1 - STARSHIP DEFIANT

“Shields down at 25%, captain.” The woman at tactical was looking at the status screen, almost in an attempt to reveal that what she was seeing right now was not how things really were. Her dark eyes darted around the holographic display in search for anything that could be used to improve the current situation. She let out a sigh, allowing her mind, only for a brief moment to wander around the space of the bridge. Several men were down, where a conduit had exploded right above their stations. The main screen was invaded with static interference, but even behind the jumbled mess of the error messages, even behind the heavy anti radiation shielding, she could see it. The surface of a star, no more than a few hundred kilometers from their current position.

“I know, I know. Serge, prepare to jump. Tac, divert power from shields to engines on my mark. Computer, disable safety regulations!” The captain’s name was Fenrir. He looked just as exhausted, if not more, as his crew on deck. It was mere seconds ago that they were still in faster than light travel, and everything was fine. They were having a nice chat, shit talking as usual. They were supposed to investigate an interesting phenomenon that the astronomers had detected. Just a boring survey mission. Only the captain and a few others were really interested in it. They were a military vessel, not a scientific one. But he had wanted to go and check, and since they were currently idle and quite bored, everyone accepted the mission without complaint. Then it all turned to shit.

“...aaaand mark! Go, go, go full speed!” He gave the final order, and his last ditch plan was set in motion. The shields dropped as they tried the last, desperate attempt to free themselves from whatever alien force was keeping their ship stationary around the red supergiant. Immediately the deck was invaded by a blinding white light. It only lasted a fraction of a second before the secondary shields went online and filtered out the majority of the light, but even that was enough to raise the temperature by several degrees. From the viewscreen, the only thing they could see now was a red ball of superheated plasma. It appeared red, and the star was called a red supergiant, but the only reason it was that color as seen from inside was because of the emergency shields. All windows on the ship came equipped with independent shields, to make sure that the crew was not exposed to deadly space radiation in case of shield failure. And this was one such case.

“I need more power, sir.” Serge complained, while fiddling with his console in order to get the ship to obey him. The entire outer hull was beginning to glow a faint orange, then a sickly yellow.

“Tac?”

“Shields are down, sir. I’m giving you all I’ve got.” She said, now visibly in a panic. She too was trying to get the ship to do something that was utterly impossible. And yet, somehow some energy found its way where it was supposed to go.

“There, I’ve got a 5 second boost, don’t waste it!”

“That’s all I needed, darling!” Replied the pilot. He licked his lips while grinning wickedly as he finalised the jumping sequence.

“FTL jump in 3… 2… 1…” The computer’s robotic voice announced. “Jumping.” The space right in front of the Defiant warped infinitely around itself, drawing a multicolored spiral with the light of the star. After less than a millisecond, a pitch black void appeared right at its center, expanding rapidly until it engulfed the whole spaceship. That was a void bubble, or warp bubble as the scientists called it. It was the infinitely warped space that surrounded a starship going faster than light. It was the one technology that had revolutionised the whole Enlightened Technocracy after the third world war, and allowed them to reach for the stars. Except this time it had brought them right into a star, so dangerously close to it that even the cutting edge military shields couldn’t do much against it.

“Something is not right…” Said the navigator, cold sweat building up on his forehead.

“What is it, Sarge?” Asked the captain. Three windows floated before his face, full of data and sensor readings from all across the ship.

“Our energy’s depleting, fast. Something is pulling us back! At this rate the spacetime compression will fail in less than a minute!” Replied tactical, following the pilot’s previous warning. Her dark face had become so pale she was white as a sheet. By disabling the safety regulations, they had effectively jumped from bad to worse. And there was no turning back now. The computer announced they now had less than 30 seconds left.

“Dammit, get me engineering.”

“Sir?” From the comms, came a woman’s voice, directly from the very heart of the ship. 

“Situation report? Why can’t we take off?”

“It’s bad, sir. We have a radiation leak. It’s… the engine is falling apart.”

“How did this even happen??” Visibly in distress, he still tried to maintain himself as calm as possible. Remember the training, remember the training. Not only was something preventing them from leaving, but even the engine was giving up on them. A million possible courses of actions came and went inside his head. But before one of them could even be finalized, he had already found a flaw in it and had discarded it.

“Sir, we need to… evac… bzzzzzzzzt” The call had been cut short. Suddenly, every single electronic device on board the ship became scrap metal, at least for now. And immediately afterwards, every single person collapsed instantly, shutting down just like the onboard electronics. Only the captain was still conscious. Standing up, alone, in the middle of the bridge he watched his ship and his crew drift among the currents of hyperspace. The warp bubble was on the verge of collapse. Suddenly a flash of blue Cherenkov light engulfed the bridge, blinding him momentarily. Next thing he knew… is this… a planet? He was, together with his spaceship, in free fall in the atmosphere of a planet. The ship was still out of commission, and the crew was out cold as well. Shit, shit, shit… what do I do… what do I do…

Directive One: Protect the Technocracy at all costs

He began reciting the directives of his navy. It was an action that always managed to calm and reassure him, even in the most dire of moments. He kept his eyes closed, freed his mind, and slowly talked.

Directive Two: Value all life equally. Sentient life is to be protected, unless it shows clear signs of hostility.

Directive Three…

He opened his eyes once again. The ground was now clearly visible in the distance. He estimated no more than five seconds before impact. There was something that he wanted to do, but it would mean going against the very meaning of being a captain. It would mean to sell his soul. But! It was in his own self interest, out of preservation, one selfish action specifically meant to preserve his own life above all else. He decided to act. He took out a small sphere he was wearing as a pendant, plucked it from its chain and pressed it with his fingers. Forgive me, my friends… And thus, he activated a personal stasis field.

He opened his eyes and saw the rays of the sun making their way through the wreckage into what little was left of the once glorious bridge of the Defiant. He looked around, almost hoping to see a welcoming committee of some sort. He had hoped some of his crew had survived and were now there, waiting for him to come out of his box he had frozen in time. But nobody was there. Everyone was, in fact, still in the same position he last saw them when they collapsed, obviously taking into account the fact that the force of the impact had moved a few bodies. The realisation had not hit him yet, and he was still merrily contemplating the scene, as if it was all a dream. He had been able to conclude that the bodies had indeed moved around quite a bit following the crash, but that the ship had somehow managed to avoid crashing upside down. In a sense, it had been a rather fortunate crash. He walked around the 45 degrees sloped bridge, towards the tactical console. There laid the corpse of his first officer. She was a big woman, black in origin but born in space like everyone else. He liked the determined character of her. As he looked at her face, though, he saw what she had felt, right before dying. Her face had been frozen still, just like everyone else’s. It was true despair. He smiled gently at her, rose to his feet and clapped his hands.

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“Ok guys, the joke is no longer fun. Come on, get up. It’s an order.” he said cheerfully. But his command was met with absolute silence. Only the sound of the broken engines, and the fire that was ravaging somewhere in the lower floors. “Guys?” He knelt before the first officer. “Tactical! Get the fuck up!” He shook her to wake her up from her deep sleep.

“Shit…” He suddenly retracted, feeling her cold skin. He looked at his hands, disgust painted all over his face. He tried to clean them using his shirt, but the feeling just didn’t leave him. “Shit.” He kept repeating as he ran towards the other people lying on the floor. Viktor, the man at the comms, was still strapped to his chair. He looked like he had taken a nap on the job. As he approached him, the captain noticed the weird angle of his neck. It had snapped in three places and described the shape of an ‘S’. “No… not you too…” He gently picked him up and softly put him on the floor. He sat on his former chair and tried to wake the console up. “Hello? Anyone copy?” Utter silence. All the systems were dead, just like his crew here.

He fled the bridge. He ran along the oddly sloped corridor, dodging piles of metal scrap and immobile bodies. They looked like broken dolls, discarded and abandoned by a child that had outgrown them. “If this is some kind of practical joke…” he shouted at the top of his lungs. He stumbled and fell. He could feel the sound of bone cracking coming from his foot, but he felt no pain. He resumed his desperate run across the length of the ship, without even noticing he was limping. He finally arrived at the canteen. There was a sickening smell of blood and vomit mixed together. Broken bodies littered the floor, floating in pools of dark red blood. “No, no…” he was limping badly, and a sharp pang of pain came from his leg. He tried to walk around the corpses that laid there, but slipped and fell again. He found himself hugging one of the bodies. It was a charred, unrecognisable body at the side of the corridor. The fire had completely consumed it to the bone. The air was thick with the smell of burnt flesh. He covered his mouth and stumbled back to his feet, trying to mitigate the smell with his clothes as he walked in the middle of that sea of death. He wanted to throw up. He bit his tongue in an attempt to focus. But he had bitten too hard, and blood came out of the wound like a river after a broken dam. It drenched his mouth. Its iron taste was nauseating. He stumbled again as his vision grew blurry, but he managed to get a hold on a woman that was standing beside a wall. Except it was no longer a woman. It was a body that had melted with the wall because of the heat. He could see her skin had molten down and fused with the metal wall in a shapeless mass. It looked like a wax statue left in the sun. He felt his consciousness fade.

He rushed outside, panting. His legs were weak, and he found himself on the ground, gasping for air. “Shit! What the fuck has happened? How could it happen? I don’t believe it… I don’t…” He yelled and cried, and pounded his fists into the ground, which was littered with metal scraps scattered all around. He punched the ground again and again, until his hands bled, and then some more. He got up to his feet, and walked around the wreckage once. There were body parts scattered there too, and he began bringing them all back to the flat ground next to the bridge.

“What did I do… what did I do…” he looked at the heap of limbs he had made, staring at it from above. All he wanted was for it all to disappear. He ran away. He ran for as long as his body allowed him, until his broken ankle finally gave up and made him tumble to the ground. And there he laid, in silence, watching the sun slowly set at the horizon.

He hugged his knees and kept repeating the words, staring at the void. “I was a coward.” The sun had set, and pale moonlight was coming from behind fleeting clouds. He crawled back to whatever was left of his ship, and his friends. His mind felt empty, his head heavy. There was only one recurring thought that kept him awake, that made it impossible for him to pass out just yet: “It’s all my fault.” Every step he took, a sharp pain coming from his foot rushed through his whole body. “I deserve this.” Another two hundred steps. “I deserve to suffer.” Another five hundred. “I’m a coward. Ha, ha, ha, I’m such a coward.” Finally he arrived at his stack of body parts.

“Haa, ha… haha…” He stared wickedly at it. “Hahahahahahah” He laughed a maniacal laugh, and cried. “But you are dead now. Dead! And dead men tell no tales. It was an accident, yes, nothing more than an accident. How could I predict it? How could I even avoid it. It was not my fault. It was not...” He kept repeating and repeating boken sentences. There was a new light in his eyes, a glimmer of something deep and dangerous. A glimmer into the abyss. He tried to remember his past, the life he had lived until just a few hours ago. There were parts, pieces of conversations, memories of his past life with his crew. He kept yelling it was not his fault, alternating moment of clarity and moment of delirium. At times he believed he had done the right thing, and at times he cursed himself. More and more he began to believe that it was all an accident, but at the same time he felt an increasing weight building up inside of him. It was trying to blow him up from the inside, if he let it. The night passed, and he was now alternating states of maniacal laughter to states of complete apathy. During those, he only stared at the pile of body parts, but he was not watching it. His gaze was lost somewhere in the distance. The night finally ended, and the sun rose above the horizon. It was his first sundawn on a planet. The first time he saw the real thing, and not the holograms in virtual reality. And yet he couldn’t appreciate it, and instead stood there, immobile, laughing and staring, then laughing again.

“I know I should have asked, guys. I know, okay? Don’t be mad at me.” He muttered while working, pale face fixated on the earth at the tip of his shovel. The sun was pleasant and warm on his skin. “I just thought, you know? Better to bury you all here, before the corpses start decomposing…” He planted the shovel into the ground then, grunting, pulled out a large chunk of earth and grass. Small roots were making the job difficult for him. “Haaah, but I’m not going to be defeated by such insignificant issues. Don’t worry, you will be next, Sarge. Right after tac… yes, right after her.” He kept talking, giving occasional glances at the woman’s body beside him. He planted the shovel once again, and collapsed to the ground. He held his hands around the throbbing mess that was his right foot.

“Uh, I seem to be getting pretty tired, right? But don’t worry, I’mma do y’all justice.” He kept talking to himself as he buried all of his crew. The only family and friends he had ever had. The only home he ever had. All that was left of his world now laid beneath a layer of dirt, in some unknown alien world.

Something captured his attention. “Who is that?” He suddenly yelled, holding out his laser gun and flailing it around. “Hey, don’t think I didn’t see you or something… Come the fuck out, now!” but nothing happened. He kept staring at the bush for at least ten minutes straight. “I guess there was nothing there after all.” He muttered to himself, then whistled softly as he retreated back into the wreckage. Suddenly, he stopped on his tracks, turned around and yelled. He planted the wrong foot on the ground and the sharp pain shook the insides of his brain. But it didn’t matter now, he had an enemy to defeat.

“HA! Got ya! Ah… ah… ahhh… there’s nothing there?” Once again, the only thing there was a small bush in the shade of a tree, its leaves gently moved around by the light breeze.

“Well, then. I got food, water, shelter, weapons… It's time to go full Robinson Crusoe! Not that I expect to ever be rescued, but… It’s gonna be fun alright!” He said, as he began collecting large rocks to create a fireplace. The dark, charred wreckage of his ship had half buried into the ground. The bridge, originally located two thirds of the way to the top, was now at ground level. The window, now the only way to get in or out, had shattered and hung a few meters above ground. He began building his fireplace on the grass right next to it. He went in and out by said window to gather a good deal of food, water, and supplies in order to camp outside. Every time he tried to use his damaged leg to climb, the pain almost made him fall back down. But every time he fell, he ignored the pain he felt as his back hit the sharp metal scrap and just climbed back again. “Yes… camping… I’ve always wanted to go camping, you know?” He turned around to face his interlocutor, but nobody was there.

“But, since it’s good to talk to someone, I guess I’ll talk to the strange figure watching me from the bush over there!” He said, softly at the beginning, and then degenerating in a loud yell. His voice broke down halfway through and left him only with a whistle of voice and a new source of pain. The incriminated bush just stood there, unmoving as always. “Well, then, let’s get started.” He took out a small flamethrower he personally had in his quarters, and used it to light the fire.