Employing the dead man’s float for the third time since the second sun had sunk beneath the horizon, I rested my exhausted muscles. In spite of the fatigue, I thanked my lucky stars, as my mom used to say, for my blessings.
Stranded in fresh water, I wouldn’t dehydrate.
Local fauna had left me alone so far.
And I had all my faculties.
Rolling onto my back, I floated and looked up at the incredible night sky from this alien planet. Unfamiliar constellations winked back at me, but one stood out from the rest in its similarity to the Big Dipper on Earth. Instead of the boxy shape of the ladle, a cluster of stars in a curved shape more closely resembled a spoon. And if I squinted, I could almost imagine the hazy spill of light from its bowl as soup instead of the galaxy or nebula it probably was. I was thankful to be alive.
Taking a deep breath, I rolled to my stomach again and found my landmark. As fate would have it, a distant jut of land had appeared moments before the second sun set, and by the light of an early moon, I’d kept it in sight as I swam. Now in the pitch black, the jut rose higher and blocked the spray of stars erupting from the black water’s surface.
I was going to make it.
Stroke after stroke, I swam, and when I couldn’t push myself any harder, I floated, careful to orient myself to my landmark.
Heat and light warmed my back and gilded the craggy land I swam towards. The first sun had risen. My strokes were mechanical; my breaths timed. And my thoughts were singular: get to land.
When a sandy shore rose up out of nowhere, I let the tears flow as I paddled closer until my feet touched bottom. The sand sucked at my boots, but the shallow water felt like a brick wall when I swam in it, my body was so fried.
When the water reached a foot deep, I crawled with difficulty as far up the dark brown sand beach as I could manage, unsure how far the tide would stretch.
Where the sand met crumbling tree bark and tangles of scrubby bushes, I collapsed on the ground. Sleep captured me in its grip, and I surrendered.
Groaning, a massive body cramp woke me, and I blinked in the low light. I’d slept the greater part of the day, or possibly longer. The orbiter was designed to function as a giant helmet. Leaving the orbiter meant leaving access to SCOOBE, as well. My suit’s wrist unit was limited to basic calculating functions and telling time, but without calibrating it to this planet’s cycles, it wouldn’t help yet.
Another cramp seized me, and I curled up, feeling the agony of lactic acid in every muscle group as well as the tight gnaw of hunger in my gut. I crawled back to the water’s edge and drank until I was full, then pulled myself up to a sit.
Letting my fingers sink into the warm sand, I breathed deep and studied the beach.
Beach was too generous of a word. The dark brown sand rose from the shore about three meters and was only five meters long before the surrounding forest encroached.
A break in the trees suggested a path, but the sand was undisturbed and free of prints. SCOOBE had reported this planet was inhabited and developed, but I’d seen no indications.
Fatigue and hunger battled it out until I caved in and crawled toward the bushes and tree trunks. I unzipped my thigh pocket and pulled out a rations bar, then watched for signs of wildlife. The odds were good I’d end up getting sick trying alien produce, but if I could see what the local animals ate, it gave me a better chance of at least finding the least dangerous options.
Dozing in the shade, I heard rustling in the underbrush nearby, and it startled me awake. My right hand drifted to my sidearm, a sturdy piece unaffected by my long swim or the stint in space, out of habit, but that instinct wasn’t out of place in an alien world.
Resting my hand on the grip, I mulled over the fact my fellow humans were without firearms. Their EEPs were equipped with excellent survival provisions as well as ordnance that would protect the vehicle itself. Repeating rotator rounds, LASER scattershot capability once the nosecones were in orbit, hell, even the fractionated quark bombs, which were serious overkill. But the miners themselves? They weren’t issued weapons at all. Machetes for clearing brush and the ever-present multi-tool.
I wondered how they were doing and if they had landed yet. Esra, an exogeologist, didn’t have much of a bio or a social life on the Lucidity so I knew next to nothing about her. I’d learned that Pattee Crow Flies, the EEP X215 designer and an engineer, was close with Amity Diaz, one of only a handful of exobiologists, so naturally I put them together. Of course, I would put myself with my best friend Joan Wu, and I figured geologists should stick together, hence Esra’s inclusion. But damn, all that careful planning, and the debris field had screwed it up. Following VELMA’s programming and trajectory, their pods would all land on the same planet as the P-MIV, and here I was, on the other planet, alone with no pod.
A little brown head peeked out from a bush. With dark brown eyes and a quivering nose, it appeared to be a rodent. It crawled out further, keeping one eye trained on me while its nose pushed into the sandy soil. Its front legs followed the path made by its nose, and it closed its eyes, pulling bulbous tubers out of the ground and shoving them into its mouth. When its cheeks bulged, it snuffled and sneezed, spewing sand every which way. Startling itself, it darted back into the trees, and I laughed.
Digging my own fingers into the soil, I found the same tubers and gathered a large handful.
I rinsed them in the water and inspected them the best I could before popping a small one in my mouth. It could be the last thing I did here, I thought before biting down into it.