ATLANTIS

After the Crash: Ariana

CHAPTER THREE

Ariana Michelet had never been so aware of the simple act of breathing. It was the first thing she felt: air sliding in her throat, expanding her lungs. The texture of the air was strange, almost oily, and thick, although how she could describe air as thick she didn't know but that's what it felt like. She could still taste the acidic trace of vomit in her mouth and along the back of her throat. 

With the awareness of breathing, she suddenly remembered. Going down, crashing. She opened her eyes and saw nothing. Complete darkness. Was she blind? Was she dead? That unnerving second question trampled over the first one. 

Ariana closed her eyes and brought her breathing under control as she'd been taught by her personal trainer. She felt something diagonally across her chest, holding her. She realized it was the shoulder harness for her seat and that feeling brought immediate comfort as she knew she was still sitting in her seat. She was alive and inside the plane. There was no sound of engines, no throb of power coming up from the seat, so she knew they were down. 

She opened her eyes again and this time caught the faintest of glows, from a small battery powered emergency light. She blinked, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dimness. 

Ariana reached forward, her hands touching the keyboard. She could work that in the dark but she paused as nothing happened. She remembered ordering Carpenter to shut Argus down. Ariana pressed a button on the side of her console and accessed the back-up emergency computer. She hit one of the keys and was rewarded by the glow of her screen. It worked and that meant there was juice coming from the banks of batteries in the cargo hold. 

She quickly accessed the emergency program. The computer worked, slower than Argus would have, but eventually the back-up emergency program was up. She hit the command for the emergency lights and the interior of the plane was bathed in a dull red glow. She checked the time and blinked. According to the back-up computer it was over fifteen hours since they'd gone down. 

Fifteen hours! Ariana slowly processed that fact in her head. How could she have been out that long? And why had a rescue party not arrived yet? With fumbling hands she unbuckled her harness. She noted as she stood that the plane was resting slightly canted to the right and forward. If they'd crashed, it had to have been a very controlled crash, since the body of the plane seemed intact. 

She staggered through the passageway to the console area. As she entered she could hear ragged breathing to the right. She reached out and felt warm flesh. It was Mark Ingram, still strapped to his seat. 

Looking down the length of the plane she could see that the crash had had another effect. Ariana hurried to a body laying up against the bulkheads holding the computers. It was one of the imaging camera operators and he was dead. His seatbelt must not have been fastened and his neck had broken when he hit the wall after his chair had slid down the plane. 

Ariana looked at him, remembering what she knew about him. She remembered a company picnic less than two months ago. He had a family. She glanced over at his normal console position. There was a photo of a woman and two children that he kept taped to the edge of his computer station. Ariana took a flight jacket that was lying on the floor and put it over the man's face. 

Everyone here was still unconscious, but some were starting to stir. Ariana retraced her steps going back forward, passing through her office to the communications center. 

There was someone moaning behind a bank of equipment as Ariana turned the corner past her office. Mitch Hudson, strapped to his seat, was pressed up against the back side of equipment. A large rack holding radios had fallen over and slammed on top of his lower body, pinning him into his chair.