Wreck of the SESV Soft Den, Medical Vessel of the Silver Empire’s 7th Fleet, GC 3478, June 6th, 1127 Hours—
Kevan opened his eyes as the burning in his chest finally became too much of a nuisance for him to ignore. His vision was filled with an opaque green blob that glowed with a soft, inner light. Confusion filled Kevan, as he didn't know where he was, and no matter where he looked or turned his head, he saw nothing but line green and maybe some blurry faint distortions without solid edges farther away. Panic began to well up inside of him, and he blinked, feeling like his eyelids were grating over sandpaper. It was an irritation that he knew well, and in a flash, he knew where he was.
Thrusting his arms forward, his hands impacted a smooth, concave glass surface. As he pushed on the cover, his body slowly inched back through the gel until he hit the opposing wall. He was literally within his arm's reach, yet he could not see the barest hint of his hands. As far as his sight was concerned, nothing beyond his nose existed.
Sucking in a breath of the thick liquid as he strained against the opposing surfaces to force open the capsule, Kevan found that the only thing he was accomplishing was growing the need for a full breath of air. It wasn't much, like sucking in three-fourths of a breath instead of a full one, but he doubted that it would be getting any better the longer he stayed in here. At the realization, the ball of infant panic in the back of his head perked up and ambled forward as it scented weakness from his thoughts.
Pushing the emotion away as he focused on his training, Kevan dropped his hands to his sides and began feeling around the back of the capsule. It took a few moments and, more importantly, a few increasingly ineffectual breaths. With every drag of gel into his lungs, the panic in the back of his mind started to grow, but before it could overwhelm him, he felt a wave of relief wash it away as he finally found the emergency escape lever. Turning his body to grab hold of it, he started pulling on the lever, causing his body to float down until his feet hit the ground.
Throwing his whole body into the action, his heart stopped for an instant as the lever refused to move more than a few inches. Gathering himself, Kevan clenched his jaw and flexed every muscle as he strained to pull it up. After what felt like years, he felt something reluctantly snap into place. The lever jerked the rest of the way up until he bumped his knuckles against the wall. Spinning in place, Kevan thrust out at the outer wall of the capsule.
Turning too far in his rush, only one of his hands hit the glass shell, but even that light touch was enough. The once solid surface fell away from his skin, and the goop it was containing rushed after it. Pulled along for the ride, Kevan found himself on the floor surrounded by the regeneration gel, hacking up the substance once filling his lungs onto the steel floor beneath him. Trying to suck in a breath while clearing his lungs at the same time was less than effective, but eventually, once his throat felt raw and bile burned at the back of his mouth, he got enough of the gunk out of his body to savor a metallic tasting hitching breath.
Falling to his side into the cooling goop covering the floor, Kevan took long breaths while he rested for a moment. He wanted to rage and cuss out the bastard who trapped him in a regeneration capsule and left him to suffocate, but that wouldn't do much to soothe the turmoil inside of him. After all, cussing at someone else was far more cathartic than at oneself. But that could have just been his lack of desire to waste his precious breathing time. He wasn't really sure which it was at that moment.
And there was the little problem of having no other options when he was clambering inside the thing. It was hard to be mad at yourself about making a decision when only one decision led to life… Well, he couldn't be sure he made the best choice, but he had lived, so it was at least a good choice. Right?
When the walls of a starship turn into a liquid for a moment before every alarm on the ship starts blaring, and you find yourself entering free fall inside an artificial gravity field, something is seriously wrong. The type of wrong where you begin looking for the nearest escape pod or the next best thing.
Kevan's only choice fell into the latter category. A funny thing about starships was that escape pods, which are designed to get away from a ship and to a safe location, were not located in the center of a starship. Whether it made sense or not, the rejuvenation centers were meant to help the recovery of noncritical patients, so they were located close to the ship's core, away from the flight decks and emergency medical facilities. This specific regeneration ward was one of the ones that usually dealt with individuals who were only moderately injured or were recuperating from undergoing the enhancement for a stage.
While there were no escape pods in any nearby corridor, he was on a starship whose primary purpose was caring for the wounded. So, it had plenty of medical capsules designed to hold patients for long periods while protecting them from all but the most catastrophic damage done to the ship. Jumping into the medical device and suffering the mental anguish of breathing in the sludge was a small price to pay.
It was more than a little scary to have a liquid slowly enveloping your body until you were forced to breathe it in. The only reason it's not terrifying is that everyone knows it's breathable and even healthy for you to eat, but that knowledge never seems to help with sucking the gel down into your lungs. Most people instinctually rebel against it and end up passing out, only to have their bodies gasp for life and lash out on instinct.
That was a problem as the higher-tiered individuals could break out of the capsule, but it is considered a great shame that they could not control themselves in such basic circumstances, not that it didn't happen on occasion. With the lower-tiered and baseline humans having no hope of breaking the capsule, no one cared how much they struggled to draw a breath.
If there was one good thing about this entire situation, it was that Kevan didn't have to experience that nightmare-inducing event again. When he hit the scream to activate the chamber and pulled himself inside of it during free fall before the lid shut, the entire ship lurched. One second, Kevan was floating in the air, waiting for the glass to seal before it filled with gel, and the next, his face was smashed in by the capsule, and he was unconscious. Or, he thought that was what happened; his memory got kind of blurry around that point.
Though, if Kevan had to be knocked unconscious, he couldn't have picked a better spot. He also couldn't have picked a worse place to fall unconscious. It's hard to justify being inside a regeneration capsule when you are the technician in charge of the ward during a crisis. Everybody had secondary and even tertiary jobs depending on whether the ship was in combat, performing search and rescue, or conducting their standard routine. Being written up would be the minimal expected result of his actions because how would he know how bad the situation was without checking.
And he didn't take the seconds to do that. If the ship only sustained heavy damage before recovering, he could have been shot for dereliction of duty. And yet, despite being seconds from living out one of the most common nightmares in the Regeneration Ward, he would do it again for one simple reason. His assumption was correct.
After a minute of staring at and around his near-death trap, Kevan only had one thought, how am I not dead? Between the time he climbed into the thing and woke up suffocating, it looked like a Silver Lord had come into the chamber and tried to tear it apart one portion at a time. Once he had a good long rampage, he then decided his results weren't good enough; he left and returned with heavy ordnance to really get the job done.
The enriched steel deck and walls were buckled and warped as if someone had tried and partially succeeded in crinkling the ship between their hands. The different sections of the wall no longer fit together, and slabs or corners of the metal walls were poking out everywhere at odd angles. Some sections looked like they had electrical blowouts, or so Kevan guessed by the carbon scoring on the walls. Other sections had their steel plates missing, letting him see the bare steel beams, electrical wiring, and pipes underneath. As to where the missing plates had gone, the answer was everywhere. The room was peppered with metal shards from anywhere as large as his fingernail to his forearm.
The control panel to his capsule was completely missing, and the base and top of the capsule had so much foreign metal lodged inside it that it should have fallen apart like it had entered a blender. The fact I didn't wake up to find a chunk of steel in my chest — or woke up at all, for that matter — was a miracle… And out of the fifty capsules in this room, only five of them, including Kevan's, still had the cavity for occupants intact.
That was pretty horrible odds, considering this was supposed to be one of the most protected areas on the ship. And it was a glaring point in favor of how great a decision he made by getting into the pod. And if all that wasn't a blaring enough point that a disaster happened, the emergency lighting was on, which was basically the same lighting, just a fraction of the brightness casting a lot of shadows. But things had to be really wrong for the emergency lighting to be on. If this room is this torn up, how bad off is the rest of the ship?
It could only be called luck that the SESV Soft Den was at the end of its Refit and Repair, meaning that all the wounded from the last battle were already treated, leaving only the standard complement of spacemen on the ship.
Rolling over and pushing himself to his feet, Kevan ran his hands over his jumpsuit, dislodging some of the larger globs of lime-colored goop. Getting the biggest chunks off, he strode across the room to the door, avoiding the warped sections of the deck as best he could. Now was not the time to lie on the ground resting. "Lan?" Kevan called out, unsurprised when he got no response. He was already flicking through his personal holo on his wrist, and his connection to the ship was missing.
Ensign Kevan could smell the ozone of arcing electricity and the acrid smell of chemicals hanging in the air. It didn't take much to guess their source, and that would be the wiring harnesses dangling out of the walls. The wires were coated in a substance that not only insulated them but also had a high heat resistance. Power surges and the excess heat that went with them were guaranteed in a battle thanks to how the shield generators worked, and having the wiring melt under a moderate strain was asking to be killed. Not that the preparations always worked out, as nothing was foolproof, especially in battle.
Turning sideways, Kevan slipped through the half-open door to the chamber, exiting into the corridor. He didn't take more than two steps out of the chamber before Kevan stopped and looked down. He was greeted by the body of a young woman wearing the ship's uniform, lying chest down. Her blank eyes stared up at him, so he traced his eyes over her delicate features. She looked pretty, with a small nose and thin eyebrows.
She wasn't someone he knew personally, but that wasn't surprising. It was a large ship, and spacers rarely left the area around their departments or bunks. Combat was ever-present inside The Breach, and it was never known when a med-ship would be called upon. Being able to instantly respond was a requirement inside a combat space, and if you weren't at your station within minutes of the alarm blaring, there would be consequences. The most minor of which would be the ones leveled against you by a superior officer. The more significant punishment for most would be the deaths of comrades that could have been prevented if you had been doing your job correctly. Few people could shrug off such knowledge, even if the one that died was an asshole and might have deserved it.
Kevan looked down at the woman for a second, then sighed and knelt beside her. Reaching out slowly, he felt her cold, gray skin. Standing up and turning about, Kevan walked back into the regeneration room and ripped open a cabinet next to the door. Inside were a couple emergency medical bags on a shelf and a smaller cabinet below. Pressing his hand to a blank screen, it flashed green once, and then a tiny click sounded as the cabinet door popped open.
Reaching inside, he grabbed one of the pistols and a belt holding more magazines before putting them on. Then, he grabbed the medical bags, strapping them over his chest so they landed on each of his hips.
Why was a weapon inside a recovery ward next to emergency bags? The answer was simple, there was a one in ten thousand chance that someone undergoing their first enhancement would go insane at some point during the procedure or a couple days after it. Their mind would shatter, and they would do anything to kill everyone around them. Over the centuries of the enhancement procedures being performed, enough experiments and studies had been done on those negatively affected that even those who claimed that no one should ever be killed had shut up about the topic. There was no saving them. There was no reeducating them. They were mindless beasts thirsting for blood, and it was best for everyone involved to put them down.
The more practical reason was that they were on a warship inside active combat with a not insubstantial chance of having their ship boarded by the Swarm. Those creatures didn't take prisoners, and even if the pistol took up to a half dozen shots to put one down, it was better than beading at its chitin with their bare fists.
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Walking back out of the room, a bit embarrassed that he forgot about the emergency supplies, Kevan strode past the body, giving her a salute as he passed. He told himself he would return and give her as much respect as he could, but right now, he needed to find out the situation and see if he could provide aid to anyone. You already know there isn't, a voice in the back of his mind hissed that he chose to ignore.
To his complete and utter expectations, Kevan never found anyone to help. Basically, every other room was filled with medical supplies, even if the doors had to be pried open. If someone was hurt so badly they couldn't reach them, they would have probably died before someone could ever arrive to help. Otherwise, they should have treated themselves before starting to work to deal with the situation.
All he encountered were contorted bodies with bones sporadically puncturing out of their flesh as he walked down the short corridor. The rare ones were those around scorched walls, who were seared by the arcing electricity and became little more than a charred lump. No matter where he went up and down the corridor or into the rooms, all he found were bodies and destroyed medical equipment. Well, also found closed blast doors at either end of the passage. Which was a serious problem.
He didn't have the equipment to pry or cut them open. With the emergency power for the door, the mostly functioning control panel did tell him there was breathable air on the other side, which was good. It also said it could trigger the doors to unlock. Which was great. What made all of that taste like bitter ash in his mouth was that even with the blast doors unlocked, they still had to be manually moved. And with the warped superstructure of the ship, not to mention the weight, those doors were not moving.
Even knowing that Kevan had tried for half an hour with a prybar, earning nothing but slightly strained muscles. If he was a tier two human, he might have a chance of moving one of the sections of the blast door, but he figured that was just jealousy speaking. Even they weren't that strong.
Kevan spent a few minutes thunking his head against the blast door until he remembered the maintenance tunnels. They should also be sealed, but the doors only needed to be large enough to block a three-foot square tunnel. With few of the swarm creatures able to fit into them, the doors wouldn't be nearly as reinforced as the main passages, which should make all the difference.
Feet clicking in the disturbingly quiet passage, Kevan walked and searched the bottom of the walls while ignoring the bodies as best he could. He had walked these halls a hundred times, yet he could not remember where a maintenance hatch was to save his life. It was one of those things you noticed and immediately forgot because it became part of the background and was irrelevant to you.
Case in point, Kevan should have remembered there was a hatch ten feet to the right across the hall from his regeneration ward. And yet he was surprised when he came across it when he was heading to the far side of the corridor, where he vaguely remembered a hatch being.
Taking the convenient offering, he got down to a knee and opened the door, poking his head inside. The tunnel was lit with intermittent red running lights along the floor that immediately slanted down out of his line of sight. Searching what he could see and looking around the corridor, Kevan sighed. Nothing was moving, and he heard no calls for help or screams of pain. Which meant he should put some bone back into his spine and climb into the maintenance tunnel because he could see no other option at this point…
And yet, he lingered at the entrance, unwilling to move his arm forward for an embarrassingly long time. "Yep, nothing spooky about this. It's not like I can't name a dozen horror vids where the survivors of a derelict starship get eaten alive when crawling around in the maintenance tunnels." Kevan muttered to himself before blowing out a long huff and moving forward.
After the quick five-foot drop, the tunnel went straight, lights marking its edges. After what must have been thirty feet, he met another ramp leading up and could see the outline of a small chamber holding a ladder, which also had small red lights on each rung.
When he reached the ladder, he was greeted with five directions. One of the other three tunnels, and up and down the ladder. Kevan paused a moment in the center of the chamber to fumble with one of the medical bags, pulling a small flashlight out. A twist and small click later, the dim red light was pierced with a ray of illumination showing the steel. Leaning forward, he looked up the ladder and was greeted… with more rungs. "What was I expecting?" He said to himself, then looked down and jumped back, banging his spine against the wall as he fumbled at his holster while his heart pounded, and he shouted, "Ahh~! What the fuck!"
Five feet down the shaft, the unmistakable layered chitin of the Swarm blocked all but the smallest section of the tunnel. When his heart rate returned to normal, and there was yet to be a Swarm creature's claw grabbing onto the edge of the shaft to pull itself up to kill him, Kevan jerkily scooted forward, holding out his shaking light and his pistol.
His first scoot might have covered little more distance than half the length of his asscheeks, and his second might have been stalled as it had taken him another couple minutes for the sudden spike in his heart rate to return to normal, but what did that matter? Kevan thought he saw a claw. With a few dozen quick movements of the light, he proved that all he was seeing were shadows playing tricks on him. Cursing out the shadows under his breath, he continued forward. It didn't matter how fast it took him to cover the distance because this wasn't a race, and he was happy to take it one inch at a time.
In his own defense, he was crawling through a well-acknowledged deathtrap, and he saw a substance that haunts most children's nightmares. Being a little cautious was warranted.
After a few more scoots, he was at the edge of the hole and looked down. Before, he only saw the chitin, and nothing else made an impression on him. Looking at it now, it is evident that it was not a swarm creature inside the ship. It was the middle section of a spike. If the fact that it was one solid piece didn't tip him off, then the broken and warped metal it was lodged in should have.
Feeling slightly embarrassed, Kevan looked around, twisting a bit to get a good look down each of the dark tunnels to his sides. Now, he could crawl around the innards of this ship and probably get lost as he clambered around areas that he had never been to before… Or, Kevan could go up and see if anyone was moving around that level of the ship. And do that a few more times until he reaches the top.
It would be pretty hard to get lost moving up and down, and if you did, you probably deserved it because your hand slipped holding the ladder rung, and you fell, hitting your head on the way down, giving yourself short-term amnesia. Who didn't know how to climb a ladder? Getting to his feet, Kevan grabbed the rails of the ladder and then swung his leg around, impacting the rung with a soft clink, and he started his way up.
It wasn't long before he was stopped by a hatch. Holding his breath, Kevan tapped on the control panel off to the side to open the doors. Nothing happened for a moment, causing his heart to drop before it surged back up as the doors slid slightly apart with a click. He could just get the fingers of one of his hands inside the gap, and with a firm push from him, the steel door slid to the side enough for him to slip by.
Kevan climbed up the next section of the ladder with a smile plastered onto his face. Reaching the next bulkhead, Kevan opened the door again and continued on his way, feeling oddly out of breath. When he got to the third hatch, he suspected something was wrong but knew for sure when he reached the fourth. Arriving at the next landing for the maintenance tunnels, a sheen of sweat was on his forehead, and there was a definite burning in his arms and legs.
This wasn't a moment in Kevan's life that was screaming at him that he needed to return to the gym as he realized how badly out of shape he was. No, being within one of the three armadas of the Coalition meant that one had to keep specific standards. Going to the gym and maintaining an active fitness regime was one of those requirements. Was he one of the super athletes on board? No, but he wasn't out of shape either.
Climbing up four flights on a ladder with what amounted to him carrying himself should not have pushed him as hard as it was. It felt like he was carrying a fully loaded pack on his back and maybe some extra thirty pounds of crap just for fun.
Coming to the end of the ladder and taking it as an excuse to stop, he sat on the landing's edge. Kevan slowly lay back on the deck, staring at the ceiling as he spoke aloud. "It can't be artificial gravity… I would be surprised if one of the engines was still functional and amazed if the gravity well generator was also working. Having both of them still operational and on would be… Impossible? So unlikely that the difference doesn't matter? And even if they were, you need a custom gravity generator for a small area to have more than 1.1 gravities; they just aren't built to do more, and this feels way more than that. Which means… we're on a planet. A large, heavy planet. But where in the Nine Lords did it come from? Finding a planet would be the talk of the fleet… No, the armada. They could never hope to hide it. Which means it's a new discovery. And we were just guarding a new breach… Fuck. We got sucked through the damn thing. I'm now stuck on a plant… which probably has a breathable atmosphere. I doubt the spike is designed to keep a solid seal."
With the ship's power down and no connection on his personal holo, he couldn't ask the ship's AI, so he only had one choice if he wanted to find out what was happening. Get to one of the areas at the edges of the ship and look around. This was already his plan, so nothing changed except that it was slightly harder than he expected.
Giving a sigh, Kevan got to his hands and knees, picked one of the tunnels at random, and started crawling down it. There were letters and numbers scrawled at the edges of each of the tunnels, but he didn't know what they meant. Random searching seemed like the fastest choice. Movement also meant stopping his thoughts from returning to the corridor filled with corpses… Or wondering what the rest of this ship-turned grave must be like… So, he might be a little biased at the moment.
Kevan crawled down the corridor until he reached the next intersection, where he looked down the three new passages. With the lighting, he couldn't see down the new tunnels, forcing him to go down each one before returning to the passage junction, when he found nothing but more hallways. He went down each of the tunnels before returning to the ladder chamber and repeating the process with one of the other three tunnels.
It was on the third tunnel he took at the ladder intersection when he found a new ladder down the second tunnel attacked to the third junction. He was long past, starting to feel a throbbing in his hands and knees from crawling around. "I don't think I've crawled this much since I was a child making a fort in the kitchen." Kevan groaned to himself, probing his palms with his fingers before moving to his knees and massaging them.
He understood that putting one path running through the center of a ship was stupid for security reasons. Still, Kevan damn well was learning to pity the poor bastards who were forced to clamber around these tunnels alongside the seething hatred for tunnels bubbling inside his gut.
After his short rest, Kevan moved up the ladder and found the latest wall blocking his path. He was expecting it, but you can't blame a man for hoping it was already open. Sighing to himself, he slowly climbed up the rest of the way and started looking around the walls, a frown on his face. He saw where the control panel for the door was, except it was blank.
After searching for a few minutes, Kevan found a hatch a couple feet below the door that blended in with the wall — a little too well if you asked Kevan and his tired arms. Opening it up with a grumble, he found a small data sink. Bringing his personal holo close enough to the screen, he formed a connection and started flipping through menus. The first few were status reports on the different systems running through this section of the ship, all of which were listed as either offline or destroyed.
After a few minutes of menu exploration, he finally found the page that would tell him the conditions on the other side of the blast door. First off was a blaring warning of a breach on this level of the ship. A warning he immediately ignored a swipe later when the next page showed a breathable atmosphere on the other side of the doors. After a couple more minutes of digging into needlessly complicated menus and tabs filled with data no one would ever need, he finally saw a tab telling him the emergency power was cut off to the door… and nothing else. Kevan's eye twitched in annoyance before releasing a slow, steady breath and returning to digging through the menus.
Finally, plunging far too deep into the tab about emergency procedures during a power failure, not to be mistaken for emergency procedures for a hull breach or emergency procedures for loss of gravity — which were also tabs under the emergency procedures umbrella but did not hold the particular piece of information he was searching for as Kevan could begrudgingly testify too — he found the steps to manually open the door.
It might just be Kevan's personal opinion, but it seemed that the information was unnecessarily buried. Then he read the steps, and his jaw clenched as he felt a further spike in irritation before getting to work. He had to pop open a small panel on the side of the hatch with the data sink — that was annoyingly hard to pop open — then grab a long slender bar within the cubby and use that to stick into two small holes next to the bulkhead to pop open two other panels on the wall.
The new cubbies held small wheeled handles that had to be turned to open one of the sides of the blast door. It wasn't one crank that opened one side of the door and then the other. Or both at the same time. It was just one wheel for each side. Calling his mood frustrated would be putting it mildly at this point.
As he spent the long minutes following the complicated steps for opening a single side of the door, Kevan had plenty of time to think about why this was the case and came up with three possible answers. It could be no one gave enough of a shit to fix it, and it was one of the poorly designed elements of any military. It could also be intentionally designed this way to give infiltrators a hard time. Or the most coldblooded and probably most accurate if he was being honest; it was designed precisely as intended. Making it near impossible for the poor bastard on the wrong side of the bulkhead during a hull breach to open the door and kill more people and possibly the entire ship…
That thought was a little bit too calculating for Kevan to completely write off as wrong… So, he chose to not think about it anymore.
Not bothering to open more than one side of the door, Kevan put the tool back, scrambled through the foot-and-a-half-wide gap, and was greeted by light at the end of the ladder. Blinking a few times to clear his eyes, he saw the ladder rise five more feet before it ended with the rails twisting back on itself.
Climbing up the last distance to the bright yellow light of a star, he poked his head over the ledges and saw the jagged wound gouged out of the Soft Den's spine. Twisted plates and large bars of metal poked out of the sloping rent in every direction, and some of the wires dangling down from the broken superstructure of the ship were sparking with life.
Moving onto the landing, he crawled forward a few feet, following the path of one of the four maintenance tunnels. Once he was past the sheered-off ledge of the deck above, he stood up. Walking forward on his own little podium, with the ripped walls of the passage steadily shrieking as he stumbled, he saw a distant lake half surrounded by trees, encircled by tall snow-tipped mountains in every direction. But the sight couldn't hold his attention.
Feet sliding to a stop, he let his hands hang by his sides as he looked up into the sky and the battle raging across the heavens. Blooms of colored light peppered the sky, and streaks of light wove and danced away from starships as every weapon they held tried to fight off the Swarm's attempts to rend them into pieces.
But for every ship still fighting it out above, it looked like another two were falling from the sky in plumes of fire and black smoke, staining the sky in soot.