Dust

[Cmdr Kent 0]

She'd taken the armrest of the right-hand XO seat solidly against the bone of her right hip as they'd crashed and the sting of that impact was still resonating up and down her leg as Sam turned to look at the bridge viewscreen.

 

For a moment she thought it was blank. There were no stars; the whole screen had a brown, solid, muddy aspect. Then a long, slim finger of yellowish light stabbed down through the brown sheen and revealed it for what it was -- dust, a tremendous, swirling dust cloud dappled occasionally by the light of an indeterminate star somewhere above them.

 

"Well, now…that's pretty…" she muttered before she could stop herself. And it was, in spite of the grim, disquieting, and somewhat inexplicable circumstances -- there was a golden, almost glowing aspect to the streaming particles which caught her gaze and held it, wonderingly, for a few moments' brief silence. "In an…it could kill us…kind of way…" she added grudgingly. Nebular matter? Not possible…thick enough to block the light of the nascent stars entirely? And what did we hit...?

 

"Where are we?" she heard LoAmi ask behind her, followed by a quick response from Ellie.

 

"Nowhere near where we were…we're against something."

 

"Wait, what?" Sam asked, jolted out of her own thoughts and looking back over her shoulder at the science officer, then back to the screen.

 

The dust swirled aside for a moment then, and she could see the clear, forbidding outline, unmistakeable even in the somewhat distorted image, of a rock face. A beautifully stratified syncline fold by the look of it, and extremely solid, and not angled properly for the Arcadia to be looking at it entirely right-side-up. They were on their side and grounded. They had crashed.

 

She swallowed, feeling a sudden dread as the reality of the situation became clear. The wormhole had been weird enough -- it had claimed at least two crew that they knew of and for all they knew the distortion was still present in their local area of space-time. But that at least had been in space; they were tooled for space, the ship was built for it. It did not do so well on the ground.

 

Sam liked the ground, admittedly, under normal circumstances. Away teams were a good chance to pull out the xenobiology and geology that so often languished under command paperwork and astrophysical mapping. But this was no away team -- they were dead in the water and potentially lost.

 

Amojan y'tek…what the hell is going on?