Experiments From Another World

SciFi April Challenge: Beacon

Stranded

Being stranded on an unknown planet is, by itself, a challenging experience, but it's even worse when the almost spherical thing you find yourself on isn't even the destination you were travelling to.

Maiya didn't even know how she was still alive after the tragic crash of her spaceship due to a malfunctioning cooling mechanism, and to make things more complicated she didn't know and couldn't know nothing on the empty land that decided to spare her.

She and her crew should have already arrived at their destination, a lush and rich green planet covered with millions of plants species still unknown to humanity, but because of that unexpected fault she was now standing with her beat limbs on what seemed like an endless desert.

Alone in an indefinite point of the cosmos.

Millions of lightyears from home.

Lost.

She had already tried recovering every kind of device that seemed still unharmed from the ship, carefully avoiding the incandescent and fuse plates just as the sight of her once fellow companions, but the circuitry seemed to haven't survive the blast and the heat. It didn't display life signs of any kind, and the technical skills of the girl proved useless in front of their forced silence.

Maiya collapsed on the dusty ground, covered in sweat under the full astronaut suit that was keeping her safe, after what seemed like hours of moving metal and eradicating hardware.

She was stuck at a dead end.

She was not a person easily angered or upset, but that situation started to piss her off even with all the training she had for emergency situations like the one she was into.

Minutes passed as the girl started ordering her multiple thoughts and concentrating on building a plan of action: the thought of getting out of the hot crysalis of her astronaut suit was really tempting, but without her sensors adept to analyse the atmosphere of the planet she was sitting on letting go that easily could mean death.

So, in the end, Maiya got up and started doing the only one thing she came up with: walking. In front of her an empty valley extended until the horizon but she prayed that, just a little further, that same valley hid something that could save her.

And so she walked.

The rising temperature of the suit, also heated up by the golden star lighting up the planet, threatened to tire her very soon but Maiya trusted her endurance and brought her hike on.

The environment, even after numerous minutes of strolling under that kind of a golden sun, never changed: the plain reddish field continued to evenly stretch itself in front of the incredulous eyes of Maiya, only streaked by some blurry points in the distance whose shapes the girl could not point out from where she was.

Her own vision started becoming blurried because of the hot air recycled by her suit and the exausting stroll so that, when one of the black figures on the horizon started looking more defined, she almost doubted herself.

Maiya marched on, trying to put more focus on that black streak of unknown in front of her, and despite her head started to tell her she was just allucinating due to lack of fresh oxigen she didn't took her eyes off that.

In the end she arrived at her destination: she was now merely meters away from a rectangular black prism that heighted three meters at least, bleeping silently with a million lights in different colours, coursed by what seemed articulated mechanisms and towered by a rather long antenna.

Maiya's senses, numbed by the effort, activated abruptly at that sight: a gigantic mechanism, an antenna, could it be...

"... A beacon?!"

The girl exploded in a liberating cry, but conscious that she had to remain focused she returned silent and started studying from afar the strange colossus in front of her, trying to understand how it worked.

It didn't seem a piece of human technology Maiya knew, maybe it was some sort of old, discarded beacon collapsed on that empty sphere, but if those beeping lights meant that the strange device was still alive somehow she had to make it work.

She knew wich frequency the station at home was monitoring for their operation, even without a decent control panel or display she could figure out how to send a Morse code message to let the crew back on Earth know that she was still alive.

After observing its structure for a while, Maiya couldn't figure out how to power up the thing or to operate it, its console and commands maybe hidden under the layer of black metal ruined by the sand, so she decided to come close to the beacon to better inspect it.

But she couldn't reach the prism that an incredible force made the land tremble violently, and the lights on the surface of the device in front of her started beeping like crazy. Then a strange sound wave shook her from head to toe, and lifting her eyes Maiya could clearly see the air rippled by what seemed a signal prorupting from the antenna.

The girl remained still, her big eyes glued to the shape in front of her, completely petrified by what was happening in front of her: the articulation she had seen started pumping and six long metal legs detached from the main body of the device, planting themself on the hard surface of the planet and starting pulling.

The prism end, that stayed under the deserted land until that moment, was freed in a matter of seconds, and Maiya found herself staring at what could only be the eye of the gigantic machine that now stood in front of her.

And the thing was not alone: Maiya noticed by the tremors of the soil that the others black shapes at the horizon had moved themselves, and were now walking straight to the astronaut.

"... Where. The f*ck. Did I land."

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Wordcount: 1000! (I've been more careful this time xD)

Author's note: Ok, second try after quite a little while, and I'm partially satisfied with this, especially when I didn't work on it as much as I wanted :'D As always, any criticism and suggestion is accepted, I hope you enjoyed this little challenge!