Those Whom Fortune Favours

07 Lullaby

Not that things ever seemed to go to plan if she had anything to do with it, but this had been more of a blow than she was prepared for.

Having paced the perimeter of the vessel until the shadows had shifted, swinging from one edge of the rocks scattered throughout the valley to their opposite side, each pass seemed to bring more bad news. Bent and scraped, the outer hull had sustained significant damage along its port side when it landed, trading paint with the crumbling rocks behind the vessel. It was nothing that she could repair, but it wasn't breached. Perhaps it would still fly, though re-entry would be a gamble. It would have to do, but perhaps it simply couldn't.

Worse had been discovering the shattered remains of one of the FTL nacelles; it had simply coughed up errors when scanned from inside the vessel, listing a litany of failed sensors, broken conduits and potential breaches, but it hadn't told her it was all because the engine had been sheared off the hull. Its twin, closer to the bow of the ship, had taken a beating in the crash, but as twisted as its casing was, it might yet fly. The errors it produced seemed far less serious - though, arguably, 'engine is missing' made everything else seem trivial.

Atmospheric thrusters hadn't fared much better in the process, with two of them so badly twisted they'd caved in on themselves. Unfortunately, they were also positioned on the belly of the ship; there was no feasible way to reach them.

The only good news she'd discovered in this dreary process was that the ferocious winds had dragged the hulking carcass the Engineer had dumped outside away, rolling it several hundred metres toward the base of the mountains and clear of anywhere they needed to be. She imagined it was now rotting in the sun. Pressure suits and atmospheric helmets certainly had their advantages - that was a stench she could live without ever experiencing.

Thinking about the task at hand, she found herself wondering if it was possible to ease the ship up using a combination of all of the remaining engines, babying the damaged hull into orbit with the sort of skill and patience she simply didn't possess, and setting course for...for...

Minor detail, she grumbled. The closest known inhabited planet is Earth.

This is not looking good.

Maybe her fantasies of exploring the galaxy were a little far-fetched. The lifeboat only did what it said on the label; it was designed to take its occupants to the nearest safe-harbour, which in this case, was back to Earth. It was no starship. Both of those had been rendered inoperable in the crash, to varying degrees. Without a vessel with longer legs, entertaining the idea of travelling the galaxy was clearly folly.

Dread had been nagging at the pit of her gut from the moment she set foot outside; she was very much staring down the barrel of last resort. The idea of sending an SOS to Earth and awaiting rescue in stasis was unconscionable for a variety of reasons, not least of which being her distaste with stasis in the first place. Worse was the Human propensity to stick fingers where they don't belong; she knew any rescue party would be overwhelmed by the temptation of exploration, no matter what dire warnings she might send ahead of her. They might even start looking around the wreckage of the alien ship before finding her, or even do exactly as the Prometheus crew had, and enter the towers. With Human bodies to discover, their risk of sating curiosity and thus encountering the things that had befallen the crew would increase by an order of magnitudes.

A rescue party would be little more than a suicide mission. They may even meet their doom before reviving her from stasis.

An involuntary shudder wracked her from head to toe. She would find herself quite literally in the same predicament as the last living Engineer - a fate, she realised in that moment, worse than death.