A few years earlier …
The plane was falling. He felt it with every cell of his body, as if he were one with this wounded machine, fighting in the air for its life. Such wounds inflicted on a huge beast flying through space were incompatible with life. Kai understood that. But he fought, fought to the last.
Fuel leaked from the holes, leaving the huge body drained of blood. The last growls, coughs, groans, and sobs came from a motor beating in death throes.
“Don’t die, my friend in battle! You’ve saved me in this battle, save me now! Do not take with you to this endless blue sky! I want to live so much!”
Kai did the incredible – they were still flying. He kept the machine in the air with the last of his strength. Then he began to descend, realizing that there was no other way out. Beneath them, there was a desert. An endless eternal desert of sand. They couldn’t cross it.
The machine was dying. It was dying in his arms. A few more moments – and he would hear the last death whine of the motor – then the end would come for both of them.
It was going down. Now the main thing was to have time to touch the ground, or rather the sand before the engines were turned off.
The earth was rapidly approaching. The machine groaned, vibrated in its death throes.
“Darling, be patient! A little more!”
A tail of smoke lay behind them. Flames flared up, licking the metal, and then extinguished, blown out by air currents.
The plane, like a shooting star, left a trail of smoke in the blue sky.
The surrounding space looked indifferently at the struggle for the lives of two – a huge plane and a man in it.
The plane touched the sand and came into contact with this surface at great speed. They were covered from above by the sand wave lifted by the plane. There was a rumble in his ears. Kai was thrown from side to side in the chair he was strapped to. The plane began to roll over. He heard the groans of twisted metal in his ears – the final scream of a dying machine. And then everything disappeared. Rather, it disappeared for him. He lost consciousness, lost touch with reality, time dissolved for him …
The plane was moving forward by inertia for some time, but, getting deeper into the sand dunes, it stopped and froze. The tons of sand he had lifted into the air began to return back. This sand, it saved them, it extinguished the flame, strangled the fire, not allowing it to flare up with renewed vigor. There was no ammunition on the plane, they were all used up in the battle. The remaining fuel leaked out into the air. The dead bomber lay in the sand under the arch of the sky, indifferent to everything that was happening.
Silence reigned in the desert. Perfect silence, the silence of dead space.
***
Kai felt cold. There was an impenetrable void all around.
“That’s all … This is the end!”
No! Everything would not end so easily in his life!
He unbuckled the straps holding him in the chair and fell out of it, rolling to the door. The floor was now tilted at a steep angle as the plane was lying on its side.
For a long time, he tried to get out of this black vacuum around him. Bumping into objects with hands, he remembered what it was and where it was located, and so gradually he moved towards the exit.
He felt no pain, he felt fear. Fear of the darkness around and the fear of staying in it – in this darkness – forever. Therefore, he crawled, clung to objects, but did not stop, just to see at least a spark of light.
All the wiring was shorted from impact and damage, the backup bulbs did not light either. There was nothing at hand that could give even a spark of light, not even his lighter – he did not take it, he forgot it at the headquarters …
The fear increased due to the silence around. Only his breathing and the rustle of his movement, and then silence. It enveloped from all sides.
“How strange …” he managed to open the side door with almost no effort. The cold air hit his face. He stepped forward and fell to the sand, then slowly rolled onto his back.
Above him stretched a huge vault of the night sky. There were myriads of stars, the Milky Way, points of movement of satellites, and flashes of lights of flying aircraft. The southern sky – there is nothing more beautiful than it. He froze, mesmerized by this beauty.
He did not know how much time had passed. Now the time became unimportant for him. Time is important to those who live among people. People have invented time to subjugate the space around, but it has turned out the other way around. Space became a time, a short time of their life. Here, in a space without people, there was no time, there was nothing, only sand and a huge night sky going into infinity.
It’s cold in the desert at night. This coldness had a healing effect on Kai. His body soaked up the cold, and the pain from the blows gradually faded away. Then he realized that he was starting to freeze. Then he crawled back into the dead car and closed the door. A gloomy vacuum of darkness thickened around him. But now it didn’t scare him. Closing his eyes, he saw the stars in the night sky. He is not alone; he is only a grain of sand among a myriad of stars. A small star that fell from the sky into this desert …
***
He woke up from the heat. He seemed to be inhaling hot sand. Kai crawled to the door and opened it. The bright light blinded, and the heat of the hot air swallowed him into its embrace. When his eyes got used to the light, he got out of the plane and looked around.
On the sand, half-buried, lay a huge military bomber. Small parts of it were scattered during its braking. But, surprisingly, the plane was practically not injured, although it could fly to pieces. Now the sand of the desert was gently covering its dead body with its soft veil. Not completely yet. But soon the desert would swallow it into arms and give it an eternity of oblivion in this sand.
And the desert would give him eternity.
How long would he live here? He knew that inside the plane there was a small supply of water and maybe something from a dry ration. Later, he would go looking for anything that would prolong his life.
And then, what would happen next …
There was a desert around. He roughly knew the square of his fall. There was nothing and no one here. No one was ever here.
Should he collect everything and go ahead? This is what fools do. The desert in a couple of days would kill him with the heat of the day and the cold at night. There was a shadow from the plane here, where he could wait out the heat and the plane itself, where he could flee from the night cold.
“Thank you!” Kai put his hand on the metal of the side, “You’ve died, you can no longer be saved. Your injuries are fatal. No one can bring you back to life. So sleep here, my friend, who has fought to the last for my life. And now I will stay with you. I will be here by your side, I will guard your peace, your sleep until I fall asleep myself. And then only the sky will know where our lives have disappeared … “
But now he was still alive. And life was wonderful. How beautiful the desert is! This is majestic infinity. It is a sea of sand with soft waves extending beyond the horizon. It is the blue of the endless sky. It was such a bright sunny day.
Kai sat on the sand in the shadow of the plane, leaning his back against its side, and recalled his such short life …
