A man was dying on a moon.
The advanced suit that was wrapped around his broken body, beeped and flashed red showing him exactly which of his numerous wounds was killing him.
While it had hardened around the damaged areas acting like a tourniquet and given him the drugs that deadened the pain and kept him conscious he was simply too broken for the suits rudimentary life support systems to keep from bleeding out let alone manage to heal him to a functional level.
So, in short, he was dying.
Painfully slowly he managed to turn and lie on what was left of his back. From there he could use the suits exoskeleton to turn his head and take a look around.
At first he thought he was in a city
"On this moon?"
but he soon realized that what lay around him where huge wrecks, pieces of the Hoyden the ship that until today he had been stationed on. Twenty years he had been aboard, his fellow crew acting as a family and the ship as a spacefaring home.
All gone now...
He was heading the same way. Just a few minutes ago he could see a large piece of wreckage which looked like an engine yet it had now faded in darkness. Slowly the darkness was approaching as if it was coming to engulf him.
He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
"Wait...The Darkness moves?"
His eyes flew open. Engaging the small servomotors of his suit he turned his head.
While on his left it was getting darker everything on his right looked normal.
He briefly considered that he was hallucinating nice bright lights from blood loss or the suit administrating too much pain relief but he felt pretty clearheaded.
That left one possibility.
He looked up.
And the world looked back at him.
Pradosh the inhabited planet of this system which this moon orbited looked huge from this distance, covered most of what he could see.
The man lay stunned for a while for seeing the planet from this close had overloaded what his senses could handle. As he cleared his head he figured out what was casuing the enroaching darkness.
A Pradosh day was long as it's orbit was quite wide but it's moon orbited it in what would be 12 Terran hours. For 1 of those hours Pradosh stood between the moon and the sun effectively performing a daily eclipse. During this hour the moon's temperature drops considerably to reach
-113°C from it's usual 86°C.
He could see that was what was about to happen. Even now only half of the sun was visible, his suits visor automatically shielding him from the full glare.
This was very bad news. Normally his spacesuit, a standard model Orlon 633X, could withstand temperatures down to 130 in extreme circumstances.
That would be quite useful if the aforementioned hadn't had a few dozen holes riddled on it. The holes had been sealed with an anti-breach foam but it was not enough and he would freeze to death in a matter of minutes. He doubted the pain relief drugs could keep him from feeling himself slowly burn from cold.
The best outcome he could say was that he died before that happened.
"Fuck" he managed to breath out.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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The advanced suit that was wrapped around his broken body, beeped and flashed red showing him exactly which of his numerous wounds was killing him.
While it had hardened around the damaged areas acting like a tourniquet and given him the drugs that deadened the pain and kept him conscious he was simply too broken for the suits rudimentary life support systems to keep from bleeding out let alone manage to heal him to a functional level.
So, in short, he was dying.
Painfully slowly he managed to turn and lie on what was left of his back. From there he could use the suits exoskeleton to turn his head and take a look around.
At first he thought he was in a city
"On this moon?"
but he soon realized that what lay around him where huge wrecks, pieces of the Hoyden the ship that until today he had been stationed on. Twenty years he had been aboard, his fellow crew acting as a family and the ship as a spacefaring home.
All gone now...
He was heading the same way. Just a few minutes ago he could see a large piece of wreckage which looked like an engine yet it had now faded in darkness. Slowly the darkness was approaching as if it was coming to engulf him.
He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
"Wait...The Darkness moves?"
His eyes flew open. Engaging the small servomotors of his suit he turned his head.
While on his left it was getting darker everything on his right looked normal.
He briefly considered that he was hallucinating nice bright lights from blood loss or the suit administrating too much pain relief but he felt pretty clearheaded.
That left one possibility.
He looked up.
And the world looked back at him.
Pradosh the inhabited planet of this system which this moon orbited looked huge from this distance, covered most of what he could see.
The man lay stunned for a while for seeing the planet from this close had overloaded what his senses could handle. As he cleared his head he figured out what was casuing the enroaching darkness.
A Pradosh day was long as it's orbit was quite wide but it's moon orbited it in what would be 12 Terran hours. For 1 of those hours Pradosh stood between the moon and the sun effectively performing a daily eclipse. During this hour the moon's temperature drops considerably to reach
-113°C from it's usual 86°C.
He could see that was what was about to happen. Even now only half of the sun was visible, his suits visor automatically shielding him from the full glare.
This was very bad news. Normally his spacesuit, a standard model Orlon 633X, could withstand temperatures down to 130 in extreme circumstances.
That would be quite useful if the aforementioned hadn't had a few dozen holes riddled on it. The holes had been sealed with an anti-breach foam but it was not enough and he would freeze to death in a matter of minutes. He doubted the pain relief drugs could keep him from feeling himself slowly burn from cold.
The best outcome he could say was that he died before that happened.
"Fuck" he managed to breath out.
TO BE CONTINUED.
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ooooooooooohhhhhhh man!!!!!!!!! Another awesome beginning of uncompleted story!!!!!!!!! You have started so many of them and you never finished any!
ReplyDeleteAs one of many followers I demand ENDINGS!!!!!!
Well it keeps things interesting....you never know which one I'll finish ;D
DeleteMy backhair now look like skycrapers! But....How did he come to this situation? What caused Hoyden to crash and what happened to the rest of the crew? Hmmmm...perhaps, before the end a flashback could be written regarding these events as the next chapter...maybe... :-P
ReplyDelete