Bored in deep space - Novelisation -
Chapter 4 - The SV-Eclipse (4)
We were here. The ship fell into a solemn, respectful orbit around Turn Seven, a silent satellite in the kingdom of a virgin world. We were a fly speck in an endless ocean of silence. The sheer, unblemished enormity of it was breathtaking, a symphony of blues, greens, browns, and swirling whites that played out on a screen the size of a god. This, perhaps, might have been my first true religious experience, to just stare out onto the sleeping giant. We were small. I was small. My problems, my identity crisis, my desperate search for reason… none of that mattered in the face of that immense untouched, silent beauty. My breath hitched. For a fleeting moment, there was only the view and quiet, contemplative hum of the Eclipse.
Of course, that peace was just a thinly veiled illusion. My cynicism, like a stubborn weed growing through the concrete of reassurance, pushed its way back through the cracks in my composure. "Tell me again, Calliope," I said, my eyes still glued to the sprawling continents below. "You're absolutely certain about this atmospheric entry? The heat shields, the integrity fields, the whole package? No little surprise, red lights waiting to pop up? We're not going to be halfway through planetfall only for you to tell me we aren't going to make it?"
The AI's response was as calm as the surface tension of an undisturbed pond. I'm sure she's made doubly sure all systems were green on her end, but there was that little, nagging voice in my head that doubted. "A full diagnostic has been completed, Captain. All atmospheric entry systems are rated as optimal. The SV-Eclipse is a commercial Hauler, Grade III, certified for all but the most extreme atmospheric conditions. Turn Seven's atmospheric pressure and compositions are well within safety parameters. Planetfall is calculated to be a routine operation."
"Routine," I scoffed. Routine was a commute to work. Routine was making a cup of coffee. Routine was most definitely not landing a beat-up, twelve-thousand-ton brick through a ceiling of clouds on a potentially hostile alien planet. I leaned back into the command chair, my arms crossed over my chest, my stomach churning that same sickening knot. "Yeah, forgive me if I don't take the computer's word for it right now. If you recall, the last routine operation -- hauling useless junk through space -- ended with us here."
"Your concerns have been noted, Captain," Calliope responded, her emotionless tone not budging an inch. "The alternative is to remain in orbit. At present rate of atmospheric leakage and resource consumption, life support on the SV-Eclipse is projected to fail in approximately 317 standard cycles without resupply. The necessary resources to fix the Fold Drive are also planetside."
Three hundred and seventeen days? That was another life sentence. Or a death sentence. Staying in orbit was just dying slower.
She was right. The Fold Drive -- the piece of technology that would get me out of here -- needed materials. The materials were on the planet. The logic was a relentless, inescapable loop back to Turn Seven. Every decision I made was just an illusion of choice. I was a rat in a maze, and the only exit was a door that was clearly labelled 'DANGER'.
I stared down at the planet… or perhaps I was staring down the barrel of a gun. A bitter, humourless scoff escaped my throat. I shook my head. This was it. The point of no return. The tech billionaires from my old life, the Musks and Bezoses, would probably have given their entire fortunes to be sitting in this chair, to be the first human to lay eyes on a new world, untouched and pure. They'd livestream it, sponsor it, slap their logos on the side of the ship. And here I was, nobody from the 21st century, about to land a garbage truck on a planet named after a strategy game. It was an opportunity of a lifetime, and I was simply terrified. The irony was so thick you could spread it on toast.
"Alright, fine," I said, my voice flat, the energy and fight drained out of me, replaced by a grim acceptance. "Do it. Begin the entry sequence, Calliope. Take the Eclipse down."
"Command acknowledged. Entry sequence initiated. Forward heat shield deployment in three… two… one…" A heavy, resonant clunk reverberated through the deck plates, a sound like a bank vault door slamming shut. The ship groaned as it shifted its orientation. "Autopilot disengaging atmospheric manoeuvring thrusters. We will begin our descent at a twelve-degree angle. Estimated entry burn will last for approximately seven minutes."
The first few minutes of the descent were, I had to admit, eerily serene. The forward viewport, which had been showing a placid view of the orbit, was now filled with the growing, incandescent fury of atmospheric entry. A halo of shimmering plasma began to lick at the edges of the viewport with a terrifying crown of fire that blazed in shades of brilliant orange and violent white. The ship began to tremble, a low-frequency vibration escalating into a deep, shuddering roar. It was the good kind of shaking, the predictable, scientific shake of physics doing its job. Everything was as intended. For a dizzying, giddy moment, a strange thrill cut through my fear -- I was a kid all over again, a scene of one sci-fi movie played in my mind, a scene just like this. This wasn't a movie; I was actually doing this. I was really, truly flying a spaceship into an alien atmosphere. The sheer, audacious absurdity of it all was almost enough to threaten a smile on my face -- I'd almost forgotten what the word 'smile' even meant. I was a tourist at the end of the world, and the price of admission was just my life.
Then, the threat of a smile on my face dissolved. Predictably too. "Murphy… you son of a bitch!"
The ship let out a high-pitched metallic scream, a sound of tortured metal that tore right through the controlled roar of the entry. The shaking went from a deep, structural groan to a violent, chaotic seizure. Everything in the bridge that wasn't bolted down was thrown into the air. The console flickered, the stable, green indicators flashed an angry, accusing red. The halo of fire outside intensified until the viewport was a solid wall of blinding white.
It was starting all over again. The familiar, shrill electronic shrieks of the sirens tore through the bridge, louder and more frantic than before.
"Report! Calliope! What's happening?!" I yelled over the cacophony. I gripped tightly at the edges of the armrest until the veins in my hands were bulging and visible.
"Multiple system failures," the AI commented with all the alarmed tone of a sleeping turtle. That same, professional and calm tone, "main power conduit… overloading. Attempting to reroute… rerouting failed. Atmospheric maneuvering thrusters… offline. Guidance systems… offline."
So frustrating. "Could you sound any less impressed, you frigid bitch?!" I shouted as I smashed down onto the console.
"We are experiencing severe electronic interference," Calliope stated, her tone sounding less like she was giving a report and having a slight undertone of fatalistic acceptance. "The source appears to be a wide-band, high-energy field emanating from the planetary surface. It is disrupting all primary systems."
All the while, the piercing shrieking of the sirens kept going off against my ears. Each winding bell quickening my heartrate.
The interference. I knew it. That wasn't just gravity pulling us down now. It was a leash. That thing, whatever it was, wanted me to come here; I knew it, but it wasn't like I had any other choice! I grimaced.
The console erupted in a shower of sparks. The holographic display in the centre of the bridge dissolved into a blizzard of static, then winked out of existence. The world trembled around me. The lights in the bridge flickered erratically, casting the room in a strobing nightmare of red and darkness before they died completely. The only light came from the hellish, solid white flare of the ship's entry through the atmosphere.
Then came the kill-shot. A wave of raw, unfiltered static, like a crackling burst from a thousand lightning strikes, washed through the bridge. Every screen, every button, every light on the console died at once. A sound like the universe taking its final, ragged breath escaped from the ship's speakers.
Silence.
The roaring was gone. The squealing sirens were offline. I could only hear the shuddering vibration of metal flapping against the wind. The vessel continued to shake. The artificial gravity was turned off, and I felt a wave of vertigo hit me. We were falling. This wasn't landing anymore.
I was falling. My heart pounded against my chest. Stomach churning. Sweat wetting my forehead.
"Calliope?!" I screamed, my voice cracking with panic. "Calliope, respond! Status report! Anything!"
Silence.
The AI, my sole companion, my rock of inhuman calm, was gone. Her synthesised presence had been wiped from the ship, like a message erased from a screen. I was alone.
The SV-Eclipse was now a metal tomb, caught in the unforgiving maw of the planet's gravity. The fiery descent was no longer a controlled burn; we were a meteor, a falling star with no guidance, no power, no hope. The ship was in free fall, plunging towards the surface of an alien world at a speed that would leave nothing but a crater and a memory.
This was how I died? I wake up trapped in this metal box and I just die unceremoniously?
The solid white walls of plasma outside the viewport vanished as the ship tumbled end over end, sending the universe into a nauseating, dizzy spin. The blue-green expanse of Turn Seven, the swirling white clouds, the deep blackness of space, all became a meaningless smear of colour. The harness dug into my shoulders, holding me in place as the G-Forces tried to tear me from the only marginally safe spot, the command chair. The only thing left for me to do was watch my own death spiral before me. To pray to a god I didn't believe in, on a world I wasn't born on.
.
.
.
Consciousness didn't return with a jolt, but seeped back into my body like a cold water filling a cracked vessel. The first sensation wasn't pain, though there was plenty of that, but the silence. A profound, ringing silence that was somehow more deafening than the shrieking alarms and roaring descent. The universe had stopped screaming.
My eyes cracked open. Blurry light bled through, a diffuse, greyish luminescence that hurt deep behind my eye sockets. I was still here. Still strapped to the command chair. The harness was a web of pressure points that dug into my flesh, my shoulders screaming in protest at the prolonged confinement. A wave of nausea washed over me as my vision tried to focus. The bridge… it was ruined. No surprise. A large section of the forward viewport was simply gone, replaced by a jagged, star shaped hole that let in the gloomy, alien daylight -- though it wasn't much different from the familiar terrestrial light. A section of the ceiling had collapsed, exposing a tangle of thick, severed cables like the guts of a slain beast. Consoles were shattered, screens dark, their surfaces potted with spiderweb cracks. A blanket of fine grey dust of pulverised metal and insulation covered everything.
It was a Christmas miracle… if Christmas even existed in the future. Still, I was breathing. The air tasted… wet? Not too dissimilar to the scent of morning dew, but distinctly foreign at the same time. It was thick with the smell of damp soil and something green. I coughed, my throat raw, the sound swallowed by the vast, broken stillness.
"Hello?" The words came out a pathetic croak. "Calliope?" No response. Or course. She was dead. Or dormant. Her systems were probably fused slag.
I squeezed my eyes shut. My head leaned back against the headrest that was still somehow intact. I couldn't even ask myself, 'what now?'.
Beep.
My eyes snapped open. The sound was small, almost apologetic. A tiny, red light.
Beep.
It came from the mountain of metal rubble before me, from the centre of the ruined bridge where the hologram projector once was. There, something… birthed out from the pile of junk and debris. It was small and cubic, no bigger than a soccer ball. Floating silently in the dusty, slanted shafts of light, was a perfect cube, maybe a few dozen centimetres across, tilted on a diagonal axis. It spun slowly like a silent pirouette in the wreckage. It was fashioned from the same gunmetal grey material as the rest of the ship, lines of plating and angular; this too was function over form. The one distinct feature was the single, central lens of dark red crystal that shimmered like a captured star. As it rotated, the lens seemed to follow me. At a first glance it didn't have any sort of propulsion to be flying around like that, defying gravity. No exhaust, no fans, no glowing thrusters. It just… hovered. The physics of how was completely beyond a 21st century layman. Anti-gravity, perhaps?
In my intrigue I had almost forgotten about the previous dread. "What the hell…"
"Captain Lee, can you hear me?" The voice strangely clear, though tiny, coming from a small speaker somewhere on the cube. It was her.
I stared, my jaw slightly agape. "C-Calliope?" I rasped, not daring to believe.
"Affirmative, Captain," the floating cube replied, its synthesised tone instantly recognisable, even when filtered by an inferior speaker. The cube looked at me, probably scanning me silently. "Your vital signs are stable. You have been unconscious for approximately fourteen hours, twenty-seven minutes. Minor concussion confirmed. Recommend immediate precaution. Do not attempt sudden movements."
A wave of relief washed over me after hearing her presence. I felt just a little lighter and less afraid than a few minutes ago. She wasn't gone. She was… portable. Cute, almost. "You… you're in a Roomba," I commented. "What happened? How did the ship's AI get transported into a rubik's cube?"
The drone -- Calliope -- paused her spinning, her single, red lens fixed on me. "This unit is a Class-IV mobile peripheral and emergency data repository, Captain. Its colloquial designation is 'Lighthouse'. My core consciousness was routed to its processing matrix 0.8 seconds prior to cascade system failure. Primary system backups are… offline."
"Yeah," I said, my gaze sweeping over the shattered bridge. "Yeah, I noticed. So much for the safe landing you promised," I complained but I wasn't particularly mad at her; I'm sure the ship would've landed just fine without that external interference. Which, by the way, was still a very real and present threat, but no movements have been made by them so far. I was out for fourteen hours, completely vulnerable, and they still didn't do anything to me. It led me to believe that they weren't able to directly interfere physically. For now, priorities. "So… Calliope Portable, what's the damage report? Are we really doomed now? Or can this be salvaged." I asked while fumbling with the buckles of the harness, my fingers still weak and clumsy. Eventually, one by one, they popped open. The sudden release of the pressure almost winded me, blood rushing back into limbs that had been pinned for who knows how long. I felt dizzy.
"Designation noted and stored as 'Calliope(Portable)'," the drone stated, her tiny red light blinking methodically. The small drone zipped forward, stopping a few feet from my face, its lens whirring softly as it focused. "Structural integrity at 32%. The port and aft sections of the cargo bay have suffered catastrophic hull breaches. We have lost approximately sixty percent of the non-essential supplies. The bridge, as you can observe, is compromised. Main and auxiliary power cores are offline. Long-range communications are inoperative."
It was a litany of failure, a shopping list of our fuck-ups. I listened, the despair creeping back in. Lost sixty percent of the supplies? That meant the raw materials I needed to fix the Fold Drive were probably scattered over the blast radius of our crash site. In alien wilderness.
"Figures." I leaned my back against the backrest. Thinking. "Is this it?"
A short, calculated pause from the floating cube. "Negative. While the situation is critical, it is not terminal. Life support in the captain's quarters and adjacent medical bay is currently running on emergency battery power. It is estimated to last for… 172 standard cycles."
172 days? A reprieve, but a temporary one. "And the Fold Drive?"
"The damage to the Fold Drive is substantial, but repairable with the appropriate materials," Calliope confirmed. "However, a large portion of the required raw materials stock from the cargo bay has been… relocated."
"Relocated… hmm," I nodded along in contemplation. I slowly, painfully pushed myself out of the chair, my legs nearly giving way under me. I leaned against the ruined console to support myself. I had to see. "Calliope," I started. "Show me the external feeds. I need to see what's left of us."
The drone zipped over to a shattered monitor, its lower surface unfolding into a complex array of tiny connectors that snaked out and plugged into the damaged console. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a sputter and a shower of orange sparks, the CRT screen flickered to life. The image was grainy, riddled with static, but it was there.
"Ugh…" I groaned. The Eclipse didn't land; it had been plowed onto the surface of this alien landscape. We laid in a vast, shallow crater of our own making, a scar on an otherwise pristine backdrop. The hull was buckled and warped, great plates of metal peeled back like the skin of a rotten fruit. Smoke, or maybe steam, curled from a dozen gashes along its length. The view panned, showing the surrounding areas. It was… desolate. An immense flat plain stretched to the horizon under pale, washed-out sky, dotted with gnarled, leafless grey trees that looked like clawed fingers of the dead. The ground itself was a dark, pitted, iron-coloured rock. There were no signs of the vibrant, living world I'd seen from orbit. Only this grey, grim tableau.
We had crashed into a bad neighbourhood. Probably exactly where they wanted me and the Eclipse. Of course, the question swirled in my mind: if they intentionally dropped me in this place, why wasn't I in a hurry to run away? The answer to that question was obvious: where? There was nowhere to run -- the Eclipse was my only sanctuary in this foreign world.
I stared at the flickering, static-ridden image on the dead console. Some part of me still didn't believe any of this was actually happening, that if I closed my eyes hard enough I might just wake up in the middle of my apartment. But it was real -- everything was real, from the smell of the dust, to the solid sensation of the hard metal floorboards beneath my feet. The alien wind brushed past my face as if trying to lightly tap reality into me.
My gaze drifted from the broken ship on the screen to the elegantly floating cube that was all that remained of my only company. "All right, lay it on me," I said, my voice flat, the anticipation of the worst news already heavy in my tone. "The straight dope. No corporate happy-talk bullshit. Forget the cargo for a second. Can this," I gestured vaguely around at the ruined bridge and towards the metallic corpse on the screen, "this flying brick, be fixed? Can the Eclipse ever fly again?"
Calliope(Portable) tilted, its single lens examining me with what I could only interpret as analytical detachment. "Query requires extensive calculation," the drone's tiny speaker buzzed. "Assessing structural integrity against engineering schematics… Cross-referencing available tooling and onboard drone capabilities… Simulating repair protocols…"
The small red light on the drone's shell began to blink in a frantic, rhythmic pattern -- the kind reminiscent of what my computer used to do when I made it calculate beyond its capabilities. This one was quieter though. It was the most emotion I'd ever seen from her. A tense, silent minute crawled by, the only sound the creak of stressed metal and the mournful whisper of wind whistling through the gaping hole on the bridge. I held my breath, a condemned man waiting for a final verdict. The universe had spent the last twenty-four hours trying its damnedest to kill me; this would be the final word on whether it had succeeded.
The rapid blinking finally ceased after five full minutes. The light returned to a steady, placid red.
"Affirmative, Captain," Calliope's synthesised voice finally stated. "Repairs to the SV-Eclipse are theoretically possible." As I listened to her words, hope, a dangerous and stupid feeling flickered within my chest. She continued, "the ship is equipped with four A-class Maintenance Rovers and a full suit of orbital-grade resource sifting probes." She projected a new set of schematics onto the damaged screen. These were smaller, more utilitarian vehicles -- bulky, legged rovers and a series of what looked like the more regular, terrestrial drone I was familiar with, only much more sturdy and advanced looking with small, claw-like appendages. "These units can be dispatched to locate and salvage the required raw materials and perform the necessary structural repairs."
I leaned closer, my palms pressed against the cold, grit-covered console. "Okay… okay, that's something. Great. How long? How long are we talking about here?" I eyed the bridge. "To get the Eclipse back in orbit with a fully functional Fold Drive."
Calliope's small, cubic body paused momentarily. The silence felt heavier this time. "Calculating optimal repair workflow… factoring in raw material dispersion and drone operation capacity… The projected timeframe for the SV-Eclipse to minimal space-flight status is…"
She listed a number. One that crushed my tiny, flickering flame of hope into a cold, minute ember.
"Approximately one hundred and twenty standard cycles," she reported. That same, calm, detached, and professional tone.
One hundred and twenty days. My breath hitched. Four months. Nearly half a year on this rock. The number hung in the dead air of the bridge. Not just surviving, but working. Every day. A hundred and twenty days of breathing this damp, alien air. A hundred and twenty nights under that pale, alien sky. A slow, monotonous prison sentence with no parole and a warden I couldn't even see.
Doubt. Even if I got the Eclipse operational, would they -- whoever brought me here -- let me go? A sigh escaped me, long and deep. I slid down from the console until I was sitting on the dusty, metal floor, my back against the cold, dead machinery. I dropped my head into my hands. "A hundred and twenty days…" I muttered into my boots. "Better than the alternative, I guess. Starving to death in the dark."
I didn't have options. What was the alternative? Giving up? Lying down in my dusty command chair and waiting for the emergency batteries to run out? That wasn't me. The 21st century corporate drone in me, the one who'd spend a decade navigating pointless meetings and idiotic bureaucratic hurdles, recoiled at the sheer inefficiency of just laying down to die. It was a terrible, soul-crushing project with an insane deadline, but it was a project nonetheless. You don't quit projects. You complain about them, you bitch about your boss, you drink yourself into a stupor every night, but you see it to the end.
"Guess we're shifting from 4X to RTS now."