Chapter One: Departure

Jonathan Brooke sat, poised at the controls. All the preperation, all the time that had been put into this moment, it felt like an overbearing weight pushing in on the back of his neck. He knew that this moment was one for the history books, he knew that this moment would be just like the tiem Neil Armstrong stepped on the face of the moon, the first time the Colonists threw a party on Mars, the first time Gregor Spinoski found a living organism on Ganymede.
If only he could say something.
The very nature of what he was about to do kept him from being able to speak. The only way that life could survive faster than light travel is submersion in super-dence liquid. Jonathan knew he could breath it, but ti still felt uncomfotatable. There seemed to be soemthing odd about sitting at the controls of a spaceship, seemingly underwater. It went against everything his body had been trained to believe about gravity.
The resistence he felt while moving his limbs was troublesome, but the controls were compact and, for the most part, layed out in front of him. he would be stuck in what he privately called the void for thirteen days, until he arrived in the Sigma stytem. It was a promising place to land his craft and set up a sort of advance base for the next people to go.
Then Jonathan would return to Earth, a hero.
Jonathan would be the first person to ever travel faster thant he speed of light. he would be the first person to ever leave the solar system. In a mirror to his left, up above his head, he could see the numers ticking down.
It seemed like they were going too slow. the seconds dragged on. It would still be a few minutes until the new science that allowed his this marvel of traveling to another place, essentially outside of time, did its job.
Before that could happen, he would have to pilot through the first stage.
Auxilary Countdown One was about to hit zero.
Through the liquid, he heard a muffled voice "AC One at twenty seconds. Remember to hold on to her, Johny. Good luck and Godspeed. We'll see you in few months."
Tick, tick, tick...
With a resounding clunk, his vessle, the Starfish undocked from Space Station 7 orbiting the moon. the ion engines began a lengthy burn that sent his spacecraft directly towards the sun.
Jonathan did not pretend to understand the physics of the machine. Quite simply, it was beyond his comprehention. By no means was Jonathan a stupid man. He had to be intellegent to qualify for this mission, but he could not bring himself to understand how it worked. Intellegence was not the only quality needed for this mission anyway. No probes had been sent ahead, as the telemetry would not have arrived in time to be useful. The only images they had of the Sigma system were those procured by radio-telescopes. That information was already several years old. Light simply did not travel fast enough for there to be an up to date image of the system. Jonathan had to be on his toes and ready for anything when he arrived in the Sigma system.
Auxilary Countdown two was on its last legs. When it hist zero, jonathan knew that he would feel a light electric shock and wake up part of the way across the galaxy. Assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong.
Five. Four. Three. jonathan took a deep breath. His lungs processed the viscous clear liquid as if it were air. he knew he would have to cough it all out when -- if -- he reached a breathable atmosphere. Two. One.

*****

When he woke up, the light was wrong. It was more blue than his eyes were used to, and it stung. He waved his head back and forth, and in a moment of panic, forgot he was breathing fluid and started to cough. he could not understand why he was so cold, nor why his vision was blurrig to red every second.
Jonathan's mind began to clear. The red -- the red was an alarm. There was a hull breech.
he brought up a hologrphaic systems display on the front port. It showed him where the breech was. There was no way he could reach it and repair it before he would be dead. It leaked directly into his fluid chamber at the front end of the ship. The hole had been filled when the fuild froze as it contacted vaccuum, but the temperature was droipping fast. Although Jonathan could not twist around to see where the breech was, he knew from his read-out that the patch of ice was spreading --fast.
A planet was visible infront of him. Jonathan assumed it to be Sigma four, a plant supposedly like earth. It was anybody's guess what the atmosphere would be like, or the temperature, but Jonanthan didn't really have nay other options. he engaged the ion engines and boosted up the heat in the cabin, hoping for the best.
The acceleration of ths ship jostled the already unstable ice patch free. Jonathan's cabin began losing it's lifegiving fluid. The ice still spread through the interrion, making popsicle tendrils reaching for the battery of warmth in the front of the room.
As he approached the plant, Jonathan noted that there was limited cloud cover. He was approaching from the dark side, but could see the whispy white tendrils on the horizen where day started. Although he knew it might be wishing for too much, Jonathan prayed for a breathable atmosphere. It would greatly simplify his predicament.
it was a race agaisnt time, but things were looking good for the Starfish and Jonathan. he looked at the apparent distance and the rates at which he was losing fuild and the temperature was dropping. a quick mental calculation seemed to suggest that he would be able to make it into the alien atmosphere, if not safely than at least alive.
there was a danger that he could skip off the atmosphere is he went in with too much speed. agains his every natural human reaction, he began to decellerate the ship. Teh ion engines reversed their flow and slowed him down, pushing backwards.
he knew if he gave his ship's engiones a sloppy orbit, it could decay and crash into the planet, possibly burn up in the atmosphere. Jonathan did not have the luxury of time. He dumped the huge aft seciont of Starfish and bent the nose of the lander in toward the atmosphere if Sigma four.
The atmosphere met the craft with a jagged bump. It was a rough ride down, but Jonathan had been through some rough re-entries before this one.
Fire curled around the port infront of him. his angle was steep, but there wasn't much he could do about it. the breaking systems were automatice, all jonathan could do was ride the ship to the ground.
As the ship hurrled onward, Jonathan saw a refelction of the fireball, far below. He must be passig over some sort of calm lake or ice. What that patch was made of was yet too be seen. As he approached the ground, he could see vegetation. Life. Non-microbal life outside of the solar system did exist. He was surprised to see that the local vegetation looked astoundingly like trees.
he began to skim the top of what looked like a forest, and seconds later, battered his way in the the limbs and trunks. it was not long before his craft came to a halt. behind him lay a trail of debris and detruction.
A read-out suggested that the gasses outside the ship were probably breathable. The temperature gage was wholly unreliable, as it would read teh heat of the ship.
jonathan knew that he was supposed to wait at least 24 hours for the readouts to get an accurate measure of what was outside the vessel, but the hole was still leaking his fluid. He knew what he had to do.
With an override code and the push of a button, the fluid began to drain out of the cabin and into reseve cells in the ships belly for the trip home. Air was filtered in from outside.
When enough fluid had drained out, jonothan breaches teh surface and exhaled deeply. It was worst than vomiting, for one, it hurt more. He took a deep breath of the local air and coffed. fluid flew out of his nose and mouth. He couldn't breath. Jonathan hated this part. He always felt panic when he transfered from one breathable medium to another. It always felt like he was drowning, in whatever direction he went.
The coffing was so violent it cause him to retch. he wondered if maybe the lack of oxygen would start to hurt him. He wondered if maybe the local air wasn't so breathable after all.
Soon, however, he found himself gaping mouthfuls of the air into his lungs, still waste deep in the lifegiving fluid he had slubmered in for the last few weeks.
He sloshed back to a sealed compartment and opened it, revleaing a bath of sorts. lifiting himself out of the fluid and into the tight compartment, jonathan subjected himself to a cleaning that would remove all traces of the fluid from his body. When it was finished, he rolled out into an empty compartment. the fluid had been sucessfully drained away.
Fixing himself with a warm suit and utility belt, Jonathan opened the hatch of his space craft and steped out into a cold night on an alien world.
"That's one small step for man, one ginat fuck up for engineering kind." he muttered as he saw the rough shape of the Starfish.