Good evening everyone! I hope that you are all having a delightful Saturday!
Please leave your feedback, I would really appreciate it! If you have your own response to this prompt, feel free to share it! If you like what you are reading here, check out my other writing exercises and my books!
Prompt: The branches whipped at his flesh. The undergrowth beneath his feet snapped as he thundered through the forest. His eyes were wide in terror. His heart was palpitating with the tension. The sun was setting and with it any hope of…
Genre: Science Fiction
Source: 10 Creative Writing Prompts To Do in 10 Mins | Lore Blog
Time Spent: 25 minutes
Word Count: 1086
Prompt: The branches whipped at his flesh. The undergrowth beneath his feet snapped as he thundered through the forest. His eyes were wide in terror. His heart was palpitating with the tension. The sun was setting and with it any hope of…
Sylvio Caran was running as fast as he could. His breath was ragged, his spacesuit torn to shreds, and his feet, even in their boots, and limbs all ached from the strain. It felt like his heart was going to burst from his chest, but still he ran on, clutching the cracked but still functioning control circuit to his chest. With the sun setting ahead of him and shadows and night growing behind him, it felt that he was racing to outrun the darkness, and in a way, he was.
Thundering over a low ridge, the forest began to peter out and in a distant clearing stood the small scout ship he had come from, the Sun Seeker. They had been getting towards the end of the area that they had been contracted by the Earth Senate to survey, when their captain Julia Stangar, had gone crazy and landed them (almost crashing) on this planet. She had always been a bit eccentric, but the madness had come on her suddenly. After the hard landing, they had thought they had properly restrained her for the journey home, but she had escaped and taken the main control circuit for the ship with her. This would not have been a problem, they could have fabricated another, but for the planet they had landed on.
They had, luckily, gotten data from their scanners before the captain had forced the landing, so they knew that this planet, Epsilon Caria IV, had a phenomenon where the temperature would drop by more than 100 degrees shortly after the coming of darkness, which meant that the terminator between light and dark on the planet had powerful wind and lightning storms that followed shortly afterward. It was highly unlikely that their scout ship, held together by hope and luck as much as by bolts and wires, would survive such a storm. Therefore, Sylvio, the first officer and surveyor, and therefore least useful in patching up what had been damaged on the hard landing, was sent after the captain.
Even with a bio scanner, it had taken him the better part of the day to find her, having apparently run straight off a cliff onto rock below. He was relieved to see that the control circuit did not seem to be damaged. She took the few personal effects that the captain, and an old friend of his, had on her. He built a small stone cairn around his body, hoping the coming storms would leave it play, and left a tracking marker with it, vowing to return as soon as it was possible to do so, to retrieve the body so her family could have a proper burial. He also did a quick med-scan on her, hoping that when the data was analyzed they could determine what had happened to her. ‘Space Psychosis’ as it was sometimes called was not unknown, but it was still poorly understood and seemingly random.
Seeing the sky begin to dim in the distance, and the ominous clouds arching over the horizon, he had started to run back. He was forced to run through a much denser section of the forest of gnarled and whiplike ‘trees’ and thorny undergrowth. His spacesuit was ripped to shreds, his arms and legs along with it, but he had no time to stop and worry, or be more cautious. He just hoped that there was nothing toxic or infections to humans about. The air and gravity were a little lighter than earth normal, but with a slightly higher oxygen content, without which he probably could not have run for so long.
At last, with darkness and the storms mere moments away, Sylio staggered through the airlock of the ship, its systems already revving up for takeoff, and handed the control circuit, which coordinated the systems of the ship which allowed them to have such a small crew, to their computer technician. His work was done, he was no pilot and would be little use of getting the ship back into space. Technically, he was captain now, but most of the crew had worked together for years, and they did not need him for the liftoff, plus they could always reach him by intercom.
As he limped, arms and legs burning, toward the medical bay, he could feel and hear the hum of the artificial magnetic field that both gave gravity to the ship and allowed them to take off and land from planets without their main engines and minimal use of their thrusters. He lay down on one of the two meds, and turned on the med system, which began to treat the many cuts and bruises on his arms and legs, attached an IV for rapid re-hydration, and gave him a few rounds of broad-spectrum immune support agents.
The medical system tilted the bed as the ship began tilting backwards. Clearly, their pilot had determined that they needed their main sub-light engines to clear the storms in time, a little sooner than it would normally be necessary. A few seconds later, he was pushed hard into the bed, rather painful with his sore and torn up limbs, as the main engines fired to rapidly increase their altitude. After a minute or two, the thrust became minimal and the bed tilted back into its original position, parallel to the floor.
He pulled up a screen in front of him, and saw from system status that they were free of the planet’s primary gravity field and were moving further away towards the nearest point where the various gravity fields of the system allowed a jump into Warp Space for the return flight, their ship was in no condition to finish their mission. He was pleased to see that someone had even had the courtesy to turn on his scanners and continue collecting data. Seeing that the crew. . his crew. . .he would have to get used to that, had everything well in hand, he tapped a few keys to have the system give him a mile stimulant, and then began recording his logs and reports of everything that had happened in the previous 14 hours while it was all fresh in his mind. Once that was done, a few other key strokes provided him with a mild sedative, but after all his exertion, plus the calming hum of the magnetic core and main engine echoing throughout the ship, he was asleep quickly, glad that he and his crew were alive, and missing his old friend.
A quick little sci-fi story for today.
Please, leave your thoughts, comments, and feedback. A like and follow of my website would be great and I would be psyched if you check out my other writing and my books!
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
Leave a comment