Tagrale - Desolate Stars

Chapter 3-2

Twenty minutes later and there was still no sign of any life from the ship. Jenna was fighting hard not to panic, but it was difficult to avoid while floating weightless in the small area with only the lamp for light. Initially she’d been glad there wasn’t too much space to float in, but now it was becoming oppressive. And she was sure the air was starting to get stale, despite knowing that shouldn’t happen for some time yet.

Only her datapad told her it had been twenty minutes. To her it felt longer. Much longer. And even at twenty minutes it felt like it was taking a lot longer than it should. Not that the purge was ever going to be quick, the systems had to be stripped down layer by layer and then rebuilt the same way… but surely it hadn’t taken this long on the Vision?

Then again Paula had been with her back then. Thinking of the friend she might never see again gave Jenna a sharp pain in her chest. There wasn’t much back in the Sironus system that she truly felt a connection to, but Paula was high on that list.

The air was definitely tasting stale. Was it time to start making use of the oxygen bottle to freshen the air a little? Maybe… but the sooner she started the sooner it would run out.

She held out for another minute, then the tightness in her chest every time she took a breath forced her to let out a puff of the precious oxygen. It definitely helped… but was that just because she believed it would?

The problem was, if the air was growing stale then she’d struggle to really know it before it was affecting her thinking, and by that point she might not use the oxygen when she really needed to.

She checked the time. Just three more minutes had passed. She gritted her teeth, determined to hold out. Ten minutes she told herself. It can’t possibly take more than another ten minutes. I can hold out for that long. Ten minutes… and probably sooner.

* * * *

The ten minutes came and went, as did the next ten minutes. Jenna was certain it was getting colder now, and she was getting a headache again. Those were the least of her problems though. She was certain the reset had failed now. That meant she was on a dead ship with only her suit and the shuttle offering any chance of surviving in the short term, and no chance at all of surviving in the long term.

She felt curiously empty at the thought. She’d done all she could. The ship was unflyable without the reset, and it wasn’t as if she’d done anything wrong. There wasn’t anything to do wrong. The reset was binary — either it worked or it didn’t.

Or rather either it was started or it wasn’t. Deep down she’d feared that the reset might not work, that it might leave her stranded, and now it had.

That left her with three choices. Choose to die quickly, choose to die slowly, or try to maintain the fantasy that she could somehow get the ship working without any of the systems… which still equated to dying slowly.

Well, she had time to decide. Time was all she had now. Time and the chance for regrets… yet strangely they were evaporating. She might be about to die, but she’d done what she’d always dreamed of. She’d travelled through the Tagrale to another place, a totally different system. And one that seemed to be far away.

Maybe noone else would ever know she’d done it, but that wasn’t important. She knew. And if she had to die, this wasn’t such a bad place to do it. The only question now was how she would choose to go.