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Topic: Sci Fi Story 'Long Haul'
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Join Date: Jun '01
While looking through my personal folder earlier, I came across this story I wrote for my english class last year. Personaly, I think its great, and I wanted to get some C&C on it, or at least share what Ive accomplished. Without further adoo, I give you 'Long Haul', a Foil Wrapper joint.

CE 2135 21:45 hours 23 days, 6 standard months
Klaxons blared, sirens roared, lights flashed. But over the noise, only one thing mattered; the steady, frantic clicking of fingers on a keyboard. Click-click-click, then nothing. Silence hung for a few precious seconds, until the almost painfully cheery voice of the computer chimed in.
‘Five minutes until self destruct.’
“Damn machine!” yelled Jamie as he threw his servo-pick across the room. His thoughts bitter, he laughed quietly at himself, and then thought for a few seconds about how he had got into this mess.
Jamie was a self-proclaimed ‘treasure hunter’, no more than a smuggler or a rogue; he traversed the length of influence of the Terran Republic’s territories, (which, due to governmental bureaucracy and funding setbacks, reached only to the limit of our solar system, and even then Pluto was extremely out of the way with only two colonies on it) searching for spare parts or scrap to sell to various merchants or anyone else who was buying. Traveling from city to city, planet-to-planet, it wasn’t a great life, but it was his…
Walking over to his servo-pick, he bent over and picked it up out of a pile of dust on the floor. Going back to the computer panel he was working on, he sighed and went back to frantically picking through data nodes and parts trying to find some way to stop the countdown. As he reached for the keypad to try another code, a data-stick fell out of his right breast pocket onto the floor. Looking around before picking it up, he felt its rough surface packed with information, and was completely oblivious to the computer chiming in that he only had four minutes left to live.“This is all your fault.” he said grimly while throwing it over his shoulder.
CE 2135 17:30 hours 03 days, 6 standard months
Pushing the data-stick into his wrist mounted data pad, Jamie looked at the view screen and back up in disbelief.
“He wants me to go to Pluto? Just to sell an old T-625? The fuel alone would cost me more than I could make by selling a hundred of those old things!”
“He said he’d cover the fuel, and that he pays premium for old parts. He’s a collector you know.” Tracho the bartender gruffly said.
“Pfft” Jamie scorned while waving his hand “What’s a rich guy doing on that rock anyway?”
“What does it matter? He’s paying, and maybe you can sell some of your junk to the colonists. They’re starved for parts there.”
“It’s not junk; it’s merchandise!” Jamie snapped back.
“Hey, it’s your chance for money; take it or leave it,” Tracho said as he turned around to serve a customer. Jamie stood leaning against the bar for a second thinking, and then flipped down ten standard credits. He got up and waved as he exited, all the while thinking of new career options.
CE 2135 18:50 hours 23 days, 6 standard months
It was twenty days since he had left Mars, and Jamie was regretting it more and more. His ship ‘The Unlucky Beggar’ was cramped with all the extra supplies he hoped to sell, and long trips always annoyed him anyway. Seeing as he was running fast and was a day early, he decided to catch some sleep.
Five minutes later he was woken by a steady beep-beep-beep coming from his dash.

“Huh, whazzat?” he said in a sleepy daze as he checked his heads up display. A proximity warning was going off. Checking his screen, he turned on 20x magnification, and what he saw shocked him.
“A space station?”
It looked decrepit and old, and had a huge impact crater on one side, right over its identification markers. Space stations were rare since the Earth-Mars war, but it was of obvious Terran design. Jamie slowly looked over its shape and tried to make out any identifying features, but there were none. He sent a hail to it five times, but all he got back was static .
‘It must be abandoned,’ he thought as he stared at it ‘and if it’s abandoned, then its parts are free for the taking. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around,’ he said with a smirk on his face, ‘so as it seems, it’s mine. Could be risky though; it may be unstable, I should probably…’ he trailed off, distracted by the concepts of the money he was about to make, and let the almost instinctual docking procedure take place.
CE 2135 19:10 hours 23 days, 6 standard months
Checking the sensors on the old style wall panel, he found that the life support systems were still online. Convenient for him as he only had a deep space suit and it was large and impractical when deployed. He hit the button on his belt and the suit slid off him and went into condensed mode inside the belt. Playing around with the panel until he got it working, he randomly hit buttons until he found a map. Looking around for a place to connect his wrist data-pad, he was dismayed to find that the wall panel was so old it was incompatible. Finally getting frustrated, he took a picture with his data-pad and queued it up on a portable holo-projector. Using the fuzzy picture, he started to make his way towards the command center.
CE 2135 19:40 hours 23 days, 6 standard months
Traversing the darkened and worn out corridors with caution, Jamie neared the command center, all the while noting the battle damage and look of a rushed evacuation. Passing personnel quarters with broken doors and personal belongings all over the floor, going through mess halls with food (or a long decomposed mass that used to be food) still on the table, he felt an eerie sensation. The station seemed haunted by the ghosts of those who used to make it their home. Finally, coming to the command center, he was dismayed to see that heavy blast doors were in place and he couldn’t enter. Checking the keypad to the right of the door, he found it had been shot by some long dead fighter trying to keep people out, or in, the command center. Trying to pry the door open with his bare hands, and then using a pipe as a lever, he still couldn’t move the door. Frowning with dismay with one eyebrow cocked, he opened up his pack and tried plan B.
CE 2135 19:42 hours 23 days, 6 standard months
Stepping over the charred rubble that used to be a door, Jamie walked over to one of the five working wall panels on the control nexus in the center of the room. Cracking his knuckles and getting to work, he casually went through subsystems trying to find a log of the history of the space station, or any other information possible. He softly cursed himself for not paying more attention in his Olde English class as he passed by a collection of works of some unknown ancient author named Stephen King. Time passed and he managed to decipher enough of the programs to get the log. It was amazing, for he was standing in history. He read the log and couldn’t believe it at all.
The space station that he was on was the infamous lost Alpha 04 station of the Earth-Mars war. Earth and Mars each controlled two stations, Earth had Alpha 01 and 02, and Mars had Alpha 03 and 04. When the civil war against Earth started, the first targets for both sides were the stations. First to fall was 01, then 03 followed by 02. But Alpha 04 was closely guarded and served as an outpost for the Mars warriors, where advanced technology was researched and developed. It helped keep them in the war. But according to legend, the Earth government wanted to crush the morale of the Martians and cripple their war effort at the same time by capturing their main symbol. They sent three highly trained agents in to get it while getting a battleship armada formed to strike after getting the station. The warriors somehow slipped through the defenses and made their way to the control center, killing all who were there. They locked the doors and called over the communications system that they were in control and all were too back down, but the commander would have nothing of it. Knowing that he couldn’t access the command, he only had one option, and it would be recorded as one of the turning points of the war and one of the greatest acts of bravado in history. In a show of futility, he called for all to evacuate, had the keypads on the command center doors shot and activated the self-destruct sequence.
When they heard the 30-minute warning sirens go off, and saw all the people evacuating, the agents didn’t know what to do, but their leader had a plan. In a show of fanaticism, the agents threw their lives away by turning the thrusters on and sending the station into a collision course with Mars’ capital city. Outside a battle raged on, but one of the Mars ships intercepted a communication saying that the station was going to explode and was going to hit the planet. In a moment of inspiration, the captain of the ship launched a warhead to send the station off course. It worked, and the station sailed off into history as the battle went on…
Jamie was shocked; Alpha 04, the last of the advanced stations. His mind raced with the ideas of what technologies he could find on it. But he still needed to know why it had not exploded. Checking the engine core records, he saw that the self-destruct had started, and that the core had started to go critical when the warhead hit. The blast disrupted the systems on the station, and activated the emergency cool down. The station’s core went offline, and most of the power to the station went off. But that didn’t explain why it was orbiting Pluto. Checking another record, he saw that it was all by chance. While on its dead flight, the station had crossed into the orbital path of Pluto and managed to hook on.
Jamie was excited, euphoric even. He had a world of wealth at his fingertips; he just needed to find more data on all the systems. He started working the keypad to try to get more of the computer network online. Minutes passed as he started to solve the puzzle, he found the startup code. Clicking away quickly he started the core up again… A faint buzzing noise could be heard, then he heard it for the first time.
‘Ten minutes until self-destruct.’
Looking puzzled at the computer screen, all he could say was “What?”
Then it dawned on him, enough of the computer systems had stayed online to store the self-destruct command in memory; and when he restarted the core, he had restarted the self-destruct command. With disbelief, he tried to shut the core back down, but to no avail. The system had shorted out with that last command. Checking his time, it dawned on him that he couldn’t possibly reach The Unlucky Beggar in ten minutes. With no other option, he ripped open the underside of one of the computers, brought out his servo-pick and hoped he could find some way to bypass the self-destruct.
Five minutes of intense work went by, and Jamie was covered in a cold sweat. He thought he had something to work with. Hitting the last switch he held his breath.
Silence
And then the almost painfully cheery voice of the computer chimed in. Five minutes left. In anger, Jamie threw his servo-pick across the room. Slowly crossing to pick it up, he started thinking to himself. When he went back to work, the data-stick with his original orders fell out. Picking it up and throwing it over his shoulder, he realized that he had no hope. Three and a half minutes left, all he could think of doing was looking on his data pad for pictures of friends and loved ones. Scanning the files, his eyes fell on the newest one, the picture of the stations map, and it gave him an idea.
‘Three minutes until self-destruct.’
Jumping up off the floor Jamie started blazing through the computer network in a race against time. All he needed was one thing, a chance, a hope, and he might make it out alive.
‘Two minutes until self-destruct.’
With a look of joy and glee, he found it. A blueprint of the station showing all the pressure spots and places of built up armor. He saw exactly what he needed; one of the rooms had a doorway that would stay intact through the explosion. Taking his last chance, he dropped his servo-pick and ran into the hall hoping to get to the door in time.
‘One minutes until self-destruct.’
Rushing with amazing speed, Jamie blazed through corridors to find the door, hoping that it was the right one.
‘Thirty seconds until self-destruct.’
Then he hit the release button on his belt, his deep space suit unpacked and slid over his body. He said a quick prayer, held on to the door with his right hand, and positioned the left over the cryo freeze button.
‘Ten seconds until self-destruct.’
He just hoped he was pointing in the right direction.
‘Five seconds…four…three…two…’
He hit the button.
‘One…’
As the icy tendrils of the cryo-freeze suspension took over his body, he aimed himself in the general direction of Pluto with his thrusters. He noticed that the explosion had sent him far off course and away from the planet, but he didn’t care. All he could think of was sunny beaches, women with drinks, and pleasant nights. He was going on a long haul, the longest of his life. Then all he knew was darkness.

 

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Sergeant
Posts: 1,843
Join Date: Apr '02
Great story. When I read stories like this it reminds me of my mediocre writing.

 

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