[ Welcome to Impact ]
[ 01: Planetfall ]
[ 02: Washed Up ]
[ 03: The Beach ]
[ 04: An Un-natural Cave ]
[ 05: Conjunction ]
[ 06: Contemplating the Singularity ]
- More to come
[ Appendices: Random Stats and Stuff ]
[ Some public domain OpenSim textures ]
[ My VR WishList ]
Water -- more than imaginable! Having to paddle across several kilometres of it in the dark with cracked ribs was not much fun. An odd current dragged me past the crater edges and to a beach of coarse sand that had collected within. Weird, but I have no direct experience of oceans or their currents: it felt like I was being towed, but I was in so much shock and pain I felt all sorts of things that probably weren't quite real!
Lying here in the dark on a sandy beach. It is cool but not cold -- all the better for my burned skin. I drag myself up the beach a bit and scream into the empty sky as I roll myself over. The pod-door and its embedded medikit is bobbing in the water threatening to drift away. I haul myself back to the water's edge and drag it up the beach. There is not much I can do for the ribs except stay as still as possible. There is salve for the burns.
A few hours have passed. I am exhausted but in too much pain to sleep. Every slight motion rakes pain through my body. Breathing too deeply is agony. The sun is coming up. I pull the pod-door over on its concave side and move myself under it for shade from the sun on my burned skin. The bio-regenerative salve is working, but the burns are deep and taking time to heal.
Days and nights are about three hours each. I managed some badly interrupted sleep over the next night. My burns are healing slowly but surely. The cracked ribs are still very tender and I move as little as possible. I am very thirsty.
Another day. My thirst over-rides my pain and I drag myself to the water's edge. The water is brackish -- I can drink it for a short time without ill effect, but it won't sustain me. There are things swimming in it -- small jelly-fish. They stay away from where my hands are disturbing the water as I sip. The rock has small crustaceans attached. I don't touch them -- could be venomous. My stomach rumbles -- nothing safe to eat here. When I am starving I will try to eat some local sea-life. It will almost certainly poison me: alien lifeforms almost never have a biostructure usable by life of a different planet's evolutionary tree. There are usually toxicity issues.
Stone is an interesting surface. I have seen stones before of course, some as big as my head. Mostly chunks of asteroid, though a few from actual planets. One reputed to be from Earth itself in the habitation museum (now either burned up or at the bottom of the sea). But a planet-sized stone!! (After all, that is what a planet is as I have always known at an intellectual level.) Walking on stone!
The sky is like a really really high ceiling. And a horizon!!! A real one - not just pictures of one. Atmosphere held in place by gravity, rather than a physical barrier. I shudder as I recall the loss of that barrier on the habitation ring still hours out from planetfall. The size of the open space is sometimes overwhelming and I have to crawl under my pod-door where I can feel enclosed!
The six-hour days are surprisingly easy to deal with - I end up going to sleep an hour after dark, sleep through the next day and night, wake up around the next dawn. Then three days and two nights awake. The sunrises are lovely!
Eight local days on, I'm feeling somewhat better. My ribs are still tender but the burns are largely regenerated. I have wandered this small beach and a little way into the rocks surrounding it. Some useful things have washed up over the past days, which is odd considering some are rather heavy items and I can't see how they could have washed up the side of the sea-floor rather than sinking to the depths! I am most grateful for this flotsam including a food-grade nano-fabricator module with enough memory intact to produce something akin to survival rations. Without that I would already be eating the local jellyfish and probably dying of it! While graded for food, these devices are capable of manufacturing a fairly wide range of small items -- from microchips to fabrics of various types. You need the base components (can be somewhat hard to come by in deep space, but rock, sand and organics are abundant where I am now) and the templates (for which I only seem to have basic foodstuffs and clothing). I won't be running out of clean knickers any time soon!
I used some electrical cable wound around my paddle with the fulcrum wedged in a crack in a rock under the sand as an improvised pull-wind-push winch to pull the heavier stuff up the beach to the cliff-face before another strange current decided to take it away again. My service pod was beached in the water not far off shore. I used the electrical cable as an umbilical back to shore lest I got swept out to sea and paddled out to it. I was able to haul it into shallower water but it is too big and heavy to haul out. I have begun stripping it of parts. I am especially interested in its tool kits and inboard computer, the latter of which seems unpowered but intact. I am pretty sure I can tap the nano-fabber's power unit to drive it as long as the compute-core has remained intact and watertight.
[ Chapter 03: The Beach ]>