Rite Of Passage

Marooned on a Desert Planet. A human finds a half-buried Ship in the sand.

Jarden knew he was in trouble. All systems seemed to be malfunctioning: Controls, Communications, Life Support. Ahead of him, the second planet in this system, one of Dust and Rock, loomed in front of his eyes and was coming up fast to meet him. He barely had time to get into his Life support space suit.

The outside of the ship took on a Red hue, radiating up from the planet's surface. Then the crash. Hitting the sand with the impact of a bomb exploding, Jarden bounced off the control panel. The seatbelt did little to keep him from harm. If there were no broken bones in his chest, then he would be badly bruised. Being knocked out, he had no way to know if the enemy had followed him down to finish the job they had started a light year away.

He woke up later and did not know if only minutes had passed or it had been hours. The one he did know for sure was that his ship had its final burst of glory. Now it is a pile of junk smashed into the sand on a planet he knew nothing about. He had survived the crash, but would he survive this Planet? That is the trillion-dollar question for which he had no answer.

Crawling from the wreckage took some time and planning. He would need some key things for survival, and most of them were under pieces of a wrecked spaceship. That his suit was intact with no rips, and the helmet was not cracked to leak out what precious oxygen he had, a major factor in his survival.

The canope was broken in many places, so he busted the rest of the way out to have better access to the outside. With deliberate movements, not to tax his strength and life support, he gradually rummaged through his ship and made ready to explore his new home, such as it was. The homing beacon he took out of the spaceship, as it would do nobody any good to come to his rescue and find only a smashed, beyond-repair ship of the fleet.

Saying goodbye to his ship, his companion through many battles, was like saying goodbye to an old friend. He walked away into the sandy landscape toward a distant point, a point he picked out by closing his eyes and pointing in that direction. The sand beneath his boots varied from being as hard as rock to almost like water, swallowing up every step he took.

Jarden could not see any mountains to indicate rock formations, only sand hills, to be swept about by a wind that was gentle at times and fierce when not. Up and down small hills, he trudged, always wondering what was over the horizon. As he got to the top of another hill, he could see off in the distance a huge sand hill. One he could think of as a Mountain. He set his sights on that mountain of sand and put one foot in front of the other.

Jarden did not look back behind him; he figured there was no reason, his ship was miles in the past. Had he bothered to take the time, he would have seen the sand move as something slithered beneath it, and that slithering followed him. It would stop when he did. In time, he would find out he would be in the Battle of his life. A battle not to live with what he had been given, but to survive.

The Orlon beneath the sand hunted by vibrations, and the thing making all that noise above it sounded delicious. It could not wait to wrap itself around the intruder, squeeze its razor-sharp spikes into it, secreting a neurotoxin that paralyzed its victim, but letting it be alive as it ate the victim.

Jarden paused as he checked his life support. Those two suns were scorching, but his suit kept him at a controlled cool temperature. The outside readings showed the temperature was over a hundred and fifty degrees and rising. He needed to find some kind of shelter, and soon as his suit could only do so much. He did not want to be broiled to death.