Page 7 of Ice Planet Barbarians

Was. Was a living creature.

My stomach roils uncomfortably again, and I go to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, then stop. It smells like sewage. Ugh. I’m covered, too, and the cabin is splattered. “What the heck happened?”

“I don’t know,” Liz says, helping me to my feet.

I ache all over, my ribs feeling bruised from where I landed on the gun. I hold onto it, though. I don’t care if it’s covered in poop and brains and everything else, it’s mine now.

A metallic sounding chirp blares over the loudspeaker, just as my ears pop hard. Liz clutches her ears at the same time as I do, and we look at each other in surprise.

Kira comes running out of the cage. “Ladies! We’ve got bigger problems. The message overhead is now saying ‘Prepare for re-entry.’ I think that means we’re crashing!”

Fuck.

We pitch again, and I tumble through the air, banging into the lockers. Something smacks my head, and everything goes black

•••

“Hey.” A familiar voice sounds in my ear. “Hey, wake up. Are you okay, Georgie?”

I slowly come to and groan at the fierce stab of pain shooting through my forehead. Then, a moment later, the pain isn’t just in my head. Every part of my body aches, my wrist most of all. It throbs with an uncomfortable fire that seems to radiate all the way up to my elbow. I squint up at Liz as she hovers over me. “Ow.”

She grins back, displaying a fat lip and a growing bruise on one cheek. “You’re alive. That’s always a plus.” She sits back on her haunches and offers me a hand. “Can you sit up?”

With her help, I get to a seated position, wincing. Sitting up just makes everything hurt even more. “What happened?”

“We crashed,” she says. “Most of us got knocked out from being bounced around. There are a few broken bones, a few bloody noses, and two who didn’t make it.”

I stare at her in shock then scan the cabin. “Two people . . . died? Who?”

“In addition to the guard you took down, Krissy and Peg. Looks like broken necks.” She nods over at the far side of the room. “Poor kids.”

I swallow the knot of grief in my throat. I didn’t know them well, but I knew their terror and fear. I’m just glad I’m alive. I hug Liz, and she hugs me back, and for a moment, we’re just relieved to be breathing and mostly whole. Over her shoulder, I squint, noticing that the entire cargo bay seems to be slanted at an angle. The metallic floor is covered with debris, tilted, and icy cold. I get to my feet with her help, wobbling, and gaze around in shock.

Several of the girls cling together in a corner—Megan is hugging Dominique and trying to calm her, the latter choking back braying sobs. Other girls are still sprawled on the ground, unconscious, and I see two bodies piled in the corner next to the dead guard. Krissy’s dark hair tumbles over her face, obscuring her features. It’s for the best. I look away. Over off to the side, Kira’s trying to help another girl straighten an obviously broken leg. Kira’s own face is bruised and blood’s running down from her ear implant.

Everyone looks beaten up, bruised, and damaged. I gaze down at my own legs, but they seem to be okay. My wrist, however, is swollen and getting a little purplish, and my ribs feel like they’re on fire. “I think I broke this,” I say, holding my bad arm out. I gingerly rotate my wrist and nearly pass out at the shockwave of pain it sends through my body.

“Guess you won’t be clubbing any more aliens then,” Liz says cheerfully. “If it’s not broken, it’s sprained pretty bad. You should see my toes on my left foot. They look pretty awful, too. Like they tried to make a strategic retreat into my foot and failed.”

I glance over at her skeptically. “Then why are you in such a good mood?”

“Because we’re free,” she says enthusiastically. “We are fucking free, and we’ve landed somewhere. I already count those as better odds than what we had before.”

“How do you know we landed?”

Liz hobbles to my side, favoring her leg. “Because the floor’s tilted and cold, and because of that.” She points at something behind me.

I turn and look. Overhead, it seems as if one of the compartments has peeled partially away, leaving a long, narrow scrape in the hull of our storage bay. Through the scrape, weak light filters in and what looks like snowflakes drizzle down. I gasp and push forward, trying to see. “Is that snow?”

“It is,” Liz says happily. “And since we’re all not asphyxiating from breathing methane or something, there’s also oxygen coming in.”

Hope thuds in my heart, and I stare up at the ceiling. I turn back to Liz, full of excitement. “Do you think we landed back on Earth somehow?”

“I don’t think so,” Kira says, her soft voice interrupting my thoughts. I glance over at her and wince. She looks pretty rough, the entire left side of her thin face purple and bloody. One of her eyes has a broken blood vessel, the red stark against her pale skin. And she is limping, too, her knee swollen.

“How do you know we’re not on Earth?” I ask. I refuse to give up hope just yet. “How many places can have snow and oxygen? We just might be, I don’t know, in Canada or something.”

“Except I heard through this thing,” she says, pointing at the bloodied earpiece still attached to her head, “that they were dumping us at a ‘safe location’ for a return pick-up at a later date.”

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