Broken Boundaries

01 - Touchdown

Alain manoeuvred the crew pod that would be his home for the foreseeable future close to one of the service hatches on the top of the warship Walkurea. He double checked the surface below the pod through the video feed, and fired harpoons at the bottom of the pod into the hull. The pod jerked as it reeled itself in on the lines attached to the harpoons and settled with a hollow clunk resonating through the structure. On the piloting console he checked the tension on each cable and activated the artificial gravity floor of the pod.

He unbuckled and took a few steps to stretch his legs after the long weightless journey to the crash site of the Walkurea with the Silth warship Amaroth. He peeked through one of the windows towards the front of the ship where the two ships had collided. The force of the impact had fused the two ships together through melted parts of the structure and they were virtually inseparable since.

Movement on the hull of the Amaroth told him the Silth were settling in on their warship. Two suits moved around their crew pod in what he expected their first inspection of their connection to the ship. After the Silth and Earth agreed on a tentative ceasefire the negotiations began on what to do with the combined wreckage. Both parties showed their distrust by accusing each other of spying if one or the other began recovery unless they were present. Neither wanted to have the other side use a large crew where one member could slip away unnoticed and sneak aboard the other's vessel, or attempt an attack on the other crew and take over the whole wreckage. Keeping an eye on everything by placing other warships close to it was undesired by the politicians as it could cause more tension and create a chance of escalating things at the slightest accident. In the end it was agreed to send a two man crew each with strict orders forbidding boarding the other warship while recovering requested parts from the ships. Sensors would set off an alert to both parties if that happened.

"And now I'm here on my own to do the job." Alain thought as he retrieved his suit to inspect his landing site.

Outside, he attached the two life lines from his suit to the safety rungs of the hull. These long rungs ran in every direction to prevent personnel drifting away from the ship while they were doing maintenance or any other task requiring them to be outside. Although the military officially forbade it, crews engaged in competitions now and then to see who could traverse a course laid out on the hull the fastest. The ones with the biggest death wish and need for attention did it without using the safety lines. The ones who were recovered after drifting away from the hull were transferred permanently to a planet based and extremely boring environment.

Alain gazed along the shaded long hull of the Walkurea from the aft section and the bulky structures used to house the various fighters and transport shuttles to the wrecked bow, and along the angled long hull of the Amaroth with similar structures housing their fighters and the launch and landing bays. The smaller structures were rows of missile launchers, gauss guns, and laser turrets. "So much destructive force." he thought and looked out at the stars and the one visible orange-red planet in a wider orbit in the solar system. "So much empty space, yet still two stubborn mules of captains had to cross paths here and compete in the size of their balls in a game of chicken behind the wheel of fucktons of metal." He sighed. "Different species, same stupidities."

He went around his pod and pulled on each anchor cable to feel the tension and examined the penetration of each harpoon. The hull didn't show signs of imminent rupture at each impact point and he continued on to the service hatch a little further away. The numeric access panel was lit, which told him there was at least partial power in this section. When the surviving crew left the warship almost everything was powered down to prevent fires or worse because the infrastructure received a system wide surge at the impact and blew up various components.

He typed in the access code he had to learn by heart and which provided access to all parts of the ship. That root code provided even access to systems and sections that even the captain's code wouldn't and Alain imagined working on the ship and smirking internally every time the officers came by and pretended they had more control than the lowly engineer keeping the ship running. "Who's really in control?" he thought when the panel lit up green and he pulled open the hatch. Emergency light strips lit up the ladder going down. 'Welcome aboard.' he said to himself and descended into the airlock.