Sayuri 2 - Helpless

Shuddering, Boreal slowly found consciousness. Everything hurt. He couldn’t shift a single part of his body without nerves screaming in pain. He was big, but after they'd been spat out of the wormhole and then hurtled through space into that planet…

Everything around him was blurry. Smoke was a thin but treacherous haze on the Main Bridge, and beyond it, dust hovered in a swirling cloud. Boreal tried to focus, tried to clear his sight enough that he could catch a glimpse of Sayuri. She'd been in the captain's chair when they'd hit the atmosphere, but with the strain on the ship, the engines and navigation system laboring to keep them from hitting planet-side at the wrong angle and end up reduced to a heap of molten slag…he hadn’t been able to keep track of her. Where was she?

Slowly the smoke began to thin out as, with enough effort that it left him shaking harder, he activated the auxiliary ventilation system. There wasn’t enough power after that landing to clear the whole Bridge, but at least Sayuri wouldn’t suffocate.

If Sayuri was still alive.

No. No, he couldn’t think like that. She wasn’t dead. His captain—his best friend for the last eighteen years, his sister in heart and soul—wasn’t dead.

He scanned the Bridge, trying to find her. She wasn’t in the captain's chair anymore. She wasn’t calling out to him. And she wasn’t jacked into the ship systems, so he couldn’t communicate with her that way, either, or run a diagnostic to check the damage done to her body during the crash. He couldn’t even call out to her.

Sayuri, he thought, dread chilling him to the core. Where are you?

And then he saw her.

She lay sprawled across the floor in front of the chair, black hair spilling around her head. Crimson blood smeared across half of her face. Her torn shirt revealed bruised, lacerated, and burned skin beneath it. One arm stuck out across the floor at a sickening angle. Bruises marred the side of her face not stained with blood.

Her slanted eyes were closed; she was either dead or unconscious. Please, Boreal prayed silently. Please just be unconscious. Sayuri!

He listened, and realized he could hear her breathing. The air she drew into her lungs sounded harsh and ragged. Her chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. Something was desperately wrong with her.

The first thing to do, he decided, trying to fight panic, was to get out of the crater their crash-landing had left in the ground. Then maybe he could figure out where the wormhole had dropped them. Depending on the place and time they were now in, he could get help.

Hang on, Sayuri, he pleaded with her silently. Hang on. I'm going to get you some help. Just hang on and please don't die.

Activating the long-range sensors, he tried to figure out how big of a hole they'd fallen into. A decent-sized crater, but they could get out. Maybe. It would depend on the engines and whether they could handle moving.

Slowly, ever so slowly, he woke the smallest pair of engines. A sharp whine echoed inside the Main Bridge. A dull ache throbbed through Boreal, but he ignored it, focusing on Sayuri's need and the brittle hum of the engines. Careful as a cat walking a tightrope, he urged the engines to take more weight. A lurch, a sick shudder as they began to rise…higher…higher…

Boreal fought the urge to pass out, straining to keep conscious as he coaxed the engines to take them over the lip of the impact-crater and forward, onto the shelf of solid earth. Then he couldn’t hold the engines anymore. They cut out so fast that if Sayuri had been awake, the impact three seconds later would've rattled her teeth. Pain zinged through Boreal's body and he silently growled several vicious things in Drókvæðä about the Nĵörðunn.
Could he scan with his long-range sensors? No. The sensors had cut off. Everything was powering down. Shoving down his exhaustion, his pain, his dread that something would happen and he wouldn’t be able to help Sayuri, somehow he managed—with agonizing slowness—to wake up the long-range sensors again.

That was how he noticed the truck. Even through the cloud of dust and airborne debris, he could see the rusty blue Chevy truck maybe fifty yards away. A human male sat inside. The male was alive, at least. The shockwave from the impact hadn’t hurt him. And Boreal also saw something furry and golden in the truck with him. It appeared to be a golden retriever but the sensors showed bizarre readings that Boreal was too disoriented and sick with pain to be able to process.

Would the human get out of the truck? If he did, what was to get him over to them? Sayuri needed medical attention. Boreal knew he wasn’t in great shape himself, but he could take care of his own wounds. He could do nothing for his captain. That helplessness flooded him with a rage he'd rarely experienced. What was the point of pairing him with Sayuri if he couldn’t actually help her? This was why he'd always argued that they needed at least one extra crewmate, but Sayuri hadn’t gotten around to picking one from a couple dozen applicants yet when they'd been attacked.

But there was no time for childish tantrums. Life wasn't fair, everyone had their limitations, he knew that. It didn’t matter. What mattered was getting someone, anyone to help his captain.

He studied the readings from the dog again, trying to process what the strange symbols were telling him. Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. That wasn't a dog. That was a…

Even though it made him ache down to his core, even though it felt as if he were going to shatter into a thousand pieces, he had enough strength left to activate the electromagnetic cloaking shield that would hide them from anyone he didn’t want to see them. Best not to scare the human male off before Boreal could explain the situation to him. Only one piece remained visible; it would have to, if his plan was going to work.

Lastly, feeling as if he might pass out again, he activated a sonic pulse. The sound rose too high for a human being's ears to catch…but he didn’t want the human to hear it. He wanted that so-called dog, the bÿrn'aĵärł, to know just who and what had crashed onto this planet.
Finally allowing himself to lie back and relax, feeling his body slowly but surely beginning to knit back together, Boreal allowed himself to look once more at Sayuri. If this worked, the human would come and help. She'd be all right. She had to be all right. He'd promised her father before they'd disembarked from Polaris Station…and she was his best friend…the other half of him.

I should've noticed the Nĵörðunn, he muttered silently, pain ebbing and flowing through him like a greasy, black tide. Why didn’t I notice? I should've picked them up on the sensors, but I only saw standard Terran fleet ships until…

Until the aliens, who shouldn’t have been hostile, had attacked the lone łyzør'vÿnðe ship. They'd been in Sector Four-Twenty-Five doing a courier job from Copenhagen Station to Helsinki Station. A single jewel-chip's worth of data—six million heavily encrypted terabytes—but they'd signed a contract promising they wouldn't try scanning the information. Sayuri had the jewel-chip in her ready-case, the bag she could grab and take anywhere at a moment's notice that would see her through anything. It had clothes, medicine, her documentation, emergency food and water rations, two fully energized TF-20 EM-pistols, everything.

Had the chip been why the Nĵörðunn had attacked? Or had it been something else? Boreal didn’t know, but he did know one thing. As they'd been hurtling through space, from just beyond an asteroid belt next to a small planetoid toward the planet they'd crashed on, just before they'd hit the atmosphere, his flickering sensors had shown another ship coming through the wormhole.

Impossible as that was, Boreal knew it probably meant one thing: the Nĵörðunn had followed them somehow. And unless the human now getting out of his truck helped Sayuri, the two of them would be sitting ducks when the Nĵörðunn arrived to finish what they'd started.