---Aftermath---
---Victor’s perspective---
Twila puts the Swift Claw down in the whipping, sunbaked sand.
Stealth not exactly being an option with our means of approach and necessity of armament type, I stride off the ship, lit falchion roaring in my right hand.
By my sides are Tuun and Thran, five ignited plasmaweapons held in their six hands.
At our flanks are Xon and Samus, their respective assault rifles angled in front of us, the lefthanded blonde at our left, the righthanded Tshwane at our right.
Even from here, I can see that we probably came here for nothing…
The door to the crashed ship is ripped open and there’s not exactly many places to hide in there…
Regardless, we sweep up the length of the craft with me taking point, Samus and Xon waiting outside with their firearms pointing in.
I sign a ‘stop’ then a ‘back up slightly’ to Tuun and Thran, turning to a cupboard sized lav (meant for crew who still have working bowels and bladders.)
The handle is on the right of the door and it’s inward opening.
Slowly, I reach my left hand out, lining up the point of my sword at chest height, and throw the door open to reveal… a toilet and a sink with a showerhead built into the ceiling… No murderous cyborgs…
“Clear.” I announce, bitterly, extinguishing my weapon and turning to stride back off the ship.
I won’t lie, I was really hoping Cap had got him… really hoping that what we’d find’d be an inert body with an expired brain (completely beyond saving) in it!
I didn’t want to have to put him down like the mad dog he is… but I was prepared to if he gave me no choice, which I know he wouldn’t’ve!
“What now?” asks Samus “Try and track him down in the desert?”
“No…” I sigh “…the headstart we was forced to give him, the lack of any useful sensors on the Claw and just how much area we’d have to cover gives an unacceptably low chance of finding him by searchin’ with a 1× zoom…” I point to my eye “…even from the air… When we get the Bright Plume back in action, we’ll track him down with her sensors… Till then, we just need to stay vigilant for him.”
“That’s…”
“I don’t like it any more than you do.” I state, bluntly, as we step back onto the Swift Claw.
Samus scowls.
Tuun, playing the optimist, says “Well… he’s probably not going to make it out of this desert before then… right? We’re more than 5,000km away from the compound and the capital aren’t we! Almost as far down the peninsula as it’s possible to get! He’ll never find his way through all this!”
I’m about to open my mouth to say something like ‘Sure, babe, but we should stay vigilant anyway’ when Thran speaks.
Demonstrating a capacity for practical numerical and spatial reasoning, far in advance of anything I could manage, and a lack of tact that’s truly staggering, she calculates “Not necessarily… he knows he crashed on a planet with a habitable zone so he knows he has to go North or South to find it. This planet has a magnetic field and he’ll definitely have a compass. Even if one wasn’t built into his body (which there will be) there would have been one on that ship… If he went South, he’s already hit the coast by now and either turned around or, more likely, begun to follow it. If we assume a relatively conservative running speed of 25km/h, 5,000km would only take him around 200hrs. He still needs to sleep but he doesn’t need to stop for anything else with a cybernetic body, so we could assume it might take him 300hrs, 12.5 Earth days or a little over 11 local days, to reach where scrub gives way to forest, where we are.”
There’s a silence as we absorb the relatively bleak calculation Thran’s just made.
I can find no fault with it…
Only going to take him 11 local days to clear an area of desert the best part of the size of Australia, if he beelines it North!
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“Twila.”
“Yes, CSS?”
“Take us back to the compound… but go by the peninsula’s West coast and fly low and slow enough for visual ID of a Human sized object.”
“Yes, CSS.”
---Tcakqaal’s perspective---
Using Victor’s shoulder to gain the necessary height to see and be seen by the portion of my crew in front of me, in the main hall of the ambassadorial habitat where they were forced to sleep last night, I stand on the stage, steeling my nerves.
Victor offered to break the news for me but… these people are my crew… a Captain who’s wings are too tremorous to have this talk herself without hiding behind her Terran right hand man is unfit as a Captain, in my view!
“I don’t have to tell you that the Bright Plume is currently uninhabitable… In the [34 seconds] that we were without power to our shields we sustained enough structural damage to completely lose both main power and, by now, we will have lost almost the entirety of our atmosphere… I thank the Seventeen that there were no casualties!… Right now, anyone with engineering or maintenance expertise is up there, both to assess the damage and to accomplish the removal of the hydroponic module and adjacent carnogenic laboratory (which Twila had the foresight to seal and pressurise before transferring her consciousness to her droid for evacuation) to be brought here to the compound for ease of access… Preliminary estimates for the repair and repressurisation time place it at… approximately… [4 months].”
A gasp of horror passes around the room at the thought of such a long time stranded on a deathworld.
“I understand that this is upsetting to hear, especially with the news that our attacker is still at large. Please rest assured that you are safe as long as you remain on this compound! Here, we are defended from the worst calibres of threat this world has to offer!”
That reassures them slightly but they’re clearly still not happy with the predicament.
“I know it is, nonetheless, upsetting to imagine spending so long in the conditions you endured since yesterday and, I shan’t lie, our resources other than space would also be taxed by so many more than expected inhabiting the ambassadorial habitat… Therefore, I am offering you an alternative.”
I recapture their attention with that and the muttering ceases.
“In order to ease the overcrowding… the escape pods you arrived in have been gathered together here, in the compound… they are equipped with capacity for stasis… I am asking all of you to enter them… and undergo stasis until the ship repairs can be completed…”
Stunned silence.
“I cannot force any of you to agree to this and I need to reassure you that none of you will forfeit any portion of your salary for this period! You will still receive all the pay you would have if you weren’t a nonevent mass with a quantum probability of zero! I also want to reassure you that, though you have all been determined to be nonessential workers in the current circumstance, I value you no less as my crew! Your choice is simply to spend the next few [months] suffering anxiety over the deathworld conditions that surround us, consuming limited planetside resources and having nothing to do in an overcrowded habitat… or to skip all of that and allow yourselves to be revived when it is possible for us to reoccupy our ship… What say you?”
---Ro’oo’u’ouu’s perspective---
It’s only been a [day and a half] between when I was sealed into the depowered hydroponicum and now, as the tiny, spacesuited people are ‘rescuing’ me, to bring me down to the planet inside this portion of the inert ship that they need to make their food.
I don’t really know why the computer woman was so agitated in her apologies to me…
I barely had any time to fret about it…(!)
---Qorak’s perspective---
The neat, orderly rows of escape pods, lined up in a previously unused part of the compound, look a little ominously reminiscent of Terran tombstones as I walk towards them with my child in my wings.
Once reassured of their safety, most offered it chose to take the stasis.
If not for Tcakak, I would have chosen to stay awake with Tcakqaal but… I can’t do that to my daughter… she can’t be subjected to [4 months] or more of stranding on a deathworld at such a tender age and I can’t bare the thought of her undergoing stasis without me… having to spend every day of that time knowing where she is and knowing that I can’t hold her, care for her, comfort her… even knowing that she’s not aware of the time passing…
Tcakqaal also brought up the very practical concern that, if both of us stayed out of stasis and went so long without feeding her, both our productions of cropmilk would dry up and we would be forced to switch her to formula.
As time won’t be passing for me, my production will remain as it is.
The others assigned to the same pod as me file in first.
I turn to my lifemate and desperately nuzzle my beak against hers in a tender goodbye.
She returns it but chitters “You’re going to feel a little silly in a few subjective moments, when you have to say ‘hello’ to me again(!)”
“Maybe… but you have [months] to go before you can see me, in the normal flow of time, again… I would feel terrible if I hadn’t given you a proper goodbye before that!”
“Very thoughtful of you, sweetfruit.” she concedes.
“I love you, Tcakqaal.” I say, meaning it with all my hearts.
“I love you too, Qorak.” she answers as the door slides shut between us.
---Jackson’s perspective---
I run North through the endless sand.
It’s so fine that, if I had any mental energy left to think about it, I’d be concerned about it working its way into my joints.
I don’t have lungs, I don’t have muscles, I don’t have blood, a stomach, bones, bowels, bladder or any other weaknesses of the flesh… except my fleshy brain, demanding sleep!
I just need to get North… once I’m there, I can find some locals and make them tell me where those treacherous trash are!
If the natives of this planet are like most other gardenworlders I’ve met, it shouldn’t be hard… They’ll probably piss their pants at the sight of me!
And seems like they’ve not even cracked radiowaves yet, from the lack of signals I’m picking up here.
They’ll probably think I’m some angry god(!)
I just need to get North.
I’ll stop for sleep only when I absolutely have to!