Chapter Three: Cosmic Castaway

When Jonathan woke up, it was still dark out. Sleeping for sixteen days outdie of time is certain to cause problems with sleeping scheduels, and Jonathan had not yet adjusted to the local time, which seemed to run on a sixteen hour day.
He knew it was useless to work in the dark, so he sat outside in the cold, eating a few energy bars for a sort of breakfast and looked at the sky. It was a very dark night again. It seemed more and more likely that the planet had nothing orbiting it.
Jonathan again thought of the rings the planet was supposed to have. In theory, if he was in the norther hemisphere and they stayed over the the southern hemisphere, they would be below the horizen. But if that were true, it would follow that he should be able to see them during the day. He could not remember seeing them.
Jonathan stared at the stars. They were entierly foreign. He did not expect to be able to recognise them, but he had seen a computer generated image of what the constalations on this planet were supposed to look like. he could recognise none of them.
"Oh shit" he said as he jumped up and ran inside.
Sigma should be a star just like the sun. Yellow. The one this planet orbited was too blue.
He brought the power online and check his flight records. Something had thrown him off course. He was no on the right Planet; he was not even in the right system.
Jonathan looked at the telemetry and knew that he was lost in space. He was a cosmic cast away.
He knew his fate was not yet sealed. Not yet. Jonathan could still, in theory, cut the mission short. Head back to Earth. It is entierly possible that no dmage would be done other than the fact that he would not have build a home base for the group that was supposed to follow him in a few months down the line. If he went back, told them what happened, the could, in theory, re-program the flight telemetry for the other ships in time for them to come to this planet, wherever it was, instead of Sigma. Ultimately, very little money would be lost that way.
But before any of that, Jonathan knew he had to get a generator. The sun was beginning to creep up over the horizen. Jonathan shut the power down in the ship and went outside to the rover.
He loaded up the map he had of the terrain and knew where to find the next Pod. He still could not identify which was which from afar. In a mental note, he decided to tell the mission specialist at home to give each pod on other vessles their own transponder signals.
he homed in on the likely position of a near pod. He search the country-side and found all the pods but one, and still yet no generator.
He homed in the last pod, knowing that it had to be the one that contained the generator. It was a simple proces of elemination.
Jonathan began to feel uneasy as he approached the location the pod should have been and he could not see it. The telemetry and triangulation had very little margin of error at this point, it should be within a few meters of the projected landing zone.And yet, the pod was novisible.
Jonathan rolled onto a frozen lake. it was perfectly smooth except for a disturbing bubbly ripple forzen in the surface.
It was the lake he had seen his reflection in the other night. The ice was perfectly clear. Jonathan could see all the way to the bottom... all the way to the bottom where the pod lay, waiting for him to retreive it.
The lake looked to be about twenty meters deep. Jonathan knew that he would have to retreive his pod, it was his only option.
He flagged the location on his map and drove his rover off to the pod he had taken it out of. He use the crane to pile mining materials on the bed infront of him, and drove back to the lake.
That day, Jonathan started what was essentially a strip mining operation, extracting huge blocks of ice and working his way, slowly, down into the lake. It was solid ice all the way to the botom. The air didn't seem quite cold enough to facilitate this, but it was a fact.
The pod must have metled it's way down with the heat energey it gained on entry into the atmosphere.
It took Jonathan over a week to get down to the pod, but in theend his mission was successful. He drove around his ice quary with the generator triumphantly on the bed of his rover, and back to his base camp.
It did not take long to hook up the nearly perfectly efficent generator to the ship and set up the uplink to the ship in orbit.
The only problem with the uplink was that there was no return signal.
The starfish had burned up and crashed into the planet during the time that Jonathan had been trying to save it from it's doom.
Truthfully, Jonathan was now stuck where he was.

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