Above them, the various pieces that made up
the space station had caught on fire and were falling at high speed to the
ocean in front of the islands. It had been a miracle that the planet had a
archipelago in the right place, or their pod would have landed in the middle of
the water and they would now be dead. As the biggest pieces collided with the
surface of the water, the five survivors of the station looked at the water in
horror, as an enormous creature roared, visibly enrage by the fallen projectiles.
There, above the ground and the sky, their
life had been ideal but not perfect. They had everything they could ask for,
such as running water, food, information, communications and so on. The program
they were involved in was only about civilians in space, so none of them were
actual astronauts or scientists. They were all normal people, in the sense that
they only had the basic knowledge of how to survive in space. And now, survival
skills were the most needed.
The group started walking downhill, as their
pod had crashed against the highest part of a mountain that seemed to be made
of something sand-like. Shock wouldn’t have let them move but they noticed the
ground shaking below them and the monster in the water became a second problem.
In front of the team, Richard was leading them towards the beach, where he
thought they could be safer. No one really said anything, they just followed
and tried to hear everything around them.
Richard had been a boy scout as a kid. He had
camped in various national parks back home and he had enjoyed it thoroughly
except for a traumatic experience that made him retire from the scouts. Their
parents never demanded to know why and he concluded it was better like that.
Now he was walking under a blazing sun, with four other people he barely knew,
even after living together in a space station for a year. That, somehow, had
not been enough time to get to know one another.
When they arrive to the beach, the first to
sit down was the only other man, a man called Sebastian. Despite the English
sounding name, he was actually Swedish and spoke with a very thick accent.
Sebastian was older than Richard and he had been a magazine editor back home.
He had become a part of the team as they all had: paying a big sum and basically
winning a lottery. He wanted to get out of the Earth fast, as his wife had died
only a few years after getting married. He felt so heartbroken that he decided
to leave on an impulse and now there he was.
The three women were called Maria, Kim and
Victoria. Maria had only win the lottery. She had won the only seat in the
station that was up for grabs without the need to pay anything. She was a
janitor back on Earth and had decided to join in order to get away from her
family, who she secretly hated. Kim was a famous supermodel, tired of being in
the spotlight and Victoria was an architect from Angola, named after the queen
that had conquered the African continent.
The three of them seemed tired but none sat
down on the ground. They instead watched the ocean, looking for the creature.
At some point, it had disappeared, along with the wreckage from the station.
Richard was still trying to understand what had happened but it had all been so
fast… They were all sleeping and the alarm started beeping: apparently the
ship’s hyper drive had ignited by itself and they were now ramming against a
planet. With only minutes to decide, they jumped on the pod and saved their
lives.
As they had no idea how that world worked,
they agreed that the best thing was to walk along the edge of the ocean and
look for something to eat. Then, they would try to find some sort of cave or
safe place to rest. After those two things had been achieved, they could be
thinking about the future, if that was a possibility. They walked in silence,
watching the strange bushes growing by the beach, hearing the strange squishing
sound coming from the greenish water of the ocean.
Not of them wanted to talk too much. After
all, there were originally six people in the space station. A man called Bruno
had not come to the pod after hearing the alarm. They never knew what he was
doing, if maybe he had been the one to make the hyper drive work. In any case,
he was now dead, spread across the skies as the station fell to the ocean. He
was a strange man, always hiding something from the rest of them. He seemed
much more tormented than all of them put together.
They stopped when they noticed a small stream
coming from inside the island. The water was also green. Kim walked closer but
Richard warned her that it might be poisonous or have chemical compounds too
different for the human body to process them. But Kim didn’t want to drink the
water but to observe it. It behave differently, not like a normal liquid but
like some sort of creature. The woman got up fast, shaking. She then looked at
the ocean and said what she was thinking aloud: what if the water in that
planet was actually alive, moving slowly on its sides?
As she said that, tentacles branched out of
the ocean and launched themselves at the group. Richard and Kim ran first.
Maria followed them closely, as did Victoria but Sebastian was way to slow and
he got grabbed by the ankles. What happened next made Maria scream and Kim
almost faint. Victoria vomited right there, just a few meters away from the
water, as they saw the most disgusting spectacle that they had never seen. The
universe was a place to be afraid of.
The water, or whatever it was, had absorbed
Sebastian’s body through those tentacles. It was like watching a kid drink out
of those juices that come in a bag, only that this bag had been alive just
moments prior. He didn’t even had the chance to scream or anything like that.
The man just died, obviously, his empty body dumped carried by the tentacles
towards the ocean. Apparently, the tentacles fed the creature that had been
disturbed by the fallen debris. It appeared again, eating their companion.
Victoria was trembling wildly and Kim had to
be helped by Richard, as her legs didn’t properly work. It was Maria who, her
face white of the horror, suggested they looked the opposite shore. They had to
verify if water was like that all around. It could be the decisive point
between remaining alive in that planet or dying without any possibility. So
they walked, in silence, still shaking and wanting to scream. But hey feared
potential creature in the bushes, so they kept to themselves.
The opposite shore was only an hour away,
cutting through the island. When they saw it from afar, they noticed right away
it was a different kind of ocean. When they got closer, they realized it was
normal water, the one they knew from back home. Deciding it couldn’t get more
dangerous than a stomachache, they decided to drink some. It wasn’t salted, as
ocean water on Earth, rather on the sweet side. They each drank a bit and then
sat down on the beach, to rest their trembling bodies.
It was Victoria who started crying first, then
it was Maria and then everyone was crying. In a weird way, that united them
more than anything before. They hadn’t really been friends or anything back in
the station, just travelling mates,. Now, things had to be a little different.
They were drying their tears with their hands
when a loud noise was heard above them. They looked up in horror to discover an
enormous ship just passing above them. It was obviously not man made. It had
all sorts of inhuman features. And it hadn’t noticed them… yet.
