Commander’s Log - Felix Macedonica (Updated)
November 15, 3302
Deep in the Abyss
I am not sure what more I can do.
The Lakon is locked down tight on the moon’s surface. I have enough fuel scooped to make a 29ly jump. Materials are bursting at the seams. All save one. That elusive Germanium. Who would ever imagine that but for 1 unit of Germanium, a pilot and his Lakon Type 6E must remain forever stranded at the far end of the galaxy. 1 lousy unit.
I have piloted through hundreds of systems and barely glanced at them - scooped a little fuel, honked the scanner, glanced at the system map - and moved on, ever on. This was supposed to be one of those systems. No, really, it was. It was a stepping stone on my way out of The Abyss and back towards the Roncevaux Crossing. A smear across the cockpit view. Nothing more.
Until I made that fatal error.
Now I have spent three days here in this place and despite the despair and the helplessness, I have found beauty and awe. It has reminded me a little why I drove for so long across the surface of Beagle Point 2. I have ‘lived’ a little now in this system. I know its vagaries - the odd orbit lines, the ring fields, the four suns revolving in ever complicated arcs. I am intimate with it now. It feels like home. As Beagle Point 2 did - well, for a while, at least. I have driven the SRVs - both the ‘Dudley Docker’ and the ‘James Caird’ here on this icy moon in search of Vanadium and I have grown again into that odd skin which is rooted in gravity. I look up at the galaxy and feel its weight upon me, over me, like a magnificent shawl resplendent with jewels and pearls.
And I find myself smiling a little again at the irony that here, on the ground, in an SRV, I seem to find more peace than up there among the stars and the endless cold glamour of witchspace.
Does that mean then I am the opposite of Commander Chiggy? He soars across the galaxy, almost a ghost, a wraith of speed and purpose, whereas I am nothing but a statue looking up, my feet encased in ice, my visor frosted over inside and out. A thousand stars tumble past his cockpit. I am enamoured of the motes of dust swirling about my feet. What opposites we are! He fills time with movement; I am slowing down like an automaton gradually unwinding. That is an illusion, of course. A deeper part of me knows this is nothing but the survival instinct kicking in. He will arrive soon and this illusion of peace and solitude and stillness will be shattered.
And then the real battle begins - not against men, nor even against errant machinery, but instead against the uncaring universe itself. For either that Germanium will be here in one of the rings or the asteroids up by the main star - or it won’t. And no amount of railing or swearing will change that. My salvation lies in the genetics of space itself. It is that simple.
And that terrifying.
I look up into that magnificent shawl of the galaxy above and wonder if one of those lights is where Chiggy is now. Once or twice, we wing-locked and his position was projected onto the cockpit and I took comfort from that. But now I think I prefer to wonder on it - to guess and smile, thinking he is nearer than he really is. For soon, one of those lights will give birth to another light and that light will flow across my vision even as the comms crackles into life - and all this solitude and all this reverie will end.
Soon . . .
http://i.imgur.com/qtHrdot.jpg