SS Nomadic

Skaði VII

The ballroom had filled up with more snow in the last hour than it had in the preceding century. Grace assumed the recent quake had exposed even more of it to the elements. She focused her efforts on staying calm. Having just been betrayed and abandoned, there was a lot to panic over here if she allowed herself.

Her environmental suit’s capacity was sufficient for twenty-four hours, so that wasn't an immediate concern. But her options to not be on board the Nomadic by this time tomorrow were severely limited. She needed a plan of how best to deal with the situation.

She couldn't stop herself from looking through the data she’d recovered. Something had caught her attention on the bridge. Grace unclipped her slate from her belt, the screen was folded into quarters and she opened it out to it’s full size and loaded up the black box data. As she began to study it, it was immediately obvious the reason the ship had gone off course.She couldn't stop herself from looking through the data she’d recovered. What had the ship's pilot been so keen to prevent any board of inquiry from ever discovering?

She lifted a slot on her right arm that allowed her to attach a terminal connection directly to the suit's systems. This was run through two different adapters to convert the decades-old technology with the modern suit that had come with her ship. It took a moment to load, and she had her software run a filter to organise the data.

The final entry was mainly a man in his early forties, whom despite his current condition, Grace recognised as the crumpled pile on the bridge deck that she had pulled this data from. It was less than a minute long recording, and he was mainly swearing and weeping.

"Poor guy," Grace thought.

She checked the previous half-dozen entries. The one before it had been made three hours earlier on the day of the crash. She had the suit show a text readout. One word immediately stood out to her: "Trafalgar."

No, Grace thought, it can't be right… Maybe a reference to the square or the battle? But surely not…

Every schoolchild in the Cluster had heard of the Battleship Trafalgar, one of the first military starships deployed from Old Earth two centuries earlier. It had been equipped with the Flux and the ability to instantly leap to one point in space and appear at another. Supposedly, this had had some limitations. They weren't able to traverse galaxies or even make the crossing from Earth to the Cluster instantaneously. That would still be a matter of weeks. But in terms of short-range, it offered easier navigation than the standard hyper-drive. Or at least it would have had the damn thing worked.

The Trafalgar didn't return from its maiden voyage. Instead of basking in its glory in front of crowds gathered in the Jovian system, it found itself on that list of doomed ships that never returned from their first flight.

Finding the Trafalgar would put Grace up there with the likes of Howard Carter, Robert Ballard, or even Byzet of Titan. It would make the money they had set to make on the Nomadic look like pocket change.

Even after she’d covered all her losses from this attempted plunder, she should probably be set for life. Half the universities across three systems would enter a bidding war to offer her the best employment contract.

While she had never considered going into academia before, she was now mentally weighing up the pros and cons of where she would like tenure.

In the ballroom, the quake had moved several cadavers into a pile around the piano. She realised just how much she was grinning and then remembered where she was. If she didn't solve her immediate problem, she would end up among those bodies, probably for decades before someone else found them.

She closed the data from her HUD and instead pulled up deck plans from the suit. The hangar was five decks down, and she would have to use the rope strapped to her back, but it was doable. She wasn't out yet.

Grace had done some abseiling for fun when she was younger and made sure that the clip was securely fastened. The red light flicked green as she tugged on the rope. She didn't feel great at the idea of putting all her weight on it, but given the options, she didn't have much choice.

The hangar bay was three decks high, and she abseiled through the middle of the ship. There was one craft left in the bay. Why hadn't it been taken? She didn't want to assume. She knew the odds of getting it to fire up were incredibly low. These had been a desperate moment for the people on board at the end.

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So, she tried not to get her hopes up, but she couldn't think of any other options. It looked promising.

Never a great fan of heights, Grace endeavoured not to look down during her descent. Instead, she had loaded a quick video tutorial that ran over the essentials to make sure she didn't do anything that would have her drop straight down. She was careful to gradually lower herself towards the hangar deck below.

The cavernous space was relatively empty. Several cargo crates had been tipped over, their contents spilt out. The main hangar doors were sealed shut, another problem to overcome but not necessarily an insurmountable one.

Her eyes kept focused on the ceiling, making a point not to think about the height she had climbed down, and was pleasantly surprised when her boots made contact with the deck. Unclipping herself from the rope she made her way towards the small ship.

It was a simple ship-to-surface craft with its rear access hatch open, so Grace moved with purpose, almost breaking into a sprint.

The HUD readout showed her scanner indicating it could initiate the ship's power system remotely, which she instructed it to do immediately. As she stepped aboard the cabin lights flicked on.

It was a small craft, only designed for taking crew members from the Nomadic to a nearby port, not for long journeys. There were four seats in the cockpit and six fold-down chairs in the rear section. The whole thing was smaller than the bedroom Grace had grown up in. But if it worked, it would more than do.

However, the four bodies in the cockpit suggested that would not be the case.

The bodies had each met a violent end, so Grace did not need to be a forensic pathologist to determine what had happened. It had been some kind of standoff where they had been fighting over who would either take the ship or control it and it had turned bloody.

Grace grabbed the nearest body and dragged it out of the shuttle, leaving it on the hangar deck. Revolted by the condition of the ancient bodies, which were seriously decomposed after this long. Leaving them in a pile, she went and sat in the pilot's chair. After a moment her suit could connect to the shuttle's onboard systems.

The engines seemed to be in working order, and she initiated the pre-flight sequence. A vibration rumbled through the cockpit as the engines started to hum. Grace allowed herself a moment of optimism that this might just work. She was thinking about her options for getting the bay doors open when an alert sounded.

The suit's HUD brought her attention to a hull breach. When the weapons had discharged, one of them had hit the bulkhead.

She stood up from the chair and walked over to the rear of the cockpit by the aftmost seat. The HUD overlay indicated exactly where the microfracture was. She couldn't see it with the naked eye, but the scorch marks made it quite obvious where the discharge had impacted. She began to look around the hangar bay for any material she might use to patch it with, but without the right welding equipment, the ship would not be airtight and while that might be enough to get her to the nearest settlement, it definitely would not get her to the Trafalgar. She sighed, disappointed.

It had all looked so promising, and it went just as quickly as it had come.

Returning to the pilot’s chair. Grace pulled up the shuttle's sensor readout. The Nomadic's system had reported all escape pods had launched, but she wanted a second opinion and used the shuttle's sensors to verify this. The scan took a few minutes; usually, this sort of reading would be instantaneous, certainly with the modern technology Grace was accustomed to. But, seeing as this shuttle had sat here this long, she didn't want to push it any further.

She stood up and turned to walk back out into the hangar. She looked up at the three decks above where her rope was attached. Had she come down that way? She was crazy.

Her HUD flashed up: the scan was complete and indicating it had found an escape pod on board. That was very unlikely. Why would all the desperate people not have left if they’d had the opportunity?

The escape pod was on A-deck not too far from the bridge, which meant going back the way she came.

Grace made the mistake of looking all the way up. There was nothing else for it, pushing the fear to the back of her mind she walked over and hooked her boots into the attachment at the bottom of the rope and began to climb.