The heat shimmered off the blue sand as a blue lizard with pink sun glasses was telling me I would have to move along because I was sitting on his towel. Then, a dark red bush butted in and said that since the lizard had been gone so long how did the lizard know this was his towel. Well, that just made the lizard nervous and I could tell he was starting to get angry. So, I told him that if he could find it he could have the towel. I even tried to help him find it, which he said was blue, about the color of the sand we were sitting on.
I looked around where I was sitting and suddenly, I saw a patch of red in the blue sand. As I focused on the red I began to see the outline of a rag of blue cloth. But this couldn't be the towel we were looking for. The red patch seemed to be just a shapeless blob. It reminded me of something but I couldn't put my finger on it. I reached down and touched the spot. My fingers came away sticky. I marveled that anything could stay damp in this heat. Then it dawned on me that there must be a source of that stickiness under the rag. It was just a rag not a towel. It wasn't even blue anymore. It was ... blood red, yes blood.
Something clicked in my head. The sand was still blue but I couldn't see the lizard anywhere and the bush was minding its own business for a change. God, my leg hurt. It was my blood, of course, but why was it outside instead of inside my body where it belonged?
Memory returned with a crash but I was too busy reliving the last twenty hours to notice these sound effects.
* * *
Everything had gone wrong from the beginning. I had just launched from the cruiser on a normal reckon mission, when three enemy gunships jumped me, too far, already, from the cruiser to get any help from there. Out gunned, I ran for the asteroid field which used to be the planet that circled this star. My ship could easily outrun the lumbering gunships but by the time I was out of range of their lasers I'd just be a ball of plasma floating through space. In the orbital debris I stood a chance of escape.
It was close. With all the evasive maneuvers I had to take my speed was reduced to a crawl. Already the Gunnies were hammering away at my tail end. But, I wasn't totally defenseless. The ajax missiles I carried in the aft tubes lanced out at the ships on my tail.
Now, while the missiles exploded, giving me some cover, I had time to maneuver. I shot into the asteroid field like a bat out of hell. After entry I continued at my previous break neck pace for no more than two long seconds before I was at zero motion relative to the rocks around me.
The idiots back in the gunships finally got throgh turning my little gifts into novas and started searching for me again. As the they brushed the surface of my ship with thier long range search radars, I griped my stick tighter and tried to think like a rock. With the two gunships waiting for me like a pair of confused blood hounds, I didn't stand a chance of escape unless I could take out both ships before they knew what was going on; nearly impossible.
It was impossible. I waited until both ships seemed to be focused away from my direction, launched out of the belt directly at them, and fired two missles at each ship. I followed the missles, brushing through explosions of light and plasma as the gunships tried to fry them. Catching both by supprise, I launched my last two missles at minimum range. The first gunship was destroyed outright. I felt good.
I have always felt that one was wiser to wory about the guy in seccond place, rather than the one in first. The one in second place is close enough to first to be very good but not good enough to be lazy. The second gunship slammed several well placed bursts of plasma into the electronics of my ship before the last missile exploded and tore it in half.
I was in trouble, but not desperate. Not yet, anyway.
My real problems began when I realized that I was in orbit around a planet and that the orbit was decaying rapidly. After I had assessed the damage my ship had sustained, I began to be desperate. I had only enough control over my thrusters to slow my descent from the terminal to the merely deadly.
I didn't notice much about the planet on the way down, except that I seemed to be heading for a vast ocean and that there wasn't a cloud in the sky that I could see. The crash was sickening. I managed to keep my angle of approach fairly flat, but my speed was high. When the ship touched down and began to slide I tried to relax. As the ship turned sideways and began to roll I started to scream. After the broken glass, plastic, and other debris stopped falling around me, and I began to smell smoke, I stopped screaming and used the emergency exit to exit from this emergency.
I didn't notice the heat, the blue sand, or my broken leg until after I was knocked to the ground by the explosion of my ship. I just watched as the pieces returned to the surface after thier last flight and discussed my landing technique with the bush until a rude lizard started bugging me about his towel.
* * *
The bush was back and it was madder than ever. Just think of a red bush turning a deeper shade of red and shouting obscenities and claiming that I not only didn't know how to fly but that I was increadbly lucky that I was in a ship at all when I crashed. What a splash I would have made as I hit the water, just like the time on Gilmore's world, when I had downed two enemies by making them laugh themselves to death as they watched me franticly attempt to stop my ship's spiral toward the ocean that covered most of that wet hell.
Copyright 1999, Robert G. Werner
robert@inreachtech.netUNIX enhancements aren't.