Delu’s eyes flashed open. She didn’t move, face down, right cheek pressed against the warmth of moist ground. Her vision instantly took focus, darting about to analyse the folds of grass that obstructed her view.
Daylight.
Her auditory muscles were already at work in an effort to extrapolate a clearer perception of her surroundings. One particular disturbance of interest was honed in on; a rapid procession of sound - light tapping; possibly the mechanical parts of a manufactured object no more than six meters away. The intervals between each tap were erratic and gradually increasing. A second repetitive sound of interest was also noted, less dominant, faintly distant, coming from the opposite direction to the first, but quickly distinguished as the familiar pulsations of a heart. Too fast to be that of man.
There was a pungent odor in the air, direction of source unknown, though its strength was enough to mask whatever other smells may have been present in the area. The odor seemed to be a combination of sulfur, stagnant water and rotting fish, the stench of which caused her left eyebrow to curl.
Her attention was next drawn to her body, as there was something discernibly different about how she was feeling. The press of her flesh on the soggy ground was… odd… weighted, yet she was aware of no object pressing down on top of her, and it took a few moments to recognize the cause. Gravity. Although the difference in gravity to that of Earth was subtle, it was enough to be acknowledged as important while her mind turned back, recalling her last memories before waking in her current position….
The Secondary Hold Room (HR2) was the second of two Hold Rooms on STS Discovery, allocated to seat selected sub-ranking officers during subspace jumps. This is where Delu was only a few minutes after STS Discovery arrived successfully at its destination, and Delu, alongside five other officers, was still harnessed securely in her seats when the dread-inspiring sirens resounded throughout the vessel.
Amid the howling alert, she heard the stress in the voice of the officer directly to her right, Franklin Shephard, speculating randomly on the problem at hand. Before long the vessel was struck by a force that caused it to violently shutter, followed by a few seconds of calm before the heavy vibrations of turbulence started up. Within moments the vibrations intensified to a brutal level and Delu clenched her jaw to prevent her teeth from clashing, while the other officers with her soon yielded to express their terror in verbal outbursts. This was a period of time that seemed to draw out for far too long, but was finally terminated by a second, violent convulsion, which merely served to introduce an abrasive metallic screech as the port wall of the Hold suddenly ripped away, sucked out through a rupture in the outer hull of STS Discovery.
For one of the few times in her life, Delu was feeling fear when sunlight exploded through the Hold. They had entered an atmosphere. The drop in air pressure screamed in her ears and gripped her like massive unseen hands, viciously attempting to snatch her from her seat. The other officers in the Hold had mostly grown silent, though Franklin Shephard was now calling out the name of his God - but his pleas went unheard as the perpetual velocity of descent was announced in the increasing rage of turbulence, affirming their fast approaching demise.
In the acceptance of her fate, owning no doubt that her death was imminent, Delu found herself with nothing to lose by relinquishing her harness. By doing so she would at the very least be free of the sirens and screaming imbecile seated beside her, allowing her a few moments of grace in a freefall before meeting her own fate.
While turning her head to provide Franklin Shepherd a saccharine look, her fingers felt their way across the straps of her harness, seized the buckle, then swiftly squeezed in on the catch.
An instant later she was swallowed into the open atmosphere of Locus, arms outstretched, body tumbling through the air currents, the surface of the planet making its hasty approach as she closed her eyes and smiled
“What the fu….”
The breath of her quiet words softly rustled the fibers of grass at her face, denoting the shining realization that she shouldn’t have been alive - but even more than this, as she continued to lay there motionlessly observing her condition, there was no pain to be felt. Defying the stupendous degree of improbability, she had speciously attained no injury.
At last she made a move, shifting her right arm, fingers confirming the presence of the equipment on her belt. Her gun was holstered. Her knife was sheathed. She then slowly brought both hands in line with her breasts and pushed away from the ground, sitting back on her heels as she took an immersed visual of the area.
Although nothing at first was found to be responsible for the offensive odor, a small, damp, twig swaying in the humid breeze and gently clashing with a stone was responsible for the nearby tapping she had heard, while the heartbeat belonged a rodent-size creature obscured by the grass thirty meters away.
Delu was otherwise alone in a field of emerald grass, sparsely broken with patches of off-green mud, girded by the distant and vibrant thicket of a forest, but all of this appeared to be distorted in a constant wave-like motion caused by the mirage of soaring humidity. To her left, far beyond the trees, was a hazy view of sharply peaked mountains gouging at the entirely cloudless sky – and it was the sky that quickly stole her attention with a tingle that ran the course of her spine; it’s vibrant, Aquatic Teal hue shimmered with ripples of movement like the face of a jewel, while directly above her the magnified platinum image of the sun pronounced its reign, crowned with a violet halo in declaration of its splendor.
Her inquiring awe of the spectacle was already playing with the possibility that the Aqua colored sky was in fact a thin ocean of water encompassing the globe, perhaps thawing by day and freezing by night, yet set at the perfect altitude to remain in orbit. In effect, creating the moist greenhouse atmosphere that had already coated her skin and dampened her clothes with precipitation.
She licked her lips to sup the water collected about her mouth as she pulled her attention from the sky. Despite its awesome beauty, she had more pressing concerns to contend with. It would appear to have been high noon, but daylight wouldn’t last forever and she would inevitably need to find food and shelter. The most logical way of obtaining these things was salvaging whatever remained of STS Discovery, but no trace of the vessel or its wreckage was anywhere in sight, which wasn’t a surprise, really. Jumping from Discovery while it plummeted towards the planet on an unknown vector, may have very well resulted in many miles of separation. The biggest problem with this was navigation; choosing a random direction to seek it out would likely result in putting even more distance between them.
As she now stood in the field, her auditory muscles working hard to assess the situation, a whole new world of sound was apparent. A number of these sounds seemed similar to those found on Earth, but most were not. Naturally, the majority of what she heard was intriguing, some greatly estranged, others felt threatening and some were even alluring to listen to, but none of them yet provided any indication to Discovery’s location….
