Symbios by Jack Kilborn Read Free Book Online

The closest I’ve ever come to hard science fiction. I wrote this back in college, and then polished it up a decade later when it was published by Apex Digest. It was originally called Star Vation, but I wisely changed the title.
    Voice Module 195567
    Record Mode:
    Is this thing working?
    Play Mode:
    Is this thing working?
    Record Mode:
    This is Lieutenant Jehrico Stiles of the mining ship Darion. I’ve crash-landed on an unknown planet somewhere in the Eighty-Sixth Sector. Captain Millhouse Braun is dead.
    I suppose I’m Captain now.
    Captain Braun’s last VM concerned the delays we’d been having due to a micro meteor shower while mining Asteroid 336-09 in orbit around Flaxion.
    A lot has happened since then. The Brain caught the Madness.
    I told Mill a thousand times we shouldn’t have used an Organic, but he was willing to take the risks, as long as he had extra cargo space to carry more ore. You know the sales pitch. Why have an interstellar processor that weighs twenty six metric tons and takes up gads of space when an Organic Brain with nutrient pumps can navigate the ship while weighing only three kilograms?
    Well, we did fit more ore on the ship. And now Mill and the rest of the crew are dead. When the Brain went bad it thrust the ship into Wormhole GG54 and I got spewed out here.
    Mill and Johnson and the rest of the crew were fried when the Brain misfired the photon props. One moment I was watching them on the console viewer, drilling into the asteroid’s cortex, and the next moment they were vaporized and the ship was being hurtled toward the wormhole.
    The trailer detached before I went through, sending millions of credits worth of iron on some unknown trajectory.
    I survived re-entry because the ionic suppressors run automatically and not on Brain power.
    The Brain wasn’t so lucky. It’s dead now, the nutrient containers smashed when we hit the planet’s surface. But the Brain had enough juice left in it to seal every hatch and cargo hold before its functioning ceased.
    Nothing on the ship works. The com-link is dead. The homing beacon is dead. I can’t even open the steel doors to the pantry, and my unrefrigerated food supply is rotting away without me being able to get to it.
    The oxygen systems have malfunctioned, but the planet I’m on has an atmosphere I can breathe. The nitrogen level is high, and I’m light-headed a lot, but so far I’m still alive.
    The temperature is also hospitable to human life. A bit chilly, but mostly pleasant. Days last about forty hours, and nights about twenty.
    I’m surprised this Voice Module still works. It’s got a crack in the case, but the batteries haven’t leaked. I figure without a recharge, I’ve got maybe two hours of recording time left.
    I’ll have to use it sparingly. I’ve salvaged all I can from this damn ship, and I can’t find a lousy pen.
    Voice Module 195568
    Record Mode:
    This is my fourth day on the planet, and I made an impressive discovery. The terrain here tests high for ferrite, making this planet worth a fortune. If no one has staked a claim, I could get funding and mine this place until it’s just as gutted as earth is. The planet is large enough that it might even end the Ore Crisis, perhaps for a few years.
    The only problem is that I’m starving.
    There’s a water stream nearby, brackish but drinkable. I waded in deep and searched for hours, but couldn’t find animal life in the water, or the surrounding area.
    Plant life abounds. At least I think they’re plants. Maybe they’re fungi. They’re reddish in color, lacking chlorophyll, and they have appendages that resemble leaves. The landscape is littered with hundreds of different species, some as high as buildings, some the size of grass.
    None have been edible. Everything I’ve plucked so far contains an acidic enzyme — concentrated highly enough to burn my fingers and my tongue. Swallowing any of it would tear a hole through my stomach.
    But at least I have