Durk sighed. He’d be floating in space for several more hours. He had enough oxygen, he had plenty of fuel, and his engines were gone, along with the entire front of his spacecraft.
But that was one battlecruiser which would never trouble his world again. He had no weapons; he’d had to ram it in the center. It had worked. He’d survived, which was surprising and vaguely distressing.
He had just enough radio to call for help and just enough cynicism to doubt that it would arrive.
Dirk took out his copy of the Tao Te Ching in order to calm himself. He read through several pieces again and took several deep breaths. He also got a couple of cryptic radio messages at the time—Morse code, of all things, with which he had no knowledge.
He was pretty sure he was about the be picked up by aliens who’d found that Da Vinci piece they shot into space, and was extremely depressed that he was nowhere near as good-looking as they expected humans to be.
He just hoped their intentions weren’t romantic.
Durk sighed for the two thousand, four hundred and sixty-seventh time in the last 72 hours. Then he carefully took his nice paper copy of the Tao out of his tiny remaining half-broken bookcase, and began slowly, carefully, folding increasingly sophisticated paper airplanes. If he wasn’t rescued in time, he planned to put on the (good for perhaps ten minutes) space suit and launch them into space; there wasn’t air for them here, but they’d float somewhere until there was. Or get hit by a comet, whatever.
He’d already accomplished “if you have to die, die for a good cause”, most likely. Now he was looking for something else positive he could put into the world, and a way to keep from being bored.
For the ten-thousandth time, he wished he’d never found that ancient, bootleg copy of “Star Wars”. It had brought him here, given him dreams of interspatial dogfights, action, and adventure, and eventually, he’d been very heroic and now he was very, very bored and also might die.
It was also the only media he possessed. He sighed, and for the two-hundred eighty-seventh time, hit “play” on the ancient, ancient VCR.
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