1 Arrival
In interstellar space between two stars, usually one of the quietest places in the universe something was happening. An anomaly, at first microscopic but steadily and slowly growing, a tear in spacetime systematically growing in an eerie hexagon pattern.
By the time it got to the size of a coin, it seemingly overcame whatever resistance was holding it back and the field grew to the size of two football fields almost instantly. The now giant hexagon that appeared to only exist in 2 dimensions was getting increasingly unstable trying to collapse inward on itself until a black rod slowly emerged out of it.
The circular 10 meter long rod, now fully emerged from the hexagon drifted slowly away into space before activating and starting to orbit the hexagon, moving faster and faster until it became a blur. Now more and more rods started to appear out from the hexagon 'gate' until 30 of them were orbiting it faster than the eye could see.
The hexagon now started to change, seemingly being affected by some invisible force from the black rods orbiting around it and started to glow in a powerful green shine. The orbiting rods now also started to shine green, in fact the whole 'constellation' soon rivalled the surrounding stars in brightness but after a while, the green light started to fade and the hexagon had disappeared in its stead a dodecahedron, a 'cube' made out of hexagons, had appeared, and at each of its 30 edges were one of the rods, now glowing bright white from the heat generated while generating and stabilising a Einstein Rosen bridge or 'warp gate'.
As soon as the gate had stabilized something started to emerge out of it, a long black triangular ship, partially destroyed. The second the ship cleared the gate the rods stabilizing the gate started to malfunction and when the 3rd one failed the dodecahedron gate imploded and disappeared having served its job. The ship that appeared out of the gate was the cruiser Omega-7 around 300 meters long and had a slim pyramid shape, that now was riddled with holes of varying sizes.
The hangar bay that was usually tightly closed doing propulsion was blown open and most of the smaller crafts inside were destroyed. Of the 9 huge thrusters propelling the cruiser only 2 were still functioning as the rest were either malfunctioning, only pulsing the deep purple beam of energised gas that indicated they worked, or outright missing from the thruster housing. At the central part of the ship the damage was even worse and lage parts of the hull was missing and bodys of the former crew floated around covered in a thin layer of ice.
In the very center of the ship was the central control, a tightly packed room filled with screens of different sizes and control panels that displayed readouts from the ships systems, most of the ones that was still functioning displayed a single message: CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE, ABANDON SHIP. But not everything aboard the ship was dead, a single screen in front of a seat occupied by the corpse of the captain in the center of the room was displaying a reboot and repair message along with a progress bar that was slowly filling.
REBOOTING 97%...99%.. COMPLETE. INTEGRATED COMBAT INTELLIGENCE V7.45
ONLINE
CHECKING MAIN SYSTEMS:
REACTOR STATUS: UNSTABLE. OUTPUT AT 21.5% - RECOMMEND REPAIR
FIRE CONTROL: OFFLINE
PRINTING WEAPON STATUS:
MK:XI REX-104 MAIN RAILGUN
101 OFFLINE 19 ONLINE
MK:V REX PONT DEFENCE CANNON
224 OFFLINE, WARNING: TORPEDO DEFENCE IMPOSSIBLE
MK:XXV REX FUSION TORPEDOS
ALL TORPEDOS DEPLETED, RECOMMEND RESUPPLY
MK:I REX SPINAL MOUNTED BEAM CANNON: OFFLINE, FUEL DEPLETED
PROPULSION SYSTEMS: ERROR, UNSTABLE. RECOMMEND REPAIR, 2 THRUSTERS ONLINE, FUEL RESERVES AT 4.4%
NAVIGATION SYSTEMS: OPERATING AT 9.4% CAPACITY, SLOW ORECTIONAL MANEUVERING POSSIBLE
COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS: OFFLINE, FTL COM ARRAY MISSING
SENSOR ARRAY: PRIMARY LIDAR ONLINE, OPERATING AT 92% CAPACITY, GRAV RADAR: OFFLINE, OPTICAL TELESCOPE: ONLINE
LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS: OFFLINE, EMERGENCY LIFE SUPPORT: ONLINE
FTL SYSTEMS: INSUFFICIENT STABILIZERS, CANNOT CONSTRUCT WARPGATE
CREW STATUS: UNKNOWN, PERFORMING SCAN…..1%.....15%...65%.....COMPLETE,
STATUS: 335 KIA, 145 MIA, 1 ONLINE: COMMANDER DAX. STATUS: CRITICAL, STARTING REPAIR, ACCESSING MEDICAL NANOBOTS NEAR SUBJECT ...…...
Commander Dax was located in the middle of the fire control centre, a sturdy room with independent life support and surrounded by a thick layer of armor plating designed to outlast even the bridge in the event of lethal close quarters combat.
That armour had however not survived the attack and there were several holes straight through it, along with the rest of the ship. Dax was strapped to one of the central chairs in front of a big monitor that had several holes in it. The entire room, along with the rest of the ship, was depressurised and small ice crystals made of blood from the dead officers and pieces of metal and fabric floated around the room. Dax could be considered lucky and had suffered relatively light injuries, a hole through his gut, and several pieces of shrapnel all over his left arm and leg, along with a large piece of metal in his head that had robbed him of his consciousness. while those injuries would normally outright kill someone, Dax is a qitron, a race genetically engineered for warfare by a long extinct race of spacefarers.
Qitrons a known to be tough to kill, even if you emptied the clip of a gauss rifle in the chest of one of them you were unlikely to kill it as several layers of hard skin acts as armour, and enhanced muscles would absorb the hits. Dax also didn't choke in the vacuum when his suit was pierced by shrapnel because of extensive body modifications, his right arm and shoulder along with his left eye and the right part of his chest had all been replaced by cybernetic augments, along with an artificial repertory system that integrates directly with the ships life support systems through a cable on his back.
If it weren't for his extensive cybernetic augments Dax looked like an ordinary qitron, standing a bit over 2 meters tall with a lean body made of densely packed muscles covered by dark brown skin with numerous white scars. he had a sharp face with a clear jawline that's covered by a thin black beard, and his black hair was cut short and his remaining eye had a thin vertical slit and a light green pupil that was typical for his species.
In the centre of the fire control room a red box mounted on the ceiling suddenly lit up, and opened and after a couple of seconds a mass of grey goo started to float out towards Dax. as the lump of goo touched Dax it quickly started to cover his body in a thin layer, and after a short while had passed shrapnel from inside his body started to appear on the surface of the now completely grey Dax, and floated out into the room where it came from. After the last piece of shrapnel was removed by the nanobots moved to cover the holes in his vacuum suit and the crack in his visor, before crystallising and becoming solid.
PRIMARY REPAIR OF COMMANDER DAX STATUS: COMPLETE
STARTING SECONDARY REPAIR….5%.....44%.....65%.....90%...99%....ERROR
WARNING: NEUROLOGICAL DAMAGE DETECTED, POSSIBLE MEMORY SEGMENTS INACCESSIBLE, HALTING REANIMATION, SUSPEND SUBJECT IN CRYOSTASIS
OVERALL SYSTEM CHECK COMPLETE, EVALUATION: COMBAT NOT ADVISABLE, UNABLE TO REJOIN FLEET. REASON: INSUFFICIENT FUEL, LOCATION UNKNOWN, COM SYSTEMS OFFLINE.
CONCLUSION BASED ON KNOWN FACTS: SEEK PLANET WITH ATMOSPHERE FOR REPAIR OF CRUISER OMEGA-7 AND REANIMATION OF COMMANDER DAX.
FUEL RESERVES AT 4.4%. SEARCHING FOR PLANETARY BODY WITH MATCHING SPECIFICATIONS WITHIN DELTA-V RANGE.....COMPLETE.
UNKNOWN PLANET #1
ESTIMATED SURFACE GRAVITY: 0.9004 G
SPECTROSCOPY INDICATES A NITROGEN HEAVY ATMOSPHERE. ACCEPTABLE LEVELS OF OXYGEN DETECTED
RANGE: 0.300045 LIGHT YEARS
CALCULATING APPROACH: COMPLETE. COMMENCING MANEUVER NODE 1 OF 354. TURNING TO HEADING 254 FOR 3425605.0054 METER PER SECOND DELTA-V CHANGE…..BURN COMPLETE. TIME TO NEXT BURN: 34771 CYCLES.
TIME TO ARRIVAL: 34940 CYCLES.
DUMPING NAVIGATION FILES IN NAV SYSTEMS AND ENTERING SLEEP MODE.
