Planetary Survival

It had been three days since the emergency landing on the planet. Rations were supposed to last two weeks, even without breaking into the emergency stash, but it was important to find another food source before they ran out, not just hope rescue would arrive before then. The computer was still doing self-diagnosis of the ship's problems and the time estimate obviously wasn't reliable. 

Zeke looked at the map he had divided into grids – section 13-12-12 had some promising geology and wasn’t that far from the ship if you went directly there. The image he was working off of was strictly visual though, he didn’t have time to turn on the distancing laser in the chaos of the crash. That meant there might be hills or valleys that didn’t show up on the map. As far as he figured the abrupt landing happened near the equivalent of noon local time, so there were very few shadows to give depth to the landscape.

He made one last check of his surroundings and started off walking to the section in question. His mind drifted back to various chat channels and preparedness drills that he had been in during the last few months.

Survivalists like Zeke were always debating how much to use droids to do surveys after crashes. There was a certain logic to getting it done, but it would leave little reserve in the matter printer once the appropriate scanners were made. One could use the ship scanners instead, the systems were fairly compatible, but that required the main computer to compile the data. That was fine, as long as one had the power to operate it and didn’t mind using the ship as a base of operations.

Zeke didn’t feel like tearing apart his ship quite yet. The amount of repairs he would need at the moment would be fairly small, but cannibalizing the ship for parts would mean a lot more work later. If one had to do it to survive it would be fine, but another part of holding out for rescue was conserving your energy.

 

Too many of the space jockeys he knew were all hopped up on deep space survival mega builds. Constructing shelters, water distillers and customizing all their droids the second they landed. In Zeke’s mind it was better to keep your resources untouched till you knew what you were dealing with. Too often he had heard of these mega builders accidentally disabling the ships comms or not leaving enough in the matter printer to replace broken items. Items that would have got them off planet if they weren’t already busy building bunkers.

Besides, the planet Zeke was on now seemed fairly hospitable, even without constructing a custom shelter. Unless you needed the room to work on a bigger project, simply staying in the cockpit was a better bet than trying to cobble something together. There was, of course, prefab kits, but unless you knew what type of planet you were going to land on – the opposite of a crash landing – most of the cheaper ones were of little use in the opposing element.

Zeke had thought about designing a kit for all temperatures, various gasses and acidity levels, but kept going back to the realization that the ship was already prepared for almost all circumstances. It made more sense to work on better seals and emergency landing procedures for that, rather than trying to start from scratch.

That’s why instead of putting in an ejection pod, he modelled his ship around making the cockpit the safest place to be in a crash landing. It meant a few more walls and doors between him and his cargo but nothing all that inconveniencing. That was another thing he saw too much of – people that would eject at the slightest hint of trouble. For one thing you would automatically be quite far from the bulk of the ship, so even when it survived you’d have to make a choice between staying at the escape pod or heading back. That automatically split resources between the two locations. Also it made any remaining choices up to the computer. Sure, the guided systems would do their best to do as little damage to the ship as possible, but that wasn’t the whole story. Where to land next to made a world of difference as well. Being close to water, a food source, or even a better place for beaming out a signal made more impact on survival than how scuffed the paint was. Zeke had even heard of people being stranded away from their ships because the on board nav. It figured there would be less damage at landing in a high altitude - half way up a mountain - than somewhere more accessible.

Zeke looked around at the landmarks currently surrounding him. He figured he was pretty close to his intended destination. He could hear the fresh water flowing already. It hadn’t taken as long as he expected, as he factored in quite a bit of time for uneven terrain that never materialized. He was almost disappointed that this planet didn’t have any serious challenges to it. He laughed to himself and thought how much harder it would have been had he not stayed in the cockpit to get the final images before landing.

The water was mostly clean and a quick test showed that boiling it would be sufficient to make it safe. Where someone else might have made a fire or a solar still, Zeke choose to keep things more in house by using the heat exhaust on his ship’s reactor. Again he had heard tales of ‘survivalists’ building a fire, not doing the oxygen level check, and accidentally starting a major blaze.

Too often what worked on one planet, was dangerous on the next one, making guides that were too specific a hindrance rather than a help. Zeke had thought to do a general guide, but kept adding to the list of things that needed to be in it. A month long course would probably be more to the point, but even then, that would only be the main topics.

One almost needed a full doctorate in ExoGeology to cover the variations of different planets one could come across. Though Zeke had taken such a course, it was usually sufficient to make a quick glance at all the planets one was likely to encounter during a standard run. He had inputted the survival rating for each of the planets he was passing by, and kept an easily accessible nav routine with the courses plotted to the best of them running. That way if anything happened during his journey, like this week, he wouldn’t have to sort through the information under pressure. Again, so many he knew made the mistake of simply heading toward the nearest place, even when a better one was only fractionally farther away.

Zeke had grabbed a number of plants on the way back to the ship and was doing a scan of them to test for basic nutritional value. He kept all of them in separate bags till he could determine which were safe. He cross referenced it with the records of the planet, seeing which might be new invasive species. There was only so many survey teams, and so many destinations. It was important to maintain the natural balance and not cause or ignore a potential ecological disasters. So far nothing stood out as being foreign.

His ship’s computer beeped at him. The self diagnosis had taken a while, but it beat tearing the ship apart himself trying to find the problem. A small junction box in a vital area had shorted, nearly taking out a section of the electrical system. Thankfully Zeke had made his ship have redundancies and he had shut down the area rather than to have it limp along and do further damage. Now he knew the problem was localized he could replace the part and be on his way. Unfortunately it was beyond the range of things that the matter printer could safely replace, and he didn’t have a spare.

Instead he changed the broadcast for his beacon to request a replacement part at five times the market value.

That was often the better part of survival and being rescued – figuring out what, exactly, was needed and how to motivate people to getting it to you.

That was the last thing he’d put in his shortened guide, now that he had the downtime to really think about it. Too often, a total rescue was a big ask, but offering to buy parts at a rate that compensated people for the trouble of getting it to you was a surer bet. Within a few hours another ship had landed with a suitable part, and Zeke offered several types of currencies or possible trades to pay or exchange for it. The pilot refused, instead asking Zeke for tips on surviving his own next mishap. Zeke was more than happy to show him his notes so far.