Back in the colonies and stations, entertainment media always preferred to utilize space as a quiet horror. Emilie had always found it distinctly amusing, in a way.
Space was so vast, so empty, and most importantly, so dangerous precisely because of those two features. A gigantic nothing that sought to kill you by its sheer presence alone. Very few species found comfort in vacuum, fewer still could actually survive it indefinitely, such as the Cordrecs and their silica-based biology.
But to Emilie, space, despite the dangers, was relaxing. It scratched the itch within her chitin like nothing else could.
She found comfort in the silence, the unperturbable nothing. All she had to do to calm down was close her eyes and let the lack of everything to wash over her. It would empty her thoughts and suffocate her feelings.
She’d found a slowly growing need for the quiet with every passing cycle. The more she learnt of the state the ship was in, the more apparent it was that her determination was tested. Even as metal walls kept her safe and contained, she knew it was an illusion.
That was where she was now. In a metal box, total darkness was all around her. She could pretend that she didn’t have a wall right within reach, that there wasn’t a strap holding her onto the bed-frame to keep her from floating off. So long as she didn’t turn on the light of her helmet, she could drown everything out in that void.
And yet her mind still wandered over her problems. The explosion alone had removed a fourth of the ship. With it, the nanomachines had run rampant and infect or destroy about half of what was left. Every subsystem was compromised at the node points, and trying to make anything work would mean the instant electricity started running through, the infestation would just eat it all.
“There has to be a way out of this.”
Her voice rang out against the utter silence around her. A proof that she was still alive. It was a self-imposed mantra, and it kept her going. Emilie was stranded at the edge of the system’s heliosphere. She was at least a dozen light-hours away from anything and everything that might be safe.
Emilie could survive, sure. There was enough energy to recycle her water until she ran out of food and starved to death. She could prolong this through entering intermittent hibernation, but… without a solution, this was as good as a coffin.
A very roomy, expensive coffin.
But she would not surrender.
There had to be a way to do more than count down the minutes until she consumed her last scrap of food.
Emilie couldn’t go anywhere. The thrusters were busted. Calling for help wouldn’t get aid that mattered, even in the off chance someone got the signal. By the time they got there she’d be mummified. What option was there that could get her somewhere safe?
Emilie floated in the dark room, floating in and out of hibernation, her stomach groaning in complaint. How could she get somewhere safe? What was there available to her that could…?
With a flick of her helmet’s illumination system, she looked on to the little bits of debris around her. Screws, bolts, tools, bits of metal dust… they were a micro-cosmos, shining under the beam of light from her helmet. The only thing missing was an orbit…
“Oh.”
Where could her best chances for survival be?
The system had been abandoned. Here she was, stranded, because it had once housed enough technology that the murderous AI from outside the galaxy had sent an attack. Maybe the AI had won the fight during those ancient battles, or maybe it didn’t. But something had to remain. Something that could sustain life.
It could not have been small either, so maybe it could even be several planets and not just some long-forgotten space stations.
All Emilie had to do was figure out if there was one, and then figure out how to get there.
First item on the list: Finding the nearest place to land on.
She needed to use the ship's sensors to find a planet. To use the ship’s sensors, she needed more power. To use more power, she needed a generator. The main generator was a bust. The secondary one hadn’t kicked in, but it was tied into the same systems. It would get chewed down to dust when it kicked up.
Did she need all that energy output, though? Emilie tapped her chin in consideration. Currently, there were no thrusters, no… anything. The sensors might be powerful, but those would be the active ones, not the passive ones. She’d want to avoid active sensors since it might trigger some other defenses she’d yet to encounter.
And to do that…
A plan slowly formed in her mind. She broke the steps down, simplified into smaller tasks.
She had to remove the sensors from the ship’s hull, unplug them from the subsystem, plug them together and into one of the spare core processors… the software would likely need something done with it to work with the new configuration, maybe the onboard AI? She grimaced, but didn’t let go of the idea of hope.
It was a path forward.
Far better than giving up, better than letting herself freeze to death or starve to death or asphyxiate or anything else that might kill her out here.
Emilie’s first instinct had been to rush towards the impromptu airlock to go out of the ship. That idea was ferociously stomped down. No. The one thing she had to spare right now was time. But her other resources were very few. Rushing could mean a fuck-up. She couldn’t afford that.
One wrong move and she could truly lose all hope.
The first thing she did was boot up and re-watch the recordings of her space-walk at half playback speed. Carefully, she cataloged and took notes. What sensors looked operational? Which ones would she need? Which ones could she spare? What looked hardest to remove?
Bit by bit, Emilie compared the feed and her notes with the ship’s blueprints. There were many aspects of the ship that were obscured or hidden, put behind intellectual property blocks. Even when the ship was the cheapest piece of scrap one could cobble together, the company had clutched at every detail it could with a death-grip. Fortunately, most of them she could bypass by checking the repair and maintenance manuals, and the rest she had to take very careful guesses.
The more she studied, the more she learnt, and the more sure she was that the first item on her list was possible. She could put something together to map out her location and that of the system.
The next step would figure out how to get there. But she had best keep everything in manageable chunks. Emilie tried to ignore the itching of her chitin. What to do once she detached the sensors… what to do…
Bit by bit, she fleshed out the first part of the plan into even smaller pieces.
Step by step.
Disconnect the back-up generator. Prepare for a space walk. Take the backup generator to the vacuum of space. Use some of the air and vacuum to hopefully suck up the nanobots. Bring it fully outside. Latch it onto the remains of the bay area. Hope it doesn’t have any nanomachines left. Open the hull and pull out the sensors. Check for nanobot presence in cables. Connect sensors to the generator and the backup intelligence core. Calibrate data. Look for space-time being deformed from gravity wells. Check the spectrometer and infrared feed to determine which one is likeliest to be a place she could survive reaching…
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And then figure out how to get her ass there before she starved to death.
Easy. Keep it up, and she’d likely get a raise during the next evaluation once she’d invented a time machine during her lunch breaks! Maybe even a certification in scrap artistry and intellectual property violations.
Then she queried the data-pad on what tools she might need for the job and…
“You need a T-824 compatible bolt remover to decouple the Argus X34 space-dilation sensor from its port. You need a V-78 compatible bolt removal to decouple the Dion C23-d sensor. You need…”
She read the list of necessary items out loud a second time, then a third. The helmed muffled her voice, the words ringing in her ears loudly, like two crashing planets. Her grip on the pad trembled a little as she checked the list of tools she had available.
The list of necessary tools was two hundred and five items long.
The list of tools on board was ten.
Emilie’s fingers trembled as she held the device and struggled to fight back the urge to scream. Just how many screws and bolts would she need to finagle her way through just to do anything!? She didn’t have any of the special equipment needed for this job. And some of these required several technicians working at once for no apparent reason! Many of the manuals warned the subsystems could block themselves off if the technician did not verify they had the corresponding license!
Why!?
WHY!?
Would the company prefer to kill their pilots rather than risk details leaking out? Details of a ship with a design so old whoever had invented it was likely dead!?
A wave of despair coursed through Emilie like the chilly moldy wind of an air-cooling unit. “I should’ve downloaded those illegal modification tutorials.” Her shoulders slumped, taking deep breaths to calm down. “This… this is just a very minor setback. I just… I just have to figure out how to brute-force this.”
Change of plans.
Her mind turned to the spare generator, her lips pursed.
New plan.
Step one: Ignore proprietary locks. Figure out how to build herself something that could cut through the ship’s hull and use THAT to turn everything in her way into scrap. Bolts can’t stay tight if they’re a liquid… right?
If she was going to die here, she’d make sure whoever found her corpse would have nothing that could be salvageable out of the ship. Because she was going to use every damn bit of it before she gave up.
> ***
Damon woke up in a strange bed in a strange room. Not knowing where he was, or how he got there.
“Again? Seriously?”
He felt groggy, his body ached all over, his everything hurt, but particularly his left arm. Like someone had run him over with a semi, and then backed up to do it again.
With a heavy groan, he moved to sit up. Except he couldn’t move, not properly. Damon shifted his focus. There were a series of metal clamps on his left arm, pinning it to the bed-frame. There was another similar clamp on his ankles and right arm, but those were tied to ropes rather than fixed in place. It almost looked as if he were wearing the metal for protection on his limbs.
“The fuck?”
His mind operated normally again, catching up to him and feeding him the memories of the fight. Damon quickly took in his surroundings: a half-rusted metal box, jagged holes made for windows, light pouring through in a fog that carried the stink of burnt plastic. The bed was a conglomeration of rivets and screws, the mattress five sizes too small and made of bloodied cloth. The only door in the room was just a bigger hole, with a curtain for a door, fluttering on a chilly draft.
Turning back down to his own body, Damon saw someone had covered him in bandages. Thick cloth that was drenched in as much blood as the bed was. The restraints looked more like something meant for…
A patient?
With a frown, he carefully bent, ignoring the aching stabbing pains so he could reach the lock on his ankle with his right hand. Once undone, he repeated the process with the other ankle. Removing the restraint on his hand proved impossible, however. As much as he didn’t like the idea of messing around with what could be doctor’s work, he enjoyed being pinned in place even less.
So best to take the middle of the road option and play it cool… once he freed himself.
“Hello?” He called out.
The slow breeze was the only answer to his call, and Damon suspected whoever had apparently patched him up was not home. His focus returned to the chunk of metal clamped on his right arm and roped on to the bed frame. He tugged again, trying to reach the latches that kept it locked in place.
A quick check with the map function of his axon confirmed he did not know where he was. The mapping function clearly did not work that great while unconscious and had placed his current whereabouts inside a “unknown” sub-category. That said, considering the prompts warning him that he’d been out of it for thirty hours, he could guess he was still near the city at the very least.
Heavy boots hammered against the metal, the cloth curtain opened and a man that was more bones than flesh stepped through. His body was scarred, black marks marred his face and arms. For a fraction of a second, Damon thought the man was a human, but quickly noticed the place where the ears should be was blackened too, covered by ear mufflers of some kind. A sasin? But one devoid of silver ears, clearly removed.
“Awake.” The man stated with a gruff, empty monotone, his eyes focused on ankles. “Hrm.” The sound was one of dissatisfaction, but he moved to circle around the bed, grabbing Damon’s wrist and releasing the clasp.
“Thanks?” Damon carefully used his freed hand to release his left one, ignoring the intense aching pains as he sat up.
There was no response from the skeletal man, only a loud snort. He did not miss a beat, turning around and stomping his way right out of the room just as hastily as he’d come in. Damon was left with a wave of confusion, but not wanting to just sit and do nothing, he looked around the room.
He found his clothes, torn sleeves and back. The leather armor had been cut through, and it was clear it’d been washed not too long ago, what with the lack of blood throughout most of it. Removing the bandages revealed he had some pretty nasty scars on his ribs and arm, the flesh was deeply bruised all over too, and he did not dare to remove the bandages on his left arm since the blood looked fresh there and it hurt to just move his fingers.
Slowly, he dressed up, trying to avoid his head bumping on the roof of the small room or the frame as he stepped out. The corridor was smaller still, and Damon had to crouch to move through the metal corridor. His boots splashed on small puddles of water that leaked from the roof and down the walls. The floor groaned slightly under his weight.
He reached some kind of common-room area, there were a handful of large tables littered with many tools and items he couldn’t recognize the use for, but he spotted enough scalpels and saws and syringes that he could guess at what was going on here. Some kind of underground medical center? Damon had a slight moment of concern about getting tetanus just from being here, but too late now.
“You deaf?”
The words made Damon spin, focusing on a pile of rags he’d initially dismissed, but now realized was a person. Whoever they were, they were not much taller than a child, and buried under layers of cloth that left little more than a pair of green eyes looking at him with a cold shudder.
“Name’s Damon, erm… sir?” Damon kept his smile cordial, bowing a little. “Thanks for patching me up.”
“Should be dead, red-blood.” The man spoke from under the rags, shifting slightly but making no moves to leave the pile. “People bleed less than you, and die. You bled lots. Red-blood.”
Damon rubbed his wrist a little, thinking back to actually stopping a blade with his arm. That had been… desperate and dumb. “If you don’t mind my asking, where am I?”
“Underside, safe, no fights.” A hand peeked out from under the cloth, a claw of chrome with four sharp fingers. “You lucky, savior paid, you keep axon, you keep good arms, good bones.”
Savior? Damon tried to ask, but the metal claw made a dismissive gesture, silencing him and pointing him at what he assumed was the entrance. He squinted, but thought better than to try and back-talk the guy who’d put him back together, even less while his body still felt like he’d barely managed to escape a giant blender.
No sooner had he taken a step towards the exit that a prompt popped up. He gave it a quick read and grimaced, drawing in a deep breath and steeling himself as he continued down his way a metallic rust-stained corridor. It led to a reception area of some kind. Damon spotted no less than a dozen people laying in beds, bloodied, groaning, or crying.
“Han.”
He greeted the blond sasin that had stood next to the entrance. The man wore a heavy cloak to hide most of his features, perhaps to also protect from the chill. He gave a curt nod and gestured for Damon to follow.
Stepping outside of the ‘clinic’ revealed a string of walkways and metal tunnels. The wind blew roughly, a deep cold that bit into bone until it rung like a bell. Damon could only wince and pull up his own cloak a bit. They were under the city, it seemed, literally hanging under the massive steel and between the gargantuan columns. Steam and water dripped and swirled, metal wires keeping everything together and stable wherever a structure happened to be.
“I-.”
Han raised his hand, stopping Damon.
“I’m not here to scold, nor for the Goddess. I’m here for me. I wish for your help.”
That shut up Damon fast. Swallowing, he nodded. “So long as it doesn’t involve dragons.”
The response made Han hesitate, then swell slightly with pride, blue eyes shining slightly as he nodded in return. “The people who were going after Idina. I am going after them.”
“Is she alright?”
“She is. We’re keeping her safe. She’s currently under protection from the knights and.. Sybil.” His shoulders slumped slightly. “I am hoping to find out why she was being targeted.” Han replied, shaking his head.
Damon took a moment, frowning. “Why do you need my help?”
Han took a moment, closing his eyes and sighing. “The Goddesses, the knights, and the users forget to look down from time to time.” He gestured around himself. “I don’t mean to blaspheme, the work the Goddesses do is of great importance.” His brows furrowed. “Only users or former users could seek harm upon someone. We can’t let that slide and tarnish a user’s work.”
Damon grimaced, scratching the back of his head, trying to ignore the brush of his fingers against the limp of metal at the base of his skull. “So what’s the plan?”
“Find them, hopefully catch a live witness or gather information.” Han replied, his brows furrowed. “As it currently stands, the knights are likely to detain you for interrogation, since you would be their best lead. And since they would undoubtedly obey the Goddesses, were they to issue an order…”
“Wonderful.” Damon rolled his eyes. “I have some names. I’ll know if any of them are nearby.”
“I know a few places where we could start.”