Tag Archives: stranded

Oh Captain!

spacecraft

Image credit: iStock – Found at numerous sources including thepromiserevealed.com

Vanessa struggled to climb out of the Salubrious Pod, sickly yellow and greenish jelly oozing off of her smooth, dark skin. She rolled over the low rim of the tub onto the cold metallic floor of the eight-by-twelve foot featureless chamber, her nude body dimly illuminated by the few flickering light tubes in the ceiling ten feet above. She shivered as the gel evaporated, and she watched a thin mist rising overhead from her body, though some of the goo clung to her short-cropped black hair, and she blinked as one drop fell from her lashes into her left eye.

“Good morning, Captain Chapman. How are you feeling?”

They’d made Sophia’s voice feminine, but the echoes coming from multiple speakers  in the ceiling still made her sound inhuman.

“Like shit, Soph.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” The AI’s reply was meant to communicate concern, but of course, as a machine, she felt nothing at all. “It is important you recover from hibernation quickly. There is a situation.”

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Castaway on Piller Island

eggs

© MorgueFile 1416928925r3kcx

Nelson Lawrence Simon had been living the dream, sailing around the world in his 36 foot sloop until his rudder chain broke during a storm. The spare, which he thought he’d packed so carefully, had been exposed to four months of salt and moisture and had rusted.

Current washed him up on the north shore of an island, Piller, according to his charts. There was some sort of electrical interference that was jamming his radio, but he saw structures in the distance, so maybe someone lived here.

Simon was halfway up what looked to be an abandoned trail when he spotted the nest. He brought provisions with him, but it had been a long time since he had fresh eggs.

“Damn. Too late.” He watched as the first of the eggs broke open, but wasn’t prepared for the emergence of the occupant.

“What? I thought alligators laid eggs closer to water.”

As a shadow fell over him from behind, he realized it wasn’t an alligator. He turned and had just enough time to recognize a velociraptor from those “Jurassic” movies before he was messily devoured, well mostly. The rest of him would feed her hungry brood.

I wrote this for the Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above to inspire the creation of a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 195.

I saw the eggs and was crestfallen, because I didn’t want to write about bird eggs. Then I decided to leverage my series of stories based on The Kaala Experiment, a time travel device that’s gone wrong and brought a whole bunch of dinosaurs forward to the present on an island in the South Pacific. Nelson Lawrence Simon never had a chance.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.

Roger’s link up still needs a lot of love, so please consider contributing a story. Thanks.

Deadly Comfort

Lorie Petty

Actress Lori Petty as the character “Noss” from the 1999 Star Trek: Voyager episode “Gravity.”

“What will my heart allow when loneliness holds me down.”

Andrea Norton was a survivor, the only survivor. Five years ago their interstellar ship Astraea came out of jumpspace during a class seven solar storm which blew out the ship’s electronics, or most of them. The heavily protected emergency systems held up for the most part, at least long enough for the computer to jettison the crew module toward Kepler 452b’s only habitable planet. The EM shield around the mod protected the twelve astronauts in hibernation long enough to enter the planet’s atmosphere.

Unfortunately the landing was a little rough.

Andrea was the only one to wake up. The surge protectors on the other eleven hibernation pods had been fried upon impact which meant their systems bypassed the required five-hour revival process and immediately exposed the suspended occupants to ship normal temperatures and atmosphere. They died within minutes.

Andrea woke up to the slow realization that she was the only one left alive. The module was mostly intact but the emergency batteries would only last a few weeks. It was long enough for her to partially restore the backup computer which let her assess the outside environment. It was livable, as the big wigs at NASA predicted, which was good because life support was going to fail along with the batteries.

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