My head hurt. My head really, really hurt. I slowly reached up to touch it, and my fingertips came away sticky. I was in complete frigid darkness, and the bridge around me was silent as death, with none of the air recycling motors running. That was a very bad sign. The emergency lighting was supposed to kick in whenever the primary electrical system went offline. I pulled at my harness, and it was disturbingly loose, loose enough for me to push off my chest without unbuckling it.

I felt ahead of me for the handhold and pulled myself upright, wincing at the sharp pain in my back and shoulder. The floor wasn’t flat, and there was some piddling amount of gravity; as a gravity-raised child, I wasn’t too skilled with estimating it, but I’d peg it at less than a tenth. The flat soles of my velcro boots tugged at my feet as I made my way towards the airlock. I pulled open the spacesuit cabinet by feel and tugged the portable torch out of its slot, then flicked it on.

The bridge was a mess. Displays hung down from their mounts, some torn clean off and strewn about the floor. The ceiling had a huge crack, running from the front to the back of the bridge. The never-ending faint clicking of the rattlers, designed to warn us when the air recirculation system failed, finally silent. I was lucky to have been in the bridge. The passenger decks were underneath us, and if the bridge was this messed up, the passenger decks were sure to have decompressed.

I picked my way through the debris of the bridge, checking for any survivors. Many of the seats had been broken, their supporting struts snapped in two, torn wires dangling out. Some of the crew had been unlucky enough to be impaled by their seat struts. Most seemed to have died from the crash landing, and it was probably a merciful death. Nothing good could come of being stranded on a barren planet without a ship.

None alive. That was unfortunate, but not unexpected. Bar none, the crew were bred and raised in space. Their bones were brittle, their muscles weaker. The G-force from the landing probably broke half of their ribs, not to mention their spines. Their bodies were all cold, their lips white.

There wasn’t much to be done here. The ship’s power system was obviously not functional, and there were no windows in the bridge to give me any indication of where we’d landed. I needed to get to the lower levels, to the engine rooms, where the primary computers were stored. There’d be backup batteries for it, along with a systems access panel I could use to determine what had happened. Being a technician, I had all the equipment to interface with it as well. I was technically onboard to diagnose a fault in the landing pad at the station, but the same equipment would also be able to interface with the ship.

I returned through the bridge to the spacesuit cabinet and pulled out a helmet and suit, both tailored to fit my body. The standard suits onboard the ship would fit most space-born, but I was bigger and bulkier. I pulled it on and zipped it shut, favoring my left arm to keep the force off my right shoulder. I was snapping the helmet down onto my spacesuit when I heard it. A faint voice, barely audible through the gap between my helmet and spacesuit. I stopped, silencing my velcro-driven steps, and held my breath.

“Help,” came the weak voice, from my right. “I can’t get out.”

I pulled the helmet off as fast as I could and swung the torch up, sweeping the room with light. There, in the corner, strapped to a jumpseat, was the form of a young girl. I moved over to her as quickly as I could. She was slumped forward against her harness, shoulder straps hard against her shoulders. The jumpseat was partially torn off the wall, pinning her left arm to the railing in front of her. It was probably what saved her in the end, her arm. Without it, the jumpseat would have pitched her head directly into the steel railing. Normally, it wouldn’t be a tough position to extricate yourself from, but post-crash was not a normal scenario. “Can you feel your toes?” I asked, and she nodded.

“I think my arm is broken, though.” She tried to move it and winced.

I gently pushed the jumpseat back to the wall, the structure crunching back into place, and pressed the harness release. She slumped forward into my arms, and I lifted her up, being careful to keep her left arm straight. She was unnaturally short for a space-born, so she must have been brought up on a mid-G planet. She groaned in pain at the movement as I carried her back to the cabinet. I gently laid her down on the floor in front of the cabinet, careful to pull her hair out from under her, and slid the first aid kit out of its slot.

I wasn’t a trained medic, but both my parents were, and I’d learned a lot from them. I wished I’d paid more attention to them now. I unlatched and opened the suitcase-sized first aid kit and located the splints. On a spaceship full of weak-boned space-borns, you needed splints surprisingly often.

We weren’t likely to encounter a trained medic in the near future, so I needed to set her arm correctly. I selected the right-sized splint and pulled out the velcro loops. I wasn’t sure if her arm was fully fractured or not, but now wasn’t the time to be taking risks. I carefully lifted her arm to wrap the velcro loop beneath it, mindful of her hiss of pain. The bone felt unbroken, and her skin was unbroken. No need to set it, then.

“This will hurt,” I warned, pulling the velcro loops tight at the same time. She gasped at the pain, but it was already done. She tried to sit up, and I motioned her back. “No need to overexert yourself yet,” I warned. “I want to see my parents —”

“Were they in the passenger decks?” I asked gently, but she already knew what I was going to say next. “Yes,” she whispered. “I wanted to see the pilots fly the ship, so they let me come up here — there was only one extra seat —”

I held her as she cried. “I need to go and check on the ship and find a way out,” I finally said, my throat sore and scratchy. “You’ll need to stay here, though. There isn’t a spacesuit that will fit you, and you wouldn’t be able to climb the ladders with that arm.”

She nodded silently, and I helped pull her into a seated position with her good arm. I checked her pulse, blood pressure, and oxygen levels: all good, or as good as somebody with a broken arm. Unfolding the emergency blanket from the first-aid kit, I draped it over her body to keep her warm. Now that she could calm down, she’d feel the chill without it.

Reaching up, I pulled a spare helmet off the rack and switched it on. The lights came up in a self-diagnostics sequence, then blinked green. I made a note of the helmet identifier: Tau-3. I snapped my own helmet onto my head and locked the clips around the edge.

“Can you hear me?” I asked into my helmet, the sound echoing unnaturally.

“Yes,” she said, and I heard it in my helmet.

“If anything happens to the air in here, we’ll both know,” I told her. “I’ll head straight back here if that happens. I’ll leave the helmet and the torch here with you. Say something every few minutes, so I know you’re still awake.”

She nodded, and I stood up and entered the airlock’s inner door, my diagnostics suitcase in tow. I cranked it shut and closed the locks, clamping the door tight against the bridge. I turned around and slowly cranked open the access tunnel air vent, then shut it to listen for leaks in the inner door. I didn’t hear any sound from the rattlers, so I cranked the vents open all the way, then pushed the door open and made my way into the access tunnel. I closed the airlock door behind me, clamping it shut. If the inner door did fail, hopefully the outer door would contain the air. Both doors were rated for several atmospheres of pressure, but with the structural state of the ship, I wasn’t taking any risks.

“Are you good?” I radioed as I hooked my suitcase to my spacesuit’s waist belt.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice quiet and tinny in my helmet.

I nodded my head resolutely and began to descend the ladder, my suitcase bumping into my legs as I descended.