I'm alive at least. No telling how deep this water is, though.
He looked down and saw nothing but billowing sand and mud below his dangling boots. Too far and he wouldn't be able to get to shore. The suit provided just enough mobility assist to have functionality down a gravity well. Everything else for the suit's architecture was devoted to life support and a myriad of mundane systems that generally went unused.
He made an abortive effort at swimming. The extra sixty
ish
kilos of weight attached to him made it like trying to walk through syrup. There was no choice but to wait and see where he stopped.
About twenty meters down, he finally touched the bottom. He toggled his helmet lights on and looked around. White sand still in motion with shells and scattered oceanic vegetation surrounded him. A bed of knee-high sea grass waved around in the limited visibility.
His HUD indicated that power reserves were under four percent and dropping at a steady rate. Bakur activated the compass and it pointed toward magnetic north with some uncertainty, flicking between two points without making a clear decision. Even so, it was enough to let him turn toward the approximate location of the shore and start walking.
He shut off all non-essential functions and killed the oxygen recycler, watching his estimated power exhaustion jump from thirteen minutes to nearly fifty. Enough time to trudge a hundred or so meters.
The sand and mud sucked at his boots, making the long walk more difficult than he anticipated. Every step was a fight against time and gravity, tiring him out with remarkable speed. He resorted to crawling on all fours to keep from sinking so far into the muck, eventually getting clear of the submerged cloud of sand and debris.
He could see the surface above him, glinting mockingly down at him just a few meters away. His oxygen supply was starting to thin out; his breath was coming on heavier with less efficacy. He switched back to air recycling and watched his power reserve timer dip dangerously low.
The shore didn't appear to be getting any closer, nor the surface any less teasingly-far away.
I have to make it. Marlin, Gen, Beorn; they're all dead for nothing if I don't find a way to do this
. Bakur decided that a dead sprint was his best bet. He switched the recycler off and hauled himself forward with all four limbs, feeling comically slow in the water. In zero-g, even the slightest touch would send an object moving. Without gravity, speed could only really increase until impact.
Here down the gravity well, every nanometer of progress had to be worked for. His entire body ached, even with the stimulant cocktail pumping his heart fast and hard enough to make adrenaline jealous. Time mattered more than air at this moment.
His hand broke the surface with fourteen seconds of power remaining. Struggling to his feet, Bakur slammed a fist into the emergency release for his e-suit's collar and his helmet nearly popped off with a
swoosh
noise, filling with a mixture of air and sea foam.
His lungs gasped for breath as a wave lazily collided with him. He struggled to stay upright, sputtering and coughing as he sucked in lungfuls of salty, crisp air. He tasted sweat. His vision blurred. Everything darkened as he waved his arms helplessly toward the shore.
His suit shut down a few moments later, dropping his arms with what felt like kilotons of added weight. His back slumped and he only kept his head above water with the effort of a man about to drown just a few steps from safety.
The next three steps felt like they were being pulled out of a black hole. Everything in Bakur's body told him that this was going to end badly, but he refused to give in. His back curled, unable to keep up with the demands he placed on it. His ribs protested. He ground his teeth so hard that his ears rang. Or was that his blood pressure spiking to a lethal level again? He couldn't tell.
Vision came and went in spots.
He collapsed face-down in the sand with consciousness barely lingering. The surf washed up in a bubbly fan around him, burying his fingers in loose, wet sand. Somewhere in the blinking dark of his oxygen-deprived vision, Bakur wondered if all meteorites felt this way when they made planetfall.
It took him several minutes to drag his body far enough onto the beach to keep his collar out of the water. He let his helmet go and rolled onto his back, still heaving with nausea and euphoria in the same breath. He was alive. He had fallen from orbit and lived, against every
literal
astronomical odd.
His throat closed as a wave of unwanted emotions overtook him. He tried to shake the raw shock and disbelief, but it manifested regardless. He lay in the sand half crying half gasping for control for what felt like hours. He had no idea what was going to happen. Voidsake, he didn't even know what was happening
now
except that he wasn't suffocating.
Eventually, he managed to reign himself in and sit up, trembling violently with every movement. He uncoupled his suit down the front, parting it with an immense amount of effort for such a simple, ubiquitous set of locks. It took him nearly five minutes to perform a fifteen-second task.
Crawling out of his suit brought on a new wave of unimpeded sobbing and shaking that took an even longer time than the first to bring to a stop. He was alive. That was everything that mattered. That was all he could accept. He made it.
I'm alive.
It was his only thought for several minutes in the cool maritime breeze.
Still on his knees, Bakur wiped away the sand clinging to his hands and took a deep, steady breath. The ocean air felt clean. It helped settle his stomach some. His pounding skull checked the progress.
Something ahead of him moved on the narrow beach and he turned his eyes up to it, quietly hoping it wasn't one of the local animals coming to investigate if he could be considered food.
Fortunately, it was one of the locals, a tanned woman with a large, reflective umbrella in hand. She approached with a mix of curiosity and concern on her face.
"Hello, visitor" she said casually.
Bakur struggled to speak. "Please stop."
"Are you injured?" she asked, continuing across the sand at a leisurely pace.
"Please. Stop."
She slowed. "Is this a request?"
"Yes."
"Then tell me when you would like me to approach." Her tone grated against the reality of the past two hours. It made his fingers curl against his knees with growing irritation.
"Just- just stay there, please. I just
fell
out of orbit."
"Then I will return soon," came the equally-irritating answer. She set up the umbrella, standing in the broad shadow beneath it for a few moments before turning to leave. She disappeared up a staircase hewn from the hillside rising away from the beach. After he was sure she'd left, he dragged his discarded e-suit across the sand and sat in the umbrella's shade. There, he managed to get the solar cells open and let them get to work. Even with the amount of energy refracted off the atmosphere, there was enough light to charge his suit, albeit slowly.
To his disappointment, the woman returned with something under one arm before his e-suit could even run a diagnostics report. This time, instead of an umbrella, the woman carried a small metal case in one hand. He didn't stop her as she sat down in front of him in the shade, holding the case out to him.
"Who are you?"
She smiled gently, inclining her head slightly to one side. "I am Nilim. Who are you?"
"Bakur."
She gave up trying to give him the case after realizing he wasn't going to take it and opened it herself. "I have brought something for you. I think you'll like it." She produced a canteen and a small sandwich and placed them in Bakur's hands. He just stared at them dumbly, hardly believing any of what he was seeing. The tonal shift of hurtling through the sky toward impending death to being handed refreshments from a demure resort hostess was too surreal.
"What is happening?" he asked to nobody in particular.
Nilim smiled broadly at that. "Do you not know what it means to be a visitor on Anoria, Bakur?"
He blinked away the disbelief.
A visitor. Isn't that one of the people that pay to come here and fertilize these hostesses? Is that what they call them?
Bakur felt his knuckles touch the sand. He deflated against the umbrella in exhaustion.
"I... I'm not a visitor," he explained.
"You're not?" Nilim asked, leaning forward slightly as if to find a lie in his words with closer inspection.
"My ship..." He looked up, but the umbrella shielded anything above them from view. "My ship was... Marlin...they're all gone. I have to go. To the outpost."
