Escape Pod

System Unknown

The thing that surprised Grace the most about her time in the pod was that whilst the weeks seemed to take a lifetime, the days themselves passed relatively quickly. She had expected it to take much longer to lose any sense of routine, but with nothing to do but wait, the lack of details forced everything to merge into one. The pod’s chronometer did its best to offer some perception of night and day, with lights brightening and dimming in an attempt to simulate the planet’s daytime. It wasn’t very efficient, but Grace appreciated the effort. It had been thirteen days since she’d left the Nomadic; of which she had spent staring at a purple nebula. The gas clouds were various shades of violet and indigo. Astronomers had described it as resembling some kind of primate, but Grace couldn’t see it. It just seemed like a formless purple gas.

The ration packs, while tasting like cardboard, had kept her fed, and for a pod designed to carry two people, they were not in short supply. She’d gone down to one every other day, and a few hours later her suit’s integrated systems processed waste away.

While she had been reasonably accurate in her calculations for finding the Trafalgar, how long she would need to keep using them before she could get back to civilisation was anyone’s guess. The hope, of course, being that she might just be able to get it salvaged. A long shot, sure, but certainly its communication systems could summon someone all too keen to get the ship back, and her with it. If she was lucky, it would be a high bidder. If not, the Navy were guaranteed to show up for their historic ship. For generations, ancient man had wandered old Earth and dreamed of space travel. Right now, Grace didn’t understand the appeal. She was bored out of her mind.

The pod’s onboard terminal had limited options in terms of entertainment feeds. With data space being at a premium and the object being to conserve power, she wasn’t able to watch any video files. She did, however, find the reading library. As far as she could tell, every book ever published for the previous five centuries before the Nomadic’s launch was available at her fingertips. She’d been tempted to start with the classics, not really out of a sense of reading the top books before you turn forty, so much as looking for something she’d heard of, but quickly realised anything written before twenty-two hundred was completely inaccessible in its writing style. She ended up going for a schlocky romance about a steward on a star liner falling in love with a first-class passenger who risked her place in society if anyone ever found out. Grace told herself she was reading it ironically, but, as there was no one else in the pod, she could at least admit to herself she was enjoying it.

There was a noise. Apart from the gentle vibration of the engines, the pod was relatively quiet. A sudden beeping startled Grace. She pulled the terminal readout over and saw a proximity alert. The pod had crossed over into a new system. She pulled up the on-board scanners and had them running a sensor sweep, waiting for the usual whole lot of nothing. It surprised her. It showed that there was another ship in the system. The correspondence was active and broadcasting an Earth naval identification prefix. She had done it. Grace Dakota, archaeologist, had located the Battleship Trafalgar.

She pulled up the navigational readout. Her pod was on a course to intercept the Trafalgar and her insane plan had worked. She was all set to dock at one of the starboard airlocks, and she would be on board. The terminal had a red line dotting out from the pod in the centre of the screen. Animated star fields passed in the background to illustrate movement at an unrealistic rate. The line switched off, and the image glitched. Instinctively, Grace slapped a hand against the side of the terminal. The image elongated and faded out for a moment before snapping back. Still, the navigation screen showed blank. There was no way to set the pod to a fully manual control. It was designed to latch on to the nearest habitable world and if none were in range, then the nearest large ship. Grace had used every trick she knew to get this far.

A dot animated out from the representation of the pod, this time yellow. It was headed away from the Trafalgar’s position, closer to the centre of the system. There was another mark on the screen. Without a clear identifier, but it was a much larger ship.

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“What the hell is that?” Grace said aloud, running the sensor sweep again, trying to get any sort of reading. They threw up the ship’s silhouette. Usually, Grace would have checked this against her ship’s library, but seeing as the last entry in this pod’s computer was from a hundred years ago, she didn’t bother. It wasn’t something she recognised, anyway. In her research for her trip, she had looked over most of the common designs used by the deep space freighters and cluster military. Nothing stood out.

If the pod locked onto that ship, her options to get into the Trafalgar were severely limited. In the best-case scenario, whoever she met over there would allow her to tag along on their exploration of the Trafalgar.

This would not do at all.

She tapped the terminal’s touchscreen, bringing back the navigational options, trying to find any way it would give her manual control. But, in place of command codes from the Trafalgar’s Captain or its command crew, it wouldn’t allow her to alter course. There must be an option. She looked up the communications submenu. Obviously, an open hail would not do her any good, but what if she tried something else?

The new ship began to take up the small porthole on the front of the pod, blocking out the stars around it. Grace could make out a dock that the pod was moving to connect with. Running through the submenus, she went for a Hail Mary and hoped the first thrusters would activate in time.

Her vision jumped and went completely white.

Her back was leaning up against a hard brick wall, and she was sitting in an alleyway in dry mud. Grace wasn’t sure how long she’d been out. When she came to, she wasn’t in the escape pod any more. She wasn’t panicking yet, but it wasn’t far off.

The sky was clear blue but slightly the wrong shade to what she was used to, more of a cyan.

Groggily, she got to her feet. There were voices. This was in some sort of town, but nowhere she recognised. It was a dry, arid place, a desert world. Grace ran her mind through all the planets in the cluster that might qualify. None of them were near this sector. If she was somewhere unregistered, then she was truly in trouble. She had come out here looking for glory, but she hadn’t wanted to be the one to make first contact.

For centuries, there had been rumours of alien life, but the longer humanity travelled the stars without contact, the less realistic an expectation it seemed to be. She reached for her slate. It was not there. That was a problem. She turned back to where she had woken up. It hadn’t fallen anywhere obvious. Shit, she could be off-grid with no means of communication. Hadn’t there been a holo-drama about exactly this situation? A character shipwrecked on a primitive planet. Sure, they were rescued in the final season, but she could be stuck for life. Adrenaline kicking in.

Grace stopped and took a deep breath. She hadn’t always been a great one to control her temper, but she knew it was the only way to get through this. Going back, she headed to the street where the sounds of voices had come from. On turning the corner, she saw a dozen or so stalls where traders were selling fruits and vegetables, foods, and all sorts needed for daily life.

She got a good look at one of the traders. He had green scales and dark red eyes. This was not going to be an easy one to get out of, she realised.

No one had reacted to her presence, so presumably they were already aware of humans.

As she passed the first stall, an outlet for clothing accessories with a round mirror dangling from the side of the stand, she caught her reflection. Not her reflection exactly, but that of a creature like the trader: a lizard humanoid.

She reached up and touched her face, and the reflection did the same. She didn’t feel particularly scaly; normal, in fact. But wherever she was, she was perceived as one of the locals. What the hell did this mean? Taking another deep breath to calm her shaky nerves, she simply browsed the markets until a better plan came along.