AN: Up to 20 Advanced Chapters on my Patreon
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Crimson_Reapr
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Mark lay there, limbs heavy with pain, and with survivor's guilt eating him alive for getting his crew killed and somehow surviving the whole ordeal. There was also some underlying confusion on whether he was the man whose memories he had borne witness to or just the man from Earth who had taken over his body.
He didn't even know if he should be pissed with the fact that someone had betrayed him, leading to his current situation. The dying hum of the Perseverance's ruined systems and her damaged reactor were the only sounds now. They were punctuated by the occasional spark, the low groan of warped metal, and Mark's own labored breathing.
His mouth was dry. His left arm screamed in pain every time his chest rose to breathe, but it was somehow manageable. His suit was partly torn in place, and his skin was exposed, along with some dried blood from cuts and slashes he had suffered. He wasn't sure if he got them during the crash or during the firefight, not that it mattered, since there wasn't much he could do about the condition of his EVA suit. Or so he thought.
He remembered that when he had initially woken up, the system had given him a bunch of rewards from a welcome package before it decided to call it quits without turning in its two-week notice.
System Inventory: Active
He blinked. That one line of text. That lone lifeline. It pulsed faintly in the back of his vision.
"Okay, okay," Mark muttered, forcing himself to sit up slowly. "Let's see just what miracles you've got left for me, broken cheat-code bastard."
A thought was all it took for his system inventory to appear before him:
INVENTORY
MRE x30, K-972 Energy Pistol x1, Pistol Magazine x5, K-272 Energy Rifle x1, Rifle Magazine x3, Solar Charged Cargo Rover x1, Ever-Shifting Uniform x1
The last item was what he was thinking of. He focused his mind on it, and a list of details expanded.
Ever-Shifting Naval Uniform
Status: Compressed Form (Pendant)Activation Method: Thought-Based CommandSuit Capabilities: EVA-grade vacuum protection, smart-fabric environmental regulation, nano-reactive plating, Class 4 kinetic resistance, modular data-link port integration.
Warning: Do not activate with a fractured or broken limb.
He blinked at the final line. "Well, I don't think I have much of a choice on the matter now, do I?"
He thought about selecting the pendant and felt a slight weight around his neck. His eyes drifted down to his own chest, and there, nestled against the standard-issue jumpsuit's collar, was a small pendant, matte-black in color with a soft red glow humming from the center. It was a stylized atom with multiple rings around it.
Mark stared at it for a second, stunned in silence at how it materialized on his person, and how he barely noticed it.
"Now, how do I get this thing working? Activate suit?" he said out loud, yet nothing happened.
"Suit up? Transform? Armor on? Go go gadget armor? Space warfare forever? Space racism? Human Supremacy? Dress blues on?"
He tried a few more catchphrases and activation commands, yet nothing happened.
He squinted, annoyed at his failure to activate the uniform. "Damn thing's voice-locked or something.... oh wait.... I'm such an idiot."
Realization finally dawned on him.
'The uniform wasn't voice-activated; it was thought-activated. But how the hell does it do that? Wouldn't a voice command be what I'm thinking?' He thought to himself.
He closed his eyes and pictured himself in a full EVA suit. He imagined the need for a tight vacuum seal, radiation shielding, flex joints, a HUD overlay on his helmet, pressure support, and a life support system.
Once the image had solidified in his mind, the pendant hanging around his neck pulsed once. A faint light shone from it before it started moving.
Liquid-black nanofibers rippled outward from the pendant, crawling up his neck, streaming across his shoulders, down his arms and legs, forming in waves of layers. First was the underweave, then reactive plates, then outer armor, each layer tearing apart his ruined jumpsuit as it advanced. His boots disassembled at the heel, the new ones coalescing from the knee down in a smooth flourish.
A sheen of blood-red highlights laced the armor's edges as the transformation finished with a hiss around his throat and jaw, sealing him in an airtight helmet with a crimson-tinted visor. HUD elements flickered to life inside it, displaying oxygen levels, muscle strain warnings, and internal nanite stabilizers for his arm.
Mark exhaled slowly, feeling like his body had just been dipped into ice, then fire, as his left arm ached. But the adrenaline shooting through him had started to take on its effect and was slowly diminishing the pain.
"Okay," he said aloud. "I gotta hand it to the system, didn't skimp out on anything. Bet this has some hand blasters or something."
Mark raised his right arm like one of the superheroes in his memories, a certain tin can man with quite the character growth. He remained in that stance for a few seconds before putting his arm down.
"Ok," he sighed, "maybe it doesn't have all the bells and whistles I thought it would have."
He felt his left arm start to grow numb as a small message appeared on the corner of his visor HUD:
Nanite Recouperation Stimulant (NRS) dispersed.
NRS remaining: 2
Shortly after the message, he could feel the area around his left arm become stiff. His suit automated a sort of splint around the fracture that was located at his upper arm, just before his arm met his shoulder joint.
While this was all happening, the helmet's visor had adjusted to the current low-light setting, allowing Mark to see wreckage around him. "And you're telling me this is just some uniform able to do all of this? Well, shit, color me surprised."
Mark swept his eyes across the mess of a bridge before they landed on the mangled corpse of the woman he had seen for a split second during their tumble from outer space into the atmosphere of this planet. Thanks to his memory assimilation, he recognized who she was. Makaila Savnt, his second in command.
A shiver ran up his spine as he stared at her split and mangled corpse, and before he could even process what he had seen, his suit's helmet rapidly retreated just in time to allow a second torrent of vomit to shoot from his mouth. He continued to do so until all he could do was gag and dry heave, his stomach completely depleted of its contents.
He turned from the sight, finally snapping from his stupor, and opened up his system inventory, his mind in dire need of a distraction.
"Thirty MREs," he murmured. "No water. For all I know, I'm all alone on an alien planet, and if that panel on the wall is correct, this planet's oxygen content is a quarter of that needed for human life... "
He let out a heavy sigh before he continued talking to himself. "I highly doubt the fact that I may have been the only survivor of all the other ships that crashed into this planet. I think I saw the destroyer that the Arclight crippled making its way down with us, but I doubt some torpedoes to a ship's engines would be enough to send them down here to keep me company. And I'm on a planet that seemed to be of interest to the Coalition... This is shaping out to be quite the dream, yep, definitely what I envisioned when I thought of travelling the stars."
He glanced at the K-972 pistol and its ammo in his inventory. With a thought, it materialized in his holster. The sleek, matte, military-grade pistol had a familiar yet foreign feel to it that felt oddly comforting in a way a weapon should never be. Mark's gaze slowly shifted over to the K-272 Rifle and its ammunition, taking his time to think over his future actions.
After some time of deliberation, he decided against equipping it. If his memories served him right, the Keffler, or K-Series energy rifles, all packed quite a punch. He wouldn't be able to control the recoil or aim effectively at a possible threat in his current state.
Mark took one last glance around the destroyed bridge of the ship, a ship he had once called his own, with the conflicting emotions of two lives welling up inside him. "Well, girl, I guess we couldn't houdini our way out of this one," he said, a heavy sigh escaping his lips. He turned to look at the corpses of various of his crew members that were strewn about the bridge, all in different positions and with varying degrees of deformation and varying percentages of anything left to call a "body."
These had all been people he had once joked with, argued with, lived with, trusted, and ultimately lost. He didn't give them a grand farewell or shaky salute, instead opting for a low and sorrowful phrase of regret, "Yeah... I guess we really fucked up this time."
And with that, he turned and left the bridge, trudging along the ceiling of the ship, his boots clunking against warped plating. The Perseverance, or what was left of it, was on its back like a beached whale. Systems, screens, and lights hissed all around him, some flickering with defiance, as if refusing to let the Perseverance die just yet. However, it was to no avail as they slowly faded and flickered out of existence.
Mark's HUD displayed a stark, blinking timer.
O₂: 23h 54m
His suit could give him enough oxygen to breathe for the next 24 hours before going into a cooldown of about 4 hours to generate more breathable oxygen. That was more than enough time to hope for a miracle to find a way to get off the planet or to either die slowly, and Mark had already died once in the past 24 hours.
He walked on the upside-down ship, throughout what was once a corridor, now nothing more than twisted metal that had somehow held together even during the ship's crash. There were also the occasional support beams jutting out into the corridor, and the sparking conduit he would have to step around every now and then.
As he was walking, he slipped on a patch of liquid and caught himself with a pained grunt. His arm that had numbed was jerked awake as a shock of pain carried throughout the left side of his body like lightning. Mark gave a pained groan as he straightened his body, forcing himself to ignore the quickly fleeting pain and continuing to walk.
After a while of taking wrong turns here and there, getting lost, crawling through tight spaces, and almost falling a few more times, Mark reached one of the escape hatches. He tapped on the door's control panel, but it didn't even flicker, clearly dead just like everything else aboard the Perseverance.
With a sigh of dejection, Mark planted his boots firmly as he forced his good hand into the emergency override lever, gritting his teeth as he pulled, but it didn't budge. He screamed as he pulled, but nothing changed. He continued to pull away at the emergency handle, but the door refused to budge. His shoulder flared white-hot with pain, and his visor slowly fogged as he kept at it with all the strength he could muster. Mark was about to give up on leaving through here after having spent minutes trying without any success. But he decided to try one last time, and on this one, he gave it his all.
He pulled at the handle with every bit of strength in his body, trembling as his body screamed in refusal. And when he was just about to stop pulling, the handle moved, just a tiny bit, before fully giving way, causing Mark to fall back and land hard against the tilted bulkhead, a piece of the release in his hand.
He heaved in pain, his arm killing him as he managed to land on it. The door had cracked open and slowly slid about a foot and a half before getting caught on its own bent frame.
Mark tried pushing it with his good arm before noticing that the door wouldn't budge any further. He sighed, and although annoying, it didn't matter to him since there was just enough space for him to fit through. Instead, he opted to look out into the landscape of the new world outside, the visage managing to steal his breath away for a split second.
Before him lay red, a sea of red. An ever-stretching horizon of desolation lay outside as a scarlet desert adorned the planet's surface, dunes curling under a bloody sky, the sun burning low.
But that wasn't what had managed to take his breath away, no. What had done it was what lay on the sand.
Stretching for miles on end lay the destroyed forms of once mighty ships. Coalition ships were strewn across the landscape like shattered toys. Frigates cracked open at the spine, their engine reactors long dead. A corvette's prow jutted from a crater. Some wrecks still smoked while others had been there for so long that they were almost completely covered in sand.
There had been some merit to his assigned task, as it was clear that this planet wasn't some mere outpost set up by the VIC to interrupt trade routes. No, before him lay a graveyard of ships, both old and new. Some experimental, others so old that Mark believed them to have been from the times humans first started experimenting with jump drives.
Whatever this place was, the CIV had placed their eyes on it for some reason, and his higher-ups had sent him and his little fleet like lambs to the slaughter for what was likely the same purpose.