Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 62128 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62128 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 311(@200wpm)___ 249(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
We are absolutely trashing this ship. The bridge was never what you might call a spic and span sort of place when our first captain was in charge, but Raine had it very orderly. She made a rule that there was to be no loitering. You were either flying the ship, manning the instruments, delivering information, or you were off the bridge completely. Then Raine got abducted trying to save Sullivan, and now…
KA-DUNK KA-THUNK
The ship jolts down suddenly, losing all the altitude we just gained, but that’s not actually Maria’s fault. She’s now splayed across the controls, having lost her balance in the attempt to avoid a human missile.
“Sorry!”
Cadence’s latest powered roller-shoe prototype has propelled her at high speed into the control panel. One of these days, we’re going to find a Cadence-sized hole in the hull and that will be the end of it. You cannot stop her tinkering, no matter what you do. Once, Raine confiscated her tools and materials, only to discover that Cadence had manufactured new tools out of bits of an old chair, and then used parts of the Mare itself for new materials. She’s incorrigible.
“CADE! GO SIT DOWN!”
Rage, not her real name, but the only name that accurately accounts for her temperament, grabs Cade by the back of the neck and drags her off the bridge, one wheel on her roller-shoes squeaking all the way. Rage has a red mohawk and only wears clothes that have tears in them. We’ve tried giving her new clothes, and somehow they end up torn within hours. She’s one of our few offensive gunners, and keeping her off the weapons system has been a constant battle.
“We should blow something up!” She shouts on her way off the bridge.
Before she was abducted, Raine was very clear we were not to blow anything up. Even if we really wanted to. We are following that order. We don’t know what consequences would follow for the captains if we were to…
“They’re fucking on the roof of that bone house,” Ame says. Ame’s usually quiet. She mostly does surveillance and used to report directly to Raine, and nobody else. Some of us had never spoken to her at all until we got stuck on this saurian planet.
“They are not… oh they are!” Maria exclaims.
My eyes widen as I look at what they’re looking at. Captain Raine and the saurian are indeed engaged in what can only be described as wild, rampant copulation atop a building made of bones. The ship’s cameras are very high resolution, and a great deal of detail is being beamed to our shocked, stunned eyes as Raine writhes atop the powerful saurian beast.
As soon as I gather my senses, I reach over and turn the screens off. “We shouldn’t watch that. Ame, don’t you dare turn the recording on.”
“It auto-records. I can’t stop it. Captain Sullivan instituted that policy years ago.”
“Then don’t you dare watch the recording. That’s private.”
“I would never,” Ame says.
“I would!” Sasha swings between hyperfocus, hypervigilance and just general hyperactivity. She’s a genius, and she is also completely uncontrollable. Sullivan was good at keeping her busy, and Raine was good at keeping her under the thumb - but now there’s nobody to step into the gulf of leadership left by those two, and Sasha is like a chainsaw blade that came off an operating chainsaw. Actually, that’s a good description for a lot of the crew. We are all running chainsaws and we are going to rip this ship apart.
Nobody is coming to save us. So I decide to go down to the planet, to bring at least one person back to us to save us. To save me.