A several days later, Rader took Skye on an extended trip to the opposite side of Glasica to see the mountain dragons in their natural habitat. The dragons resided in a large preserve in the Selkelres (Sĕl kĕ rĕs) Mountain range where no settlements were allowed. Tourism was strictly limited to two specific areas where people could stay and in rental units perched near the summit on a mountain near the dragons’ habitat.
They were circular structures with the residential flats in the center and an observational deck around the outside of the of the structure. The observation deck was transparent on three sides and was a bit dizzying for people sensitive to heights.
Rader flew them to the edge of the Selkeres Preserve in his personal vehicle. They left the flyer at the landing port and took a suspended cable car up the mountain. As it took them higher and higher, Skye was less sure she wanted to see flying dragons as much as she had thought. She had never been so high above the ground before except in a plane and a spaceship.
They hadn’t even gotten to the lodge before they saw what could only be a flock of dragons flying past their cable car. They were sleek, elegant creatures with large bat-like wings and heads shaped like seahorses but with hooked bills. Their bodies were covered with scales in a yellow and black pattern, and their feet were clawed almost like birds.
The Selkeres dragons soared on the air currents like eagles searching for prey with their keen eyesight. They were warm-blooded creatures that lived in high mountain caves and laid eggs like many reptiles.
While the lodge was fully automated, there was a small resident team of Alliance scientists that studied the dragons and well as monitoring the impact of settlements on the indigent wildlife of the planet.
They spent one night there and part of the next day before heading back to Rader’s homestead. Rader took off from the preserve landing site and had flown for about ten minutes when a spaceship seemed to materialize in front of them. He tried to bank the flyer to evade collision but was a split second too slow because the
spaceship clipped it.
The lightweight flyer bounced off the haul of the ship and tumbled out of control. Rader did his best to stabilize the trajectory, but the airship was damaged, and some of the braking thrusters weren’t working or only partly working. They were going in for a rough landing.
Fortunately, they had cleared the Selkeres mountains before they were clipped and they were going down on the plain. Normally, flyers were landed vertically so they could easily be parked by someone’s dwelling. This one had sustained too much damage, so Rader was forced to land it as a plane on the rough ground.
He’d managed to right the flyer by tapping into the onboard AI with his cybernetics, but he couldn’t fix the structural damage. The land wheels were down, but they hit hard and too fast. The nose was angled toward the ground too steeply, and the flyer flipped end over end before smashed to the ground, landing on its wheels.
On impact with the spaceship safety devices stabilized Rader and Skye for impact. Even though they sustained no broken bones, they both had concussions from being violently shaken by the crash.
Rader was the first to become aware, partly because of the uncomfortable temperature in the cabin from the sun. The plain between the mountains and the Arktak Ocean was a barren desert, and it was midday with the sun directly overhead. The engine had shut off on impact.
The first thing Rader realized when he opened his eyes was that his head was throbbing. He jerked off the body harness that held his body in place and turned to see how Skye had fared. There were no visible injuries or bleeding but her eyes closed and she wasn’t moving. He reached across the console and pressed two fingers to her neck over her carotid artery.
Her pulse was strong and steady.
“Skye? Skye?” he said urgently. He unfastened the harness and patted her face gently. “Skye, wake up.”
She moaned, and slowly opened her eyes. She looked dazed and confused. “Dizzy,” she said closing her eyes.
“Are you hurt anywhere, sweet one?”
Skye moved in her seat, checking various part of her body. “Just my head. Everything is spinning. What happened? Did someone hit us?”
“Yes. A spaceship that wasn’t supposed to be there. It’s probably smugglers, landing here illegally in stealth mode,” Rader growled. “My flyer is badly damaged. It’s not going to fly again without some major work.”
“Can you call someone?”
“The com system is down, and my tablet is---” Rader paused, looking around the cabin. It was on the floor. The mini AI appeared to be intact but wouldn’t turn on. “Not working. The main chip is broken. It probably got slammed around pretty hard.”
“Ooh, I don’t feel so good. I think I’m going to be sick, do you have something?”
Rader grabbed a motion sickness bag from a dispenser in the back of her seat and handed it to her just in time. “It’s probably the impact concussion and the heat.”
While Skye sealed the vomit bag, Rader turned in his seat and reached for the hand crank to open the butterfly doors on the flyer. “I’m going to go out and check the damage. I can’t seem to connect to the internal AI, but the distress beacon is working. The problem is that we don’t know who is going to get it.”
They called them flyers, but they were actually all-terrain vehicles. They could be driven on the ground like cars, but there were no paved highways on Glasica just streets within the towns and villages. Most people either walked or used solar charged scooters,
As Rader got out of the vehicle, he realized he was a little unsteady on his feet. His brain was a little better cushioned inside his head than a natural human, so the effects of the concussion weren’t as severe for him as they were for Skye. It hadn’t been long enough for her system to build up enough of his nanites to quickly repair the damage as they would in him.
He had just given her a fresh injection when they’d had sex that morning. Hopefully, that would be enough to prevent any long-term damage.
Walking around the vehicle, Rader shook his head. It looked pretty battered, and one of the wheels was broken. He couldn’t fix it even with a spare because the housing had bent at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. His flyer wasn’t taking them anywhere, and he had no idea how long it would take for anyone to find them.
He added their coordinates to the message then went around to Skye’s side of the flyer while waiting for a reply. She was sitting in her seat with her eyes closed with her head back against the headrest.
“Skye?” he gently drew his fingers across her smooth cheek. “How are you, love?”
“Not quite as dizzy or nauseous, but still, have a hell of a headache.”
“I’ll get the medkit, it will have some medicine to ease your pain and prevent your brain from swelling.” He moved toward the back of the flyer and took out a moderate sized plastic box that looked like a toolbox. It was a little more sophisticated than that. Rader pressed a button, and two sides opened and spread like wings with multiple compartments.
He found what he wanted and took out two gel tablets then went to another compartment for a plastic bottle of cool water. He took the gel tabs and the water to Skye.
“Open your mouth babe.” When she did, he dropped them on her tongue. She swallowed them then took the bottle of water he put in her hand. Skye drank a few swallows and gave it back to him, still keeping her eyes closed.
“How did this happen?” she asked.
“I’m pretty sure it was smugglers. The AI logged in our flight plan before we left the Preserve. Any legitimate transports would have gotten the information when they asked for landing clearance. They never should have come close, let alone hit us. Their landing wasn’t legal.
“They probably didn’t figure there would be any flyers out this far in the wilderness.”
“But we were because I wanted to see dragons,” Skye said with a note of apology in her tone.
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. We had a good time at the lodge and got some good pictures of them,” Rader asserted. “That ship had no damn business landing here without clearance. But we have no space force here to stop them from coming in. The colony isn’t that big.”
“What do they smuggle?”
“Could be drugs, weapons, or wildlife. My guess is they are poachers here for the dragons,” Rader said. “There’s not much worth stealing out here otherwise.”
“Our coms are out. I am trying to connect to the satellite array with my internal com. Even though it’s not made for that, I might be able to connect when it gets overhead.”
“What about Jaiba?” Skye asked.
“Out of range. The satellite will be closer if it gets overhead.”
“Are we going to be all right?” she asked him.
“I’m not going to let anything worse happen to you. There was nothing I could do about the crash, but we can survive this,” he assured her. “As far as I can tell, we are almost centered between the mountain’s and the ocean.” He squatted down beside her seat and pushed her hair back off her forehead.
“I think the medicine helped. My head feels a little better,” she told him. “The heat is not helping, though.” She was sweating, and he was too.
“I know, and there is nowhere to get out of it either,” he said. “I opened the wings to let heat out because our heating and cooling system are out as well. About all this thing is good for now is some shelter and shade.”
Rader took a long pull from the recyclable water bottle. Then he handed to Skye. “We have plenty of water; we need to keep hydrated.”
She nodded and took the bottle from him to drink.
Meanwhile, Rader kept trying to ping the satellite to get a message out.