Page 16 of Roping Her Alien Ranchers

The blunt tip of my posterior left limb pressed the blinking indicator, and then I yanked down the four yellow emergency levers: the final step.

“Brace for impact!” I roared as a countdown began on the pulsing panel. The ground was coming closer… closer… closer.

At the last moment, I put in another code. The one that would shut down everything in the ship right before collision. With some luck, it would protect the important systems from aftermath surges. From the few diagnostics I’d successfully run, it was already going to be a nightmare to recover from the current damage, not even counting what would be mangled upon collision with the planet.

“What are you doing?” Cyro came into view, lengthening his body as tall as possible and looming over me. I had no idea how he was staying upright as the ship rocked back and forth violently.

“Safeguarding the ship!” I shouted.

“Cancel that code,” Cyro demanded. “With everything powered down, the crash won’t send the automatic distress signal!”

“With everything powered on, we risk frying systems we can’t repair,” I argued.

“I’m the leader of this mission⁠—”

I cut him off, not bothering to point out that Vantor had assumed control. Cyro knew; he simply preferred to ignore reality. “We’ll manually set the beacon after surviving.”

What else could I protect? What was the most important thing to preserve?

Sliding off the chair, I stretched my gelatinous body around the base of the control panel. The interface surface was important, but the neural network beneath was far more precious. I could repair the display, but I highly doubted this planet would have synthetic fiber flesh and laboratory grown nerve pathways. My coloring shifted to a mottled tie dye of evergreen and dark soil as I felt resignation flood into my digestive cavity. I’d done all I could. We’d either survive or die.

“What can I do?” Vantor hollered, dropping into my sightlines, his own boneless body, skin swirling with alert hues, flattening against the floor.

“Protect the environmental system,” I ordered, as if I was in charge. I never was. I was good at following orders. Good at lightening the mood. I didn’t like to call the shots. Right now, though, I was the only one who could give us hope of leaving this planet after crashing. That made me the king of this plummeting paperweight.

Vantor nodded, slipping away quickly. I watched as he wrapped his own body, sucking in air to create protective cushioning pockets beneath his skin, around the quad tanks that kept the ship survivable for our bodies.

The circuitry I encircled throbbed against my body, sending tremors into every part of me. Once a vibrant, vital organ keeping our ship ‘alive’, it now had a staccato, choked pulse that threatened to give out at any second. Blotches of black scar tissue marked dead nodes between cerulean pathways still clinging to life. The sensory suckers of my tentacles explored the minor and major damage. The central processor core was charred, its organic matrix vaporized. Total corruption. But beneath the growing darkness, I sensed the light and lifeforce that meant the ship wasn’t past saving. We could revive the brain and get the heart pumping again even if it took on more damage.

We could survive this.

We could take flight again and get home.

Yet it wouldn’t be easy.

It would test even my remarkable talents.

This wasn’t a localized fault—this was systemic. The damage had spread through backups, through tertiary processors. The navigation neural web was annihilated. Cyro was right; I must have missed crucial effects of that solar flare, some catastrophic fracturing that I could have repaired had I caught it in time. Earlier, I hadn’t checked. Everything was too chaotic. Now…

I risked a direct link—something I’d refused to do earlier, choosing instead to gently probe hundreds of system sections at random. But now I pressed my central tentacle’s neural pad against the main diagnostic port beneath the console. Electronic screams flared in my mind as data dumped itself into me. Every corrupted pathway, every singed junction mapped themselves across my nerves. I tasted despair at a cellular level.

“It was the solar flare,” I croaked, voice hollow as I withdrew, sending spikes of phantom pain ricocheting through the linked appendage. “That K-class star we scoped yesterday—its radiation ripped the matrix to shreds. Shields. Scanners. Communication. Navigation’s molecular scaffold…all gone. I don’t know why it waited until we were this close to the planet to truly fail.”

Silence. Then Vantor’s tight inhale. Cyro dropped into view; his iridescence dwindled into ashen white.

“Can you fix it after we’ve landed?” Cyro’s words were weak.

Landed. He deliberately used that term.

There was no easy landing now. This was going to be brutal.

I lifted my appendage away, breaking the connection, breathing through the trembling in my chest. Fluid bleeding from the neural column dripped off me in sparks of flickering bioluminescence.

“Rebuilding that scaffold requires a clean facility and days of molecular re-synthesis. I… I don’t know if it’s possible on this planet with the equipment I requisitioned.” And didn’t officially requisition, I thought.

“There has to be a way,” Cyro pressed, tone urgent.

There was a very slim chance. If we could find several minerals that were scarce and priceless even on our own planet. “There’s a way,” I offered Cyro what he needed to hear, just so he wouldn’t despair further in what could be our last moments. “Protect the ship’s heart, Cyro. The more we can safeguard, the better off we’ll be later.”