“So what’s the plan?” Cyrus asked as I made my way towards one of the enclosed ladders that gave access to the different levels of the room. I might have been able to just jump over the railing and let the suit’s fall protection take care of me but it was high enough up that it would probably hurt even with the suit’s help.

“First step, we’re going to see if any of the batteries in the vehicles still work.”

“Makes sense. You planning to ride one out of here?”

“Maybe. It’s going to depend a lot on if the hanger doors open or not.”

“This would probably be easier with some light.”

“The suit should give me plenty enough for what I need to do.”

“Fair enough. What’s step two?”

I put my hands on the edges of the ladder and my feet on the sides. I gradually loosened my grip until I was sliding down. That was easier to do when I could actually feel the ladder beneath my hands but I didn’t slip and fall to my death or my mildly inconvenient injury.

“Step two is going to be seeing just how bad the damage to the engine is.”

“Why do you assume it's broken?” Cyrus asked.

“Because…” My mind flashed back to my dead friends in the cave. “This place obviously isn’t damaged enough to leave if it’s a good shelter. And look around, there’s plenty of missing tools in here. And some of these rooms still look lived in and there aren’t a bunch of bodies laying around. It wouldn’t be like that if the crash killed everyone. Someone cleaned up and they aren’t here anymore.”

“So they must have left.”

“Exactly.”

“How do you know they didn’t take all the good stuff when they went?”

“I don’t. That’s why I’m checking.”

“Ah. Good idea.”

“Thank you.”

The ground vehicles were stored in one corner of the engineering room with magnetic locks over their wheels to ensure they didn’t slide while the ship was in motion. Of course that had been meant for things like, course changes and problems with the artificial gravity. It hadn’t really been meant to deal with the stresses of falling out of the sky onto a planet with very real gravity.

Still they had apparently done their jobs fairly well. Several of the ATVs looked completely intact at a glance. The flying vehicles hadn’t fared so well. They hung suspended in the air over the ATVs by a series of magnetic cranes. In fact, most of the damage to the ATVs seemed to be due to falling helicopters and VTOLs, jets that were designed to be able to take off and land vertically. In a few places it was hard to tell exactly what aircraft had fallen onto what vehicle. Gravity strikes again.

I went to the nearest ATV that looked relatively undamaged. I popped the hood and looked in. The engine had been picked apart. Someone must’ve scavenged it for parts. But the important part was still there. A perfectly good battery. It wasn’t surprising that they would leave it behind. The batteries could power the vehicles for months, maybe even years at a time so they would only need a handful of the dozens that were probably available. Unless, like me, they were planning to power something that needed a lot more juice than a ground vehicle.

I was going to need a lot of those batteries, but now that I knew that at least one was there, in one of the first places anyone who needed extra batteries would go looking for one, I felt confident that I’d be able to find more than enough of them.

Now for the bigger problem.

Another lightning strike rumbled the ship, the distant echo of its fury like the voice of a giant. A voice that would pair perfectly with the enormous face my mind tricked me into seeing on the front of the engine. As I moved closer, it seemed to swell, the shadows cast by my light giving the entire thing the appearance of a skull.

I needed to get into the tunnel that made it look like the engine had eyes. There were a lot of diagnostic screens down near the base of the engine but those were meant for checking on the engine's parts while it was in motion. If it was damaged I’d need to see inside to tell what, if anything, was wrong with it. Only the upper tunnels, thirty feet or more off the ground, would let me inside the engine where I could see what was going on in its core.

The way you were supposed to do it was using a special vehicle that was something like a cherry picker combined with the sliding tables used to get beneath ground vehicles to repair their undersides. The cherry picker side lifted you up and the table slid you inside. I would have used that vehicle but I passed its remains, crushed by a helicopter like a bug beneath a boot, as I made my way to the engine.

Without the vehicle I was going to have to get creative. I couldn’t easily climb up to the opening. The engine’s face was too slick and offered very little in the way of good hand or footholds. I couldn’t just jump up to it. Even with a running start and the suit’s help, I couldn’t make it nearly high enough. But there was a way.

The cranes that had once held air vehicles were in the general vicinity of the opening. They were probably thirty feet above it, but with the right momentum and timing, that would work to my advantage. If I didn’t splatter against a wall or the floor.

I made my way to the top floor again and walked across the cat walk to the point closest to one of the still dangling VTOLs. I took a few breaths to steady myself and then climbed up on top of the railing, holding onto a support strut for balance. And then, before I could let myself start thinking about all the ways this could go wrong, I jumped out onto the wing of the VTOL.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

My feet hit it and I nearly lost my balance and fell all the way to the floor, where I might have landed in the still open hood of the ATV I’d checked for its battery. I windmilled my arms for a couple seconds, my feet tapping on the ground trying to balance on the shifting wing before I steadied.

“Good job.”

“Thanks.”

“Now what?”

I pointed.

“Ah. Gonna try a Tarzan, huh?”

“A who?”

“You know about comic book heroes from more than a century ago but you don’t know Tarzan?”

“My movie selection was limited. Who are you talking about?”

Cyrus let out a sigh.

“He was a kid that got raised in the jungle by gorillas. He’s famous for swinging on vines.”

“Oh. I thought that guy was called George.”

“No, that was… you know what, it’s not important. Get to swinging.”

“Okay, whatever.”

I shook my head and crossed over the cockpit of the VTOL, all but sitting to avoid sliding on the smooth clear glass as I came down on the other side. This was going to be the scary part. I had to run down the wing, jump off the unstable surface and catch one of the dangling crane wires. Then I would get to swing from there to the next wires and then to a third wire. After that would come the hard part.

“Alright. Just don’t think about it too much. Yeah. This will definitely work.”

“Totally. I believe in you.”

“Really?”

“Uh, yeah. Sure.”

“Asshole.”

I ran. I gave myself a little hop at the end, bounced down on the wing and waited a second for the wing to dip and then rise back up and then flung myself into the air with everything I had.

It was almost too much. I had planned to grab onto the claw at the end of the wire. Instead I had to wrap my arm around the wire itself. My momentum carried me past it and I barely held on and immediately started to slide down. My head bounced off the claw hard enough to chip the helmet’s glass. But my arm was around it and the suit's reflexes were better than mine. I hung there, dangling and flailing my legs to try and get them up high enough to wrap around the claw so I could pull myself up. Then I remembered that I was relying on the suit’s strength rather than my own and just hauled myself up using the wire.

I’d lost all the momentum I’d been planning to use to swing to the next wire but once I planted my feet on the claw it was easy enough to start swinging the base back and forth to build it up again. But I wouldn’t really be able to jump off this time and the wire wasn’t long enough to quite reach the next one.

So there was nothing to do but build up as much momentum as possible and try to fling myself over to it.

“Hey, uh, Euclid?”

“Not now Cyrus.”

“But-“

“Seriously, I don’t need your jokes right now. I need to concentrate.”

“Uh, okay.”

It took me almost a full minute before I was going back and forth as far and as fast as I thought I could. Then it took me almost another full minute to work up the courage to throw myself. This time I didn’t overshoot but I still made a mistake.

In my focus on the next wire I didn’t notice the thin helicopter blade at the top of my arc. It caught me again in the face. This did not make landing any easier.

“For the record,” Cyrus said as I clung to the edge of the claw at the end of the wire, “I was going to say ‘watch out for that helicopter blade.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I mean, it’s no ‘watch out for that tree’ or anyth-“

“Yes. Thank You.” I said, through gritted teeth and began to pull myself up.

“Also you should stay down there.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You’ll have a stronger arc from there. You’re not getting much to push off of when you jump so just timing your release and keeping the most weight at the lowest point will give you the greatest possible control over your speed and trajectory.”

That… made sense.

“But I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Because it was your idea.”

“Works for me. I don’t mind saying, ‘watch out for that engine,” in a minute when you splat yourself against it.”

“What if I got hurt and died when that happened? Would you feel bad about your last words to me being a joke at my expense?”

“Of course not.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. If you die it’s gonna get real boring in here for me real fast. I’ll need to get as much entertainment value out of your death as possible.”

“Wow. I don’t even… Just wow.”

“Hey, at least I’m honest.”

I hung from the claw and the worst possible thing happened. Cyrus was right. This was a much better idea. The jerk.

I was only going to get one chance at this. I wished I could get some help from the suit with timing my release. It’s systems could probably process something like that. If it was capable of predicting and avoiding things that tried to attack me then this would be child’s play in comparison. Unfortunately I had no idea how to access those systems. So I was going to have to guess and hope.

By the time I thought I had enough speed, I was having a hard time just holding on much less thinking about when to let go. My hands were covered in sweat. Thank god for the suit or I’d have slipped just because of that. I felt it when I decided I was going to let go, knew it in my heart that I was ready. It was a strange feeling, one I just wasn’t that familiar with. But it felt good.

Which made it a shame when my fingers didn’t let go the instant I wanted them to. And then, I guess in panic, I let go a second or two later. That moment of weightlessness was horrible but it only lasted a moment. I’d wanted to let go and hit the edge of the opening with the top half of my body but because I’d let go at a weird moment it was my feet that were carried forward first. By some unimaginable luck, my feet went directly into the opening and I slid in just far enough that my shoulders and head were the only part of my body outside when I came to rest. Staring up at the dark ceiling all I could think to say was,

“I meant to do that.”

Cyrus snorted.

“Yeah. Definitely. I can tell from the victory screech you did when you let go.”

For a minute I just laid there, feeling every bruise and all the exhaustion that I’d brought down on myself to get this far. I hurt, especially my backside at the moment but still, I felt good. This felt right somehow. Honest. I thought Rip might be proud of me for getting this far.

When I sat up, I found I had to crawl forward into the opening. The material around me was clear but the suit’s light made it difficult to see past the glare. I was supposed to be able to see the inner workings of the engine from here and, if the power was on, there would be a variety of gauges to tell me all sorts of information about how the system was working. Instead it felt like slipping inside some vast, dead, and bloodless creature and seeing the remains of what was left inside. Dark pieces of machinery I couldn’t begin to recognize surrounded and enveloped me.

But at the end of the tube, that was where I would find what I was looking for. The chamber echoed as I crawled towards the end, throwing my progress back in my face. And then it was there in front of me, the tiny port that I just needed to plug the suit into and I would find out everything I needed to know to fix the ship.

And yet, I hesitated. Something told me to stop, to think about what I was doing. That something was wrong.

But that was silly right? What could go wrong here? At worst the ship wouldn’t be repairable. That would be frustrating but not the end of the world. I’d faced down much worse to get here.

“Kid?”

“Yeah, sorry. Got lost in my head there for a second.”

“Well, don’t stay lost too long. I’d like to get out of here as soon as possible. Kinda cramped, you know what I mean?”

I glanced around at my own cramped surroundings.

“Yeah, I sort of do.”

And I shook off the feeling of dread and plugged into the computer. I didn’t know it just then but I had made a horrible mistake.