Chapter 1: A Spacious Place
Chapter 1: A Spacious Place
Sometimes, you know that you are asleep even though you can hear and understand everything that is going on around you. You know what someone is saying, you even are able to process and understand, but you are asleep and until you wake up you are unable to do anything. I understood this on an entirely new level as I woke up to the sound of nothing but the echo of metal on metal.
Finally able to convince my aching and sore body to rouse from its lethargy. I groaned and looked around. Where in the world was I. I didn't recognize anything and strangely I was floating, floating in some sort of room with a strange looking laptop and wrapped in a hammock that appeared to be anchored to a metal wall. There was a door that looked similar to the pressure doors on an aircraft carrier or some other sort of ship but it had a couple of extra locking mechanisms that I didn't recognize. I still didn't know why I was floating, but I knew that I had to figure out where I was. Unfortunately, the first thing I knew about figuring things out was to sit down. And I was not able to do that at this moment.
Taking my time, I slowly wiggled myself free from the strange hammock and let myself drift towards the weird computer that was floating and bouncing around the room. Taking care to not move to quickly in the seemingly zero gravity environment I found myself in. Grabbing the laptop I opened it. "What the heck?" I muttered to myself as I gazed upon a strange user interface that lacked any sort of mouse. "Thank God for QWERTY." I said as I began to fiddle with this strange looking computer.
"Where is the power symbol?" I asked myself as I began to push any of the unfamiliar keys. The keyboard layout was mostly the same as the ones I had seen over my lifetime with the exception of a few keys that had Symbols I didn't recognize. "Ahh, there it is." I said as I found it on the left side of the computer built into the lower left hand corner of the screen.
While the unfamiliar style compute began to boot up I took stock of myself. Running my left arm up and down my torso and legs checking for any injuries. The last thing I remembered was being at work with my sidearm and all of the gear I normally have with me. "Legs good, no injuries there." I muttered my check out loud. "Hmm, Med bag and extra magazines are there." I thought to myself. "No handgun though? That's odd, who takes a weapon but leave the extra magazines?" I felt my torso. "The holster is there but no weapon?"
A loud slap resounded as I facepalmed while watching my Canik float out of the hammock. Hurriedly, not wanting to be unarmed in a strange place, I grabbed my sidearm and holstered it. "Crap!" I said as I flipped around before stopping against a wall. "Slow down Mark." I said to myself as I braced myself in the corner. I finished my inventory and realized that I had everything I normally have with my while at work barring my backpack and laptop.
Upon thinking about my laptop, I realized that I had ignored the one that was floating in the middle of the room for long enough that it had booted up and was seemingly waiting on some sort of BIOS screen.
"IT experience don't fail me now." I sad as I crossed my fingers and began to work a little bit of computer magic to get the 80s looking machine to boot into whatever native operating system it had. After a couple of seconds, an IBM logo appeared in the middle along with a loading screen. Then there was a starting prompt that appeared. Thankfully there were no passwords to enter seeing as I had nothing to guess at anyway aside from the standard "Password" that some idiots used. Upon startup, the computer opened a program that showed the current battery life and the programs that had been active before shutdown. Slowly acclimating myself to the different options and figuring out the different commands and prompts I slowly delved into the knowledge on this strange device.
"Frack!" I exclaimed when I discovered what was on what I now knew to be a Noteputer. I had seemingly discovered both what universe I had landed myself in somehow and a ballpark estimate of when I was. At least relatively speaking. The date on the Noteputer said that it was January 1st 3000 and listed several things that ensured that I knew I was truly and totally screwed.
"Okay, nothing on this matters if I don't know where I am and if I don't manage to do anything in the first place." I said to myself as I closed the Noteputer. Looking at the hammock and the Noteputer in my hand I pulled out my pocketknife and fashioned a sort of carry satchel/ backpack to put the treasure trove I had just found in. I then pushed off of the corner in order to get myself close to the only doorway in the room.
Reaching the door, I opened the pressure seal with baited breath, hoping that the other side was pressurized so that I wouldn't die 15 minutes into my new found adventure. Thankfully, it opened into a corridor that was pressurized. Drawing my Canik, I eased myself in the Zero G out in to the corridor and nearly opened fire with my weapon when I saw what looked like a person in a modernized spacesuit around 15 feet away. After holding it at gunpoint for a moment, I maneuvered myself to inspect it. Having no clue if there was anyone in the suit or not. When had finally reached it I spun it around to face me and gagged and nearly threw up when I saw what appeared to be a mostly decomposed corpse. The faceplate was missing from the helmet and some dogtags were hanging out in front of the corpses face.
Grabbing the dog tags, I ripped them off and took a good look at them. "SLDF Robert Kingsley Lieutenant Junior Grade" I read out loud as I put the dog tags into my pocket. Surveying the rest of the corridor, I saw that there were arrows on the floor that gave directions to the various shipboard areas. Seeing the direction that the bridge was, I made my way towards it.
After an hour of navigating my way around the ship I had found myself on, I reached the bridge. It was several ladders up and was almost at the very top of the ship. Luckily, all but one of the pressure doors between the room I had woken up in and the bridge were open. The bridge was just as deserted as the rest of the ship, and also like the rest of it was only lit by emergency lighting aside from the weapon mounted light I had aside from the one workstation that was lit. Closing the door to the bridge behind me, I made my way over to the workstation and with my recently gained experience with this style of OS I began to learn what my current situation was.
"Captains Log, March 16th 2785, SLDF Captain James Cromwell. We made what repairs we could to the Manassas' K-F drive. We are planning on Jumping and trying to rendezvous with the rest of the SLDF as we head towards deep space. We have logged the planned course and hope to meet Kerensky at some point in the near future. On a side note, I find the nature of some of our upgrades to be unsettling. I understand the need for better longevity on what could be a journey years in the making, but having our weapons systems automated enough to be controlled from the bridge? Why, I saw thousands killed by these so called "perfect" systems! At least with a gunnery crew there is no danger of the computer going insane! But nontheless, I do see the need for some of these upgrades. And I made sure that there is a shut off for those systems while we were in dry dock. " I read the last log that was displayed out loud.
After reading the rest of the log including the detailed repairs to the K-F drive I made my way to the rest of What I now knew to be the Warship Manassas' bridge stations in order to figure out what the situation was as far as Oxygen and power were concerned. It turned out that while there seemed to be plenty of rations, the ship was on emergency power and there were only three of the four Confederate dropships still attached to the collars.
Well, while I wasn't an engineer and I wasn't good with numbers I knew that if I didn't fix both of those problems than I wasn't going to be long for this world