The hidden world

Chapter 2.1: The escape pod

I sat in darkness waiting for him to return, he wasn't usually this late. I jumped a bit as the door opened. Looking through the doorway I let out a sigh of relief.

"Hey Scraper, found anything interesting?" I asked my four-armed bot as he entered through the front door of my little workshop.

Scraper nodded before he walked over to me with his mostly filled bag. Turning it upside down, all sorts of parts fell down onto my table.

"Thanks. Remember to hook yourself up to the solar panels before you turn yourself off for the night." I said with a smile.

He nodded before walking into the door behind me into our "house". Turning on the small lamp above my workshop I begin to look through the parts. Another robotic arm, I can't give Scraper five different types of arms, he has enough problems with the four different ones. I thought to myself before I began to dismantle it. Looking up through one of the holes in the tarp above me I could see the star-filled night sky. A storm had just settled. It wasn't often this clear as there were most of the time a space storm either brewing, ongoing or fading. That's why there was always new scrap on this planet. Ships, satellites, space stations being thrown into this planet of ours. Some of the gangs say that the rings around our planet are mostly made up of old parts, just waiting to fall down. One day I will build a ship that is capable of leaving this planet and find out. Having dismantled the arm I continue to look at the parts.

"Still no voice chip for Scraper..." I mumbled to myself before I began sorting the parts into the shelf with similar parts.

Grabbing the rifle I have made for myself I turn off the lamp and carefully walk outside. I hadn't built my base in a tactically smart area. not yet at least. I could imagine it all as I looked at the small edges around me. Building walls around the edges of the wide crater would make for an ideal city one day. I wish it was a bit deeper tho, it was currently almost two meters deep. I snapped out of my imagining and instinctively looked up as I heard the sound of something entering the atmosphere, the momentarily loud humming before I saw a large ship soar through the sky. I climbed atop of my shack before continuing atop of the Crowsnest like construction where I had fastened the solar panels and antennas. I watched in awe as the ship inched closer and closer to the ground far away from here. Grabbing the railing as I prepared for the quake of the space cruisers impact. I smiled as the shacking began, the impact must have been about an 8 of magnitude and none of the things I had built since the last impact was destroyed. I only imagined the impact where the space cruiser had made contact with the planet. It had to be about nine days of travel from here if I used my bike, maybe twenty-four days by foot. Looking up at the sky I could see a long smoke trail from where the cruiser had fallen and a light. I looked at the light in the smoke confused before moments later something impacted the edge of the crater before skipping a bit further away from my base, sending small rocks in all directions.

"An escape pod..." I said out loud in awe before climbing down running towards it my grip tightening around my rifle as I knew it would attract the Dune gang.

I stopped about twenty steps away from the pod, it was so fine in its design compared to the other stuff I had seen fall onto this planet. My hand wrapped around the grip of the rifle and my finger resting on the trigger. The door of the escape pod flew off as the escape pod probably hadn't been able to calibrate to the pressure difference, the circular door digging itself into the rocky ground. A helmeted figure climbed unsteadily out of the pod clad in a gray jumpsuit with a deep orange vest. I keep my rifle pointed at the figure as it crawled down onto the orange dirt ground. It slowly took off its helmet revealing a strange figure. A humanoid but nothing like I have ever seen before, on this planet there are for the most part only of the Ereat race. It raised its arms above its head which had pointy ears that caught my attention, its features were a bit strange to me. They were finer than the normal features of an Ereat, its skin a bit more of a concentrated pink than mine who had been turning a bit more of a color similar to the orange-red ground around us as I spent much time outside.