The first thing she did on her first full day on Chunk was take stock of what she had. She had crashed at some point in the early hours of the day but the day seemed way too long so she just decided to estimate a day has passed considering she was unconscious for god knows how long.

  She had named the planet Chunk approximately four minutes after she had finished cursing everything she could think of. The system had not registered the name. She used it anyway since the system didn't tell her the name of the planet and she was not willing to ask.

  Hull integrity at 13%. That was the number everything else organized around. She couldn't leave Chunk at 13% anything. Escaping the planet's gravity at that integrity would finish what the entry had started. She needed materials, she needed time, she needed the blast furnace and the fabrication skill and everything volume one had given her applied to the problem of making the box space worthy again.

  First she needed to understand what she was working with.

  She spent the first two hours of day one hundred and fourteen doing a full exterior assessment of the box, moving around it in the 1.3G with the systematic focus of someone conducting an inspection and the growing physical awareness that 1.3G was not a rounding error. Her body was hers and she knew it well — four months of flux optimization had made her intimately familiar with her own biological systems — and her body was currently informing her that everything weighed thirty percent more than she was used to and that this included her own limbs and that her lower back had not signed up for this.

  She noted the damage methodically. The starboard thrust arrays were the most visible problem — two of the four were bent beyond immediate use, one was intact, one was borderline. The hull had dented in the landing, the external conduits on the port side had torn loose, and the hatch she'd jammed getting out was going to need realignment before it sealed properly again. The window, as previously established, was fine. The window was always fine.

  She made a list in her memo tab. Prioritized by what she needed to do first versus what she could do last. The internal repairs came after hull integrity. Hull integrity came after materials. Materials came from the surface.

  She decided to go explore.

  Chunk, up close, was less barren than it had looked from the window on the way down.

  Not hospitable. But there was life here. No not aliens. I mean non sentient aliens. With no these conditions I could only imagine they survived out of sheer biological spite. The microorganisms were the first life she'd countered. She was just examining the skid marks made by the box and was about to touch the ground the system window popped up.

  [Microorganisms detected.]

  [Due to unfavorable conditions these seem to lie in a dormant state]

  [DO NOT MAKE CONTACT UNDER ANY CONDITIONS. ]

  I obediently slowly withdrew my flux laminated hand and turned around and walked the other way.

  She found the blue-leafed plants next. Up close they were more interesting than withered — the withering was confusing as the sun wasn't that bright or hot and it was what she assumed to be midday by now, the uppermost leaves dried and brown at the tips, but the inner leaves near the rock shadows were intact, a deep vivid blue that had no equivalent in any plant she had any memory of. She crouched in front of one for a moment, just looking at it. The blue was not decorative. It was evolution — the orange star's light spectrum, the plant absorbing what it needed and reflecting what it didn't, and what it didn't need was blue.

  She took a small sample. The system identified it as unknown flora — analysis pending.

  She was approximately three hundred meters from the box, examining (When I say examining I mean just staring at it and afraid to touch due to the constant warning of microorganisms that would probably end her on contact) a rock formation that had promising mineral density according to her flux perception, when the system chimed.

  PLANETARY PHENOMENON DETECTED: SOLAR FLARE EVENT

  The host star of this planetary system — spectral classification K2V — exhibits periodic coronal mass ejection events at intervals consistent with its stellar activity cycle. These events, commonly referred to as solar flares in stellar classification literature, occur when magnetic energy accumulated in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released, producing bursts of radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum including X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths, as well as streams of energetic particles—

  She looked up from the rock. The system was still talking. She read ahead.

  —the intensity of these events varies based on stellar classification and activity cycle phase, with K-type stars exhibiting particularly energetic flare activity relative to their baseline luminosity. The thin helium atmosphere of this planetary body provides significantly reduced shielding compared to nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres of comparable density, meaning surface radiation exposure during a flare event would be—

  "You're in a good mood today, I've never seen you yap this...."

  —WARNING: SOLAR FLARE IMMINENT.

  Estimated time to surface impact: 30 seconds.

  Recommended action: Seek immediate shelter.

  Distance from Unit 00: 314 meters.

  She stared at that for one full second.

  Then she ran.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Three hundred and fourteen meters. In 1.3G. In a school uniform. Her head was spinning as this was the first time she had ever run in her memory. She had zero memory of ever doing any sort of exercise but she could feel it. She was damn fast.

  She ran even faster, ran with everything she had.

  The gravity was a wall she had to push through with every stride — each footfall cost more than it should have, the ground demanding more effort per step than any ground she'd run on before. As she accelerated she could feel her flux reinforcement compensating automatically, pulling on reserves to bridge the gap between what her muscles could do and what the situation required, and she ran and the box was there, she could see it, Gerald's light through the window like a beacon, and the ground between her and it was red-brown and rocky and three hundred meters of it remained and then two hundred and then one hundred and then—

  The sky changed.

  She felt it before she saw it — a shift in the quality of the light, a sudden increase in temperature that had no gradation, no warning except the warning she'd already been given and was already sprinting on. The orange star flared and the sky went from dim copper to a brownish color she had no color name for, and the temperature of the air went up in a way that was not a gradual increase but an arrival.

  She jumped and flew feet first into the hole she had cut in the box to get out at full speed, the sharp edges making a huge cut on her leg. She scrambled to her feet inside and grabbed the metal panel she'd cut out and slammed it back over the hole.

  This whole process took 28 seconds.

  The heat arrived.

  She had planned to weld it. That had been the logic — get inside, get the panel back in place, flux weld it shut, done. Thirty seconds had not accounted for the welding. Thirty seconds had accounted for getting inside and getting the panel up and that was all thirty seconds had been able to hold.

  She held the panel against the gap with both hands and her full body weight and felt the box begin to heat.

  The flux lamination went up over her hands automatically — she'd been maintaining a thin layer since going outside — and for the first forty seconds it was enough. The heat conducting through the metal was intense but managed, the lamination sitting between her palms and the surface..

  Then the box went red.

  Not metaphorically. The metal walls, under the sustained heat and radiation of a K-type solar flare with a helium atmosphere providing approximately no shielding, reached a temperature she did not want to calculate and the walls went the dull red-orange of heated metal and the panel under her hands was the same temperature as the walls and the flux lamination began to thin.

  She pressed harder. Held the lamination together by force of will and four months of flux control. She could feel the heat now — not as pain yet, as a precursor to pain, the warning her nervous system gave before it escalated to something less polite.

  She held it.

  The heat passed through lamination further. The heat became pain. Not the sharp immediate pain of an impact — the deep sustained pain of something too hot, conducted through a surface she couldn't release because releasing it meant a gap in the wall and a gap in the wall during a solar flare on a planet with a helium atmosphere meant something final.

  She held it.

  The lamination failed on her left hand first. Not catastrophically — it just became insufficient, the heat exceeding what she could maintain at the edges, and the metal under her left palm was the temperature of something that should not be touched with bare skin and she was touching it with bare skin.

  She screamed.

  It was not a decision. It was not a performance. It was the sound her body made when the pain exceeded the threshold she had been holding it below — involuntary and immediate and loud in the small space of the box — and she kept holding the panel because letting go was worse but she screamed while she held it and the box was red and Gerald was off, the fixture dark for the first time in one hundred and fourteen days, and she held the panel and screamed until the heat began to recede and then she held it and made sounds that were not quite screaming but were not nothing either and then the heat receded further and then it was done.

  The box cooled slowly.

  She sat on the floor with her back against the panel — holding it still, because she wasn't sure the flare was completely over and she wasn't taking chances — and looked at her hands in the dim light.

  The left palm was bad. The right was better — the lamination had held longer on her dominant side — but the left was blistered in a way that had a clinical term she didn't want to find right now. The 1HP skill noted the damage with the same equanimity it noted everything. She was not going to die of second degree burns. She was going to have them and continue existing.

  "Great," she said. Her voice was wrecked from the screaming. "That's great."

  Gerald flickered back on.

  She looked up at him. He hummed, faint at first, then steadying.

  "Don't," she said. "Don't be comforting right now. I'm angry."

  Gerald hummed steadily.

  She sat with her burned hands in her lap and breathed the cooled air and waited for the anger to subside into something more workable. It took a while. That was fine.

  When it had subsided she pulled up the system and added a new entry to her personal task list, above everything else, underlined twice:

  Figure out the flare schedule. Never be more than sprinting distance from the box during it. Non-negotiable.

  She looked at Gerald. "Day one hundred and fourteen," she said. "Noted."

  About three hours of just staring at her injuries and thinking of any kind of first aid. She got up.

  She had no way of treating her wounds but hey sitting around and doing nothing would get her killed so she made a choice.

  She told the system to warn her if there was going to be a solar flare as soon as it detects it.

  [Acknowledged]

  [Time till next solar flare: 72:29:19]

  She didn't even have time to get mad at the system she just took a deep breath.

  She had been going what she believed to be west of the box because she saw something shiny in the distance and with absence of anything better to do with her time she went in its direction.

  After a few minutes of walking she could sense a mass of flux. She got closer.

  The shiny thing she saw earlier was some sort of crystal like shard. It seemed to have been used as a beacon of some sorts. She tries picking it up but it was brittle and scattered in her hand.

  She stopped walking. The path started to get steep downward.

  She looked down.

  The rock she was standing next to had a straight edge. Not the irregular fracture of natural stone — a cut. Clean, right-angled, the kind of edge that required intention and a tool. She crouched and brushed the red-brown dust away with her good hand and found more of it — a surface, flat and worked, running in a line beneath the accumulated drift of however many centuries of Chunk's particular brand of weathering.

  She sat back on her heels and looked at it.

  Then she looked at the ground around it, using her perception, following the structured flux signature in the direction it pointed — down, mostly, deeper than the surface, a network of faint geometric signals that went under the rock and kept going.

  Underground.

  There was something underground.

  She looked at the flat worked edge of ancient stone and thought about the system's note — former habitable zone — and thought about a civilization that had survived on a planet with daily solar flares and no surface water, and thought about what you built when the surface was trying to kill without fail.

  You built down.

  She stood up. Looked at the box. Looked at the sky, which was behaving itself, the orange star sitting at its usual dim indifference. Looked at the worked stone.

  "Okay," she said, in the tone she used when something had just gotten significantly more complicated and she was choosing to be okay with that.

  She took out a system memo and started documenting. Whatever was down there had been waiting long enough that a few more days wouldn't hurt it.