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“Alright, Ollo, on three.”
[Affirmative.]
“One... two... THREE!”
With a grunt of exertion, Jess threw his weight against the handle of his prybar, while Ollo pulled upwards with whatever force his hydraulic suspensions could muster. Jess’s heavy breathing mixed with the high-pitched whine of Ollo’s motors and the metallic screeches of the doors they were trying to breaking open.
They had been hammering away at this port for the last half hour by now. They had to break into the ship to find if there were any survivors.
That is, if the survivors haven’t suffocated, burned, or bled to death yet.
“Damnit!” Jess cussed, redoubling his efforts. “Open, you fu-”
CLANG!
A chunk of steel plating wrenched free from the door, skittering across the ground. A gout of fire belched from the gaping wound, singing the hairs off of Jess’ forearms. He fell backwards with a surprised, strangled yelp.
Ollo stepped out of the conflagration, its plasteel skin singed. The nanobots on its arms formed into nozzles as boiling hydraulic fluid hissed out of the vents on its back. Its screen currently displayed a yellow exclamation point.
[Temperature of 2,000 Standard Galactic Degrees detected. Commencing fire hazard removal method.]
Pointing its arms towards the fire, Ollo fearlessly waded into the flames, fire-suppressant pumping out of its rear tanks and spewing out of its newly-formed nozzles. The billowing cloud of soot and smoke thrown up by Ollo’s battle with the flames made Jess gag.
“H-Hey!” Jess yelled, amidst a fit of coughing. “Don’t just walk into the fire like that! It’s bad for your armor!”
[Threat deemed sufficiently hazardous. High potential risk-reward value.] Ollo’s voice wafted from the crackling blaze.
Looking towards the inferno inside the ship, Jess sighed and steeled his nerves. He reached for his pocket extinguisher and thumbed it on.
“Frikkin’... well, looks like I’ve got no choice. If there’s someone alive in there...”
Without a second thought, Jess jammed down the button on his extinguisher and dove into the flames.
Jess winced as the regenerative nanobot mist enveloped his arm. It felt about as pleasant as a trillion microscopic needles stabbing him at the same time, repeatedly.
“We are never doing that again.” He managed to croak, as the nanobots hyper-accelerated his epidermal growth. Pale skin crept over the blackened flesh on his arms as the muscles slowly reformed. Jess gasped as his nerve endings healed and reconnected; the sensation of pain flooded into his mind, ten times stronger.
[Task was vital/urgent.] Ollo asserted, a small cloud of nanobots hovering about the exposed patches of grey flesh, hard at work. [High potential risk-reward value.]
“You’ve got balls.” Jess groaned, forcing out a tight-lipped grin.
Ollo tilted its dome-head downwards a few degrees, attempting to replicate a human nod.
[Compliment appreciated]
Jess nodded in return, grimacing as the medbots continued repairing his burnt flesh.
‘Can’t believe they don’t use anesthesia or something.’ Jess mused under his breath. ‘woulda made this whole healing process about a million times nicer. Then again, there was something about how anesthesia numbs reflexes or something, and that could be disastrous if-’
[Ensign Jess.]
Jess blinked hard. Ollo almost never initiated a conversation. This was most certainly important.
“Yeah?”
[High potential risk-reward value.]
Jess sighed. Maybe the heat had fried some of the Engi’s motherboards or something. Small glitches like these happened occasionally.
“Yes, I know,” Jess reassured. “I’m glad you gave it-”
Ollo’s “face” flickered to blackness. Moments later, a line of text flashed across the screen.
[Recording 001051 (ALPHA PRIORITY). Playback protocols commencing.]
Jess watched the words on the screen transformed into a burning hellscape: Ollo had recorded its passage through the ship, apparently. Jess recognized some of the places Ollo trundled through, though he didn’t get nearly as deep into the ship as Ollo did. Perhaps Ollo was trying to recreate a map of ship’s interior as it cleared the fires in the corridors.
But there was some status text in the upper right hand corner of the screen which caught Jess by surprise.
“FRIENDLY LIFE SIGN DETECTED,” it read.
“Oh.” Jess muttered. “So that’s why you went in.”
Jess watched as Ollo waded through the burning interior. The doors inside the ship itself were little more than melted slag. It didn’t take much time or effort for Ollo to rip open any obstructions with its stout arms. Ollo’s biosigns started to fluctuate, but it continued into the fires, getting ever closer to the Federation Life Sign.
On-screen, Ollo crashed his way into yet another chamber. The fires seemed less intense, and the heat readings on Ollo’s HUD immediately spiked downwards. After a few controlled puffs from Ollo’s fire suppression nozzles, the fires were doused.
The room was a cockpit... and there was a man sitting at the helm.
Just looking at the survivor made Jess sick to the stomach. Blisters and blackened flesh covered his body. Yet, even though the man’s uniform was charred and ripped, he could spot the glinting stars and bars of a Federation Rear Admiral.
“Holy shit...” Jess whispered.
Ollo approached the Rear Admiral and placed some of its appendages on the man’s throat and legs. He had a feeble pulse, and his blood oxygen percentage was critically low.
In the corner of the small screen, the phrase “DEATH IMMINENT” blinked on and off, on and off...
The man’s eyes glinted as he weakly turned to face Ollo. “I am... Rear Admiral... Willson.” Willson croaked, his eyelids fluttering. “Per Federation Military... Code 42 Subsection B… you... and Ensign Jess... all personnel in this station... are conscripted to Project... Archangel.”
[Speech extrapolation: “Per Federation Military Code 42, Subsection B, you, Ensign Jess, and all personnel in this station have been conscripted into Project Archangel.”] Ollo interjected.
“Right.” Jess grimly murmured in reply. “I got that.”
The recording continued. Jess forced himself to watch as Willson desperately clung to his life.
“This ship... her name is... the Potential. Mission parameters... over there.”
A sudden coughing fit shook the Rear Admiral’s body. His vitals dipped even lower. He managed to lift one of his arms, his hand limply gesturing towards one of the few unmelted consoles.
“Jess… Engi... the Federation... depends on you… this ship. The reactor core… experimental. One of a kind. Go to stores… upgrade... get stronger.”
In a sudden - and final - burst of strength, Wilson lunged off his chair and gripped Ollo’s shoulders in a dead man’s grip, leaning his scorched visage against the Engi’s chest.
“This ship… she can do anything… infinite… Potential.”
Ollo’s recording followed Willson as the man slumped to the ground, dying eyes fixed on the Engi’s viewscreen. His final words were little more than mere whispers… a plea.
“Save our Federation.”
“I can’t do this.”
Ollo tracked Jess with its visual sensors as the panicked Ensign paced the hangar bay, agitated.
“I can’t do this!” Jess continued to rant. “I’ve never piloted anything bigger than a goddamn shuttle! How are just two of us supposed to man a heavy cruiser?!”
[Unknown.] Ollo replied, after a short pause.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Jess huffed. “Real reassuring. Do you even know how to repair this thing?”
Ollo’s screen displayed a three-dimensional model of the Potential, the damaged parts of the ship highlighted red. On the screen, the entire ship was encased in blaring crimson and vibrant oranges, almost as if the Potential was covered in its own blood.
To say that she was in bad shape would be a gross understatement.
[Affirmative. Structure integrity: extremely critical. Weapon status: destroyed. Weapon mount D destroyed-- no chance of repair. FTL Engines offline. Impulse engines: extremely critical. Sensors offline. Reactors at Na/N power outpu-]
“I don’t need the details.” Jess cut him off brusquely. “Go ahead and fix her up. Use the sysrep bot if you have to, and pull whatever metal plating we have left in storage. I’ve gotta read up on how to pilot this hunk of junk.”
[Affirmative.] Ollo obediently strode towards The Potential’s gashed fuselage, appendages already morphing into wrenches and buzz saws. Small laser cutters mounted atop Ollo’s shoulders scored the Potential’s metal skin, marking damaged armor plates for replacement.
Jess spared a gaze at the cruiser. Though her body was melted and rent with holes, Jess couldn’t help but admire the Potential’s robust design. Like all Federation Ships-of-the-Line, the Potential was built, first and foremost, to take a beating and live to tell the tale. Though most of the external armor plates had been vaporized, the cross-bracings and hydraulic reinforcements within formed a incredibly durable metallic honeycomb. The rear-mounted engines were Thurston Mk. IIs: old and outdated, but steadfastly reliable. They were the same engines attached to the now-decommissioned Kestrel-Class Light Cruisers.
Sparks showered from the side of the Potential as Ollo began to melt away some of the jagged edges, using one arm as a blowtorch, the other as an arc welder. The harsh light the tools emitted threw long ghostly shadows against the precision-milled walls of Station Kepler-19’s Repair Bay Number 7.
“The late Rear Admiral said something about this ship’s reactor being special.” Jess mused, watching his Engi companion work. “That might explain why they attached the Kestrel’s underslung cargo bay. Maybe they needed all that space.”
“Hey, Ollo!” Jess called out, spectral reverberations of his voice echoing through the hangar. “Couldja scan the fuselage, try to find out where that reactor is? The Admiral said there was something special about it.”
Ollo obediently stopped his repairs to make a pass over the midsection of the ship with his scanner suite... before pausing briefly halfway through the scan.
[Error.]
“That ain’t good.”
Jess’ quip went unheard. Ollo edged yet closer to the fuselage, splaying a hundred different kinds of probes across the metal skin.
[Analysing... Stand by.]
“Uh, what’s the matter?” Jess inquired, agitated. “Is the reactor busted or something?”
[Stand by.]
Jess furrowed his brow. “Stand by? So basically you’re telling me to fuck off-”
[Affirmative.]
“-and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Jess finished with an indignant frown. “Have fun scanning... or whatever the hell it is that you’re doing.”
No response, aside from the gentle whirrs of Ollo’s precision servos making micro adjustments on its innumerable, feathery scanner probes. Jess swore that if Ollo had a face, it would be locked into a grimace of concentration.
Jess rolled his eyes and returned to the lone table, sitting squat at the end of Repair Bay 7. The brass didn’t have the resources to crew their ships, let alone furnish every room. Jess was fortunate enough to requisition a table and chair for his station, two standard galactic years ago.
The Standard-Issue Instructional Pamphlet, or SIP, laid open on the table, on page 54.
Jess didn’t understand why the ship-jockeys called it a pamphlet. It was about as thick as a Zoltan Peacekeeper’s Archive-Tome... and it made about as much sense as one.
“Chapter Two. Applications of Stochastic Pavel-Boytz Quanta in Multidimensional Spatial Differentials.”
“Great.” Jess muttered, his voice suffused with baleful sarcasm. “My favorite.”
“A complete and comprehensive understanding of this material is crucial for basic maneuvers in zero-gee, three-dimensional movement blah blah blah, yada yada yada, unhealthy dose of numbers-and-symbols-you-couldn’t-possibly-understand.”
“I can’t fuckin’ read this.” Jess sighed, rubbing his temples and staring at the ceiling in resignation. “It’s useless. It makes no sense. Fuck you, Pavel. Fuck you, too, Boytz.”
He idly flipped through the arcane pages again, blankly gazing at the far wall and the warship... his warship.
“It can’t be too different from a shuttle...” Jess hypothesized to himself; a vain hope, perhaps, but justified. “Feet on the pedals. One hand on the throttle, one hand on the directional thruster stick, and hold ‘em steady. Just have to learn how to handle those mystery buttons and flashing panels... and lasers flying into my face.”
In his mind’s eye, he saw snippets of propaganda he was shown as a child. The brief scenes of space warfare he remembered were intense and fast-paced. Laser bolts, high-intensity cutting beams, and heavy missiles streaking across the screen: a latticework of high-energy lethality. The ships were tiny, glinting dots in the blackspace, juking and jinking, flipping and gracefully arcing in impossible-looking trajectories, each soaring past superheated bolts of plasma and unleashing hellish fusillades from mighty weapon batteries.
Jess glanced at the Potential again. She looked about as maneuverable as a flying office building. The power-weight-balance ratio seemed way off... unless there was some sort of absurdly large mass anchored to the middle of the ship.
Which was, again, where the supposed “special reactor” was stored. Key word: supposed. Judging from Ollo’s reticence, the Engi hadn’t yet discovered anything.
Had it?
“Ollo? Didja find anything important?”
… Where did it go?
“Ollo...?”
Jess stood and briskly strode towards the Cruiser, when he felt a slight tremor under his feet.
Something that could cause a thousand-ton space station to shiver, even slightly, was cause for concern.
The shaking intensified, as the lights above fluctuated in intensity, flaring white, then cooling to dim blues and reds. Clouds of soot and smoke billowed out of the Potential’s Thurston Mk. IIs.
“What the... hell is goin’ on!” Jess yelled, lunging into a sprint...
But his feet never made contact with the ground. Jess found himself drifting forwards in frictionless zero-gee.
“Shit!” Jess cussed, flailing his arms, hoping to grab onto a handhold. “Ollo! What the fuck did you do?!”
The Potential’s battered hull came closer and closer. Jess tucked in his legs and spun; a maneuver he had practiced in spacewalking class. He extended his arms, slowing the spin... and managed to grab hold one of the Potential’s exposed cross-braces.
Tools and components drifted upwards, almost gracefully. The system repair bot remained attached to the station floor by its lone, magnetic wheel. The bot diligently roved about, collecting what tools it could, utterly indifferent towards the sudden lack of gravity... an indifference Jess currently envied.
Jess noted, with no small amount of annoyance, that the Standard Instructional Pamphlet was hovering above the table, its pages fanning out in the zero-gee.
“Damn.” Jess muttered. “Shoulda bookmarked.”
Clank.
Jess felt intense vertigo in the pits of his stomach.
Clank. Clink. Clank.
The tools were falling to the ground. Wrenches and I-beams alike clattered as they slammed into the floor.
The Station’s Gravity Generator was coming back online.
Jess felt the air rush upwards. He grabbed the metal rod tighter and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for impact...
A/N:
There. Chapter 2’s a bit short, but I felt that I should’ve finished it sometime or later. Just a little continuation on the previous chapter. We’ll be getting out into blackspace soon enough, comrades! Don’t you fret!
Big thanks to one Sacrom, who helped edit this chapter so that it looks better than what it was previously. As opposed to making it look worse. God Damn, you’re stupid, Alias.
(Sacrom would also like to stress the importance of bookmarking your goddamn pages.)
That is all. See you all next time.
-Alias Maxima

Description
body div#devskin0 hr { }

“Alright, Ollo, on three.”
[Affirmative.]
“One... two... THREE!”
With a grunt of exertion, Jess threw his weight against the handle of his prybar, while Ollo pulled upwards with whatever force his hydraulic suspensions could muster. Jess’s heavy breathing mixed with the high-pitched whine of Ollo’s motors and the metallic screeches of the doors they were trying to breaking open.
They had been hammering away at this port for the last half hour by now. They had to break into the ship to find if there were any survivors.
That is, if the survivors haven’t suffocated, burned, or bled to death yet.
“Damnit!” Jess cussed, redoubling his efforts. “Open, you fu-”
CLANG!
A chunk of steel plating wrenched free from the door, skittering across the ground. A gout of fire belched from the gaping wound, singing the hairs off of Jess’ forearms. He fell backwards with a surprised, strangled yelp.
Ollo stepped out of the conflagration, its plasteel skin singed. The nanobots on its arms formed into nozzles as boiling hydraulic fluid hissed out of the vents on its back. Its screen currently displayed a yellow exclamation point.
[Temperature of 2,000 Standard Galactic Degrees detected. Commencing fire hazard removal method.]
Pointing its arms towards the fire, Ollo fearlessly waded into the flames, fire-suppressant pumping out of its rear tanks and spewing out of its newly-formed nozzles. The billowing cloud of soot and smoke thrown up by Ollo’s battle with the flames made Jess gag.
“H-Hey!” Jess yelled, amidst a fit of coughing. “Don’t just walk into the fire like that! It’s bad for your armor!”
[Threat deemed sufficiently hazardous. High potential risk-reward value.] Ollo’s voice wafted from the crackling blaze.
Looking towards the inferno inside the ship, Jess sighed and steeled his nerves. He reached for his pocket extinguisher and thumbed it on.
“Frikkin’... well, looks like I’ve got no choice. If there’s someone alive in there...”
Without a second thought, Jess jammed down the button on his extinguisher and dove into the flames.
Jess winced as the regenerative nanobot mist enveloped his arm. It felt about as pleasant as a trillion microscopic needles stabbing him at the same time, repeatedly.
“We are never doing that again.” He managed to croak, as the nanobots hyper-accelerated his epidermal growth. Pale skin crept over the blackened flesh on his arms as the muscles slowly reformed. Jess gasped as his nerve endings healed and reconnected; the sensation of pain flooded into his mind, ten times stronger.
[Task was vital/urgent.] Ollo asserted, a small cloud of nanobots hovering about the exposed patches of grey flesh, hard at work. [High potential risk-reward value.]
“You’ve got balls.” Jess groaned, forcing out a tight-lipped grin.
Ollo tilted its dome-head downwards a few degrees, attempting to replicate a human nod.
[Compliment appreciated]
Jess nodded in return, grimacing as the medbots continued repairing his burnt flesh.
‘Can’t believe they don’t use anesthesia or something.’ Jess mused under his breath. ‘woulda made this whole healing process about a million times nicer. Then again, there was something about how anesthesia numbs reflexes or something, and that could be disastrous if-’
[Ensign Jess.]
Jess blinked hard. Ollo almost never initiated a conversation. This was most certainly important.
“Yeah?”
[High potential risk-reward value.]
Jess sighed. Maybe the heat had fried some of the Engi’s motherboards or something. Small glitches like these happened occasionally.
“Yes, I know,” Jess reassured. “I’m glad you gave it-”
Ollo’s “face” flickered to blackness. Moments later, a line of text flashed across the screen.
[Recording 001051 (ALPHA PRIORITY). Playback protocols commencing.]
Jess watched the words on the screen transformed into a burning hellscape: Ollo had recorded its passage through the ship, apparently. Jess recognized some of the places Ollo trundled through, though he didn’t get nearly as deep into the ship as Ollo did. Perhaps Ollo was trying to recreate a map of ship’s interior as it cleared the fires in the corridors.
But there was some status text in the upper right hand corner of the screen which caught Jess by surprise.
“FRIENDLY LIFE SIGN DETECTED,” it read.
“Oh.” Jess muttered. “So that’s why you went in.”
Jess watched as Ollo waded through the burning interior. The doors inside the ship itself were little more than melted slag. It didn’t take much time or effort for Ollo to rip open any obstructions with its stout arms. Ollo’s biosigns started to fluctuate, but it continued into the fires, getting ever closer to the Federation Life Sign.
On-screen, Ollo crashed his way into yet another chamber. The fires seemed less intense, and the heat readings on Ollo’s HUD immediately spiked downwards. After a few controlled puffs from Ollo’s fire suppression nozzles, the fires were doused.
The room was a cockpit... and there was a man sitting at the helm.
Just looking at the survivor made Jess sick to the stomach. Blisters and blackened flesh covered his body. Yet, even though the man’s uniform was charred and ripped, he could spot the glinting stars and bars of a Federation Rear Admiral.
“Holy shit...” Jess whispered.
Ollo approached the Rear Admiral and placed some of its appendages on the man’s throat and legs. He had a feeble pulse, and his blood oxygen percentage was critically low.
In the corner of the small screen, the phrase “DEATH IMMINENT” blinked on and off, on and off...
The man’s eyes glinted as he weakly turned to face Ollo. “I am... Rear Admiral... Willson.” Willson croaked, his eyelids fluttering. “Per Federation Military... Code 42 Subsection B… you... and Ensign Jess... all personnel in this station... are conscripted to Project... Archangel.”
[Speech extrapolation: “Per Federation Military Code 42, Subsection B, you, Ensign Jess, and all personnel in this station have been conscripted into Project Archangel.”] Ollo interjected.
“Right.” Jess grimly murmured in reply. “I got that.”
The recording continued. Jess forced himself to watch as Willson desperately clung to his life.
“This ship... her name is... the Potential. Mission parameters... over there.”
A sudden coughing fit shook the Rear Admiral’s body. His vitals dipped even lower. He managed to lift one of his arms, his hand limply gesturing towards one of the few unmelted consoles.
“Jess… Engi... the Federation... depends on you… this ship. The reactor core… experimental. One of a kind. Go to stores… upgrade... get stronger.”
In a sudden - and final - burst of strength, Wilson lunged off his chair and gripped Ollo’s shoulders in a dead man’s grip, leaning his scorched visage against the Engi’s chest.
“This ship… she can do anything… infinite… Potential.”
Ollo’s recording followed Willson as the man slumped to the ground, dying eyes fixed on the Engi’s viewscreen. His final words were little more than mere whispers… a plea.
“Save our Federation.”
“I can’t do this.”
Ollo tracked Jess with its visual sensors as the panicked Ensign paced the hangar bay, agitated.
“I can’t do this!” Jess continued to rant. “I’ve never piloted anything bigger than a goddamn shuttle! How are just two of us supposed to man a heavy cruiser?!”
[Unknown.] Ollo replied, after a short pause.
“Yeah. Thanks.” Jess huffed. “Real reassuring. Do you even know how to repair this thing?”
Ollo’s screen displayed a three-dimensional model of the Potential, the damaged parts of the ship highlighted red. On the screen, the entire ship was encased in blaring crimson and vibrant oranges, almost as if the Potential was covered in its own blood.
To say that she was in bad shape would be a gross understatement.
[Affirmative. Structure integrity: extremely critical. Weapon status: destroyed. Weapon mount D destroyed-- no chance of repair. FTL Engines offline. Impulse engines: extremely critical. Sensors offline. Reactors at Na/N power outpu-]
“I don’t need the details.” Jess cut him off brusquely. “Go ahead and fix her up. Use the sysrep bot if you have to, and pull whatever metal plating we have left in storage. I’ve gotta read up on how to pilot this hunk of junk.”
[Affirmative.] Ollo obediently strode towards The Potential’s gashed fuselage, appendages already morphing into wrenches and buzz saws. Small laser cutters mounted atop Ollo’s shoulders scored the Potential’s metal skin, marking damaged armor plates for replacement.
Jess spared a gaze at the cruiser. Though her body was melted and rent with holes, Jess couldn’t help but admire the Potential’s robust design. Like all Federation Ships-of-the-Line, the Potential was built, first and foremost, to take a beating and live to tell the tale. Though most of the external armor plates had been vaporized, the cross-bracings and hydraulic reinforcements within formed a incredibly durable metallic honeycomb. The rear-mounted engines were Thurston Mk. IIs: old and outdated, but steadfastly reliable. They were the same engines attached to the now-decommissioned Kestrel-Class Light Cruisers.
Sparks showered from the side of the Potential as Ollo began to melt away some of the jagged edges, using one arm as a blowtorch, the other as an arc welder. The harsh light the tools emitted threw long ghostly shadows against the precision-milled walls of Station Kepler-19’s Repair Bay Number 7.
“The late Rear Admiral said something about this ship’s reactor being special.” Jess mused, watching his Engi companion work. “That might explain why they attached the Kestrel’s underslung cargo bay. Maybe they needed all that space.”
“Hey, Ollo!” Jess called out, spectral reverberations of his voice echoing through the hangar. “Couldja scan the fuselage, try to find out where that reactor is? The Admiral said there was something special about it.”
Ollo obediently stopped his repairs to make a pass over the midsection of the ship with his scanner suite... before pausing briefly halfway through the scan.
[Error.]
“That ain’t good.”
Jess’ quip went unheard. Ollo edged yet closer to the fuselage, splaying a hundred different kinds of probes across the metal skin.
[Analysing... Stand by.]
“Uh, what’s the matter?” Jess inquired, agitated. “Is the reactor busted or something?”
[Stand by.]
Jess furrowed his brow. “Stand by? So basically you’re telling me to fuck off-”
[Affirmative.]
“-and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.” Jess finished with an indignant frown. “Have fun scanning... or whatever the hell it is that you’re doing.”
No response, aside from the gentle whirrs of Ollo’s precision servos making micro adjustments on its innumerable, feathery scanner probes. Jess swore that if Ollo had a face, it would be locked into a grimace of concentration.
Jess rolled his eyes and returned to the lone table, sitting squat at the end of Repair Bay 7. The brass didn’t have the resources to crew their ships, let alone furnish every room. Jess was fortunate enough to requisition a table and chair for his station, two standard galactic years ago.
The Standard-Issue Instructional Pamphlet, or SIP, laid open on the table, on page 54.
Jess didn’t understand why the ship-jockeys called it a pamphlet. It was about as thick as a Zoltan Peacekeeper’s Archive-Tome... and it made about as much sense as one.
“Chapter Two. Applications of Stochastic Pavel-Boytz Quanta in Multidimensional Spatial Differentials.”
“Great.” Jess muttered, his voice suffused with baleful sarcasm. “My favorite.”
“A complete and comprehensive understanding of this material is crucial for basic maneuvers in zero-gee, three-dimensional movement blah blah blah, yada yada yada, unhealthy dose of numbers-and-symbols-you-couldn’t-possibly-understand.”
“I can’t fuckin’ read this.” Jess sighed, rubbing his temples and staring at the ceiling in resignation. “It’s useless. It makes no sense. Fuck you, Pavel. Fuck you, too, Boytz.”
He idly flipped through the arcane pages again, blankly gazing at the far wall and the warship... his warship.
“It can’t be too different from a shuttle...” Jess hypothesized to himself; a vain hope, perhaps, but justified. “Feet on the pedals. One hand on the throttle, one hand on the directional thruster stick, and hold ‘em steady. Just have to learn how to handle those mystery buttons and flashing panels... and lasers flying into my face.”
In his mind’s eye, he saw snippets of propaganda he was shown as a child. The brief scenes of space warfare he remembered were intense and fast-paced. Laser bolts, high-intensity cutting beams, and heavy missiles streaking across the screen: a latticework of high-energy lethality. The ships were tiny, glinting dots in the blackspace, juking and jinking, flipping and gracefully arcing in impossible-looking trajectories, each soaring past superheated bolts of plasma and unleashing hellish fusillades from mighty weapon batteries.
Jess glanced at the Potential again. She looked about as maneuverable as a flying office building. The power-weight-balance ratio seemed way off... unless there was some sort of absurdly large mass anchored to the middle of the ship.
Which was, again, where the supposed “special reactor” was stored. Key word: supposed. Judging from Ollo’s reticence, the Engi hadn’t yet discovered anything.
Had it?
“Ollo? Didja find anything important?”
… Where did it go?
“Ollo...?”
Jess stood and briskly strode towards the Cruiser, when he felt a slight tremor under his feet.
Something that could cause a thousand-ton space station to shiver, even slightly, was cause for concern.
The shaking intensified, as the lights above fluctuated in intensity, flaring white, then cooling to dim blues and reds. Clouds of soot and smoke billowed out of the Potential’s Thurston Mk. IIs.
“What the... hell is goin’ on!” Jess yelled, lunging into a sprint...
But his feet never made contact with the ground. Jess found himself drifting forwards in frictionless zero-gee.
“Shit!” Jess cussed, flailing his arms, hoping to grab onto a handhold. “Ollo! What the fuck did you do?!”
The Potential’s battered hull came closer and closer. Jess tucked in his legs and spun; a maneuver he had practiced in spacewalking class. He extended his arms, slowing the spin... and managed to grab hold one of the Potential’s exposed cross-braces.
Tools and components drifted upwards, almost gracefully. The system repair bot remained attached to the station floor by its lone, magnetic wheel. The bot diligently roved about, collecting what tools it could, utterly indifferent towards the sudden lack of gravity... an indifference Jess currently envied.
Jess noted, with no small amount of annoyance, that the Standard Instructional Pamphlet was hovering above the table, its pages fanning out in the zero-gee.
“Damn.” Jess muttered. “Shoulda bookmarked.”
Clank.
Jess felt intense vertigo in the pits of his stomach.
Clank. Clink. Clank.
The tools were falling to the ground. Wrenches and I-beams alike clattered as they slammed into the floor.
The Station’s Gravity Generator was coming back online.
Jess felt the air rush upwards. He grabbed the metal rod tighter and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for impact...
A/N:
There. Chapter 2’s a bit short, but I felt that I should’ve finished it sometime or later. Just a little continuation on the previous chapter. We’ll be getting out into blackspace soon enough, comrades! Don’t you fret!
Big thanks to one Sacrom, who helped edit this chapter so that it looks better than what it was previously. As opposed to making it look worse. God Damn, you’re stupid, Alias.
(Sacrom would also like to stress the importance of bookmarking your goddamn pages.)
That is all. See you all next time.
-Alias Maxima