Morning all, I hope you are doing fabulously well. I had a strange dream where thousands of gold balloons descended on the back yard and exploded into rainbows when they touched the grass. No clue why but it made me happy. So I am starting the day off happy. Shall we take our happy into the morning prompt? Timers at the ready and off we go.
Well that did not translate into a terribly happy writing time. I am still happy but the character I created is miserable. Odd. Still it is an interesting segment. Kind of a calm before the storm of what will be the story starts. could be fun. After all, who doesn’t love an interstellar fugitive hunt?
Wednesday, June 26th: The wild herd stampeded across the plains.
The wild herd stampeded across the plains. He paused to watch them a smile tilting his face. It was the first sign of life he had seen in the last three days. Even though it was at a distance, It was ice to see something other than himself moving across the landscape.
‘I think I prefer them at a distance,’ he thought as he watched them move across his field of vision. From where he stood he could imagine them to be wild horses or buffalo, antelope or elk. ‘Even moose,’ he thought.
He knew they were none of those things but some sort of as yet to be named species that lied on this planet. He paused and made a note of them. He counted the vague outlines of what he assumed to be their heads and jotted down an estimate of their numbers. He would have to get closer if he wanted any identifying features, but he took out his recorder and got a good video of them racing across the plains. While he couldn’t see anything because of the distance and the dust they kicked up, there was always the possibility the lab techs could enhance things when he returned.
‘If I return,’ he thought wearily. It was a heavy thought. Thus far, there had been no life threatening hazards on the trip. ‘This trip anyway.’
He knew if he did his job, recording what needed to be recorded her and made it back safely to base, then all the information he collected would be gathered and analyzed while he was reequipped and sent somewhere else. It was his punishment. Dissenters to the new regime were sent to work in out of the way places as part of their punishment.
The fact that he was a dissenter by default was immaterial. His Uncle was the activist, the protestor, but the entire family had been taken in and judged corrupt. Their skills were studied and each was placed in a position where they would be usefully out of the way. He had been wounded several times in the line of duty and knew there would probably be any more injuries in his future.
In theory, there was an end in sight. He had two ore years to go on his service and then he would be released, his lesson learned. Or so he had been told. That was what went on his official record. On paper it looked like a legally based sentence. However he had never heard of any one taken ever being released from service. He suspected that if he did manage to last out the last two years, then at the end of it some accident would be arranged, eliminating him before he could be freed.
The knowledge of that, the weight of inevitability weighed on him. Often times he thought of arranging his own death on one of the planets he found acceptable and living out the rest of his days alone. Somehow he had never quite managed to arrange it. There were trackers of course, ways of finding him if he abandoned his post. He knew that without a whole lot of blood or the remains of his bones, they would never pronounce him officially dead. They would list him as a deserter until it could be proven he was dead. Any remains they found would be sent for DNA testing. It limited his options as far as planning went.
Ten til Midnight 