[COUPLING SYSTEMS OFFLINE. EJECTING CARGO_POD02.]
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" cursed the marine, fumbling with the console beside the airlock's door as the jettison alarms screamed into his ears — much like the instructors did back at the academy. The ground shook and groaned beneath him as the pod accelerated, the heat of reentry burning away at its thick hull.
Even if he did manage to get the control systems back online, it was already too late. His bulky metal coffin was already tumbling through the atmosphere, travelling far too quickly for its rudimentary propulsion systems to return.
The cargo pod was designed to protect its contents from anything short of a direct hit via ship-based railgun blast and survive a hard landing, after all — not to reach escape velocity.
Richard retched a little as his stomach's contents threatened to empty themselves onto the pristine metal floors of the pod's interior, which he resisted as any good marine in uniform should. If it could twist and knot any more than it already had, it would've looked like a balloon animal by now.
Throwing up wasn't going to help anyone.
He had to think.
Doing what he could to brace himself, he curled up into one of the pod's corners as it continued on its ungainly descent. He thought back to the books and movie-streams of the tried-and-true shipwreck-on-an-unfamiliar-world trope so common in the fiction of his youth; someone would crash-land onto some unfamiliar world, struggle to survive, get better at the whole surviving thing, and then stumble into the main plot with long-dead aliens or something.
He hoped his story wouldn’t be like that.
He hoped things wouldn’t be too rough down there.
And above all, he hoped for a quick rescue.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Emergency lights switched on as the pod diverted what little power it stored towards propulsion, turning sterile white lighting to a sinister red glow as the planet drew closer. he knew the planet was breathable — it was the entire reason they even stopped in its star system in the first place — but at the time of the attack, they knew very little else.
The scans were just about to start when they’d been hit, after all — the complete lack of information was one of many strokes of bad luck for good old Richard “Dick” Fletcher.
The floor beneath him shook further, metal groaning louder than ever as several forces racked the pod, much to the marine’s displeasure. Evidently, very little thought was spared during its design to protect fleshy bags of meat and muscle that happened to be inside.
The landing came with a deafening thud followed by the sound of even more groaning metal, growing in intensity by the minute as Richard imagined the hull’s metal splitting open before his very eyes. His fears would never come to pass, fortunately enough, and the pod eventually came to a complete halt.
He breathed a sigh of relief as the lights switched back to the sterile white glow of normalcy.
[BROADCASTING RECOVERY ALERT.]
The only noises he could hear after that were those of the pod’s metal hull slowly cooling and contracting. Ignoring that, it was uncomfortably silent.
He could hear his own heart racing now, beating wildly as it came down from the rush of adrenaline this unplanned trip to the surface had given him. His ragged breaths and cold sweat escaping his mouth and pores respectively could no longer be ignored.
More importantly, he was alive and uninjured!
Taking a moment to collect himself, the ball of marine known as Richard unfurled cautiously, testing the ground as he reached for his field cap, which had conveniently fallen within arms’ reach. Reminding himself that he did, in fact, have to get started on the survival part of his story, he went over what he’d need to do to survive long enough for rescue to come around.
First order of business would be checking over the cargo pod’s inventory; seeing what he had, and then deciding what to do with it.
Second would be security, checking on whatever he could safely scout out nearby. He’d have to make sure everything outside was safe, and failing that, make everything around him as safe as possible.
With his priorities in order, Richard “Dick” Fletcher slapped himself in the face a few times for the extra ‘motivation,’ and began his new life in this unfamiliar new world.