His name was Albert Ritter but few called him Al and his mother was the only one that called him Albert.
The world called him Tex.
He was The NASA hot shot astronaut but Nasa was no longer flying which royally pissed him off. He had just finished his training when the space shuttles were confined to museums.
He was assigned to Edwards AFB and did flight testing on new and improved aircraft. He was assigned 'the over the hump' test flights, the ones after all knew the thing would fly and not disintegrate before landing.
It was not his idea, he had always volunteered for first flights but others were chosen. Those guys were by the book and would not have tested the limits of their craft or themselves.
It took him a while to understand those guys would not have minded if their crafts committed suicide.
Tex would test the limits of the crafts but had an innate ability to sense when it was enough and back off. He was an aeronautical engineer and could also give useful details about the performance of the air ship.
On the ground he was much less successful. He had adopted a brash cowboy persona that seemed to attract bimbos well so he got laid often. But he was now thirty three years old and was wishing for intelligent conversation, a sense of humor, and some comprehension of what he did for a living from the women around him.
Those type of women didn't like Tex.
An opportunity arose that would change his life although it would be years before he understood it did.
The RAM rocket craft had been built and the pilotless prototype had been successfully tested. Larger ones were being built and Tex saw it as an X-15 experience waiting to happen.
That second pilotless craft did not perform well in test flights and someone decided craft number three needed to have a pilot. It would be called the Armstrong.
A training mock up was built and he was one of ten pilots assigned too train in it. He was the only one not to have a catastrophic failure, in fact he was the only on to have fewer than three so he was chosen for the first flight.
After many delays he and the ship were ready. The ship was strapped under a B-52 and was released at an altitude of forty seven thousand feet and a velocity of five hundred eighty mile an hour. The ships rockets fired but quit forty seconds too soon so the RAM engines never had the speed needed even though he had achieved mach 3.
Tex glided the ship to the ground effortlessly and was debriefed for a week.
Everyone was sure the RAM engine should have ignited and were at a loss on why it did not. They asked Tex if he had tried the emergency override button.
"What override button?" he asked.
Sure enough the option of pilot initiated ignition had not been built into the craft.
They decided to go ahead with the second test even though many knew an asteroid of some size was going to hit the Earth in just over a year. The powers that be had decided to see if the engine would be capable of fast enough travel through space to save "just the right people."
Tex was unaware of that.
His glimpse of space on his first flight had amazed him and wanted to see that again, after all, he was a trained astronaut.
The fact that he had not been in space had eaten into him a lot more than he realized.
When the RAM engine ignited he was supposed to stop it before his ship achieved escape velocity but the acceleration was so smooth he never looked at his instruments.
He did not notice he was in space until his clipboard floated past him.
"I fucked up," he said to ground control.
"Yes you did," ground control said back.
"While you are there see if you can guide the ship into a turn. When after facing west turn the engines off."
"Roger," he said and using the side thrusters turned the ship around.
"Done," he said, "but my instruments say I have gained a hundred thousand feet during the turn. Is that right?"
"Yes it is. Turn the RAM engine off and fire forward thrusters for thirty seven seconds, that should slow you enough for re-entry.
We read an anomaly near you, do you see anything?"
"No. Wait, the universe just winked at me."
That was the last anyone heard of Albert Ritter. He and his ship had simply vanished for the land controllers.
It caused some stir on Earth but that was the day an evacuation was ordered for the entire U.S. Gulf coast so only a few in NASA wondered what happened to him, all others were busy getting their families away from the Gulf from Florida to Texas.
Tex found himself in what felt like a dark tunnel, an impossibility he knew but it still felt that way. He felt he was traveling to somewhere but did not feel like he was in motion, his ships instruments were not not recording anything at all.
That state of reality lasted only a bit over a minute and he suddenly saw himself hurtling to a planet below. He turned the RAM vehicle around then killed its engine when he felt he had shed enough speed then turned it to face the planet.
It was not Earth he immediately saw, this planet was covered with Ice. He was also still going towards it too fast. He began to fire his thrusters and managed to put himself in orbit around it.
His instruments told him the planets atmosphere was sitting just above five hundred feet of its icy surface. Its atmosphere was in the process of freezing. He saw no signs of life on his first orbit and spent the next three orbits trying to figure out where he was in space.
He tried to contact Earth but he knew he was not on his own solar system so he knew that was futile. He ate his smuggled empanadillas and drank his gatorade as he visually scanned the planet.
He saw what may be the only piece of land not frozen over completely at what may be the planets equator. He lowered his orbit enough to see it was a mountain with what looked like a building on top. A frozen lake surrounded the building.
He aimed his antenna to it and began to jabber and sing for an entire orbit, he had realized he was going to die there.
His ships life support system read it would keep him alive three more days but he knew that had to be wrong, he had travelled interstellar space.
He was jolted out of his pre-death euphoria by a voice over his communicator. He did not recognized the language and had no idea what they said but they sounded friendly.
He introduced himself as a lost traveller and sympathized with their predicament. He also said he would be there for lunch.
He began to lower his orbit until he wondered if the planet had enough of an atmosphere to fly. He was at a thousand feet before he learned it did. He ignited the RAM engine and flew a very long approach to the building.
Intuitively he shut the RAM off as he glided over the lake. He managed to land and his drag chute opened. Tex coaxed the ship to within three feet of the building.
He knew he had perhaps a thirty second survival time once he got out of the ship but he saw people looking out at him so decided to try it. He was wearing only a flight suit and no portable oxygen mask, he would need to hurry.
But before loosing consciousness he saw the door open and three people in spacesuits came out and helped him inside.
He passed out.
Two women and an old man were looking at him when he woke up. They asked him questions and he made sure they knew he did not understand them but thanked them anyway.
He sat up and noticed he was in an infirmary of some kind. He saw his helmet and water was dripping out of it.
It was water vapor from his lungs that had frozen immediately when he exhaled.
It took several weeks before Tex could communicate with anyone there. He learned that the people that had treated him the first day were the Queen, her father the King, and the Princess of the planet.
He also learned that nearly every being on their planet was in the building. There were around one eighty of them there and perhaps another twenty in a space station orbiting the planet.
Unfortunately they had no way to resupply the space station, all their crafts were buried in miles of ice. The ones in the space station were barely surviving.
