Fat Girl in a Strange Land by Bart R. Leib, Kay T. Holt Page B

across the debris field. She’d taken a scanner from the medical bay, hoping she could find someone still alive, someone who could help her.
    After seeing the third mangled corpse, though, she’d given up on that and returned to the ship. She found some painkillers in the broken-open pharmacy locker and took one; the headache fled in abject terror, which allowed her to think clearly.
    “Where am I?”
    Well, that one was easy enough. Wen reached for her comm—
    No. She reached for her pocket, but her comm was gone.
    She found it in the corner of the medical bay, screen shattered, unwilling to even turn on. “Well, that’s brilliant.” Wen’s voice was scratchy in her ears — had she screamed as the ship had crash-landed? She didn’t remember.
    Wen had to shove open the door of the next compartment — people were often surprised how strong she was, but then, it took a lot of muscle to move all that body around. At least, that’s what she told people. Once she’d managed to open the door, she found more bodies: a popular girl named Laka and her boyfriend Akito. Their clothes were strewn around the room — apparently Laka had made good on her promise to bed Akito before graduation — but as Wen knelt to check and see if they were alive — they weren’t — she found Laka’s comm, undamaged, sticking out of a jacket pocket. No signal, but at least it was working. Small favors.
    She moved on to the next compartment.
----
    Tiny scaled creatures no bigger than Wen’s hand slithered past, through the crystal debris, clearly fleeing something. Wen risked a peek above the patch of crystalline bushes that hid her, but saw nothing.
    Then a noise, high-pitched and horribly discordant, drove her to the dirt again. She looked up, but saw nothing. So she climbed to her feet, checked her comm, and started to jog again.
    And was nearly mauled by the huge, heavily-scaled serpent that had been hiding in a hollow in the ground. It rammed into her backpack, knocking her flat on her face. She spat a mouthful of crystal pebbles and got to her knees once more. The serpent was staring at her, tensed, ready to attack again.
    Wen looked into its huge blue eyes. It blinked, and she blinked. She guessed it wasn’t used to its prey getting up again.
    Holding its eyes with hers, Wen slowly brought up the blaster until it was pointed at the serpent.
    Then, without warning, it attacked.
    At this distance, she didn’t even have to aim. One shot from the blaster blew its head clean off. The rest of the body knocked her to the hard ground yet again, her head thumping against the top of the backpack, but the thing was clearly dead.
    She shoved the remains of the serpent to one side, stood up again, and got moving.
----
    Wen made her way through the ship, waving Laka’s comm in slow arcs, trying to get a signal. She had no idea where the ship had crashed; the impact had flattened everything for half a kilometer, and although she had seen stars when she’d gone outside—
    Stars. Stars, just barely peeking through the clouds and the auroras.
    Wen found the nearest emergency door and opened it, then jumped down onto the hard ground. Her knees and ankles let her know just how bad an idea that had been, but she didn’t care; she activated the comm and pointed its visual pickup at the star-speckled sky.
    It pinged a couple of seconds later.
    Wen read its screen and swallowed hard.
    Sidqiel. They’d crashed on Sidqiel.
    She was as good as dead.
----
    Wen checked the comm: only a kilometer to go before she reached the old substation. Though she was dripping with sweat and aching in ways she never knew her body could ache, she picked up her pace, trying to move faster, trying to get to safety before the sun’s radiation blasted her like she’d blasted the serpent.
    Soon enough, she burst free from the crystal forest and into a clearing. In the distance, she saw the dark, blocky shape of the substation.
    And right in front of her, the ground