Malik hissed like a startled cat at the sudden spike of pain he felt when he thoughtlessly wiped away the layer of sweat clinging to his brow. With no mirror and no one else to call attention to the gash over his right eye, it was easy to forget it was there. The silver-infused antimicrobial gel, or SAG treatment, had closed the wound and begun to reduce the swelling in the two days since his violent encounter with a coatl. However, the medical gel wasn’t some mystical panacea. It would be some time before the injury was well and truly healed.

It’s almost definitely going to leave a scar, Mal thought wryly as he leaned over the crash couch that he’d been disassembling since he woke this morning. That’s bad enough. If my dumbass could avoid making it worse, that would be fantastic. It isn’t as if I don’t have plenty of things on my plate. I could do without adding ‘Potentially Bleeding Out’ to the list. Or back onto the list, I guess. I was feeling pretty light-headed by the time Oscar carried me back to the pod.

Thank goodness the leviathan’s refined palette leans more toward the taste of flying snakes than bloody humans.

Mal chuckled with bemusement as he went back to work. Over the course of the day he’d dismantled one of the pod’s two crash couches with the efficiency of a master butcher carving up a side of beef. Small pieces of plasteel that served as the couch’s skeletal ribs lay in a pile beside the nearby medkit. On the opposite side, near the pod’s control panel, he’d stacked the four pieces of viscoelastic foam that comprised the couch’s seat.

The real prize, and the purpose of all this destruction, was the tritanium base fastened directly to the pod’s floor. It served as a virtually indestructible foundation for the couch and, more importantly, the spine that the seat’s five-point harness was anchored. If Mal planned to turn Oscar’s raw strength into power for locomotion, it would have to begin here.

The five straps were gunmetal gray. Or pewter, if Oscar preferred. Each piece of fabric was made from Dyneema woven with just enough low-density polyethylene to provide the necessary measure of elasticity. They were designed to stand up to rigors that far exceeded the pressure it would take to tow the lifepod. The difficulty would come in fashioning them into a cohesive whole.

And then fastening them around Oscar. Without getting eaten.

And directing the sea monster to follow a desired course. Preferably, without getting eaten.

Now that I think about it, there are a whole lot of ways that this ends with me getting eaten. I can’t count on him going along with the plan just because he didn’t chomp down on me the other day. There’s a wide gulf between lazing about while I provide a buffet and accommodating my desire to hitch him to my proverbial wagon.

Mal frowned to himself as he began to loosen a hex bolt. There wasn’t a better plan. At least, not one he could devise. Maybe Mullins could come up with a better way to alter the pod so it could traverse the seemingly endless sea. Jackson might have a better idea of how to find a patch of dry land. Spain’s skill with communication may have been able to manipulate the range of his distress call. Even Doc Lisell would have had a more useful skill set than his, as evidenced by the barbaric way he’d packed wound gel into the gash on his head and, in doing so, wasted most of a precious tube of SAG.

To the Chief's surprise, he suddenly noticed that his right hand was shaking like a guitar string plucked by an angry amateur. His blue eyes, haunted by visions of his absent crew, swam back in to focus to find his hand clenched around the ratchet with a white-knuckled grip. The thick, corded muscle wrapped around his forearm stood out in stark relief beneath pale skin that was beginning to darken to a sun-kissed bronze. With the slow deliberate touch of an anxious mother swaddling their newborn, Mal wrapped the fingers of his left hand around his right wrist to stop the trembling. A heartbeat later the ratchet fell to the pod’s floor with a dull clang that sounded, to Mal’s ears, like the bulkhead closing behind Chris as the engineer left him behind aboard the Journey.

You chose this, Malik told himself while he slowly massaged the tension out of his arm. I may not have the skills to find the others, but I will survive out here. I’ll find them. All I need is time.

Mal was still staring at his hand with the hard, flinty gaze of a captain regarding a traitorous first mate when a noise that he hadn’t heard in decades murmured through the lifepod’s open hatch.

His head immediately snapped up. Even a lifetime among the silent stars couldn’t erase one of his most vivid memories as a child.

The sound of thunder.

“No, nononono…” Mal leaped to his feet only to find one of his legs numbed from his hours of work on the crash couch. A string of colorful profanity that would have made Doc Lisell blush spilled from his lips as he lurched drunkenly across the pod. In moments he was grabbing hold of the hatch’s threshold for support as he leaned as far over the water as he could without plunging into the drink.

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In the distance, he could see tall, dark clouds churning like smoke clawing its way free of some infernal furnace. While he watched, frozen by the display of inexorable force, the rain-laden clouds reached down with jagged fingers of blinding light to caress the ocean below. The sudden flash snapped him out of his daze and he immediately began mentally counting off the seconds. After the count of ten, he heard thunder tumble across the sea like the guttural chuckle of some cruel beast toying with its prey.

10 seconds. That means two kilometers. Maybe three?

“Oscar! There’s a storm coming!” Malik yelled above the increasingly loud whine of the wind around him.

Oscar’s slitted amber eyes, each the size of golf balls, regarded the frantic human with an air of patient indulgence.

Malik frowned, feeling the wind take on an icy edge that sliced through his synthetic clothing like a scalpel cast from winter rime. “You better stay safe! We’ve got an entire world to terrorize. It’d be a shame for things to end before they started!”

By the time Mal finished speaking, the waves had begun to churn in a violent roil. Before his friend’s eyes vanished beneath the frothing water, Malik was convinced that he saw a sparkle of amusement in the sea monster's reptilian gaze. He started to call out again to plead with Oscar to stay safe, but a nearby flash of lightning cleaved the heavens in twain and announced the squall’s arrival with a roll of thunder that shook the sky.

Mal gave the choppy waters one last glance before he ducked back inside his lifepod.

The first thing he did was race toward the monitor slaved to his drone’s camera. When he saw the calm ocean and clear skies displayed through the camera feed, a spike of worry lodged itself deep in his chest. A glance at the geolocation tracker told him that the drone, Ayespy, was still twenty-three kilometers west of his current location.

There was no way he could bring the drone into dock before the storm swept over the lifepod.

Gritting his teeth in frustration, Malik tore himself from the display to address more immediate concerns. He moved across the pod to where his skinsuit lay folded in one corner. He hadn’t worn the protective garment in days, but he wanted to be as prepared as he could be for whatever the storm had in store.

He almost lost his balance as he stepped into the suit when the pod listed heavily to one side. Foamy water was now spilling freely through the open hatch, carried by white-capped waves that seemed to grow taller with every passing minute. Where warm sunshine had streamed through the open portal only minutes before, now darkness lay beyond the hatch’s threshold, lit only by the strokes of lightning that erupted from the tumultuous clouds above. Mal spared one look toward his boots before he turned toward the hatch. He needed to lock up before the entire compartment flooded.

Then the rain came.

With a roar like a stampede of wild horses, a deluge fell from the sky that obscured the entire world, as far as the eye could see, behind a wall of descending water. Driven back by the droplets that slammed into him like a barrage of pebbles, Mal’s bare feet slipped underneath him. He careened helplessly toward the open hatch, only managing to avoid falling overboard by throwing himself hard to his left. His shoulder made an alarming thud when it hit the tritanium threshold, but Mal ignored the sudden flash of heat scorching his arm. He never heard the feral growl that split his lips, that bestial cry lost amidst the constant boom of thunder shaking the sea.

Despite it all, Mal took hold of the door and moved to close the hatch even as the wind howled in defiance. It shrieked with glee as it threw an arsenal of rain at him hard enough to wash the SAG from the gash above his eye. Feeling blood beginning to mix with the water coursing down his face, Mal planted his feet and gave a wordless shout of desperation as he strained with every muscle in his body. An inferno of pain ignited in his left shoulder, rushing down his arm like a wildfire greedily consuming dry tinder.

But as agonizing as the sensation was, Malik refused to let the storm send him to a watery grave. One slow centimeter at a time, he pulled at the tritanium slab until, at last, the barrier settled into place. Reflex alone sent his right hand darting to the panel beside the hatch to activate the MAG locking system that instantly sealed the door closed.

His chest was heaving beneath his skinsuit when he turned to face the interior of the pod. Water sloshed underfoot, covering some of the gear he hadn’t properly stowed, including the empty medkit whose contents had been spilled out across the floor. His first instinct was to drop to his knees and find one of the two SAG tubes that had been inside the kit, but as the waves outside grew even more fierce, Malik knew there was only one rational choice to make.

With his left arm hanging limply by his side, Mal sank to his knees and crawled through the sloshing water while the pod pitched and rolled with nauseating enthusiasm. Careful to keep himself anchored as best he could, he made his way across the small chamber to climb up into the crash couch that he hadn’t disassembled yet. As he fumbled, one-handed, with the harness, he thought he caught sight of a tube of wound gel, only to watch it disappear beneath a wave of water that rushed across the floor to smash into the far wall.

When the harness finally closed around him his entire body went limp like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Ignoring the now familiar sticky feeling of blood clinging to his face, Mal closed his eyes and focused on the angry sound of the rain beating at the roof of the lifepod like an angry landlord demanding the rent. For a few moments, he let himself sit there like that, simply feeling the rise and fall of the towering waves beneath him while he caught his breath.

Chest still heaving, Mal cracked his left eye open and carefully leaned forward to scan the drone’s geolocation data. After studying the plots for several seconds, he reached out to toggle the drone’s manual control. He couldn’t afford to lose a tool that valuable.

Because of all its sound and fury, in time, the storm would pass.

Till then, Malik Rosen would simply find a way, any way, to do what he’d always done.

Endure.