Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 55551 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55551 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 278(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
The crater that used to be my ship continues to steam gently in the hole I made as I look around. I see the usual planet things. The area I’ve crashed in is relatively flat and covered in a lot of brownish-red grass, much of which is burning off around me in a sort of concentric pattern. In the distance, there’s thick jungle-like undergrowth and overgrowth. A forest of some kind.
You don’t see forests all that often anymore. Most planets remove them to allow more room for construction. Wood’s an unsought after commodity in the universe now, which makes sense because you can’t build ships with it, and that’s what life is these days. Interstellar travel. If you’re not moving, you’re not living.
I know they do have some tech, though. I’m pretty sure I saw a string of satellites as I plummeted past them. I am starting to get that little tingly feeling on the back of my neck. I don’t really feel fear, but I do get other indications when things are about to go wrong. There’s something about this planet that makes me think I’m going to have a hard time here, and I have to pay attention to that feeling. That’s the difference between surviving and not surviving.
I’m going to need to find a settlement of some kind. Not too far away, I can see something too uniformly shaped not to be a construction of some kind. That’s also very good. Someone’s built something, and that means there’s shelter and probably infrastructure, and even more importantly: something to steal.
I check the contents of my crash suit real quick. I’ve got water purification tablets. I’ve got a retractable field knife. I’ve got a few tight rolls of hydratable meals. Enough to survive a good week without food foraged from the planet. I’ve also got the hitchhiker signal, which is solar powered. And I’ve got about fifty other little tricks that don’t immediately relate to survival, but which will definitely potentially come in handy. This suit is covered in pockets, it’s basically pockets all the way down.
This suit was designed by a fucking pirate god, created in the case that a mutiny of some kind happens and a pirate captain is set adrift. When I first bought it, I did so as a joke. My crew laughed and laughed as I paraded it around. And now here I am. Adrift. Crashed. Alive.
This thing will keep me warm if I need to be warm, cool if I need to be cool, and worst case scenario I don’t make it, decomposition will trigger an external casing to appear from head to toe. You’ll end up looking like a person-sized opaque insect egg. That’s why some of my ilk call these things coffin suits. But I’m a more positive thinker — and so far that’s really paying off, because I am still breathing.
I set off for the building up the hill. It’s interesting nobody has come out of it to see what the almighty crash that must have just made the ground shake was. In some parts of the universe, you’ll draw a massive crowd that way. Other parts? The inhabitants of a planet won’t notice if you crash a hundred ships into it. There are all kinds of species in existence, and they’ve all got their own sensitivities and sensibilities.
The closer I get to the building, I start to realize a few things. One, it’s actually a lot further away than I thought, and it’s playing incredibly loud music. That explains why nobody came rushing out to see what happened. For all I know it might have sounded like a dull thud to those inside, if they heard anything at all. I can feel the marrow pounding in my bones as the bass thrums.
If I had to guess time of day, which is always difficult on any planet, I’d say that it is about three o’clock in the afternoon. Pretty early for this kind of carrying on, unless it’s a holiday. Or unless this is a very celebratory species. Or unless it’s the sort of place where there’s people who think really loud music is acceptable whenever, and the latter could be interesting.
Along the exterior of the building I can see a bunch of very large two-wheeled conveyances parked. They have big round rubber wheels, one in front of the other, and then a general sort of body with a seat for sitting on, and handlebars for steering. This is some very, very old tech. Ancient, really. No wonder Saurmos is classed as a primitive planet. These people are getting around like humans did all the way back in the late nineteenth century. We’re talking tech literally thousands of years old. I wonder if it runs on the old oil-based tech too? There’s definitely a scent about the space, some of the bikes dripping a thick black viscous substance onto the ground beneath them.