifted her head up, felt a wave of vertigo, but it soon passed and she dared to open her eyes again. This time she knew what to expect and she could see despite the smoke. A moment later she closed them again. But in that time, she saw her surroundings.

The fighter was a flaming wreck. The engine and fuselage were on fire. The wings had been clipped off sometime earlier in the slide and were nowhere to be seen. The cockpit with her and Welke had miraculously broken free and continued down the slope, putting some distance between them and the fire. That break had saved their lives.

She was still strapped into the pilot's seat, tattered and battered and snapped off its mounting. She was laying on her side. She undid her harness and rolled free. She checked herself. Aside from a few bruises, she was unharmed, unbelievable as that sounded. There was no blood to be seen.

Then she crawled through the wreckage. There was sheet aluminum and steel struts. All twisted by the crash and the heat. There were wrecked control panels, now a tangle of wires.

And then she found Welke. The kid was free of his chair. His legs and hips were pinned beneath a twisted brace. She dragged the metal off him and put an ear to his chest. Still breathing. Good. She checked his pulse. Weak. He had lost a lot of blood but she couldn't see from where. Then she felt around beneath him and found a spar of steel puncturing his hip. It was bad. He'd probably never walk again.

There was a first aid kit at the rear of the cockpit. Not much, but it was all they had. She scrambled through the flaming debris strewn across the rocky shelf of land. She pushed aside bits and pieces of her ship.

The kit. She found it strapped to a bulkhead. Beside it was a fire extinguisher. She took both and went back to Welke.

She popped the kit. Water. Aspirin. Gauze. There was a syringe of morphine, but she held off on that for the time being. The kid was still unconscious. At the bottom of the kit there was a bag of plasma. It seemed blood loss had been a foreseeable problem.

She took off her flight jacket and balled it and pushed it against the wound to stymie the blood flow. She'd have to clean it later, but for now this was triage.

It took a couple minutes to get ready: clean his elbow, clean her hands and find a length of metal that would hold the bag while the plasma dripped into his veins. When everything was ready, she hooked him up and let the plasma replace what he had lost.

Then she turned her attention back to the spar sticking through him. She knew she had to get it out and clean and seal the wound, but she had no idea how. She had spent more time examining the wreckage of the fighter than she did the wreckage of his body.

At last she felt confident. She unhooked the bag of plasma. Decided to save the rest. Then she moved the sheet aluminum aside. When he was uncovered, with just the spar through his hip, she put her knee on the metal and her hands under the small of his back and his butt. And she lifted. It took a bit of work to lift him off the metal. Her hands slipped in the blood and almost dropped him. But finally she got him off and lay him aside.

Then she wrapped her jacket around him, keeping the pressure tight. She went back up to his neck and checked his pulse again and only then did she find that he was dead.

She crouched next to him for some time. Shocked. Not knowing what to do.

A detail caught her eye, a cord around his neck. She opened his flight jacket and saw a necklace with a crucifix.

He had been a member of the Universalists. She suddenly remembered him talking about it one time. He believed that Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of all sentient life in the universe, not just for humanity. He believed all intelligent life had once lived in Paradise and that Original Sin was something all intelligent species were guilty of and and therefore all were in need of a Savior.

It had seemed stupid at the time. She had teased him for it. Though in her heart she envied him his faith. It was something she had never had.

Now this Christian, this soldier, this virgin kid was dead. Laying on some anonymous ball of rock in a star system that only had value because of the heavy gases that were mined from a nearby gas giant.

She leaned over and kissed him on his finely sculpted lips.

In a few minutes the shock and the adrenaline waned and that's when the reality of her situation hit. Only then did she start crying. She sat and leaned back against the hull of her ship's cockpit and closed her eyes and breathed deep. Letting the tears flow freely. Some of them for this young man lost in war. Some for herself and the slim chance that she would ever see Earth again.

*

Shan Reddings had been a military brat even before she joined the Earth Defense Force. She loved those flight simulations and she loved risk taking, and she even loved the wargames people played, silly though they sometimes were.

When she turned eighteen she enrolled in the military academy. Her father had always been a history buff, he loved studying wars of the past, but he never had much use for the wars of the present.

For Shan it became real when she read a book about the Epsilon Eridani 41 colonies. They had been annexed by the cynwall some time ago and the humans there had been enslaved. When the first encounters with the dirz began over distant colonies it had seemed so remote to most people, so far removed from their daily lives. But to Shan it was history repeating itself.

In flight school, Shan was excellent. She had a knack for flying. More specifically she had a knack for not thinking, just acting on instinct. That's what it took to be a good pilot.

After graduating, her first assignment had been to a carrier group. She ran recon ops for a time before getting into her first dogfight. Her flight found a dirz mining colony on an asteroid in the belt outside the system. A group of dirz fighters intercepted her squadron to keep them from reporting back. She downed one of the fighters before breaking away and making evasive maneuvers back to the carrier. She was the only pilot to survive the attack and her superiors saw she had that survivor's instinct. They promoted her and gave her a fighter. It wasn't long before she was a Colonel and she was in command of a squadron.

And now here she was, marooned on some godforsaken rock in some system in the outer rim with little chance of survival and even less chance of rescue. Not unless the sergeant on duty that day just happened to be totally OCD about things and insisted on a planetary scan for any missing fighters.

She wasn't holding her breath.

It took some time for Shan to gather what supplies she could from the wreckage.

First she checked the transmitter. Completely destroyed. No hope of being repaired. Not with the tools and knowledge she had.

There were flares. In the event of an atmospheric battle, there was a chance low flying craft could spot survivors. But their battle had been in orbit. It was only her dogged pursuit of the enemy that got her into this mess. It was probable no one would be looking for her, assuming she had been destroyed in low orbit near the rest of the fighting.

She had already recovered the medical kit with its morphine and bandages and antibiotics.

As for food and water, that had not been a priority for the designers. There was a canister of water in the medical kit along with a few power bars.

No one expected a fighter pilot to have to survive on their own for long before rescue.

During her search, she found a scrap of aluminum wedged into the cushion of her headrest narrowly missing her head by inches, tapered and twisted and smoothed from the heat, it had a steel grommet on one end. She held it tight. Tears blurred her vision. A tiny shard of her Gargoyle fighter. Now laying in a flaming wreck across the surface of some anonymous shit hole of a planet. She blinked a few times. Collected herself. Then she pulled a length of wire from a smashed console and laced it through the grommet and tied it around her neck.

Welke had his cross. She had her own icon.

Then dawn broke over the distant horizon.

During the dogfight in orbit the sun had crested the edge of the planet. But in the ensuing battle she had strayed to the nightside of the planet. And now the sun had finally caught up with her.

She dragged Welke away from the crash to a fissure in the rock face. She took off his boots and helmet and flight jacket. She considered taking pants and shirt, but the thought of leaving him naked felt wrong. Then she kissed his cross and put it against his chest. Then she buried him under a cairn of stones. She stood over his grave and said a few words to his God and to him by way of parting.

Then she turned and surveyed the planet. Her new home.

The sky was red, gritty and filled with some particulate matter. The rock of the slope was dark and hard and worn by wind. There was some vegetation, green and brown, in tight clumps in the crevices of the mountain side. Green meant photosynthesis, which meant carbon based life. And so there was hope of liquid water and some hope that these plants were edible.

She looked out over the valley below. There appeared to be a river running through the lowlands. The valley bed was laced with more green. Some of it seemed fuller and brighter.

Then she checked the opposite rise, across the river and saw a plume of smoke.

That might be the alien ship she had shot down. It didn't have the altitude to cross the opposite peak and reach the next valley.

There was a chance that the alien's transmitter was intact. And there was a chance she could configure it to transmit on an Earth band and contact her ship. There might even be food and water that she could add to her supply while she had to wait.

Hell, while she was at it, she might as well just wish the thing was operational and she could fly the fuck off this rock.

She hoisted her pack and continued. Only then did it occur to her that the enemy pilot might still be alive. She froze. Considered her options. She needed whatever might be over there. She'd just have to approach with some measure of caution and hope for the best.

*

Shan descended the slope. She picked her way across the rocky surface and had to cross jagged scars in the rock face. Here the vegetation grew in clumps of brush and grass. When she reached the bottom, she crossed alluvial mudflats along the banks of the river.

The river itself was wide and shallow and it indeed consisted of liquid water. Although it was brackish with silt and would need to be filtered before she could drink it. Still, the existence of water heartened her and she forded the river with ease, her spirits high for the first time since the crash.

On the opposite shore she crouched by the water's edge. She ripped an arm off Welke's flight jacket. Then she cut it lengthwise and took off her helmet and set it on the bank between two rocks. She scooped water into the length of cloth and let the water sieve out the bottom and into the upturned helmet. It took a long time for the water to filter through. It was dense fabric. But at last she had some small amount of water in the helmet.

She brought it to her lips, paused, prayed this would be clean enough to drink. Then she took a draw of the water.

It was not great. It was kind of nappy. But it was cool and it didn't make her gag.

Then she waited for any ill effects. There were none, so she finished her helmet of water and stood up and considered her situation.

She set her helmet and the spare flight jacket beside the river. No need to carry it with her. Then she thought about it some more and added the pack of medical supplies and her own jacket to the pile.

Then she turned to face the path before her.

This close to the base of the slope, she had lost sight of the downed dirz fighter behind the irregularity of the terrain. She knew its approximate direction and set herself on that course. The climb was eased by her lightened load. And she drank liberally from her canteen as she now had a reliable source to refill.

It took her some time to climb to the first counterscarp. As she got closer, she saw the smoke was rising from the other side. So she dropped to her belly and crawled the rest of the way, keeping a low profile.

At the top she stopped and scanned the defile. Sure enough the enemy fighter lay smashed at the bottom. There was smoke rising from the thrusters at the end of the fuselage. The wings were crumpled and folded back. The nose was submerged in a thin pool of water.

She saw no motion. No sign of life. It was entirely possible the pilot had been killed. It would take a miracle to survive something like that. But then, that's what had happened to her.

She descended the slope being careful not to slip on the loose shale. Her heart was thumping in her chest, her nerves hummed. As she approached she could feel the heat coming from the fire.

She moved toward the front of the craft. The canopy was shattered. There was blood on the fiberglass shards.

She found a stone, hefted it, hesitated, then stepped closer to the fighter. She looked inside. Nothing. The cockpit was empty.

She moved around to the other side and that's when she saw him. The pilot. Sprawled on the rocks.

She saw her hated enemy. No human had ever seen a dirz before. Not to her knowledge any way. And here he was, unconscious, blood pooled around him, helpless on the rocks.

The dirz was humanoid, in a dark flight suit similar to what a human would wear. But this was not a human. He had dark leathery skin. His head was wide at the top and tapered to a small mouth and chin. No hair. He had a crown of bony ridges that ringed his scalp. His nose was just two slits and his eyes were small compared to the width of his skull.

She moved toward him. Her heart racing in her chest. She thought of all the lives lost, all her friends lost to this war. This meaningless, senseless war.

She hefted the rock. Held it over her head. One blow and she'd end this life that had claimed who knows how many human lives.

She hesitated.

And in that time, he opened his eyes. His pupils contracted. He turned to her. Their eyes met.

He said something in that alien language that of course she couldn't understand. Then his head rolled back and he passed out again.

Suddenly she didn't see her enemy, she saw a helpless being, hurt and lost and scared, just as she was. Her only companion on this godawful rock.

This alien had to have something in common with her. After all, any species that was capable of space flight had to have a level of civilization, and that meant laws, that meant familial relationships, that meant the capacity to rise above emotions and to learn and to grow.

This alien had to have something like humanity in him.

She lowered the rock. Dropped it.

Then she set to work pulling wires from the dirz fighter and binding her captive.

*

Later, with her captive bound and no longer a threat, she set to work tending his wounds. She hoped this time would be more successful than the last.

Other than some minor cuts and bruises on his arms and chest, the only serious problem was a gash on his shoulder that ran up the side of his neck. That was the source of the pool of blood. She used the adhesive from the medical kit to glue the flesh together until it could heal itself. Then she poured a trickle of water down his throat and held his head up so it ran down his throat.

She gathered some wood from farther up the slope and lit it using the smoldering fire from the burning engine. She moved her captive near the fire. It was chilly and the red sun was weak and distant and did little to warm the air.

After that was done, she turned to the wreckage of the fighter and began inspecting something no human had ever seen up close.

The layout was remarkably similar to a human design. Even the cockpit was similar. She could have sat in the seat and operated the controls. The instruments were intuitive. She probably could have flown the thing. Despite all the problems between their species, there were very few differences. Science transcended politics.