LF Friends, Will Travel

What's a crash landing between friends?

Ivan woke up covered in blood with a banging headache. In general this meant that yesterday was either a very good day, or a very bad one.. The fact that the blood had the absolute audacity to be his own instead of someone else's told a story of someone who had just had a really bad day.

Ivan was currently strapped to the captain's chair of the "Bridge" of his starship, which due to the size of the vessel was also the living quarters, kitchen, dining room, guest room and foyer. Anything that hadn't been strapped down now lay scattered around the room, along with a few things that had been strapped down but had decided to shake off their physical constraints in the chaos that had ensued.

The lights of the small ship flickered on and off as every single device that made up a modern FTL capable vehicle bleeped and blinked out error codes that Ivan probably should've known the meaning of. Even the sandwich toaster was flashing an orange light in some form of error message. Clearly, in this emergency there would be no paninis made today.

Ivan looked around at the mess that was his ship, then at the mess that was his body. Even on the best of days Ivan was not what you would call "a perfect specimen", but this went well beyond that. The rapidly clotting blood from the head wound was absolutely everywhere, his body ached from head to toe, and even worse Ivan's sunglasses were missing. Somehow Ivan had managed to make everything worse.

"Odin, status report?"

The Terran's voice came out raspy and hoarse, waiting a few moments until Ivan remembered that the AI ODIN wasn't here with him. That had been the entire point of this trip, hadn't it? Ivan and ODIN spent their time doing odd jobs; delivering small amounts of important cargo, checking on interesting scientific anomalies, basically anything that someone with a tiny one person cargo carrier could do for cash.

During their latest job, Ivan had spotted an unusual set of signals originating from an uninhabited planet, strange broadcasts that ODIN had seemed to miss. He knew how much his AI friend liked interesting data like that; they once had spent an entire three weeks just watching a sun go supernova. The prospect of being able to finally surprise ODIN with something nice was what had caused Ivan to go on this "extra curricular activity" in the first place.

"Snuck off" would be the wrong term for it, since although it felt at times ODIN was actually the one in charge of the operation, they were both equal partners. But Ivan did take "The Leaky Bucket" for a quick trip without notifying his AI friend. The plan had been simple: Fly the ship to where he had seen the signals, spend a day recording them, then return to ODIN and soak up all the praise for finding and procuring such a thoughtful gift.

Sure, Ivan didn't normally fly the ship, such things were better left to the AI. But it wasn't like he couldn't! He did technically have a licence, after passing the test on his fifth attempt. How hard could just going to a location and hovering in orbit be?

Turns out: harder than expected. Halfway through data gathering, his ship had evidently floated a little too close to the planet's orbit. By the time he'd tried to rectify his mistake, the space-ship had turned into an atmosphere-ship, plummeting down into the gravitational pull of the planet below. If Ivan was being honest, a more skilled pilot would have recovered from such a blunder. Heck, ODIN probably could have done it with his optical sensors closed. But Ivan was, at best, a below average pilot, meaning the ship did eventually crash into one of the many large structures that dominated the planet's surface.

If Ivan had some time to think he would have wondered about how an unoccupied planet had such structures, but for now the Terran had other things to worry about. He looked down at the harness holding him in place on the chair, starting to move his right arm to unbuckle himself before a crunching screaming pain told him that this was an incorrect choice.