Author's Note:
I am back after a long hiatus. With smut. This one is a serial—I have the plot outlined but I'm writing as I go. An homage to one of the most iconic sci-fi franchises of all time but with a futa twist! No sex in this chapter I'm afraid. Tune in next chapter!
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Chapter 1
Anna gasped out loud. As the haze slowly began to clear and her senses began to return, the first thing she noticed was the cold.
She shivered. Her entire body shuddered and trembled as if she was seizing. Her skin was so cold it felt as if it was on fire. If she could see, she was sure her breath would come out in mists. Her limbs felt heavy, like they had been asleep forever.
Asleep. Cryostasis. Colony ship.
A surge of excitement. They had finally arrived.
Her eyes snapped open.
The room was dark. A low tone beeped behind her ears. No one greeted her and only the emergency navigation lights were on but even those were dim beyond their normal levels, casting the room in dark red glow.
Pain suddenly tore through her skull and she curled over and cried out.
"Fuck!"
It was unbearable.
But as soon as the migraine happened it was gone and she was left breathing hard.
Groaning, she pushed herself up and felt herself lift from the pod and float upwards.
"That's strange," Anna muttered.
She grabbed the lip of the pod and used it to spin herself around to touch down onto the ground. Technically, there was no "down" in space especially when the ship's artificial gravity was offline but she needed some semblance of normality. She winced as her entire body exploded in fiery pain. As the sensation slowly returned to her limbs, she felt a wave of nausea suddenly overtake her and doubled over, hacking up stasis fluid. Globules of gray liquid floated through the air before splashing onto the "ground."
Just when she thought she was done, another wave of nausea hit her and she threw up again. Her head throbbed with a series of brain melting migraines and it was all she do to curl up into a fetal position and float in place, waiting for everything to subside.
"Hello?!" she cried, her voice hoarse and weak, "Is anybody there?!
"Leah?! Is this some sort of prank? Come on, this isn't funny."
After what felt like an eternity she unfurled herself and pushed herself back down to the floor and looked around again.
She was in one of the cryostasis chambers but all the other pods stored behind her were dark and none of them were open.
Very carefully, she picked herself up and steadied herself on her pod.
All the pods had an interface on the right side for accessing vital functions and diagnostics. Anna looked down and tried to make sense of the readings.
There were no readings displayed, only the same warning that flashed repeatedly.
Emergency Revitalization Sequence Initiated
Anna frowned. She tried pressing the menu button or swiping around with her finger but the screen was unresponsive. Without her gear—namely her tablet there wasn't any way for her to access the system console and diagnose what went wrong.
Shivering, she wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to keep warm.
"Need clothes."
The form-fitting cryostasis suits they wore into the pods were state-of-the-art and had embedded sensors to help monitor vitals but were also sheer, thin, and not very insulating.
She went over to the far side of the room and pressed a button to open one of the storage lockers.
Nothing happened.
Cursing under her breath, she tried another one. Again, no response. She went down the line, trying all of them out of sheer frustration. None of them opened.
"Helloooo?!" cried Anna looking up at the ceiling, "what the hell is going on?"
No response. What had happened to the ship's AI? Why wasn't anything powered?
Did we even make it to the new system?
A sinking feeling crept into her as she began to run through all the worst case scenarios in her head.
The door that led out of the chamber was open at least and the hallway beyond was lit in the soft red glow of emergency navigation lights.
Steeling herself, Anna left the chamber and went right down the hallway. She tried to remember the layout of the ship from memory but the mental fog from stasis was making things a struggle. Luckily, the ship had maps etched into the wall just about every block.
"Here we go," she muttered as a spidery collection of lines, words, and symbols came into view.
Shivering in place, Anna traced where she was on the ship. While her brain seemed to be running slower than synth syrup, she vaguely recollected being told that the cryopods were built towards the aft of the ship. The map on the wall confirmed her suspicions and once she saw where the bridge was, she groaned inwardly.
"Well at least I won't have to walk."
It had taken some detours and all in all much longer than she'd have liked but Anna had made it to the bridge. Along the way, she had found a jumpsuit from a maintenance closet that had malfunctioned and now wore it zipped up over her cryosuit. There had been a few in the closet and she had been pleasantly surprised to find one that was roughly her size. She couldn't quite tell what color it was since it was dark enough to simply look black underneath the red lighting but it helped with the cold and it had pockets that she could put stuff into and that was a win. There had been a portable work light in the closet as well which she had tucked into one of her many pockets.
"Hello?" she called.
The bridge was eerily silent. The door was wide open though a part of the door jutted out as if it had been manually opened and someone hadn't pushed it all the way open. The room was cast in the same dim red light as the rest of the ship. All of the operator screens were dark and the main navigation hub looked to be completely offline. There was someone there sort of debris suspended in the air on the far side of the room and below the navigation hub, a panel had been removed and a tangle of wires erupted from the base like some sort of tangle of vines. A toolkit was hooked onto one of the safety bars.
Anna floated through and immediately made her way over to the pilot's chair where an array of screens and controls surrounded the chair in a semi-circle. She tapped the main screen but there was no response. Frowning she found the manual power switch and pressed that, holding it down for at least ten seconds.
After a pause, the backlight glowed and a logo appeared in the middle of the screen shaped like a V. It was the symbol of Vector, one of the biggest software companies in the system. Or it had been at any rate, it was anyone's guess if they were still around. Anna didn't even know what year it was.
The bootup finished in a few seconds and the home screen appeared. She looked up at the corner of the screen and pulled down one of the menus and stared.
10:53
Thursday, August 20
3314
She frowned. That couldn't be right. They had left the system in 2089. The trip was only supposed to take a hundred and fifty years. If this was accurate then they had been in space for
over a thousand years.
She tapped on a few icons and brought up the ship's main log and the screen filled with lines upon lines of neatly organized text entries accompanied with various icons that related to the different sections of the ship. She scrolled through and read the headlines—it was a lot of warnings about different parts of the ship losing power or failing. After what seemed like an hour of scrolling (probably only a minute at most), she let out an exasperated sigh and tapped the filter settings and reorganized the entries by date ascending instead.
"Should've just done this in the first place," Anna muttered to nobody but herself.
It was still a lot of information to process but at least now she was getting dates that were closer to their departure year. As she skimmed and kept scrolling she quickly saw where the warnings began.
[ 2186/9/03 4:53:39 ]
Warning!
Class 5 Solar flare detected
[ 2186/9/03 4:54:15 ] Attempting evasive maneuvers
[ %$8/ÔÏ/&* 4:5§‹Ç◊ ]
War_ni•ª˚∆ng!
Damage
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[ I...≤86&WTG03 4a¶©˚ ]
Q4r28i|?'!
