Digital Galaxies

Bundit let us go grudgingly, finally allowing Cerri and I to detangle our limbs from the compulsory game of twister we’d just played. All my joints ached from the abuse of the crash, plus being crushed into the cockpit with my friend on top of me. Not that I hadn’t enjoyed the feeling of her body pressed to mine…

“Bloody hell,” Cerri groaned from her place on the floor where she sat massaging her leg. “Having a body is nice, but sometimes it is so uncomfortable!”

“Trust me, I know,” I replied with a wry smile. “Should we head to the bridge?”

“Yeah, let’s go,” she sighed, perhaps a little theatrically.

Annoyingly, my brain was now hyper aware of how good looking her character was, and watching her get up was a lot to deal with. The way she moved, the part of her appearance that was the most genuinely her, it captivated me. There was a slightly languid nature to it, along with a purposeful air that made me think she was still getting used to moving it around.

Standing up, she raised an eyebrow at me as I continued to stand there and stare at her. “You okay? Lost in that expansive mind of yours?”

“A-ah… yeah,” I nodded, turning for the door before she could see my rapidly reddening cheeks. Thank goodness I wasn’t a guy anymore, this kind of blushing maiden behavior would have been so embarrassing on my old body.

It was clear on our way up through the ship that we had taken a massive beating. All my hard work was ruined, wiring had burnt out in many places, mainly in power-guzzling systems like the weapons. Then there was the alarming way that the spine of the ship seemed ever so slightly twisted. Not much, but enough to notice when you were looking down the central hallway.

Gravity appeared to be out in a few rooms, including a two meter length of the hallway out to the left wing, as well as… Gloria’s room, Cerri’s room, and Jason’s room. I’d probably have to fix that first, not because those rooms were especially important, but because those gravity generators were… volatile, to say the least.

Arriving on the bridge, we found the rest of our crew, tattered but alive. Actually, tattered was an understatement in Jason’s case. Warren was busy bandaging him off to the side, the larger man seemingly unconscious.

Roger’s leg looked to be completely mangled, and a portable autodoc unit was handling that. Ed stood off to the side with David, both deep in conversation while Gloria sat in her seat, frowning at one of her consoles and swearing under her breath.

“What are we dealing with?” Cerri asked, going straight for her chair and strapping in. I followed suit, bringing up a status screen for the ship’s systems. Oh gosh, that was a hell of a lot of flashing angry red lights.

“A miracle, that’s what,” Gloria called from the pilot’s seat. “We rammed straight into an aethercloud and survived.”

“I’d rather we were destroyed and were currently dealing with claiming insurance, to be honest,” Roger said with a pained laugh.

“I wouldn’t be so quick with that,” Cerri whispered, staring at her screen in awe.

Gloria made a noise of agreement from the pilot’s chair. “Yep, you see it too?”

Cerri was just staring at her screen now, which currently displayed a star chart. “Yeah.”

Wait… bringing up the map of the local area on one of my own screens, I stared in shock and confusion. I began to zoom out… and out… and out…

Where are we? I asked in the group chat, although I directed my attention at Cerri.

“I don’t even know,” my friend said with an amazed laugh. “Too far for our sensors to pick out anything familiar. I’ll have to run some calculations based on maps of the known galaxy to pinpoint where we are.”

“I can tell you that we’re closer to the galactic core,” Warren said, finishing up on Jason and leaning back against a wall. “Look out the front window.”

Huh, he was right. A hell of a lot closer actually, considering the brightness and size difference.

“I can definitely make an estimate based on that,” Cerri chuckled, beginning to tap away at her screens with purpose.

“Alia, how is the Turshen looking?” Roger asked, spinning his seat to face me.

Oh, this question was easy.

Fucked, I typed with an apologetic shrug. The guns are all fried, the aetherdrive is busted, half our gravity plates are showing red, and I think we have a few armoured plates missing. None of that matters though, because the spine of the ship is bent. First time we try and go into aetherspace and it will snap in half.

Roger’s face fell. “Shit.”

“Are we going to have to self-destruct and start over?” David asked with a forlorn look. “I was kind of enjoying the Turshen and everything.”

“Maybe it’s time we find another game?” Ed asked him quietly. “This hasn’t exactly been an action packed experience so far.”

“Maybe…” David sighed, running a hand through his hair.

Silence descended as we all contemplated what would happen next. We were stranded way out in deep space, our crash having somehow flung us out here. The lore wasn’t kidding when it said you had to avoid the aether clouds while you were in FTL. The spazzy cloud must have yeeted us way out into the dark instead of completely obliterating us though.

Realistically speaking, we were screwed, there was no way for us to get back home. Either we just logged out and never logged back in, or we blew ourselves up and hoped that insurance would cover the cost of another ship.

Except, we also sort of had an opportunity. No one had made it out this far in the game, so we could at least gather as much data as possible and beam it back before exploding ourselves.

I think we might have a weird sort of opportunity here, I began, typing out my thoughts as I had them. If we could get the sensors and other science equipment working, we could do a detailed scan of the region and then beam it back home. Sell it for some extra money to get us sorted.

“That’s a great idea,” Warren began, tone of voice indicating he has some very bad news. “Unfortunately, our FTL comm unit is literally gone. Sheared off and scattered into tiny pieces along our recent trajectory.”

Fuck. Nevermind then. I sighed, deflating into my chair.

“Not a bad idea to do a sweep of the area, though,” Cerri said soothingly. “The sensors are actually mostly functional, oddly enough. Let me set up some scans.”

While she did that and everyone else did their own thing, I began to catalogue the damage to the Turshen. It wasn’t pretty. My earlier assessment wasn’t the whole story, not by a long shot. Minor systems all across the ship had been damaged, including some less urgent components within life support. That was probably the second order of business after the gravity plates. At least things were sort of stable right now and we didn’t have any hull breaches. That was nice.

“U-uh… guuuuuys,” Cerri said urgently, breaking the silence. Her eyes were even wider than when she’d seen our current location. “Guuuys!”

“What is it Cerri?” Roger asked, still sounding depressed about our situation.

“Okay first off,” she said excitedly, taking over the main monitor and throwing a map onto it. “First off, we’re in a star system. Twelve celestial bodies large enough to be considered planets. None habitable currently, although it looks like one of them used to be.”

She paused as more data came in, her excitement climbing higher. “Yup, I thought so. That world used to be habitable, its atmosphere probably similar to what we breathe. Unfortunately for it and its old inhabitants, it appears to have been bombarded from orbit. Speaking of orbit… my god is it messy. Debris everywhere, ship hulks, smashed space stations, you name it, it’s got it. Whatever battle occurred here was massive. Most of the wreckage is clustered around that planet, but there’s bits and pieces all over the system.”

Gloria perked up as Cerri spoke, and turned to Roger when the scientist was done. “Our sub-light engines still work.”

“Can the ship take the strain of being moved?” he asked me quickly, depression completely gone.

Yeah, so long as we’re gentle with it, I nodded, feeling a smile spreading over my face. We had a mission now, something way more exciting than scanning a dumb cloud. I’d wait until I’ve fixed a few things up first. Water filtration is down and the gravity plates aren’t happy.

“Excellent, can you get working on that now?” he asked, giving me an encouraging smile.

I nodded, smiling back. It was good to see him being our leader again after his defeated attitude just now.

“Can you get Jason’s room sorted first?” Warren asked hopefully. “He needs to be laying in a bed and the autodoc won’t be able to do its job on him if there’s no gravity.”

Another nod and I was out the door, headed for the room in question. The twist to the main hallway still had my gut churning a little, it was just not right. Poor Turshen.

I had to make a detour into my machine shop to grab my tools, and then I was off into the crawl spaces. Getting under Jason’s room was easy, and apparently so was the fix for the gravity plate. The power plug had fallen out. I’m not even kidding. Well, actually, the metal bracket that kept it plugged in had snapped, and then it had fallen out, but that was details.

After flicking a quick message to Warren that Jason’s room was habitable again, I wriggled my way to Cerri’s room. I figured she would probably want functioning gravity too.

When I arrived however, I quickly saw that I was not going to be able to fix this problem. In fact, I probably had about ten minutes before the ship detonated.

Fuck! The gravity plate under Cerri’s room is busted and very angry about that fact! I sent to the crew at large as I raced to get it out of its socket.

I could see dust around the plate wiggling wildly as gravity oscillated and warped around the piece of volatile tech, and as my hands entered that field, I felt it too. I knew what this behaviour meant, I’d read about it in one of the manuals.

The plate had become unstable, and that wildly changing field of gravity would begin expanding soon, along with the intensity of the different fields it generated from one second to the next. This would continue until the gravity it was creating was enough to tear the plate apart, at which point it would detonate in a very large and very deadly explosion of exotic particles.

I very quickly gave up trying to get the thing out gently and instead just cut the whole mounting out with a plasma saw.

Angry gravity plate under one arm, I rushed through the crawl spaces as fast as I could while mentally ordering Bundit to meet me at the nearest hatch.

My loyal mech had the hatch already open as I arrived, and I threw the impromptu bomb into its waiting arms.

“Get it out of here! Throw it as hard as you can out an airlock Bundit!” I shouted, making feeble shooing motions with my hands.

Bundit was on it, racing off and around a corner in a few seconds flat. Air whistled past me as the mech overrode the airlock safeties to save time, then stopped as the door slammed once again.

I waited breathlessly to see if we’d been fast enough, the seconds ticking by far too slowly. Then, the ship shuddered slightly, the shields protesting this latest assault on their integrity.

“Oh, thank fuck,” I groaned, allowing myself to collapse face first onto the floor. I needed another nap.