Terra IV
Prompt: The Vessel
It gleamed in the distance, on the large concrete launchpad. The starship Terra IV was so massive you could see it for kilometers. The bleak grassy plains surrounding it were desolate, save for a few tumbleweeds and an occasional scrub brush. Everything was so brown and dry I could taste the lack of moisture in the air every time my lips parted.
As barren as the landscape was, my eyes drank it in like a sponge. The way the brittle grasses swayed in the light breeze, the way the dust swirled behind our rover as we sped across the rolling hills, the way the wind felt in my hair and the warmth of the blue star on my skin. Gods, I would miss this planet. My life aboard the Terra IV for the next few months will be so gray and monotonous compared to this.
This rock wasn’t the one we were looking for, I guess. Who knows why not, they never tell me - I’m just a lowly tech. All I do is take samples, make observations, record data. A bot could easily do it. But I guess they can pay me shit wages and not have to worry about the liability of their proprietary technology getting ripped off by space pirates and sold to competitors.
Plus, humanoid employees are literal canaries in the coal mine; useful for things bots can’t do - like get sick and die if there’s something hazardous we wouldn’t know to test for ahead of time. Death is an important piece of data. That’s why we never work alone. One tech getting sick is a fluke, but multiple instances means something is up. Thinking about the amount of methodical poking and prodding that my body will go through when I get out of quarantine back aboard the Terra makes me shudder.
Still, I can’t complain. My parents were refugees from the second Grivion War, so considering the fact I grew up as a lower caste kid hanging around a bunch of port jockeys, a tech job aboard a starship like the Terra is pretty respectable. A shared dormitory, reliable dehydrated food packs, and free healthcare is more than most people from my world can scrape together these days, even if my employers think of me as expendable…
