Commander Asadi stumbled out of the lander and staggered away, her right arm hanging limp at her side. She could move it, but the pain involved in doing so discouraged the idea. She could tell that her hijab was burnt to cinders, since stray strands of hair clung to her face as a newborn child does its mother.

After taking a few more shaky steps, she decided that she was a safe distance away and slumped to the ground. Instead of grass, giant emerald pads of moss covered the ground, with what looked like enormous ferns towering over them.

Paulson, Asadi remembered, her breath catching in her throat. Ensign Jack Paulson, pilot rating first-class. Finding herself unable to stand back up, she instead pivoted where she sat to look back at the Lander.

Or what was left of it, anyway. It sat in a smoldering heap of jagged metal and sparking wires. Asadi narrowed her eyes as she tried to see through the wreckage, looking for any sign of life. Not seeing any, she sighed to herself and clawed back to her feet, using a nearby fern for support. Once the spots dancing in front of her eyes cleared, she lurched back to the smoking Lander, her knees shaking like a newborn fawn.

The smoke burned her throat and stung her eyes, causing them to tear up until she could only see through a watery haze. Reaching into the lander like a carnival claw machine, she searched the cockpit for the transmitter, ignoring the scorching heat singing her forearms. After a few minutes, she withdrew the small steel box and inspected it. Aside from a few cracks and dents, it looked usable.

Asadi walked to her resting place underneath the fern and activated the transmitter. No static, which meant that either she had a clear signal or the internal circuitry was fried.

“This is… Commander Asadi,” she began, stopping when she had to cough up something that tasted a lot like blood. She spat the rest of it out, then continued.

“I’ve… crash landed about five miles from the target,” she said between her pants. “I will… I will wait here for two hours, or as close to that time as I can estimate. If I do not… receive contact in that time… I will proceed to the mission objective. Asadi out,” she finished, clicking off the comm. The circuits were probably melted to slag, but she had to try.

As she set down the transmitter, her tired, aching body refused to relax, as if pushing her to begin her trek early. Closing her eyes with firm defiance, Asadi tried to force her body to relax so she could get a few hours’ rest before leaving. That worked about as well as expected; her shoulders tensed up, sending spikes of pain shooting down her collarbone and up her neck. After about thirty seconds, she sighed in defeat and leaned against the fern, using it as a crutch to get back on her feet. Then she set out towards her objective, her steps unbalanced but resolute.

The planet’s atmosphere seemed to have more oxygen and lighter gravity than Earth, making the trip much less arduous. Save for the pain in her shoulders, collarbone, calves… well everywhere, it was almost pleasant. The heat wasn’t too bad either; instead of beating down on her, the sun instead offered a guiding hand of warmth, replenishing her strength and urging her on.

As a result, Asadi reached the mountain in something like ninety minutes. Although, ‘mountain’ perhaps wasn’t the best description. It looked more like a giant steel dome, the slate-gray metal tinged with Denys-orange rust in some places and covered with moss in others. It was certainly the size of a small mountain, stretching far above the canopy of ferns until it scraped the cloud layer.

She reported her arrival to the comm, although by now she knew deep in the pit of her stomach that it was dead. Then, Asadi walked a circuit around the structure, trying to locate an entrance. She found none, although she confirmed that it was indeed metal when she tripped and smacked her knee off the side. Grimacing with pain, she sat down and massaged the cramps out of her legs, trying to ignore the bruise that was forming on her knee.

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Then she ducked when she heard a mechanical roar, looking up in time to see a sphere shoot into the sky, identical to the one the Galaxie had spotted earlier. It didn’t pause to patrol the area, instead streaking away as if it had things to do and places to be. Two more followed it, both shooting out of a small opening Asadi hadn’t noticed on her circuit around the structure. Her fatigue draining away, she stood up and began climbing up the dome towards the opening.

Within a minute, she found what looked like an open ventilation shaft, no more than five feet wide and heading at a steep slope into the structure. After putting her ear to the ground and listening for any sign of another sphere, she stood up and took a deep breath.

` She didn’t have any fears of getting stuck-- scratch that, she didn’t have any logical fear that she’d get stuck. However, the sides of the circular shaft were completely smooth, and it did head into the dome at a steep angle. Besides, a tremor of anxiety coursed through her at the thought of crawling down that confined space.

Then Asadi shook her head. Whatever was in that dome sent the spheres, and as a result shot down her shuttle. She wasn’t in a forgiving mood; apart from a little giddiness from the excess oxygen, cold rage washed over her. She sat down, scooted until her feet dangled over the edge, then pushed off.

It would’ve been an exhilarating ride, except for two things. The first was the joints in the metal sections of the shaft, that caused her to bounce every ten feet and almost smash her face off the top. After about three of these joints, her back felt like it was going to split in two.

The second was the darkness. Asadi didn’t consider herself claustrophobic; living on the cramped confines of a starship discouraged many from space travel for precisely that reason. The Galaxie was, for all its technology, a metal tube packed with equipment and personnel.

However, that all changed as she slid down the shaft. The darkness ceased to be merely the absence of light, morphing into something more solid than metal, pressing down on Asadi as if attempting to stop her progress. Her breath began to catch in her throat as she felt the darkness close in, causing the pipe to shrink narrower and narrower and narrower, beginning to crush her underneath its weight. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear, she could only feel the weight of-

The sadistic pipe spat out Asadi into a cramped storage room, its gaping maw cackling from the chaos it had caused. After taking a few shuddering breaths to regain control, the commander stood up and examined her surroundings more.

Shelves holding hundreds of spheres filled the room, each one glistening like a ball bearing pierced in a dozen places. Underneath her feet, Asadi noticed what looked like tracks, each set running between a pair of shelves to the other end of the room, where a row of mechanical claws stood like a line of stone soldiers, a far cry from their gimmicky arcade cousins.

The whole room had the feel of heavy industry, from the crisscross of metal pipes and support beams on the ceiling to the bare, unpainted concrete floor. She paced around the room a few times, regarding the spheres with suspicion. They seemed to be restless, laying on their shelves anxious to see action.

After a minute of searching, Asadi found a door that led out into a featureless concrete hallway. As she walked down the corridor, her footsteps echoed off the walls, bouncing down the hall and making them almost ten times louder. Grinding her teeth, she finally reached another door.

It led into a chamber at least ten times as big as the storage room, with rows upon rows of glass containers, hooked up to all sorts of blinking machines. A spider’s web of wiring covered the floor, stretching from wall to wall with no sense of direction or purpose.

Her anxiety building from the pit of her stomach to her throat, Asadi walked up to one of the containers and peered inside. It appeared to contain some sort of fluid that refracted the light from within it, but it looked like there was something floating within it.

“Ya allah!” Asadi gasped, backpedaling away once she saw what was inside. This caused her to trip over the mess of wiring, saving herself from disaster just in time. Once she recovered her wits and balanced, she glanced in several more containers to confirm her sighting.

Bodies. Lots and lots of bodies.