Terraroid
Everything fell apart so quickly. All the preparation, drills, emergency procedures, and contingency plans turned out to be utterly useless when disaster struck. Billions spent, then evaporated in an instant. It should have been a simple job: repair the communications antenna, then be on their way to fame and riches. A spacewalk they’d rehearsed a thousand times in the simulators. They could have waited until they were closer to their destination before initiating the repair, but why wait when the job was that easy? Might as well get it done.
Maybe it wasn’t easy for the everyman, but they were trained astronauts, professionals. They weren’t the one percent; they were the one percent of the one percent. Best in class. How many people had even been to space, much less been a part of such an important and potentially lucrative mission? It still felt impossible to Stern that this could have all gone so horribly wrong. But it had… and now he was stranded.
Stern wasn’t quite sure how he ended up sitting on the nearby asteroid. Events were a blur, but he theorised that muscle memory must have kicked in, the robotic nature of his repetitive training doing what it was meant to do. Or had it just been down to the basic human need to survive at all costs? Find a way. Now, on the asteroid, with some awareness returning, he dare not move. He could feel space’s need to reclaim him, and the ground beneath him softly crumbling.
He recalled the explosion, Thompson being shot one direction, him the other. The shuttle practically disintegrating before his very eyes, debris replacing what had been his home for the last six months. The accumulation of his life’s dreams was now transformed into tiny floating pieces lost in the black. He had to presume the other three members of the crew had died in the explosion; there was nowhere else for them to go. The tragic loss rushed through him as the realisation settled in.
He had seen Thompson’s suit depressurising, debris from the shuttle piercing multiple spots. Stern didn’t even have the chance to say goodbye to his friend of the last seven years before witnessing Thompson’s head burst. He hoped that part was his memory playing tricks on him, and that his friend suffered a more dignified death, if there was such a thing in the cold, lonely darkness of deep space.
Stern reckoned he’d find out for himself soon enough.
Whatever miracle had occurred allowing him to end up sitting on an asteroid was no doubt extraordinary, but it was only a temporary reprieve, a pause before the unavoidable. They had been a million miles from home and in the middle of fixing the very thing that allowed them to communicate with Mission Control. They wouldn’t know where he was. No one was coming to rescue him. And even if, by some miracle of all miracles, they were, it would take at least six months. With no food, no water, and an hour’s worth of oxygen left in the tank, that was going to be a stretch. There was no avoiding the undeniable reality of the situation: Stern was going to die.
Accepting that knowledge, Stern considered that there were really only three options for how to spend his last hour. Option one: cry away the rest of his oxygen and curse the high heavens for how unfair this all was. He was only forty and had a gorgeous girlfriend waiting back home who he planned on marrying. A beautiful house. A loyal dog. Incredible friends. Shares in Astro-mining Corp. A lifetime of happiness had been inexplicably snatched away from him, and he was entitled to be bitter about his loss.
Option two: kill himself. Why delay the inevitable? His colleagues were dead, and no one could save him in time… it wasn’t even going to be a close call. There was little left to live for within his last hour of air. Why slowly suffocate when he could just remove his helmet and get it over with quickly?
The final option was to spend the last hour alive reminiscing about a life well lived and focusing on the remaining positives. For starters, he was the first human ever to set foot on an asteroid. That honour was originally going to be his commander’s, but circumstances now meant the privilege was his. Whether it would ever be known to the rest of mankind or not was irrelevant; he was the first. Stern took pride in that. Also, as the explosion sent him spiralling away from the shuttle, and they had already travelled deeper into space than anyone else, he now held the sole record for being the furthest human from Earth. No one in the history of humanity had travelled further into the stars than him. If you’d told him that would be his greatest accomplishment twenty years ago, he’d have snapped up the accolade, no questions asked.
And, as Stern sat on the asteroid contemplating these incredible achievements, a third was added to the list, one which, quite frankly, blew the other two out of the water, as he watched a small creature crawl across the asteroid’s rocky surface… he’d discovered alien life!
He couldn’t believe it. Stern’s hands automatically shot to his face to wipe his eyes in disbelief, but his helmet stopped the action, resulting in a clunking sound, which fortunately didn’t send the critter scampering away. Instead, he wiped the visor as if his vision had been impaired, but it hadn’t. Sure enough, there was an alien creature crawling across the stones directly in front of him. Proof we weren’t alone in the universe.
Stern awkwardly shuffled in his suit, angling himself for a better look at the small, wondrous creature. On closer inspection, the critter somewhat resembled a baby terrapin and was the same size. It had a hard, unblemished, reddish-coloured shell on its back, and an ugly, screwed-up face. It looked angry. The Terraroid, as Stern named the creature (it was his discovery, after all, so he got to name it), had a single eye and an oddly shaped mouth, but no nose or anything that could be considered ears. Its four mini feet appeared flat with a bizarre texture, but Stern couldn’t get a good enough view to examine them further.
“Hey,” Stern automatically spoke aloud, as he had when his dog ran up to him, or when he saw a wandering cat in the street. It instantly occurred to him that he probably should have led with something more poetic or profound for first contact with an alien race, but he’d be dead within the hour, so did it really matter? Plus, ‘hey’ was surely universal.
“I come in peace,” he said with a joking smile as he uttered his first proper sentence to the alien life. That one felt more fitting for the momentous occasion; he was sure his superiors would have been pleased with the choice. He even did the little greeting wave as he said it, which got the Terraroid’s attention.
The critter turned towards Stern, its head tilting to the side as if it recognised the presence of something else on its rock for the first time. It began to crawl towards him at a pace greater than the astronaut thought it would be capable of. He lowered his hand onto the rock, angling it so the creature could crawl onto it, then lifted it for closer examination.
It probably wasn’t correct protocol for first contact, but Stern didn’t know what was. It wasn’t something they were taught, nor something he had ever expected to come across. As far as he was concerned, he was writing the rule book as it happened. “They should study my ways,” he muttered to himself, as he aimed the miniature extra-terrestrial closer to his helmet.
Upon closer inspection, his first instinct had been accurate. Barring the colour and the lack of a few facial features, it looked exactly like a baby terrapin. If he had seen the creature in a tank at a friend’s house, he wouldn’t have questioned anything beyond its colour. That got him thinking… were terrapins aliens? Had they arrived on Earth at some point and evolved from the thing standing in the palm of his gloved hand? What a crazy thought.
Before he could consider the possibility any further, the Terraroid moved towards his index finger and bit down hard. Its large, sharp teeth, now on full display, didn’t look remotely proportional to its body. Why on Earth did it need teeth like that?
Stern was briefly amused by the critter’s overly aggressive actions before the bite morphed into a focused gnaw, and the very real possibility of the Terraroid piercing the glove entered his mind.
The Terraroid had clamped down hard and had no intention of letting go as its teeth continued to grind at Stern’s thick glove. He tried to gently nudge the critter aside with his free hand, but incredibly, the thing hissed at him and went right back to biting. Stern couldn’t hear the sound of the hiss, but there was no mistaking the familiar action, despite its alien origins. If the situation wasn’t so spectacularly bizarre, he’d have been getting flashbacks of his ex’s grumpy cat anytime he tried to stroke the damn thing.
Eventually, the Terraroid willingly let go, but only because its attention switched from Stern’s glove to his helmet. It leapt like no terrapin Stern knew of, and its tiny feet clung to the front of his helmet like suction pads. The critter’s teeth further elongated as it sunk them into the reinforced helmet, giving Stern a closer view of the terrifying fangs as a small crack threatened to slowly form. It was going to eventually break through.
He tried swiping the Terraroid from his helmet, but it didn’t budge. He couldn’t get a grip to lift it off either, as the creature continued its tunnel-vision task of breaching Stern’s helmet and, as a byproduct, killing him. The time for niceties was over. Gentle wasn’t going to cut it anymore, as the small crack on the first protective layer of his helmet grew.
Stern flicked the creature from his visor, sending it spinning back to the asteroid’s rocky surface. He could now add, ‘first to flick an alien,’ to his growing list of accolades. However, there was no time to muse over the absurdity of the flick, as the stubborn creature pounced back onto his helmet and continued its relentless assault.
Stern’s next flick wasn’t aimed at the deck beneath him, as he ruthlessly sent the Terraroid corkscrewing into space, giving it a triumphant look as it floated away from him. Remarkably, the creature’s little legs began to swing in a swimming-like motion as it propelled itself back towards the asteroid. It wasn’t the only one on the rock to now forgo the niceties, as its eyes looked ablaze and its teeth once again grew. It was coming to finish the job.
SPLAT!
There was no sugarcoating what Stern did. He wasn’t going to allow the creature to pierce his helmet. There was no escaping that his time was almost up, and he was going to die no matter what, but not at the hands of some fucking asteroid terrapin with a bad attitude and ridiculously oversized teeth. He squished the critter between his gloves, exterminating it like some overzealous fly that wouldn’t stop invading his personal space while he was trying to eat.
“That’s right, first to kill an alien too!” he victoriously shouted to absolutely no one, or maybe to the whole universe.
In truth, it had been a silly move. He was lucky the large fangs didn’t pierce his glove with the force he slammed his hands together. But there was also another reason it hadn’t been advisable…
The rocky ground beneath Stern shook. It felt like a vibration at first, before it visually started to look more like an implosion. Large mounds of rock and stones sank in on themselves and then were replaced by something altogether different… hundreds, if not thousands, of Terraroids.
All reached the rocky surface with a single goal in mind as they swarmed Stern, their teeth biting every part of his suit while his body trembled beneath the protective layer. He couldn’t help but wonder, in his final moments, if he’d accidentally just started some kind of intergalactic war.
