Chapter 1: Wrecked

Wrecked

Jake:

Swimming up from the fog of stasis, my ears are assaulted with the sound of alarms. Opening my eyes I see that the cover to my suspension tube is open, there’s smoke in the circulating air and brief flashes of sparking circuits. Only the end of the trip or a major emergency would cause my tube to open, and it looks like the latter has happened.

I gingerly step out of the tube, remembering that being in Pod One means that spin-gravity is less than a third of standard. Then I notice the tubes across the narrow walkway, they’re all damaged to some extent and everyone in them is obviously dead. Slashed bodies, missing limbs and one is even missing their head. Swallowing hard I turn to look at my sister and parents ... to find that they too are all dead.

Glancing at my own tube I realize that I was lucky. The tube hadn’t opened for me, the cover was shattered by something, but all the debris missed me somehow. I might be the only one still alive in the Pod. Emergency Procedures drilled into us until they were habit, I grab my gear from the compartment at the base of my tube, put one arm in the suit for body contact and stick my face into the mask section. The HUD lights up, the AI Idiot runs a diagnostic on my skinsuit and I breath a sigh of relief when it comes back as undamaged and at full capacity. I also notice that my biometrics show a near panic level, elevated blood pressure, heart rate and respiration ... totally normal considering.

Ancient astronauts of the twentieth through twenty-second centuries would kill to have suits like these. Advances in nano-fibers like graphene, phosphorene, boronitrene and others allow suits with the same life-support capabilities and protection from micro-meteors as the old bulky suits but be much lighter and less restrictive. A person in a skinsuit is less encumbered than an old underwater explorer in a wet-suit. We have full mobility and the storage vacuole in the small of the back gives us twelve hours of oxygen and power ... Replace the vacuole twice daily, and you can live in a skinsuit for weeks if needed as water is recycled, the vacuoles in the thighs contain a concentrated nutrition syrup and the solid waste ... if any ... is just ejected when convenient. The power-cell in the mask is good for a couple weeks by itself, all it runs is the AI.

I pull the suit up my legs, make the one plumbing connection, then get my arms into the sleeves, front opening is mag-sealed and I’m pretty much set. Boots are integrated and the gloves are already on, so all I’d have to do is pull up my hood, slap on the mag-sealed mask and I could take a walk outside. Mask hangs from my right hip for now, and I remove the gloves as I might need more sensitivity in my hands if there are injured to help.

Then I begin looking around. We’re at the aft end of the pod and part of me just wants to cycle through the airlock into the aft strut, go down to the habitat ring, crawl into a sleep pod and wish this all away. That’s not how my parents raised me though, so while my stomach churns at the thought, I know I have to check for other survivors. It’s only thirty meters to the forward end, but it seems like thirty kilometers, especially since I have to walk carefully ... this close to the core, the spin gravity in the pod is just under a third Earth normal.

I slowly make my way along the walkway between the two rows of pods, still unnerved by all the dead, until I hear some whimpering. Almost to the forward end of the pod is a girl clutching at her right arm. There’s blood splattered, but the girl still in her tube is trying to hold back further bleeding. I grab the nearest med-kit from the back wall, curse when it falls apart and find an intact one halfway back up the bay and move in between her tube and the next one.