Adara From Beyond The Burning Sky

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Which is why the haunting, labored shrieks of her frantic co-pilot, and the shrill, vicious whistling of the wind instinctively told Adara everything she needed to know before she could even reopen her eyes.

She was not in space anymore.

Alarms were blaring. The starboard side of her shuttle was torn open. The shuttle itself was in an unrecoverable tailspin, subjecting the craft, herself, and her co-pilot to intense centrifugal forces. Despite her flight suit still being in one piece, she could barely breathe. Her head was throbbing. Everything felt hazy. It was getting harder and harder to remain conscious.

Both craft and crew were struggling to maintain their constitution.

But for one, the strain was too great.

Without warning, more of the shuttle broke apart. There was the sickening sound of shearing metal, and in an instant, co-pilot Codi’s screaming faded away to nothing. Adara looked to her right.

His seat was gone.

He was gone; sucked out into the unforgiving skies of an alien world.

There was no air left in her lungs to even mourn his loss. But she refused to share his fate. Straining, she reached out toward her dying console, gloved fingers inching closer…closer…to a series of switches.

One by one, fighting off the urge to pass out, she manually activated whatever flaps, slats, and tail rudders were left on her shuttle.

Slowly, the craft began to right itself.

And then, the miracle.

Adara realized her portside tail rudder, and its built-in emergency parachute, had not automatically deployed! With a breathless, pleading prayer, she smashed the button and hoped for the best. Without warning, the entire shuttle lurched.

Instead of falling and spinning uncontrollably, the damaged shuttle was now simply falling uncontrollably. Out her portside window, the distant horizon was no longer spinning like a top.

Her spacecraft was still falling too fast for anything other than a crash landing, but it was falling slow enough to be a crash landing she might just walk away from.

Hands still shaking from adrenaline, Adara fiddled with her console's electronics, working to reactivate her ship’s radar, and get an accurate read on her altitude.

Her training took over, her actions went on autopilot, allowing her mind to briefly wander and piece together what had gone so wrong.

She was a lander shuttle pilot and exo-planet explorer, one of many on her 3-kilometer long, interstellar research cruiser, the ISS Valiant. They had been decelerating into orbit around the Earth-sized moon of a gas giant exo-planet.

This particular moon had been showing all the standard signs of a life-bearing world, and the Valiant had been tasked with evaluating its habitability and potential compatibility for human colonization.

Centuries of exploring the stars had taught humanity one crucial fact: life itself was common in the universe.

Microbes seemed more abundant than the stars. You could find them on basically every other planet, every other moon, hiding and thriving nearly anywhere you could find water. Sometimes, lucky expeditions could even find more complex organisms: full-blown alien flora, or rarer still, alien fauna.

But intelligent life? That had never been discovered, not even close.

Until about 26 minutes ago.

As the Valiant was in the process of decelerating into orbit, something impossible had happened. From the black of space, an artificial structure had appeared. It was utterly massive, at least 20 times the size of the Valiant. And thanks to its breathtaking hexagonal prism appearance, the object was indisputably artificial.

They had immediately tried hailing it, signaling it, but to no effect.

That is until they got within 86 kilometers of the megastructure. From silence, it exploded into activity, releasing a repeating burst of radio waves. The crew tried repeating the pattern back to the structure.

No response.

Their captain had ordered all landing shuttles on standby. The cruiser was too big and too slow to easily maneuver away in the event of an emergency.

As Adara and Codi had been running pre-launch checks on their shuttle, the Valiant clipped within 58 kilometers. Out of nowhere, multiple hatches were detected opening across the artificial structure, and over 40 projectiles were launched right at them! Each projectile split in half, then those halves split, until hundreds of tiny missiles were hurtling at the cruiser! With less than 50 seconds to impact, the captain had ordered the emergency launch of every shuttle.

Adara and Codi had managed to get away from the Valiant in time, but something had still clipped them on the way down the planet's surface.

The thought snapped Adara back to the present as she noticed an electronic beeping.

Another miracle. She had altitude and radar back up!

She was at…190 meters…

120 meters…

70 meters…

Oh.

It was a hard landing, but one she could survive.

Broken but breathing, Adara hauled herself out of the wreckage of her shuttle.

She was in the middle of a meter-deep ocean.

Above her, a trillion flaming embers across the twilight sky.

Her ship, her crew, nothing was left but fire and dust.

Below her, the ocean water rippled. Adara pulled herself higher onto the shuttle’s wreckage.

More ripples. Just below the surface of the water, something was moving, circling the crashed ship.

Shivering - half from the cold, half from the shock - Adara finally allowed herself to face the harsh reality of her situation.

Two horrors, equally true, crept up into her racing mind.

She was all alone on this planet.

And she was not alone on this planet.