Survive!

Prologue

Five months ago.

Twelve light-years from Earth, Lieutenant Commander Valory Jeanne was alone in the astrophysics lab when the United Earth Space Force (UESF) ship, Copernicus, started to lose atmosphere. She shut the airtight compartment hatch and put on her emergency breathing apparatus as required per the emergency procedures manual just as an explosion rocked the ship. She lost her balance and struck her head on a computer console and was rendered unconscious. The unexpected meteor storm struck while the ship orbited a newly discovered planet in the Tau Ceti star system and was destroyed. Valory never heard the abandon ship alarms.

When Valory awoke, the lab was dark, quiet, and getting colder. Her head hurt, and her ribs and left arm were sore from lying in an unnatural position. The only illumination emanated from an emergency lantern on the bulkhead that cast ominous shadows throughout the compartment. She pulled herself to a sitting position using the computer console as a backrest. Gingerly she rubbed her ribs and arm and checked for broken bones. Although painful, she found only bruises. She attempted to stand and grasped the console for support when the room began to spin. The lean, forty-two-year-old PhD astrophysicist paused for a moment while the dizziness abated. She attempted to use the ship’s intercom to call for help and realized that all the circuits were dead. In frustration and fear, she shouted, “Help! Can anyone hear me?” After regaining her balance, she approached the compartment hatch and saw that the pressure meter above the entrance to the adjacent compartment read zero. She said to herself, “Great! Now, what do I do?”

The adjacent compartment was without air, so she couldn’t open the hatch without losing atmosphere from her compartment. Valory considered her options that were few. She first attempted to find a way out of the astrophysics lab to the rest of the ship. The Extra Vehicular Activity training back at the Earth space station before the Copernicus departed was instrumental. She had used that training when she replaced the gravimetric sensor array with the upgraded version developed by Dr. Sullivan, the head of the astrophysics lab on the Copernicus.

She donned a spacesuit from one of the storage lockers in the lab. The EVA experience prepared her to use the lab’s airlock to go outside the ship where she eventually found a hull breach from one of the explosions large enough for her to reenter. The large breach minimized the chance of snagging and ripping her spacesuit and allowed her entrance to the airless portion of the ship. Valory made her way to the Emergency Departure Compartment to discover that five of the capsules had successfully launched, but that the others were damaged beyond her ability to repair. Her next thought was to use the shuttle to escape. Not being a pilot, she anticipated that she could use the onboard computers and autopilot to land in a safe area, hopefully near the other escape pods on the planet below, Tau Ceti g.

On her way to the shuttle bay, Valory discovered that one of the power cores on the ship was still producing power, but only to the battery backup system. All the normal power connections had been severed by meteors that punctured the ship or were burned through by surges in the system before the circuit breakers were able to engage. In some cases, the power surge was so great that arcing across the circuit breakers fused them before they could trip and caused massive damage and fires in equipment. With no atmosphere or power in the bulk of the ship, the fires extinguished and the environmental controls were off line. Artificial gravity was spotty, dependent upon where the graviton power junctions and plates weren’t destroyed.

However, when she arrived at the shuttle bay, she discovered prior damage from a thruster failure while entering the bay the week before, and it had only been partially repaired. In addition to the non-completed repairs, she found several baseball-sized, ragged hull punctures that would present a problem from heat build-up during reentry. There were also many heat ablative tiles cracked or missing on the wings and fuselage. She suspected the damage was due to meteor fragments ricocheting inside the hanger. Unfortunately, the damage required more than she could do to make the shuttle flight-worthy.

Needing a place to eat, sleep, stay warm, and that had sanitary facilities was an immediate problem. The spacesuit could provide most of what Valory required, but only temporarily. She could charge the spacesuit batteries and exchange oxygen tanks while wearing the suit, but that was a cumbersome and time-consuming task. Refilling the suit’s liquid food and water containers, and emptying the sanitary holding bags required her to open her suit, which could only be done in the astrophysics lab where there was an atmosphere though the process had to be completed quickly because of the extreme cold. The food and water containers would take several hours to thaw once inside the suit, so planning ahead was essential. She knew her situation was dismal, and the longer she put off figuring out how to stay alive the direr her circumstance would become. She realized that even if there were heat in the astrophysics lab, with the environmental controls off-line, rising carbon dioxide levels would eventually make the air toxic and unbreathable. Thus, the shuttle became her focus for living quarters.

It took several days for Valory to make enough repairs to the shuttle to maintain atmospheric pressure inside and turn on the heat. The shuttle was designed to be used by a crew of four and accommodate up to sixteen passengers, sustaining them for voyages up to thirty days’ duration, so it was relatively comfortable in a Spartan sort of way. With the onboard anti-matter drives, power would last for many years. Wastewater could be recycled providing her with virtually an unlimited supply of water. There was enough food to sustain her for twelve months, which could be supplemented with food packets from the ship. She was grateful when she could finally remove her spacesuit to shower and get a hot meal with solid food.

After restoring pressure to the shuttle, Valory had found that all its systems were working properly except the flight controls that were damaged beyond her ability to repair. Power, artificial gravity, heat, sanitation facilities, computers, and air and water regeneration modules all worked within normal parameters. However, during her investigation of the onboard systems, she discovered that the inertial dampeners only functioned when the shuttle was in flight. She also noted that the onboard computers had not been updated with the latest information about the planet since all systems were off during the repair. The communication console seemed to work well according to the display. However, when she tried to contact the escape capsules that had departed for the surface, she wasn’t sure if the signal was getting through the hull of the Copernicus, or if no one had made it alive to the surface to respond to her hails. As far as she knew, she was the lone survivor.

During several EVA excursions, Valory had taken her time, and with great care, examined the outside of the Copernicus to discover that all major compartments had been compromised. There were a few smaller areas of the ship that hadn’t sustained damage, but she wouldn’t be able to open the hatches to those compartments without explosive decompression occurring and the possibility of being killed or seriously injured in the process. During the first hours of her exploration, she had found two crewmembers that were still alive and trapped in one of the smaller compartments.