Regolith

First Draft - Chapter 1

Regolith

I awoke to the familiar whirling noise of the Lifereach pod, it's muffled beeping banging in my head like coins bouncing off a snare drum. The stale, plastic smell of medical equipment and chemical sealant filled my nose, wrapped over my own musky odor. The haze and confusion was the only thing about myself that seemed normal, and it lifted slowly like clouds clearing after a rain. I lifted my head to sit up and banged it hard on the pod ceiling... "oh yeah" I thought, remembering the last time I did that.

Then I remembered the instructions. Don't try to get up, don't panic, don't try to free yourself. I'd be trapped for about an hour as the Lifereach systems brought my own back online. The holo overlay displaying my vitals spun into view, dimly stacked against the inside of the pod, the only other light the faint blue status beacons pulsing by my feet. I had a terrible headache, and my body hurt down to the bones, but at least my tech was working, which meant I hadn't been killed, which was a relief, but not a big one.

Slowly my memory modules kicked back in, spinning up the feed from the job [last moments?] just before I went into cryo. The fireball and deafening blast moved frame by frame, overtaking Rala and Skim as they raced towards the other pods, barging toward me as the silky black pod doors lowered shut.

I can't think about Skim like that, too much history. And poor Rala. I'd figured she wouldn't make it out of that job, we all did, but to get so close to the pod before being incinerated like that... a shame. I'd rather enjoyed showing her the ropes, and she'd shown a knack for wetwork you usually don't find in the nature born.

My eyes adjusted a bit, and the thinly coiling overlay spread out into view against the dreary pale backdrop of the pod. Needed time to see where I was. That's the thing about Lifereach pods, if you can manage to get inside and get the doors closed, nothing short of direct anti-ship munitions or a small nuclear blast can get at you, but once the cryo kicks in you never know what'll happen to you. I could've been in deep space for years, decades even if it was fully charged at launch, and this one was. I reached up to my right temple, could still feel the small bump of the implant, could see my feet waving back and forth in front of the blue pulsing diode at the far end. All here, I thought. I ran my fingers along the inside seam of the door, the rough frozen powder from the cryo cap scraping onto them, another sign I hadn't been disturbed. All that powder would evaporate once the doors open, the cabin depressurizes and warm air rushes in, but even with that, something didn't feel quite right.

I let out a sublim, "Pin, you there?" A silence echoed, stilling my mind and suffocating my confusion. "Pin!" Out loud this time.

"Here sir..." I felt a rush of relief at the program's delayed response. "I seem to... I seem to be having some difficulty sir."

"What kind of difficulty?" I asked, checking the area around my implant for any sign of damage to it. You never know what the hell you'll open the pod to, but you can rest assured that nothing was able to open it from the outside without you waking up. "Status check."

"All systems are online, gestalt functional, left tibia fractured but healed, immuno response suppressed and override capable, mesh and nanos rebooting... But I.. I can't see anything."

"What do you mean you can't see. The implant feels fine... can you read the..."

Pin cut me off. "I can read the implant, it's there, but I cannot retrieve ocular data from it. Thus, I am currently unable to see. I am running a diagnostic, but not coming up with much. It seems the connection to your ocular nerve is severed, yet it passes continuity and feedback checks. Quite odd."

"Odd indeed," I said. "I can see perfectly fine, I'm stuck inside the Pod, can you tell me where the hell I am?"

"Negative sir. From the umbilical tether I can confirm we are in a docking bay aboard a salvage ship, no doubt sent out after the [insert name of prequel ship] was destroyed, and are stationary, indicating we are docked. I will not be able to tell you more until the pod opens."