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Author Topic: Whistling toward the stars. (Centurion)  (Read 592 times)

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Anonymous

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Whistling toward the stars. (Centurion)
« on: July 08, 2009, 01:19:53 am »
The sky streaked by, blue and red and orange.  They'd come in at Mach 15 and screamed down through the air.  Rune felt the jostling of the atmosphere's sudden pressure, but heard nothing inside, nothing but the groan of machinery that was not meant to do that.  Rune, canting back and forth on unstable legs, braced himself against the control panel.  His fingers clenched over the joystick, and his other hand danced over the control panel.  Couldn't brake.  Air cushion shot.  No, no, and no again.  Inside his shirt, his charms jangled and chimed against each other, shifting pendulumlike as the ship vibrated and rocked side to side.  

"We're going down."  Linn sounded calm, but his face had turned pale green, striped red from the blaring warning lights.  

"Systems failure.  Systems failure."

Down, down, down.  They passed a huge glacial mountain--one wing scraped a cliff, and the craft spun wildly, metal shearing free.  Rune held on tight and jammed his lucky leg into the bristling wires beneath the hub.  

Down, over the blue blur of water and then out into white, nothing but white.  Down.  A streak of green and brilliant red and then white again, shifting, shimmering, and then

CRRRRKSSSSH.

Whirling, tumbling.  Impact.  Impact that wasn't quite impact, impact that came in a slow, sliding wave and then, when it stopped, they kept tumbling end over end over end--Rune felt himself jarred forward.  Momentum slammed him into the wall, he heard a crunch, he thought hallo, not dead! and then he felt nothing.

Rune blinked awake at the nagging beep and blip of the Fortune's Fool's fuel gage.  It bleated its 'empty' signal, insistent as an infant waiting to be fed.  Rune frowned to himself.  Where was he?  He was on his ship.  He blinked.  The air felt fuzzy and hot.  He could smell blood.  His?  Only a little!  

He could remember not very much less than usual.  He darted his tongue out, tasting himself.  He was warm.  His lips had cracked.  He'd been out for perhaps several hours and dehydrated somewhat.  He could taste something a little gritty, like shell.  Like sand.  

Rune blinked again and opened his eyes very slowly, and his surroundings spun into place.  Broken paneling, spraying sparks.  Blinking red lights.  Every system on the ship blared out its misfortune.  The Fortune's Fool could be so prissy when she got hurt.  He tried to move his arms and found they still worked, though when he tried to lift his left he found it latticed with blood, mashed against a broken panel.  He flexed his hand and arm, and felt the tendons move beneath the skin; it still worked.  Fine.  Next he groped beneath his suit, freeing the zipper, and reached in to feel the charms resting against the hot curves of his ribs.  Those were bruised, but he sucked in a long, experimental breath and felt no discomfort.  Hehe.  Good thing he had his Coraite health symbol.  And his Betruvian numerological pendant.  All in order, all in order, all in order, good fortune follows, lucky day lucky day!  His left leg always worked but it had gone away now.  Patting for it he found only emptiness where it had been.  His hip had jammed uncomfortably into a corner; wherever the ship had landed, it lay aslant, nose buried downward, and he had sprawled across one corner of the fore port.  He extracted himself carefully, wincing at the movements, pain still blurred by surprise and glee that he was alive.  He balanced on his one good leg and cast about for his other leg.  Where was it?  It was his better leg!  It was his lucky leg.

Where was Linn?

Linn was not lucky.  Linn was not a happy puppy.  Linn was a heap of broken things in a corner covered in sticky blood.  Linn was dead.

Rune felt sad.

Then he felt better.

He took a deep breath through his teeth and cast about for his leg, which he found laying across the white window out, through which he could see nothing but white sparklies, sparkling.  Little sparkles.  He tapped at the plastine and squinted, while he fumbled the leg back into his hip socket.  His pants were torn right around the seam, and he could see flashes of metal through the fabric.  It was sand, outside.  White, sparkling sand, which he'd tasted, as some had come in through the cracks.  The air inside the ship had already taken on some of the outdoor dry aridity.  Desert.  Or a beach!  Something.

Not red sand.  He glanced back at Linn, expressionless.

Burying someone was hard in a desert.  He had to dig for several hours, during which time the faraway orange sun hardly moved in the sky.  He talked to himself while he dug, hummed, whistled under his breath, muttered.  Once he had finished, he stood over the tamped sand, which shifted and skiffed and whispered by in skeins in the breeze, and squinted this way and that, along the humped backs of white-and-gray glittering dunes, into the hazy reaches of veryveryfaraway things and things.  Sand stung the cuts on his arm and face.  A dripple-drop of blood slid down his right cheek and he caught it with a dart out of the tongue.

"A few words," he said out loud, remembering what Linn looked like.  Not fetal Linn, bloody and all wrapped up in a tarp and bundled into the slightly damp sand he had found at the bottom.  RegularLinn.  "A few words for you.  Happy times.  Hello!"  He fumbled his necklaces out and pawed through them until he came up with the turruth's claw.  For sending things on their way and resting and renewing and also six kinds of poison and good for burials somewhere wherever he had gotten it he didn't remember.  He waved it in the air.  The curved, yellow-gray bone hit the light.  He swung it a few times and then carefully returned it to his neck, patting it into place; it clinked against his charms.  "Few words few words few words."  He smiled down at the sand, squinted, and turned back to his ship.  

After he checked the system and ran a scan he knew where he was.  He even managed to repair some things, the damage superficial, though they'd had a fuel leak.  The Fortune's Fool was empty, and he had no backup.  They'd cracked the phasor crystal and run out of missiles, but okay okay!  Biggest problem was moving the ship.  Hmhmhm.  Planet, called Peromeve by some people, deserty, not very much stuff on it except a few little settlements and the stuff he'd come to get before even more rapacious pirates decided to fight him for things like fuel.  Haha.  Because he didn't have any now!  That was the spin of fortune's wheel for you.

"Round and round," he said, squeaking one thumb over the smear of blood on the forward controls.  The scanner blipped.  Blipped.  Oh hello!  Life.  Something life.  A drumlop.  What was a drumlop?  It was a big leathery deserty creature with horns.  Hello.  It could pull his ship.  Who called it a drumlop?  Some sort of taxonomist who had been out here.  Names were funny.  You'd think taxonomists would give themselves a better one.

Rune decided this very rapidly and pulled up the information on the creatures, while he kept half an eye on the tiny shapes moving amongst the dunes, miles out, in the lengthening shadows as the upwardly mobile horizon finally tipped toward the sun.  At last, ignoring the stiffening and pain in his arm and the ache in his cheek, though he took drinks of water to stave off dehydration, he made a funny little harness out of carbon filament cable.  He carefully bent a wire plug into a kind of large hook, and he strung one of the enormous rawtha fruits they kept in the cargo hold onto his makeshift fishing line.  Then, moving hand over hand, he climbed out of the ship's hatch and perched on its top, swinging the line out and over the sand.  Eventually he would get a bite.  They would like the high fructose content of the fruit, they smelled fructose (he smelled it too, it smelled like a strange grape), and its water, they liked water-bearing fruit.

And one would pull him to safety, to the settlement he had found on his scanner.  They would have fuel.  And things!  It would all work out.  

Rune hummed to himself, dangling his legs (one real, one lucky) over the edge of his ship, while it slumbered nose-down in white sand and huge leathery creatures meandered through the dunes, sniffing out his bait, and cold night fell on the desert.  Peromeve had two moons and all the both of them were very small.  He followed them across the sky, whistling out toward the stars.
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