Darius Bergeron
10/02/08
Period 6
NOMAD
Whrrr-click. Whrrr-click. Whrrr-click. It was this sound, not the whine of the engines, or even the careening of the ship that awoke him. As he staggered upright he noticed a scab cracking as he moved his head, and deduced that he must have tripped. Then the man, short and slim, rushed over to the device that was droning for attention. The apparatus hung from the wall, and appeared simply to be a matrix of coloured dots, with no pattern or purpose. But the man’s fingers, dexterous from years of repetition, quickly flew across the large buttons, and this caused a series of holographic images to pop up. The first appeared to be a menu, and so did the next, and the next. There seemed toe no end to these colourless displays, and an onlooker would certainly have been impatient by now, especially as large chunks of the ship threatened to tear loose. But Nomad, for that was what he was called, continued to dash through the menus. He eventually happened upon one that seemed to please him, and he operated the controls even more rapidly, at an inhuman pace. The speed seemed a snail’s pace, however, when compared to how fast the ship was losing control and tearing itself apart. He pulled up a diagram of the ship, more like a diagnostic, and slid his finger a line of dots to rotate the image. It showed that the ships stabilizers, long, slender fins that ran down three sides of the ship, were only connected by their drag lines. This, combined with the fact that he was starved and injured, and that the outside of the ship was burning up, did not appear to bother nomad at all. He decided that a crash landing was necessary, but he could not perform one without the stabilizers working properly. It was only at this point in time that he looked up at the planet he was approaching, and found that it was not a planet at all, but a fusion between a moon and a space station. This would make things more difficult, with all those bars and...