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The planet below Joel had seen better days. For a world that had suffered a disaster, it wasn’t even the cool kind of disaster, the atmospheric kind of disaster, with crumbling buildings and nature taking over and whatnot. There were a few places where a floating structure had fallen, creating some much-needed rubble to sell what was literally an apocalypse, but overall it was just… quiet. Dark, without any screens flashing. A bit sad, really.
Which meant it was the right place.
“Whassit- it’s Arcan, is it?” He called over the groan of the engine – or, well, he said that. It was more the groan of the entire hull. And roof. And panels. So really it was just the whole Relation groaning, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Give me a minute!” A pause as Grian scrolled through the data banks, then: “Arcan’s the city, the planet’s Mira… oh, the reason for evacuation is some tech virus,” he said, a frown in his voice. “Be careful what you scavenge.”
The planet’s surface was slowly getting closer – terraformed like all satellites in that millenium of whenever, it had them spoiled for choice for landing spots. A good little planet, it was. Still a bit sad though. “Why’d you evacuate a whole planet because of some computer virus? Seems a bit cringe. Losers."
“I dunno, it seems… seems pretty bad, actually. Remote spreading…huh. Rotting tech?” The Relation’s happy bleeping stopped as a full article was scrutinised. “Danger to internal nanotech reported… risk of organ failure, loss of life. Beware the infected, they have lowered impulse control and heightened aggression…”
-No. No way. No way technology had seriously started a zombie apocalypse.
“Dude-”
“Oh, I’m so heading down there.”
He didn’t even have to see Grian’s face to know his expression. “Dude. After everything I've just said?”
“Aww, come on, Grian, d’you really think my Relation would get beaten by a puny little virus?” Shaking his head at the misguided pilot, he placed an arm on the wall. “Four entire years and he still can’t see your inner strength. What a bad, bad man.”
“Joel!”
Said Joel made no effort to hide the giggles. They started up again every time Joel glanced at Grian’s expression, meaning they never faded during any of Grian’s next words: “This- this hunk of ship is way too old to get infected, anyway. The thing I’m worried-”
“He’s only saying that because he can’t express love.”
“-Joel! I have inbuilt tech!”
…
Ah.
“Ah.”
“…Wait, hold on. You forgot- you didn’t actually forget about my boosters, right?” Grian’s voice held the beginnings of that disbelieving hilarity – one unfortunately unbased though.
“Obviously I know about your boosters, Grian! But can you not just turn them off?”
“I can, but I don’t know if that’ll work.”
“Oh, right.” A pause. “I’m still going down there though. You can stay very sad and very bored in my glorious ship.”
“Well, you’d better bring back some good loot.” The controls chirped again as Grian fiddled around with them, a humming starting to sound from the ship. “Right, we’re on hover mode. The pod is,” he flicked a switch, “ready when you need it. It’s set to seal itself shortly after it attaches itself back to the ship, so don’t get stuck.”
Ah, still jammed. If he found anything worth selling, Joel would use it to finally give his Relation the loveliest repair of her entire life.
“Don’t go out of scan range, and leave every piece of loot in there until I can contact Mumbo. He’ll probably be able to make something to remove infected tech. He’ll probably be able to do that,” Grian said, the way someone would say it if they knew Mumbo would not, in fact, probably be able to do that.
Even if they never could safely collect the loot though, even if they had to eject it into space when the day finally came to actually use the pod to lose pursuers, boasting that he’d been in an actual zombie apocalypse and survived would be more than enough treasure. Joel began walking to the pod; the doors creaked as he slid them open. “Isn’t he off taking a break or something?”
“Well, he is officially. Which we are very much not.” He turned to Joel, hand over a button. “Alright. Ready to get ejected?”
“I am ready to get ejected, yes, and to actually have fun.”
“Don’t die, Joel. And don’t bring back infected tech!” With a lovely clank, the button was pressed. In Joel’s pod, a mechanical arrow moved to the number five. “And I’d go if I didn’t have the boosters, you know.”
Four.
“Yeah, uh, that is very sad Grian.”
Three. Joel kept his eyes on the clock, timing his next words. Two-
“-Luckily I did not need to choose between zombies and talless.”
One. The doors sealed shut, cutting off the pod from all external sound and external Grian exclamations. Joel giggled once again at the expression on his face at the other side of the glass, the sound soon turning into whoops as the pod was ejected. He couldn’t feel the wind, but the acceleration was fast enough to feel the rush all the same – to feel his stomach leap within him as he skated on the wind and began the all-too-short descent to the planet below.
The landscape stretched out beneath him, the location of his landing spot getting clearer and clearer every second. Not as exciting as a random landing on a non-terraformed planet – everything was still flat and endless, there weren’t any surprise trees to avoid crashing into at the last second, and it was still a bit boring to look at from space. But from the surface…
…Oh, this was going to be fun.