Upon a Salvage Shore

An Emergency

"You heard the man!" Carter said firmly. "Life pods! Now!"

The men dropped their foam sprayers and tools and all charged up companionway Backer toward the life pod station. Carter was bringing up the rear, making sure no man was left behind when the next explosion occurred. The local gravity failed completely as he was in the middle of a stride and the next thing Carter knew he was waking up floating near the ceiling. The main lights had gone out, leaving only red battle lamps to see by.

"Alpha team, this is six. Report," Carter said weakly. He could taste blood in his mouth and his tongue hurt. He must have bitten it when the gravity failed and the ship bucked him into the ceiling. He got no response on the main team channel. Switching to the alternate frequency he said again, "Alpha team, report."

Farther along the smoke-filled companionway he could make out a few bodies floating. Carter pushed off the ceiling and locked his boot clamps to the deck. Making his way to the nearest body he discovered one of the techs. The man was clearly dead. The next body was a marine, as were the next two. His team was dead. Carter switched to the command frequency, listening. No sound. The channel was live, but there was no one there to talk on it.

"This is Alpha six to anyone, over," he said into the dead air. "Any unit, respond. This is Alpha six, over."

No reply came back.

It would be fair, at this point, to say Sergeant Liam Carter was more than a little worried. The command frequency was never left active without chatter. There was always someone to give orders and pass on information. Always.

"Not if they're all dead," he murmured to himself. He tried all the other channels getting no one except the ship's computer and it wasn't making any sense. "Probably damaged in the attack."

Gritting his teeth and swallowing his fear along with the blood in his mouth, Carter made for the nearest life pod station, fifty meters ahead. Only one pod remained and it appeared to have a hole in it. He went to the station's panel and checked the status of all pods aboard ship. The only one remaining was the damaged one.

"Motherfucker," he swore softly.

Checking the ship's general status revealed that most of the decks were exposed to vacuum. Lucky for him, Companionway Backer was in a section still sealed.

"It never rains unless it pours," Carter grumbled and took stock of his situation.

He knew there was near zero chance for him if he stayed with the transport. If he tried to use the escape pod the odds were even smaller. The pod had a transponder, but with the damage, he would have only his internal life support to rely on. Of course, the air in the ship was probably contaminated with fumes after the fires and her filtration system was offline, so again his internal life support was all he would have aboard her as well. Or was it?

It took him about twenty minutes to go over his three dead marines and the damage control tech. He knew he had limited time and forced himself to do it in cold blood. If there was time later he would raise a glass to their memory. Carter collected their atmosphere cylinders, sidearms, spare ammunition, med kits and food packs. It wasn't all that much, but he now had three or four times as much as he had carried alone. All his finds went into a musette bag clipped to his harness.

Just as he was adjusting the bag there came a long, ominous rumble from somewhere deep in the ship. Quickly he returned to the computer console and began flogging its damaged circuits to bring up readouts on the vessel's condition. The news was not good. Apparently the battle damage was severe enough for the ship to continue breaking up.

No choices left, Carter climbed into the damaged pod. Amazingly, in spite of the fist-sized hole punched straight through one side and out the other, the little pod still had power and full functionality, except for its atmosphere. These things were built tough. He'd heard of one that had survived a crash into a gas giant. The poor bastards in it had been crushed by the planet's enormous gravity, but the pod had been recovered intact and still operational.

"Alright," he said to himself, settling in front of the small nav computer on the bulkhead. "Let's see what we can see."

He punched up the local beacon frequency, but got very little. The ruptured drives of the transport were spilling out enough radiation to obscure or distort the signal. He found the last known location of the transport and scanned it for anything useful. He crosschecked the data with last known heading and velocity. A glimmer of hope flickered to life in his mind. Depending on how long he had been out, the ship might now be close enough for him to reach a class M world in a nearby system. Indications from the Conglomerated Planets survey were that the world was habitable, though no sentient life was apparent. Even better, the planet was not a "super earth" with the usual crushing gravity. It had a two percent larger diameter than Earth, which doesn't sound like much, but it meant literally billions of tons more rock, soil and water. The planet's gravity was, however, slightly less than Earth's, due to a dearth of heavy minerals present. All in all, the planet would be a much better place to wait for rescue than either the damaged transport or the holed life pod.

As the transport shook from another explosion somewhere in the engine compartment, Carter powered up the life pod and launched. He was clear of immediate calamity and had at least some hope of rescue. He was also aware there was at least as great a possibility of being captured by the enemy. Still, that might be preferable to being marooned on a backwater planet at the edge of a war zone.