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There and Back Again...An (Ten Year) Opifex Tale..

Started by Siirine, Nov 08, 2014, 21:15

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Siirine

Most of your brain shuts down in cryosleep. All but the primitive side...the animal side.
No wonder I'm still awake.
Transporting with civilians...Sounded like a good idea at the time.
Heard a Solitus voice. Smooth as silk.
Some hoodoo holy man. Probably on his way to New Mega.
But what route? What route would get me as far away as possible?
Smelled an Atrox.
Sweat, boots, tool belt, leather. Prospector type.
Free settlers.
And the new guy driving this heap is only taken the back roads...
...only this time they picked a ghost lane for auto-piloting.
A long time between stops. A long time for something to go wrong.


-----------------------
( To be continued...)

Siirine

PHFUT-PHFUT-PHFUT-PHFUT!
Unknown particles bore through the cabin, blasting open the Captain's chest, shattering cryo-lock doors. Alarms and flashing lights fill the compartment. More particles puncture the hull, hitting navigational instruments on the opposite wall and leaving contrails.
A loud hissing fills the cryo-chamber as the door pops open and the seat ejects its passenger.
Shana lands on her ass, horrified by the bloody scene around her. Suddenly...more particles rip through the hull.
Another Cryo-locker blows open. A body falls right on top of Shana --
   but this one's still alive. Disoriented, panicked: its the new guy...
Shana roughly shoves him off and jumps up running for the deck of the main cabin. She surveys the traveling compartments for body count:
Four crew members, their lockers in a forward section, countless more in back. But the deck of the ship is canted at a sick angle and alarms SCREAM everywhere--
     The world is dying around her.
----------------
(to be continued..)

Siirine

"Why did we fall?" shouts the new guy from the back navigational seat, he's checking screens and dropped into his recently completed flight school training.

Ignoring him Shana grabs a warm-up suit out of storage and straps into the Captains chair, putting a headset on, she starts checking her screens. She wasn't trained in flying this particular ship and makes a few mental errors but recovers and back tracks for the correct key combinations.

"Shut the hell up and help me level this beast out!" Shana yells before violently kicking a switch with her foot, which doesn't budge despite the hard kick.

The new guy, Chadwick, ignores Shana this time and continues.

"Stats say we're twenty six weeks out, so gravity wasn't suppose to kick in for another twelve. One thousand four hundred twenty seven millibars, dropping twenty millibars per minute...

"Shit! We're hemorrhaging air! Somethin' took a swipe at us!" Chadwick shouts through the comm over continued alarms and mechanical sounds.

Shana starts hammering various buttons and switches, momentarily unsure of their fate.

Chadwick continues like an obediently trained reet..

"This is an emergency from merchant vessel Rusty Cod...

we're in route to The Xauker system..

..with commercial passengers on board. We've been knocked out of our shipping lane

and entering a moon or planetary like body in the following postion.." A series of clicks and robotic sounds crackle through as response to Chadwick's message.

"Comms are out to main base...rate of descent is unknown..." his voice trails off the radio as panic sets in, he jumps up from his chair and runs over to Shana shoving her hands and entering the correct key codes.

Activating an exterior view, they finally understood.

A planet rushes up to meet them. The ship plummets through the upper atmosphere,  communication antenna already disintegrated. Shana tightens her harness tighter in the seat and gives the same lever a much harder kick this time. Four crash shutters jolt on release with the kick, but only three release correctly, the fourth disintegrates in the vicious atmospheric plummet. Cloud strata sweeps up past the windshield like floor lights on a dropped elevator.

"That's why we have gravity and We're shedding to much altitude.."  Shana says as she activates more emergency buttons and switches. "The center of gravity is off, there's no way to level it out in time..." she yells at Chadwick who quickly returns to his seat and straps back in.

"Emergency Auto pilot selected Number Eight of this system because it shows atleast some oxygen...

...and more then one thousand five hundred millibars of pressure at surface level. Okay!! So maybe this heap of shit done something right for a change!" Chadwick shouts over the glaring alarms.

Shana slams her hand down on a button that silences the alarms but doesn't kill the rotating emergency lights. Multiple sheets of metal peel off the hull blowing away nonessential parts that hinder aerodynamics, including deep space drives. The last metallic separation sends the Rusty Cod into a dangerous roll.

Out the windshield of the vessel, cloud strata whirls with the spiral descent. Smaller, more minuscule airbrakes decide to deploy, letting Shana control the roll, but the ship is still spinning out of control.

Chadwick reports on the planetary readings:

"I show no major water bodies...maximum terrain, two hundred meters over the mean surface..

Largely cinder and rock with some vapourice notum deposits."

Breaking through the cloud strata theres a momentary glimpse of landscape before one of the smaller airbrakes fail, shearing off violently and pinwheeling into the windshield.
The windshield holds but shatters into tiny pieces. Sunlight flares from every fractured edge, like looking into a million burning diamonds.

Now Shana has to rely on Chadwick... and a ground mapping display..

His voice pipes through the comm on queue,

"One hundred twenty meters altitude. And dropping. Ground map- Sixty meters..."

A dark mass rises up into view, Land.

"Forty meters...Thirty....Twenty....Ten..." After ten Chadwick's voice stops reporting through the comm.

There is a tortured silence on the com link, as Shana braces herself. Behind her in the passenger cabin, over one hundred passengers are caught in cryosleep, blissful expressions on their faces, no idea of the devastation around them. Among them, an Omni-Tek high profile guru in his prime-of-life, badge on display proudly adorning his chest. The silence was only brief...

The ship slams into the unknown planet. The windshield blows inward with the impact, sending air hurricaning into the cabin. Chairs rip from their mooring on impact, including Chadwick's, which slams into the ceiling and smashes his body like a ragdoll. A huge section of the ship tears off and skitters, crashing along the planetfloor behind Shana, disintergrating out of sight. One hundred or more cryo-lockers vanish with it. One hundred lives lost.

Hammered by wind Shana risks opening her eyes experimentally and regrets doing so...an extreme heat penetrates her corneas, over stimulating them and searing her vision. The nose of the ship burrows deeper into the ground with the impact, a vortex of motion, speed, and of blurring debris.

Shana pivots her chair one hundred and eighty degrees and puts her arms up over her knees in the chair, resting her head on her knees, she laughs.

Dirt avalanches into the cockpit and buries the cabin...
--------------------------------------
( to be continued...)

Tussa

Jenae "Tussa" Godfray
President of Assembly
Meta-Physicist, Mindshifter and Redhead

Siirine

Darkness. It seemed easy to slip into. Comfortable almost.

Yellow dusty air settles on the wreakage, several small fires burn in areas where the ship had separated. The huge smoldering scar in the ground behind the ship is confirmation enough, there would be no survivors. Tiffany lamps, chairs, clothes and other various belongings that someone once held dear, litter the scar adding more carnage to the wreckage.

She had managed to land the remnants of the ship in a valley. Lucky for her.

The valley floor was littered with sand dunes, that were spiked with earthen spires. To either side, mountainous terrain mimics veins crawling through the dunes. Giving very little shelter from the multiple scorching suns--one red , one yellow and a third, sapphire blue.
~~~~

The light beam swept the dusty air of the cockpit, it's packed with dirt. Registering no life forms the android turned to search elsewhere, but then, pinged with recognition of a low heart rate, somewhere in the pile.

The droid crawled into the pile, following the low sound, and found her buried to the gills, breathing but barely alive.  Having lost it's beaurocat companion in the ship separation the droid was lost, it was drawn to the closest life form here. Shana. It began to dig her out.



------------------------------------------
{continued}

Siirine

"Don't know how many times I've been crossed off the list and left for dead. Suppose the first time it happens is the day you were born...next, Omni bastards..then eventually bounty dogs...

So this was nothing new...Whole damn universe wanted a piece of me.

There's really bad days, then there's LEGENDARY bad days.. This was shaping up to be one of those days.

Somewhere along the way I got sloppy. Dulled my own edge and wentn' done the worst thing possible.

I got civilized...

So now we zero the clock, just me and this no name world. I gotta find that primative side again...

Because theres a whole 'nother world over there I need. Water, grass, the coppertone smell of Omni blood on the skin..

Just have one thing in my way...."

Shana faded in and out of consciousness for days from fevered dreams that ravaged her mind, while the Android continued to provide first aid.

~~Dream fades into view~~

She picked up the scent about an hour ago as she was heading home through the woods. Food and a warm bath could wait, this was far more important. The scent was faint, but carried on the wind; it was a smell of mint and grassland. A smell of windswept plains, the smell of mint. It didn't belong in the forests of West Athens.

A Nanomage was here. She was intrigued. They rarely ventured into West athens forest unless part of a raiding party or involved with the Clan's deforestation activities.

She found him at the shore of the lake, alone. Observing him from the shadows, her mind tried to digest what she saw. He was alone, downwind of West Athens, easily giving his scent away to anybody with a sense of smell. He was also unarmed, aside from his fishing pole only a bedroll and knapsack were in his possession. He was humming a happy tune as he watched the reets playing in the bushes ahead, oblivious to her presence.

Watching him a while longer she gathered that he was young, perhaps 30 or 40 seasons old, his body fully developed into the mass of muscle and pale skin complexion that was his breed. He was a little leaner when compared to the Nanomage breed she had encountered before. She also gathered that he was inexperienced and naïve in the ways of combat, his senses dull, his mind unprepared as he watched the bobber float on the surface of the calm water, still oblivious. She smiled to herself as an idea came to her.

Silently she crept up on him, her body moving in fluid motion as he continued humming to himself. She stopped inches away and inhaled the intoxicating smell of mint, her head spun with the scent of grasslands, the smell taking her thousands of miles from here to another place entirely. She smiled evilly and pounced.

Grabbing him around the midsection she hugged him tightly. He bellowed in surprise and fear as her hug found purchase in the meat of his soul. He dropped the fishing pole and accidently called forth his meatball manifestation from fear, he spun around looking for the source of his surprise, and found the love of his life. Laughing to himself at his complete lack of common close combat knowledge, she had practically walked right up on him, he pulled her back into a loving embrace.

~~Dream fades away~~

Slowly consciousness returned to Shana, her mind foggy, unable to focus at first. The world appeared slowly to her new eyesight, startling with surprise, she found herself staring up at an Androids' face looking intently down at her.


(Continued..)