Chapter 2
The Globally at last came to a rest, after what seemed like an interminable slide across the gritty sand, accompanied by the cacophony of the ship's metallic screeches and groans that not even the sleep pods could mask. Willow's eyes had flown open upon impact and she cried out in fear as she was jostled violently about. When all finally stilled, Willow, though badly shaken, was unharmed thanks to her sleep pod's extensive cushioning and Cole's incredible foresight. She caught her breath for a moment, dazed, before staggering out of the dented cocoon and gazing wildly around her.
Unsurprisingly, there was some kind of blackout, and the darkness surrounding her was so thick that her hand was not even evident in front of her face. Questing timidly forward down the strangely tilted hall a few steps, towards an emergency kit she knew she would find there, she held her hands aloft until they touched the case. Inside was a flashlight, which she clicked on, casting its circle of light about.
The sleep pods' hallway she now stood in was indeed tilted sideways several degrees. There had been an artificially generated gravity field on the Globally, of course, oriented to make everything fall towards the bottom of the ship. That gravity field was no more, however, leaving everything her light touched surreally misplaced. As the seconds passed and wakefulness returned more steadily to her, she noticed her wrist aching from when it had been pinned awkwardly between her body and the pod's cushioning. Silence reigned.
"Hello?" she called, fearful for her few remaining shipmates after such a crash. "Hello?! Is anyone here?" Her voice echoed distantly before all sound died away once more. The endless hum of the Globally's numerous systems and generators, a hum which had never ceased for as long as Willow had been alive, was conspicuously absent. This silence that met her ears was far more ominous than the cries of legions of injured people; were it not for her own voice rippling through empty metal corridors, she would have wondered if she'd lost her hearing entirely.
Not knowing where else to go, she scrambled clumsily through the ringing emptiness towards the ship's bridge, determined to find out what was going on, and encountered countless mangled bodies along the way: another Keeper who had been a dear friend, several Sentinels, Farmers, children. None had survived the crushing impact. Gasping anew at every painful scene she found, tears leaked from her eyes at the scale of these losses, when already there had been so few survivors of the 11's long voyage still left. These people had gone their entire lives in hopes of landing on Incognitus to start anew, to really be able to live as humans ought, and right at the very end, right before their new beginnings, they had perished. The cruelty of such a fate was breathtaking.
All was quiet and still except for her clanking footsteps and shallow inhalations; the once-familiar walls, nearly hidden in blackness, seemed to be pressing in eerily as the minutes ticked by with no visual reprieve from this stark and hellish landscape of dead.
When Willow finally reached the bridge, she there discovered the grisly scene that had dramatically played out only minutes prior. A strangled scream escaped her at the sight of such violence as the spot of light danced from one terrible image to another in her shaking hand; she had never beheld anything like this before, despite being aware, in a distant way, of similar past events that had been quickly covered over and hushed up in order to preserve the mental stability of the other colonists.
She found she was unable to step into the room, unwilling to become a part of this ghastly tableaux. The Pilot had fallen backwards against the control panel, her injuries so extensive, so indescribable, as to make it obvious that she had already perished. Cole, however, sprawled on the floor and blinking in the sudden brightness of Willow's flashlight as blood seeped steadily out of his chest, lived yet, although just barely. The Sentinel responsible for these fresh terrors had already taken his own life and lay crumpled in the corner, an arc of splattered blood and brains tattooing the wall a few feet above his lifeless, blasted skull. A tiny peep of "Help" from Cole jolted Willow back to her senses. She rushed over to her former classmate - had it really been years since they had mused over the fate of the Globally 3 in Origins? - and cradled his torso and head in her arms, the flashlight dropping out of her hands and rolling across the tilted floor, forgotten. If only she had ever received anything beyond the most basic Healer training!
"Willow," Cole rasped, squinting up into her face in the dimness. "You're alive. We...might be the only ones who still are. I tried...the ship..."
"Hold on," she pleaded. "Just hold on. Don't try to talk."
He smiled grimly at her. "We're here," he said simply. "We made it." He coughed, blood leaking remorselessly out of his mouth. "Will you...will you tell me what Incognitus is like? Someday?" And then, with a small, painful gurgle, his rattling breaths ceased.
Willow remained there in the bridge, her chin resting in Cole's curly black hair, holding this last linkage to the only other sentient beings she had ever known, for a very long time. Her tears fell and then dried, and she shed no more of them, for there was nothing now but numbness.
Minutes, hours, or days passed in the bridge - time mattered not - when a slight dizziness overtook her, and as time's unknown increments passed further, that dizziness grew. It took a long while before her shock-addled brain understood: the oxygen generators had failed in the crash. The Globally's bridge was still largely airtight despite the impact of the emergency landing, and with no fresh air being pumped in, she would slowly suffocate unless she left. With much the same situation to be found anywhere else aboard the ship, Willow slowly grasped that she was going to have to test Incognitus' atmosphere sooner rather than later. If the Earth scientists' observations and calculations hundreds of years ago had been wrong, the moments before her death would likely be excruciating. But there was nothing else to do now but take her chances and disembark, since she surely would not last long with only a dwindling oxygen supply to sustain her. And what was left for her now on this ship, anyway? It was dead in more ways than one.
Willow, like all of the colonists on the Globally, had been very thoroughly instructed in the correct procedures of how to properly exit the ship should it safely - or safely enough - land on a planet with solid ground. She made her way dully, silently, down to the bilge, footfalls clanking, breath reaching, light dancing, averting her eyes over and over from the evidence of the catastrophe that had befallen her shipmates.
She felt lucky, in a sense, that Hen was not among these twisted corpses; her mother had died a couple of years prior, when a particularly potent respiratory virus had swept through the humans of the Globally, wreaking havoc amid the small population. The architects of the Incognitus Expeditions had carefully arranged an unorthodox family structure for the ships - largely discarding traditional monogamous couplings in favor of polygamy so as to increase the birth rate - in order to give these space-faring colonies the best possible chance of completing their journeys with sufficient numbers of people. Nevertheless, widespread fatal illnesses had not been anticipated to such a degree as had ultimately occurred, and Willow, like everyone else aboard, had endured the anguish of many a solemn "sending off" ceremony, when the body of the deceased was ejected from the ship to forevermore float lonely in the infinity of space. It was to that area of the ship that she now carefully descended, minding her balance on narrow platforms and dangerously tilted flights of stairs, where shadows stretched dizzyingly away from her flashlight.
Willow reached the quartet of thick doors, each facing a different direction to account for the ship's different possible orientations upon landing. They were imposing, not just for their strong association in her mind of loss, a final glimpse into a loved one's face before the permanent parting, but because of another kind of death: that of the existence she had always known. One of these doorways - which, based on the Globally's resting position, was most likely the one on her right - was going to usher her into the rest of her life, however long or short it might be.
The doors were usually electronically controlled, but had been designed with a manual override in anticipation of just the type of situation Willow now found herself in, with the entire ship powered down. She calmly rotated the tumblers to the inner door and swung open the heavy handle, then started in on the middle door beyond it, until finally she was before the third and last door, which stood resolutely between her and her fate. She rotated the tumblers into position, grasped the handle, and pulled.