to my head and I fought the redout that lingered on the edges of my vision.
If I didn’t know better, I’d assume we were accelerating toward the ground.
Another alarm went off before Loch silenced it. The uniform brown landscape shifted into hills, valleys, and fields as we descended. We were coming in way too fast.
My hands flew over my own console as I tried to slow our descent, but he’d locked me out. “What are you doing? We can’t come into the spaceport like this; they’ll shoot us down.” When it came to casualties, spaceports defaulted to protecting the assets already on the ground unless they had a really, really good reason to do otherwise.
“We’re not headed to the spaceport and we’re sitting ducks in the air. The faster we’re on the ground, the safer we are.”
“We won’t be safer if we hit the ground at this speed—we’ll be splattered.”
He grinned at me with a flash of white teeth. “Trust me, sweetheart. I know what I’m doing.”
Trust was earned, and so far, Marcus Loch had done some, but not nearly enough to earn mine. I debated trying to override the lockout on my control panel while I watched the ground hurtle closer. But trust was a two-way street and I didn’t think Loch was suicidal, so I clutched the edge of the control panel and did nothing.
Giving up control of my fate was harder than I anticipated. Even though I knew Marcus must have a plan, doing nothing went against everything in my nature.
Proximity alarms blared to life. Loch was laser focused on the control panel. I dug my fingernails into my palms and said nothing. Distracting him would not help us land.
We were coming down in a gently rolling area gouged by deep canyons. Flat areas big enough for the ship were few and far between. As we got ever closer, I realized the canyons were both deeper and wider than I first thought.
And we were aiming directly for one.
We were nearly even with the ground at the lip of the canyon before Loch fired the thrusters to slow our descent. The ship shuddered and groaned under the strain, but Loch only cranked the thrusters higher. We were nearly at the thrust level that would be used for takeoff and still we descended deeper.
The engine whine ratcheted up a notch and our descent slowed. My screen showed our landing location to be a relatively flat spot at the bottom of the canyon, still a hundred meters away. At fifty meters, the engines screamed as Loch pushed the thrusters to their maximum output.
“Brace!” Loch shouted. I crossed my arms over my chest and pushed my head back into the headrest designed for exactly this scenario.
We achieved a survivable rate of descent just two seconds before we slammed into the ground. I felt my chair give on its pedestal, absorbing some of the impact force, but we still hit hard enough to stun me for a few seconds.
The engines shut off, leaving behind a cacophony of alarms.
I hurt. I wiggled my fingers and toes before moving on to my arms and legs. Nothing appeared to be broken, but my whole body felt bruised from the inside out.
“You okay?” Loch asked after he silenced the alarms.
“You crashed our only escape vehicle,” I said. My voice sounded eerily calm to my own ears, like someone else was speaking.
I heard him groan and unclip from his seat. The sound of his pain did nothing to calm my temper. I unclipped my own harness with clumsy fingers. I felt heavy and slow. Only part of that was due to the crash—this planet had slightly stronger gravity than the Earth-standard most ships and stations used.
“You crashed our escape vehicle,” I said again.
“The landing was within tolerance,” Loch said. “Now get moving. Anyone who saw us come down is going to come investigate and we don’t want to be here when they arrive.”
I locked the pain and fear and anger behind a wall of icy calm. I found my rucksack and started filling it with food rations and water from the emergency supply. Water was heavy as hell, but I’d seen no indication of surface water, so I’d only have what I carried until we reached the city. I also threw in the ship’s first aid kit. It was heavy, too, but worth the weight.
A quick check of the outside temperature proved that I was underdressed. I grabbed a second set of clothes from the storage locker.