Broken Boundaries

01 - Touchdown

More emergency lights switched on in the corridor below and gave him a dim view of his surroundings. It reminded him of scenes of sunken submarines, only without creatures of the sea swimming around and crawling in and out of various drowned sailor's orifices. He found a terminal console nearby, opened it, activated the local power circuit, and activated the gravity floor with the override button when the circuit lit up green.

He held on to the console while his body was drawn slowly to the floor and let go when his weight rested securely on his feet. A test run of all systems returned a positive result and he activated the environmental control, then took off his helmet when that lit up green. He took a deep breath of the cold filtered air and was glad ships like these carried a greenery to filter the smell of humans from the air, and planned to see if he could hook up the pod's filtration system to the ship and get rid of his own smell building up in the pod.

A cursory exploration of the section revealed it was a standard mixed section containing crew quarters, local mess hall, storage of goods and weapons, and independent support infrastructure. Medium and larger ships had been sectioned into independent parts for redundancy and survival in case of incidents, and in cases of military vessels, battles. The fighting between humans and Silth had proved the efficiency of the design.

The weapon storage had been cleared of weapons and ammunition during the disembarking of the crew and Alain was a little disappointed when he looked at the empty racks. He'd been assigned a pistol as an emergency weapon if the Silth did decide to compromise the Walkurea, or worse, targeted him, but if it did end up like that he liked to have something a bit more intimidating to wave around, even if he had no intention to actually use it. The little disappointment at that left quickly when he took a peek inside the mess hall stores and the amount of food left there. The status report he'd been given on the ship stated the cargo sections had been mostly emptied and thus of the main food supply as well, but it looked like they hadn't bothered to empty the well stocked section storages. He took out an oblong container from one of the compartments labelled ravioli and smiled a little. He wouldn't have to worry about food in the first place because his pod was stocked up for two people and the probes sent to retrieve the recovered parts would deliver supplies as well, but if a probe failed or arrived empty it wouldn't matter. Especially when he noticed the drinks cabinets and the amount of alcohol in it. Top brass had found out quickly that morale went down into the dumps if the military crew was forbidden to drink during their stay in space while civilian crews could, and had allowed a limited amount of alcohol to be used on journeys. Now he wouldn't have to worry about food or getting wasted if he desired to.

He returned to the pod with a real book he spotted in the corner of one of the crew quarters. Items like that were rare in space and it happened to be one he hadn't read from one horror writer he knew. He could end the day after writing the initial report with a good meal and a good book, and accompanied by a stiff drink.

***

Alain woke up and stretched as far as he was able to in the cramped space he slept in. He contemplated moving to one of the crew quarters but with the state the ship was in he didn't want to risk something going wrong while he slept and at worst locking him inside without access to food or water, or at best killing him quickly through asphyxiation.

He freshened up in the tight shower and picked something to eat at random while he went over the list of requested parts for recovery and sending back with the first probe that would arrive in fifty days. The initial list was made for two people to work on and he decided to take his time locating and disassembling the parts. He was confident he could do more than half on his own if there were no unforeseen circumstances but he wouldn't reveal that to his supervisors. He'd take full advantage of the fact he was sent alone and make clear things would then take more than double the effort compared to two men handling them. He would enjoy his time away from home and work at a leisurely pace.