My dad gave me a once-over to confirm that I was okay. With that done, he told me to make sure the Ursa was contained.
That’s when I realized he hadn’t seen the rear of the ship rip off. Voice shaking, I told him the news. “It’s gone. The whole back of the ship is gone.”
“Rangers! Count off!” my dad shouted, his voice booming through the main cabin. But its echoes were met with total silence. A coughing fit overtook him, but when he recovered, he repeated his order.
“Most of them were in the back when the tail broke off,” I told him. It felt strange, knowing more about what had happened than my dad did, even for a minute.
Dad tried to pull himself to his feet, but I could see right away that his legs couldn’t hold him up. He cried out, collapsing back to the floor. I saw him struggling to stay focused despite the pain. It only took a moment before he was back in control. “The cockpit is directly above us. Go. Now.”
I didn’t want to leave him. Not when he was so badly hurt, not when he had only just come back to me. I slowly got to my feet, but then I stood there just staring at him.
“Go, Kitai,” he insisted, and I nodded. I headed up toward the cockpit. With each step, I felt more and more certain that my dad would save us. He was, after all, the greatest hero Nova Prime had ever known. Maybe that sounds like bragging. But I always thought, it’s not bragging if it’s true. It would take more than a spaceship crash to take him out.
I drew in a sharp breath when I entered the cockpit. Both the pilot and the navigator were still in their chairs, but they’d been crushed beneath a structural beam. I had to lean over them to see the control board. Emergency lights flashed everywhere. I glanced into the open avionics system just off the cockpit and saw that most of the equipment there was still lit up. At least not everything was destroyed.
“Go to the control board.” My dad’s voice came from the bottom of the stairwell. “In front of the left seat. Top row, fourth from the right. Activate Exterior Motion Sensors.”
I reached for the panel, but my hands were shaking too hard to activate the screen. I clamped them together to stop them, drawing in deep breaths. Trying again, I found the screen for the exterior motion sensors. I hit a button and Motion Sensors Activated appeared on the screen.
“Check,” I called down to my dad.
Next he told me where to find the emergency beacon and what it would look like. “We need it to send a distress signal,” he explained. “Bring it to me.”
The thought of activating a beacon and having the Rangers come save us, wherever we might have landed, made me feel instantly lighter. We weren’t trapped here. I would find the signal, press a button, and just wait for our rescuers. Then we’d go home.
But when I got to the communication rack, I saw the damage. I found the emergency beacon, but the bottom of it was crushed. I carried it back down the ladder to show it to my dad, hoping that the part that was broken wasn’t the part that mattered.
My dad inspected the damage, then switched the beacon on. Its activity light stayed off. He detached its mangled lower section, and I thought he might be able to fix it. But after a few minutes, he shook his head. The beacon was useless.
I knew it would still be okay, though—he was the Commander General, and he would come up with a solution. I could actually see him thinking, rapidly concocting and rejecting ideas until he reached a decision.
“We need to get me into the cockpit,” he announced. “There’s a cargo loader at the rear.”
I spotted the flat hydraulic machine on a cargo elevator by the ship’s front bow. A small ramp ran from the loader to the floor. When I hit a button, the ramp started moving like a conveyor belt. My dad braced his arms at his sides, and I lifted his leg onto the belt. When he winced, I paused, realizing he was in more pain than he was letting on but of course he wouldn’t tell me how bad it was. The loader started dragging him up, and I hurried to lift his other leg onto it. With some maneuvering, he was able to get his upper body onto the conveyor belt himself.
When he reached the top of the loader, I saw that blood from his legs streaked the ramp. His blood was on my hands too, from where I had grasped his legs to move them. I could see that he was injured, of course, but those bright red streaks really brought it home. Cypher Raige was not invincible. He was a man like any other. And that meant he could be broken.
But that didn’t mean he would stop. I pressed a button and the cargo elevator began to rise. I craned my head back so I could keep my eyes on him.
“Inventory up. Full assets. Now,” Dad called down. I paused, noticing that the windows outside were crusted with ice. I didn’t find that encouraging. But I couldn’t keep my dad waiting while I worried about the weather, so I climbed up after him.
It only took me a second to realize that I was going to have to move the pilot and the navigator so my dad could get to the controls. Bracing myself, I dragged the navigator out of his seat and over to a hatch in the floor labeled Nitro Storage Container. It was awful, clutching his cold arm, hefting his dead weight, but I couldn’t let myself stop. I hadn’t known this man, but I felt grief wash over me at the thought that he would never again fly, or smile, or see his family. But my responsibility now was to the two of us who had survived. I needed to get the bodies into the nitro container to avoid attracting whatever predators were on this planet. I popped open the hatch and pushed the navigator into the container, quickly closing it behind him. I wanted to break down right then, but there was no time. I had to move the pilot too.
Shaking, I turned to see my dad sitting in the navigator’s seat. He had transferred himself from the loader to the chair and now sat upright with his left leg propped on the console beside him. Since he was settled in at the control center, I took a minute to get ahold of myself. Sinking to the floor, I tried not to remember the heft of those bodies, tried not to think about who they had been, and who they had left behind. I rocked slowly back and forth, trying to calm my mind. And there in front of me was my dad, bleeding but completely in control. Maybe I really wasn’t like him at all.
Dad placed his palm on a terminal to activate the cockpit computers. They burst to life, and I felt a flicker of hope. A hologram flashed the words Identity Verified: General Cypher Raige, and the computers booted up. Although the console in front of the pilot’s seat was completely destroyed, the holographic display in front of my dad spit out initial readings, apparently fully functional.
He ran through the various systems, and the computer announced, Main cabin breach. Self-sealing in progress, and, Transport ship: condition critical.
“General Cypher Raige,” he said, glancing at the cockpit recorder to confirm that it was capturing his words. “Crash-landed.”
Even though the reports were all bad, watching him go through the standard checks helped me calm down. If he could keep doing his job, I figured I could too. So I got to my feet and went looking for whatever supplies I could find. We would need them.
I managed to accumulate a decent pile. A med kit and my dad’s kit bag were the best finds. But now the scavenging was done, and I was at a loss again.
“I need you to focus right now,” my dad told me. “Assets?”
“Four bodies. I put them in the nitro compartment.” Not exactly an asset, but it seemed like an important part of my report. “Radio nonoperational. Four Ranger packs. Cabin pressure stable. One emergency med kit. And I got your bag from the troop bay.” I could feel him watching me, assessing my every word and movement. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for, exactly, but it seemed safe to assume I wouldn’t measure up.