Concerto

Tuesday

One bullet. One bullet is all I'll need.
My vision is swimming, and I can barely move for the pain that is travelling through my body. I've purged everything I had in me to purge, and if I focus really hard, I can see that I still have twenty yards or so to reach the ship.
Twenty yards, sixty feet; it may as well be sixty miles. I'm not going to make it. Violent retching again, and I give up and lay down next to the pile of bloody vomit, praying for death. Yellow will be the colour of my defeat; yellow leaves of poison.
I know I must be nearing the end now, for my mind is taking me down whimsical pathways. One of the huge bird-like creatures that I have never seen up close is standing before me, waiting for me to die and become the carrion it must eat. From here, it looks like an angel of death - a huge, scaley, black angel ... and it's singing softly. I close my eyes and wait for it ...

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My ship crashed onto this small, rocky planet many years ago. I lost count of the seasons turning after forty or so. I don’t even know how the seasons here translate to the seasons on Tiran, but I do know that I have barely felt the passage of years. I know it has been years since I landed; the ship’s clock finally stopped at eleven years, three months, and twenty days. It is that day that I finally gave up all hope of rescue.

My mission was pretty basic: find and survey habitable planets within the local solar system, and two neighboring ones. It went well for the first three years, until I ran into an unexpected asteroid belt. It wasn’t supposed to be there, in fact, it wasn’t even there the first time I flew that sector of space. Somehow, in the eleven months that I was on the other side, asteroids appeared right in my flight path.

I took a few hits, and thought I had cleared it with only minimal damage, but my steering was knocked out of whack, and I could not avoid a larger meteor. A glancing blow from a rock that was eight times my ship’s size knocked me right off the charted path, and locked the accelerating jets into place.

Dear Renenet, I miss Terran vegetables and fruit.

Sorry. Sometimes, my thoughts become disjointed, and I forget what mental path I was taking. It might be a side effect of the loneliness, the isolation, or it could be an aspect of a physical condition. I suppose it no longer matters. I’ll be here and alone until the day I die.

The atmosphere here is pretty favorable. Moderate temperatures with an easy transition between the seasons, if this planet had been on my route, I would have marked it for future habitation. With the right equipment, humans could easily survive long-term here.

For myself, though, I was never meant to leave my ship. Survey and mark off as habitable or not, resource rich or barren, all done from a respectable distance from the surface. The ship was self-sustaining, and would have kept me comfortably, if not luxuriously, for the 56 month voyage.