Chapter 3
645 Words
Chapter 3
Fifteen years ago
There are three basic things they teach at the Academy when it comes to survival, food, water, and shelter. I added a fourth to the list, air. I need air and life support, and I need it right now.
This ship carried both a shuttle and a small runabout. Those should be in the hangar bay. The trouble was getting to the hangar bay with all this wreckage in the way.
Either of those small ships could help to save my life. They were both equipped with independent life support systems.
The main hatch from the engineering space used to be right front of me. There was now an extensive hole located there. I guessed it was only luck the hole didn’t bisect the ship and kill me.
“The next time someone offers to show you around the ship, let them, you i***t,” I muttered. Talking to yourself is a sure sign you are going insane. At least it’s what I have been told.
I‘d only been on this ship for less than a month. Since I was this big, bad engineer, I didn’t need directions. Hindsight just sucks!
It felt like I crawled through the wreckage for hours before I found the C.I.C. room. I located a copy of the ship schematics on the computer. I wasted another precious hour of air navigating through the access ducts that crisscrossed our ship.
Finally, I reached the hangar bay, but my air supply was nearly depleted. My readout informed me I was down to thirty minutes of life. Panicked, I scrambled across some bent, and twisted bulkhead supports spotting a nearby fire locker. Inside I found several air cartridges. I finally had more air for a little while.
Thanks to space gods and FSM. Both ships were still in the hangar bay. Unfortunately, only the runabout was of any use. A large section of bulkhead had fallen crushing the shuttle flat to the deck.
I had cleared some of the fallen equipment away, enabling me to open the hatch and crawl into the runabout. Breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was a small matter to engage life support. Finally being able to breathe clean air was a miracle. I took off my skin suit and helmet. Three days with a suit on can make you a bit rank.
The runabout should be able to transport me to the construction site. The hidden station we had been building had plenty of supplies in it already. It appeared those supplies would be needed.
The runabout could not leave the system. No interstellar drive on something this small. I could use impulse speed, but it would take around fifty years to get home. Unless I could find something in the wreckage of the other ships, it looked like I was stuck in this sector!
The asteroid station’s life support was still on, and the compartments had air. The long-term supplies were in storage pods waiting to be deployed, so I had my food, water, shelter, and air covered. I’d helped build this base, so I knew where everything was in it. One huge problem, damn it! No communications. They had been scheduled to be installed later this week. The parts and sections of the system were now spread throughout the nebula. The ship they were on had been utterly destroyed in one of the nuclear explosions that claimed the fleet.
Several over-sized construction drones sat piled near the entrance. Those may be useful, I thought to myself. The Tesla had a pretty good engineering and technical library. If it had survived, I might have something to pass the time with.
I opened the main door to the base and looked around. Lots of boxes and cartons scattered around, but everything looked to still be in place. I got settled into my new home and went to work.
I was an Engineer. Let’s go, engineer, something!
- Writer
