The airlock door pulled open, letting the bright landing lights spill into the small chamber. As the gap widened, revealing the universe, Blaze gave the land beyond a cold, stoic stare. The sheer size of the sunless frontier was daunting, but he refused to stand down. This space cowboy wasn't going to be cowed by space. Such a vast land demanded an imposing, swaggering personality who could match its epic scale. Somebody who could win a staring contest with the abyss. Take his incredible force of will, and brand the cosmos with the human spirit.
When the door opened all the way, and the path was clear, he fixed his safety line to the metal bar and gave it a tug to make sure it wouldn't come undone. Before he left, he took a moment to gaze through the doorway. Their starship was a piece of home they carried through the cosmos. Warm and bright and comfortable. Beyond the circle of its light, nothing could be seen. Only a distant rim of dark hills blocking the stars. A massive hidden frontier, tinted black by the sunless void, waited for him. Colossal and unknowable. Anything might be lurking inside it. Amazing adventure or horrible death … the possibilities were as endless as the universe.
What's out there? he thought.
He steeled his nerves for the descent.
Let's take a look.
His thoughts had the same tone as a man convincing himself to take a running leap off a waterfall.
Gripping the safety line tightly, he stepped out of the airlock. The rope ran through his padded glove. Friction slowed his fall. As he descended, the ground rose up under him. Coming to meet him, like an enormous predator rising up from the ocean depths. He dropped out of reach of the ship's neck, and the security of its hull.
The ship was a cargo hauler meant to ferry goods between starports. It wasn't really equipped for exploring the unknown. The only two airlocks were on the neck, a dozen feet in the air. The hatch on the flight deck was physically impossible to open unless the ship had a breathable atmosphere around it. And while the cargo bay could be depressurized, it was more of a hassle than it was worth right now.
But…
On the frontier, a cowboy made do with what he had on hand.
His boots slammed into the ground. As their soles settled into the layer of cosmic dust coating the planet, he braced himself for the inevitable moment something burst out of the land underfoot and tried to eat him up. Heartbeat quickening, he tightened his grip on the safety line.
Nothing happened.
Too scared to mess with me, I'll bet, he thought.
He unclipped the safety line and dropped it to the ground. The rope coiled like a snake in the gray dust. He raised his left arm and hit the button on its wrist control panel to open a comms channel.
"Hey, you hear me?"
In his ear, Rsh replied, "Yes. What do you see?"
"Ground's pretty dusty out here."
"Take a reading."
Blaze faced the distant horizon and scowled at whatever fearsome danger might be lurking beyond it. His arms tensed up. His hands hovered at his sides. His fingers curled around the handle sticking out of the pouch at his side. This rogue planet was out to get him, and he waited for his enormous foe to make the first move. Blaze whistled like the soundtrack to an ancient western film. His limber fingers stretched and tensed as they prepared to spring into action.
"Blaze," Rsh said wearily.
Ignoring the wet blanket of a voice in his ear, Blaze continued to whistle and stare the rogue world down. Just waiting for the right moment to spring into action, pistols blazing …
"Hi-yah!" he shouted.
His holler filled up his helmet and got his blood pumping. He gripped the handle and ripped it out of its pouch. Aiming the pistol-shaped device at the ground, he pulled its trigger. A beam of intense light shot out the front and hit the dust covering the planet. He held his tensed-up gunslinger's pose, finger pulling the trigger down, for a few seconds. Giving Rsh time to analyze the data.
Then he asked, "What's it say, partner?"
On the back of the handheld spectroscope, a little display screen outputted a rainbow spectrum with thin black lines missing from it. Showing the composition of whatever the beam of light landed on.
"I see nothing," Rsh replied, slightly more gruff than usual. "Try again."
Blaze took his finger off the spectroscope's trigger. The beam of light disappeared. Then, with another cry, he squeezed it again. The beam shot out and hit the dusty ground.
"How about now?" he asked.
"No."
Blaze eased out of his dueling pose. His finger fell off the trigger, making the beam of light disappear.
"What now?"
"Hold on. I am rebooting the program."
The seconds ticked by. Blaze waited next to the starship and stared at the darkness beyond the protective ring of light. He put his hand on his hip and tilted his head with a grim sneer, giving the darkness a taste of his impressive cowboy swagger. A shiver of fear went up his spine, but that just encouraged him to shore up his stance more. I'm not afraid, he thought, shrugging off that itch creeping over his shoulders and neck that made him feel like something big and ugly was rising up behind him.
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"Try now," Rsh said. "Without the cowboy sound effects."
Tsking, Blaze raised the spectroscope casually and fired its beam at the ground like he was using a remote control to turn a screen on.
"Anything?" he asked.
From the extended silence, Blaze guessed it wasn't good news. He shifted his weight and felt himself sink deeper into the loose dusty surface.
"You will need to eyeball it," Rsh said.
"I don't know how to read a spectroscope!"
"We have no other choice."
"It worked when we tested it back at Point Pleasant."
"It did. There must have been a change … in the conditions."
The sound of heavy fingers slamming rapid-fire into the console's mechanical keyboard shot out of the speaker like blaster bolts from a rifle. But then, the sound abruptly cut off. As an eerie silence fell over Blaze, the itch on his neck got much worse. And, sealed up in his suit, he couldn't even scratch it. The helmet seemed tighter now, like it was collapsing around him. Trapping him within a few square inches of oxygen, in the middle of this gigantic airless void.
"Rsh?" he asked, tapping the side of his helmet. "Can you hear me? Hey!"
Suddenly, the comms channel opened again. He was greeted by a deep-throated growl.
"I have located the issue," Rsh said.
"What is it?"
"RDEX."
"Huh?"
"'Remote … Data … EXchange.'"
"What the hell is that?"
"A standard for wireless data-sharing invented by … the tech companies." He paused to catch his breath. "But, as is their way, they all 'improved' the standard. For 'convenience.'" Though Rsh's voice always got throatier and more aggressive the longer he spoke without pause, the angry growling seemed very fitting in this case. "RDEX Plus, RDEX Enhanced, RDEX Ultra. In their attempts to create vendor lock-in, the standard … is no longer standardized."
"So what does that mean?" Blaze asked.
"Your suit software uses RDEX Plus. The spectroscope software uses RDEX Enhanced. The OS has compatibility modes for both … but they cannot both be active."
Blaze scoffed. "So I can either talk to you or use the spectroscope?"
"That is correct."
"That seems like a really bad design."
"It is. The OS is outdated and past end-of-service." His voice turned sharply and poked Blaze like a spear coming through the speaker. "I recall many times requesting you save your money … for situations such as this. Yet you insisted … on going to the bar … and wasting it on … futile attempts to impress 'space babes'."
"Didn't you say our ship is so old and outdated it can't handle an OS upgrade?"
After a bout of wordless grumbling, Rsh said, "Still. It is … the wise thing to do."
Blaze sighed and stared at the gray ground. His forehead started to throb. Distracted by his thoughts, he raised his hand to massage it, but the hand just thumped against the helmet.
"Oh, man," he muttered. "So what now?"
"You shall need to read the output."
"No way, partner. I leave the nerd stuff to you. I just boldly venture into the unknown. That's my style. If I can't solve the problem with my blaster or my fists, it's not my area."
Another bout of wordless grumbling came over the comms channel.
"Hey, you're a computer programmer," Blaze said. "Can't you hack it so both RDEX whatevers are active at once?"
"Perhaps. But it shall take time. The starnet likely has patches … but we are not in range."
"What do we do in the meantime?"
After he asked the question, there were ten seconds of silence. Long enough he thought the comms channel had crapped out again.
"We shall need to swap," Rsh said. "Turn comms off, use the spectroscope, turn comms on."
"Should I just throw myself off the edge of the crater right now?"
"Wait thirty seconds. Take a sample. I shall reenable comms … in one minute."
The line went quiet, leaving Blaze all alone in the vast desert. He kept time by pacing, one stride per second, toward the crater's edge. Raising his leg with purpose, shifting his weight forward like he was the most unstoppable force in the galaxy, stamping his boot down into the dusty land so hard that his footprint would last until the end of the universe. He'd dismounted from his steel steed, but he wasn't going to stop riding tall, like a true gunslinger. Every stride took him a little farther across the massive land, and a little farther away from the light he'd brought with him. As he paced, whistling to himself, he claimed more of the land for himself.
The universe is gonna remember that Blaze Corvo, space cowboy, was here!
After twenty-five paces, he approached the crater's rim. The steep dropoff was at the boundary of the ship's circle of light. The view down into the bottomless pit tightened his stomach and staggered his stampede-like strut. As he inched closer, he turned sideways. Extending his left leg to test the ground, while leaning back so as not to put too much weight on it. Ready to turn and run, if need be. He wasn't scared, exactly. It was just practical. What if a chunk of ground dislodged? Being ready for danger wasn't the same thing as being scared of it. Not by a long shot. To make up for his backward lean, he craned his head and lifted it up to try and get a better look down into the darkness. But there wasn't anything to see. The light from the ship, and from his space suit's headlamp, it just … ended. There was nothing to shine on down there. The void in the crater was as dark as the event horizon of a black hole.
Standing on the shoreline of shadow, Blaze felt like if he fell down he'd go right through the planet. Gravity would pull him down and then launch him out the other side. Launch him so fast, he'd drift into space. The huge, dark rogue planet already made him feel small and lost. But out among the stars, he was just one tiny fragile little lump of carbon in an eternal universe …
No way! I'm Blaze Corvo, larger than life space cowboy!
If he found himself adrift in space, he'd hitch a ride on a passing comet or meteor and ride the stardusty trails to the end of space, time, or both. Old cowboys never died, they just rode off into the sunset. And outer space had a hell of a lot of sunsets. Crossing the cosmos like a shooting star, he'd soar past every single one of them. Yippie ki-yay! he thought, fortifying his courage in the face of the infinite universe.
'Blaze!' a voice cried. 'I'm falling!'
The voice echoed from the chasm. Not the one in front of him, exactly. And yet … it was the same chasm. All of a sudden, two different chasms — separated by spacetime — bridged together like a wormhole inside his memories. The darkness at his feet became the darkness of his past. He tried to keep his shoulders squared and his chin up, but the weight of the memory tore his swagger down. He staggered backward, trying to fend off the panic and fear crawling out of the chasm alongside the cry for help.
No! On that day … I swore I'd never be a coward again!
Filling his lungs with air, he straightened back up into his gunslinger's posture and brushed the past out of his mind like dust off his boots.
It's been thirty seconds.
His hand flashed to his side and ripped the spectroscope out of its pouch. Pivoting on his feet, he snapped his arm up. Fired the beam at the gray ground, feet apart, head raised. Flawless quickdraw posture, for his duel with this massive rogue planet. Blaze Corvo was no coward, and he was ready to conquer this dark frontier.