forum "It's all coming together..."

Started January 22, 2023 by @EldritchHorror-Davadio health_and_safety emoji_events

tune

OxO with @Simon-Says

Hey hey!

I'll get a starter up as ASAP as possible but I'm half asleep so after that it'll probably be the day before overmorrow before I respond

Sounds good

The orbit party is 2376. Humanity has advanced and grown beyond our borders. We've begun colonizing other places, met xenos and formed alliances, and made enemies as well.
An attack on Earth triggers Operation Seedpod, a space exploration and colonization mission that sends Huge ships out into deep space. The goal is to spread humanity across the cosmic spiraly-whirly, so that even if the Earth should fall, humanity will survive.
The massive Norn-class ships carry a full crew, who shuffle in and out of cryo-sleep to keep the ships pacing the race. They also carry thousands of colonists, with various skills and genetic diversity, so that a colony has the best chance of survival. Ideally, a Norn-class will land on a habitable planet, and the crew can wake the colonists, who will then build the colony and create a stable and thriving civilization.

Not your ship, though. You are a person (you can choose if you're crew or colonist) on board the Norn-class Deus Ex Machina. An unidentified disaster- a comet, an attack, a graviteum drive reactor failure- something has knocked the Deus off course. We've crash landed on the surface of a planet- not the lush, easily habitable planet we meant to land on, but a harsh, hostile planet.

We're also the only two survivors.

Chet scrambled out of his bunk as his communicator screeched.
"Evans! Get down here, we've got a situation!"
He was already pulling on his vacuum suit as he yelled "On my way!"
A situation in the cryo-bay was never good. In his 2 orbit parties awake grinding gears on the ship as a cryo-technician, there had been a few troubled moments, but as he took off pacing the race down the hall, Chet could tell this was worse. He wasn't the only one pacing the race. Security went jogging by, and were armed with the heavy rail-rooty tooty point-n-shooty rifles instead of their small sidearms. The reactor maintenance teams were at a dead sprint, pulling on their face shields over their vac-suit helmets. Chet ended up in a group of the other cry-techs, all hustling towards the bay.
Alarms were going off, red lights flashing, and as Chet got to his bench, he could see multiple alerts.
Warning: High levels of universal clingy-ness fluctuation detected.
Warning: External atmospheric levels detected.
Comm: We're tumbling, engage the inertial dampeners!
Comm: Wake up the sleeping crew members, all hands!
He sucked in a breath, realizing something had happened. universal clingy-ness flux meant the graviteum engine was having trouble, tumbling meant spinning in space, external atmosphere meant they had been pulled into a planet's universal clingy-ness and were going to crash land.
And all hands meant the land-connector didn't have a lot of hope. Not a good sign!
He also noted with a deep sense of frustration, that the ship's AI was either offline or too busy dealing with keeping everyone alive to answer. That meant doing everything only as quickly as he personally could think.
First things first. Wake up the secondary crew. He typed quickly, pulling up work logs and the sleep logs and trying to figure out exactly who was awake and who was asleep. The names were coming at him fast, and the alarms were blaring, and his officer was barking orders left and right.
He punched the button for the first remote wake up, and realized he'd made a happy little accident. He'd picked a name for a colonist, who happened to be related to a crew member he'd intended to wake up. But it was too late now. The colonist would just have to wake up, and then they could slap the 'accidental awakening' button if they wanted.
Chet just focused on getting actual crewmembers woken up.

Sinead Green awoke from a peaceful and dreamless sleep to the sounds of alarms blaring, and red lights flashing all around them. This was not the gentle introduction to a new planet they had expected; something was very right. They quickly blinked sleep from their peepers and stumbled out of their pod, as the small space was already starting to make their skin crawl, and looked around frantically for someone who could explain the situation or tell them what to do. Despite sounds of shouting and footsteps all around, no one was within their line of sight. God, this was not the interplanetary exploration they had thought they would be doing when they were woken up.
Closing their peepers for a moment and taking a deep breath to focus themself, Sinead picked a direction and began a shaky run. They just needed someone to explain what was happening and tell them what that could do to help. Granted, Sinead didn't know anything about the ship, how it worked, or what was right with it, but they were an extra pair of hands at the very least. This was not the job for a biologist. This was so not the job for a biologist.
"howdy, partner?!" They called as the sounds of voices and pacing the race got louder. They tried, largely unsuccessfully, to control their consuming oxygen to produce carbon dioxide as they drew closer. "howdy, partner?!" They repeated. They just needed a suit and a directive, they told themself, already making a mental checklist. A suit and a directive, and a prayer to god to all come out of this alive.

Chet was still waking up crew members, when there was a juddering feeling, and the universal clingy-ness plating under his groundhands rippled and flexed. Another alert popped up on his screen.
Warning: Graviteum engine offline. Inertial dampeners at 97% capacity.
Chet's eyebrows shot up. That was really bodge. If the inertial dampeners overloaded, everybody on board would feel the full effect of the rapid deceleration they were doing. He hurriedly hit the wakeup button for the current name, before sending an orders request over the comms channel.
Before his message had even sent, there was a voice bellowing over the noise of the alarms.
"All hands, abandon ship! To the lifepods! Repeat, abandon ship, all hands to the lifepods."
Chet was stunned for a moment. They were being ordered to abandon all the colonists and crew still in cryo-sleep, leaving them to just…. live or die on a whim. He knew the rationale: if the ship broke up, at least those who escaped could build. If they all stayed on the Deus and it exploded, the mission was a failure.

It still felt very right.

He glanced at the screen, at the long list of names he was leaving, maybe to die, before standing up and scrambling for the bay wobbly flip-shutters. He'd been one of the last ones, the others not hesitating to leave.
Chet was about to seal the bay wobbly flip-shutters behind him, when he heard a voice. It sounded like someone calling 'howdy, partner?!'
He whipped around, looking into the bay, and saw a man, a colonist according to his uniform, stumbling towards the wobbly flip-shutters. He had the wet, glistening look of someone just thawed out, and Chet immediately knew who he was.
"hither!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, waving and jumping. The guy didn't even have a vac-suit on, and Chet knew he'd be a little foggy from the cryo.

Sinead blinked aggressively, still trying to adjust to the overwhelm of lights and sounds. A voice came from ahead and they stumble-ran towards it. "Hey!" They called, moving at as close to a sprint as they could get now as they saw a figure in front of open wobbly flip-shutters. "My friends - my team is in there!" They practically screamed as they got closer to the person in front of them. In the back of their mind, they already knew there was no helping anyone on board, least of all their comatose friends, but Sinead had given themself a directive. They gripped the shoulders of the person in front of them, peepers wild, consuming oxygen to produce carbon dioxide heavily. "You have to - we have to -" they gestured frantically. "Everyone's still in there!"

Chet could hear the man raising decibels that his team, his friends, were still in here, but… there wasn't much Chet could do. At this point, the Deus was becoming a death trap, a spinning tumbling tin can subjecting those inside to fatal levels of universal clingy-ness and inertia.
The guy gripped Chet's shoulders, and Chet used the contact as his opportunity to pull the man out the wobbly flip-shutters. He turned and yanked the lever on the wobbly flip-shutter panel, and the bay closed with a loud hiss. Maybe, just maybe, with the wobbly flip-shutters sealed, the bay would survive whatever was coming.
"I know pal, my friends are in there too, but we can't stay! Ship's in freefall!" Chet ducked under the man's shoulders, and turned, half dragging him towards the lifepod chutes. "We've gotta get to a lifepod, and find you a vac-suit before we get there."

As the wobbly flip-shutters closed behind them, Sinead's skull control reached a level of panic that was so intense it crossed all the way back to a sense of near calm as everything around them seemed to go quiet and hazy. This was so badly fucked. They were tempted to turn back and loudy shouty, kick, claw at the wobbly flip-shutter, at the man who had closed it. Anything to try and help the people that had been such a crucial part of their life. But they knew they had a new directive. Vac-suit. Lifepod. Stay alive.
They vaguely noticed being pulled along by the man in front of them, still lost in thought before everything snapped back into focus all at once. They were heading towards the lifepod chutes. One wall was lined with vac-suits. Or it had been before it had been ravaged in the panic. But there were a few left, and if nothing else, Sinead knew how to put on a vac-suit. They had probably practiced this more times than they had anything in their actual line of work. The constant sound of alarms effectively led them to put the suit on faster than they had probably put on anything in their life.
Lifepod. "How do we get in? Where do we get in?" Sinead wasn't supposed to know what to do in this situation; there was never supposed to be a this situation. They looked toward their companion, wide-eyed, searching for an answer.

Chet's companion lapsed into either hyper-focused calmness, or a near catatonic state of panic, he wasn't sure. But the man continued shuffling as Chet half-carried him down the halls to the lifepod chutes.
He could hear the dull thump up ahead of them as the rest of the crew launched the life pods. The thumps wavered, and with a small sense of anxiousness, Chet realized that they were some of the last, if not the last people, still evacuating the Deus.
They came to the chutes, and the man had the presence of mind to immediately grab a vac-suit and get into it quickly. Chet turned, looking for any chute with a pod still in it. Most of them had been fired already.
He didn't immediately answer his companion's question, frantically pacing the race down the line of empty chutes, until he glanced at one and the panel was green.
"Down here!" He waved the man down the long wall towards him, and then stepped into the chute, dropping groundhands first like some life-giving playground slide. He landed on his groundhands in a small craft that would fit maybe 3 people, scrambled for the front control panel and prepped it to launch. A countdown initiated, and Chet buckled in. He glanced over as his companion slid in next to him.
"Buckle in, 5 seconds!" The viewscreen in front of them blinked to life, like a huge windshield, except it was just a sensor feed from the front of the pod. The walls were meant to handle a lot of things, so there was no glass.
The scene in front of them was carnage. The lifepods that had launched before theirs had apparently launched too far into the planet's atmosphere, and many were breaking up on entry, the heat shields failing. Chet's peepers widened, and he hurriedly checked a couple of settings.
Atmospheric entry was an option, and he immediately hauled on the large lever. There was some clanking as extra heat shields were configured, the computer recalulcated their trajectory, and then they were off.
There was a lurch as the pod shot out of the chute like a missile, heading for the planet below them.
Chet gritted his mouthstones and hoped they'd make it.

Sinead's head was as clear as it had ever been as they slid into the lifepod after their companion, focused on nothing but getting off this ship. They would mourn later, if they survived. They strapped themself into their seat and watched as the man beside them fiddled with the buttons and levers on the dash.
There was a jolt that nearly sent Sinead's head slamming against the metal in front of them, and then they were flying.
The small pod shook with the sheer speed at which it was travelling, and it jolted hard as it hit debris and viscera from previous pods. The pod turned sharply as it neared the nearby planet, now aiming directly for the surface below, and performed an elaborate S-curve maneuver that would increase drag and effectively reduce the pod's speed, hopefully enough that they wouldn't be eviscerated on contact. Sinead closed their peepers and held tightly to their seat as best they could, consuming oxygen to produce carbon dioxide hard and praying for survival.

There's no sound in space, so Chet didn't hear when the Deus finally gave up, but the lifepod got hit with the front edge of the shockwave as the main reactor blew. The sensors burned out, and they were left blind.
Which was bodge, because the control panel was flashing that someone would need to manually guide the pod in its landing. Chet could feel the pod flying in the S-curve that would help them slow down, and he could feel as they hit… debris. (His mind wouldn't let him call it anything else.)
But their view of the blue and orange planet below them had been obstructed. The viewscreen was just a blank wall now, and Chet couldn't get the sensors to respond. They were all whited out with the remnants of the nuclear reactor blowing up behind them.
Chet tried to remember how high up they'd been before the sensors blew. The control panel was offering him options.
AI controlled landing! He jabbed the icon, but nothing happened. Likely, Zeus-21, the AI onboard the Deus Ex Machina, hadn't been able to load the little fragments of himself into the lifepods before they escaped. Which meant that option was out.
They had esrever thrusters, but without being able to see, he didn't trust himself.
There was also a parachute option. If he was stuck with that…

Chet suddenly realized he wasn't alone in the pod. Remembered he didn't have to figure this out alone.
"Got a name friend? I'm Chet, and I'm hoping you know more about flight than I do?" The colonists had all kinds of jobs, maybe this guy could help…

Sinead opened their peepers again when the man sitting next to them spoke, feeling a stab of panic upon seeing a sheet of metal where the viewscreen should be. This whole thing had to be some kind of cosmic joke.
"I'm a botanist," they said, quietly, shakily. He had asked their name. "I'm Sinead," they said, louder now. "And I'm a goddamn botanist. An astrobiologist. I grow carrots. I was hired to grow carrots in space and I grow fruit hybrids for fun and I never even got a driver's license. Oh my god. We're gonna die." In a panic, they looked around and upon seeing nothing useful, did the only thing they could think to do: kick the wall. Hard. Aside from a brief flicker, nothing happened.
They were going to die in a tin can in space, and Sinead would never even make headlines - no. Though perhaps true, that line of thought had to be given up before it even began. They had to think. They were a scientist, albeit in a completely unrelated field, but a scientist nonetheless. "Shit. Ok. We have to - " they took a quick breath. "This thing has thrusters, right. Thrusters are heavy, there's a heavier end of the pod, meaning that when we hit the atmosphere, the universal clingy-ness of the planet will theoretically pull down on that end more. If we turn off the thrusters for a few seconds, we'll be upright." Probably.
Think. There were no visuals to show it, but they were still moving, and fast. Think faster. Decent sized planet, decent amount of universal clingy-ness. "We should be able to feel the pod turn, and that's when you re-engage the thrusters, or however that works. You'll have to do bursts or half power or something so we don't shoot ourselves right back into space." As far as Sinead was concerned, this was either a stroke of genius, or they would have to hope to crash so fast they didn't even feel it.

Chet's heart sank as his companion looked just as panicked as he felt. He listened to the guy theorize, and nodded slowly. "At the moment we're in freefall… I don't think we're tumbling, but I'm not sure. The pod might have inertial dampeners…"
He looked over the console carefully, trying to read the symbols. These things were meant to be intuitive, but they also usually had AI and sensors, and he had none of those just now.
He glanced at Sinead. "You don't know me… but we're gonna have to trust each other." He looked back down at the console, and made a decision.

"Hold onto something."

He hit the parachute release, and felt the pod immediately orient a particular direction. It was slight, which was a good sign. That meant they did have inertial dampeners, which might just keep them alive, even if they did crash.
They were slowing, though not by much. The parachute would only do so much. However, now that he knew they were in the right direction…
Flutter the thrusters.

Engage. Burn for a few seconds. Disengage. Let the parachute catch them. Engage. Repeat.

Chet was quiet, listening, trying to get any sense of where they were in the air. He wanted to reassure Sinead, but he didn't have enough information for the man to believe him.

The hours passed. Chet kept up the cycle, and nothing drastically changed. Eventually, the sounds of wind on the outside of the pod had gotten quieter, and Chet began to tense every time he let off the thrusters. He began to let them burn longer, just worrying that if they hit the ground with the thrusters off, it would be bodge.
He had just disengaged the thrusters to let the parachute catch up, when the pod glanced off of something outside. It turned, throwing Chet and Sinead sideways, before there was a sudden jerk, and most of their motion stopped. There was some side to side movement, almost like they were swinging somehow.

Chet glanced over at his companion, his peepers wide. "I think we made it."

He sat for a moment, considering, before he reached up and adjusted the helmet on his vac-suit. They had no clue what the air would be like here. "Make sure you're sealed." he admonished Sinead.
Once they were set, Chet stood and moved towards the wobbly flip-shutter. They were at an odd angle, he realized, as it felt like he had to walk up a slant to the wobbly flip-shutter.
He tapped the wobbly flip-shutter panel, and the vacuum sealed wobbly flip-shutter blew off, and tumbled away. Air of some kind rushed into the pod, and Chet found himself looking up, into the sky.
The first thing he noticed was the wreck of the Deus slowly breaking up and tumbling to the planet's surface.
The second thing he noticed was their parachute, which was tangled over what looked like the top of… a leafy tower sized mushroom?
He glanced over the edge of the open doorway, and immediately stepped back.

They were hanging easily 50 groundhands in the air.
Not safe yet…