Chapter 4

The gravity anomaly hit like a sucker punch—one moment the Horizon was gliding past the unnamed planet's magenta-tinged rings, the next it was violently lurching sideways with a groan of straining metal. Jake's forehead smacked against the console before he could brace himself, the taste of copper flooding his mouth. He felt liquid drip down his face and when he touched it, his fingers came away red. Alarms blared. Red lights flashed ominously, painting panic across the features of the crew. 

Across the control room, Lena's fingers flew over her panel, her usually crisp commands dissolving into something raw. “Damage has caused a malfunction in the navigation system!” There was panic in her voice that sent ice coursing through Jake’s veins. "We're caught in the—Christ, the trajectory's—" The ship shuddered violently, cutting her off as a meteor the size of a cargo pod skimmed the hull with a scream of shearing metal.

Captain Rivers' knuckles whitened around the command chair. "Reroute auxiliary power to lateral thrusters!" The order tore from her throat just as the main screen splintered into overlapping damage reports—hull breaches causing decompression on decks seven through nine, oxygen levels dropping in cargo bay three.

“The thrusters are not responding, captain.”

“Chen, reroute it manually.”

Behind her, Jax wrenched open an access panel, sparks dancing across his forearms as he bypassed fried circuits. "Navigation's down to thirty percent!" he shouted. "We're flying blind into that shower!"

“Calm down, everyone, we’ll figure this out,” Captain Rivers barked, trying to keep control. However, as minutes ticked away and the readings on the screen became more dire, it was clear that the calm façade was slipping. Whatever had struck them had slingshot them straight toward the unnamed planet and now the strong gravity from the planet had them and the computer failure prevented them from correcting the error. The ship would began entering the harsh atmosphere soon and the approach angle was devastating.

Jake spat blood onto the decking and lunged for the engineering feed. The numbers scrolling past made his stomach drop—the planet's gravity had them in a death spiral, their angle of descent sharpening by the second. He opened a ship wide channel, his voice cracking. "All hands, brace for atmospheric entry! Repeat, brace—" The Horizon pitched nose-down, throwing him against the console again.

In hydroponics, Dr. Zhou's seedlings went berserk. Their stems thrashed against containment fields as if sensing the coming fire, bioluminescent veins flaring panic-bright. Dr. Reeve grabbed Lia's wrist as a tray of Eden wheat exploded, sending glass shards skittering across the floor. Lia's scream tangled with the sound of a hundred plants tearing free from their roots. "They know," he breathed.

As the crew scrambled to troubleshoot, Jake’s heart raced. They had been so close to the arrival at New Eden. It couldn’t end like this. Yet, as they initiated the manual override, the fatal error caused a cascading system failure in the ship’s algorithms. A jarring shudder rocked the Horizon, throwing Jake against the wall hard. His vision dimmed briefly but he held on to consciousness.

The bridge became a nightmare of streaking fire. Sera watched through the cracking viewport as the first heat shields peeled away, molten fragments spiraling into the atmosphere behind them. The planet's surface rushed up—a jagged mosaic of obsidian mountains and sulfur-yellow lakes—too fast, far too fast. She caught a glimpse of Jax’s reflection in the glass, his mouth moving silently as he input last-ditch override codes. Then the Horizon struck the upper atmosphere like a bullet hitting water, and the world dissolved into screaming metal.

“Jettson the hab unit! Abandon ship! Now!” Sera screamed. She slammed her hand on the consol to sound the alarm.

Jake hesitated for a split second, heart pounding, before darting toward the escape pod bay. The corridor twisted precariously, lights flickering in and out, revealing the frantic faces of his fellow crew members as they pushed their way toward salvation.

Lena yanked him backward just as a conduit burst overhead, showering them with sparks. "We're not dying here," she hissed, her breath hot against his ear. Her freckles stood out like starbursts under the flickering lights. Somewhere belowdecks, the Eden wheat was screaming—Jake could feel it in his teeth, a vibration that wasn't just structural stress. The plants knew. They'd always known.

The emergency lights painted the corridor in strobe-lit freeze-frames as they ran—Jake's fists against a sealed hatch, Lena's fingers digging into his shoulder pulling him forward, an explosion that had already claimed Engineer Cho and Medic Randel. Their names floated in Jake's skull like debris. The ship groaned around them, a sound more animal than machine, as the Horizon's death throes reverberated through the deck plating.

The ship lurched again—a sickening, metallic groan—and Jake watched in horror as a jagged tear split the corridor wall like wet paper. The rip exhaled a monstrous sigh as the ship vented into the upper atmosphere of the planet, yanking two figures into its maw before he could even register their faces. Equipment wrenched free next—a storage crate, a loose conduit panel—slamming into the breach in a grotesque clog of twisted metal and frozen condensation. Most of the crew was roughly yanked backwards when the hole opened, then they hit the deck hard when it clogged.

Jack got lucky.

He was able to grab an exposed pipe with both hands when the tear ripped through the ship. He was the first to recover. The first to continue running. The first to make it through the heavy doors. The emergency doors slid shut with a hydraulic hiss, robotic and uncaring, sealing off the bay just as he reached it, shutting before the rest of the crew had made it through. There was no way they would be able to find another route in time.

“No!” His voice cracked against the door as he slammed both palms against the unyielding metal. The ship’s AI chirped overhead, infuriatingly calm: “Breach contained. Integrity stabilized.” Jake barely heard it over the blood roaring in his ears. He stabbed at the access panel—once, twice—but the display flashed red. “Command denied: lockdown protocol active.”

"Jake!" Lena's scream tore through the buckling corridor, her fingers clawing at the hatch window as the metal groaned around her. Through the smeared plexiglass, he saw the exact moment terror became resolve in her eyes—a hardening that made his stomach drop. "Go!" She slammed her palm against the door. "Get to the pods. Now!"

He ignored her. He wrenched at the manual override lever with both hands, muscles burning, but the mechanism screamed in protest, locked down by the ship's failing systems. Behind Lena, the corridor lights stuttered—illuminating the crew members still scrambling toward her in flickering snapshots. All of them too far. Too slow.

The groan of rending metal drowned out Jake's wordless scream as the hull split like rotten fruit. Lena's mouth formed his name one last time before the breach exhaled—sucking all of them into the ether in a grotesque pirouette of limbs and loose tools.

Jake's knees hit the deck. He didn't remember falling. His heart wanted to stay there but the alarms shrieking overhead reminded him he had to go. With an agonized sob he turned and ran into the bay.

The escape pod bay lights pulsed red. All around him, the Horizon was dying—its ribs snapping, its organs spilling into vacuum. Jake stumbled forward on numb legs, the taste of bile and blood thick in his mouth. The nearest pod's hatch yawned open, its interior sterile and smelling faintly of antiseptic. He fell into the seat, fingers fumbling with harness clasps that kept slipping through his shaking hands. There were no assurances, no guarantees. Just the sound of clanging metal and finally, silence as the pod sealed.

The escape pod ejected with a force that cracked Jake's teeth together—a concussive whump that sent stars across his vision. For a moment, he floated in perfect, gut-dropping weightlessness, the pod's interior lights flickering like dying fireflies. Then the turbulence hit. The capsule spun wildly, centrifugal force pressing him against the harness as the control panel erupted in crimson alerts: “STABILIZATION FAILURE. TRAJECTORY DEVIATION. IMPACT PROBABILITY 87%.”

Atmospheric entry was a riot of impossible colors. The pod's exterior cameras, glitching wildly, showed the alien sky fracturing into prismatic streaks—violet melting into sulfur-yellow, then bleeding to a feverish orange as heat shields glowed white-hot. Jake's skull smacked against the headrest with each violent rotation, the pod screaming around him like a living thing. He tasted blood again.

The emergency thrusters fired late—too late—with a series of jerking bursts that felt like being kicked down a flight of stairs. Jake's vision grayed at the edges as the G-forces spiked. Somewhere beneath the pod's tortured metal skin, a structural beam groaned, then snapped with a sound like a gunshot. The right-side camera feed died instantly, replaced by static and a single, blinking warning: “LANDING GEAR COMPROMISED.”

Impact was a universe of noise and pain. The pod struck something—tumbled—struck again, Jake's body whipping against the restraints. For one terrifying moment, he was upside down, watching loose tools and ration packs float past his face. Then the world righted itself with a final, bone-jarring crunch followed by silence.

Dazed and disoriented, Jake hung suspended in the harness for a few long breaths, the quiet pressing against his eardrums like cotton. His harsh exhales sounded obscenely loud in the dead air. Smoke curled from the control panel—thin, acrid tendrils that stung his eyes—and somewhere beneath him, the pod's metal skin ticked as it cooled. He fumbled with the harness release, fingers numb and clumsy, his muscles protesting as if he'd been beaten. The buckle gave with a snap, and he crashed onto the deck, his knees striking metal with a hollow clang that reverberated up his spine.

The hatch resisted at first, its mechanism warped from impact. Jake threw his weight against it, shoulder screaming, until the seal broke with a hiss. The door fell outward, landing with a muffled thud in thick, purple-tinged soil. The air that rushed in carried the scent of wet earth and something vegetal—sharp, almost citrusy—underlaid with a metallic tang that made his sinuses sting. He hesitated, one hand braced on the frame, before dragging himself out onto alien ground.

The sky was wrong. Not the colors—though the teal and violet bands streaking the atmosphere were dizzying—but the way the gravity pressed down, heavy as a palm against his sternum. Behind him, the pod listed in the dirt like a spent bullet, its hull streaked with blackened reentry scars. Towering, ominous mountains loomed in the distance.

As he ventured forth, he felt sickened by the truth that awaited him. Ahead, the Horizon's wreckage smoldered, scattered across the valley floor, a grotesque sculpture of twisted alloy and shattered viewports. Flames still licked at the edges where fuel cells had ruptured, painting the crater in flickering oranges. 

Jake’s boots sank slightly into the soil as he stumbled forward numbly, the ground yielding beneath him like damp sand. The air hung heavy and thick, stale in his lungs and heavy with an unspoken menace. The vegetation here was low-growing—rubbery leaves serrated and dark, clinging stubbornly to his pant legs as if trying to tether him to this cursed place. Ahead, a stand of spindly, cobalt-tipped reeds trembled in a wind he couldn’t feel, their movements rippling unnervingly in unnatural synchronization. His stomach twisted sharply. No birds sang here. No insects buzzed through the air. There was only eerie silence, broken intermittently by the creak of cooling metal and the distant hiss of escaping gases.

The pit in Jake’s gut deepened as he crested the ridge. What lay before him stole the breath from his lungs and sent a cold dread crawling along his spine. He fell to his knees with a ragged cry, voice cracking with despair. Below, sprawled across the valley floor, lay the silver wreckage of the jettisoned hab unit—twisted panels scattered like discarded foil, glinting faintly beneath the alien sun. 

The mountain that had claimed the module rose behind the debris field, as ominous as a silent sentinel. Its black obsidian cliffs were scarred and still smoldering, the charred scent of burnt composite hanging faintly in the air. Shadows lengthened in the violet dusk, casting the twisted wreckage into something resembling a graveyard of broken dreams. One intact airlock door stood upright, half-buried in ash and gravel, like a tombstone carved from metal. Its emergency lights blinked weakly, red pulses flickering like a dying heartbeat.

Chapter 14

The tripwire snapped with a sound like breaking bone. Jake didn't turn to watch the log studded with razor-sharp obsidian shards swing into place—he was already moving, dragging Li'ara by the wrist through a curtain of hanging vines that stung where they slapped bare skin. Behind them, a guttural scream tore through the jungle, cut short by a wet crunch. One less. For now.

He wasn’t sure how many he had killed in the three days that they had been running. There were many though. He had never killed a sentient being before now but he didn’t let himself dwell on it. It was Li’ara and him or it was them. He had no doubts about that.

Li'ara's breath came in short, controlled bursts against his shoulder as they crouched in the hollow of a lightning-blasted tree. Her fingers spelled against his palm—their silent language of pressures and pauses: Two. Closing. East. Jake nodded, pressing his forehead briefly against hers before signaling toward the ravine. Their only chance now was the maze of limestone tunnels beneath the river, where the hunters' scanners blurred in the mineral-rich waters.

Dawn found them shivering in a cavern too low to stand upright, listening to the distant whine of repulsor engines skimming the treetops. Jake's fingers trembled as he smeared luminescent fungus paste over Li'ara's pulse points—masking her alien biochemistry beneath the planet's own scent signature. When she touched his blackened fingertips in question, he shook his head. His sweat didn't seem to register on their sensors. Small mercies.

"Here." Jake pressed the bone knife into her palm, wrapping her fingers around the hilt. "If we're separated—" The words clogged in his throat. The thought of being parted from her hurt worse than the burns lacing his forearms.

Li'ara's pupils dilated and welled with tears but she nodded firmly. Then she was moving, slipping through a fissure in the rock too narrow for pursuers. Jake followed, his shoulders scraping stone, the scent of wet limestone and his own blood thick in his nostrils.