The Woman Who Fell from Space

Mel’ne slammed into her chair as the ship bucked violently. One more sonic torpedo and the vessel would rip itself apart. The view outside the canopy flipped in dizzying succession between the black void of space and the planet swelling larger with every uncontrolled spin. Metal shrieked. Warning lights strobed red. Then the centrifugal force tore her harness free. She lurched forward. Her knee smashed into the console, sending white-hot pain through her leg. Grabbing the loose harness, she caught herself before her skull struck the controls.

The ship punched into the atmosphere. Heat roared across the hull, and the vessel became a falling fireball, every seam glowing, every strut protesting as if the frame itself had begun to scream.

Mel’ne forced herself to inhale slowly once, then exhale. Panic wasted oxygen. She scanned her body. Broken femur. Dislocated shoulder. Manageable. She slapped a body bot against her thigh, triggering the release. Expanding foam cocooned her leg while billions of nanobots surged into the fracture, knitting bone as others raced through her bloodstream toward her shoulder.

Two seconds. She risked a glance through the canopy. Please believe I died. If the captain aboard the Op ship thought the fireball was all that remained of her vessel, they might stop hunting. Using every scrap of strength she had left, Mel’ne dragged herself into the lifeboat. She angled it toward the planet rushing up beneath her. One precise burst from the thrusters. Nothing more. She powered down nearly everything—technological systems and even portions of her biological network—allowing the lifeboat to tumble like a lifeless fragment of wreckage. If her calculations held, gravity would carry it through the atmosphere and into a broad body of water.

She pictured the enemy crew watching the burning debris streak toward the surface, satisfied that their target had been destroyed. One final gamble. Mel’ne brought her systems online just long enough to cool the lifeboat's outer hull before shutting everything down again. Deep within her body, her embedded biological sensors whispered one last report. The Op ship was turning away. Relief lasted less than a heartbeat.

A surveillance probe detached from the enemy vessel and settled into orbit. Her stomach tightened. Better to die than let them find me. Before the probe reached its station, Mel’ne snapped the engine online. Three seconds. No more. The engines screamed as they fought her deadly descent, shaving just enough speed from the fall to make survival possible. Three...Two...One... Silence. She shut everything down. The lifeboat plunged. Atmosphere battered the hull. Gravity seized it. Then—Impact.

Water exploded around her. The craft skipped once before slamming sideways into a rocky lakebed. Metal twisted. Every bone in her body rattled. She had minutes at best. Without her technology online, she had no oxygen recycler. No heat. No food. No protection. Nothing. She crawled into the escape tube, each movement sending fresh pain through her battered body. The hatch slammed shut behind her with a heavy metallic thud. No going back. She gripped the manual release and pulled. The outer hatch burst open.

Ice-cold water flooded the tube, stealing her breath. Mel’ne pushed through the opening and kicked hard toward the crimson light filtering down from above. Sixty meters. Just sixty. Her repaired leg burned. Her shoulder screamed with every stroke. Her lungs tightened. Keep moving. Red sunlight shimmered overhead, impossibly far away. One kick. Another. Her chest felt ready to burst. Then, she broke the surface. Air. She gulped it in, coughing and laughing at the same time. Alive.

Half a mile away, the shoreline waited beneath the crimson sky. Mel’ne rolled onto her side and began the long swim, every stroke trembling with exhaustion as the cold gnawed deeper into her muscles. Fresh air. Fresh water. Her biological systems still lived despite the ship, the probe, the lake, and the silence closing over her technology.

Adem sat easily on his dapple-gray horse, moving five hundred Angus toward the lower pasture where early spring grass had just begun to green. Beyond the herd, the Jagged Mountains held their crowns of snow beneath a magenta sky, the low red sun bleeding along the horizon. But it was not the mountains that held him. It was the white-hot blaze tearing across the sky. His gray mare tossed her head at the pulsing roar. A heartbeat later, the burning light struck the lake at an angle, smacked the surface hard, and threw a column of water a hundred feet into the air. Adem pressed his thighs into the mare and whistled the cattle into a faster pace. They were drifting toward the lake grass less than a mile away. He shoved one hand through his black hair, settled his oiled canvas hat, and spurred toward the silver birch and red willows ringing the shore, his eyes searching the twilight sky.

Daylight was good. Twilight was better. More shadows to hide in. Better for stealth observation. From the water, Mel’ne tracked her surroundings in a full three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep. The sun touched the scrub grasses with the fading warmth of an old star. On the nearest shore stood a grove of white-barked trees, their small triangular leaves stirring in the breeze. Beyond the wind in the branches and the lowing of a herd of large black animals, the world was quiet. Jagged mountains ringed the plains like the rim of a bowl. A long tubular creature swayed low through the grass, moving like living muscle, its small triangular head lifted toward her. Nearby, something scuffled in the brush—a dark-furred rodent with a flat, wide tail. Farther out, half a dozen long-limbed, white-tailed mammals grazed. Mel’ne could not risk using her technological operating system. Any errant signature might be captured by the probe orbiting above the atmosphere. Instead, using only her biological systems, she reached gently outward with heightened senses, searching for a connection to the planet’s living mainframe. She was alive. She had breathable air and drinkable water. Where there was life, there was hope.

Still treading water, with only her head visible above the surface, she opened herself to the water, the land, the grass, the trees, the animals, the air. A distant stirring answered. Not acceptance. Not awareness. Only the rays of an old, dying sun warming a strange new world. Odd combination, she thought. She paddled to shore, stepped onto the white sand, and moved lightly to one of the larger white-barked trees. Hand over hand, gripping the trunk with her toes, she climbed high enough to see the land around her. Nestled in the fork of a branch, she stilled her graceful, predatory energy and opened fully to the environmental connection as she waited for deep night.

Adem reached the edge of the birch and pine stand behind the herd, which had begun to meander lazily toward the sweet grass at the lake’s edge. He had always been good with cattle. They seemed to sense his intentions before he had to crack his whip or yelp at them, though they still shied when he came too close. Skittery, he called it. He scanned the lake. No smoke curled from the ground. No ripples spread across the water. No splashes settled back into stillness. No disturbance at all. Birds chirped. Cattle grazed. On the distant plain, deer bent their heads to the grass. He decided to swing his horse a mile along each side of the lake and look for signs before he built a campfire and fished for dinner.

Mel’ne watched from high in the tree. A tall, dark-haired man in his prime sat astride a large gray animal, guiding it with almost invisible pressure from his thighs. He was close to her height, perhaps a few inches taller—six foot two, by her estimate. Thick black hair, threaded here and there with silver. Eyes the brown of a muddy river, flecked with green and amber. Dark lashes. Straight nose. Full lips. He moved as if he and the animal shared one body. While he searched the ground for tracks, his attention stayed ahead and down. Classic two-dimensional thinker, she thought. Then he hesitated, turned his head slightly, and looked directly toward her.

Startled, Mel’ne concentrated on the environment and swayed in time with the wild grasses as she slipped from the tree. A white-tailed mammal ambled in front of her and bent its delicate head to the young rye grass. Slowly, the herd gathered around it, forming a living camouflage around Mel’ne. She lingered for a moment, feeling the grasses sway and the herd’s sweet, stubborn strength. Then she bent forward and crawled through the grass toward the stand of trees where the horsed man stared in her direction. She moved in low, undulating waves, like one long muscle close to the ground. Beneath her, she felt the structure of the earth. Around her, the lake pines sang high, hard C notes in a symphony of secret melodies. When she looked up, the horseman frowned, temporary lines creasing the skin between his thick brows. Soundlessly, Mel’ne rose from the grass directly behind the man and his animal. She smelled the tang of his sweat and felt the contained energy bunched in his companion’s muscles. She bent forward, thinking to touch them.

Adem exhaled and rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the prickling sensation crawling between them. Something was wrong. He could not see it, could not name it, but the feeling stayed with him, sharp as a burr beneath his shirt. He turned his head slightly to the right. Nothing but grass, trees, cattle, and the darkening lake. With a soft click of his tongue, he urged his horse forward. He still had the upper end of the lakeshore to search, and daylight was bleeding away.

Mel’ne held her breath as the man’s head turned. Her hand hovered inches from his animal companion. If he looked back now, he would see her. If the animal startled, it might expose her. Neither happened. When he cantered away, she sank into the meadow grass and listened to the fading hoofbeats, the wind in the trees, and the distant pulse of the probe moving somewhere above the atmosphere. She had survived the crash. She had evaded the hunters. But survival was only the beginning. Standing, she loped toward the mountains. Her breathing slowed as she shifted from glutes to quads and set a long, ground-eating pace. Switching her eyesight from horizon scan to telescopic focus, Mel’ne found the nearest settlement and aimed for it. Nestled in the mountains, the town looked large enough to hide her and small enough to study. It would give her anonymity, data, raw materials, and perhaps the primitive technology she needed to repair what remained of her ship. First, she had to become one of them—or something close enough to pass.

The town was no odder than the dozens of planets she had walked before, each unique in its own way, though this one glittered with an unusual amount of glass. Or was it transparent metal? How had such a primitive culture learned to shape so much light? Mel’ne slowed at the edge of a narrow alley and let the shadows take her. From within the dark, she watched the strangers pass beneath the windows and lamps, listened to the rhythm of their voices, measured the movement of their bodies. Somewhere above, the probe would begin its search. Somewhere behind her, the horseman might still be wondering what had touched the air behind him. Mel’ne smiled, showing no teeth. By morning, this world would have a new native.