Page 1 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

CHAPTER 1

*** MARINA ***

The alarms were the first sign that everything had gone wrong.

Marina Livingstone grabbed the edge of her console as the Vulcana shuddered beneath her. The ship had been cruising smoothly for weeks, and now the floor was tilting at an angle that no spacecraft should ever achieve. Red lights flashed across every screen in the science bay. The sound was deafening.

"All hands, brace for impact! This is not a drill!" Captain Okafor's voice boomed through the intercom, strained but steady.

Marina didn't need to be told twice. She threw herself into the nearest crash seat and pulled the harness tight across her chest. Her equipment; months of carefully organized research samples, slid off the counters and shattered on the floor. She winced but didn't move. The samples weren't worth her life.

The ship hit something, hard.

The impact threw her forward against the harness. Her teeth slammed together. The lights went out, then flickered back in emergency red. The shuddering stopped, replaced by an eerie stillness that was somehow worse. Through the porthole, she could see dust and debris settling around the hull. They'd landed, or crashed. The distinction was going to matter.

"Marina! You okay?" Athena's voice cut through the ringing in her ears. Her younger sister appeared in the doorway of the science bay, sidearm already drawn, blonde ponytail swinging. She looked like she'd just walked out of a combat simulation, not a near-death experience. That was Athena. The universe could be ending and she'd face it with a gun and an attitude.

"I'm fine. What happened?"

"Gravitational anomaly pulled us off course. We tried to correct, but the planet's atmosphere grabbed us before Okafor could compensate. We're on the surface of..." Athena checked her wrist link. "Ceylara. Red Wall 7. Uncharted."

"Uncharted is not reassuring."

"Nothing about this is reassuring. Okafor's checking the hull. He says we might've cracked the port stabilizer, which means we're not flying anywhere until it's fixed." Athena holstered her weapon, though Marina noticed she didn't click the safety. "The good news is we're alive. Forty-seven crew, all accounted for."

"And the bad news?"

"The air out there is breathable but barely. It's hot as hell, and something tripped the external sensors about three minutes after we landed. Movement. Big movement."

Marina stood and crossed to the main viewport. The world outside was red. Not a pleasant red; not autumn leaves or sunset, but a hostile red. Cracked rock stretched in every direction, broken by smoking vents that spewed yellowish gas. Two suns blazed overhead, close enough that their light had a physical weight. The sky was brown where it should've been blue. There was no vegetation she could see. No water, just rock and heat and the vague shimmer of something moving at the edge of her vision.

"That's... not great," Marina said.

"Understatement of the century," Athena agreed. "But we need to know what we're dealing with. I want to take a team outside. Short recon. A quarter mile in each direction. See if there's water, shelter, anything useful."

"We don't even know if those vents are toxic."

"The sensors say the air is breathable. The vents are sulfuric, which means stay upwind. I'm not suggesting a picnic, Marina. I'm suggesting we figure out where we are before whatever tripped those sensors figures out we're here."

Marina looked at her sister. Athena was three years younger and approximately three decades more reckless, but she wasn't wrong. Sitting inside a damaged ship on an unknown planet waiting for something to come to them was not a strategy. It was a death sentence with extra steps.

"Fine. Take Peter and two of his security team. Stay in radio contact. If you see anything you can't identify, you come back. You don't engage."

"When have I ever engaged unnecessarily?"

"Do you want the list chronologically or alphabetically?"

Athena grinned. It was the grin that had gotten her into and out of more trouble than Marina could count. "Thirty minutes. We'll be back before you've finished cataloging whatever's left of your samples."

She was gone before Marina could respond. That was also Athena.

Marina turned back to the viewport. The red world stared back. Somewhere out there, something was moving, and she was responsible for forty-seven people who were counting on her to keep them alive long enough to get home. She didn't even know where home was from here.

She pulled up the navigation data on her console and started calculating. Panic was a luxury she couldn't afford. Data was free.

* * *

The recon team returned in twenty-two minutes. Athena's face told Marina everything before her sister opened her mouth.