Dead bodies were scattered all over the corridor, she felt so powerless in front of all that grief, the fact that many of them could have families and she suddenly realized that maybe she wouldn’t be able to see her mother again.

The terrible idea that that planet could become their grave was now finding its way into her mind more than ever but she decided to blind her mind against those thoughts that had no place in her mind, not fitting with her desire to go home.

A cough catched her attention, a man was spitting blood in a corner and it didn’t look good for him either, probably only time was keeping him alive and soon he would be gone.

“Haila. What happened?” McKanzie said. His chest had been pierced by some unidentified scrap that most probably flowed around during impact. Did he lie all this time on the floor, what agonizing experience was he living, why didn’t the bio monitor show his lifesign?

The question got soon answered, the biomonitor had been cutted during the piercing that damaged a good part of his shoulder as well. Blood was spilling all over his suit and over the two stars on his left shoulder.

For a second she thought about the chain of command, about the power that had been just taken away from her shoulders but she grabbed his hand back and she explained to him about the crash and the captain lying on the floor of the cockpit and he nodded trying to say something but his voice was drowned in his blood.

There were a couple of fireflies flying around his head. How was it possible that that was the only insect going around the planet? But they weren’t just two. There were a whole bunch of them inside the corridors and they were all flying all around McKenzie’s head.

“You are in charge now! You are the higher in command,” he whispered. She nodded in tears.

“Save us! Bring us home,” he said. It looked more like an order though. That was in fact the big plan, to fly the ship home, he didn’t need to tell her to. She wanted to go home probably harder than him.

But he didn’t last long. His face contorted in a mild pain since his heart was actually failing, his eyes became still and dead. She cried for a bit but then she remembered what she had to do, after all she had just received an order from a superior officer.

“Fuck!” she exclaimed when he passed away, that was an image she was sure she would never forget. The sensation of his blood on her hands, the actual smell of blood she could feel into her nostrils.

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Sitting in the corridor looking at the corpse and crying. Yes. he was right, she was in charge now. This shouldn't come into effect until after the mission. On their way home she would have become an officer, the higher military honor was to be promoted into seniority but like this it was just terrible, to be promoted by a superior officer on the death bed.

She thought that this happened only in movies and never would have thought that reality was just steps away. Now she needed a doctor more now than never, she needed to be sure that somebody could take care of the crew.

The door for the infirmary was not difficult to open, it just required a magnetic grip and this made her wonder why Trevor didn’t do it. Was he incapacitated? Luckily for her he was alive and well but the image in front of her was the worst she could imagine.

He was just starting an operation for extracting something from his own leg.

She could fly that ship out of the planet in case, if the Okamba would have been fly worthy again, her muscle memory and instinct would have allowed her to reach the Kashmir again. It was the training she had received her whole life, but to heal and cure her own wounds would have been something too eerie and scary.

The respect she had for the doctor was above the scale, she would probably prefer to stay under a pile of rubbers rather than face her own broken leg.

If she tried operating her own wounds she would have probably have receded every blood vessel and bleed to death and this was the reason why she was a pilot and Trevor was the doctor.

“Thank god you are here,” he said when she entered the room. “I need you to help me here,” he finished.

“Helping you with the leg?” She asked bemused. He nodded.

“I can’t ask you to extract the scalpel, you will mutilate me, but I need you to stop the blood when it is extracted.”

“Do you mean like in the movies, just put pressure with a cloth?”

He nodded. That much she could do and she could even have the cold blood necessary to save him if that was just what she was required to do.

The scalpel had found its way deep into the leg. It was passing the leg from both sides but luckily it had the decency to avoid the femur, it was just cutting through muscles and meat, not ideal at all but better than having it cut the whole bone. The noise of the 3d printer working out a leg cover that could have helped maintain the wound closed and at the same time allowing him to walk semi normally.

He had thought about everything and the fact that she showed up at the best possible time was just good karma that he had around.

“Are you ready?” He asked.

“No!” she replied, shaking her head, but deep inside she knew that she had to do it, that she could do it.

“At the count of three,” he said.

“One,” he said, taking a deep breath.

“Two,” they were maintaining eye contact in a way that she found irresistible.

“Tree.”