***So we continue with Ryan's recollections. This begins after the first night on what looks as though it might be where he'll be for the um, foreseeable future.
Like any new arrival anywhere, he wants to see the lay of the land and what's shakin', so to speak and other top of mind things, like where's the nearest Starbuc - ok, maybe not that.
0_o
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Ryan woke up in the morning from the sound of the alarm that he'd set on the panel. He swung over the edge of the hideaway bunk and stood stretching on the decking at the rear of the flight deck door. He padded naked to the galley and thought about his choices. Everything looked tasteless to him today, but he thought that he'd better eat something if he was going to get used to not living in cryo now. His next thought was that he'd better think about saving what he had while he still had it. It was a conundrum.
So that brought the choice of breakfast down to a cup of instant coffee. He made it and then sat at the controls again. With lots of battery power available to him, he turned on the cameras which were built into the shuttle and he opened their little ports for a look around his new home.
He was sitting on a flat-topped mountain not all that far away from the small rise that led to the very top. He looked at the camera which would be pointed toward where the ship had crashed. He could still see the pall of smoke rising from some of that. It looked to be a long walk away indeed.
Awesome, he thought pessimistically.
Why, if he had the fuel to waste, he'd fly right on over. But he didn't have that luxury. While he still had tons of it, he now had a better idea. The ship had fuel cells -- a lot of them. He wondered if all of them had been smashed. He looked at the column of smoke out here again and sighed. That was probably what was still burning out there, aside from what might be left to burn out of the huge fuel tanks that the ship had carried to fuel the shuttle's engines.
He sighed. To get anywhere near to upper edges of the atmosphere on this rock, it was going to take one mother of an external fuel tank full of a lot of volatile and inherently dangerous fuel. Ryan thought that he'd just better get used to the idea that he was staying here for the rest of his life.
He finished his coffee and walked to the arms locker. If he was going to go for a walk, he'd need to take something along. He just knew that he wasn't the only form of self-propelled life walking around here.
But what to take?
He made his choices and then he tried to determine a few other things, such as what the sunlight here was like. The answer wasn't bad, he decided, the UV that his sensors picked up was about the same as on Earth, so he'd need sunscreen, having lived without real sunshine for so long.
He was about to walk out when he looked at himself and chuckled. He'd been about to become the most heavily-armed nudist on this world. He pulled on some combats and laced up his boots before he pulled a T-shirt over his head and shrugged into a knapsack with a day's supply of food, a little water, and a lot of ammunition.
The loading ramp ground downward and he jumped down before hitting the retract control to close it again. He walked to the edge of the plateau and looked down.
It wasn't too sheer, but it was a long downward walk. And that would mean that it would be a long uphill hike on the way back.
Fucking awesome.
He pulled out his proxalert and noted background readings. Something was moving, but he didn't see anything, and anyway, there was nothing nearby. He set that setting as the zero point to shut it up unless there was anything closer and then he reached for his NavPad to set his present location as home. It worked much the same as a pocket GPS unit on Earth -- or those worlds where man had stayed long enough to launch and place the satellites that were required. There was nothing like that here, but he'd pulled a mapping feed from his console and the thing had a tiny ring-laser gyro, so it could keep him informed about just where he was on this world for a day or so.
He stepped over the edge and began to walk.
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Ryan stayed watchful on his way down the long gentle slope. The geography here -- from what he could see was pleasant, though he'd have preferred a bit more in the way of open spaces, maybe a little grassy savannah and like that, but there wasn't all that much that he could do about it and he did like the heavy forest that he saw off in the distance. A little in front of that, he saw the occasional tree which had taken root successfully on the rock surface.
He saw a fair bit of wildlife, and a lot of it seemed to have no clue about the hazards of humans in the neighborhood, but then again, how would they know? The only other thing which troubled him was that he had to try to figure out from the way that an animal was built what its purpose might be, since he had no idea. But it was all that he had to go by.
Whenever he saw something which might be a little brighter and was built for a bit of speed and looked to have some power, well that was when Ryan knew that he had to be alert and careful. From what he saw here, it looked to him as though everyone had eaten a healthy breakfast fairly recently, since nothing seemed to regard him with much interest.
But back to the original thing that bothered him. His proxalert was cheeping quietly in his ear. He looked down, and saw that there was something at his seven o'clock, out about a hundred yards. He stole a slow glance that way and saw -- nothing.
The alert didn't go away. He tried to change direction slightly -- about thirty degrees away and the alert was still there and the same range, though now behind him at the same distance.
So he was being followed.
Ryan resumed his earlier heading for a little while. As he walked, he thought about it. There was only one creature that he knew of who possessed an ability such as this.
And he'd seen the remains of the wreck of one of their ships yesterday on the way in.
He smiled to himself. Perhaps he wouldn't need to figure out if he could leave. Maybe it might be a little more constructive to try to decide just which of the few prayers that he remembered to use in his final moments.
He had an idea, and reached around to a side pocket of the knapsack, hoping a little that this was the standard combat issue one, and not some flyboy's idea. He'd disliked the main shuttle pilot on sight, though they'd had nothing to do with each other once the ship had gotten underway, obviously.
His fingers found the military issue small pack of six cigarettes and the military issue cheap lighter. After hundreds of years of trying to stamp out the habit, the military still decided that if you were going to send somebody out to get his ass shot off, then the state of health of his lungs for the time that he was under your command was not much of an issue, and it was more manly than having him suck his thumb.
Ryan looked at the pack. They were ages old and quite stale. He'd quit long ago, but this might work out for him here. He opened the pack and took one out, stopping slowly for a look around. His eyes were moving while the rest of him stood still.
Sure enough, he saw a very slight shift in something out there, and then it was gone and things looked normal. He sat down and waited with his personal defence weapon cocked and in his lap with the safety on set to full-auto. PDWs were really very compact rifles and didn't really look like much like a weapon at all, but they were perfect for close-in last ditch defence and they could be carried easily almost anywhere, which is why they were standard additions to the survival backpack.
Ryan just looked off into space, not appearing to be focussed on anything ahead of him. In fact, he was trying to look to his left so hard that his eyeballs hurt.
It took a little time, but the cheeping in his ear grew more insistent. He turned down the volume a little and waited.
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Taela was a little fascinated, she had to admit. She'd only seen one of them leave the aircraft and step over the edge of the slope to walk down, but she'd stopped anyway and hid herself, stepping out farther and staying downwind.
She even had to smile. She wouldn't have said at this point that her mother had been correct about everything, but she did find the odd thing about the human male that she liked a little. He didn't look anything like the unfortunates in the photos that she'd seen. This one looked healthy.
From this distance, he looked to have dark brown hair much the same color as her own, though it was very short and he wore a hat over it. She thought that he'd look better if he had more of a mane like the ones that Morgarod males grew, but then she realized that she was mixing things to think like this.
He had those odd legs like her mother's and he also had little feet, compared to her own. Still, she thought, he didn't look all that bad and he certainly wasn't built like the poor ones in the pictures. He was made much more like her father was, and she liked that. She knew that he'd been her only reference as to what a male ought to look like and the fact that this one was built along those lines did make her smile to herself. He did smell a little funny, she thought.
Taela had no way to know it, but Ryan hated the way that he smelled now -- ever since he'd had to apply the sunscreen. Just why the fuck this stuff had to smell like a bouquet of flowers eluded him frankly, but he blamed the dead shuttle pilot. He hadn't liked the guy right out of the gate.
Well, he had to blame somebody.
Taela wanted to get a little closer. Doing that would have caused her no trouble in the forest, but out here, well, it was a bit more difficult, since he was walking fairly quickly for her body's blending ability to keep up. But then he stopped, and she was able to get closer still. She stopped only a few feet from him.
From this close up, she liked him even more, though he wasn't what she'd ever thought that she'd like. He was so strange, from her point of view. Anyway, she thought, all that she had was a strange desire to know someone like him a little. Just as he seemed strange to her, she was sure that she would seem so odd to him. She slowly crouched down near him.
She found herself just about to sigh, but she caught it in time, and then wondered where that had come from. She'd spent the years of her life where a young girl would have normally had the first real interactions with males of her age out here but there had been no one for her. From her reading, she'd learned that it was about the same for human girls. But she hadn't had that. She felt some kind of a want in her, but overall, she just felt stupid.
She looked down a little at his shoulder and his arm. She felt like an idiot. She didn't know what to do, other than what she was doing. She guessed that if there was a chance for it, she'd like to know him at least a little. If he was stuck here like the rest of them, she hoped that she might find at least an acquaintance in him one day, if they could even understand each other. She knew that where he came from had different forms of speech and she'd need to find out about that somehow before they could talk. If she could hear him say a few words, then she'd try to memorize what she heard and repeat it to her mother. It might give a clue as to which language to look up in her old system, if it was there.
Her situation at the moment came to her, and she realized that she ought to back away at least a little. From this close, he'd have to know, wouldn't he? Her mother had said that humans have a sense, and she'd been here this close for far too long if her mother had been right.
