Hand over hand, Tolly clambered at the ladder rung of the overturned firecrawler's top-level scaffolding. She reached, pulling herself up and onto the grated platform that sat at a slight angle suspended above a muddy depression in the earth below. The stale stink of sunbaked mud percolated through the grating, a familiar smell for Tolly.
Laying on her back, Tolly’s hair draped through the grated floor as she rested. At the back of her mind, she knew she should get up, sprint, run, live. All she wanted, all she ever wanted to do now, was rest.
From across the field, the rapture of footsteps begged closer. Tolly could see through the barred walls of the scaffolding what that meant. Two of the monsters that had plagued her everywhere she went, ever since the loop tunnel two days ago, and now there they were, the same pearlescent silver beasts. They were almost beautiful if one could ignore their gnashing teeth and wild domineering arms swinging with every stride. They ran shoulder to shoulder, never looking at each other. Instead, they focused their gaze or lack of eyes on their path ahead, on the firecrawler, and on her.
She was uneasy with her sudden return to The Perun. She hadn't recalled the valley they left the Perun in during the night of the storm, but she'd thought it wasn't the one they were in now. Maybe the Perun was swept up in the mudflows?
Tolly had heard stories of the flows taking smaller vehicles, airships, hell, even a research station or two, but never a firecrawler. Firecrawlers, as far as she knew, were designed to stay put in a storm through sheer mass and brutish stubbornness. For all Tolly knew, it had been carried in the flows. Or, more likely, she'd misread the maps that lead her here. Either way, The Perun was here, and so was she. And so were they.
Enough waiting to die, Tolly decided she'd let the hounds catch up enough. She worked herself to her feet. Her bones ached, muscles bruised, and her vision cut in and out. She was starving, parched, but damned if she was going to be eaten alive.
Working an outer hatch of The Perun, she managed to pry it open with her fingers. Had the firecrawler still been operable, upright and powered, the magnetic locks would have prevented her from doing so. But as the current state of the crawler was little more than a mangled wreck, she popped the hatch open with ease.
Hoisting herself up inside the command deck, she slammed the hatch closed after her. It wouldn't stop the creatures much if they had any sense to them, but it just felt wrong to leave it open.
The command deck still bore swaths of mud coating every console from where it had burst through the front windscreen. Shards of quartzite glass littered the baked mulch like nuts in a breakfast loaf. They crunched under her feet as she walked.
She stepped over to her command console and crumbled mud off of the central screen. Staying in the command deck was indefensible, but maybe she might be able to get some telemetry, some sense of what was going on in the world outside. She had to act fast since the creatures would reach the scaffolding momentarily.
The console screen was dark. Since the core had been ejected, the main power supply had gone. Instead, Tolly ripped open a panel at the console's base. She pulled the console's induction power supply free and instead jammed her terminal in its place. With her terminal acting as a power supply, the console booted to life.
“Guten Morgen Kapit?n, wie geht’s?” the console read, before she switched the language to Federation basic. Old Groen had spoken his family language, which she'd never put in the time to learn. She hadn't even had time as captain to switch it to her language. She tapped the screen and noted her terminal was only showing her battery at a third of a full charge.
She queried the console for local telemetry and was shown a readout, however fuzzy with sections incomplete or outright missing, of the surrounding valley. The clearing extended in an almost even perimeter around The Perun, with the first trees starting at two hundred feet away. The trees that did grow just out of that range were notably stunted, twisted, and otherwise dwarfed by the surrounding forest. Odd, she thought. But instead, she queried a list of other operable systems.
“Bulletin’s out,” she mused to herself, scrolling through the rest of the systems, “locomotion too.”
Reactor data was missing. Figures, she thought, as the entire module had been ejected along with the core. The passive sensors on the outer hull displayed a large section missing several metres across of the vehicle's lower engineering deck, along with the central vestibule of the crew quarters containing the mess hall.
“Damnit,” she said, though she hadn't expected much. “No way to close this hole.” She had hoped she would find a way to close the breach or at least trigger a lockdown.
“Hold on,” she said and triggered the command to seal off the engineering and crew levels or what was left of them. The blast doors didn't budge, and without power to level three, they never would.
The only power source she had on her was the terminal, and that was only enough to run the console in front of her, and several sensor feeds spiderwebbed throughout the decking. Typically, in extreme cases like this, a firecrawler would default to its backup power systems. In this case, the aforementioned power systems took the form of solar collectors that were now buried under the bulk of The Perun, if she could somehow turn the crawler over on itself.
She rechecked the locomotive systems: still offline. It seems power was the problem here too. If she could activate the manual releases on each leg on the port side at once, however, their combined stored elasticity should be enough to shift the crawler on its side.
Tolly hurriedly disconnected her terminal and buttoned up the console panel, hiding any trace of what she had done. She didn't know what level of intelligence she should expect from her pursuers despite their outward appearance, but she wasn't taking any chances. Heading out of the command deck, she popped into the liftway and slammed the door behind her.
She tried the outgoing on her hand terminal again once she reached the third level, still no signal. After she fixed the power problem, communications would be next. She thought back and hoped that Connor and Phillipe had actually gotten around to fixing the array that day.
Under normal circumstances, she would have to activate the manual releases for each leg from the engineering level. Seeing as how the engineering level was now a smoking crater in the crawler's underside, she was forced to think of a workaround. Thankfully, she remembered that alternate releases were placed near the connections of the legs to the vessel. On the downside, these releases were on the exterior of the hull.
Hurrying on with her plan, she came to the first leg’s access and swung it open. The light that had been blocked by The Perun’s outer walls now flooded in. She reached for the handhold, climbed out, and opened the exterior release panel then slammed the rusted lever into position. The Perun groaned with a hidden power stored somewhere inside its frame.
“One down. Five to go,” she whispered, exhausted.
The next three went as easy as the first. Each time she swung open the exterior panel revealing a swath of light, pushed the lever into position, and headed back in. All the while, she could hear a scuttling in the command deck beneath her. The creatures hadn't yet accessed the liftway, which she thought was strange. She had been hustling from each leg release to the next, but she assumed by now they would have made their way to her level.
She pressed her ear to the ceiling plating underfoot and listened. The haphazard footsteps of the silverskins were unmistakable. They thrashed about the cabin with an unbuttoned rage. She wondered if they were trying to gain access to the vessel’s systems as she had. That was until they suddenly went silent.
The footsteps that she had grown to loath had faded abruptly. In their place, a slow, measured pat of armoured boots echoed through the plating. The black-suited soldier was here, his presence quelling the monsters’ unrest. Was he somehow controlling the other two?
Not waiting to find out, she burst to her feet and headed to the next release. Leg four released just as the others had. She couldn't help but worry about what the creatures and their master were planning. Why didn't they stop her? Maybe they wanted the power restored, or maybe they wanted her to call for help? Either way, she had no other option. If they were going to hunt her down and kill her anyway, she couldn't just sit idly and accept it.
She set the last of the five levers in the active position and left to find safety in a crewman’s quarters to detonate the manual releases. The closer to the interior of the crawler, the safer she knew she would be. Tolly passed by her own quarters but decided against it, seeing how she had broken the door escaping it the first time. Turning around, she decided on Marco’s and Silva's.
After entering, she slid each of the double doors shut and positioned herself in the centre of the bed. She looked around the room. Marco, a meticulous engineering-type, had always ensured peak tidiness of his quarters. Often Tolly would hear Silva and him squabbling through the walls about something as menial as a misplaced blouse. And as such, the room was spotless, even after the disaster that had wrecked the rest of The Perun.
Upon entering the space, Tolly noticed Marco and Silva's bed had pivoted on its axis and lay right side up, despite the firecrawler being at the moment upside down. This was due to the fact that all beds in every firecrawler were each equipped to overturn, pitch, and yaw in response to the current position of the firecrawler, whether that be forty-five degrees sunward climbing a mountain rise or overturned entirely following a catastrophic incident like the one that had befallen The Perun.
Tolly ripped some sheets into strips and spun them together. She looped one makeshift rope through the bed frame and tied off both of her feet. Then, she did the same with her hands, being sure to keep her left hand wrapped firmly to her terminal, her thumb centimetres from the release trigger.
“Sorry, Groen,” Tolly said, at last, imagining him hovering nearby with a frown. With a short breath in, she activated the release.
Her eyes pinched shut as she braced herself. It was nearly a minute before she realised something was wrong. She looked at her terminal to find an error light flashing. The releases had been flipped, the system rigged to go, and yet after all that: nothing.
Tolly considered her options. She could untie herself, sneak out of the firecrawler, and run back into the woods. Little good that would do, she thought.
Suddenly, an immense thunderclap rang out on the horizon. The Perun shuddered for several moments as the ground beneath the crawler began to shift. Then, a fast-moving shockwave cleared the tree-lined hills to the east, splintering boughs as it rushed downslope towards the crawler. The shockwave impacted The Perun with enough force to cause the inner walls to tremble. And as they did, the emergency release mechanism fired.
The crawler's six main appendages moaned to life and dug into the soft earth. The whole vessel shifted before finally it leapt and shuddered, forcing Tolly down into the bed and towards the bed's footrest with eight g’s of force. The crawler remained airborne for nearly ten seconds as Tolly's hair waved vivaciously in front of her eyes and in her mouth.
As the crawler came down, it impacted the mud and sent the pool’s contents below it in a spray over the wider clearing. The Perun came to rest on its starboard side at a slight angle towards the vessel’s belly. Tolly moaned with the strain to her neck, and after several seconds, the lights flickered on.
Tolly struggled to free her hands before a shooting sensation burst from her right wrist up her forearm and signalled to her brain that it had broken in the flip. Trying not to move her right arm, she gnawed free her left with her teeth.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
After she freed her arm, she fashioned a makeshift sling out of the bedsheets she had used to tie herself off. The bed had pivoted again, as it had during the explosion, and was hovering several metres above what would've been the wall and only entrance to the room several minutes ago. She would have to find a way down, and quickly.
Tolly set to work checking her tablet. The tablet's screen had fractured under the weight of her hand, coming down on it like a hammer but was still touch-sensitive. She called up the readings from the remote sensors.
Locomotion was still out and likely never would work again after that stunt. After looking over at where she had imagined Groen had been, she smiled sardonically and looked back to her terminal. Most other systems were unresponsive as well, as she expected, running the crawler on backup. Tolly noted that although four of the crawler's legs had released during the flip. One, however, did not. Had she had more time, she might've liked to investigate the cause. In the top right of her terminal's viewport was a blinking signal icon. The communications array had rebooted after the reset and was now receiving.
To her surprise, a bulletin request popped up in her main view. The address was unknown but bore the insignia of The Cattleheart Flock and seemed to be a direct line from somewhere high in the atmosphere. Without even accepting, the call activated, and a slim, middle-aged woman with Asian features was staring back at her.
“I detected your SOS, though the timestamp on the transmission seems to be three weeks ago,” she said bluntly.
With the power coming back on, it must've reinitialized the original distress beacon that Groen had activated during the night of the storm. Without hesitation, she located the routine to deactivate the distress beacon.
“Well, at least it was,” said the slim woman.
“Sorry about that. The distress was old,” Tolly explained, “though I am still in some manner of distress come to think of it. You wouldn’t be able to lend a hand, would you?”
“Come again? The signal from your vessel– where are you anyways, has your ship been shot down?”
“Ship?” Tolly said, confused for a moment before realising this woman was an offworlder. “Oh right. No ship here. The hunk of metal I'm in now is– was a firecrawler.”
She could see the woman glance away as if she was typing something off-screen before returning.
“Fire– ler? What's a—?” The woman said, the signal still cutting in and out.
“Hang on,” said Tolly as she made some adjustments on her terminal with her free arm. A humming followed by a loud clunk sounding from outside the firecrawler as the comms array readjusted itself. It was nice to see something finally work, she thought.
“How's that?” she asked, but the woman seemed to skip over her question.
“Right,” she said. “And what sort of distress are you in if you don't mind my asking? Oh, and do be blunt.”
Tolly didn't waste any time explaining how she came to be back on The Perun for the second time, how she had been lost in the wilds for days, what she had seen back in the city, how she had met up with Soren, and then her friend Connor, who happened to be in urgent need of medical. She also detailed the hunting party that now stalked her through the crawler and how little time she had to talk as well. She didn't know why; maybe it was because she was at her wit’s end, maybe it was easy seeing another human again, or maybe she saw something in this woman, but she knew she should trust her.
The woman looked pensive for a while as if mulling over what Tolly had just said. After a long pause, she said: “Seems like you've been through a lot Tolly, or should I say, Captain Ignacio? I've pulled your file here. My name’s Miran.”
“Yes. Yes, of course!” Tolly blurted out, elated in the sudden possibility of rescue.
“You said the man who accompanied you out of the city was Soren?”
“Yes, I did. He said he was a Captain in your fleet if I remember right.”
“Captain Djucovik, was it?”
“Yes!”
“Very well. Thank you for informing me. I have dispatched a shuttle to your location. We should be overhead in short order. If you can, please move quickly to the height of the structure, and we will be able to evacuate you.”
“Great!” she said, then suddenly remembering her friends. “What about Soren and Connor?”
“As much as it pains me, I have no way of locating them from up here. If they have, in fact, gone into the wilds on their own without a terminal or another means of locating them, I am hesitant to risk the lives of more people in the off chance they are located.”
There was a long pause. Tolly could sense an absence to her voice, almost like The Matriarch was trying not to feel something.
“I won't stop looking,” Miran said finally, “I have dispatched drones to scour the forest. If they're out there still, we will find traces.”
Tolly nodded and shut off the connection. Miran had told her to make it to the highest point in the firecrawler, and she had to hurry. The black soldier and his pets hadn't made any noise since the flip, but she now knew she wondered whether or not that was a good thing.
_“_They're still out there,” she said to herself. Surely, they must've survived. A picture of hardened battle armour on the soldier and the rippling muscle mass on the two beasts that followed entered her mind.
Her feet were still fastened to the bed frame, which she labouredly untied. She had to make her way up to the door, but first, she would have to go down.
She pushed herself to the edge of the bed and looked over. The drop was three or four metres, give or take. She would risk breaking an ankle if she just leapt off. In a sense of panic, she almost forced herself off. Then she saw the rungs.
Being an engineer with plenty of downtime and idle hands, Marco had built a set of horizontal ladder rungs set into the room’s outer wall. All she had to do was find her way over to it.
Despite being mobile enough to turn itself over, the bed was too rigid to add any horizontal movement to the equation. The bedsheets she had torn up may have been able to have been used as an ad hoc rope, but being no more than shreds and a sling left, she had to look for another option.
Remembering that a leg on the firecrawler had failed to fire, she rechecked locomotion on her terminal.
If she could just budge it, she thought, it might work to ease the angle of descent towards the doorway.
In the subdirectory for the leg in question, she accessed the error log.
**CRITICAL RELEASE FAILURE. CAUTION: APPENDAGE TWO-STARBOARD DETECTED FAULT IN SOCKET. ALERT DISPATCHED TO ENGINEER ON DUTY [MARCO FISK]. ENGINEER OVERRIDE REQUIRED.**
Lucky the other legs hadn't flown off during the night of the storm, she thought. She tried to access the engineering subsystem, but it was locked by a biometric lock. She would have to get access to Marco's terminal, or else his DNA to unlock it, which wasn't likely since his ashes were now in a graveyard in Libourne. Or, at least, she hoped it was. She pretended not to know how those silverskin creeps sprung into existence.
With the communications array back up, and with Tolly finally giving herself time to think, she noticed a bulletin was waiting to be opened sent from Groen. Her heart skipping a beat, she pressed it.
“Tolly, my dear,” the message from Groen said, his warm face beaming back at her, “I hope this message finds you well in your new command. I have spent my time onboard this vessel, withering and ageing and never hoping for something more. I see something different for you than just the captainship of The Perun. So sure, take this station for the now, but I urge you to not forget about the future. You are a bright young woman, Tolly. Your sister is proud; I am proud of you. You will make something of yourself, I know.”
Tolly was weeping, watching the video with a bittersweet sorrow in her heart. Here was a man, lost in a tragedy, the first in a long line of tragedies, and still his words brought her hope. So much had gone wrong since then, she thought.
“Be well and serve your crew well, Captain Tolly Ignacio,” he said as the bulletin ended.
On the tail-end of the message, a datacrypt file opened. Tolly skimmed the file and nestled in between lists of notarized procedures and legalese crossed out and rewritten personally in Groen’s handwriting was a set of captain’s command codes. Miran copied the code and plugged it into the firecrawler’s control system.
Tolly triggered the leg release. The leg came down limp on the soft mud outside with a thump. Not enough to catapult the firecrawler like the combined power of the other four legs, but with enough force to push the leading edge of the crawler further into the mud. The firecrawler creaked and groaned as a giant might after just suffering a mighty fall. Tolly directed the leg to push harder as it headed backwards over the outer hull.
A shearing sound followed by an audible pop that was like a gunshot went off, sparking warnings across Tolly's terminal window. The firecrawler eased to a sudden halt. An error code was blinking on-screen.
**CATASTROPHIC FAILURE. CONNECTION LOST: APPENDAGE TWO-STARBOARD UNRESPONSIVE. ENGINEERING HAS BEEN NOTIFIED**
Tolly shrugged. The bed beneath had shifted again, as had the angle of the room. A steep but manageable slope now stood between her and the exit. She carefully heaved herself with one arm over to the edge of the bed, closest to the slope and rolled off, sliding down the incline and coming to a painful and clumsy stop on the double doors. That's when she heard it.
Sliding open the outer door, a dull duet of growls echoed down the length of the hall, accompanying the sound of dragging feet. Wasting no time, she retreated back into The Fisks’ room and resealed the doors.
The creatures were instantly upon her, pawing and slashing at the other side of the doors. Tolly began to heave herself up the slope back towards the bed. A new bulletin opened on her terminal, bearing the same Cattleheart emblem. Gripping the bed frame with one hand, she answered the call.
“Miran?” Tolly said, hesitation breaking through. “Please tell me you’re here.”
“No ma'am, this is her pilot,” said the shuttle pilot, “We’ve run into a little difficulty on our way to you. We hit a plume from a fire that is headed your way, so we've had to take the long way up and over.”
“Did you say fire?” Tolly asked.
“What's that–?” The pilot was cut off by his co-pilot before he turned back to Tolly.
“Ma’am, I've got a call on the other line for you. Patching it through,” he said, as Tolly’s anxiety level rose. She was being hunted, and now a harbinger of wildfire crept towards them. The bulletin reconnected to show a face of a young man as he pushed his way through underbrush.
“Tolly?” Connor asked in a raspy voice, the sound of fronds and crunching branches in the background.
“Connor! Connor, is that really you – where are you?” Tolly asked, elated.
“Yes, Tolly, it's me. We made it to Malfjordur. Barely,” he said, nearly out of breath, “Listen, Soren’s hurt pretty bad. They tell me he took a beating from one of the silverskins. He's been out cold since we arrived. I went in to see him, and he’s not looking too good.”
“Connor, where are you now– did you feel that blast?” she asked, but he neglected to answer.
“Tell me, when you found me,” he continued, “The last thing I remember before that was running; running from them. Then there was a fall. I didn't see the cliff and just ran out of the forest straight off. I've been trying to make sense of it. Tolly, I think they were my family.”
“Your family? Who was? Connor, you're not making any sense.”
“Them, the ones who were chasing me; the silverskins. One was smaller than the other, but they both had these haunting brown eyes,” he said. There were tears now streaming down his face in the playback.
Tolly was confused. The things chasing her didn't have any hair or clothes from what she could remember.
“Tolly, I don't know if they will find you, but I can't lose you. I can't lose you to them,” he said before stopping in response to the loud pounding that rattled the door to her room. “What's that?”
“It's nothing,” she lied.
“Just tell me I'm going to see you again. You’re the only family I have left, not those things.”
“Connor,” she said, “where are you?”
“I left Soren at the station,” he said, “I’m coming to get you.”
Tolly’s heart sank with this. He wasn’t the first group that had promised rescue.
“Connor, I’m scared about what’s going to happen. They are breaking their way into me.”
“I’m coming,” he said, quickening his pace, “I’m coming.”
The pounding on her door grew louder as the beasts’ desperation rose. The door started to deform, beginning to fracture under the strain. The familiar thick smell of smoke started to permeate the room from cracks in the structure, and Tolly knew what that meant; a wildfire was close by.
She knew the end was near, knew that rescue was on the horizon, and all she could do was think of Connor.
“You need to stop,” she told him, “You need to turn around.”
“What? What are you saying,” he said between breaths.
“Connor, you don’t understand. There’s a shuttle on its way to me. They’re going to get me out of here,” she said, all while not very sure if she believed that herself. “Connor, you need to go back to Malfjordur. You need to get out of here.”
“I’m not leaving you here, Tolly,” he said, “I’m not–”
“Don’t be an idiot,” she spat, “You’re wasting your life for nothing.”
Connor stopped running, and so did the shaking of his bulletin feed.
“You’re pale if you think I’d leave you,” he said with a sweetness behind his words.
“You’re not leaving me. I’m going to be rescued,” she said, hoping the drumbeats of paws trying to tear through the door didn’t translate over the bulletin.
Connor was frozen, uncertain as to his path ahead. His smile, which was the same smile she could remember from that day at Parade – from their kiss at the stadium – began to fade.
“Tolly,” he said, “I’ve run too far. I won’t reach you in time.”
“I know, I said that. You need to head back to Malfjordur.”
“You misunderstand,” he said, deliberately, “I’m too far from you, but I’m also too far from Malfjordur. I think I’m going to get left behind.”
Tolly thought back to the events that led her here. She could see Connor’s face now, sullen and defeated, but also as it was. She could see the glow on him after their first kiss, but also the terror in the aftermath of the attack on Ternor Stadium. She remembered that Groen’s death was what had led her to the stadium and everything since. She recalled Groen’s warm face, masked by the fear of his own failure that killed The Perun. She remembered Blane and how wonderful she looked as she headed out for her date with Soren and how happy she had been that day in the cafe.
Her mind raced, and a universe of uncertainty swirled as a maelstrom in front of her.
“I love you, Tolly,” Connor said, his words dragging her back, screaming into reality.
Tears streamed down her face, and she pressed a thumb to the image around Connor’s temple.
“Go. Connor, go now,” she said. If he hurried, he might make it back in time for rescue. “Run.”
Connor nodded and ended the call.
The pounding on the door stopped so suddenly that it caused her to shiver. The monsters had caused incredible damage to the door, but it was largely cosmetic from what Tolly could tell. As far as she could tell, the door was going to hold.
Then, as if to prove one last time just how wrong she was, the door flew outwards as it was sheared straight from its hinges. The monsters stood there, waiting behind the hulking form of the black-suited soldier.
Gripping the doorframe, the soldier stepped into the space in silence as an all-consuming dread swallowed all that was left of Tolly’s resolve.
