* * *
Nanto opened her eyes to the burned out shell of the ship’s medical bay. A force field protected a gaping hole to the outside. Fear crawled through her bones.
What had happened?
A grunting snore caught her attention. Captain Drese slept in a chair beside her bed.
Nanto licked dry lips and Sorel appeared with a water stick.
“I’m alive?” Nanto croaked.
“Yes, thank the Lir.”
Nanto sucked on the stick greedily. Sorel kicked Drese’s boot and he jolted awake.
The ship’s captain stared at her through bleary eyes. “You’re back.” He blinked sleep away. “How do you feel?”
“Like someone used my head for a battering ram.”
Drese glanced at Sorel, his concern obvious, but only on his face.
Nanto extended her mind out towards him and frowned. She couldn’t sense Drese’s thoughts, not even his privacy shield. “What are you hiding?” she asked him.
“I’m not.” His gaze dropped to his hands before meeting Nanto’s eyes. “Sorel reports your brain levels have altered. We suspect that cloaking the fleet in a shield burned out your mind’s higher order abilities. What can you remember?”
Nantosuelta swallowed back a sob. “I remember the alien ship; fighting the alien bridge . . . it was just too powerful.”
Drese grimaced. “We are in an uncharted part of the universe. I assumed you had brought us here.”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t . . . no, this was orchestrated by another.” She studied the hole in the wall. A green mist hovered at its torn edges. “What happened?”
“The fleet emerged in a low orbit around a planet.” A shadow crossed Drese’s face. “We could not escape its gravity and crashed. Many died. Our heat shields struggled to cope, but this ship survived better than the others, thanks to you. Your cloak dissipated much of the energy. We owe you our lives. The survivors are fortifying defenses on this ship against the planet’s indigenous population. This planet is desolate, only barely capable of sustaining life. The creatures here are not like us.”
He exchanged a strange look with Sorel and the ache lurking behind Nanto’s eyes increased. Why couldn’t she share their silent exchange? She felt locked out.
Alone.
“Tell me,” she pleaded.
Drese touched her hand gently. “We’re trapped here, Nantosuelta. Even if we had a space-worthy ship, without your bridge-building ability, we could never escape this solar system.”
“What about Treso?” Her apprentice showed great promise, with time he would surpass her.
“He died in the crash.”
Nanto lay as still as she could manage given the firestorm of grief building inside her. A dead weight lay across her belly. When she went to push it away, she found nothing there.
Sorel laid a cool cloth across her forehead. “Try to relax, Nanto, and your headache will lessen.”
As Sorel’s healing touch increased the endorphins in her blood, the pain receded to a manageable level. A memory skittered through Nanto’s thoughts, too transient to catch. It teased her, beckoned her to chase it, but her foggy mind couldn’t keep up.
“Something important happened. Something I need to remember,” she whispered.
“It will come back to you,” Sorel soothed. “Give it time.”
Nanto looked away. She needed more than her memory. The fleet was stranded without her ability to build a bridge. As her hopes of finding Earth faded, that heavy weight settled into her bones.