Fiction: Jorlanth's Last Words 1/2

This was written as part of Carlos Alos-Ferrier's "short" adventure set in the Etan system in his Beyond the Extents setting, a varient of the Traveller setting. This game started at the beginning of April 2003 and was carried by the Yahoo Group 'Traveller'. Credit to Carlos for the adventure, and to the other players for their characters. Jorlanth's actions and attitudes are the only thing that I can claim credit for. Also note that Jorlanth's interpretation of what happened isn't necessarily accurate. He did spend entirely too much time as a cowering gibbering wreck after all.

The Traveller setting was first conceived back in 1977, and retains the flavour of Science Fiction from that age.

Terran's are humans decended from Earth. Retani are humans descended from a stock taken from Earth some 30,000 years ago by the Ancients. One of several subspecies of human's created as a result of this event. Vargr are genetically engineered Terran dogs modified by the same species that spread humans through out known space, and beyond. Vargr walk upright in a digi-grade fashion, have opposable thumbs and talk mostly legibly.

Jorlanth set up a distress beacon and recorded what he feared may be his last words.

My name is Simon Jorlanth from Nawarth, Citizen ID N345-JH5698-AUB7203-IO3443. I work for Etan Advanced Hydroponics at the Kampeins Habitat.

I'm recording this because we are so far from anyone else that I don't think my air will last long enough. You need to know what happened. What is out here. They are killers and they can hide anywhere. I wish I didn't know any of this, but I do and you need to know too. How did I get into this?

I had been returning to Kampeins after a brief holiday with my family back on Nawarth when it started. I had been on board one of Aaghian Transport's shuttles leaving some habitat on the edge of the Endhagoi district. I've forgotten which one after all the insanity that has happened since then. The shuttle was supposed to be my last leg to get to Kampeins, only an eight hour trip. But for some reason it was late leaving.

A Retani came out of the cockpit, he was wearing the right uniform so we believed he was who he seemed to be. He told us that the shuttle had been reassigned, that we should return to the terminal and catch the next shuttle.

Another passenger, Leonid Brashumsky, a big Terran Belter, tried to talk to the pilot, something about having to make a connection at Kampeins, to somewhere in Ykkara District I think. Yet another passenger, some undersecretary of some sort called something Compton, tried to persuade the pilot to got to Kampeins. He was talking something about contracts and obligations. It was at that point that another man boarded the shuttle. A Terran, also in uniform and speaking Anglic. He screamed at us to leave the shuttle. He looked as if he had been running.

A Vargr passenger joined in the argument while I waited to see if this shuttle would actually go to Kampeins. If it didn't, and I had to wait for the next shuttle, I would be late for my shift the next day. Perhaps I should have gotten of. Then I would at least still have a chance to live.

The Vargr would later tell us that he was a StarPol officer. Darrurz Goranggr.

The uniformed Terran said to let us rot and that they should leave straight away. The Retani went back into the cockpit and an alarm went of as the shuttle launched. It was a horrible launch. We all got thrown back into our seats. Apart from the two Terrans and the Retani passenger that is.

I could see through the still open door that there were two people on the bridge, the Retani that spoken to us and one other. I could see that they had been working on sort of trajectory plot.The uniformed Terran went into the bridge closing and locking the door and left the four of us in the passenger area. That was me, Leonid, Compton and the Vargr.

They then spoke to us over the comms system from the bridge and told us to be quite and nothing would happen to us.

The other passengers tried to decide what to do. I think they were wanting to take over the shuttle and fly it to Kampeins. I was made to try and hook into the comms system, but I tried to tell them that the shuttle might be going to some disaster. Maybe to help a ship in distress. I didn't want to jeopardize that by messing with the ships systems. But they didn't listen to me.

I finally got Compton's portable comm unit patched into the ships comms system but that took about an hour to do, I think. It was another hour before he was able to get anything out of it.

It was at this point that the Vargr finally told us that he was StarPol and had a gun on him.We were being hijacked and he could have done something about it and didn't. Bloody Vargr.

Anyway, the Terran, Compton, managed to let us hear what was going on on the bridge.

We didn't really understand much of what we heard. Something about Space Troopers, having an hour and a half advantage but that we would have been caught up with. They were expecting that as part of whatever there plan was. They seemed concerned that someone was still alive somewhere, presumably at their destination. We picked out one name, the Retani's: Edaian. They talked about slamming into a support module. At the time we didn't realise what they meant by that. Still, it didn't sound like something we wanted to stick around for. They also talked about only having three Jet Packs and we could hear three different voices, which would have been the Terran, the Retani and the other figure that I had seen through the door to the bridge. The Retani didn't seem to want to let us die when they crashed the shuttle, but they felt that their plan was more important than our collateral deaths. They at least seemed slightly concerned at what PlanPol's reaction to our deaths might be.

As much as I'd rather not have been involved at all, I can see now why they were so desperate to destroy the habitat that we were heading for. We were about two hours away from it by then and it had been a little longer than that since we had left the habitat.

At this point I was convinced that they were terrorists, and until very recently I still thought that was the case.

I came up with an idea to try and regain control of the shuttle, or at least influence it. We just had to think like a parasite that wants to control what it's host does. If we could use our hacked up comms link into the shuttle's systems to feed false sensor information. We didn't need to control the engines ourselves, all we had to do was trick the hijackers into doing what we wanted them to do. If only it had worked.

We had no idea where we were heading as we couldn't access the navigation data.

After mumbling to himself a lot in one of the Vargr languages Darrurz, who had assumed he was in charge, agreed that my plan was a good was and that we should do it. He gave Compton a message to transmit on the long-range comms should we fail in stopping the shuttle.

Darrurz recorded his message in Retani, so I've no idea what he said.

[Retani] Starpol ID (DARRURZ's id number). Officer being illegally detained. Shuttle on a collision course with an unknown space module. Stop shuttle by any means. Other civilians on board. Primary objective stop shuttle.

Compton's foresight saved us for a little while when he suggested we got the life capsules ready. Darrurz and Leonid broke the big inflatable balls from the overhead lockers.

I worked with Compton to generate the false sensor recordings that we would use to fool the hijackers. We settled on telling them that there was a sharp power spike on the engines, that they were overloaded and that a safety cutout would engage soon. We would then gradually creep the levels of the engine's feedback back up until we warned them of a possible cutout again. We hoped we could repeat this a few times to make them slow the shuttle till we could figure out a better plan.

Unfortunately it took us nearly an hour to get that all setup. We repeated our ruse three times without them slowing down before they realised what we were trying to do. We did however hear them refer to, what we thought was an asteroid 'RH-17'. I think this was where they were planning to rendezvous and transfer to with the Jet Packs.

Darrurz got angry at that and started ranting. He threw one of the emergency life pod at me and asked if we could think of any other ways to slow the shuttle.

Compton started talking about going outside the shuttle in the life pods to try and sabotage the engines. Leonid was the only one who thought he knew enough to do anything to the engines and was also mad enough to wear a life pod with holes cut in it for his arms and legs, duct-taped to seal it to he skin.

While Leonid was cutting up one of the life pods Darrurz forced me to help override the safety controls on the rear hatch of the shuttle. It was just that. A hatch. No airlock, so it was designed no to open unless it sensed an atmosphere outside.

Once Leonid was ready the rest of us got into our life pods and Darrurz blew the hatch open. We had tried to tie ourselves down but none of the ropes worked and Darrurz was pulled straight out the open hatch. Being as the only rope that held was the one that we had used to tie us to each other I was pulled towards the opening after Darrurz. I managed to get stuck in the opening without tearing my bubble, but I think it was Compton fell on me from behind and knocked me out into the void pulling him and Leonid out with me.

As we hung there in space I was able to spot the flashes of the three Jet Packs head of into the distance towards an asteroid that seemed to be floating in space overhead. It was obvious the this must have been RH-17 that they were transferring to. The shuttle that they had presumable landed on it's surface before hand was sitting there waiting on them.

I'd managed to hurt my arm leaving the shuttle. It wasn't too bad, but it hurt.

Leonid managed to climb back up the rope towards the shuttle and pulled us all into the now abandoned bridge through the airlock the hijackers had used to leave. Once we got out of our life pods, Leonid and Compton tried to halt the shuttles course but it had all been locked down and the computer was directing the shuttle towards a small modular habitat. It was aiming for one of the modules that formed part of the main habitat's ring.

I tried to find the Auto-Pilot to shut it of, but the hijackers must have done something to it. I couldn't disengage it. In an attempt to regain control of the computer and the shuttle, Compton reset it. This left us with absolutely no control of the ship. Apparently the computer wouldn't come back on-line because of the hull breaches in the passenger section.

Looking out of the bridge viewport I could see the habitat now. There was a loud clang noise and I was thrown across the bridge with the others. My face slammed into one of the walls as we were all thrown about the bridge. I think we must have been spinning widely and that some thrusters were trying to stabilize our tumble. By the time I could look again there was a stream of blood floating out in front of me from my nose, held up by the zero gravity. I wasn't the only one bleeding either. I think Darrurz must have gotten cut on something and Leonid smashed his head badly too.

That was when I noticed the crack on the viewport. I had been looking at the surface of an asteroid that the emergency systems had managed to land us on when I saw it. I screamed at the others to get back into out rescue balls. We were just quick enough. When it did crack and explode outward under the cabin pressure was pulled outside, but because I hadn't had time to completely inflate by pod I could grab hold of the surface of the asteroid before floating of into space.

Darrurz had been pulled outside too, but he hadn't managed to grab hold of anything. He was drifting of away from the asteroid. I could see past him, about half a klick away, the remains of the habitat. Despite our efforts the bulk of the shuttle had still hit part of the station. Where there had originally been a ring of modules was now just half of it and a cloud of drifting wreckage.

Leonid and Compton managed to use the rope we had made earlier from strips of carpeting in the passenger section of the shuttle and a ball of duct tape to pull me back to the shuttle's bridge module. Darrurz was too far away by now.

The rest of us were able to talk by pressing the surfaces of our life pods together. It was terrible. We couldn't do anything for Darrurz. The asteroid was the roof that we were desperate to hold onto for fear of falling into space. But we couldn't stay there. Our air supply was low already. We decided to try and sacrifice the air from one of the pod, the spare one the Leonid had originally planned to climb into after sabotaging the engines of the shuttle. We would use it's air canister as a jet to push us towards the remains of the habitat and hope that our aim was good, that we could find a functional airlock and that there was still a sealed environment over there. We had to try. If we stayed where we were we were dead anyway.

More in Part 2 once I've had something to eat.