Pink Planet

Chapter Three

The ship has been reoriented. 

Green and Valania are guided to their pods almost immediately; Green is stopped gently to be asked what happened to Terimeter. Under his breath, he mutters to the man who initially woke them something about Terimeter and the comet. The man who roused him optimistically interprets it as 'she's processing the comet sample.'

Thus Icey is the one to hear his anger when the scientist sees the torn tether, and that is that. Something makes Icey want to punch the man who rages on and on as he guides Icey to his pod, but he gets over that enraging feeling and goes to sleep.

Icey, this time, briefly dreams of the pink planet, him and him alone, but in his dream he sees Ampersa lying on the floor, eyes closed and mouth a calm smile. Then Icey's blood was replaced by cryodine and black takes it all away.

Distraught- Terimeter was his lover- the suited rouser stumbles around the ship, and after seeing a vision of his beloved still in her white suit standing in a corridor, he bashes his helmet into the wall. Somehow, the glass breaks.

A line of blood drips down his face, and as he holds his throat, the man stumbles, falls, and tears his suit at the shoulder on a rivet. The ship did not have a dormant supply of oxygen.

Thus as his body is cradled by another, the ship moves on for the original time planned; when it slams through the atmosphere of the Pink Planet, nobody is there to land it and it smashes nose first into the rigid surface.

. . .

Dencil Macbeth wakes up as his blood is pumped in, but no one is there to dislodge him, and so he lays there in his pod, solids dissolving in his chest and essential gasses beginning to pass into his suit. After no response from external stimuli, Dencil is released by default; he groans and rises to his feet, stepping halfway into the hall.

He's risen to utter darkness, and sensing normal pressures outside, the pod below him decides to disengage from the ship. 

The ship was designed to open its side panels while standing upright; the pods were meant to open with the ship nose oriented towards the sky, each pod sliding into the ship and leaving an  open hole for clean atmosphere to enter. Ultimately, the pods were not prepared to disengage in an inverted ship. 

Dencil suddenly finds himself without ground under one foot, and windmilling backwards before clinging to the sides of the rectangular opening, Dencil strains with a foot against the floor, his hands gripping tightly onto the sides of the metal hole. An opening yawns behind him. He pulls himself to the right side of the gap, panting heavily, pushes himself back into the ship then looks over the edge.

Hundreds of feet down, Dencil's pod is smashed against the pink ground to his very eyes, tiny components shattered across the pink... ground. Is it sand? Is it dust? He can't tell.

Hearing a pod disengage somewhere else, Dencil feels fear trickle down his spine as he realizes people might be waking...

...and falling.

"Shit," he whispers, and runs to the second rectangle, but he reaches out a hand too slow and he's forced to keep running as other pods disengage. Rectangles of pink shine into the ship like windows on a summer day.

Green is found, and woken, and saved, and Dencil instructs him to wake Valania and Ampersa, who are instructed to wake Superior and Icey, and so on, and soon enough there are white suits running up and down the corridors, trying to disengage the people as more and more pods eject themselves into the air.

Some in the pods get lucky. Those are the ones who were still blinking when ejected, had the pod break below them and had the cryogenic goop splatter around them, and were like the still-intact chocolate chip on a broken cookie dropped to the floor; shaken, but unharmed. The ones who stood up straight and caught themselves were lucky; the ones who were caught were lucky.

If you stood up in the pod and fell, though, or fell through the air, you were not lucky.

When every pod had been ejected or alleviated, the suits on the ground looked up at the suits in the sky and tried not to look at the dead ones littered around them.

Then the ship began to creak, and shuddering, Green yelled to "Get down as quickly as you can" and figuring out that they had landed nose first. Green and the others were on the bottom floor of the ship, which was now the top floor dangling high in the sky. And the ship had not landed perfectly; it was beginning to fall over.

The scientists start to hurry to where the stairways were, leaping down to the floors below, and together they begin the great transversal to the outdoors, joining those smart enough to do what they did in the higher- now lower- levels-- and passing gravely by the levels that weren't awake enough to figure it out.

The top twenty floors have been pulverized by the crash landing. There were one hundred floors total.

When the scientists exit the pod-holes on the 80th floor to step into the simmering sands, they help up those who survived in the pods, and form a group far away from the splatter marks of the ones who didn't.

A resourceful scientist- albeit one uninformed as to the nature of the mission- asks a man whose helmet is broken how exactly he's feeling. When the man replies, scratching his head with his glove, that his head hurts from his injury but he isn't dizzy and he feels fine-- the scientist, having thus determined that in fact this man is breathing, raises a triumphant fist and informs everybody in a shrill yell that they can take their helmets off.

Collective relief passes though the crowd, and Green frowns at the air level reading on his suit, but removes the helmet anyways, breathing in the slightly dangerously oxidized air.

"EXCUSE ME!" a loud scientist yells at the top of his lungs, "YOU MAY NOT KNOW THIS, BUT THE MISSION HAS FAILED! WE MADE IT BUT NOW WE ARE MAROONED! AS WE ARE, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!"

Collective outrage surges through the crowd, and Green, staring angrily at this scientist standing on an upturned pod that he dragged over to become a lectern, tells Ampersa and Icey to lift him up from the feet. Straining, they do. Miraculously, Green raises, wobbly, to face the scientist with Dencil spotting his back. Valania is mysteriously absent.

"WE HAVE NOT FAILED," Green yells, voice breaking from the intensity of his shout as the voice of reason, "WE HAVE ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION AND MUST DO WHAT WE CAME HERE TO DO. THEY CAN SEE US. THEY WILL SEND HELP."

Valania returns and motions for Ampersa and Icey to let Green down. Ampersa purses her lips and stares at her Icey lowers Green immediately. Green falls sideways, crashing into another scientist.

When Valania is raised by Ampersa and Icey above the crowd, she holds up a scraper with something glinting on it in the yellow light.

"THIS IS UNBUDUNIUM!" she screams, and Green suddenly remembers seeing the passing comet, the showering chunks of comet ice, slamming into the ship and collecting near Terimeter's lodged scraper. Terimeter's lodged scraper catching particles. Green remembered most of all the staring suit, flitting by on the comet, arms crossed.

Ubundunum... the time-warping mineral.

"WE HAVE FOUND EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED!" Valania shouts. 

"No," Green whispers, and looks up in the sky to see a massive, transparent helmet descending, taking up three quarters of the sky. It turns with a black glassplate to stare at him with leering, glowing white eyes and teeth.

Telimiter's eyes flash in the sky and then the helmet condenses, the body falls, and Green stares up with primal fearing eyes as the suited body shoots down and crashes him into the ground, powder erupting that wasn't sand and wasn't dust, and grinning at his helmet.

The helmets touch.