“Well, this is a surprisingly lonely start,” Nathan said wryly. “Saucer, you’re looking high-tech today. What’ve you got for me?”
Dimensional analysis in process. Precipitous action contraindicated.
“Right, okay. When you’re in space, slow is fast, as in secure; and fast is slow, as in a slow death drifting in the darkness.”
He was not precisely in space, but he felt that his approximation was fair due to the lack of an atmosphere. Abandoned space stations can have that effect; and he was very, very confident in having appeared in an abandoned space station.
And the view that gave him that impression was spectacular.
Below him, spread out and consuming the entirety of the greater-than-one-eighty-degree view from the slightly bulged-out window which took up the entire “bottom” of the space station, he could see a planet. Red and orange and snarling-dry was its surface, and thick angry clouds in every color from green to purple cloaked patches of its surface. It was so vast, so immense that he couldn’t internalize its size or its scope, or even the basic visuals of it—for one thing, the shimmer of its atmosphere was visible on its horizon as the light seemed to visibly bend, though he had no idea whether that was what the actual effect he was seeing was.
Through the side windows of what he suspected was a combination of observation deck and command room, he could see long, branching spars of metal stretching out into the starry void. Decrepit installations on those spars could have been solar panels or solar sails or something else entirely, and the spars themselves were mildly pocketed by micrometeorites but seemed to be structurally intact.
The stars he could see beyond them were glorious. He had always heard that they were, from space, or at least he’d read it on social media when people were posting fifth-hand memories of what they’d seen astronauts saying in interviews, and unsurprisingly everything he’d heard had undersold it.
He also had absolutely no ability to appreciate it, because he was in a thin, body-hugging spacesuit in an abandoned, airless space station.
“Staying slow, because that’s fast, but just for some calibration, how much air do I have?”
A momentary verbose readout of good news, occupied the visor of Nathan’s helmet. The results undid a certain amount of tension in the recently reincarnated itinerant young man’s muscles, because they were better than what he’d feared.
AIR—THREE DAYS PLUS UNKNOWN SUIT RECYCLING SYSTEMS
WATER—THREE DAYS PLUS UNKNOWN SUIT RECYCLING SYSTEMS
NUTRIENTS—NINE THOUSAND DAYS
POWER—100%, DRAW NEGLIGIBLE / NO EXHAUSTION ESTIMATE
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
SUIT INTEGRITY—100%
OTHER SUIT FUNCTIONS—UNKNOWN
With a flicker of text, the readout disappeared, and then a condensed and space-efficient version of it reappeared as a HUD, hovering on the upper left of his field of view. He smiled at that, and it immediately disappeared from his conscious view because the numbers were sufficiently large as to be irrelevant.
“I guess I can take a look around,” he murmured to himself. “Carefully and slowly. Very carefully and slowly.”
He reached out and touched a handhold on the wall next to him, putting a tiny bit of lateral and diagonal pressure on it. It held up under the strain without complaint, and he noted that it didn’t have any dust or discoloration on the sheen of its silvery chrome—which of course would make sense, since in space, there would be nothing to accumulate dust.
While the handholds—and there were quite a few spread out across all of the walls and the roof wherever there wasn’t a computer console, hatch, or window—were bright in the light of…
“Huh.”
Nathan looked down at his suit, taking note of the fact that he was radiating a soft glow from every inch of the spacesuit, which he suddenly decided to start calling a skinsuit for no particular reason other than it being skintight. It was a warm, amber light; comfortable and friendly, reflecting off of the handholds and the darker, more matte walls that held themselves in such contrast from the silvery chrome. He brought himself in towards the nearby wall, reaching out to touch it through the skinsuit glove, and found a surprise: the wall was just ever-so-slightly soft and yielding to the touch, compressing just the tiniest bit.
“Probably made for softer landings, if you missed a handhold or went too fast?” He thought about it, then shrugged. “Might as well go with that for a theory for now, but obviously I’ll need to keep an open mind, since I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
And in this regard, he was both prescient and unusually self-aware.
From his new, more-secure perch with his body against the wall and his hands securing his position on a pair of handholds, Nathan surveyed the room more deliberately. There were seven hatches, seven consoles, and seven definitely-not-chairs in chair-like positions near the consoles. He wondered whether seven was a particularly important number, and then shoved that aside—after all, there was clearly too little information to meaningfully speculate, and it could easily have just been prime numbers that were important.
Reader: it was neither the number seven nor primes that were relevant. But Nathan would find that out in due course.
There was a dearth of writing on the surfaces he could see, though from his place opposite the vast window which he thought of as down—and indeed, that was reasonable, given the commanding vantage which the planet had—he didn’t have a line of sight onto any of what he was tentatively, and correctly, assuming were crew stations. Rather, each of them was spread across the “ceiling” of the room, with whatever interface the crewmember was using facing the ceiling’s entrance and with one of the six “horizontal”-plane doors behind them.
And with that, Nathan had a brief moment of nearly useless enlightenment.
The key number was not seven. It was six.
And with that, the basic structure of the room snapped into a firm, concrete understanding. The structure was a hexagonal prism with two faces of the prism—the one on the floor facing the planet and the one on the ceiling—bulged out into hemispheres. Each crew station and door was aligned with one of the remaining, hexagonal, faces.
Nathan smiled as his eyes lit upon the tiny engravings next to those doors. “North,” he murmured. “Warp. Weft. South. Shuttle. Comb.” His smile disappeared momentarily as he mulled over the words, and then it was back, but with a long-suffering affect. “I can work with this,” he reassured himself. “I can.”
And it would prove to be true. But that would not make him any happier with the compass points in question.