He landed on the gravel with like a smelting-oven boiling through the window above him. He wasn’t safe yet. Before the house and all its machinery were only a blackened memory more explosions were sure to come.

Joel opened the landing bay door just as he heard the father of all explosions. A heavy looking storage chest about a meter high and slightly wider stood nearby. More debris hit the building even as Joel hit the floor behind the chest.

Joel covered his head with his hands and arms. Curled into as small a space as possible, he heard the metal siding tear loose and chunks of debris thundered around him.  

When he heard no further explosions, he waited a few more minutes, and then stood up.

The front of the hanger building had been torn away and large chunks of plas and syncrete littered the floor. The Chinese-style house was a blackened pile of rubble. All that remained of the launch bay was the super-hardened cylinder of the ‘port stream and a few pieces of the launch machinery. He wondered if they’d work.

A hissing sound caught his attention. And just then wind, like the desert hurricanes of Vobyash, blew grit into his skin and the blisters on his back let him know he’d need attention soon.

But that could wait. Looking up, he saw widening cracks in the life-support shell. The air would last less than a minute.

He ran, yet it seemed as if he were trapped in a gel solution. His lungs hurt; he knew he wouldn’t last out here. “Go!” He ordered himself and pressed on.

His ship, only fifty feet away. His ear itched terribly. Fans trying to help him.

Getting darker, must get in my ship.

He couldn’t be dying now, not with life and freedom so near. He wouldn’t give his fans a death scene.

He forced himself forward. Even as blackness descended, he pushed his unfeeling body inside.

He didn’t remember pressing the emergency pad. Gradually he became aware that he could see and think again. He must have pressed the pad.

He sat only a moment. The itch behind his ear drove him before he’d fully recovered.

The port machinery worked well enough. He left the now barren and airless planetoid. A few remaining light years of time brought him to the outside of the black nebula.

He’d barely exited when the race broke on all sides of him.

“Folks, I don’t have a lead, but I’m not last any more. Can I win? You can bet my ship’s new engines I’m going to try.”

END