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Prompt: The main character’s spaceship is destroyed on a planet, so he needs to look for a new one. But just then a giant alien arrives, making his task much more difficult.
Genre: Science Fiction
Source: 110+ Sci-Fi Writing Prompts (+ Generator) | Imagine Forest
Time Spent: 30 minutes
Word Count: 787
Prompt: The main character’s spaceship is destroyed on a planet, so he needs to look for a new one. But just then a giant alien arrives, making his task much more difficult.
Karak Hadron had gathered the crystals that he had been sent to Quadron to collect. The planet barely had an atmosphere, generated by the small habitable zone on the planet’s equator, and just barely enough gravity. Karak had landed well to the south of the habitable zone, in the desolate, stony wasteland that made up the rest of the planet. The planet happened to be a great source of crystals that made ideal Warp Lenses.
It was also a fact that mining the crystals without a permit was, decidedly, illegal. The planet was sparsely populated and at the very edge of human space, so he was far from the only smuggler operating out there and this was not the first time he had accepted a job to come mine some. Luck was, however, not with him that day.
As he skirted around a hill that was a little too steep and loose to climb to come into view of his ship, the Crimson Sprite, just in time to see two E.S.F.R Patrol Fighters dive out of the sky, fire two A.R.T’s each, and his prized ship disappear in a ball of flame. Karak threw himself behind a tall rock, but he didn’t have bothered. The fighters were already climbing back to their patrol altitude, no doubt thinking that whoever the ship belonged to, if they weren’t in or near enough the ship to die, was now stranded many hundreds of miles from anywhere.
Karak cursed and swore at the sky until he was short of breath, not long in the thin air, and then silently cursed himself for not doing a better job of camouflaging his ship. Once he had it out of his system, he turned on the spot and made his way toward the distant mountains.
Karak had always been a practical person, which is why he had put on his full environment suit and a fully stocked pack. He could survive weeks, maybe a month if he stretched his supplies, but he would not need to. He was pretty confident that the Frontier Rangers were not aware of a major mining operation merely a hundred miles away from where he had landed, or else they had been paid off to look the other way. Even with them having an entire mining operation, he had found a bag full of good quality and sized crystals, no doubt he could barter a way off the planet, or perhaps even get a small system hopper. It would take some hard work to get a ship of the quality of The Crimson Sprite and get back to where he was, but he had some savings, was a talented smuggler, crystal hunter, occasional bounty hunter, and general ship for hire in the frontier.
Karak had made it almost half the distance to the hidden camp of illegal miners, crossing a wide, flat expanse of shifting gravel, with the grey-blue mountains in the distance now dominating the area in front of him. It was early the following morning, with Karak having taken a rest for a few hours at night. With the lighter gravity and a small dose of stims, he was making quick progress.
The field of shifting gravel was rather odd to him. His familiarity with Quadron was limited, but he had never heard of such a terrain on the planet before. What oddness he felt, was put down in his haste, which he realized a little too late, as the gravel began to tremble.
Gravel exploded about a hundred meters in front of him and a creature that Karak likened to an earth insect erupted out of the ground. It stood at least a dozen meters tall, had a hard and well-worn exoskeleton, a protruding maw of razor-sharp teeth that clicked open and closed in four parts, and each leg ended in a fearsome, wide claw. Karak stopped counting the number of legs when he hit fifteen.
Karak kicked himself again for not considering that the approach to illegal camps and settlements were often setup with some kind of natural defense such as this to prevent those who would sneak up on foot. No one knew for certain where such creatures came from, only that in the wide and tangled web that was the Black Market of a society now spread across hundreds of star systems and thousands of planets, particularly in frontier space, such things were whispered of and those who felt the need for one often managed to find it.
As the huge creature sized him up and advanced slowly, Karak sighed to himself as he thought through his options and muttered to himself, “this really isn’t my week, and yesterday started so promisingly too.”
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I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day; you get the chance to do or experience something creative, and I’ll catch you all on the next one!
– Jon
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