A/N - I've obviously taken some liberties with the lore. There's so much possibility with the history of war between the trans-govs! I really hope there's more about it in Below Zero.

Chapter 2
Curious Crabs

Girlish screaming woke Rekha.

"Get away from me!"

She jumped up to find Harrington using a water bottle to fend off a four-legged crab the size of a dog.

In a single motion, Rekha grabbed a leg and swung the thing against a rock. It snickered at her. She shrieked and threw it into the ocean. White hot pain lanced through her ribs. She gasped, falling to her knees, touching her sides. A hand came away bloody. What?

"Y-You," Harrington stuttered, her expression wide and frightened. She panted. Her gaze went to Rekha's bloody hand, and her features softened. "You reopened your injury. Sit still. Put pressure on it."

Right. The monster from the deep that tried to eat her last night. Closing her eyes to hold back tears, she pressed down on the bleeding puncture, wishing for the painkillers that Alterra had decided weren't necessary survival items.

"Wouldn't it have been easier to deal with the crab like you did the leviathan?"

Her eyes shot open. The glare of the morning sun across the water made them flutter and squint.

"Or are you so used to hiding your psionic abilities that a physical response was your first reflex?"

Air rushed in and out of her mouth. She'd hoped Harrington had assumed Rekha was ultra lucky with her escape.

"Given that your psionic scream saved my life as well, I'm in no position to judge you, Dogar. I can't say that I feel particularly friendly toward you. I lost a lot of friends in the Grass Moon War." Harrington's tone dropped its friendly effort, dipping cold and low.

Rekha couldn't blame the older woman. Augmented Delhian soldiers had decimated the defending troops. She winced. What they hadn't massacred, they'd twisted and broken to act as examples of Delhian superiority. "You aren't native Alterran either," blurted out. She gasped and looked up.

Harrington's lips were a thin line. "No. I'm Martian."

The government of Mars had been so utterly stomped on that Alterra had absorbed it and more or less finished wiping out its unique culture. That war had also been one of the major reasons for the Charter.

"I'm sorry." Rekha didn't know what else to say. The Grass Moon War had ended when she was an infant. Yet it was why her people were universally hated throughout the galaxy.

"How did you hide your genetic revisions?"

Bribes. Judicious alterations of government records. Rekha ran a hand over her face. "I came to Alterra because I didn't like the way things were done there. Look, I'll find my own corner of this planet to wait for rescue on. I won't bother you."

Harrington watched as Rekha got up, starting climbing up the steep embankment. Rekha was puffing at the pain within moments. Her foot slipped on a loose stone, and she cried out as she started falling back. A strong hand caught her.

"I think it's safer if we stick together, Dogar." Harrington stated. "If you were my enemy, you would've gotten rid of me instead of letting me know your secret." Confident, she met Rekha's eye. "Right?"

"Yes." Killing non-augmented people was easy. Though most sentients had a natural defense against psychic intrusion, few had training with it. Harrington might, given her age and origins. She may even have technological upgrades to it.

H-class psionics could breeze right past those defenses. Another reason that Rekha had left. Intruding on people's minds had always left her feeling dirty and unsettled. She wanted the sharing of thoughts to be a happy thing. She liked building and fixing things, not breaking them; hence her study of mechanical things and how to maintain them.

How to fix this problem? Her secret was out. Harrington would undoubtedly tell the authorities once they were rescued. Bribing officials would be expensive, far out of Rekha's price range. Her best bet would be to run and hide at the first opportunity. With as little bloodshed as possible.

They cleared the barren hill and burst into a jungle. Some of the trees were odd, bulbous, blunt things that barely cleared three meters and produced a milky sap that smelled vaguely sweet. Too bad they hadn't built a scanner before being evicted from their pod. Rekha would've liked to eat something other than chewy, offensively-lemony nutrient bars. There were traditional leafy trees, giant ferns, vines, grasses, fat purple cylinders, a dozen different flowers, and all manner of giant fungi. And of course, everything was luminescent, even in the daylight. At least one plant should be edible.

Unlike the ocean that teemed with animal life, the land boasted fish-like birds -birdfish?- and the giant crabs. That's it. Not even insects. It was the most bizarre experience to walk through dense jungle and not get a faceful of spiderweb or hear something buzzing in the ears. Nothing. Just the wind playing with leaves and the pungent scent of green. Was this an island?

There definitely weren't any humans nearby.

"Think anyone has discovered this?" Harrington wondered aloud.

Not anyone alive, was her reflexive thought.

Harrington glanced at her. She blinked, her face floating through a dozen emotions. "Can you," she swallowed. "Can you hear anyone?"

"No."

Despair pinched her features, giving them the lines that her age hadn't. "At all?"

"No! I mean, yes! There are others." Rekha gestured back the way they'd come. "But they're out there. I don't sense anyone up here at all."

Harrington sighed. "Can you tell how many?"

Rekha looked at the sunlight filtering through the green. It was easier to talk about her sixth sense without looking at the Martian. "I…" She closed her eyes completely, reached out, felt for the unique brightness that was human life. There'd been 53 the first day. Many of them had been weak, probably suffered fatal wounds given that yesterday's count was 35. A dozen were clustered in what she guessed was the Aurora's location. Most of the weak ones had been there. All the others were in ones and twos, lifepods. She finished her count. "Twenty-nine."

"So few," puffed from the doctor. She reached a hand to a tree for support.

Aurora's original compliment had been 148 plus 9 passengers, the Mongolian emissary and his retinue. Less than a quarter were alive. Colleagues and friends they'd been sailing with for 13 months, even longer for Harrington, who'd been on Aurora for years, was aiming for the chief medical officer position. All those people gone. Their ship a smoldering lump of wreckage.

Rekha yawned. She needed a decent night's sleep. Her wounds twinged. The beginnings of a headache pulsed. Painkillers would be good too. She found a nice patch of ground to sit on and yawned again.

"How far of a spread?" Harrington asked.

"Kilometers."

"You're H-class, aren't you?" Hushed awe, underlain with tight fear questioned her.

Rekha stiffened. "Several classes of psionics can sense life across vast distances, doctor."

"By the red gods, I felt the ripples of what you threw at that monster! Telekinesis is rare. Most can only lift a few kilos within a couple meters. Only a handful are strong enough to wield it as a weapon without the tech augments that the Charter forbids. Even fewer are also telepathic."

Wow. Harrington was incredibly well informed. Telepathy and telekinesis were generally incompatible skills. That was the purpose of the H-57 breeding program: to create weapons capable of using both. Children bred as weapons. Rekha frowned. She was lucky to have been born while abroad. Her parents had chosen to raise her outside of Delhi territories. Fifteen years as a human being instead of a weapon. Rekha had been taught to harness her power like any good Delhian, yet had also had the chance to play and explore, to live. Being forced into the military upon her parents' recall…

Rekha had started looking for a way to leave by the first night of boot camp.

"My sister would never believe this. An H-class not two meters from me, and my brain isn't leaking out my nose."

"I'm a person, not a fucking weapon class!" barked out of her. Her lungs heaved with her sudden, righteous anger. "I'm a person!"

Huge eyes stared at her. Terror had the irises as thin rings.

Tears blurred her vision. She blinked them away and got up. "I apologize for my outburst," hissed out of her. "I'm going to go explore."

The sun was high overhead when she realized that Harrington was following several meters behind. Rekha stopped. Her body ached, her stomach grumbled about lunch, and her heart beat a dull throb of loneliness in her chest. She found a place to sit and pull out sustenance.

Slowly, Harrington approached. She sat down. "Thought we agreed that staying together was safer around here."

A crab chose that moment to burst from the undergrowth, skittering toward Rekha. She batted it away with a thought. It crashed through the trees a dozen meters away. "Safer to stay with the biggest monster around?" was her angry sneer.

Harrington's gaze drifted back from where it'd followed the crab's airborne trajectory. Fear remained in them, yet it didn't emanate from her like it had earlier. "I have to admit, I'm starting to see the bright side of hanging around a revised person."

Rekha pursed her lips and turned her sight to the clouds starting to gather in the distance.

"You watch my back, I'll watch yours." Harrington said. "Otherwise these crabs will eat us in our sleep."

They probably would.

"Good enough, Dogar?"

She met Harrington's eye to say, "Good enough."

Talk was abandoned.

Metal glinting in the late afternoon sun had one of them breaking the silence to point it out. Exhaustion and pain momentarily forgotten, they ran up the incline and crested the hill to find a habitat.

An old, heavily damaged habitat that was half buried under a landslide.

"Piss."

Rekha did a quick mental sweep, in vague hope of her eyes' deception, yet the surrounding area was as devoid of human life as before. She sighed. "Maybe it'll still be good for shelter." The clouds she'd been watching all day were now a black mass on the horizon. What looked like a nasty storm couldn't be more than a few hours away.

"Maybe," hummed from Harrington. She skittered down the collapsed hillside. Rocks and birdfish jumped away.

Crabs came to investigate. Rekha threw them at one of the two peaks that dominated the landscape. Now in the small valley between them, she could see glass and metal at the top of each. Likely as abandoned as this facility.

"This must be what Emissary Khasar came looking for." Harrington said. "Has to be from the Degasi survivors."

Degasi? She remembered hearing about the Mongolians who'd crashed on some backwater planet a decade ago. It'd made the major news channels because the wealthy head of the Torgal clan and his heir were the ones who'd disappeared. Their skeletons were probably in this wreckage somewhere.

The original habitat design hadn't been large, unless there was a maze hidden under the landslide. It had once been two levels. Two basic tubular units for the upper, one of which looked like it'd been ripped off and tossed aside. What was left of the main level was an 'L' of two units attached to circular general purpose room. Rocks and dirt filled what little they could see through the windows of the big room. The hatch was off the 'L', and four crabs came skittering when Harrington made a mountain of noise yanking on the rusted thing. They joined their brethren on an airborne journey.

Harrington managed to bully the hatch enough for the two of them to squeeze inside and investigate by the light of their PDAs. Two more crabs had to be dealt with. Rekha yawned at the effort. She chose to let Harrington test the ladder and investigate whatever was up there. She returned after wrestling the ladder's hatch closed.

"Not much up there except shattered glass. Found a few ration bars in an old crate. They're Mongolian and a decade old, but edible." Two were offered to Rekha.

"Thanks."

Harrington nodded. "Let's see if we can get this hatch shut and finish blocking the corridor. We'll have a safe place to grab some shuteye."

They put on gloves to gather loose stones and wall up the corridor. As the shadows were starting to get long and the local foliage began to light up, they battled with rusted hinges. It was a losing battle. Rekha gave up first, her injuries screaming at the abuse. She walked around the base angrily until she nearly tripped over a half buried cargo box. A little digging had it revealing its jumbled contents.

Bottles and bottles of liquids, in various states of mostly empty. Bleach, hydrochloric acid, fertilizer -fertilizer? Had they started a farm? She peered into the growing dark, but shook her head. Tomorrow. What else was in here? Rolls of fiber mesh and rubber. More bottles of the same. Hand written label for lantern wine. Huh. It wasn't sealed and smelled awful. Too bad. Wine didn't last long unsealed. The last bottle was lubricant.

Hey, that could be useful.

"Harrington!" Bottle in hand, she made her way back to the hatch. "Maybe this will help."

The label was squinted at. "Red gods, I hope so." A brief struggle with the lid, and she splashed yellow slime on the hinges. She moved the door what little it would, splashed more. Same process on repeat for twenty minutes yielded excellent results. The hatch closed all the way and even locked in place.

The women shared relieved grins. Rolls of mesh and rubber were retrieved, then a small latrine pit was dug in the sand. Awful, yet better than doing her business over the open hatch of an escape pod. Thunder rumbled overhead. Rekha went to run inside. Harrington stayed, a thoughtful look on her face.

"Harrington." Rekha grumbled as lightning flashed. "We should get inside."
"We don't know when it'll rain next."

So?

"We should try to collect water while we can."

"I've still got several liters." Rekha argued, her eyeballs aching with the need for sleep.

"Dogar, in case you haven't figured it out, we aren't getting off this planet any time soon. Even if the Aurora can fly again, it'll take weeks to repair the kind of damage that knocked it out of the sky to begin with. If it can't, well, you remember how long it took us to get here from the last phasegate. And we both know we aren't lucky enough for anyone else to be this far out from the shipping lanes."

Months. If only they'd gotten that phasegate up before they'd wandered past this terrible planet. More thunder growled, streaks of lightning quickly following. "Okay, doctor. What about that crate I pulled the lube from?"

They emptied the crate, finished pulling it from the ground, angled the open side straight up, and did the same with another crate they found. Wind whipped across the landscape, nearly shoving Rekha off her feet, scattering the bottles, and giving them a taste of what might have caused the terrible damage to the habitat. Thunder cracked. Lightning flashed.

Harrington decided to shove the crates up against boulders and weigh them down with stones at their bottoms. Rekha captured what bottles she could and tossed them into the habitat.

Rain began to pelt their faces.

They had to yell to be heard over the storm and hold onto each other to keep from being blown away. It became abruptly quiet when the hatch closed behind them. Rain pounded the habitat, yet the multiple layer construction of the walls kept it from being a deafening roar.

Rekha wiped sodden hair from her face, took off squishy shoes and collapsed to the floor. At least she'd been wearing her dive suit the entire time. If the jungle hadn't been full of scratchy twigs and stabbing thorns, she would've switched into her ship uniform. The suit had been a nice protective barrier. Speaking of her suit, she pulled food and water from its storage. Harrington mentioning rations again had her stopping at half a bar. Her ravenous stomach objected, but it would be even unhappier getting nothing later.

"I think I saw some grow beds out there." Harrington yawned. "We can investigate what's growing in them tomorrow."

The prospect of actual food instead of gritty bar made her mouth water.

Harrington unfurled a couple rolls of rubber and mesh, made something like an actual bed. Another roll served as a pillow. She stretched out and moaned. "That's the stuff."

Rekha was left to create her own. She thought to walk that extra two meters around the corner for a breath of privacy. Sheer exhaustion had her getting horizontal as quickly as possible. Gingerly, she laid on her back, right next to Harrington. The doctor opened an eye for a moment.

"Good dreams, Harrington."

"You too, Dogar."

She let her eyes fall.