]WARNING! PROXIMITY RANGE EXCEEDING SPECIFIED LIMITS![
The announcement on his helmet’s speakers, jarred him awake, opening his eyes to see the same words flashing in angry red letters on the HUD.
] M.S. Gladstone moving to save Warp Tunnel Distance [
I let out a string of curses that would have gotten me one hell of a beating if my mother had been around to hear it. “I knew that two faced, conniving bastard was going to pull something.”
Sitting up from where I’d been knocked unconscious, I tapped the comms button on the control panel mounted to the arm of my EVA suit. “Barstol you bastard!” I growled out, “You pintasta sucking, backstabbing son of a bitch! Get back here
and pick me up!”
I really wasn’t expecting a response from the Gladstone, Barstol was a slimy enough piece of work that it was even money he’d just ignore the communication link and keep heading out of system, but unless he messed with the ship’s flight recorder, it’d be on record. Of course, I wouldn’t put that past him either. And as
I watched the distance readout on my HUD grow steadily larger, I was surprised when a channel opened up.
“Tommy-boy! You’re alive!” the voice exclaimed, “Eddy said you’d fallen down a deep fissure and we’d thought you were dead!”
“Cut the crap Barstol, we both know you’re lying your ass off. This was your plan all along”
The channel went quiet for a long moment, “What was that Tommy-Boy?” he finally replied, “Your signal seems to be breaking up, The Tunnel Drive is already cycling up, so you know there’s no way for us to abort and come get you, not without frying all the control circuits and stranding us here for a week! Hold tight and we’ll send someone back for you as soon as we exit hyperspace”
“BARSTOL!” but it was no good, I saw the proximity reading flash to infinity.
]COMMLINK DESYNC[ my suit’s interface reported ]M.S. Gladstone no longer in system.[
I forced myself to control my temper and push myself to my feet to take stock of my surroundings. I was really up shit creek here; stranded on an atmosphere free planetoid, off or any main trade routes – hell, barely even on any standard star map – with only the O2, water and nutrient fluid available in my EVA suit. While the O2 scrubber would keep me breathing for a while, I really didn’t want to run the numbers on which resource I was going to run out of first.
I wasn’t likely to make it out of this situation without a miracle, and I wasn’t the praying type.
Even if I believed Barstol was actually going to come back for me – which was about as likely as a Synaxian trying to get in my pants – by the time the Gladstone dropped out of hyperspace and could recharge the tunnel drive to come back for me, I’d be dead. That’s how far off the beaten path this system was.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have even been working for Barstol if I’d had any other choice. We had a history, and I didn’t trust the man’s ethics. But he had me over a barrel. To refuse would have meant people I cared about getting hurt. I could only hope my little contingency plan worked and my sister was able to get away before Barstol made it back to Rotterdam Colony.
I began to explore the cavern I found myself trapped in. While my EVA suit had jump jets, and the gravity on this Void-be-damned planetoid was fairly low, I couldn’t risk injury, or waste my suit’s power. Every microwatt of power conserved meant the water and oxygen scrubbers would last that much longer. Perhaps it was futile to ration in this way, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.
One thing about being an old scrapper; we’re stubborn bastards.
The pocket I’d fallen into – pushed, if I wasn’t wrong – seemed to be the start of a tunnel deeper into the planetoid. So turning on my helmet lights, I began walking, hoping I might find something that’d allow me to get out of this mess.
We had come here to salvage a wreck after all, and the wreck had been intact enough that we’d been able to hook up grapples and excavate it enough to free it from its grave on this rock. We didn’t even know the origin of the wreck, so it was very likely to have had alien tech in it that would be worth a fortune. It was the reason Barstol had put so much into convincing me to come out of retirement and “join” the crew. He needed my skills, and it was far less likely he’d have gotten anyone close to my certifications willing to trust him.
I was hoping beyond hope that if a ship of that size had crashed here, there might be another ship somewhere on this dirtball. Perhaps a shuttle, or a transport; just something I could use to either extend my life support or maybe even repair enough to get home. Yeah, I know; again, chances are in the same territory as Barstol sending someone back to get me. Sitting on my ass and brooding wasn’t going to do me any good though, so I might as well look around.
There was definitely something weird about this planetoid.
I mean, besides what we knew going into this mission, which was that for a rock this size, its gravity was far too strong. Barstool’s plans had been to sell its coordinates to a mining corporation after we were finished with the salvage op. The only explanation for the gravity was a very dense pocket of exotic minerals at its core.
At this point I’d been exploring these vents and fissures for 2 days, and my resources were really starting to get low. My suit’s power pack was down to 50%, and O2 reserves -even with the scrubbers would- would only last another day. In the 53 hours I’ve been roaming around the guts of this rock, I’d slept very little. It’s really hard to sleep when you are looking forward to death by hypoxia. The anxiety isn’t very conducive to it.
The insomnia was starting to make me question my thinking, however. I kept seeing hints that these various tunnels were, in fact, passage ways, not naturally formed. It wasn’t glaringly obvious, but my instincts kept screaming at me. There were bits of wall that seemed too smooth, sections too straight. It all made me worried that at any moment some bug eyed alien would come round the corner and tear my head off.
But every corner was just more cave. There’d even been the odd crevasse dropping deep into darkness within the rock. Every time I came upon one of those I had to make the choice to risk the jump, use my suits thrusters, or backtrack and take a different fork in the tunnel. So far I’d played it safe and backtracked, but I couldn’t keep wasting time and energy. My chances of finding something to help me off this rock were slim, but salvagers weren’t the type to just lay down and die.
Ironically, that was when I turned around and found myself in front of yet another crevasse.
I eyed it carefully and tried to get my sleep clouded mind to run the numbers on its width and how possible it would be to jump over. It really was time, I thought, to take a risk, if it wasn’t too high. Comparing my own mental calculations against my suit’s rangefinding and gravity measurements, I decided it was worth a try.
Backing up a few steps, I closed my eyes, took a deep focusing breath and tried to clear my head. It wasn’t that wide, I could do this, I’d find something to help on the other side. I’d get out of this mess and hunt Barstol down and make SURE my little surprise tore his ass off. “Stars guide me” I whispered, and started my run up.
Did I mention the fact that I was operating on 53 hours with next to no sleep? Or that during that time all I’d had for calories was the nutrient fluid my suit was set up to supply for longer salvaging sessions? I may have been a bit overconfident in my estimates of success. Looking back later, even the suit’s computations put the chances at around even money without using the jump thrusters. It goes to show how one’s judgment can get cloudy in such situations.
As I flew over that chasm, my brain started to realize just how close my landing was going to be. There was a good chance I might need to give a momentary burst of the jump thrusters at the last second to clear it. Too late for regrets now though, I thought to myself as I started the descent half of my jump.
My feet touched down on the porous rock right at the edge of the chasm, and I wobbled for a moment to get my balance. “FUCK that was close,” I exclaimed, the adrenaline spike of it all having woken me up and cleared my head in that instant of terror. But as I caught my balance and was about to step forward, I felt something let go violently underneath me.
I threw myself forward in that instant, trying to clear the edge of the section of rock breaking away, but it was no good. I felt myself starting to descend into the black of the chasm, and reacted with the absolute last chance I had to save myself – I activated my jump thrusters…
And nothing happened.
]WARNING, JUMP JETS NON-OPERATIONAL, CONTROL SYSTEMS DISABLED[ Flashed angry red in my HUD as I fell into the darkness. With the reduced gravity, I had enough time to curse Barstol’s entire family line. The bastard must have sabotaged the jump thrusters. This was going to hurt…
***
Once again, I was stabbed awake by the persistent voice from my suits computer. ]WARNING, O2 Recycler unit offline. O2 reserves are approaching dangerously low levels. Estimating 4 hours of operation remaining. Please begin return to nearest refuge immediately[
“Void Take that bastard!” I cursed, and carefully Checked myself for injuries. While they made EVA suits with medical diagnostics systems Built in, I wasn’t that flush. I’d been out of the salvaging game too long. Luckily, I hadn’t broken anything on the way down, just been knocked unconscious.
I swear, if the guild didn’t put that man’s head on a pike for this, I was gonna make sure personally that he paid for this.
As I got to my feet, I discovered that all but one of my suit’s lights had been taken out in the fall, and the remaining one had a worrying flicker. If it dies on me down here, with only 4 hours of O2 left, I might as well just Crack the seals on my suit and let the cold vacuum Take me, because I was done for.
But as I turned around in place to survey the chamber where I’d landed, the flickering of that last light glinted off brushed metal, not 5 meters away.
I needed and wished I could rub my eyes. Was I being things? This WAS the kind of thing I’d been hoping to find, but I’d also just taken quite a tumble. Maybe I was concussed, delusional, suffering hypoxia? I was quite deem Into the planetoid at this point, it couldn’t be real, could it?
I moved cautiously towards it, half expecting to either have another cave In under my feet, or some other unfortunate thing happen. I reached out and placed my hand carefully against it, feeling the smooth hard edges, even through the thick material of the EVA suit.
Please don’t let me be hallucinating. I thought to myself as I traced around the edges of the smooth metal, looking to find any sign of control panels or anything hinting at a way this might save my life.
Probably Just under a square meter of metal was exposed against the rock face, but it was obvious that there was more. The rock encroached around in an irregular border, as if built up over time. Space dust deposited layer on layer over what might have been centuries. If I was lucky, maybe I could chip away at it, and find the control Panel that wasn’t immediately accessible.
The good thing about being a salvage engineer is you tend to always have tools on you during an EVA operation. And I tended to work a bit old school, packing a few manual tools to go along with the laser cutters and other modern contrivances. I didn’t want to risk my suit’s remaining light by trying any power tools.
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I pulled a short pry bar out of the toolbelt around my waist and gave the rock around that metal an experimental whack.
I was lucky! It flaked away easily, revealing more of the strange brushed alloy underneath. So I set to work, clearing off as much of the rock as I could.
It was an exhausting 3 hours of work later that I found it: a small flickering panel set low to the ground, maybe 75cm high. Whoever built this place was either short as hell, or has some odd design conventions. I thought to myself as I examined the panel closely.
]WARNING, O2 RESERVES AS CRITICAL LEVELS. ESTIMATING 22 MINUTES TO DEPLETION[
“Fuck, the work musta been burning through The oxygen quicker than estimated.” I tapped experimentally at the flickering panel, which stabilized for a moment, displayed some alien symbols, then went back to flickering, “gonna have to hope I can crack this thing open quick!”
Not many salvaging jobs send you out after wrecks of unknown aliens races; the one I’d come here to help with being the exception. But it was one we hadn’t anticipated the need to get inside of, just rig for towing: it was completely dead.
This was different. Whatever was behind there still had a modicum of power, meaning there might be defenses. I also didn’t have any heavier equipment, like cutting lasers that would make short work of this…door? I wasn’t much of a hacker even when working with a language I knew, so I was gonna have to go after this a bit sideways.
I ran my fingers along the edges of the control panel, looking for a ridge or lip I could fit a screwdriver under to pry the panel off and access the circuitry behind. …There… Thankfully whoever these aliens were, they didn’t weld on their panels, not from the looks of it anyway.
A bit of careful jimmying with a screwdriver and the frame surrounding the panel popped off, revealing the bolt plate underneath.
Thankfully, one of the seemingly universal rules of manufacturing was there were only so many ways to drive a mechanical fastener. Of all the aliens humans had discovered since inventing the hyperspace tunnel drive, almost every one seemed to settle eventually onto using either the hex head, or the torx driver. I Guess it just turned out that they were the most efficient ways to apply torque to a fastener.
The issue was always the sizing: one could never tell what a newly discovered species would determine as their standard sizes for bits. This could, sometimes, cause some headaches, but usually you could make something work in a pinch if you weren’t worried about not damaging the fastener.
Luckily I always Kept my Unidriver(™) set on my person on jobs like this. And it had just the bit I needed.
]WARNING, O2 RESERVES AT CRITICAL. APPOX. 15 MINUTES TO DEPLETION[
I tuned the warning out and got the bolt plate off as quickly as I could, not even worrying about where the bolts went. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer to whatever God or goddess might be looking on, and carefully pulled on the bolt plate.
Optical cables. I just might have gotten lucky.
Remember I said I wasn’t much of a hacker? That didn’t mean I couldn’t utilize automated tools That were made for the job, and unless an interface had some kind of super heavy clearance security on it, most optically controlled door interfaces could be cracked open with another tool I always kept on hand on these kinds of jobs.
I pulled the small rectangular device known as a Optimaster out of my tool pouch, aĺong with its splicer cables. The cables were designed specifically to both sever and patch into the optical cables of a door control unit in order to not trigger any security protocols, but still inject signals. Technically, the optimaster was illegal in most systems in the League of Worlds, unless you were special ops, or had very special licensing.
Or you happened to come across one on a salvaging run, and decided to tuck it away for special use. My previous captains had turned a blind eye to my possessing it, because I only used it when necessary, and never for criminal purposes. Thankfully Barstol never did end up finding out about it, or his trial would have gone differently…
]WARNING! O2 RESERVES CRITICAL, ESTIMATING 6 MINUTES TO DEPLETION[
Damn, I must be reacting badly to the stress, I’m going space cadet, Concentrate Thomas!
Once the splicers were hooked on to what I hoped were the best combination of cables, I started its programs and waited. Six minutes was going to be close if the Optimaster had no database references to the coding or language used by these aliens.but I had nothing else I could do but split my attention between it’s countdown, and the rapidly diminishing O2 levels of my suit.
At around 4 Minutes in, the Optimaster’s screen Flashed a name. “Giobhioni”, indicating that it had managed to decode the system’s language against its database, and the process would kick into high gear from here. So these aliens aren’t unknown then, I thought, just not a species known widely to humans.
The light on the door panel stabilized again, and blinked through several interfaces.
]WARNING, O2 RESERVE DEPLETED. HYPOXIA IMMINENT.[
I closed my eyes again and tried to sow my breathing as much as I could. Every second was precious now, every moment giving more time for the process To Crack the door interface. It would really suck if I passed out and suffocated 2 seconds before the hatch cracked open.
I was fighting to stay conscious when the Optimaster Finally Flashed green, and a hatch in the alien alloy popped open. At first I didn’t even register it happened until my suit blamed out a warning about my. Blood oxygen being dangerously low, snapping me back into wakefulness Just enough to see the open hatch.
I crawled as fast as I could through that hatch, not even worrying about the optimaster: if I survived, I could retrieve it later. For now the only important thing was getting inside, and hoping to the Void that there was a breathable atmosphere.
What felt like an eternity later, I dragged my legs in through the hatch, and glanced around for a control pad to seal it again. But as I did, the message Flashed across my HUD ]ATMOSPHERE DETECTED! ANALYZING[
Oh good, I thought, at least there’s atmosphere…
And then I slipped into oblivion, it was starting to become a habit.
***
Sometime later, I woke up yet again in my EVA suit, having been dreaming of sizing drinks on a beach with a lovely Benastian woman I had met in college. I had one hell of a headache, and my HUD was showing its reserve O2 supply had been replenished, even if the scrubbers were still offline. My helmet was also being flooded with the smell of slightly stale, dusty air – the hard seal had been triggered by the VI in order to provide me with air.
Whatever this place was, it had saved my life. At least for the time being. I still had no way off this rock, no food, and no water, because while my suit was set up to recycle sweat and other things, it needed power to do it.
And this place doesn’t look promising on the power front.
The room I’d found myself in seemed to be an airlock of sorts. About 4 meters by 4 meters, and a somewhat low ceiling, maybe 1.5 meters. These Aliens must have been damned short, I thought to myself, considering the hatch size and the ceiling.
I really hope their corridors are just as low clearance, I thought to myself, or have any low hanging conduits. Searching through this place hunched over like a geriatric isn’t gonna be fun….
Pushing myself to my feet and making a quick mental note to look up my old Benastian classmate if I managed to get out of this pickle, I went to check the interior hatch of the airlock. I might not be about to asphyxiate any longer, but I still needed food, water, and a way back to civilization. Finding an abandoned alien installation hidden inside of a remote planetoid might be a once in a lifetime experience and all, but it meant nothing if I was still trapped here without food and water.
The interior door turned out to be easy to open, thankfully. Their systems seemed to be set up much like a lot of Terran systems, and as long as the outer hatch had a positive pressure lock, a simple button press to the right off the interior door triggered its opening.
What I saw beyond the airlock raised my hopes for survival.
The flickering emergency lighting was just enough to give me a sense of the sheer size of the room. Don’t ask me to estimate its size, because in that lighting, I wasn’t going to even attempt it, but I can tell you, it was huge. Big enough, certainly, that I’m fairly sure the entirety of The Gladstone would fit inside with room to spare. On the walls I could just barely make out what looked like gantry cranes and what had to be some of the largest robotic arms I’ve ever seen.
Was this some kind of construction facility maybe? Ship repair? Was all the rock outside just accumulated space debris, or camouflage to keep the place hidden?
Whatever the truth was, if I could figure out the systems in this place and get power restored, maybe I could set this place to building me a ship. I didn’t need anything big after all, just fast, and capable of opening a hyperspace tunnel, or whatever FTL method these aliens used. Hell, I thought, maybe I’ll get lucky and there’ll be a ship somewhere in here already mostly built…
Twenty four hours of investigating the facility later, the idea of getting lucky regarding a ship was looking less and less likely. “And so much for there not being any damned low hanging conduit!” I cursed out loud, hearing my voice echo in the empty corridors.
Navigating through the dimly lit facility, I’d bashed my head off of conduit no less than 13 times, tripped on collapsed equipment six, and barked my funny bone off weird nodules on the walls at least 4 times. It wouldn’t be so bad if the lights were at full power, but with half of them out, and the other half flickering, there were just too many obstacles hidden in shadows.
About the only real luck I’d had in those twenty four hours is finding what seemed to be a storage closet that was half filled with various kinds of packing material, neatly sorted into boxes for recycling. There was also enough floor space in the closet that I could use said packing material to build myself a nice little mattress and finally get something approaching a decent night’s sleep. If it hadn’t been for my stomach growling at me, it would have been glorious.
After another 48 hours, I was beginning to think this entire facility had been abandoned with no real resources left behind. I’d found no sign of former residents, just several more supply closets, tool lockers, one room that almost seemed to be a conference room, and corridor after corridor of locked doors.
I could have made an EVA out the airlock to fetch the Optimaster to try and crack those locks, but I hadn’t convinced myself to do so yet. I was not a tiny bit paranoid that if I went outside after it, I would be able to get back in for some reason. Alien tech could be strange that way. Just because the Optimaster decoded the lock, didn’t mean once it was disconnected, and the optical cables spliced back together, that the codes would continue to work. I was not desperate enough to attempt that yet. My suit still had enough power left to recycle fluids to keep my hydrated enough to keep going. I was just hungry as hell.
It wasn’t until the fifth day exploring the corridors that I finally located their cafeteria.
I swear, it felt like walking into a middle school cafeteria. The tables and benches were all sized for people much shorter than myself, maybe a bit over a meter tall, and there was lots of seating. Enough for hundreds of tiny asses to sit down for food.
But I didn’t bother thinking about where all those asses had disappeared to right at that moment. My priority was to see if there was any edible food left in the kitchen! If I didn’t get some food in me soon, I might just be tempted to eat my own hand or something.
What I found in the kitchen, however, was cabinet after cabinet of nothing, and computerized alcoves with flickering screens attempting to display some sort of menu. “Fuck, did they even pack up every scrap of food when they left?” This whole deal so far seemed to be a series of dashed hopes of survival. I was getting entirely too frustrated with the entire thing. “Took everything with them but the bubble wrap? Some salvager in the future is gonna find this place with just my skeleton. I can only hope it’ll confuse the crap out of them!”
In rage and frustration, I lashed out and kicked at one of the few remaining cabinets I hadn’t checked yet. The door to the cabinet broke off its hinges and careened across the floor, As it did, what looked like dozens of mylar wrapped packages tumbled out of the cabinet.
Do you have any idea how hard it was for me at that moment, seeing dozens of what looked like some sort of ration packets piled on the floor, not to just take a dozen of them open and stuff them down my cakehole like a 5 year old at a birthday party? I’d been without solid food at that point for almost a week, without any food for at least two of them. But I’d taken the survival training, I knew how much of a bad idea that was for two reasons: a) wolfing down food after not eating anything solid for a week was never good, and b) this was an alien foodstuff, I had absolutely no idea if it was even safe for me to eat or not.
So chanting to myself, test it before you eat it, over and over again, I slowly lowered myself to sit on the floor and grabbed one of the packets.
One good thing about your average EVA suit in the salvaging business – hell, in most businesses – was that they planned for emergency contingencies. They were designed not just for your everyday extravehicular activity to salvage or do maintenance on spacecraft, but also for inclusion in escape pods and crash landings on alien planets. If you found yourself in such a situation, you needed to be able to test the local flora and fauna to see if it was safe for consumption. To that end, they came standard with a small chemical analyzer. All I needed to do was place a small sample into the food port, and 10 minutes later it’d tell me if it was safe to eat.
Those 10 minutes ranked right up there with some of the hardest minutes I’ve ever had to wait through in my entire life, even when you factor in the smell of the stuff that was inside of those packets.
When I’d cracked that first packet open, the smell that hit me was the exact opposite of what I’d call appetizing. I mean, ration packets were never all that appetizing in my experience, unless you were one of those Jarheads in the Commonwealth Fleet that talked about them like they were ambrosia. No, this stuff smelled like year old sweat socks that had been steeped in fermented squid ink or something.
Like I said though, even with that smell, I still eyed the rest of that first packet and debated with myself on the merits of just saying fuck it and starting in it. If it wasn’t edible, I was likely to starve to death soon anyway, right?
Finally, the analyzer alert sounded off. ]ANALYSIS COMPLETE. SUBSTANCE TOXICITY WITHIN SAFE PARAMETERS FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. CALORIC CONTENT: HIGH. CARBOHYDRATE CONTENT: HIGH. RECOMMEND CAUTION IN PORTION CONTROL.[
The report hadn’t even completed before I had the first bite of the ration in my mouth and down my throat. I had taken just a small morsel, conscious of the possibility of it coming right back up again, and swallowed it quickly, worried the smell would be indicative of its taste.
It was, in fact, very indicative.
“GAH!!!” I yelled, after I forced the bite down my throat, my face wanting to implode from the taste. “It tastes like anchovies….and PEUCE! Why am I tasting colors!”