An Enduring Persistence

His head pounded and his body ached, feeling like he had been tossed into a terraforming machine and spat out as mulch. Groaning, he went to sit up, his helmet hitting the hatch above. He strained his arm to push it open, but his muscles refused to respond.

Resigned to the fact he had to lie still while his body recovered from the hard landing, he coaxed his eyes open, only to immediately slam them shut against the bright, glaring light of the planet’s sun shining through the hatch window.

After years in space, he had forgotten how bright it could be planetside. He hadn’t set foot on a terra firma since cadet training and his body felt crushed beneath who knows how much real gravity.

After a few minutes, his hands and feet began to tingle, a sensation he knew would soon become the tortuous pins and needles of limbs waking up. He wiggled his fingers and let out a pained sound as the blood returned, stabbing up his arms. Forcing his limbs to cooperate, he wrenched his hand up, felt around for the handle, and pushed the door’s latch. It opened with a pop and hiss as the seal broke and air rushed into the cramped, egg-shaped pod.

With the hatch out of the way, he was able to sit up and feel the wind whip around him - real atmosphere! The feeling was almost surreal and he longed to open his eyes to see it all. He felt along his sleeve, bypassing the biometric scanners and emergency alerts, and found the controls for his helmet. Turning the dial to increase the shade of his visor, he set it to max for now until his eyes adjusted.

Finally, he looked out at the landscape around his pod. It was a barren desert with craggy hills pockmarking the terrain. He could see far into the horizon, the hills not high enough to block his view. Everything was cast in a deep purple hue from his visor, so he was unable to discern the world’s true colors. There were spindly trees rising from the sand, their twisting branches reaching for the sun. They bore no leaves and resembled the arching horns of the bovidae creatures he’d seen on vids.

He turned his attention back to the controls in his suit and ran a scan of the planet’s atmosphere. It was breathable, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, so he hastily opened the vents in his helmet and removed the mouthpiece.

Sucking in a deep breath, he relished the icy sting as air filled his lungs, even as they protested with a shuddering rattle. His chest ached with the effort, but the air smelled clean, free of the ever-present stink of body odor that was inescapable with atmo recyclers on ships. He opened his mouth to taste it, wanting it to infuse his pores and sink into his bloodstream.

After another searing breath, he used the array programmed into his helmet to tap into the nearest satellite. When the image came into focus, the blood drained from his face. There, scattered like stars on a clear night, were the shattered remains of the UFF Phoenix.

He had been stationed on the Phoenix for six months when it received the order. They were to travel to a planet in a nearby system to retrieve intel from an undercover source that promised the location of the V’izan’s main base of operations. A targeted strike there could put the United Federal Fleet in position to wipe out the V'izan for good and turn the tide of the war.

The Phoenix successfully rendezvoused with the informant and obtained the starmap, but was attacked between hyperspace jumps on the way back to the main fleet. Losing the ship would be a blow to the UFF, its resources already spread so thin, but losing the map would be the end. He’d known he had to ensure it made it off the ship and was delivered safely, so he had downloaded the map onto an info drive, buckled himself into an escape pod, and set the nav to the closest planet. The last thing he remembered before waking up on the planet was the ship shuddering from a massive hit and his body bouncing off the wall of the pod.

Feeling around his suit, wincing whenever he brushed against another growing bruise, he found the small lump of the drive in his interior breast pocket and released a sigh of relief.

Using the dial on his sleeve, he lessened the tint of his visor slowly, allowing his eyes to adjust. Once clear, he looked around again and saw that the ground was a pale beige, tinted with red, as if there were rubies embedded in the sand. Hoisting himself out of the pod, he immediately tumbled forward, still not used to the heavy gravity pulling him down.

As he sat next to the small, single-person capsule, he knew he should run a biometric scan, but could tell by the rattle in his lungs that he wouldn't like the results. Instead, he marveled at the novel sensation of sand sifting through the fingers of his gloves before hesitantly tuning back into the satellite’s images of his former ship.

The body was riddled with gaping holes as it slowly spun on an aimless axis, dead and floating through space. Pieces of debris surrounded it, like the seeds of a dandelion blown gently into the air. Occasionally, a light would glow from the interior of the ship before blinking into darkness, the last embers of life extinguished by the apathy of space. It seemed so serene compared to the violent explosions he knew must have caused such destruction.

Turning off the feed of the wreckage, he lifted his right arm and flipped up the panel covering the delicate communications equipment. He activated the pre-programmed distress signal to loop on the UFF’s encrypted network. Hopefully, someone would get the message and come to retrieve him, he just had to wait and keep the starmap safe until it could be uploaded at the UFF base. He leaned back against the hull of his pod and closed his eyes against the steadily increasing pain behind his ribs.

The decade-long war with the V’izan had decimated the UFF’s numbers, the surface of the alliance planets having become V’izan targets and millions had been wiped out in the initial strikes. What was left of the civilian population had crowded into underground bunker cities or onto generation ships.

He remembered living in one of the underground cities for about six months before enlisting, surrounded by the detritus and debris of cramped human occupation. The prospect of dying in space had seemed a better alternative to living in the unbearable heat and squalor of the bunker. For the people he left behind, surviving was its own act of rebellion against the V’izan scourge - an enduring persistence that wouldn’t go out without a fight. Even so, he knew that, without this starmap, humanity would be wiped out in the next few years. This small info drive would be the key to bringing the UFF back from the brink.

Movement caught his eye on the horizon. The flash and crackle of a signal flare just beyond a ridge in the distance. He tried to jump to his feet, making it only part way before falling back to his knees in the sand. He smiled wide, anticipation rising in his chest. Others had survived the attack and made it to the planet. The dread that had taken hold of him when the Phoenix had been attacked gave way to the bubbling fizz of hope.

Pushing his aching body to stand, he set off across the alien desert toward the flare. His feet dragged through the deep sand, his body heavy and battered, the pain in his chest growing worse, but he kept walking. He would crawl there if he had to. He would survive this. The UFF would survive.

The sun was starting to set as the desert plain stretched ahead of him. His stumbling steps got him no closer to the flare’s location. He was losing the fight against his injuries from the crash, the heavy gravity, and the sand sucking at his boots. He had to make it to the ridge ahead. He had to keep going, his determination to continue on as insistent as the shrill beeping of his helmet’s bio-alert.

Finally, inevitably, his legs collapsed beneath him and he fell forward, limp, with a muffled thump. He reached one hand out and tried to pull himself onward, but there was no grip in the yielding sand. His legs pushed fruitlessly, only managing to dig divots into the malleable earth. With a shuddering breath, he rolled onto his back and stared at the darkening sky.

He knew the ruins of the Phoenix hung suspended, just beyond the opaque atmosphere. Its broken corpse floated above while his own lay crushed upon the sand. Darkness crept into the corners of his eyes. He wasn’t going to make it.

He lifted his leaden arm and touched the auto-fastener to unzip the front of his suit. Reaching into the interior pocket, he grabbed the info drive and gripped it tightly. With his other hand he reached back into the pocket and removed his own emergency flare. Straightening his arm as much as he could, he pulled the trigger.

The flare shot into the air above him with a fiery tail, exploding in a shower of reds, yellows, and oranges. The flames burst like wings spreading across his vision before fading and dissipating in the gentle evening breeze.

He lay there, gripping the info drive tight in his fist, letting the haze of oblivion settle over him. His vision darkened further, but he didn’t know if it was night falling completely or his own mind winking out. Then he heard it, distantly, through the muffled final dregs of consciousness - voices - human voices.

He could feel hands touching him, checking the biometric readouts on his sleeves and feeling around his helmet for the latch. As the helmet lifted from his head, he heard the voices again.

“What’s that in his hand?”