The ground rover grew smaller and smaller as it ran over the flat shimmering desert. That it didn't kick up a dust trail only added to the appearance of how fast it was disappearing. With a sigh, I sat down on a rock and looked up at the vast blackness of space and it's dusting of brilliant stars. Home was up there somewhere but I'd never see it again.
I checked the oxygen gauge on my spacesuit. The tank was almost full. They were killing me but they were giving me time enough to make my peace with.... Whatever.... I guess I could take solace in the fact that they would only outlast me by a few months at best.
Air wasn't a problem. The oxygen generator had survived the crash. It could make plenty of air from the rock of the planet and even throw in a little water to boot. Now food, ah, there was the rub. X amount of food and five people didn't divide up for to long. The same food and four people went better, at least in their minds.
I hadn't asked to come out to space and I sure hadn't volunteered to map and explore this rock they called a planet. I wasn't much more than a glorified houseboy and gopher, so I didn't add anything that might help them. I did take food so here I was, with no way back to the camp.
As for getting home, all of us could forget that. Without the hyper-jump unit we were history and a lost piece of history at that. This wasn't even the planet we were supposed to explore. It was gone, an asteroid belt where there was supposed to be open space.
The ship was supposed to come out of hyperspace a quarter orbit in front of the fifth planet. Well, duh, that worked out really well. Starships and asteroids don't mix. Twenty-five people and eighty percent of our equipment vaporized in an instant.
I had been in a vacuum suit and cleaning the waste unit when the shit hit the fan, literally. I was flung clear and later, the lifeboat with the bridge crew aboard picked me up. Assholes, each and every one. The ones in charge, the ones who picked the exit site, and the ones who killed everyone but themselves and me. Now they were killing me. Four hours of air and it'd all be over.
*****
Never one to sit still, I got up and took a look around. I'd use more air but it was better than being bored when I died. Thoughts of being bored to death made me chuckle. It sounded dry and strained in the confines of the suit.
They had dropped me at the base of a mountain range. At one time in the far past, I had tried rock climbing but nothing like the size of these cliffs. They rose straight up for thousands of feet. If I had had the gear it might have been fun to try and scale them.
Gravity was about eighty percent of earth normal. Even with the suit it would be feasible. I wondered what the view would be like from up there, probably a lot better than from here. It wasn't like a fall would do more than kill me. I was dead anyway so what would it hurt. Most likely, I'd run out of air before I reached the top anyway.
The biomechanical grip of the suit's gloves was a help and a hindrance, both at once. It could grip far tighter than my fingers but it could also crush the rock if it was to soft or if I squeezed to hard. The sharp edges of the boots got grip in places that there didn't look like there was any.
*****
I was a little over a quarter of the way up when something that had been bugging me became clear. The rock appeared to be weathered. How could there be weather on an airless ball of rock? Maybe the place had had an atmosphere at one time in the past. Maybe it was just weathered from space dust.
I had nothing to compare it to and no information was available on the suit computer. Maybe I could tap into the escape pods computer system. I looked around and found a small ledge above and to my left. It looked wide enough to allow me to rest on. I couldn't climb and use the wrist pad at the same time.
The view from the ledge was spectacular. I could even see the camp if I upped the magnification on my visor. Everything was black and white with brown and rust colored highlights. It was like an old photograph from a history book I'd seen but I couldn't remember which one. My mind was odd that way.
At one time I had been an engineer but that was a long time ago. It was back before the war, back in a time of peace and plenty. Back before the colonies had revolted against Earth and before my ship had been blown to hell. I had been the only survivor and my time floating alone in space had changed me.
Changed me is the nice way to say I was crazy, mad as a hatter, as the saying goes. Between the emergency meds and the cold of space, I had been dead or as close as one could get and not be there. Some say I was out there for over a hundred years but I figured it was closer to one fifty. The mind can do strange things when you dream for that long.
There are large gaps in my memories from before and then there are things that might be real or from the dreams. I can't tell and neither could the Doctors. They couldn't believe I was alive, much less not a total vegetable. As for me, I didn't care one way or the other.
All I had wanted to do was to rest and retire but the fleet command said I still owed them for reviving me. They were not happy when I told them that was their problem, I had been very happy right where I was. They figured I was crazy but still able to clean trash bins among other shit jobs.
The bridge crew had expected a fight out of me when they decided I was dead weight. Hell, I had been dead before any of them were born so why fight it. If I had the combat meds like before, I would have volunteered. It would have been like going home to my land of sunlit mountains and my dream family.
I sighed deeply at the thought of my dream family, the family that had taken the place of my long dead one. The small dark haired Afro-Asian woman, that I had loved so long and so dearly, the woman who was so different from the love of my life before. May, my wife from Earth had been a tall rawboned Nordic blonde.
The only thing they shared was their everlasting love for me. Stella, my dream wife was feisty and fun loving, where May was steady, laid back, and pragmatic. I often wondered if that was from wishful thinking on my part or some deeply hidden resentment of May. May was a good woman; don't get me wrong. She was just dull and boring.
Stella on the other hand was outgoing and always up to something that made life fun and exciting. Not to mention the sex. Wow! What a difference. Stella could do more with her little slight body than any other three women I had ever met. She made me feel ten feet tall and bullet proof.
The Doctors called it a repressed delusion because May had kids every time we had sex. Well, almost anyway, we had eight kids in eleven years. I love my kids but most of the time I was glad I was gone a lot.
I liked space duty in the solar system, six months out and three months home, made life sweet. It had been mostly rescue and patrol work until the war. Then it got hairy trying to intercept the rocks the colonist threw at us. We'd make a high speed run and then blow the sucker to rubble.
The problem was they threw so many of them we couldn't keep up. Of the few that got through, only about half hit the Earth or moon, but that was more than enough. One such, got the moon base, and May and the kids. I like to have gone mad when I heard but we were chasing another rock and I didn't have the time.
