Escape Pod
System Unknown
The pod was calm and silent as death. Grace stared out of the round porthole directly in front of her at the world she had just seen. She focused on her slow breathing. Her heart was beating at a rapid pace, which she endeavoured to slow down.
I am Grace Dakota, explorer, adventurer, and archaeologist in practice if not qualification. I am not a lizard rebel; I have never been a partisan in an occupation.
“I am Grace Dakota,” There, her heart was beginning to slow. She shut her eyes for a moment. She thought she was back in a desert. Her eyes burst open. She looked at the blackness of space before her.
“I am Grace Dakota,” leaning forward. Grace pulled open the drawer below her seat, took out one of the sachets of water and drank. The rationing had probably not helped with whatever that was, a hallucination.
“What else could it have been?”
While she had been cocksure when she had left over the supply situation, having located the Trafalgar, she now worried more about how she would get back to the cluster and how she would feed herself. While the ship, like the Trafalgar, was certainly designed for long-range deep space missions, they could have industrial stasis freezers with perfectly preserved food that could sustain her for centuries in lieu of a crew of hundreds. But until she found a working freezer, she was not about to resume.
“I am Grace Dakota.”
An alarm was beeping. Her heart rate shot up again, hoping that wasn’t the alarm that indicated the air was finally running out. She Pulled up the pod’s screen; it showed it was a proximity alert. That other ship had entered the system.
“What the hell?” asked Grace that couldn’t be right. How could anyone else have located the Trafalgar? She had put in the legwork. They couldn’t just stumble upon it now.
“Dammit,” she said, clicking on the screen, showing the new ship on the edge of the system. It was broadcasting a military transponder. Dammit, it was the Navy. It was never going to be easy to claim this prize but it just got harder. She had no more options now. She would have to push on.
The pod was much closer to the Trafalgar than the newcomer. She could reach it before them if she was quick about it. They may not even have located the ship yet. She scrolled through the pod’s controls, bringing up its limited navigational controls. The Trafalgar was slightly starboard.
Using a manoeuvring thruster, she turned the pod. There was a glint of sunlight reflecting off it, and she was about to it with her bare eyes she was still several thousand kilometres away, and it was only a speck in the window. But there it was. The battleship Trafalgar.
She had the pod fired the rearmost manoeuvring thruster. The distance readout started counting down exponentially as the ship became larger in the viewport. This was it; she was gonna get on board first, and it was still going to be working, and she would be able to ride it home victoriously.
These military guys would be left in her stellar dust.
The ship was almost on top of her and she was coming in too fast. It was only supposed to have been a quick burn. What happened?
She switched to the touchscreen and pulled up the more detailed interface. It didn’t respond. The menu appeared to have stalled. Looking up, the Trafalgar was even bigger in her viewport now. She was beginning to regret everything. Grace could fire one of the other manoeuvring thrusters, but then she would likely overshoot.
She didn’t know if she could get back before the newcomers. She hit the port manoeuvring thruster for a split second, just enough to turn 180°. The Trafalgar now filled the window, with the thruster still firing, but now slowing her approach rather than keeping her speeding towards it.
Grace closed off the menu for the controls and came back in. This time, it allowed her to kill the thruster entirely. This time, the starboard thruster spun her back around the Trafalgar, filling the forward porthole.
She tried to get the computer to interface with the ship’s docking computer. There was no response. The ship’s computer was offline. She would have to manually find a docking port. There were several along the ship’s port bow, but the controls were unwieldy at best. Slowly sending short bursts from each of the various manoeuvring thrusters, she came up alongside Trafalgar and tried to line up with the docking port.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
An alarm sounded. It differed from the previous proximity alarm, which was more of a bleep. Dammit, she thought. The slate’s readout was turning red to emphasise the impending danger.
Grace was coming in far too fast. She spun the pod back around and fired the main manoeuvring thruster to slow her speed. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment, waiting.
The distance indicator was at a hundred meters, then ninety, eighty... She waited as it got down to zero and hoped the docking clamps would kick in.
Instead, the whole pod shook violently as it made contact with the Trafalgar’s hull and bounced off it. The straps holding her in the seat were the only thing to stop her from being thrown against the bulkhead.
The century-old inertial dampers were not very effective. As her stomach tied itself in knots, she put all her confidence and concentration into holding the last ration pack she had consumed within her stomach.
The Trafalgar was passing the porthole five times a minute, growing smaller with every roll. The pod was out of control. She needed to get it back stabilised and fight her way back to docking.
Using both hands, she grabbed at the slate and fired the manoeuvring thrusters with the last of the reserves. They kicked in, and the pod's rapid rotation slowed. Grace felt her stomach with her right hand, hoping to suppress the nausea, but it was feeling very irritated. The escape pod was tiny, and she really didn't want to vomit in it. She should probably feel grateful that at least that the straps were holding her in place—small mercies and all that. Outside the porthole, which was now looking away from the Trafalgar. Instead, her view was filled with a large yellow-orange desert planet.
A flashback to her hallucination kicked in. Was the world below the same one... But the experience had been so visceral—she had experienced an alien culture and remembered memories not her own. Whilst she was reasonably sure that she hadn't eaten some bad ration packs, but that was certainly a possibility and logically the more likely one. Anyone else who claimed to have received alien memories would not be someone Grace would usually look to for advice on the next steps, certainly in a situation as precarious as this.
But this was the same planet, she was sure of it, and she was positive her experience had been real. She was about to tell anyone, of course, but what matters is what she believed.
Reaching down, the pods' interface, which was still set to engine controls. With systems currently stabilised, let the pod run a complete scan of the planet.
An alarm bleeped and Grace realised too late that if it picked up lifeforms, it would initiate the one-way landing procedure, and it would be very unlikely that she would be able to leave. Unless, of course, she could convince that military ship to give her a lift. Either way, she should never board the Trafalgar before them, and probably not at all, at least not until someone else had converted it into a museum and even then, she was probably too stubborn to pay the entry fee.
She waited with bated breath as the scan initiated. It was currently at 5% and would take about twenty minutes to complete. Grace leaned back in the chair and shut her eyes in frustration. If she was back on her rented ship, it would have been completed in seconds—on a ship with faster processing and a better sensor grid than a hundred-year-old escape pod designed for survival.
God damn Scott Dryden the ship-stealing bastard. What had she even liked about him? She asked herself. She spent a moment allowing herself to think about what she had liked about him, then returned to anger.
A vibration in the pod changed. The manoeuvring thrusters had been holding steady while the scan was started, but now it moved in to change direction.