had buried a crate or three.
Most of the crates were intact and still held whatever the thieves had managed
to accumulate over the time they had been here. A smile crept onto my face. The
very thing that Adam refused to haul back in his rush to kill me was now what
would save us.
We spent what must have been an entire
day going through the supplies. Most of them were food and water. I suspected
that they must have had more food stores elsewhere in the base but they were
likely buried in the ruin or suffered a failure in refrigeration when the base
lost power. Cass had only been able to restore the lights in this room by
rigging some of the stored power cells to it.
“We may be able to restore some of the
network in time. They must have been using a similar technology to draw power
from the sunlight that we use. When your arm heals we may be able to fix at
least some of it.”
I nodded at her words and realized that
she was preparing for a very long period of time on this planet. It hit me that
I had been holding out for some sort of quick fix—Adam’s return, or whatever
ship the thieves had used to transport their spoils here. Something like that
happening was unlikely, and it dawned on me that this may be my life for some
time. Perhaps for the rest of my life.
At the end of the day Cass displayed an
organized list of all we had gathered from every crate. One had been medical
supplies, which I felt a twinge of guilt over being ecstatic over finding. They
must have been ransacked from a hospital ship, and I was benefiting from the
misery of others, even if it was inadvertently.
We had pain killers, antibiotics, and
regeneration packs that could heal wounds, but nothing to treat broken bones.
Still, it was reassuring to have something, and I was quickly in the least
amount of pain I had been in for weeks.
The base had been intended for over a
dozen people for extended stays over the course of a few months to a year.
There was ample food and water for only me, a single man, to survive on. Cass
even suspected that I may have been right in my theory about an underground
water source, but even without it I had enough to last for years.
Other containers were filled with
clothes and tools. Some contained luxury goods, such as jewelery or unrefined
materials—things that were mostly useless to me. One crate had been brimming
with holotapes of movies, books, and music. It was almost too good to be true,
that I even had something to occupy my time in addition to food and water.
The remainder of the containers were
weapons and ammunition. I planned to move them all to another part of the base
when I was fully healed. There was nothing we found that could repair the
damage done to the battle aegis, but we hadn’t expected to get that lucky.
I ate and drank as much as I wanted
before I slept at the end of the day. I could pile crates against the door to
keep any crawlers out if necessary during the night cycles. I had enough time
for my body to fully heal, as much as it could heal without a medical facility.
I settled down to sleep that night unaware of the length of time that was about
to pass before I could leave the planet. If I had known, maybe I would not have
slept so soundly.
* * *
My arm and chest made a full recovery
before the end of the first year. My leg should have also, but I was only able
to get limited movement and a slight bend of the knee without feeling like my
muscles were being pulled apart. It no longer caused constant pain, but the
strain of moving it was too uncomfortable to bear.
The movement I did get out of my leg
became natural over the years, and I walked with only a slight limp. Still,
Cass refused to let me remove the armor from that leg out of fear that I
wouldn’t be able to strap it back on.
I wore the suit less and less during the
planet’s day cycle. The hardware had its own capability of keeping its interior
clean but after more than a year there was only so much it
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