Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 280(@200wpm)___ 224(@250wpm)___ 187(@300wpm)
My sunny peace lasts about two minutes before I hear a rustling in the bushes. I open my eyes, which is already an inconvenience, and find myself looking into another set of eyes. These belong to a red and black scaled animal around the size of a golden retriever. It has large lizard eyes, flashing fangs in a mouth designed to eviscerate, and oversized claws on little hands that have three fingers.
“If I get eaten within two minutes on this planet, I’ll be the most unfortunate one of our crew yet,” I say.
I haven’t moved. It might be if I stay still I will avoid being attacked.
Nostrils sniff at me. It twists its head in a very avian type way, back and forth, looking at me with its beady green eye on the left side of its head, and then on the right side of its head.
I’m not sure it knows what to make of me. I hope it decides not to make me dinner. I rack my brains for something I can do to improve the situation, but conclude the answer is more or less nothing.
“Get back here, Deek!” Someone shouts the command at a distance.
Someone is coming. I continue to keep very still. It’s working so far.
Deek sniffs at me again.
“DEEK!”
The voice becomes thunderous with annoyance. Deek heeds the tone and scurries off after the saurian. It must be more of a pet than a wild predator. That’s pretty cute. I wish I had a pet, but the crew of the Mare didn’t have pets, just like they didn’t have babies, or mates, or uppity notions of being captain.
I settle back into my grassy spot and think annoyed thoughts about how Lettie just fucking screwed me. I never liked her. Well, I did, actually. But I retroactively don’t like her anymore. She might have had good intentions to start off with, but now she’s on a power trip and she thinks anything she does is justified because it is in the service of her goal. She’s become obsessed with the ends, which are impossible, and she doesn’t care about the means.
To hell with it. I’m taking the transponder off. I don’t want to be used as her bait. If she wants to catch some big, evil alien, she can damn well come down here and do it herself. As far as I’m concerned, she’s a mutineer. Captain Sullivan would never have treated any of the crew this way. She might have put us at risk from time to time, but she was always the most at risk herself. Lettie is sitting up there in the Mare, treating the rest of us like pawns to be sacrificed on some big alien chessboard.
As I reach down my body to try to find the transponder, I discover that it’s been sewn into my pants. That’s a problem. The fabric of this outfit isn’t exactly expedition ready. Most of the crew wear special suits when they go down to alien planets. The suits are awesome. They are full body coverage and they are stocked with dozens of little tricks and tools to get the wearer out of tight spots. This outfit is a tight spot and offers nothing besides likely death by exposure if the weather turns one way or another.
I sit up and pull at the transponder. It starts to come free, but just as I think I am about to get rid of it, the seam rips and the left leg of the pants detaches entirely.
“Stupid,” I curse, pushing it down my leg, off my foot, balling it all up, and throwing it as hard and as far as I can — which isn’t far.
I have a real problem. I have to find shelter and food, otherwise I’m going to pass away out here. One of those little dinosaurs wasn’t so bad, but I’ve heard them talking about the very, very big creatures that could consume you just by inhaling you.
Of course, Lettie’s antics of late have turned all the saurians against us. I’d be lucky if one of them took me in without squishing me like a bug just for being an annoyance.
I sit up, which feels about as proactive as I can manage right now. This action reveals that I am not in the wild as I first suspected. I am in a city park, as evidenced by the buildings all around the perimeter of the grassy, bushy area. There’s a lake here too, a very extensive one. And in the midst of the lake and the grasses and looming high over my head is a very, very big skeleton belonging to a creature so large it could probably swallow one of the buildings in a single bite.
I stare at it for a while, imagining how big this creature must have been when it was alive. The size of a small city. Definitely as big as a town. What did it eat? It must have been constantly ravenous. I feel a sense of pity for the creature, for having lived and then having died and being so big that its bones have remained exposed for hundreds of years.