Extra-Vehicular Activity

by alamais


Jump (redux)

You drag yourself awake, head pounding. You can still see the orange glow of alien daylight through a tangled forest of twisted metal and plastic.

A glance at your countdown—'3.2 m'—tells you all you need to know. Heaving the corner of a shelf off your body, you untangle yourself and stand. You jump, and grab the end of a pipe. It shifts slightly, but holds. You crawl through the web of debris, avoiding sharp edges and unstable hoofholds as well as you can.

As you reach the top of the heap, you're looking up. You can see the aft half of the ship. While the half you're on is still nosediving, the other half is unstable, spinning and breaking apart, turning into an expanding cloud of debris. Past it you can see the ring, now trailing far behind, its shape giving it more drag in the atmosphere.

You stand, and look at your flight path. Ahead are the green beams of the gravity tethers. You've veered a tiny bit off-course, but you'll only be a few dozen meters away as you pass by. Crawling over to what's left of the starboard side, you prepare to jump.

Then, a vice clamps around your hoof, and you're dragged down into another hole in the debris.

You hold your other hoof away from it, and grab onto the first thing you can, feeling like it's going to pull your leg off. You kick at it, but can't get a good angle. Then you notice a long, pale leg creeping up over a box right in front of your face.

As the spider pounces at you, you let go of your hold and grab it, then swing it around to slam right into the mouth of its big brother. Big bro bites reflexively, then squeals as acidic blood pours into its mouth. The spider falls away, broken, but the damned monster grabs at you again. You grab for the nearest thing you can find, a locker door, but pause and blink when you see the photo taped to the inside: one of the ship aliens, wearing very little clothing, and striking a pose that even a different species can tell is provocative.

Then you shake your head, and start beating the monster over the head with the locker door, screaming at it. "BUCK. OFF. YOU. CREEPY. FREAKSHOW." The blood in its mouth quickly eats a hole through the thin metal, but you just keep hitting it, until one last resounding BANG ends with its head sticking right through the hole, blocking its arms.

You dive upwards, kicking at debris as you pass to collapse the tunnel behind you. You get to the top, and see green beams in your peripheral vision, so you don't even think—you just jump.

The wind almost snaps your wings off, but you manage some sort of control. When you hit the edge of a beam, you feel like someone just went after you with a locker door, but you lose some of your momentum, and spin across the gap to the other side of the circle of green light.

You hit the next beam full-on, and a giant monster made of gravitational gradients stomps on you, breaking every bone in your body.

...


...

Okay, maybe not every bone, but you're a mess. You just hang there, floating upward. You're barely cognizant of the ring passing by, far below. Your focus is more on the crack in your faceplate, highlighted by a plume of escaping air visible on the outside. Your overlay is gone, so you must be completely out of power.

You're not sure what you should do, but you should do something, right? But you're so tired. It'll be fine. You'll just take a little rest, then you'll get right on it.

Blurry stars fill your vision, as your eyes drift shut…