Page 2 of The Huntmaster

Stars exploded in my vision, brighter than any I had seen in the void. My grip loosened. The mask slipped. As the world turned into a blurred streak of fire and forest green, my last conscious thought drifted through the encroaching blackness.

Is this the end... or is it finally the beginning?

Then, there was only the silence of the crash.

Chapter 1

Lyra

Pain wasn’t a sharp spike; it was a tide—heavy, rhythmic, and cold—pulling me out of the blackness and dumping me onto a shore of jagged glass and twisted metal.

I gasped, the sound rattling in my throat like dry gravel. My lungs burned with a fierce, localised fire. For a long time, I didn't open my eyes. I couldn't. My eyelids felt like they had been soldered shut. I just lay there and listened to the death rattle of my life’s work.

The Vanguard-7 was humming, but it wasn't the steady, mechanical thrum of a healthy engine. It was a series of dying groans—the hiss of ruptured coolant lines, the erratic, rhythmic spark of short-circuiting wires, and the slow, heavy drip-drip-drip of something chemical hitting the floor near my ear.

I forced my eyelids up. The world was tilted at a nauseating forty-five-degree angle, making my head swim with a fresh wave of vertigo. Red emergency lighting flickered, casting long, jerky shadows across the cabin that looked like reaching fingers. Dust and smoke danced in the beams, thick enough to taste, coating my tongue in a layer of bitter ash.

"AI?" I croaked. My voice was a shredded ruin, barely audible over the groaning metal.

Silence. Not even a spark of static came from the overhead speakers. The Mother-interface, my only companion for the last ninety-two days, was dead. I was truly, utterly alone in a titanium coffin.

I tried to move my left arm to push myself up, and the world vanished into a white-hot sheet of agony. I let out a choked scream, collapsing back onto the cold grating of the floor. My shoulder— the dislocation I’d felt during the violent descent had settled into a throbbing, swollen mess that radiated heat through my entire side.

I reached up with my right hand to steady myself, and my fingers brushed against the plastic edge of the emergency oxygen mask. It was still strapped to my face, but the seal was broken—the plastic casing was cracked right down the middle from when I’d slammed into the console. I pulled it off, the elastic snapping painfully against my skin. It was useless now. Piece of junk.

The air was... strange. It was thick and wet, smelling of ancient rot and something sharp, like crushed peppercorns. It felt dense in my lungs, almost like I was drinking the atmosphere rather than breathing it, but yet I wasn’t choking or suffocating. I was fully capable of filling my lungs with this weird oxygen. Relief settled through me. One less thing to worry about.

I looked down at myself and felt a fresh wave of despair. My high-tech flight suit, the one the UES developers claimed was "virtually indestructible," was a joke. The reinforced fabric was shredded. A barbed piece of the bulkhead had caught me across the chest, tearing a "V" through the chest plate and the underlying mesh, exposing the pale skin of my sternum and the curve of my ribs.

"Indestructible," I whispered, my voice thick with bitter sarcasm as I looked at the ruined gear. "Well done, boys. Really worth the trillion-dollar budget."

The fabric was torn open across my thighs and midsection too, the white material stained with grease, dirt, and my own blood. One of the cooling tubes had snapped, leaking a blue, sticky fluid down my leg. I looked like a discarded rag doll.

Get up, Lyra. If you stay here, you fucking die.

The stubbornness that had made me an outcast on Earth was the only thing I had left to cling to. I used my good arm to hook my fingers into a broken piece of the primary navigation console, dragging my body across the tilted floor. My legs felt like lead, weak and unresponsive, but I forced them to crawl.

I dragged myself toward the storage lockers in the back of the cabin, the metal grating scraping against my exposed skin. I needed water. I needed a med-kit to pop my shoulder back in. But as I reached the supply bay, my heart sank.

The force of the impact had been cataclysmic. The titanium lockers had been sheared open as if by a giant’s hand. My sensors, my tablets, my mapping gear—everything I had spent years mastering—was a mangled heap of plastic and shattered silicone. I reached for the emergency ration crate, but the hyper-drive core must have leaked during the fall. The intense heat of entry had fused the metal casing shut, and the pungent smell of melted polymers told me everything inside was toxic slag.

Nothing was scrapable. The tech was fried, the food was gone, and the air recyclers were silent.

I hauled myself toward the hole where the airlock door used to be. The metal was curled back like burnt paper, still radiating a dull, dying heat. As I reached the lip of the wreckage and looked out, the breath was punched clean out of my lungs.

It wasn't a wasteland. It was a cathedral of the impossible.

The oppressive heat hit me first. It was a heavy, wet weight that pressed against my skin, instantly making the sweat spring up on my brow. The ship was suspended twenty feet in the air, caught in the massive, "V" shaped crook of a tree that looked like it was made of rusted iron. Its leaves were the size of umbrellas, a deep purple that seemed to absorb the light.

Below me, the forest floor didn't just exist; it moved. A carpet of glowing moss stretched out in every direction, shifting through shades of teal and gold. And then, I felt it.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

It wasn't a sound. It was a vibration that travelled through the iron-bark of the tree, into the hull of the ship, and straight into my marrow. The planet had a heartbeat. A deep pulse that made my teeth ache.

I sat at the edge of the metal, my legs dangling over the twenty-foot drop, and watched the violet mists of this nameless world swirl through the undergrowth. My shoulder throbbed in time with the planet’s heart.

I was a scientist with no tools. A traveller with no map. I was a golden glitch in a world that felt like a living, breathing predator.