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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Whashisfac on 2025-12-17 05:05:24+00:00.

Marathon

   Ghurt hissed and waved his hand as a spark singed his finger. He sat back and sighed, staring at the mangled jigsaw before him and willing it to present its solution. It was the engine. He was no engineer but he was pretty sure it was only supposed to spew smoke from certain places.

   'Any luck in there, Ghurt?' A stilted voice asked from what was now an entryway into the guts of the ship. He looked up to the light, spilling into the engine bay through the jagged tear in the hull, caused by some unfortunate mountaintop that had gone down fighting. 'Can you fix it?'

   'Oh, it depends! Do we have any miracle cream left?' The small reptilian creature replied nastily.

   There was a pause before he heard a response. 'Where do we keep that?'

   Ghurt sighed. The Gallian’s were always like this. They seemed to have some kind of mental block which left them unable to understand even the simplest of social or conversational cues. They could not understand sarcasm. They could not tell when they were not wanted and the concept of personal space seemed to them to be some strange fault found in the rest of the galaxy, which could only be fixed by staying as close to it as possible. They were not popular on the public transport vessels in the inner core.

   'We probably lost it on impact,' said Ghurt, climbing up the safe area he had squeezed in through. On the edge of the opening sat his Gallain crewmate, Hirkutar, whose wide, bulging eyes and furry body gave him the image of a permanently shocked toupee. 'It's no use. The engines been ripped to shreds. I'm surprised it didn't simply explode, with the state it's in.'

   The ship, known at the Beetle IV, was a research vessel under the ownership of the Inter-Galactic Conglomerate of Allied Sentient Lifeforms, but most people just knew it as the Government. The death world they had landed on had yet to be known as anything, as there had been some legal trouble regarding the proposed name, and its sounding far too similar to the name for a reproductive organ in the Heshelt species lexicon.

   There were only five members of the crew, with most of the ships functions automated. Ghurt, chief researcher. Yuskar, the medical officer. Tykra, the pilot. Lillian, the box mover. And Hirkutar, who as far as Ghurt was aware came with the ship, and was functionally indistinguishable from the fluffy dice Lillian had hung in the cockpit. Ghurt was relieved to find that despite the pilot’s best efforts there had been only minor injuries on impact.

   'It wasn't a bad landing, given the circumstances,' mumbled Tykra. The lithe creature looked like a jellyfish that had thought it was time to pursue an exciting lifestyle in leatherwear. Her pale, near translucent head was the only part of her body not covered in the stuff, which was only possible for the creature to don thanks to the assistance of an exo-suit, given her species near total lack of muscle mass.

   'Oh, certainly,' said Ghurt, gesturing to the ship as it smoked, its under-hull baking in the worlds sun. 'An expert landing. It’s just the planet that’s the wrong way up. Tell me, pilot, how is this possible? Why am I looking at a vessel that has crashed on a routine surveyance flight, one that I happened to have been in, I might add?'

   ‘I just didn’t see the mountain coming, sir,’ said Tykra, miserably.

   ‘Yes, they are easy to miss, aren’t they?’ Ghurt scoffed, and then seeing the Yulliag was beginning to droop into an unfashionable puddle he relented a little. ‘Oh, never mind. There may have been some interference from that hellish upper atmosphere. That stuff’ll scramble a ships sensors faster than anyone can react.’ That thought brought a small alarm to the back of his mind but he ignored it in favour of taking stock of the situation.

   ‘Lillian! Any samples survive?’ The crews resident Human looked up from a small pile of battered crates. Small being a relative term, as in comparison to Lillian the Beetle IV seemed somewhat undersized. With even the females of their race registering at twice the height of the Lutwith’s, the galaxies ex-tallest species, Humans had quickly found themselves taking the position as the manual labourers of choice for the government on a budget. They were large and brutish but cheaper than robots, and so Lillian had been hired off of a nearby spaceport for general heavy lifting.

   ‘Uh, some of them. Not much of the supplies though. We’ve only got enough for a few days.’

   ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about that. We’ll call in a rescue from the closest listening post. They should only take a few hours. As long as some of the samples survived this won’t have been a complete disaster. Where is the emergency kit?’

   Lillian pointed to Hirkutar, who was staring into the emergency kit with a look of blank interest. ‘Good work, Hirkutar. Find the communicator for me, will you?’

   ‘Yes sir!’

   Ghurt sighed. He had been doing that a lot lately. It wasn’t that he disliked the crew. It was rather that they seemed to possess some sort of invisible field around them that caused sudden migraines if he drew to close to it, or talked to them for more than thirty minutes in a day. His species was not built for stress, having evolved to achieve the primary objective of finding a warm rock in the small hours of the morning. But with the heat-suits the Inter-Galactic Conglomerate of Allied Sentient Lifeforms had provided his people, they had been given the bright new opportunity to experience the joys of long hours, bad pay and grating coworkers. At least he enjoyed the work, he reasoned to himself as the others milled about in the odd calm that comes over people after a major catastrophe.

   He stared gloomily at the distant mountain ranges that had cause all his trouble, and then he sat up quite suddenly and cursed. ‘Blast!’

   ‘What! What is it?’ said Tykra, who had been trying to be helpful to Lillian with moving crates in her own oddly unhelpful way. To share the load Lillian had to bend all the way down so the Yulliag could reach.

   ‘Damn and blast!’ Ghurt cursed again. He knew what that little alarm in his mind had been for. If the upper atmosphere had been affecting the ships sensors at such a low altitude, then it meant one thing.

   'We've got a storm coming in,' he said, grimly pointing to the mountains.

   Tykra looked to where he was pointing and gave her species equivalent of a shrug. 'So? It might cool this place down.'

   ‘No, you don't understand. Storms on… whatever they’ll call this place, are deadly!’

   Lillian joined the two and squinted. The distance between the crash and the mountains was significant. If the lower atmosphere of the planet was not so clear the dividing range would have been invisible. 'It looks pretty far off,' she said. 'We should be fine.'

   Ghurt had to concede that it probably wouldn't be on them for days at least, but even so he wasn't willing to take chances.

   'Regardless, we need to get to a listening post. It’s safer that way. There's one to the east of the dividing range,' he pointed to the mountains and then in the opposite direction. 'Post Gamma, I believe. Hirkutar! The communicator?'

   'I can't seem to find it,' said Hirkutar as he rummaged endlessly through the emergency satchel.

   ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Ghurt as he made to take the kit from the Gallian, when Lillian raised a hand, guilt practically wafting off of her.

   'I, uh, I might have been using it in the engine room every night to play some- some games...' Her explanation petered out under the weight of Ghurt's stare. She attempted to rally. 'I always put it back after! And that's the truth, Mr Ghurt, though... I can't exactly remember if I put it back last night...'

   Ghurt smiled in that reptilian way that made birds uncomfortable. 'Well, that's alright! No problem there! We all like games, don't we? It must have fallen out of the new exhaust vent in the engine room Tykra was kind enough to supply us! It always did get so hot in there. It shouldn't be too difficult to find one little communicator, it could only be anywhere from here to, ohhh... the other side of that mountain range over there.'

   ‘But we’re okay right now. Can’t we just hide in the ship?' said Tykra.

   ‘With all the holes in it? It’s alright down here among the trees, but the atmosphere up there isn’t friendly. And the rain? It’ll be drenched in methane, carbon monoxide, and all sorts of nasties. We’ll choke to death on it. We can’t wait around here for someone to notice we haven’t turned up for dinner, we need to get to that listening post before the storm gets to us!’

   ‘But Post Gamma is a week away on foot!’ protested Tykra.

   ‘For you,’ said Yuskar, who had deigned to join the conversation after satisfying himself with the safety of his medicine box. The Anglion was impersonable even by the standards of his insectoid species. Analytical to a degree that some might consider mentally ill, he tended to leave others feeling offput after speaking to him, as if he considered it a personal failing on evolutions part for neglecting to include instruction manuals somewhere on the final product. ‘Crewmate Lillian is perfectly capable of making the journey in three days.’

   ‘Oh good,’ said Ghurt. ‘One of us might not die.’

   ‘She is perfectly capable of making the journey in three days whilst carrying the rest of us. Perhaps some small number of supplies as well.’

   ‘No I’m bloody not!’

   ‘Phys...

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