Astronomicon 1: Inception Point (Finished)

7 - One Small Step

With the power out to the airlock doors, Chris had to use the manual crank handle behind a floor plate, now vertical due to the Elysian lying on its side. As soon as the doors parted, the Auxiliary Storeroom filled with a faint chalky smell, apparently the smell of the air outside the ship, and the temperature in the room fell noticeably. It took a while to crank the door open enough to step through it.

He shone his torch on the outer doors. It was easy to see why the sensors had reported that the airlock was compromised. Where there should have been a perfect seal between the two vertical door panels, a hefty inward dent in the left one, near enough to the rubber seal to leave a gap big enough to stick a finger into, would have depressurised it in seconds. A shaft of pinkish light shining in from outside the airlock made the airborne dust sparkle.

The edges of the gap were blackened and the heavy-duty, rubber seal was severely melted for several centimetres on either side of the gap. Chris suspected that the late expulsion of the drive module had probably saved the airlock from considerably worse damage. It seemed that a little of their bad luck may have saved the ship.

Moving closer to the compromised, outer doors, he flipped open the panel beside the outer door and began to wind the larger crank handle inside. The handle was icy cold to touch and resisted being turned. The mechanism groaned and creaked for a moment and Chris drastically increased the force he was applying. A metallic rubbing sound heralded the panels starting to move. There were clearly structural problems with the doors, but they were not, as he feared, jammed by the damage.

His wrist was aching by the time the doors were open enough to allow him through. According to protocol, anyone leaving the vessel was required to wear one of the Hostile Environment Protection Outfits or H.E.P.O.s for short. The temperature outside the airlock was frosty but not too cold for him to safely tolerate it for a couple of minutes. The only worrying thought was that it was clearly daylight right now. At their current position, near the equator, each day-night cycle would be twelve hours and twenty-two minutes. That meant they had a maximum of six hours of daytime left before the temperatures plummeted by almost twenty-five degrees as darkness fell.

He peered out at the horizon, a jagged ridge a few hundred metres behind the Elysian. He knew from the many briefings he and his crew had received before they launched that the rocks on most of the planet's surface were dull, mid-grey in colour, but everything around him had a faint red tint to it due to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri being a red dwarf.

He lowered himself down and sat on the bottom of the airlock frame. Dropping the remaining metre-and-a-half to the ground was not difficult, helped in part by the eighty-percent Earth gravity. He lowered himself as far as he could and then dropped the last half of the distance, his thin-soled deck shoes offering little protection against the hard, irregular surface below.

Standing at the end of a smoothed area, apparently cleared when the Elysian ploughed through the loose surface rocks, now scattered on either side, he was most immediately aware that his deck shoes were inadequate for the low temperature of the uneven rocky surface. The air was thin, but the faint breeze stung his skin. It took a few moments for the sensation of suffocating to pass. There was enough oxygen to breathe but his body would have to acclimatise to the same oxygen level as being almost five thousand metres up on Earth. He knew most of it was psychological as he had already been breathing the planet's atmosphere for a while.

Looking at the wider area behind the ship, it seemed the Elysian had already left clear marks on the planet. The rocky ridge had an obvious, crescent-shaped chunk missing from the summit. Nearer to his current position, a wake began in the loose, surface rocks, scattered by Elysian as she touched and then ploughed into the surface. Either side resembled a rough wave frozen in time.

The cold was beginning to hurt, and he craved the relative warmth of the interior of the ship. As he turned to climb back up to the airlock doors, the magnitude of the moment struck him. Whilst he had simply stepped out through a doorway onto some rocky ground, he had also just become the very first human to step onto a planet orbiting another star. He felt he should say something, make some speech or comment like Neil Armstrong over a century before, but he did not know what to say and there was no-one around to record his words anyway.

So, the first human footfall on an extra-solar planet was a bizarre anti-climax, a mundane moment overshadowed by the events around it.

Chris redirected his thoughts to those more immediate matters. It was time to get back on board, close the outer door and open the H.E.P.O. lockers in the hatch room. After more than a decade vacuum-sealed and compressed, it was time for the H.E.P.O.s to prove their worth.

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