Memories flickered through her dreams. Her procedure. The new job offer. Boarding the ship. Her brain collating and organizing her thoughts while she slept. Dreams always seemed to be more intense in the multiplier field.
She heard a sound like a thousand doors being slammed shut all at once. Hypnagogic auditory hallucination? The feeling of falling. Surely just her mind playing tricks. Pain. The animal part of her that still remained began dripping epinephrine into her veins. The machines inside her flooded her head with neurotransmitters. Her eyes fluttered open.
In the dark a dull red light pulsed. She became aware of a terrible drone filling her head. The machines did their job and she snapped into focus. A warning. A klaxxon. A hull breach. She sat up.
Her bunkroom was trashed. The bunk itself ripped from the wall with debris and luggage pilled around her in one corner of the room. An internal diagnostic system reported a misalignment in her implanted spine and a dozen other more minor injuries. She could feel the vertebrae out of place. She braced herself against the far wall and a piece of shattered plastic from the murphy bunk and shoved her metallic spine back somewhere close to where it belonged.
She shuffled around in the luggage and pulled on some clothes and a pair of boots then grabbed her backpack and pried open the bunkroom door. The metal screeched under her grip and peeled away. She dropped her pack on the other side and crawled through after it. Lit only with reddish emergency lights, the hallway lined with bunkrooms in both directions was clogged with suitcases and slabs of plastic from the ceiling. The hallway itself was bent. All of the room doors were open and she saw neither signs of life nor corpses. An automated voice echoed in the desolation, just barely heard above the klaxxon's din.
"Please make for the escape pods in an orderly fashion."
The voice was disconcertingly posh and cheerful amid the chaos. But the advice seemed sound. The ship shuddered around her and a distant metallic scream rang through the bulkheads. The floor shifted, throwing her into a wall as the centrifuge slowed. She did not give herself the liberty of imagining what a million tonne wheel ripping off its axles would do to its occupants. A slight breeze down the hallway carried disembodied flower petals past her cheek. The air was getting noticeably thinner.
The exits were clearly marked but the door to the escape pod room stairwell was sealed shut. As were most other doors to the outer skin of the wheel. The damage had gotten progressively more intense the closer she got to the outer hull with dining halls sheared in half and corridors warped into quivering snakes. Her breathing was rapid and the nausea would have overwhelmed her if not for her augmentations. She broke open a wall-mounted first aid box and strapped on an oxygen mask inside. Her body regulated to the oxygen, but she was still suffering from the effects of decompression sickness.
With renewed vigor she prodded at the emergency exit door until she found a small label indicating the manual release was hidden beneath a panel. The hydraulic release valve hissed yet the door was wedged shut by the warped bulkhead around it. She gripped the handle of the door and planted her feet on the frame and pulled. She felt her artificial bones press against each other and her printed muscles strain. The heavy door slowly scraped away from the frame and the thin air rushed into the tiny gaps. A tendon snapped in her wrist. She heard it more than felt it. Like a whip crack. Another in her shoulder. That one she felt. Her eyes watered. The door groaned and came free as a harsh wind whipped past her. She pushed herself into the gap and the door slammed shut behind her.
The mask beeped quietly. Audible only through bone conduction. It was the low pressure warning. Her ears popped. Her eyes stung. She exhaled involuntarily. Her breath a fog of crystals that glinted in light from gaps in the hull below her. The light shafts moved as the centrifuge stubbornly continued to turn. Then she was plunged into darkness. The emergency lights had malfunctioned here or some other catastrophe had taken them out. The white walls were covered in white strips of aramid belts designed by an artist as an abstract installation, but the webbing was there because it was essential for climbing in microgravity. She climbed down the stairs, using the webbing for support. In the bright parts of the rotation she noticed that her vision was blurry. Her internal systems reported burst blood vessels. The oxygen mask was not designed for use in a vacuum and was draining rapidly. The floor suddenly leaped away from her and she clung to the wall webbing while the stairwell thrashed silently around her. The ship was seizing again. She didn't know how long the quake would last, so she forced herself to pull along the webbing. The artistic angles of the straps made it difficult to judge where the next best grip would be in the strobing dark and light and shaking.
She reached the bottom but the quaking continued while the plaintive cry of her oxygen mask announced that it was nearly spent. She swung herself over a rent in the floor and released the pressure door to the emergency exit.
Stars spun beneath her. The kind of infinite drop that an acrophobic only imagined was there yawning in front of her. There were so many reasons for her to be light headed and experiencing vertigo, she had no idea which was the cause of her feelings. The teeth of the starry expanse flashed white and red as the coach wheel spun towards the bright light that she had been seeing. She turned her eyes away expecting a nearby sun, but the flickering shadows made her cast a cautious eye towards it. She saw the engineering deck wreathed in blue-white flame.
The engineering deck was a long spine stretched along the outside edge of 3 counter-rotating passenger wheels. The multiplier engine somewhere in the middle of that iridescent aurora had been allowing the ship to transit at effectively supraluminal speeds. Undoubtedly a failure within had been the cause of her current situation.
She looked up from the billowing sparks and yellow afterimages danced in her vision. The light allowed her to see up the gutted corridor and to the one remaining escape pod at the far end, before the wheel's rotation plunged her into darkness once more. The other berths empty or torn away entirely. Her oxygen mask bleated a 10 second warning. She reached up to the aramid webbing across the ceiling. It had been white with red crisscrossing lines but now much of it was scorched and blackened and melted. She pulled at the webbing and swung herself across the starry void below. The anchor ripped away on one burned end and she fell for a terrifying moment before another mount bore her weight. She scrambled up the dangling web and over to the open escape pod door, reached down with her feet to brace herself around the frame and climbed in as the oxygen mask gave her a final breath. She pressed the door seal and pressurization controls and stuffs her pack into a corner before strapping into the inertia couch as the door closed. A rush of fresh air hit her and she became aware of a shadow that lifted as the color and sound returned to the world that she had not realized had gone. She tore the spent mask off and stuffed it into a compartment with one hand as the other punched up a local system map. She looked for a place to go. If there was any.
The local navigation chart provided to the pod by the ship while it was still functional only displayed a UUID. Not even a placeholder designation for the system. The ship had no idea where it was. There was no information on any other pods. But there was a planet just barely within range that had liquid water. Scans showed it was not traditionally habitable, but with some catalyst filters it should be possible to make the air breathable. With no other options in the system, even if the pod had had a greater range, she locked it in. She chose a site in what she hoped was the temperate band near a coast and what the incomplete scan data indicated as a drainage basin or river delta with moderate probability. The pod itself had very limited scanning capabilities and was only effective at short range, so she would have to wait until orbital insertion to see if she chose right. The pod would probably not be able to divert more than a couple hundred miles, even if the trajectory was accurate in the first place. She squinted at the stars for a glimpse of her destination, but it was indistinguishable from any of the other background stars gliding past. She tore off the safety panel and pulled the launch cord.
She felt the pod bounce off something as it launched from the berth and the stars spun. Some bit of debris must have been in the launch tube. The momentum of the centrifuge had thrown the pod towards the hellfire that had been the engineering deck. The pod's navigation system was refusing to activate until it had a firing solution. The blood rushed to her head as the pod spun and her consciousness threatened to red-out from the g-forces. The skeletal engineering deck filled the external view as the pod spun towards it. The computer asked for permission to use reaction control system without a firing solution and she fumbled for a control by her thigh, pressing several unseen and unknown buttons before the dialog accepted the input. Immediately she heard the hiss of the RCS vents and the spinning slowed. The computer came to a firing solution and dots appeared on the display. Arcs of flame from the ship's engines reached ever closer to the pod. External sensors flared a heat warning. The navigation computer asked for a destination confirmation, informing her that the planet had low survivability scores and was not a recommended destination. She drove her finger into the control input again. The pod relented and the main engines fired, shoving her towards her feet, but the couch and the straps held her tightly. She swore she saw one of the tendrils of the ship's aurora reach past her. The pod seemed to ripple. A brilliant explosion buffeted her pod.
The main engine burns vibrated the whole pod. She drifted in and out of restless sleep as her body attempted to repair itself. She was accelerating at around 1.5Gs. It was a big jump from the 0.24Gs that she had in her bunkroom near the central axle of the coach wheel on the ship. The pod computer informed her that she slept for 20 hours. Essentially standing up. She imagined that her old knees would have been offended by such treatment. But it was the least of her worries. She checked the pod's systems before her own.
The first thing she looked at was the pod's planned trajectory. It was going to be several months before reaching her destination. She groaned. They were way out of the plane of the ecliptic. If the ship hadn't already had the generally correct momentum her little pod would never had made it. In a few thousand years the ship might even break up in the same planet's atmosphere.
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