Distress
The alarms sounded. André woke form his slumber soundlessly, and began to prepare for his work. The alarm he had heard before, in-fact, the alarm was on most of the time the ship was undocked. André wished sourly that he could disable the ship-wide klaxon.
André was one of the few crewmen aboard a capsuleer vessel, ironically dubbed the “Impending Failure.” The ship, a Raven, was jury-rigged to have exceptionally strong armor, and relied on armor-repairing nanites streamed to it from other nearby ships to maintain its integrity. The klaxon was the shield failure warning.
André had grown accustomed to the warning, at first it had startled him, the shields were the first line of defense, but the capsuleer obviously didn’t care if they were gone, he had faith in his allies and his armor, so André would have to as well. André’s roll aboard the ship was minor, as most of the vessel’s systems were automated or directly controlled by the capsuleer’s mind through his neural link to the ship. His job, the same as the other skeleton crewman, was cargo management and emergency damage control. The ship was massive, nearly a small city, but housed only a few dozen personnel, and the ghostly autonomy of the ship sometimes disturbed André when he was still half-asleep. Emergency force-fields would flicker to life around damage components or overloaded parts as nanite paste was injected automatically by the ship to repair the damaged area. The capsuleer never spared him or the other crewman a thought and André knew it. He was extraneous, a loose end for things that could not easily be automated. The capsuleer didn’t even personally hire André or the crew; their contracts were bought with the ship by CONCORD rule, probably to keep a market for starship technicians alive.
The repetitive sound of impacts on the hull, unhampered by shields, reminded André of his terrestrial childhood. The planet had frequent, violent hurricanes and thunderstorms, precipitated by its large oceans and closeness to the system’s sun. One of André’s most repeated memories would be looking out of the window of his room at the middle of the night, and looking up towards the sky though heavy rainfall and a boiling, cloudy sky. Those clouds had been his thoughts, and that rain had been his salvation, a cleansing release from turbulent ideas. He had lived in a small temperate colony situated on the fringes of Lonetrek, where he and his parents had eked out a simple living by farming terrestrial good and exporting them out to nearby stations, where apparently even the most mundane planetary objects were able to be sold for a high profit.
As a teen, André had grown tired of his repetitive life. He woke up, prepared for work, worked, ate a meal, watched holoreels, and then went to sleep. Every day he had gone through this cycle from his early teens until the day he left, with little deviation. André had looked to the stars and seen a future for him, where every day was different, where repetition was impossible, where you couldn’t find a pattern in the endless cosmos. His parents tried to curb this enthusiasm with work and a tireless education, but even with his two pillars grounding him, his parents couldn’t keep his head out of the stars.
Secretly, in his few hours of free time each day, he would slip into his father’s office and use the computer interface to browse the entire database’s knowledge on starships. Their design, their function, their appearance. Before he could conceptualize how he could make a living in space, André was fully capable of articulating the scientific concepts behind warp drives and stargates, and the detailed operation parameters of shields and armor. He knowledgeable in the maintenance of starships, and could repair a shield relay after an overload in 30 seconds, flat. All this, he learned in secret, he thought, over the course of 8 years.
At age 19, he formulated a plan to get off the rock he called a home and begin a new life amongst the stars. He planned to sneak aboard one of the cargo transports, make use of a neural stimulant he had developed to numb his senses so he could retain consciousness during the warp to the nearby station, then stealthily disembark on the station, and plead with the administrators for a job as a janitor while he looked for a place who would hire someone without a diploma as a mechanical or technical engineer aboard a starship. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was all he could manage with his few connections and skills.
The evening André had chosen to enact this plan had been an exceptionally stormy one. Cracks of thunder created a tempo to which he moved though the torrent, while the periodic bursts of lightning illuminated his path with sudden clarity. As he approached the spaceport, André could hear the rain beating against the sides, trying with all its might to break through the prefabricated structure. The wind blew the rain around with ferocious speed; André did not notice the stinging impacts on his skin due to the stimulant he swallowed prior to leaving for the spaceport. Now was the time to begin, the time to start anew for André. The cacophony of the outdoors abruptly ceased at the boundary into the spaceport. He stepped through the boundary of the spaceport and slunk past the sleeping guard. His role had only been to greet new arrivals and had been for years; actually screening cargo had become autonomous years ago. The order of the port amused André, everything arranged neatly, ready to launch immediately when the need arises. The nearest transport was small, barely large enough for the cockpit and a room of goods, and was filled with unlabeled crates. These crates, he knew, were filled with canisters of organic compounds to be sold at the station. André entered the cargo bay of the shuttle and waited. The cargo would have already been screened since it was already loaded, he would not be noticed until he disembarked at the station. He waited, calmly, for the 2100 flight out to leave. By 2110 it had not left. The lights inside the cargo bay went out. A mechanically soothing voice came over the loudspeaker in the spaceport, barely audible through the ship’s thick hull,
“Attention all personnel, due to inclement weather, all launches for the 2100 flight have been delayed until the 0900 flight. We apologize for the inconvenience the may have caused any clients.”
André decided he could not wait inside the dark casket of a freighter for twelve hours. At that time, surely, his parents would notice his absence and come looking for him. His hearth throbbed. The stimulant was beginning to wear off. He would have to return to his prefab unit home. He quietly left the freighter and slipped past the still asleep guard. He wondered how he could have slept through the loudspeaker announcement for a moment, but then decided it didn’t matter. As he crossed the threshold of the building and walked back outside, he looked to the sky and its unbidden might as it poured gallons of water over the vast expanse of terrain around him. He whispered to no-one “soon…” and sighed. He walked slowly back towards his home, feeling every drop of rain as it made contact with his clothes and flesh, and wincing at the constant sting. The stimulant had worn off. He had numbed himself for his escape, expecting at this time to be sitting in an office at a station millions of kilometers from this place, not walking back towards that which he had hoped to escape. His emotions returned like breakers crashing back down to the ocean’s surface.
Why did this damned planet want to keep him here? Why wouldn’t his parents let him leave? What was so wrong about wanting to explore the vast expanses above? What was WRONG with this place?
When his prefabricated habitation unit came into view he froze. It was on fire. It was shattered like a fragile piece of glass, with debris strewn about the ground all around it. A huge communications tower was standing in the center of the rubble of the unit he had once called home.
André did not know it at the time, but this was the beginning of a revolution for planet side production. CONCORD had lifted restrictions on capsuleer interactions with planets, and they had immediately begun to extract resources from planets by their own means with ruthless efficiency. This change had made his parents redundant, they would not have a chance to compete with the automatic, highly efficient, ordered production.
Extraction units fell from the sky in the distance, impacting the terrain and marring the landscape, rapidly linking up to one another by pipes and cables manufactured by nano-factories and nanites inside construction blocks housed in the extractors at speeds that André couldn’t begin to comprehend. The machines didn’t care about the inclement weather. They marched on endlessly to the rapid pace of electricity. André stood there, amazed at the creation taking place before his eyes. Then he ran towards the debris and began searching, his face contorting into a pained expression of grief and worry.
Though he had been willing to leave only moments ago, André longed to see his parents’ faces, and hear their voices. He had to know that they were there. He had to know that they were okay. A flash of lightning illuminated the rubble and revealed to him a horrible truth. His mother lay underneath a collapsed wall, impaled in the chest in multiple places by high-strength support beams used in the construction of the prefabricated home unit, likely ripped away and thrown out by the command center’s crash into the unit. His mother was definitely dead. He began to sob lightly, but intensified his search. His mother may be dead, but his father could still be alive, lying under a piece of debris. Another flash of lightning brightened the area. He saw his father ten meters away, pinned to the ground by a chunk of rubble with a metal rod protruding from his shoulder. André ran over.
“Father!” exclaimed André. His father coughed up blood and sputtered.
He labored, “My son, there is nothing here for you now. I wish I had only seen it coming… I endorse your endeavor…” André held his hand and sat there, sobbing over him, until André’s father had completely faded from existence.
His resolve firm, André had taken a shuttle to the station with the last of his parent’s assets, not having to sneak or slink, stealth no longer necessary now that he was his own man, liberated by forces beyond his control. CONCORD, embarrassed by the incident that had killed his parents, paid for his diploma, and within a year he had a job aboard a starship. It was not as glorious as he had thought. There were new places, always stations, and there was traveling, but he still had no control. No control of any of it. He had never had any control. First controlled by his parents, then shuttled about by CONCORD, and finally by an unfeeling capsuleer. Each liberation was just another capture, another person controlling him.
Back aboard the “Impending Failure,” André walked listlessly around the halls of the ship, observing its autonomy, noting any discrepancies in a notebook so that they may be repaired the next time the ship docked. The ship hadn’t docked in a long time actually, months, and being employed on it was beginning to feel like a jail sentence. A rarer klaxon sounded, a bit louder, a bit lower in pitch, lasting a bit longer per beat. His walk fell into step with the new klaxon, it was for low armor integrity, this alarm happened infrequently, but he had ceased worrying about it. The ship’s hull had never been breached before; the capsuleer’s comrades were obviously adept at whatever it was they were doing. Minutes later another alarm began to sound, even deeper and louder ad longer in duration, its scream more urgent than the others. André instantly recognized this klaxon. This klaxon he had heard in his training. This klaxon was serious. This klaxon meant impending death. This klaxon meant that hull integrity was dropping. The same soothing, mechanical voice he remembered from that day in the spaceport came onto the ship’s loudspeaker.
“Attention all personnel, hull failure is imminent. All personnel report to emergency escape pods for evacuation.” And repeated, over and over, cycling. He ran to the nearest escape pod, it only a few doors away, and slid into it. He had piloted one in training exorcises, but had never needed to use one before. He sealed the door behind him and waited for the inevitable explosion, expelling him and any other crew fortunate enough to get to an escape pod in time from the ruined starship.
When the pod’s systems came online, he learned more about his surroundings than anybody other than the capsuleer aboard the Raven had known before. He was nowhere. He was surrounded by unknown, oddly formed ships. The system they were in had no stargates. It had 7 planets and a red giant sun. Two of the planets were habitable. He had not learned any contingency plans for this. Nobody had informed him that there may not be a way out. The capsuleer could just commit suicide and instantly be reborn, back safely in a station, ready to start over. But him... André was distressed for a moment. He did not know what to do. Then he remembered his parents, his childhood, and set destination for an open field on the closer of the two terrestrial planets.
He could eke out a living here, out of the loop, and he could do it with nobody controlling him but himself.
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Topic: [Fiction Contest] Distress (Read 894 times)