The roaring sound was coming from overhead. It had to be a natural sound. Lieutenant Yili Curtiss knew every sound her ships and boats could make, and this kind of angry roar could only happen during a catastrophic decompression event and even then, it would only last a few seconds before a deck alarm sounded.

No, this sound was some kind of alien hurricane. The gradually declining temperature that came with it forced her back to consciousness. If it weren’t for the fact she was at the base of a canyon of some kind, Curtiss knew she wouldn’t have survived this long. Frost had gathered on her eyebrows and arms. She estimated the air temperature was well below human tolerances. There were remains of some kind of material nearby that appeared to be smoldering. Tiny wisps of smoke appeared and vanished occasionally. A fire would explain how she hadn’t passed out from hypothermia by now.

She turned her wrist with some difficulty and noted her mission chronometer was counting up from sixty-one hours. That was impossible. Copernicus One’s mission was only a survey. Under normal circumstances, they would have lifted off to rendezvous with the battleship Argent after only a couple of hours.

Yili tried to move, and was rewarded with a sharp pain in her right side from shoulder to knee. She looked up and could only identify vague shapes. It was long past dusk on Bayone Three. Somewhere overhead there was some kind of light shining, but from her vantage point, Curtiss couldn’t see where it was located. The broken and heat-scarred outer hull of her orbital combat engineering corvette rose into the darkness behind her. She couldn’t feel her toes.

Crashed?

“Report!”

The sound of Curtiss’ croaking voice was ripped into the sky and dissolved by the screaming gale force gusts. If anyone heard her, they didn’t respond. Yili reached for her commlink and found it drained of all power. That was also impossible. Fully charged, a Skywatch commlink’s battery would last more than a month even under heavy use. There was something terribly wrong, and despite her technical knowledge, Lieutenant Curtiss had been fully awake for several minutes now and still didn’t have a single clue what it was.

“Any Skywatch personnel, report!” If her radios wouldn’t work, she would just have to rely on volume. “Skywatch personnel! Can anyone hear me?!” She knew Able Crewman Tackett had stayed with the boat. Another shooting pain flashed up her arm, drawing a gasp from the engineer. She reached back with one hand and found part of the corvette hull to hold on to. Using her weight for leverage, Yili finally managed to pull herself up to a relatively stable sitting position. She hadn’t realized it up to this point, but the ground depression she was in had apparently been produced by the boat itself. She silently thanked goodness this particular planet had a marginally breathable atmosphere.

She craned her neck back as far as she possibly could, desperately trying to see where the light was coming from. It was a stark white glow and it cast a distorted set of shadows along the far wall of the ragged crater. It wasn’t moving, which led Yili to believe it was likely one of the corvette’s running lights mounted on the hull. She couldn’t explain why one light was on and the rest of the boat appeared dark, but she certainly wasn’t going to complain. That light was the only thing making it possible for her to see at all.

A spectacular canopy of stars filled the night sky over Bayone Three. With the exception of the repeater, the farms and the Lethe Deeps complex, there were no heavily populated human settlements to speak of planetside. The system made a fine stop-off point for vessels looking to load backup consumables, but it was by no means a place where most people would want to spend any time.

Unfortunately, although the running lamp high overhead was providing enough ambient light for Curtiss to see where she was, it wasn’t going to be much help with her next priority, which was getting back inside her boat. Leaving aside the immediate survival concerns about the dangerously high wind speeds and the rapidly plummeting temperature, whatever injury Yili had sustained would need to be treated by someone with medical training or by an emergency medical unit like those aboard her boat.

The OCE Corps was most of the reason the Angel autonomous rescue vehicles had been invented in the first place. It went without saying every Copernicus-class orbital combat engineering corvette would be equipped with at least one. Like all technical personnel, Yili never knew when she would find herself injured by whatever she was trying to fix, so she had modified her own boat to support two. Fleet called them “Saint Bernards with anti-grav.”

The angels aboard her boat were also the only way she was going to find the other four members of her crew. Curtiss carefully performed a personal inventory. Both her blasters were intact and holstered right where they were supposed to be. If she were attacked by bison or man-eating insectoid creatures, she would at least be able to defend herself after a fashion. She gingerly reached around and found her breakaway tools attached to her cinch at the center of her back. If she needed to build a man-eating insectoid creature, she had enough equipment to get started.

Like all engineering problems, the keys to everything were power and time. Power was likely not going to be the problem, as it was clear there was something aboard the boat that was working. The problem was going to be oxygen, temperature and medical attention, probably in that order. Although Bayone Three’s atmosphere was breathable, it didn’t have the oxygen concentration necessary for human energy needs. Without supplementary life support, over time the average conscious person would start to become fatigued. In fact, this was likely to become serious after only a few hours. Had she been awake, Yili realized she would have likely suffocated by now. Only the fact she had been literally out cold had saved her life.

With a working commlink, she could transmit a distress call and simply wait for the battleship Argent to launch a rescue from orbit. But the way things stood at the moment, such a transmission was unlikely to happen any time soon. She could wait, but now that she was awake, she had about ten hours of consciousness left without life support.

Chief Engineer Yili Curtiss had her work cut out.