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Title: Apollo and the Angel Author: J. C. Sun Type: ROUGH, rough as sandpaper Grit tears at her throat, biting her eyes, and the hot, dry, burning air steals the oxygen from her starved lungs, and the gravsled trembles. It's batteries are weakening; it was never designed to hold two people. Squinting at the hazy, noontime sun, she determines the rendezvous point is still west, and she yanks the driving handles with tired arms. Precious sweat drips from her forehead, and the darkness in her eyes, the purple half-moons beneath her eyes gleam. She forces her mind to sharpen, her senses to struggle. Her jaw is clenched with concentration, and her hands, trembling only in the veins, are clamped the rubber navigation grips. She spares only the quickest of glances for the energy meter as she skims across the broken rocks embedded in blood-red sand and the canyons push in close around her shoulders, around the edges of the gravsled as it starts drifting downwards. With a grunt, half by direction and half by brute force, she yanks the sled upwards just in time to miss a bush. . . All this desert reminds her of another one, one where she went camping as part of a wilderness survival course her freshman year at the Academey, and in another time, another place, she would have enjoyed the stark symmetry of the dried riverbends and the layered geologic rock. Now, though, each rocky outcropping, boulder and stunning vista is only a landmark for the course she's steering back to the shuttle to escape this world. . . As she hangs a particularly tight turn, his limp body slides down against her feett. His heels bump into hers and a boneless arm brushes her calf, lightly, then falls back to the metal deck with a thump; she's lashed him to the side of the sled with cargo netting, and powdered sand cakes his blonde hair, crusts his thin, pale lips, dances on his shallow breaths. His eyes are shut, his shoulders hang limp, and underneath the layer of sand, his breathing grows weaker and weaker. This man will die soon. A flicker of titanium-coated steel and diamond-focused energy has torn his innards so that they leaked from a hole in his side. She has wrapped a bandage, a length of her shirt around it, and sand has crusted this hole, plugged it so it will not drain. When she first tied him down, the blood squelched in her shoes, in her socks. Most of it's dried or slipped off the gravsled by now, but she can feel it sloshing in her boots and hissing in his lungs. She grits her teeth and forces another ounce of speed from the overheating engine because she knows that even if she lives, if she somehow makes her way home but the man behind her dies, then she might as well have died along with him. Accused of selling technological secrets to the very Raiders now pursuing her, sentenced to spend the rest of the trip home in her quarters, saved from being turned over to the dubious justice of the planetary authorities only by the intervention of the captain -- intervention prompted only by the urgings of her sole remaining friend, not out of interest for her. . . If she goes back to the ship, Janeway will undoubtedly put her in the brig for the rest of the trip home, but the worst part is that if she goes back without Tom, she'll step out of the shuttle and see the light flicker out of her friend's eyes, see the void whirling, bursting, pulsing in his dark eyes as his mouth holds steady and his eyes hold dry. Far away, behind her, she can hear the buzzing of the Raiders, the cries of their metal ships, like a hundred thousand gnats swarming under the bloody sun; laughter rattles in her throat, and the sound is like a penny falling down the grate. Harshly, she forces the throttle forward, slamming it to the limit with the strength of her entire body. Her eyes flicker shut for the breifest of moments; a prayer, perhaps? The sled jerks forward as the last bit of energy is thrown into the engines, and she can see the edge of the force feild, shimmering in the distance. And as she hurtles forward, she can see the hole, the cap where the field has been weakened, where she can slam through and at the moment of her departure, she will be transported back to the ship. Still, she can hear the metal ships crying, and shreiking as the gap jumps up upon her, quickly, suddenly, exploding into her vision like the sun from behind a mountain, except the buzzing grows louder, louder, until she can feel the dust from their engines and the air vibrates with their beating wings hissing past her in great hot streams. There is a sizzling noise as their fire lances through the air. To her left, to her right, with leaden arms she yanks the flagging sled. Up, up, up, until her engines scream, left, right, down again, in an aerial rollercoaster that leaves her feeling sick. She dodges, runs, but they slice to both her sides, and burn through the metal casing to reveal steaming wires. And as she falls, plummeting downward, the world streaking into a haze, blue dripping into red, the copper sky melting into a sand that blew into her senses, roared up at her, and distantly, distantly (closer now), she could hear the crash of the sled, a metallic jangling that sliced across her ears, through the howling wind, the sound of metal and barely alive flesh, and as she fell like a star, like a comet. And as she fell, her mouth formed words that were torn from her by the wind, words that trickled down her face, ones that twisted her mouth up and caused her eyes to slip shut, shut lightly shut, words that made her laugh. And if one could have heard these words, they would have been that this was the wrong man, the wrong man to die for. Dying for love implies the presence of that emotion, that the one you die for is with you in your death, but here. . . The gravsled blossoms into fire. .end
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