Purple Planet

Considerable damage was done to the mesa. The first landing of the captain’s ship some 18 years ago had cracked open millennium-old rocks like they were ice cubes dropped on the kitchen floor. 

Smithereens, they called it. “Don’t get lost up in Smithereens!” Raina’s mother used to say. “Getting lost” was a novel concept to kids who had grown up on the desert planet. The light purple sediment was all that Raina and her friends had known.

 

Raina carefully picked her way up through the blasted rocks, utterly grateful that she had remembered to wear her boots. The captain was scheduled to return today and she was hopeful for an audience.

 

She approached the landing spot, a ribbed dent at the center of the mesa. Boulders and shards of rock laid about. Smithereens, indeed.

 

Now, it was time to wait. The captain’s arrival time was a mystery to all from Raina’s backwater colony, but the date was certain as the captain kept a religious schedule. Raina pulled from her bag a textbook for her biology class: “Extraterrestrial Farming in the Second Space Age”. It was a dry read with the occasional charming illustration. It would have to do.

 

The hours passed and the planet’s two moons danced around each other. Just as the Friend made his second attempt toward the Foe, Raina heard a craft break through the atmosphere. She threw her bag together and sought cover behind a boulder the size of her mother’s living pod. 

 

A spherical craft broke through the feathery clouds and seemed to drop straight towards Raina. She covered her face with her jacket, purple dust flying about.

 

The craft settled into complete and utter silence. Whoever was on board was perhaps hitting the bathroom before making their grand entrance, or maybe grabbing a snack. Raina was fiddling anxiously with her shoelaces when she heard a puff of air and the cranking of hinges. A bottom quarter of the sphere blossomed, revealing a walkway with a tubby little man. He had thinning gray hair and wore an embarrassing black cape that was at least a decade out of fashion. He stepped out, seeming to assess his parking job. 

 

“Captain!”

 

The man looked up, alarmed to have a visitor. His hand went toward his gun.

 

“Are you here for the cargo?” the man barked.

 

Raina stepped closer. “I’m actually here for you.”

 

The captain frowned. “What do you want?”

 

Raina sputtered awkwardly. “I- I’m actually your daughter?”

 

The man lowered his weapon and frowned even harder. His silence devoured the afternoon air. 

 

After they sat silently for what felt like a year, the man raised his weapon again, changed the setting to “stun”, and fired at his alleged daughter. Raina dropped to the ground.

 

The captain was not supposed to have children. The captain was not supposed to have ties to any of the planets he visited. And most importantly, the captain was not supposed to have anything that could be used to blackmail him and his order. Captain Erik von Redd had captured gaseous life forms in bottles, toppled insurrections within his own order, and extracted ore from violently contested asteroids. But all of those challenges paled in comparison to his apparent fatherhood. 

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Thanks for reading!

Rudolph