If anyone is interested, I'm working on a (hopefully) fairly substantial 'fan-fic' story titled '
Aurora Falls'.
There's just one tiny favour I'd like to ask...
Please,
please don't quote huge slabs of the story's text when you're commenting on the story as it evolves. I realize there's no actual malicious intent behind this, but it does seriously disrupt the flow of the narrative. Please keep your comments brief, and your use of quotes down to a relevant sentence or two. This small courtesy would be greatly appreciated.
AURORA FALLS - A Subnautica Story.
Chapter One
"Call me Al."
My full name is Alexander Fergus Selkirk. Alterra employee number, 105/8874.
Mission Time: Day 267, 2171 C.E
Given my current situation, my parents must have had a fine sense of irony. If not, at least some significant measure of prescience. I'm currently stranded on an alien world, approximately 175 light years from Terra. So, not exactly within range of human assistance. Worked that one out fairly early in the piece. I've more or less resigned myself to the fact that IF help is on the way, it will be at least six months or more down the track. However, that depressing fact is the very least of my concerns at the moment.
I'm guessing that you have already found the PDA logs. If you haven't, I'd suggest digging below the
Aurora's memorial plaque and opening the Lifepod that I buried there. You can't miss the
Aurora monument. It's that hundred-metre nanocrete obelisk, one klick dead south of the ship. Not too shabby, eh?
It's amazing what one can achieve with a Terraformer and a metric butt-tonne of spare time.
Spare time was hard to come by in the first couple of weeks after the crash.
Survival was the name of the game, and this planet did everything it possibly could to be rid of me. It's a damned deceptive place, I'll tell you that for free. Looks like a tropical paradise at first glance, but it seems as though the entire planet (That's '4546B' to you, 'Manannán' to me.) is in a constant state of high alert against intruders. It's weird. There are creatures down here that earnestly want to make you dead.
I kid you not.
First of all, I'd best tell you of what actually happened to the
Aurora... Well, at least as much as I was able to fathom, at any rate.
Aurora had been in orbit around the planet for about three days. Standard approach pattern, hailing calls on all known EM frequencies, dropped landing beacons in the proposed area of operations, yada-yada, et cetera, et cetera. All strictly by the book, precisely as Alterra wrote it. Heard nary a peep from anything planet-side, so the Captain decided to bring
Aurora down to five klicks for a couple of slow atmospheric orbits prior to touchdown. Again, just to make absolutely certain that no-one of the indigenous persuasion had any valid objections to our noble enterprise.
After all, nobody wanted a repeat performance of the Kharaa Incident. Nasty business.
I was halfway through my shift when
Aurora commenced her descent. The Dark Matter drive was well and truly offline, having completed its power-down sequence during first watch, earlier that day. The sound of an operating DM drive is a subtle thing; it's supposed to be sub-audible even under full power, but there's always this
thrummmmm that hovers on the very edge of one's consciousness, seeping into your bones like a warming shot of good whisky. Damn. That's something else I miss about Terra. I've managed to cobble together some basic hydrocarbons using the Fabricator, benzene mostly, but nothing that would match a 12-year old Laphroaig single malt. Nothing that would come close to a decent paint-thinner, actually.
Sound is an engineer's primary diagnostic tool. Never met a techie worth their salt who ever ignored even the faintest odd noise, and probably never will. It's usually the very first sign that something has started to come adrift, and it's a sign you'd do well to investigate further. Torsten Mikkelsen of Red Watch mentioned hearing something strange in one of the Lifepods, but couldn't pin down the source. Poor sod. He must be losing his touch. Either that, or he simply couldn't be arsed spending more time on it. Pure coincidence that he button-holed me outside the Borealis Lounge, and Blue Watch had just started. What the hell. Reckon he owes me a solid for this one.
Pod Five was my destination. Starboard bow, forward evacuation array. Took a Slider down Broadway, then hopped off at the Rec Plaza. Got my first decent look at the new planet. Even though I barely broke my stride in catching a glimpse of it, that view counted as today's completely unexpected bonus. Folks back on Terra like to think of their world as a perfect blue marble, hanging in space like a lonely Christmas tree ornament. This one was nothing but water, as far as I could see. Man! There's something primal that stirs deep inside whenever a body sees that much water. I was born and raised in the Arcadia Planitia region back on Mars, and 'dry' was never a word my fellow Marvins used lightly. After all, terraforming can only achieve so much on Mars. Truth be known, it's simply too small and cold to retain any decent imitation of a normal Terran atmosphere.
Have to stay on the bounce, gorram it. Aircon's on the fritz in Officer Country, and I've got at least six other awkward little jobs waiting in the stack. It's good to be busy again. I can't complain though; spent most of the outbound trip in Frozen Watch as a tech-sicle, and didn't get thawed until
Aurora entered this system.
You may not dream in Cryo, but you still get paid.
As I made my way over to the starboard Lifepod deck, I bumped into Kaori. She was also in a fair kind of hurry, but we somehow managed to nail down a time for dinner together. Granted, our date was a fortnight hence, but I could live with that. Something nice to look forward to. Kaori worked in Life Sciences division, and I figured she and her crew were all a-hustle because of our imminent landing. There's only so much you can learn from orbital scans, so it was only natural that Life Sciences would be the first team to leave the ship. Some members of the crew regarded LS as a bunch of puffed-up glory hounds, given their 'first and foremost' status on these missions, but I knew differently. It takes some serious stones To Boldly Go, particularly when you've got no clear picture of what's waiting outside that airlock. Experience has confirmed this fact time and time again... It's definitely not unicorns, fluffy bunnies and pixies. You can take that to the bank.
That was the very last time I saw Kaori alive.
There have been quite a few times when I've seriously considered stripping butt-naked, then heading out with just a mask, Powerglide and a single tank. Find myself a nice deep canyon, and simply let nitrogen narcosis take care of the final details. Curiously, as bad as the situation got, I never truly reached that sticking-point. Got to admit, I've found my head wandering in some dark and nasty places at times, but always managed to drag myself back to functioning like a regular human being again. Guess it's just the Engineer gene, automatically asserting itself after running into another emotional brick wall. I suppose it helps to deal with adversity or depression as just another technical problem; something that needs to be fixed, scrapped or jury-rigged as the situation demands. Might not be a pretty fix according to the tastes of some folks, but it always seemed to work well enough for me.
Pod Five responded normally to the standard diagnostic program. Life support, power management, descent systems, survival supply inventory, Fabricator, beacon transmitter, tachyon burst transceiver... All were operating within nominal tolerances, according to the readout on my PDA. That might have been enough to satisfy anyone else's curiosity, but I figured it was time to take a long, hard look under the hood. I palmed the Pod's access slap-pad and spoke the command phrase 'Maintenance Access. Selkirk, A. Ident: 105/8874.' The Pod door slid open briskly, and I climbed inside. The main display's tell-tale lights were all showing green save one, essentially confirming that the Pod was indeed ready to go. The single red light signified that a safety interlock was engaged, and that the Pod could not be launched accidentally during a maintenance session. This seemed like a bit of a contradiction in terms, since it usually requires an accident to launch a Lifepod in the first place.
I finally tracked down the source of Mikkelsen's premature grey hairs, but not before pulling out, inspecting and refitting almost every damned MemPak, servo, telemetry node and fluid link in the Pod. The job had taken nearly ten minutes thus far, and I was starting to get moderately concerned that any further delays would eat into the time allotted to complete this shift's target workload. Oh well, at least it wasn't anything major. Turned out that a small LS coolant pump had worn through one of its vibration mounts, and was rubbing bare metal as it cycled through its scheduled self-test routines. Out you come, you little rascal. Reckon I'll make a nice shiny wooden plaque to mount this doohickey on, and hang it in Red Watch's mess-hall for all to ...
I won't bore you with my particular insights into the sequence of events that followed.
In the space between two heartbeats, Something killed
Aurora and everyone aboard her. Two thousand, five hundred souls. All gone.
I survived. Not entirely certain I should have.
TO BE CONTINUED? - You decide!
![:smiley:]( ":smiley:")
Farming Update Released! - Subnautica
