Gavin sat in his cubicle and stared at the grey wall waiting for his shift to start. This grey wall was the same color as the other four walls in his small sleeping cubicle except this was special. On it was a brightly colored poster of a company CEO pointing outward toward the audience in stunning vid 3d. The CEO had on a confident smile, he was tall and broad with perfect hair and perfect teeth. You could tell by his perfectly manicured hands that he had never had to work a hard day in his life. Yet the poster’s caption read in big bold black letters “OPPORTUNITY IS WAITING IN THE FRONTIER.”. There was a beautiful woman on his arm. Her perfectly done up face, and alluring, sculpted body seemed to scream, ‘You could have me if only you work harder’. Gavin found himself hating that woman with every fibre of his being. Not enough hate that he wouldn’t think of her while lying in bed. Both people stared out with a happiness Gavin had never felt, nor had his parents who had spent most of their lives slaving away in the mines. He saw hope in the depicted eyes. The hope on their faces was what had first drawn his eye to the recruiter’s office on his home planet. In all honesty it hadn’t taken much convincing for him to join the navy and wind up on this ship. He’d been applying for an academic licence for three years and been rejected. His parents had been supportive at first, but when it became apparent that he wouldn’t get it, they had just looked tired. He’d even considered applying for student loans but had ultimately opted against it due to the interest rates being so high that his great grandchildren would still be paying off the dept. He gave up the life of study that he had always dreamed of for this cubicle, on this ship, in the middle of space. Oh well, at least he was fed, if you could call what the cooks served food. That’s what his parents had told him before sending him off facing down starvation themselves. When the company “moved on” as it was called, they left once resource rich planets with site’s barren and populations so poor they couldn’t even afford the trip off world to new jobs.
Gavin shook himself, “You have it fine asshole, you actually lucked out with your job.”
He had in fact. The military always needed bodies and though his slight scrawny form wasn’t especially suited to combat, it was fine for support staff. Having done the mandatory 3 months of basic training, he found himself on the maintenance crew of the company warship, Dawn of Reason. Everyone said the captain was different, and in the six months he had spent on this ship he hadn’t seen one person treated unfairly. As far as he could tell all the sailors on the ship seemed to love the captain.
Unfortunately, Gavin got to work with the one man on the ship the captain absolutely loathed. Gavin had come from a mining planet; his father had been a miner and one thing he could say of all the miners they were hard workers as society demanded. Trevor on the other hand had to be the single laziest person he had ever met. Granted he had little experience with non-miners or off worlders. He had seen Trevor spend hours staring at a broken piece of equipment without picking up a tool or lifting a finger to fix the problem even when the ships metrics were down, and it was underperforming. When asked about it he would say he was thinking.
The other coworker in his department Danny was actually pretty good. Whenever she was tasked with a problem she would quickly and efficiently come up with a solution. Often times the problems that Trevor had spent hours “considering”. She had been born on a ship and had spent her life fixing them. She was probably the only person Gavin had ever seen who actually enjoyed their job.
Suddenly, Gavin was thrown from his chair and ended up sprawled on the floor. He was violently shaken from his revere when the entire ship was rocked by a deep explosion. The projected poster collapsing in on itself Alarms started blaring as he struggled to stand up. the artificial gravity was obviously interrupted because he was tossed about like rubber ball in a small space. When he finally gained his feet, he saw that the holo had been replaced by a window with the captain’s face upon it. She looked startled, her grey hair was standing on end a bit, and she seemed to be panting between breaths as she addressed the crew.
“Impact. We have been thrown off course and been nocked into the gravity field of a class C Planet. Expect landfall in 5 minutes. Get to the escape pods, and good luck.” The captain’s image disappeared, and Gavin stood there staring at the place where she had just been before shaking himself. He grabbed his Techbit, an earpiece that connected him to computers and showed holo displays, then rushed out the door to his cubicle. He made his way toward the escape pods located at the aft of the ship. He raced across the metal catwalks thanking his sergeants for the fitness regimes they had made him complete as part of basic training. Sliding down the railing of a stairway he continued stumbling for a bit before catching himself. He reached the compartment with the escape pods and entered his code for access. The panel slid open, and he rushed through looking for any unused pods. A crewman he didn’t know jumped into one of the last few pods and blasted off immediately he turned to the last one left in this section. Gavin rushed toward it and hit the launch button as he came through the door waiting as the door closed, but the pod didn’t launch.6 He pressed the button again and after a moment started slapping it repeatedly. Looking to the touch screen above the button having a horrible sneaking suspicion. He checked the maintenance logs. In Big bold letters the computer screen flashed his doom. This pod was last inspected by Trevor Briggson.
He slumped against the door to the escape pod. Well, that was it. He was going to die. Wait. ‘No fuck that I’m not dying. I have to punch that asshole’. He accessed the pods computer through his techbit’s interface then rushed through settings to find out what was blocking it. Engines: good, Hull integrity: good, Safety systems: good, Life support: bad. He quickly sorted through the data looking for the section that was holding him up and he found it. The air purifier filter hadn’t been changed recently. Figures the computer wouldn’t let him run the ship without the air purifier because it was afraid it would kill him. ‘Well staying on this ship is definitely going to kill me so fuck it’. He jumpered around the input, then checked the launch sequence. It was good so he hit the launch button. The whole task had probably taken a minute or two to find the problem and bypass it. How close was the ship to crashing? was it already to late? Then the escape pod launched and he sighed with relief. ‘Not today mother fucker. Not - His escape pod hit something, and Gavin was thrown about losing consciousness when his head hit the ceiling. Gavin woke with a start a while later and grabbed the back of his head which stung like a bastard. He looked at his hand that had come away sticky and saw some blood on his fingers. That wasn’t good in a survival situation. His instructor from basic had told him a head injury could make you do dumb things. He would have to find a med pack to patch himself up. He was pretty sure he could find one on the escape pod unless it was Trevor who was assigned with keeping them stocked. Then he was probably going to die. He brought up his Techbit’s HUD a holographic screen that surrounded him and scanned his vitals. Besides his head and a few other cuts and bruises he was fine. Not bad all things considered. He started looking around the ship for the emergency pack and found it lying under the seat in a compartment. It had food, water, and the med pack. Gavin shot himself up with a stim pack filled with a dose of stem cells and nanites which would heal his injuries over the next half hour until they and passed from his body. He looked around and found natural light pouring in from a hole in the roof. Preceded by a frantic look for the respirator that was supposed to be in these escape pods. Then paused, “If the air was going to kill me that easy it would have already done it.” Rechecking his Techbit anyway just to be sure confirmed it. The air was almost earth norm with a few trace elements off.
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“First bit of luck I’ve had all day.” Gavin got up grabbed his pack and tried the exit button. It did nothing.
“And there it is.” He tried the manual release, but nothing happened. Then shoved on the door hard … nothing. He tried again and kept trying for five minutes, calling for help from anyone who might be out there. There was no response. Gavin tried not to think about that and what it could mean for his survival. Slumping to the floor and looking around for anything that might help him, he spotted a pistol in the weapons locker moving to grab it. The superheated bolt that the gun fired should be able to cut through the ship’s armour. He pointed it at where he expected the hinges were, turned his head away, and fired. The white-hot slug tore through the hull like he’d hoped leaving a hole 25 centimetres across, but he was peppered with slag which burned slightly. Stim pack should fix that. Aiming at where the other hinge should be, Gavin repeated the process. There was no big bang of the door hit the ground, so he looked back and found the door still standing. Putting the gun in a holster he belted it onto his hip, Gavin put his shoulder into the door again. With this final shove he felt his weight move forward through the door and as the door hit the ground, he rolled over top of it to land with his face collecting a mouth full of dirt. The first thing he realized about where he was included that there was an approximation of dirt on this planet. He spit it out quickly. ‘Really hope there wasn’t some alien virus in there.’ With his luck so far, he’d probably be wearing his organs on the outside no matter how many stim packs he had. Lying face down he brought his knees and elbows together underneath himself and raised up to kneel while looking at his new environment.
It was a nightmare. He was at the center of a giant crater made by the Dawn of Reason’s crash site. Burning wreckage lay all around him. Some of the slate grey metal glowed red hot from entry and crash. One of the giant spire like engines sat in front of him mostly disintegrated from the impact. ‘Lucky the fucking thing didn’t explode,’ he thought.
The ship sat in a deep depression at the end of a long canyon made by the crash. Surrounding that was a dense jungle of yellow and orange foliage. The sky of this new planet was a mix of red and orange clouds. Where the temperature on the ship had been climate controlled, here it was oppressively hot and muggy, making his maintenance uniform immediately stuck to his body. He could hear muffled screams from around him in all directions. Basic escape pod protocol was to land in a place of relative safety, but he had launched his pod so late it probably dragged him in the general direction of the ship. It had set him down as close to other pods as its limited navigation could muster.
Gavin assessed the Techbits map function and was unsurprised to see the Unknown topography flash across his vision. The technology ran off the ship’s scanners or automated drones so it was no wonder he couldn’t see anything. However, it did show his relative position to other Techbits so he decided to move in the direction of a small group that was forming a few hundred metres to the North of him. He adjusted his pack and made his way toward the others hoping he wouldn’t just come across a bunch of mangled bodies. Picking his way through the crash site careful not to touch the still burning metal that surrounded him, the air smelled of smoke and hot metal. He eventually heard voices ahead behind what he assumed was the remains of a bathroom. He came a mound of debris and saw a cluster of people standing around in a huddle. They stood around a man lying prone on the ground. Blood coated the officer’s navy uniform so much you could barely tell what its original color had once been. The blood came from a large hunk of metal that stuck out of the unfortunate man’s chest on the right side. He convulsed and screamed weakly as a couple medical personnel tried to stabilize him. As Gavin drew closer, he could hear their strained conversation as they tried hopelessly to save the man's life.
“Keep that stable.” stressed the leader who Gavin now saw from his bit was the ships doctor. He hadn't really had any need to visit him in the six months since he had been stationed on the Dawn of Reason, but he had seen him around the ship. His name was Thritz, and he was a somewhat portly middle-aged man who was balding the hair he had remaining turned grey. He was currently trying to carefully remove the steel shard protruding from the man's chest while using a stim sealer to heal closed the wound as he went. Judging by the grim look on the doctor’s face Gavin guessed that it wasn’t going according to plan. The stem stim sealer should repair any damage that was caused by both the initial wound and the removal, but it obviously wasn’t enough to save the man as his movement and cries were getting weaker by the second.
“Where the hell is that blood replenishing pack?” Thritz snapped to his subordinates. A woman was pulling a pack of pink liquid when the man on the ground expired. Thritz and his team all slumped as the light left the man’s eyes, Gavin’s holo-display updating the man’s name from green to faded grey indicating no life signs. Thritz looked hopelessly at those around him.47
“Well, any of you sorry sacs of shit hurt?” Everyone had suddenly found the ground at their feet exceedingly interesting indeed as no one would make eye contact. Thritz threw up his hands in disgust and instructed his team to treat the crew's wounds. As the most senior officer present, he was to assume command of the crew and start organizing search parties. Gavin approached the closest medic to have her give him a once over. She quickly looked him over and concluded that he was fine, the med kit had done its job, before sending him off to get organized with the others. Thritz was talking to a senior soldier present a man by the name of Simms. He was a big heavily muscles man with short, dark, cropped hair and wearing green fatigues.
“What the fuck happened? Were we attacked by another company fleet or what?”
“As far as I’m aware sir the markets are in a state of stability right now so there isn’t any real need for conflict. Besides the command staff never really gave us any indication that we were under attack. No incoming ship warnings or anything so if they did hit us, it was fast as fuck, and nobody saw it coming.”
“Probably another hostile takeover from a rival, I remember Skytech tried that in 58. Nearly 5 billion died before we beat those assholes out of our star systems.” Thritz grumbled.
“Regardless we should probably be on the lookout for an attack of some kind. We need the captain and the other command staff. All our maps are down sir we will need someone from maintenance to restore them.” They both turned to Gavin who had been standing there awkwardly waiting to talk to them.
“You, what’s your name? You’re from maintenance, right?” He noted looking at Gavins uniform. “Why are the map systems down?” Gavin looked around him to the completely destroyed ship and sighed. Probably best not to explain how the map systems worked. People always expected everything to work all the time when it was needed despite obvious problems that were hindering it.
“I’ll look into it right away sir.” He knew it wasn’t going to work but he tried any way to access the ships programs from his Techbit and was completely unsurprised when it told him he didn’t have a connection. He tried contacting the ship LIA for assistance, but it had probably been destroyed in the crash and didn’t answer him.
“I can’t connect to anything sir. Both the ships systems and the LAI that usually runs them are down and not responding. If we want the map back, we will have to restore them or get some drones up and running to ping off our Techbits.” Thritz sighed.
“You know how long its going to take us to find Drones in this mess? Simms is heading for the Bridge. You can go with him and see if you can restore the LAI. Long range communications and power are also going to be an asset, so you’ll have to look at getting those too. I will organize the rest of these assholes and see if we can’t find some drones. We are going to need some of those any way”. Gavin nodded and stood by Simms as he organized the crew into a search party for the captain. It took ten minutes, and, in that time, Gavin had been scanning the names he could see on his Techbit for the captain he thought he saw somewhere to the west of their current position with a few other names. He tried to contact her but with the power in a shotty state and with the Limited Artificial Intelligence offline that wasn’t going to happen.9 He spent the rest of the time watching people organize into search parties for equipment or personnel. They all looked like they were in a state of shock. He could only imagine what his own face looked like. Many had torn uniforms or sported cuts and scrapes and a few broken bones that took longer to heal with traditional med kits. Simms collected him and they set out for the captain to regain some order to this fucking mess.