NationStates Jolt Archive

The day the last supply train arrived from Earth, Susan Lederman was rebuilding a robot. It was one of the old-fashioned DV series; large, clunky, and expensive; but it was the best they had and she knew that every minute it was out of action delayed the construction of Daled Base a little bit more. It was the kind of work she'd trained for, and which rarely came into use outside of the colonies because of the increasing prevalence of automated systems. The robot had broken down while constructing part of the outer wall; ordinarily that wouldn't require a full rebuild, but it had been tied to its scaffolding and when that gave way in Avalon's higher gravity it fell eighty feet onto the stone and metal foundations upon which the base was being constructed. Even then it had survived mostly intact, at which Lederman marveled; these things were two or three hundred years old and still functional, and so much more durable than the modern robots used dirtside.

The day hadn't been a remarkable one. Even the captain of the supply ship hadn't appeared to be aware that this would be the last time he'd be making this run; from what Commander Leroy of Avalon Spiral had recalled, the captain and his crew had bantered and traded mock insults as usual as they unloaded the supplies, and the supplies themselves had not contained anything out of the ordinary: food, medicine, spare parts, letters. And the departure was not considered problematic, for in case of emergencies, there was a fully functional vessel -- the RVSN Predatory Flamingo -- docked at the Spiral, with a Royal Navy crew and room for thousands of passengers. Even if the worst-case scenario happened and the colony had to be evacuated, the Navy could be called in to assist.

Nonetheless, that day -- technically the 17th of June, 4788, on Earth, although who knows what it really was here with the lightspeed delay -- would come to be rued by the colonists, although what Susan Lederman remembered much better was the next day, the day all the occupants of Daled Base were called into the main auditorium (still under construction) by Major Caleb Danforth, the base's commanding officer. She'd just finished fixing the DV90k, and had barely had time to change into clean clothing before the announcement came over the PA system: "All personnel to the auditorium at once, emergency briefing..." As she'd filed in among the other five hundred occupants of Daled Base she'd noticed that her hands were still dirty, with grease under the nails and dark splotches and stains left by some kind of chemical; safety equipment could be in short supply around here, but the Board of Health was almost entirely certain those chemicals didn't cause any deadly diseases, and out here (with men outnumbering women two to one) standards of attractiveness were greatly lowered, so it didn't really affect her much. She'd just wash them out later on.

Major Danforth had said that they'd lost contact with Earth. They were receiving "server stopped responding" messages and timeouts when they pinged its main banks with wormhole messages, and had tested the emergency broadcast system to no response; they had been alerted when a regular instacomm update was interrupted and plunged into static. It was possible that it was just an equipment malfunction, and if so, they'd get it repaired when next week's supply ship showed up; but he'd suggested that the colonists prepare to spend some time without Earthbound supplies. In particular, the major said, the research teams should redouble searches for food and natural components for whatever supplies they needed.

This hadn't really bothered Lederman. As a member of the engineering team she was part of a small group reassigned to building a 'bot that could process products of Avalon's rich biodiversity and determine whether they were safe for consumption. Such projects had been in the making for some time, but most of the analysis had been done so far by scientific teams, who made better time than the average 'bot. The challenge here was just building something more efficient than the last few tries. It was difficult but engaging work, enough so that she barely noticed when, a few days later, Spiral went offline too.

It was the same deal: radio contact was lost, the servers stopped responding to pings, and if the station had not still been visible in the sky one would have thought it ceased to exist at all. Except this time it also started a distress call, an SOS, cut off after only a few iterations. Lederman had heard of that and had assumed that whatever emergency had occurred had been brought under control. She was right. The question was, whose control.

In retrospect, she thought, as she counted the bullets she had left, maybe she should have wondered about that a little more. Maybe, if more people had reacted, the crew of Daled Base wouldn't be holed up in the half-completed basements, running low on supplies and wearing very little.

* * *

For the next thirty seconds we will be conducting a test of the emergency broadcast system....

The RVSN Predatory Flamingo drifted in space near the system's jump point. It would be redundant to say that it drifted silently, and inaccurate to say that it was listing; but, were space an ocean, it would be doing both. The orbit it maintained around Avalon's sun was irregular, and every orbit it made took it closer to the star itself, where it would eventually spiral into the star and burn into nothingness.

... either the captain or the main AI will use this space to issue a brief description of the problem, followed by a continuation of...

Inside, conditions were unusually harsh, because the cooling systems were operating below power. The temperature was about ninety degrees Fahrenheit, rising slowly; and over a hundred and ten in compartments that received the direct light of the Sun. It was also a little drier than usual, as though something had soaked up most of the water vapor in the atmosphere; humidity was probably fifteen per cent below normal, or even more.

...In case of life support failure, the lockers contain space suits with oxygen supplies and weighted boots. Also note the location of the escape pods, which are located along the central passageway between the bridge and Engineering.

The artificial gravity was still active, usually being among the last few systems to fail, so the streams of viscous blood trickled down along the floor, moving slowly; kept liquid only by the heat. The starship's crew was dead, or nearly so; many of their corpses were charred beyond recognition, or sliced and mangled hideously, as by many swords. The lights had mostly failed, but it couldn't have been just that that seemed to rob all colour from the scenes of carnage; even the blood appeared a dull grey. The passageway leading up to the escape pods was strewn with the dead, expressions of sheer terror frozen on their faces; the escape pods themselves were missing, but no Vojvodina-Nihonians had escaped with them.

The main computers recorded the starship's final message: a distress call, cut off after the second broadcast, and followed by the universal "everything's fine" signal. With the main jump point out of commission, it would be a day or two before the signals were anywhere close to being received. And every five minutes or so, the emergency broadcast system repeated its message.

This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. This is only a test. If this were a real emergency, you would all be dead now.


I hate disrupting the flow with these little OOC notes, but this one's kind of necessary. This is an open RP, to a point. The number of participants will be capped, eventually, assuming this gets off the ground at all; and only those who can write halfway decently will be accepted. I will accept that a maximum of one foreign ship intercepts the SOS and comes to investigate. Everyone else has a choice of being a colonist, a Royal Navy crewman, or one of the station personnel. The goal: Survive, and find out exactly what's going on.

Also, no more OOC in this thread. If you have any OOC questions or concerns, direct them to me via TG or MSN. Kthxbai.

The darkness was almost palpable. The Avalonian night had fallen, a hundred and ten of Earth's hours long, and its gloomiest hours were dark indeed, especially with most of the electric lights burnt out. Here on the ruins of Daled Base there were not the sounds of the forest, where strange night-birds trilled eerie songs to the distant moon and sometimes a twig snapped as a chupacabra prowled the forests silently in search of rodentine prey; there was only a very distant and high-pitched hum, the frequency of which changed every now and then like a doppler. Susan Lederman counted the bullets again: not enough. It was time to leave.

Darkness this severe has its monsters like darkness anywhere. Most of the time only in the minds of the people trapped in it. But these monsters were real, they were unknowable, and they had the ultimate psychological effect on the few thousand human beings occupying Avalon's surface. Cut off from any assistance, with their modern technology, their computers, the very fabric that made up their clothing abandoning them in their hour of need -- these humans had only their natural abilities to keep them alive, and sometimes, it didn't seem like those were all too impressive.

Lederman cinched the utility belt tighter around her waist and around the converted shower curtain that she used as clothing and to conceal most of the burns and scars she'd sustained. They were still visible on her arms and face and feet; there was blood encrusted under her fingernails, mostly her own, and a gaping wound on the side of her face, the pain of which the Bowen's leaves had mostly dulled. As she raised herself and prepared to run back to safety, the hum suddenly increased in volume, and she threw herself to the ground again to avoid something that whooshed past just over her head with a deadly scream of blades. As it went past again she fired twice and missed both times. The explosions resounded. She cursed under her breath: bullets, like everything else, had to be rationed.

The flying object was a metal dinner plate. But those plates appeared to have had their edges honed to fine monomolecular points. Plate-Thrower was relatively harmless; relatively being the operative term. She ran.

There were no lights; she oriented herself by the position of the wall, turned down another passageway, and put on a turn of speed, even though it wouldn't help if Plate-Thrower decided to follow her. And indeed, on the shot-out screens at the end of the passageway she could see pictures trying to manifest themselves, electric connections attempting to be re-forged. Her goal was the door in between the screens. It led into one of the strongrooms, which had four walls. Four walls of metal. There was something about places with four walls; they couldn't get into them, which was why they tried to destroy them. But strongrooms were too tough to destroy; they could withstand nuclear blasts. As she approached the door it opened for her.

That in itself was already wrong. She halted once inside to stare at Marks, a fellow engineer, wearing a plastic loincloth created from interior wall material; he was equally disheveled and bloodied, and he seemed unnaturally glad to see her. She slammed the door behind her.

"You're finally back, Susan. Find anything?"

"No, I--" She started. Everyone on the team referred to her as Lederman. And they were still working on understanding human psychology. She fired a single shot into Marks' head. It was a high-caliber bullet; the hole it blasted in his head was sufficient to blow his brains and cranial fluid across the room. Even as she brought her gun around he leaped for her; now, lacking a brain, he staggered forward a little further, produced a strange half-moan, half-gurgle from a shattered throat, then collapsed. For the next few minutes he would continue to make jerky convulsions while his blood spilled upon the steel floors, but they couldn't reanimate his body out here, because except in the bodies of humans they couldn't penetrate the rooms.

Lederman sat down heavily, facing her fellow refugees. She was very tired and, when the Bowen's leaves ran out, the pain was excruciating. Marks had been of invaluable assistance designing the plant analyzer, and his sense of humour had enlivened many a company discussion. And somewhere under the personality of the monster who'd taken over his body his original mind had survived, bound and helpless, watching impotently as his body was used to destroy everything he'd ever worked for.

"Nothing," Lederman said. "No food, no medicine, nothing. Some crates, but they'd been burnt away mostly. We'll have to leave this place."

There was silence for a moment in the vault, as the survivors sat around a few lanterns that were their only source of light. Around them piles of boxes, mostly empty, reached high into the darkness. Many of them were staring at the man Lederman had just killed, or what had once been a man.

"He went out for only a moment," a very young man, somewhere shy of twenty, offered. He was missing an eye and several fingers. "To check on the situation in the other vault. We didn't notice anything different."

"They're learning," Lederman said. "Someday soon they'll get too smart for either of us. We have to get out now, or within the next day or two. Head for one of the other bases, see if anyone's still alive and, more importantly, if they have any supplies left."

They nodded. They'd all been saying it for days. But nobody had done anything about it.

"And I think I know how we can do it. It won't be easy, though. We might lose people."

Silence.

"We'll need a tank."

Silence.

"And someone to pilot it. Someone who will, most probably, die. Horribly."

Silence, but a general stirring.

"Don't worry too much about that part, though. Here's my general idea...."

Every darkness has its monsters. But in the long Avalonian night, the Vojvodina-Nihonian survivors of Daled Base had given up their own. They had very little to lose, and nothing to gain by fighting one another. So they worked together, as they should have done a gal-standard week ago, when the monsters first came.