Chapter 2

"Who's that talking?

Death the Revelator.

Who's that talking?

Death the Revelator.

Who's that talking?

Death the Revelator

In the book of the Seventh Seal."

Harper laughed and cheered. He felt like there was fire in his veins instead of blood. His heart was pounding like a rabbit's. He dipped into the stratosphere, watching sparks flying off of his slipfighter. He had grown tired of having Dylan shouting at him and turned his comms system off. Yet his good mood died away as the cockpit began to shake.

'Damn, he muttered. He was gong to fast. He quickly pulled out of the stratosphere, but the simple movement meant that he was now speeding away from Trance and Dylan. He didn't even know where he was supposed to be landing. 'Damn, damn, damn. Co-ordinates…' He looked down at his console but there were still no co-ordinates there. Quickly, he turned his comms system back on.

'Dylan, I uh…'

'Harper, look out!' Trance screamed.

'Huh?' Harper looked up just as a massive hunk of space-rock slammed into his slipfighter. He spun off at a crazy angle that hurtled him into the planet's atmosphere. The cockpit shook crazily, and if he hadn't been strapped in he would have been smeared all over the inside of the slipfighter. Harper grabbed the controls and tried to bring the craft back under his control.

Beka appeared on one of his screens. She must have been following his 'progress'. 'Harper, what are you doing? Why can't you fly like a sane person?' she snapped, but there was fear in her voice.

'Uh…' Harper looked over the other display screens and tried to register what they were telling him. He looked out and saw that he was passing over water, heading towards what looked like an expanse of green. As he got closer he realised that it was a forest. The water passed away beneath him as he wrestled with the controls, trying to slow himself down. He knew it wasn't working. He felt a stab of pain in his stomach, as if the creatures inside him had also sensed that something was wrong. 'It's OK, kids,' he lied through gritted teeth. 'Daddy's just having a tough day at work.'

'Harper?' Beka said in a puzzled voice.

'Yeah?'

'What is your location and status?'

'Um…' He checked the readings on the various consoles. 'Location is shit creek. Status … missing a paddle.'

'Oh, that's real helpful.'

He managed to slow his craft down a little but it was too little too late. The ground grew closer. Then suddenly the topmost leaves of the tallest trees were whipping at the plexiglass screen in front of him, which had a long crack down it from the impact of the hunk of space rock.

'Beka,' he said quickly. 'You know how you made me promise I wouldn't die without saying goodbye to you first.'

'Harper, no…'

'Bye, boss.'

Crunch.

Light. Pain. The slime of blood on his forehead and hands.

The first thing he did was try to move his arms and legs. His toes wriggled. His fingers curled into a fist. Good, he wasn't paralyzed. His left knee spiked with pain whenever he moved it, though.

He was propped up against a tree. This was strange in itself. Where was his slipfighter? He looked around.

'Oh, crap.'

The craft was a wreck. The plexiglass screen was missing, but he could see splashes of red on the few shards remaining. That must be his blood. He could see small fires burning within the cockpit. He could hear the crackle of static over what was left of the comms. OK, so his craft was a corpse. Now he had to look at himself.

It wasn't pretty. Through a tear in the material of his pants he could see the huge, ugly bruise on his kneecap. There was also a burn high on his right thigh, and another on his hand. The same hand was missing the index finger from the first knuckle upwards. A wide cut marred his forehead. His face, back and arms were covered in tiny cuts from the broken plexiglass. He could fell another nasty bruise on his back where he'd hit the tree.

And there was something else. Something that he couldn't quite put his finger on (ha!). He stood up and found the motion to be slow and difficult. Clutching his bad hand to his chest, he used the other to inspect himself.

Ah, there it was.

A small metal shard from the slipfighter was sticking out of his stomach. Natural painkillers meant that he hadn't felt it at first, but he felt sure that he would start to feel it very soon. He tested it with his fingers and hissed in a sharp breath. Deep. It had probably barely grazed his internal organs but it was deep nonetheless. Probably not wise to remove it just yet. It would be better to ask Trance to take a look at it.

Trance.

'Oh boy.'

He limped forward a couple of steps and looked around. He was definitely in a forest, and he couldn't see any signs of civilisation. However, in this state that didn't mean much. He might only be a mile or so from a settlement. He looked around and saw a small, furry quadruped with a stubby tail peering at him cautiously from behind a tree. He hissed at it and it ran away, squealing like a pig.

He headed over to the remains of his slipfighter, and used the small manual fire extinguisher to put out the fires. Since the first-aid kit had been melted in one of the fires, he tore strips of material from the pilot's seat and tied them around his hand and the stump of his finger. He used another strip to bind up the cut on his forehead. He walked around the cargo bay and found his luggage. Since they'd planned to stay on the planet for a few days he'd brought a few changes of clothes. He pulled out a T-shirt and pressed it to his stomach wound, binding it there with a belt. It meant that the shard of metal was pressed into his gut but at least it slowed the bleeding a little. There, immediate problems were taken care of.

The trouble was that he was on a planet. And planets were really, really big. If he somehow managed to pull himself together enough to scramble up a tree he would be able to see two, maybe three miles if he was lucky. About as far as he could walk. And this planet was probably about millions of square miles in surface area. Dylan and Trance could be in any one of those square miles. He had flown off course and away from them before he had landed, but not too far. So, if he was very lucky, they would probably only be in the next country. A few thousand miles away.

'Harper!'

On the other hand…

A pretty purple girl came running towards him and threw her arms around him. Harper muffled a cry of pain and hugged her gently back, smearing blood on her colourful jumpsuit.

'I thought you were dead!' she cried.

'Me? SuperHarper? Man of Steel? Not a chance.'

He held him at arm's length and looked at him. 'You're a mess!' she said, sounding shocked.

Harper rolled his eyes. 'Trance, I just crash-landed a slipfighter.'

'Yes, but still…' Her roving eyes found his hand with the missing finger. 'Ew!' She touched the material carefully.

'Reckon it's the universe's way of telling me it's rude to point?'

'We can probably get you a transplant once we get to a hospital. There's a settlement about five miles from here. I came after you when I saw you were about to crash. Dylan's at the landing site.'

'Which is?'

'In Ga'aul.'

'Which is?'

'The capital city of Arand'es.'

'Which is how far from here?'

'Three thousand miles.'

'Fantastic. Where's your slipfighter?'

'In a clearing near here. But it won't fly. I had kind of a rough landing myself,' she said with a sheepish grin.

'Is your first aid kit still intact?' he asked as a fresh wave of pain swept through his abdomen.

'Yes.'

'Good.' He lifted up his shirt and showed her the wound with its makeshift bandage. She gently undid the belt and pulled the T-shirt away as slowly as she could. Dried blood had stuck it to the wound and Harper winced as it tore away from the skin. Once it was gone, fresh blood spewed over his stomach, seeping into his pants. He tried not to scream as Trance poked at the wound.

'It's deep,' she muttered. 'I'm going to need bandage this properly before we go too far.'

'You think it's damaged anything important?'

She gently pushed her fingers inside. 'No. But it may be pressed up against some of your internal organs, so we don't want it going any deeper.'

'All that medical training just to work out that it might not be a good idea to push the bit of shrapnel in deeper?' Harper commented, a little more roughly than he had intended.

She replaced the T-shirt and told him to hold it there. Then she lifted his arm over her shoulder and supported him so that he wouldn't put too much pressure on his bad knee. The two of them made their way slowly to Trance's slipfighter. Harper raised an eyebrow when he saw it. It wasn't as bad as his own but it was still in a pretty bad way. And yet Trance didn't seem to have a scratch on her.

She lay him down, grabbed the first aid kit and went to work on him. Nanobots took care of his knee, the cut on his forehead and the smaller cuts. She took off his shirt, rolled up the legs of his pants and washed off as much of the blood as she could. After cleaning up the stump of his finger she put another bandage on it to stop the bleeding. With a sponge she gently cleaned his stomach wound, but blood continued ooze from it. After inspecting it once again she explained that she couldn't pull the shrapnel out without the proper equipment, since he might bleed to death.

'Mmmff mmmbb,' Harper replied. He had a piece of leather crammed into his mouth and he bit down on it every time the pain grew too much to bear. Trance refused to give him painkillers because she was worried about concussion and she didn't want to put him to sleep. She bandaged the wound again, and hastily packed some supplies while he put his shirt and boots back on. Then the two of them set off for the village.