Fight To The Finish

Sandbox Earth #7

INDEX| Episode 6 | Episode 7 | Episode 8

The Race Continues

“What was in the room?”

“Well I’m not sure what I expected. It was two Indian astronauts, in their space suits, looking over a control panel of some kind. It had to have been an important room, since it was connected to this central causeway. I can’t tell if the Indians chose this room or if it just happened to be open.

“Anyway, I darken the doorway—which is a little narrow for humans but nevertheless simple to enter. The two Indians notice me right away. They turn to face me. We are all three of us wearing space suits, so we cannot communicate. I hold up my hands, you know, ‘don’t shoot’, that kind of thing. They freeze. I start reaching for my camera so I can start taking pictures. I’m hoping at this point that they just go back to doing what they are doing.

“They didn’t like that I had taken my camera out. I couldn’t tell if they wanted the camera itself or if they wanted me to leave, but they started gesturing aggressively. One of them stepped towards me, and I took a step back—put my hands up again. It killed me that we couldn’t speak to each other. I don’t know if we would have understood each other, but it would have been a little more pleasant than two faceless Indian domes speaking to this faceless American dome.

“The one astronaut kept stepping towards me, and I tried to leave the room but he grabbed the camera strap and yanked hard. The Camera didn’t come free but it pulled me back. I stumbled in the slightly lower gravity and fell into him, and we fell to the ground. His friend must have thought we were fighting, because he got behind me and started pulling me away and the first guy kept clawing at my Camera.

“So I get to my feet and I am tired and pissed off and I don’t have all that much Oxygen left—this is my one job, understand? So I start pushing these guys around as best as I can. I got away from the guy who was pulling me backwards and I push him backwards into the wall and shove him to the ground. The other guy tried to tackle me but I braced so he just ended up wrapping his arms around me. He was strong though—he pulled me away and threw me towards the other side of the room—I stumbled and fell to the floor.

“As I was getting to my feet, one of the guys was coming towards me so I pushed him back. He fell backwards and landed on the control panel, which immediately came to life, with sounds and lights and symbols that I am sure are very meaningful to the aliens but which were meaningless to me. It sounded like an alert of some kind had sounded.

“All three of us turned to look at the panel. We didn’t know what we had done. The power flickered—Elisa and Charles in my ear told me that a massive red laser fired from the ship and hit somewhere in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa, where massive steam clouds immediately rose. I suppose we were lucky in the sense that we hadn’t blasted some city off the face of the earth, but things were different after that: It looks like it took every last ounce of power from the ship to fire it, so the lights went out and the gravity ‘turned off’ whatever that meant. I am told that the laser-blast into the Atlantic and all that hot evaporated water is what initiated Hurricane Omega. Another thing this did was it told the nations of the world that the most powerful weapon ever known was in orbit and about to fall to earth. Elisa also told me that chunks had fallen off the ship—we almost certainly had less time remaining before the ship re-entered the atmosphere.

“Floating as we were, now in a zero-G environment, I could escape the combative astronauts from India and move on through the ship. This fight had taken a lot of time and more importantly, a lot of my oxygen. I had only 20 minutes left—it was enough to get back to the pod, but I didn’t know how long we had on the ship. I asked Elisa, I said, ‘What do you think, how much time do I have?’

“She said, ‘The remains of the Diamond are descending rapidly—you have less than an hour for sure.’ She didn’t understand why it was descending so fast—maybe someone somewhere was still piloting the blasted thing.

“So that was that. I made the decision to buckle up. I pushed my way through a different door, and floated down the hallways. It was disorienting—hard to tell which way was up, the way the hallways and rooms were designed. I managed to follow a hallway towards the open end of the ship and sure enough, I found something that looked like harnesses in the wall, with a dead alien body in it.

“I took some pictures of the alien—it looked reptilian, had scales and a tail almost as long as its legs. It was a small creature though—thin arms, thin legs, claws. It had a snout—honestly, it looked like a Komodo Dragon, am I allowed to say that? Imagine a Komodo Dragon with a slightly shorter snout, and about the size of a teenager. It was dead, but honestly I appreciated that it was still in the harness—it showed me how to use it. I untangled the body and hid it in a nearby room; and I started strapping myself into the harness.

“It was painstaking work, as I was much bigger and bulkier in my spacesuit than the little alien was. Yet by the end of it, I was strapped in as best as I could. I told Elisa and Charles my plan, I said, ‘My friends, I am going to ride this thing down. If it’s not in the atmosphere yet it will be soon. I’ve got enough time on my Oxygen to make it to re-entry, and hopefully by the time I run out I will be back in the atmosphere.’

“It was a huge gamble. I knew it. Charles knew it. Charles said, ‘See you on the other side, Pete.’ Elisa said a quiet ‘See you soon’.

“When this thing landed, I knew everyone would be fighting to get a piece of it, and I also knew that if an American was on board maybe we could claim a chunk and I could fight off those Indian twerps. If I survived—but the ship was so blasted big that I was sure I would be fine. You can see that I was, more or less, fine—but at the time, how could anyone be sure?

“I asked Elisa and Charles to talk to me while I waited for re-entry. They told me what they could see—the early formations of Hurricane Omega, the fragments and pieces of the ship. They saw the Japanese crew tear away a big chunk of something and lift it away from the wreckage, into orbit. I started to feel rumbling and shaking as the massive wreck started interacting with the atmosphere.

“The last thing I heard was Elisa calling to Charles. She said, ‘Look, look—it’s the Russians.’

“I later learned that the Russians had launched their resupply mission to the ISS as scheduled, maybe in the hopes of taking control of the ISS while everyone was distracted. I learned later that they put Elisa and Charles in the return craft and launched them back to Earth.

“I wasn’t thinking about that, at the time, though. I was hanging on for dear life. The big ship re-entered the atmosphere when I had 5 minutes of oxygen left. The trip down was the worst hour of my life.

“I woke up in the sand of the Sahara, my faceplate was cracked open, and debris from the ship stretched from horizon to horizon, in a massive line across the sand.”

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Thank You For Reading!

This is the end of Part 2 of the Sandbox Earth series. Part 3 begins next week with a new point of view!

My prequel series continues! I hope you are enjoying. I am very excited to be bringing this series of deep lore from the Adventures of Tylus Worran to you, and I hope you are enjoying it. It tells the story of the infancy of humanity’s life among the stars.

Thank you for reading, and God Bless you!