FTL-4...Faster Than Life.

Chapter 4

Two weeks later…

There’s yelling and screaming as the drill kicks into gear in the middle of our sleep cycle. The lights kick off and the gravity goes off and the ship drops out of sub-light cruising fast and then there’s this horrible sick feeling of the ship going end over end.

The light pop off and we’re dropped into emergency lighting and even that’s in only a few areas. My low-light modified eyes are getting used to the dark revealing things with this washed out sort of black and white look to them. Some people look very odd with the infra-red and ultraviolet eyes shimmering different colors as the rods in those eyes become active.

I stick my feet into the bunk frame to anchor myself and grab my vacc-mask and my r-suit and slither into it as fast as I can while we’re trying to get seal-snap gloves and boots on as we’re being told to evacuate…

Evacuate…

This.. this isn’t a drill.

There’s panic and jostling around and I’m scared really scared. I lose track once we’re out in the halls as everyone’s panicking and there’s this wave of gravity that sort of washes like a wave of nausea as the entire ship does another end over end flip. The centrifugal force causing this wave of grav force not enough to do anything than make you sea sick.

Looking out the nearest window and the swirl of space all topsy-turvy almost makes me hurl in my mask. I’m shoved a few times and desperately trying to get a hold of things in my sparse zero gravity training. I get shoved again because I didn’t get away fast enough and I crash my arm into the wall and It breaks.

I curl into a ball shocked by the level of pain I’ve never felt before until Corporal Stillwater’s screaming at me, and screaming until that reflex of command and obey over rides the pain and I push along with the others until I get to and escape pod and get in and I seal the door and hit the button under the glass casing.

There’s this rush of getting blasted away then there’s a bit of a spin and then. It’s just you, and the crazy, crazy com traffic as the disaster is going on around you and all you have is sensors and coms to rely on. People freaking out causes them to cancel our frequencies to the ship limiting us to short range coms only.

The escape pod has one seat, and its six feet or so wide inside. I’m in pain but I soon try and focus on getting hooked into the recycling systems…which requires getting undressed and inserting things with adhesive patches…to keep you clean by sealing these devices while they takes care of your necessary bodily functions. Not easy with a broken arm. And very eeew.

That’s when the adrenaline wears off after a few hours. It’s when doubts start creeping in and that’s when it gets really scary. You can only get other pods part of the time through interference. Then there’s these times where you here people freaking out, some people are not going through this well. I don’t go through this well and turn off my com’s general channel leaving the emergency channel on but I turn my life support to conserve and curl up and cry. I cry and freak out in the dark and there’s times I’m sure I’m going to die. I worry about rations and power and water and if it wasn’t for my OBC I’d have lost track of time.

The first day the first twenty four hours are the worst of it. The others are in varying degrees of panic. Most of the people I here are cadets…no recruits like me and other staff a lot of the higher ranking staff stayed on ship. And we can’t raise the ship.

It’s slowly becoming a matter of survival and that’s becoming an issue of keeping your head, and being smart about how you do things and because we’re all in this together because you’re family you have to do your best to keep yourself calm and others calm too.

I rely on keeping calm, but there’s those out there that are doing more. Sunshine’s talking to people to most of us and calming people down. She takes over the coms a lot like a com-show host. Taking in callers, getting us to talk about who we are, where we’re from and why we joined. Nelle and a few others with vocal talents sing along with songs in voice only. My whole contribution is to recite technical details and trying to figure out what to do for those calling in and panicking with things going wrong. I’m no engineer and I’m doing this on the fly from what I know from the intro to escape pod classes and reading the tech manual. It helps to save my mind, keep me focused and we all keep busy.

But time takes it’s toll and things happen…Trey Hennessey a boy I don’t know from a month before us ends up with a pressure leak he can’t fix and it casts a huge pall over all of us as he runs out of air and we lose the first of us recruits and there’s crying and silence for hours more as we drift in what’s very close to solitary confinement.

I’ve never felt so bad in my life since and except being cut off from my family. Actually this is almost worse. Is worse I’m so unsure. It’s quiet for a bit after he dies and then someone tried a benediction or a prayer for him and that started an argument and that let loose all that fear based anger we all had going on inside of us. It led to screaming matches, name calling and swearing and people being really shitty to each other before it wore off/burned out after a few hours and once more we lapsed back into silence and a few bits of isolated crying.

After about four hours on silence more or less there’s someone a girl on the comlinks playing something called a harmonica? And she sings out some ancient ballad that sitting in the drifting lonely dark kind of fits…

“Put a candle in the window, but I feel I’ve got to move…”
“Though I’m going, going, I’ll be coming home soon.”
“As long as I can see the light…”

“Pack my bag and let’s get moving, ‘Cause I bound to drift awhile…”
“Well I’m gone, gone, you don’t have to worry no…”
“As long as I can see the light…”

It’s what they call an old warriors song and things like it have been sung and a part of military life for over a thousand years. There was more of it and it was very repetitive but there was this out in the void drifting wanting to find our way home soulfulness to the song that got to a lot of us.

Time even with the time clocks everyone has gets all distorted. It seems to drift and take forever. The walls/hull seems to close in on you if you let it and hours turn to days, you start to ration the three meal packs and seven meal bars and the water your using until you have to eat or drink, some are more successful with rationing that others. Some lose it every once in awhile and freak out in our prisons.

I rarely hear from my bunkmates. Bree a bit more than the others, Nelle is there a lot too but Jesika, Anna, Carrington are all out of range I think.

On day three Holly Ingram on of our fellow cadet trainees eats her side arm…she just couldn’t take it anymore…she did it over the comlink and I don’t think that we’ll ever get the sound out of our heads.

On day five it almost becomes an option for Jane Declan, Sunshine talks her down. Some people help or try to some people make it worse. But after ten hours Sunshine talks her down.

By day eight we’re right on the bare edge of survival. Half-way starved and freezing we’ve made out our wills and made voice letters goodbye to those we love and we care about then as we’re drifting off into that long cold sleep I keep getting disturbed by this ping on my pods systems. It takes awhile with hypoxia setting into most of us before I realize it’s a Colonial Union com signal.

It takes longer to rouse the others and to get us transmitting so they can pick us up.

I remember getting opened up once we’re on board. On board our ship and the look of Corporal Stillwater as she got us taken out of our escape pods and onto the deck plating of our ship, our perfectly fine ship.

“Congratulations recruits those of you who are here just made it through training op castaway.”

I’m not sure where the anger came from in me but a remember swinging on her. Then her swinging at me. Then darkness, I don’t even remember hitting the floor.

***
I wake up in the infirmary with a case of mild exposure, a urinary tract infection from the waste hole-tube-patch thing, and a mild concussion and a nano-mender cast fixing my arm. I’m there for two days mostly eating and sleeping. Bone-mender chalk shakes are gross by the way; they boost the stuff the nano’s use to fix you up but are like well chalk.

Corporal Stillwater stops by and looks in on me. “You did good stone, you kept your head even while injured, made your rations last, conserved power and were actually useful to your recruit-mates.” She took a drink from the coffee she was drinking. “The Two fatalities were both wash outs, we had people staged to get you out in case of an emergency.”

I blink. “But we heard the gunshot?”

“No you here A gunshot, we got to her before she got that far. It doesn’t matter the truth of it is you were really sent out there, none of you knew the truth and you all performed pretty well.”

“Oh.” I’m so not sure what to think about this whole thing. Honestly if you asked me before if I would have been strong enough to do that much time in a escape pod hurt with no gear or next to no gear I’d have said no.

Corporal Stillwater looks at me. “Now for striking a superior, you’re to report to astrometrics on a full shift and do whatever they tell you to do until further notice after mid-meal mess you go me?”

“Yes Corporal.”

***
Astrometrics is navigation and once I’m there they have me working on calculations mostly. I’m connected to the lab’s net-work and I spend my time waiting/monitoring live feeds from various ship systems or doing calculations that any computer could do, mass equations because every kilo or pound of mass counts in a jump or even to do figures for orbits and sub-light flight. I get to use a mind-board and that’s like a virtual chalk board in your mind where you can turn pages and write out your work on that VR screen. No apps or anything than doing the raw math to come up with the variables to send off to whoever needs them to run all navigation chores. Any and everyone of them makes me show them, down load to them my work. Mentally it’s hard and grueling work but occasionally I’m shown how these equations are used to do every aspect of moving this ship through space. I’ve got splitting headaches for days from using my brain this hard.

I’m require fleet uniform when I’m in the Astrometrics labs. Dress slacks that are always to be pressed. Tunic cotton dress tunic, over that I have to wear my tunic jacket fastened and also pressed, dress boots shined and my hair has to be either cut short or tightly braided and pinned up off of my neck. If I’m not dressed properly security won’t let me pass through the doors to the section.

I’m also expected to do secretarial duties as needed and to make beverages for when they are needed. Part of me hates that and loves it at the same time.

It’s from 13:00 to 21:00 hours and before that I get to spend from 08:00 to 12:00 hours of the day training in PT (physical training.) self defense, languages, survival skills and operating the light cargo equipment and the use of firearms.

That certainly doesn’t leave me with much personal time at all. I’m still not sure if it’s punishment or training. Like a lot of things here in fleet there’s a lot of sink or swim.

***

I’m at the small arms range with an assault carbine trying my hand at shooting moving target drones in some of my spare hours. As it turns out I’m a bad shot, my gamerness had never included combat games so I’ve been squeamish about guns. But I’m trying to get some practice in a half hour at a time.

I’m doing badly and missing a lot and frowning when I hear this smooth deep soft “Excuse me. Recruit…Stone is it? I think I see what you‘re doing wrong, would you be okay if I showed you a few things?”

I lower the carbine and look over to where that sexy voice came from and it’s that Triton guy, the Deltan native standing close by staring at me all built, buffed and exotic…I’m not one of those sim fantasy girls except to be one. I’ve been a sim mermaid once or twice trying it out, playing out fantasies from my inner little girl.

He takes those feelings and makes them real girl, real mature fantasies really fast…I bite my lower lip. I’m feeling flushes just being close to this beautiful man. “I’d really uhm appreciate the pointers, I’m not very good.”

“Here.” He slides in behind me then wraps his arms around me and gathers my arms and the carbine with his and he starts to guide me moving.

“Shooting is all about it becoming natural. There’s a rhythm to it. Alright…keep an eye on your target now just float, just follow it with the rifle and breathe, okay get the way you move it’s not about the target as much as the way you feel with the gun. Now when it feels relaxed…are you relaxed?”

Yes…No…His arms are like steel underneath the scale kissed…sorry; enhanced skin and he’s warmer that I thought. He’s actually pressed against me and I can feel more rock hard guy body touching my shoulder blades and his hips…groin is pressed tight to my bottom and I can feel him aroused.

He’s aroused by me. I’m doing this, the thrill of it and the way he feels against me is sooooo good, it’s making me ache good, It’s not wanting to be a virgin achingly good. I have a hot sexy, hard bodied mer-man pressed up against me and I’m turning him on.

I’m so wet right now that if he “went down on me.” he might just need those gills. My voice is tight with feeling and other things but I answer hoarsely. “Yes…”

“Okay, fire…fire…fire…fire…fire..” It’s soft, sultry man voiced, manly, whale song sensual…he has a voice like a vibrator. And after every shot, as I squeeze off each shot there’s this little push of me back into him and…I love it, the ache, the arousal in me and him and the attention. He helps me drill through almost the full thirty minutes I’ve signed in for and guiding me the whole time…I feel so sexy, slutty or maybe slutty, alive….I feel alive in a way that everything is awake and he pulls away… “You’re doing really good. You’ve great concentration, and focus. I’ve got to hit the dojo so I’ll maybe see you around again…?”

……………………It takes me a moment… “Oh Erin, and you’re?”

“Patrick,… Patrick Mako.” He smiles and shakes my hand gently and moves to go. “It was really nice meeting you Erin, we’ll have to try and do this again.”

He’s walking away and my mind is locked up in the so horned up, he’s got the best ass I’ve ever seen look…stare… “I..er..Uhm,…It was nice to meet you too…”

“Thanks…I like your perfume by the way…”

“I’m not wearing any…”

He’s gone and I’m there just…

Just….Oh…I need to talk to the girls, I got flirted with…I got flirted with like a real woman.