This is work-in-progress that Dominick started back on November 3rd, 2019.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1: The Energy Crisis
- Chapter 2: A Strange Planet
- Chapter 3: A Tough Encounter
- Chapter 4: The Big Fight
- Chapter 5: Hold On Tight!
Chapter 1: The Energy Crisis
“Why did you wake me up?” I asked.
I was laying on my comfy smart bed sleeping in – when all of a sudden my personal robot woke me up. I was so startled I fell out of my bed. Luckily my personal robot (Hal) caught me. “You must report to the captain right away sir.” he said. The Captain! I said, Wow! I got out of my room as quickly as I could ( If I had to meet with the Captain it must have been important.) and found my way to the sound proofed meeting room. No one was there waiting for me. Then Hal quickly caught up to me and informed me that he just got a message from the captain saying that he was waiting for me in the control room. That was odd because only the most important and urgent meetings were held there. In Fact I’ve never even been in the control room.
I quickly scrambled after Hal (who was leading me there.) And there he was, the man himself was sitting at the main controls waiting for me. I excitedly grabbed a chair and sat next to him. “Hello, are you D0m1n1ck?” He asked.
“Yes I am” I replied. “We need to visit the artificial earth room. ”He said “I didn’t know I was going to run around so much today! It may not sound like it but you don’t know how big the starship is!” So I quickly ran to the artificial earth room
“It’s one of my favorite rooms on the ship.” When he finally caught up to me
“He’s not the skinniest fellow.” we walked into the room. It was unusually cold and dark.
“We are too far away from any star to get any energy for our solar panels and our storage battery is running low on energy. Soon the whole ship will shut down!” The captain told me.
“What are we going to do?” I asked worriedly. “
“We will have to find another source of energy in the meantime.”
“Where are we going to find another source of energy?” I asked.
“Well I had the same question yesterday so I did a little research and I found a strange planet Just about 500 lightyears away! Replied the captain.
”Then Why don’t we go into interstellar drive!” I said.
“Well,” replied the captain. We don’t know If It’s a good source of energy or not, plus Interstellar drive uses a lot of energy and that’s not really the biggest thing we have right now, so if we go there and there’s no energy, we could very well be stuck there. And even if my space encyclopedia did say something about that unique green stuff, we know from past experiences it is not always right.” “While why don’t you check Space.com?” I suggested. “Ok, But we really should have a professor on board.” The captian replied. “But I guess I’ll check on my 80 Yottaflop supercomputer.” He bragged. “Or, I could just check the app on my Nebula phone.” I reasoned. Plus that thing uses a lot of energy. And that’s again not exactly the biggest thing we have right now. Fine. He sighed. But I barely ever get to use the thing!
“Ok” I said as I opened up the app and searched up green gooey unique stuff. As I kind of guessed there were no search results.
“Well I’m not going to step foot on that planet, I said, ask Bart.” But it’s Bart’s day off though, The captain replied, he deserves a day off.
“Then you will need to gear up.” He said. “You will need a low gravity suit, a space helmet, spare oxygen tanks, a laser gun, a walkie talkie, a” I cut him off.
“Just gear me up, before I chicken out” I told him. “Well first We need to get there.” He reminded me. The captain started walking toward the control room and I walked to my room. Once I got there I thought I was ready for interstellar drive. All of a sudden the ship bolted forward, I fell over and was stuck to the back of the room.
“You can never be ready for interstellar drive.” Before I knew it, we were there. On the planet now I just needed to get equipped. I was about to walk up to the control room but the captain was already at my door.
“You ready?” He asked me.
“I guess.” I replied. So he put on all of my gear. “I can’t wait to get out there.” I said, because I was so hot and it felt heavy. I turned on my extra range walkie talkie. And stepped outside the ship. I was scared and excited at the same time…
Chapter 2: A Strange Planet
I immediately felt lighter. When I stepped it would feel harder to put my foot down, there was a strange yellow color to the surface. I took out my walkie talkie and said “the gravity is light and the color is yellow” the captain immediately responded by saying “ okay keep going forward, you might find something” I kept walking forward but found nothing.
The strange thing was that the energy detector was beeping nonstop. Everywhere I went it would beep. I was beginning to think it was broken when it came to me. A few months ago I was casually browsing through space.com when I saw an article about planets with cores of solid electricity, and that it emitted green light from the surface, the stuff that the captain thought was green goo was actually that light!
I quickly informed the captain about this and he was pleased with my idea. He said that he would send a few of our drill bots to drill it out. “we’ll have energy for years!” I exclaimed.
Once the drill bots were on the planet we headed to work, I got inside one while other crew members got in the others. After a few hours of work my machine all of a sudden shut down. At first I thought it just had a minor malfunction, but then I realized that it ran out of batteries. We couldn’t charge them because now the ship only had enough energy for the necessities. I told the captain and he said we could shut down the lights to a few rooms we weren’t using at the time to get one more charge on some of them, we were so close to having enough to get to the next star. So I said yes, the reason I was skeptical about this is I knew we could get the rest with shovels and this would include turning off the lights in my room and I’m not too fond of the dark.
While the machines were charging I decided to go to the café, I hadn’t eaten anything yet today. When they were done charging I had just finished up my berry smoothie. (berries are grown in the artificial earth room.) I went back out to the dig site where the dig bots already were. We got back to work and before we knew it we had all the energy we needed and more. (just in case)
Chapter 3: A Tough Encounter
We were starting to put the digbots away when we noticed a weird sound. I looked around and suddenly the sound sharply turned louder and screechier. I was starting to get scared so I walkie talkied the captain. I asked him about it and he said to investigate. As much as I don’t want to obey him, it’s the captain’s orders so I’d better do it.
As the sound grew closer I grew more scared. I held my laser gun to my side just in case it jumped on me. As I was just anticipating it to jump out the sound suddenly stopped. My heart was pounding. As I was just about to head back to the ship I saw a moving pink rock. I inched towards it and before i knew it the rock charged at me. I panicked and zapped it with the laser gun, but it didn’t seem to affect it. Before I did anything else I quickly notified the captain, he was on his way.
Chapter 4: The Big Fight
Minutes passed as I waited for the captain, I stood there, shivering, scared, and impatient, dodging the charges of the mysterious pink rock. As I was just about to break out in tears, I saw a light. It wasn’t that bright, but it was a light. It was in the sky, seeming to move toward me. The captain! I cried practically with tears of joy. As the flying pod landed I realized that it wasn’t the captain, it was Victor.
Victor has to be one of the most trained and skilled people on the ship, not to mention being a close friend of mine. He also brought his lifeform identity scanner. He scanned the rock and it was identified as a “Kaykro” Interesting, I remarked. Victor said that he didn’t know anything about the strange species, but luckily he brought some more weapons to try on the thing. It was already getting late so we didn’t have a WHOLE lot of time. But we had enough.
We tried a few weapons before we finally found one that at least did something, the rainbow gun. We shot it a few times, it charged us a few times. It went on like this for about five minutes until the Kaykro finally gave up and ran away. “Whew”, said Victor. “Yeah, talk about it”, I replied. so we started walking home.
After about an hour we got back to the ship. The Captain was relieved that we were safe. and after a few minutes we were taking off. The next star was called “Straios” which is a only a few thousand lightyears away. Two weeks went by, and we were starting to get energy coming in from the star. After we got a bit closer to the star we parked the ship and let it get to full energy. It took about two days but now we were fully charged and ready for anything!
Chapter 5: Hold On Tight!
My morning freeze-dried chocolate was delicious, It was my favorite – strawberry infused chocolate. We haven’t been able to have food like this for a few days now because the energy had been out, so it tasted even better than normal. “This is turning out to be a great day already!” I thought. BEEP… BEEP… BEEP… All of a sudden there was an emergency announcement. “Oh no”, I thought. “Not now!”
I started heading toward the meeting room, (that’s where we all meet for emergency meetings). When I sat down, it seemed very urgent. “What’s the matter?” Victor asked. ” Ok guys” the Captain said, “I know none of us want to hear any bad news right now, especially since all the chaos that has been going on lately. But this is urgent. We’ve detected an asteroid that is headed for our ship at rapid speed. If we don’t make an emergency landing on… Planet 7280, there’s a good chance of us getting hit.”
We all groaned at the news. “Why now?!” The Captain responded “Quick, no time for whining, we’ll be landing in about 3.5 hours.”
I decided not to let it bring my day down so I spent some extra Zaucha (Our currency) today. I got quite a bit from my mission the other day and decided to buy myself my favorite lunch, fluffy gold and pear pudding.
The 3 hours went by quickly and before I knew it going down and getting ready to land. I was a little bit nervous, but I knew it would be ok. Then when I least expected it, something hit us.
We were going down rapidly, spinning in circles, with emergency lights flashing on. Safety bubbles deployed around us. I was terrified. After a few minutes of chaos, we hit the planet…
Sincerely,
I love your story, Dominick! I can’t wait to read the next chapter!
Dominick, you are going to be an author. Great job. Love you, Captain