Alpha Centauri: First Landing (T-Space: Alpha Centauri Book 1) by Alastair Mayer

Author:Alastair Mayer [Mayer, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mabash Books
Published: 2016-10-27T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19: No Walk in the Park

EP02 crash site, Kakuloa

Something poked Tyrell’s right side. It wouldn’t let him sleep, and that’s all he wanted to do. He tried to push it away and his hands encountered graphite tubing. The memory started to come back, and with it pain. They had crashed.

He opened his eyes. Or rather, his left eye, the right one was stuck shut. He wiped it with his hand, rubbed it, then blinked it open. Dried blood covered his hand. Ulrika? Where was Klaar? He moved to get up, or tried to. He was still strapped in to the plane’s seat, but the frame was crumpled and the wings had collapsed. It was a piece of the frame that dug into his ribs.

“Ulrika?” His voice came out as more of a croak, and the effort made his head hurt. “Dr. Klaar, you there?” Ow, that was enough. Time to rest again. He closed his eyes.

“Fred, don’t go back to sleep on me.” Klaar’s voice.

“What?” He opened his eyes again. There was Klaar, leaning on the wreckage of the plane right in front of him. He could have sworn she wasn’t there a moment ago.

“Here, can you drink some of this?” She held out a water bottle.

Tyrell sat up a bit further. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. His throat hurt. He grabbed for the water bottle and drank from it greedily, chugging it down.

“Stop,” she said, grabbing back the bottle. “Take it slowly, we don’t have much of that, and you don’t want to make yourself sick. How are you feeling, does anything hurt?”

Tyrell wondered if there was anything that didn’t hurt, but he paused and took stock. Headache, sore throat, the pain in his side from where the fuselage had poked him. His hips hurt, probably bruised from the seat-belt. Aside from that and a general feeling of having been rolled down a flight of stairs in a cardboard box, he didn’t feel too bad.

“No broken bones, if that’s what you mean. How about you?”

“Shaken but not stirred. Just a few bumps and scrapes. What’s my name?”

“What? Ulrika Klaar. You got amnesia?”

“No, just wondering if you do. What’s your name?”

“Fred Tyrell. And my birthday’s June twenty-second. And today is . . . uh, do you want Earth time or Alpha Centauri time? Why do you think I have amnesia?”

“Do you remember waking up before?”

“Uh, no, I just woke up.”

“This is the third time you’ve woken up and we’ve talked. Mind, you’re doing better this time. You took a nasty bump on the head, it knocked you out. You had amnesia for a little while there.”

“What?” The thought of losing his memory was frightening.

“Don’t worry,” Klaar added at the look of alarm on his face, “most likely it was just short term memory. Sometimes that happens, coming around from being unconscious.”

“I was awake before? Really?”

“Yes you were.” She peered into his eyes and held up a finger. “Now watch my finger.” She moved her arm slowly left and right, up and down.

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