“I’ll splint your leg as best I can, but besides that, yeah, I think we ride it out until there’s enough light to see what we’re dealing with.”
“And then?”
Olivia felt a burbling surge of adrenaline, fear, and uncertainty churning in her gut. But she was the relatively uninjured one. Whatever came next, she was going to have to take the lead.
“And then we make plans from there. Day by day is how we’ll play it as we get our bearings. For now, let’s get that leg padded and bound. Once that’s done, we wait out the night.”
Olivia set to work at once, scavenging what she could from the ruined craft to fashion a makeshift splint for Harper’s leg. It was a closed break of her lower left leg, so fortunately there was no broken skin or protruding bones. Pulling it back into place before splinting, however, was something that would hurt no matter what. There was no way around that unpleasantness.
Harper grit her teeth and took it like a champ, but she was clearly spent. To be fair, as the adrenaline wore off, so was Olivia. That one pressing task accomplished, she curled up with her friend and lay her head down to wait for morning, whenever that might be, and eventually drifted off into a restless sleep.
CHAPTER FOUR
The orange glow on the inside of her lids woke Olivia, the alien world’s sunlight shining a ray through the torn hole in the hull. Naturally, it was just her luck that her face was in perfect alignment for the solar intrusion.
“Even here,” she grumbled quietly to herself as she carefully pushed back from Harper so as not to wake her.
It was something of a personal joke for Olivia alone. No matter where she had lived ever since college, sunlight always seemed to find her pillow at the most inopportune moments. Be it a gap in the curtains or a reflection from the edge of a mirror or her phone lying on its charging pad, it had gotten to the point where she almost wondered if she was living in a simulation and her personal code had that one rather annoying glitch written into her daily routine.
Of course, she knew that wasn’t the case. Or, at least, she certainly hoped not. If she was the product of some lines of code, she sure as hell wanted a word with whoever wrote this particularly shitty situation.
She looked at the wrecked interior, taking in the damage in full detail now that there was proper illumination filtering in.The place was a mess, broken bits and bobs everywhere even though the compartment had been a relatively Spartan setup while still attached to the Raxxian craft. But now, after the turmoil it had been put through, many of those systems formerly hidden within the walls were exposed to view, and a lot of their components were scattered as a result.
The red arm lying cocked at an unnatural angle caught her eye. Olivia glanced at her sleeping friend, still out cold after the ordeal. Her injuries were pretty significant, and she needed her rest. More than that, she very much needed to keep her cool when she woke up. Olivia knew that meant there was only one thing to do.
Fuck.
With the most stealth she could manage, Olivia moved through the compartment, gathering up their limited bunk linings and anything else she could use to wrap up the bodies of their shipmates. It was a horrible job that she in no way wanted, but if she could spare Harper from the sight of their broken friends, she’d do it.
Wrapping them up was a grim but rather straightforward task. In no time, she’d managed to hide the bodies from view while only getting a tiny bit of their blood on her hands. She wiped it off as best she could after she mopped up the largest of the drying puddles spotting the deck where the bodies had come to rest. She then cleared a path to the hole in the hull to keep noise to a minimum and dragged the bodies out one by one.
By the time Harper finally woke, the three corpses were nowhere to be seen, buried in a shallow grave in the alien soil nearby. Olivia didn’t know if there were wild animals about, but she was sure as hell not taking any chances. The soil tamped down firmly, she was about to follow her nose to what smelled like water nearby when she heard a worried voice.
“Liv? Are you there?” Harper called out.
Fortunately, sound didn’t carry far from the inside of the compartment, meaning they would be relatively safe talking in normal voices. Only if someone happened upon the craft itself and came near would there be risk of detection.
“Yeah, I’m here,” she said, giving her handiwork one last look then climbing back inside. “How you feeling?”
Harper gestured at her splinted leg. “You need to ask?”
“Valid point. Sorry we don’t have any pain relievers.”
“At least it’s stabilized,” the woman said, examining the MacGyvered splint job her friend had whipped up. “You did this in the dark?”
“Well, to be fair, there was a little light to work with. And this was pretty straightforward.”
“Straightforward? It’s an improvised splint made from parts of an alien spaceship.”
“Okay, there is that. But the principle is the same.”
Harper pulled on the wrappings holding the splint in place. All was properly secured and well padded.
“How do you even know how to do this?” she asked.
Olivia let out a chuckle, the sound and accompanying genuine hint of amusement she felt surprising her.
“That’s a long story, my friend.”
