These Broken Stars (Starbound #1)(16)

“Keep sitting,” I say, rising to my feet and filling the canteen from my pack at the water tank. “I’m going to stick my head outside and see if the communications array is okay.”

She raises an eyebrow at me, her mouth curving to a tiny smile that somehow manages to be superior, despite the hair everywhere, and the blood, and the black eye. I feel myself bristle as that smile echoes every condescending moment I’ve ever experienced at the hands of her people.

“Major,” she says, speaking slowly, as if to a child, “all we have to do is stay put. Even if the communications array is gone, the colonists will have seen the crash. My father’s teams are probably already on their way.”

I wish I could afford to be so sure someone was going to swoop down and save me, but I’ve never been able to count on that in the past. Then again, I’m not Roderick LaRoux’s only child.

I leave her sitting on one of the seats, arranging her skirt artistically and clasping her hands in her lap, and head for the door. It takes the weight of my whole body behind my shoulder to ram it free of its warped frame. It gives with a screech that the uncharitable might suggest sounds just like Miss LaRoux, when displeased.

Outside, everything’s quiet. The chilly air is rich—not thin and spare like it is on some of the younger colonized planets. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever breathed anything so pure, not even at home. I shove that thought away. I can’t let myself be distracted by thinking of home, of my parents. I’m stranded with the richest girl in the galaxy, and I need to make sure that when her daddy shows up to find us, we’re out in plain sight.

I can’t hear birds, or any of the small scuffles that might suggest there’s local wildlife on the move. Then again, our pod’s cut a furrow through the surrounding woods that stretches nearly a klick, huge trees laid out flat and ground into the mud along the length of the scar. Perhaps the local fauna’s just hiding up trees and down holes, waiting for the end of the world to continue.

The trees are tall and straight, their lower trunks mostly devoid of limbs, their foliage a dark green with a distinctive smell, crisp and clean. I’ve seen them before. I don’t know their technical name, but we call them pole trees. They’re the first trees the terraforming crews get in, once all the organic muck has provided a basic layer of soil. They grow quickly, and make good building material with those tall, straight trunks. It’s later that the ornamental and the harvest trees are planted. So, perhaps this is my first hint at where we might be. Since I see pole trees and not much else, we’re probably on a newer planet, despite the rich air.

But they’re large enough that the ecosystem has clearly had a while to take. In fact, they’re huge, bigger than any pole trees I’ve ever seen. They stretch up skyward at least half as tall again as usual, their spindly tops bending under the weight of the branches. How did they get so big? By this point, the terraformers should have introduced all manner of other species that would’ve edged the pole trees out of the ecosystem.

Any hopes I had for the communications array are answered with a glance. It’s been ripped off, and if it wasn’t fried by the surge or burned up when we entered the atmosphere, then it’s probably lying somewhere back along our swath of destruction, reduced to its component parts. So my cranky heiress might be right, and her father might show up any minute, but more than likely we’re going to look like one of ten thousand pieces of debris scattered across the planet. We need to find a bigger crash site, a more prominent place, so we’ll be somewhere the rescue party will definitely land.

I study the trees around me that are still standing. Like regular pole trees, they get narrow toward the top, so there’s no way I’m climbing high enough to see any distance. She’s lighter and might manage, but I’m grinning just thinking about it. Come on, Miss LaRoux. Your evening gown will match the trees. The nature goddess look is all the rage in Corinth, trust me. I wonder if she’s ever even seen real leaves.

That’s when I realize, standing there in the middle of this disaster, aching all over from being jerked back and forth against my restraints, but grinning like an idiot—I kind of like this. After weeks trussed up on board the ship, chest covered in medals and days taken up by people who don’t like their war too real, I feel like I’m home.

There’s a hill some way off to what I arbitrarily call the west, because the sun’s setting in that direction. The land rises, and with any luck it’ll offer the view we need. It’ll be a long walk, and as I climb back up into the ruined pod, perhaps it’s my newfound good mood that has me feeling a little sorry for the girl inside. I might be back in my world, but she’s out of hers. I know well enough how it feels.

“Our communications are gone,” I tell her.

I half expected tears—instead she just nods as if she already knew. “They would’ve been useless anyway. Most of the circuits got shorted during that electrical surge.”

I want to ask her how she knows, where she learned to do what she did, but instead the question that emerges is: “What was that? The surge?”

She hesitates, her eyes on the trees visible outside the viewport. “The Icarus came out of hyperspace when it wasn’t supposed to. Something happened, I don’t know what. Didn’t you learn about hyperspace jumps in school?” There’s disdain in her voice, but she doesn’t stop long enough for me to reply. Just as well, because all I know about hyperspace is that it gets you from A to B without taking two hundred years.