Surviving the bog

    It was during the dark watches as the passenger liner slipped through folded space that the pirate ship attacked.  No one knew it was even there as it had slipped up from behind hiding in the massive wake of the ship’s engines.  All anyone knew was suddenly and violently the ship’s engines shut down causing the ship to suddenly be ripped back into normal space.  Passenger ships were not designed for that amount of stress and in less than a second it buckled, then tore through amidships.  The klaxons began warbling and all lights turned red which on a ship like this meant rapid decompression had started.
    Eve hearing the alarm jumped from her bed, pulled on her jeans, flannel shirt, and her boots, grabbed her pack and shoved it into the personal escape pod attached to her state room.  Once inside Eve hit the button to seal the pod’s airlock.
    “Voice print to proceed, state your name.”
    “Evelynn Kimiko Toyoda-Simineaux”
    “Print match, fasten harness, launch sequence initialized.”
Eve barely had time to buckle her harness before the pod was launched away from the main ship like a cork being blown out of a bottle of Champagne.  She could see the ship as the pod arced away from it, flotsam rapidly creating a growing debris field as the last of the escaping atmosphere drug the ship's contents into the vacuum with it.  She could see random pods in the field, others still launching, the suited pirates already combing the debris field for anything of value like carrion fowl picking at the dead on a battlefield.
    Her next thought was on her own survival.  Her first act was to activate her personal beacon that would notify her family of her needing extraction, while giving them a fixed point to find her.  She reached up and broke the seal on the pendant then squeezed it.  The normally opaque piece of garnet red crystal began to glow then pulse, the only sign it was working.  The beacon was a gift from her grandfather Toyoda after she had been taken hostage at eight years old while on a field trip and none in her family had been aware.  It was slow, but if any Gian or friendly ship caught the signal it would be boosted by that ship via quantum amplification and relay.
    Her next course of action was pod control override.  She plugged her phone into the pod’s data port and soon had control over its maneuvering thrusters via override commands built into the system.  With motion control in her grasp she began looking at all nearby planets, moons, or dwarf planets, with a class M atmosphere.  She found one, just barely within distance for the pod in both thruster time and oxygen.  The pod was designed for ninety-six hours of life support.  The moon she found was seventy-two hours away, three days in a pod not a lot larger than a Goldwing motorcycle.  There should be enough rations for a week in the pod–the designers planned for stress eating.  She had another week’s worth of ration bars in her pack.  The thing that really bothered her though was knowing just how much the pod was going to stink inside by the time she got to moon 5 of Zipple 345 between her own breath and filling the excrement bags.  Eve adjusted course, and set the thrusters to burn for the appropriate length of time, then went back to sleep.
    Eve woke up eight hours later, and checked the proximity scans around her, no pirates, but several other pods were following hers now as apparently they tried to stay clustered.  Eve knew this move was risky, but so was sitting still.  She also knew that her beacon was better than the brief mayday the ship would have sent.  Sixty-four hours left in this metal tube and that was just to reach Zipple 345 plus 5–the moon's official name.  Then would be atmospheric entry and landing.  What really bothered her was the limited information about the moon.  Beyond class M atmosphere the navigational computer had nothing to share.  As far as she knew it could be a fifteen percent oxygen atmosphere, yeah you can stay alive in that but you can’t do anything without exhaustion.  Could be a dry desert like Mars once was or a giant frozen ice cube like Io.
    She slipped out of her flight harness, contorted around, pulled out her tablet from her pack, and opened a book to read.  Right now it was a good thing she was a Book Dragon even if her hoard is digital.  Her Grandma Olivera was also a Book Dragon, but her hoard was physical, about ten thousand books strong and they rotated with her deployments, usually ten at a time.
Eve managed to read three and four books a day during this boring flight. She let her sleep just come and go as it was want to do.  She tended to skip meals when really bored or stressed much like her dad and very opposite of her mom and grandma.  She woke up on day three to the proximity alarm sounding and Zipple 345 plus 5 now taking up most of her forward view.  The atmosphere was too thick to see much partly from her being on the dark side of the moon.  The pod would naturally loop the planet, take sensor readings including a radar scan, so the limited navigation system would adjust reentry and land the pod on land in an equatorial region and not the middle of an ocean.  What data the scanners could gather Eve was reading eighteen percent oxygen, sixty-eight percent nitrogen, ten percent argon, 0.5 parts per million sulfur dioxide, and the rest being carbon dioxide, so breathable.  She could see auroras from both poles that reached most of the way to the equator, lots of electromagnetic discharges in the atmosphere, and a few volcanic eruptions violent enough to see the pyroclasts from orbit.
    On the second loop of the moon the pod began its descent phase and very quickly things started to get hot as the ablative coatings began to ablate into the atmosphere via friction.  Breaking thrusters engaged causing the pod to shimmy and shake violently, then the drag ribbon, and finally the parachute, but even with all of slowing the pod could do, it hit the ground with a sickening squelching sound as it drove into the viscous mud of the surface.  Eve waited several minutes so both the pod and herself could settle into their new predicament and cool down some before opening the access hatch.
    The first thing she noticed on opening the hatch was the smell of burnt matches that she rightly figured was from the sulfur dioxide.  As she began to look around she realized she was in a bog and based on the planetary scans the pod made, the entire moon was a bog with random volcanoes.  Eve surveyed what she could from the pod hatch, noting the many massive trees and other equally massive pieces of foliage.  She did not trust using the pod as shelter as she was not sure it wouldn’t suddenly sink further, and closing the hatch would lead to suffocation.  She spotted a large mass of roots not far from her and decided they looked the most stable.  Retrieving her pack she left the pod and headed for the roots.
    The trip took what was left of her morning and reaching the roots offered new challenges.  She knew she needed a fire, she had everything to make a fire, but how do you build a fire in a bog?  The obvious answer is to build it on something that won't burn–not the easiest thing to do considering her location.  A bunch of rocks would be great, but none to be seen around her.  The only answer is to use her e-tool (folding shovel) and move mud from the bog to the top of the roots.  Eve began by filling a spot with branches, vines, and leaves, then covering the spot with mud until it was nearly a foot thick above the detritus she used as filler.  Once the area was covered, she began setting up for her fire by grabbing any branch she could reach that was dead and still attached to a tree.  She made mental notes of branches too high up to reach for tomorrow’s collection.  With material gathered she made a teepee fire filling the central portion with fuzz sticks and with her old Zippo lighter she lit the fuzz sticks as the sky turned very quickly to dusk.
    With the fire lit, it became a beacon for her to navigate to and from, allowing her to return to the pod and bring its parachutes and ribbon back to camp.  She laid out one of the mylar covered parachutes across part of her mud platform, sat down and took off her boots and socks as they were now soaked through.  She wedged a couple of heavier branches near the fire, stuck a boot on each with a sock further down the branch so they would drain and dry near the fire’s heat.
She assessed her built up dais again and decided to set her tent on top of the parachute.  She wondered how the other people in the other pods were doing right now, and knew none of them were equipped for immediate deployment like her.
    Eve being raised in a combat family, knew to always be prepared and her combat deployment pack was how she traveled, always ready for most anything, anywhere, or the wonders of being recalled from leave to do a job.  That being prepared is once again paying off, just not in the usual way.  With her tent set up, she drew her Katana from the side of her pack–another gift from Grandpa Toyoda when he began training her in Bushido–so she could cut some of the foliage back from her dais.  With the foliage trimmed back she took a length of paracord off the now ground covering parachute and strung a clothes line before pulling out her battle uniform and stripping down before the fire.  Her civilian clothes were as soaked as her boots and getting her jeans off was a personal nightmare.
    She pulled the closure tab off a waterless wash cloth pouch and in the light of the fire she wiped down, ensuring all the grime accumulated since her last shower was removed.  Once clean she hung her now dirty towel and clothes over the line so they could dry and began dressing in her clean combat uniform and spare sneakers. Being clean she crawled into her tent and laid out her sleep system, extra firm ground pad, sleeping bag, Marine Corp issued blanket from Grandma, and field alarm clock with proximity detection issued to Imperial Japanese Navy special operations from her dad.  Then out came the one hard case in the pack with a biometric lock, a gift from her mom that held a Colt 1911, and a Peacemaker both chambered in .45 ACP.  Mom didn’t fully trust modern solutions to firearms, said “the 1911 served through two world wars, Korea, and Vietnam, and the Peacemaker from 1872 through World War two, so to her they were proven to survive anything.”  She had to give it to mom as in several situations these two guns had saved her life when her service pistol jammed–something that in her line of work you did not need happening.
    The last thing she did was set up her big luxury item from her pack, a three legged folding stool, then sat down with a ration bar and washed it down with a pouch of ration water from the pod–she hated the flavor of pouched water, it always tasted like plastic to her.  After her dinner she counted out her rations, ten days worth of food, the same in water, she planned to hunt tomorrow and see what vegetation could be found.  Before going to bed Eve took out her tablet and filled out today’s DA 1594 to document her activities for when she returns to her base and has to be debriefed on her missing time.  The last thing she did for the night was check her pendant, it was still pulsing red, one pulse every four seconds now, by morning it would be down to once a minute as it went into power saving mode, and with that thought she knew she could be here for quite a while.
    Eve woke several times overnight due to the proximity alarm being tripped by the local fauna.  She got out of her bed roll at 05:30, poked the coals of her fire and began adding more wood to chase away the damp of the night here.  Her clothes were no more dry than they were last night, her tent was covered in dew, and the mud was still mud.  She pulled out her mess kit, and her very non-regulation small copper tea kettle from Grandma Toyoda.  She poured two pouches of ration water into the kettle and set it amongst the coals in the fire to heat.  She learned sometime ago that little comforts make life easier, so she carried a kettle, tea, instant coffee, and two copper mugs hanging on the outside of her pack with their green patina blending them into most any camouflage situation but allowing her to share with comrades when the situation warranted–unless they were Polivaxian as they copper is a neuro toxin to them.
    With the water on to heat she brushed her hair, pulled it back into a ponytail secured with several rubber bands, then popped on her pith helmet.  Many of her fellow soldiers opted for a baseball cap, but Eve preferred the full brim of the pith helmet.  Next she strapped on her holsters and holstered her guns, then began scanning the area with her binoculars.
    Eve was way too used to reading alien terrain from her deployments, too used to looking for hostiles, too used to scavenging food from her surroundings, too good at waiting for extraction teams to pick her up from her assignments, the downsides of being part of the Memento Mori division.  Her scans told her a few things: there are animals to hunt, that this is a temperate bog with winter coming in, and at this time not a lot of variation in vegetation.  Winter was her first problem to deal with, as freezing weather in a bog could be a major problem.  She didn’t know how long it would be before it started to get really cold so her first task was to rely on her rations for a few more days as she built a more substantial winter camp–like Washington at Valley Forge, her supplies would be tight.

    Eve began by gathering small saplings and weaving them together, tying them with thin viny plants into a dome about four meters across and two meters high over her current camp–she wanted the camp to decompose once she left, letting nature erase her time here.  She had to move her tent a bit further from her fire so the center of her dome was directly over her campfire, but for now that was a decent compromise.  She left a small aperture near the top about thirty centimeters across but with a weaving of sticks that held a platform above the hole that she covered in mud and leaves.  To all of this weaving she began adding large leaves that were still pliable enough to tie and shape to the frame.  Over the leaves she covered the hut in mud then added more leaves and grasses.  She spent two days just getting the dome up, then covered the floor with more grasses and something close to reeds.  She was glad she had experience with tatami covered floors in Grandma and Grandpa Toyoda’s House in Hokkaido, that instilled a life long habit of removing shoes on entering a home–an experience that was a problem in military barracks and offices where removing your boots was frowned upon.  She devised a sort of cross between a door and a plug for her entrance and once the hut was done she put away her tent.
    The next few days were spent harvesting and drying a tapir-like animal over a drying rack she placed near her fire.  With meat in abundance for a while Eve began to consider her water issues.  One would think on a planet that is one giant bog, water wouldn’t be a problem, but the water all around her is in the bog.  She fashioned a small lean too off the ground covered in leaves with leaves arranged to form a gutter and lead the nightly rains into the folding sink from her pack.  Once gathered she carefully boiled the water and moved it to her canteen and hydration bladder.
She spent her days combing the area for roots that she watched the local fauna digging up and once tested if they could be eaten she piled several types inside her hut including some that reminded her of wild garlic.  Soon she had herbs, grasses, something close to mint, and some aromatic flowers hanging from her ceiling as well.  She stacked wood under her lean too, some in her hut, and more around her hut.  Her dais was quickly getting smaller as she added things but she needed to be prepared.  Her hut stayed warm and was quickly drying out even without a lot of fire and she was comfortable even if she was bored.
    Part out of boredom and part out of necessity Eve returned to the escape pod and removed its battery cells and enough of its wiring to use them as a charger for her tablet.  Even only using the tablet to fill out her reports she knew the battery would not last much longer and wanted to ensure it continued to function.  She closed the pod and headed home wanting for some reason she could not place to be home, snug in her little hut.  Maybe it was the weather, the wind was picking up, the sky was darkening, and the temperature was definitely dropping, or it could have been any number of things her training was picking up on subconsciously; whatever it was though she needed to be home.
    Once back at her hut she set her parts down, brought in enough wood to go through the next morning and closed herself back inside.  She spent the rest of her day working by firelight on the batteries and wiring as she set them up to charge her tablet–a juxtaposition that was not lost on her, working on modern electronics in a mud hut, by firelight.
    At 01:47 Eve heard the ice falling as it struck her hut.  She opened her door slightly, looked out, felt the ice sting her face but due to the extreme and all encompassing darkness saw nothing, she raked her fire, added some wood, and went back to bed.
    At 05:30 Eve’s alarm went off though it didn’t need to as she was already awake.  She was up, dressed, and making breakfast when her proximity alarm sounded.  She checked the display and whatever it was it was heading directly toward her camp.  Training now kicked in, holsters, guns, bandolier, Katana, jacket, combat boots all on and out her door.  Her left hand rested upon the kashira waiting for the reflexive draw of her silent yet devastating weapon.  She knew whatever was out there should be in visual range and her eyes were quickly scanning the area when she spotted them.
    They were Keplarian, obviously a youth, they were trying to walk along the many roots but their feet were designed for a water world not a bog.  They were staggering about probably from a lack of oxygen and food.  Eve walked toward them evaluating their threat level as she went.  They saw her, smiled then collapsed.  Eve picked them up in a fireman’s lift and carried them back to camp.  They weighed next to nothing to her, and were easy to get in through her door.  She set them down with great care as their skin is covered with placoid scales like the sharks of Earth and she didn’t need to be tearing her clothes or skin.  They felt cold and considering the temperature outside Eve assumed they had begun to enter torpor.  She had no real idea what to do with them as her medical knowledge on Keplarian’s was scarce and mostly limited to what would kill them.
    Eve washed her hands and went back to making breakfast watching as she ate for any signs of life from her visitor.  It was an hour and two cups of tea later before they began to move, they shivered, looked around, then moved closer to the fire.  They spotted Eve sitting there and tried to speak but there was a language barrier.  For her part Eve tried English as it was the commerce language between Gian’s and the other groups in the galaxy, then a few other languages she knew, but none seemed any less confusing to her guest.  It was when she stood up to tend the fire that the barrier broke and they said a word she knew.
    “Katana?”
    Eve answered “Hai” and the Keplarian’s face lit up.  Eve tried asking their name in Japanese.  The closest they could get was swordfish so that was where they settled.  When Eve pressed Swordfish about how they knew Japanese the answer was simple, they taught themselves so they could watch anime.  Swordfish was amazed to meet a human from Japan even if Eve was only partly from Japan.  She learned the story of how Swordfish (she/her) survived, and that she had been wandering not knowing what to do once her mother passed from her injuries.  Swordfish could see the heat from Eve’s fire every so often and when it started to get cold she began walking toward it.  She didn’t know who or what she would find but she was so hungry and thirsty anything even death was better than what she was going through.  When she saw Eve she thought she was dreaming about an anime as she didn’t see any way she would have found a human here.  Eve learned that Swordfish and her mom were on a diplomatic trip, that her mom was a government official with the commerce department.  The conversation was long and tedious as Swordfish really only spoke broken Japanese from the way she learned and her only being twelve years old, but was learning new words fast as Eve pieced together her story.
    It was a month later when Eve was woken up at precisely 02:00 by a chiming from her pendant and the usual red was gone, replaced by an amber glow.  Swordfish asked what was the sound as Eve looked at her pendant.
    “The beacon has been bounced, the message has been found by a Gian vessel.”
    At that moment the amber glow was replaced by vivid green.
    “It changed color again?”
    “Yes, and green means my family are on their way to get us.”
    “To get you, they don’t know me.”
    “That’s not how this works, you leave here with me, then we find your family and get you home.”
    A week later at 12:00 the proximity alarm went nuts, and when Eve stepped outside she knew to look up as very few things could block out a star at high noon, and there above her was DN-63 and a small shuttle was coming descending toward the surface.  The shuttle hovered just off her dais, a ramp lowered, and out walked General Scarlet Louise Simineaux-Toyoda in full battle uniform with two dozen infantry ready for battle.
    “MOM!”
    Her mom ran up, her copper braids bouncing as she went and wrapped her arms around Eve in a crushing hug.
    “Eve, we have been so worried!  Are you alright?  Anything broken?”
    “I’m fine mom, it's been a weird vacation and I assume the debriefing is going to be murder.  Well between me and your grandma they can’t rake you through the coals too much.
    I see there is another survivor?”
    “Mom, this is Swordfish…at least that’s the name we could agree was closest to her real name.  She learned Japanese from anime so I have been speaking nothing but Japanese for a month since she found my camp.”
    Scarlet switched to Japanese and introduced herself, then the group began dismantling Eve’s camp and removing anything that was not of Zipple 345 plus 5 and everyone loaded into the shuttle where Eve found Grandma Olivera at the flight controls.
    “Admiral, surprised to see you in here.”
    “Now you knock off that Admiral stuff, you are the one of two people in the Gian military who don’t have to use my rank and the other one calls me Mom.”
    “Yes, grandma.”
    Eve hugged her grandma, climbed into the copilot's seat and they all went back to DN-63.
    It was another month before Swordfish’s family was located, and during that time she stayed with Grandma and Grandpa Toyoda in Hokkaido and got to see some of Japan.  Two weeks after her family was found she was on a ship heading back to her own home on Kepler 22B and Eve was on another mission that did not exist, to do things that never officially happened, but those are other stories.

Maura out