(AIASP) Caelum's Arrival, page 1

The roaring icy wind pounded Caelum’s eardrums and pummeled his body, waking him instantly. His limp body snapped back to life in a flailing fit, and he screamed in horror. His hoarse voice was muted by the thumping wind of free-fall, and his muscles locked up – knotting his body like a dying spider. He shuddered as weightlessness gave way to nauseating numbness & confused panic. The situation allowed for only one thought, “What’s happening?”

He somersaulted out of control as he fell. The force sucked his blood away from his heart and filled his head with pressure, he knew his head would split apart in a bloody mess at any moment if he didn’t balance out soon. His veins swelled, his neck tightened, his vision was fading. He struggled to open his eyes further to no avail, they froze half open and his retinas tingled with dancing sparks. He tried to shut his mouth but couldn’t, and it felt as though the wind was peeling his face from his skull. Like a rubber band just before it snaps, his muscles were at a breaking point – pulled outward by the spinning and clamped inward by the cold.

He ripped himself free from his catatonic shock and spread his limbs out, tearing every fiber in his body. He forcefully blinked over and over, prying his eyelids from his corneas so he could at least see how close he was to impact. He glimpsed, seemingly spinning around him, the distant ground below and not so distant sky above. To his right beyond the swirling horizon was a huge ringed planet, and to his left a blinding light twirled…some unknown sun.

He flipped and balanced himself and the wind slammed his chest slowing his descent. He heaved in another deep breath of the thin atmosphere which then gave way to rapid gasps. There was enough oxygen, but goddamn it burned. A face-full of liquid nitrogen would have been just as pleasant. The wind shredded his shirt and billowed through his pants, and his boots did little to shield the cold.

Facing the ground, Caelum could now get a better view of the land below. With one squinty eye he saw a desolate planet, colored of honey and rust. No oceans, no foliage, though portions of the surface glistened, probably shallow desert lakes. The most noticeable feature was a massive black canyon that cut across the surface, diagonal from horizon to horizon, as if the planet was split open. The chasm dipped down to the core in places as there were glimmers of yellow and orange piercing the jagged darkness.

His sight then failed from the pain and filled his view with a shimmering gold. Again blinded, nausea returned, and acceptance of his fate soon followed. He estimated five more minutes, maybe six…no more.

Suddenly the air around his body felt warmer. He assumed it was a random pocket of hot air...it was almost comforting. Then a white flash of brilliant light burst through his eyelids and sizzled his retinas. His vision flickered yellow, green, red, then purple. The warmth increased immensely, and a gut-pounding boom reached him a moment later. His eardrums exploded and weazed, and he went limp again, deaf and spinning uncontrollably. He screamed vomit as his spiralling body expulsed all air and liquid like a squeezed sponge.

Successive pulses, equally powerful, knocked him backwards to face the sky. His eyelids relaxed and slid open in the violence, and his pupils swiveled around and locked onto a great light in the distance. There above him was a massive ship heading back into space. Most certainly concussed, he still was able to process what he was seeing. He recognized the vessel immediately. “My ship. My baby, my baby” he mouthed, his whispers lost in the roar of the wind and rumble of the ship’s acceleration. He closed his eyes and thought “Those sons of bitches…”

Spent green plasma plumes ejected from the exhaust ports jetted out and engulfed Caelum, singeing his nearly frozen body. Charred badly, he tumbled down towards the black chasm below, leaving behind a thin grey tendril of smoke as he fell. Somehow, his mind refused to switch off.

Now nearly a dot lost in the sky, the ship had already drifted and tunneled, and Caelum knew he’d be dead before he hit the ground. The final shockwave plowed forth like a tsunami in three concessive blasts – the first vaporized Caelum’s extremities, and the second damaged his neural nano-cube, shutting it down cold.

The third pulse resonated with the first two, overlapped and traversed the full thickness of the atmosphere instantly, and proceeded rippling around the planet. The ship had broken every known galactic directive by firing its plasma drive and tunneling within a planetary system, let alone within a planet’s atmosphere. The damage could have been catastrophic if the world indeed had life.

Caelum’s body fell silently to the surface and impacted just beyond the ridge of mountains lining the chasm. His tiny crater was a mere spec, hardly noticeable in the vast plain of the ancient impact site. The planet still rang from the explosion, and his maimed body slid deeper in the shifting sand. The strong surface winds quickly hid all evidence of his unintended arrival, and what was left of his physical presence degraded and then condensed to form a capsule containing his NNC mental processor. A lonely distress beacon pinged out a signal, and for 400 years he lay dreaming, alone, banished and buried on the moon of a ringed gas giant, some 500,000 light years from Earth…dead to this new world.

The robotic salvage crew would have one hell of a job upon retrieval, and Commander Caelum, unaware of his special synthetic attributes, was in for one hell of a surprise upon reactivation.