spacetrucking

A collection of short sci-fi stories, interwoven into one universe.

Having been prematurely awoken from his cryo-slumber by the emergency protocols built into his suit. Derick thought the blast shields of his small Mining Frigate were locked into place. Once the cryo induced mind fog cleared and his eyes regained their vision he noticed that instead of the inky blackness of space pin-pricked with millions of points of light, the vast expanse that lay before him was the darkest pitch black you could imagine with the only illumination coming from the orange glow of the navicom screen blinking in front of him.

Something was wrong, terribly wrong. Where were all the stars? He pondered this question for a moment before turning his attention to the navicom and the message that its orange phosphorus display was blinking with urgency.

[System ERR]

Somehow it had failed and without it he had no way of knowing where he was, how long he had been asleep or how to get back to a sector of space with stars. Inhaling deeply at the thought of being alone in a mysterious sector of dead-space with no way of getting home Derick passed his hand over a panel of switches and slowly checked through the rest of the ships systems. In doing so the rest of the cockpit began to show signs of life as the various systems began waking from their long period of low power operation.

It became apparent after a few minutes of checks that the only system in a state of error was the navicom but that didn't make sense. In the case of any of the ships systems entering an error state the pilot should be awoken from cryo-slumber and if that had happened then why was he in some unknown part of space with no stars, no nothing, no light source of any kind.

The bio-shell doors opened slowly with a sharp hissing noise venting thick white clouds of cryo-gas that billowed outwards to completely engulf the small interior of the room. As the doors opened its occupant, Ekta, opened her eyes slowly from what had been a routine deep slumber to quickly realise as her eyesight returned that this was no routine awakening.

Clouds of cryo-gas that would have normally been extracted had by now entirely consumed the room and were being illuminated by a solitary orange-red emergency light that flashed menacingly inside a panel on the wall opposite to the bio-shell.

As soon as she was able to move her arms, Ekta flung a hand clumsily towards the release mechanism of her harness. Her mind numbed by the long sleep and shocked by a sudden and apparent emergency awakening began to process the scene before her.

“This wasn't right,” she thought as she began to float away from the bio-shell, “something is wrong here.” It took a few moments before she realised that instead of dropping into a heap on the floor, in the absence of gravity she was instead drifting into the middle of the room towards the panel with the soul light source flashing away.

Ekta contemplated why this was wrong before slowly coming into contact with the wall. Her arms still sluggish from the deep sleep responded too slowly and clumsily to be of any use in bracing for the impact but she was able to cling hold of the panels edge to stop herself from bouncing backwards.

In doing so she was able to read the description next to the source of the flashing, in big capital letters it read:

“EMERGENCY”