Transmission Lost Read Online Free

outside and have a look around. It's getting stuffy in here, anywhere.” Jack went for the door that led out of the ship, which was just outside of the door to his cabin. His hand paused over the control mechanism. “Better safe than sorry...”
    Jack returned to his cabin, opening a locked compartment underneath the bed. Reaching inside, he drew out a belt made of military-spec webbed material. Attached to it was a holster, magazine pouches, a flashlight, and a small fixed-blade knife. Jack checked the holster out of habit. Fitted snugly inside was a matte-black .45 semiautomatic. The same one, in fact, that he'd carried as a pilot in the Navy. Jack enjoyed shooting and he'd kept up with it after retiring from the military. With ten shots in the magazine, one in the chamber, and four spare magazines on his belt, Jack would feel quite a bit safer stepping out onto an unfamiliar planet with it than he would have without it. He strapped the belt around his waist, and went back to the door.
    “Alright, world...Let's see what you got.” He pressed the door release, and with a strained groan the hatch opened. Jack stood there, looking out, feeling a certain sense of awe. “Yeah, that's...That's something, alright.”
    Light from the sun of whatever solar system he was in warmed his face. The light was filtering down through thick trees all around the crashed ship, tall broad-leafed trees of purple, dark green, and iridescent blue. The alien forest around him was thick enough that he couldn't see very far, but not thick enough to make it dark. Jack looked down at the forest floor, and found the source of the smoke inside the ship. When the Star's Eye had come down, heat from the hull had set fallen leaves afire, and the smoke had seeped into the ship through the breached armor plating. Where the forest floor had not burned, Jack saw short green grass covered in a layer of dead brown leaves. He wasn't sure how the crash hadn't set off a huge forest fire, but from the smell of the air it seemed that he was in a rainforest type of environment. Perhaps the heavy moisture of the area had prevented the fire from spreading.
    Sitting down on the edge of the hatch, Jack hopped the short distance down to the ground. He landed lightly, his boots squelching slightly against the soil, which was damp. It seemed as though rain had fallen recently, perhaps even since the ship had crashed. Jack stood there for a minute or two, listening and looking around.
    The air smelled not too different from the air on Earth, but it was fresher and more...something. Flavorful would be the word he would have used to describe it. Whether the freshness was from lack of pollution or a higher oxygen content, Jack couldn't tell yet. A number of trees lay fallen around him, knocked over by the crash. He looked straight up, and saw a pale blue sky smeared here and there with white clouds. All around him was a constant noise that sounded like birds calling.
    Jack looked back at the ship, and started walking around it. The damage from outside seemed a whole lot worse than he'd imagined from inside. His engines were almost completely wrecked, and the hull was crumpled in numerous places, with several gashes in the armor plating showing through into the inside of the ship. Dusk was starting to set in once Jack completed his evaluation of the Star's Eye , and he shook his head as he came to his conclusion.
    “There's no way this ship is flying again,” he said. “Not without at least a month to make repairs. And I don't know if I can cannibalize enough non-essential parts from the rest of the ship to make the repairs I need to get back into space with.”
    That said, though, Jack had to admit that it could have been much, much worse. He was alive, after all, and that was step number one in repairing any ship after a crash. His main problem, of course, was patching the hull to make it airtight and getting the main engines back online. His hyperdrive engines had been