This is part two of a some-times serial following the story of Daniel Anderson, a sci/fi story in space. Part one can be found here.
Daniel Anderson woke up gasping for air. Heavy breaths rushed out of him, adrenaline racing. Slowly he came to recognize the cotton sheets clutched in his hands.
Alive. Still aboard the stolen shuttle, still helplessly adrift in Deep Space. No Galaxy Alliance Inquest agents, no hurtling suit-less through an airlock. It was just a dream. It’s not real. Just a dream. Even repeating it over and over in his head did little to loosen the vise that seemed to hold him.
The high-pitched beeping of his vitals monitor made him bolt upright in irritation. He tore it off. I’m fucked. Tell me something I don’t know. There was no use in trying for sleep again. The dreams would just come back.
He groped for the sidearm tucked beneath the corner of the mattress. It was an old habit, but still. It was a small comfort to feel the cold metal against his fingertips, heavy in his palm.
I’ve made my peace with this. That’s what he’d been telling himself. If he whispered it a hundred more times would it stick? Two hundred? A thousand? He often thought of that ancient Earth poem, the one about not going gently into the night.
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light”
Now going gently seemed like it was all he could do.
It was quiet at the shuttle controls, no change for 57 days. Nothing new in the vast dark. No one to save him. Too far out for scavengers or those with a morbid curiosity for distress calls at the edge of the solar system.
The shuttle was no more than a metal tomb now. He tried to not think of the nails in the coffin again, but did anyway. Thrusters busted to shit, engine power cannibalized for life support, oxygen scrubbers on their last leg, comms beyond repair… No one could hear him rage against anything, let alone the distant sunsets of Earth.
Reaching acceptance of his situation was proving difficult. He slumped into the seat at the deck console to the waiting shuttle log. It was an on-going stream of consciousness, without sense or courtesy. It was the most honest he’d ever been with himself… or anyone else for that matter.
The diary was his collection of fears, named and categorized like half-healed wounds with no remedy. Perhaps it would tell his widow what he could not. Like the truth. Maybe one day someone will find me. Maybe one day she’ll know.
Daniel wasn’t one for hope. He preferred colder realities, like the one in his hands. The sidearm gleamed as he held it to the dim light of the console. Was it accepting his fate to use his final bullet? Was it going gently into the night?
Not just yet. He slid the weapon back underneath the mattress.
Perhaps he hadn’t made peace yet after all.
Link to the Theme Thursday reddit post here.