1 The Crash That Changed Everything

"Occupant vitals critical. Dispensing…"

Shara woke with a start as the stimulants kicked in. To her surprise, there wasn't a welcoming party here to greet her, as she had expected. She must have crashed down. She didn't feel anywhere near safe, but at least she wasn't dead from the impact. Shara unbuckled the straps holding her to the escape pod's lone seat, and then sat back in pain.

"Uugh, everything hurts." She groaned.

The suit's AI started running again as Shara started to move. It recognized it would be able to sap energy from her movement to charge. Shara wriggled her fingers and toes, trying to regain feeling. Slowly, her limbs began to tingle. She sighed, now at least she knew her body was at least intact. She waited in suspense almost expecting to feel blood running down her body. She hurt way too much for her body to be wound-free. As she warmed and the pain killers began to kick in, she relaxed. Her armor had done its' job well.

"Deprioritizing rescue beacon… Booting… Welcome back to the land of the living, Lieutenant Shara." Valkyr said, her suit's AI said as she began moving and charging the suit's internal batteries.

"Thank you, Valkyr." She breathed as she started to move her head. She looked through her helmet and saw that her escape pod was intact as well. For the most part. "Now, where are we?" she asked.

"Our current location is unknown. I currently do not have access to any navigational nodes, nor is there any current method to ascertain our position due to the position of stellar bodies. However, we are located in a stellar body in the Namo star sector."

"Did you just say, 'in the Namo star sector'?"

"Correct."

Shara finally managed to sit up further, painfully at first, and then less so as the suit's interfaces started to dispense high dosages of painkillers. Her wrecked escape pod burned slowly outside the confines of the pilot's seat, while tons of text scrolled by on the screens on the left-hand and several emergency warnings echoed them on the right-hand screen.

Shara reached out with her right hand and turned off the warnings. The pod couldn't move on its own anyways, and she wanted to use the computer systems to see what had happened.

"Valkyr, help me with pulling up the logs. I want to see how we got here before the fires burn out the batteries or the computer systems."

"Sure thing, Shara."

The right monitor exploded into a map screen, showing hundreds of data plots and their trajectories. It started back when the pod ejected from the cruiser she had been an officer aboard. There was a highlighted trajectory that was designated as her pod.

"This trajectory makes no sense, by any means I should be in the same system still and waiting for a pickup!"

Indeed, the trajectory of her pod would have taken her towards the star of the system and used its mass to eject her towards the nearest planet in the system, if only to put it in orbit there and leave her in cryostasis until someone picked her up.

Instead, her trajectory had went balls up and sent her into a nearby asteroid belt!

"Valkyr, what's our current gravity?"

"One point one times terran standard."

"Artificial or actual?"

"As far as I can tell, actual."

Shara's suit overlay finally came up, showing her status and vitals. She had a few minor injuries, but nothing broken. Apparently, she was just sore. Pretty good, considering the pod must have malfunctioned.

Turning her attention back to the screen, she studied her trajectory as it got further from the star and got closer to the asteroid belt. After it reached about halfway through the belt, the trajectory became nearly linear for a moment before the limited processing power of the pod had stopped being able to compute their path.

"Valkyr, what's your analysis? I know you kept running after the ship went down and I went unconscious."

"I disabled most of the pod's internal and external sensors when the trajectory became abnormal. It was essential to conserve the battery to keep you in stasis."

"How long was I out?"

"Three months, five days, and 16 hours. The external atmosphere has been analyzed. Advise you put your helmet on and seal up, Shara. Oxygen values in the pod are decreasing at an exceptional rate."

Shara put her helmet on and began going through the checklist of items that made sure her armor was airtight. Valkyr continued to monologue in the background as she went through the list, all the while listening to the pod smolder through the helmet's external microphones.

"...External atmosphere composition 96% Carbon Dioxide, 2% Nitrogen, 2% Argon. Traces of oxygen discovered, presumably from the pod O-2 supplies. Pod door is clear. Shara, do the honors."

Shara reached over to the control panel to her upper left, and pressed the door eject. The pod shuddered as the hydraulic lift for the door engaged and lifted the heavy, nearly destroyed door. As far as anyone was concerned, it had done its job well. It's ragged shape, nearly melted by the heat of reentry and the subsequent crash, was almost artistically shaped, Shara thought as she slowly stepped out of the pod and onto the hard, metallic floor under it.

Wait. Metallic flooring.

Shara immediately turned on all of the lights on the exterior of her armor, allowing her to see, among other things, the hard, almost organic looking metal floor beneath her.

"Where...am I?"

Turning around to get at the emergency supplies in the escape pod, she grabbed what little was salvageable and immediately useful. She scavenged a little bit of food, not that she could eat it right now anyways with the external atmosphere being mostly carbon dioxide, and her trusty bullpup assault rifle, as well as several magazines. Being an infantry scale railgun weapon, at least she knew it had a good punch, as well as enough charge to be of at least minor use against whatever she found in here.

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