NULL SPACE - Part 21

NULL SPACE - Part 21

Once Solvar was done setting the autopilot Silvia said, “Alright, Let’s go to the escape pod. You want to get out of here don’t you?” She then lead him through the ship to the escape pod. He got in and she pointed the gun at him while she shut the door. She seal the door and waited.

After a minute she could hear Solvar yell, “What are you waiting for, eject me.” Now that she wasn’t pointing a gun at him he was able to show her the full measure of his anger. He continued to yell at her through the sealed doors. Silvia hadn’t primed the escape pod yet so he wasn’t able to eject by himself. She ignored his yelling for several minutes. Eventually she felt that they were far enough from the planet to be fairly safe. She pressed the button and the escape pod shot out from the ship and into empty space.

Silvia dropped the gun with a clatter and sank down the the ground. She felt so tense that she felt like she was going to explode. She lay there trying to recover for a while before finally climbing to her feet and walking back to the cockpit. She tried to remember how Solvar set the autopilot and did her best to set it to a different nearby planet. It would have been stupid to continue on a course charted by somebody that hated you but she needed him to do it so that she could watch how he did it. She only hoped that it was set up correctly.

She then looked around the ship. She didn’t know where the man had brought both Jeran and Null but she soon found them. They were both still unconscious and Silvia had to lean close and listen hard to find that Null was still alive. Silvia was thankful that she could still detect Null’s breathing and heartbeat even though they were faint. She didn’t know what was wrong with Null so she couldn’t do anything about it.

Jeran however was a different story. Silvia managed to find some bandages and water and tried to clean Jeran’s wounds and wrap them. It was a grousome task. His arms and legs were badly burned as if by acid. She did the best she could trying to remember how the nurses in the hospital did things. After a while she had covered his arms and legs in bandages and she only hoped those would help. She returned to the cockpit and looked around. Nothing was obviously wrong but she had little experience about this stuff. She scoured the room and eventually found the user operation guide to the ship. She began looking through it hoping it would help.

She continued reading and watching the panels on the ship until… until… She woke up suddenly, not realizing that she had been sleeping. She scrambled to check the instruments only to find that her dad was laying unconscious in the co-pilot’s chair and that she had a blanket draped over her. She got up and checked her dad, he seemed to be either unconscious or sleeping but otherwise he seemed fine.

She looked over the controls and saw that their course had been changed slightly. He dad must have corrected it while she was sleeping. Silvia then got up and went back into the ship to check on Null. She had been placed under the bed covers and several sheets had been laid over her. Silvia realized that her should have done with, with Null as cold as she had been this seemed like an obvious action.

After Silvia had finished checking on Null she decided to go exploring the ship. It was a different model then the one that they had been flying on previously. Unfortunately they had lost all their stuff on the other ship, however they had gotten away with their lives which was good. She managed to find the kitchen and began looking through the supplies. Unfortunately it was filled with all of the sorts of things that her dad might have chosen, did the military really like nutritional paste that much?

She prepared something to the best of her capability and then let a place next to both Jeran and Null. She knew that they would be hungry if they woke up. After then she brought the ship’s manual with her into the bunkroom and read that until she fell asleep again.

It was a little while later that Jeran woke up again. He had previously woken up to find himself on a strange ship next to Null. His arms and legs still felt like they were one fire but it seemed that somebody, probably Silvia, had bandaged them. They wrappings were badly done but he left them like they were. He took a couple of pain killers from the medical kit that was still sitting next to him and then just to be safe took a couple extra. That was a lot more then they recommended but if anyone needed extra painkiller it was him.

Then after slipping the bottle of painkiller into his pocket he check on Null. She was very cold but she seemed to still be breathing, if very shallow. While she was laying on a bed, Jeran thought it would be better to put her under some covers. After doing that he checked around the ship. He found Silvia asleep in the pilot’s chair with the ship’s manual in her lap. He placed his hand on her head for a second before returning to the bunkroom and grabbing another blanket.

After laying that on Silvia he check the ships course. It seemed that Silvia must have sent the autopilot. He looked over it and smiled to himself. For a beginner she had done fairly well. Jeran was proud of her for everything that she had done. He tweaked a few of the settings to ensure nothing happened during the journey. The painkillers were making him feel sort of drowsy, but on the plus side his arms and legs now only hurt a little bit. He sat down in the chair next to Silvia and fell asleep.

The second time that he woke up he found a plate for food next to him. He felt hungry but before he started to eat he had to take the painkillers out and take a few more of them. He knew that both him and Null needed real hospital attention but he didn’t know if they could really risk it. He was hunger however and quickly eat everything that Silvia had left for him. Afterward he left to check on Null again. There was a plate of food next to her but it was uneaten. While Jeran had more obvious wounds he feared that Null was hurt more then he was. Silvia was also in the room sleeping. She had taken the manual in with her. He made sure to move the book to the nearby table and that she was tucked in.

They needed to find a good place to recover, preferably some planet or space station which they wouldn’t be found at but which they could get the necessary medical attention. Some place they wouldn’t keep records about their visit so that they couldn’t be tracked. Jeran really didn’t like the sound of that, but considering they were basically considered criminals there weren’t very many other good choices.

Because of that Jeran began the time consuming process of clearing the ship’s records so that people wouldn’t be able to trace it back to the Mythian military or let the Mythian military trace it. He then began combing the ship to make sure that there weren’t any tracking devices on it. Luckly tracking devices that worked over long distances were fairly large so he would have been able to find any if they were there. By the time he had finished searching he limbs were beginning to pain him again because his pain killers must have begun to wear off.

He took some more pain killers before returning to the bunk room and laying down. He had to lay awake in the bed for a while before the pain began to dull and he was finally able to fall asleep.

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Time passed on the ship and eventually Jeran and Silvia were awake at the same time. Jeran explained what had happened down in the tunnels when he went to rescue Null and Silvia told the story about how she managed to threaten Solvar into letting them have the ship. She of course left out all the parts about how nervous she was and how many times she though that she was going to fail. Jeran had been eating an unhealthy amount of pain killers and Silvia was worried, however Jeran didn’t think he would be able to function without that many of them.

While the ship flew to the course they had initially planned Jeran told Silvia that they needed to find a place with a hospital that would be able to keep them secret. There were several places that would do that for them but most of them were unsavory. Eventually Jeran suggested that they visit The End, it wasn’t a very nice place because there wasn’t much law there and it had a lot of crime, however they would be able to hide their visit because of that. The only problem that Jeran foresaw was what they were going to do about the hospital bill. Jeran had practically no money left and since he had learned that Myth had been tracking him through his bank account and he didn’t want to spend the money that he did have.

He guess that he could have to see this ship and use the money to pay for the medical bills. Then he would try to buy a smaller ship with the remaining money. However there was still the larger problem of how to afford things in the future. He guess they he would have to get a method of earning money. It was Silvia that suggested that since they planned on keeping moving that they should work as a transport. Jeran thought that was a good idea, space stations in particular were always needed supplies of some kind. The main problem was that if they downgraded the size of the ship then it probably wouldn’t be big enough to function as a transport.

Still they didn’t have many options. The End was their best option. It took them several days to reach it, during that time Null still wasn’t waking up and Jeran began to run dangerously low on pain killers. He knew his arms couldn’t be getting any better without treatment. When they arrived at the space station it was easy to convince them to let them land and get a parking spot. After they got off Jeran said to Silvia, “I’m going to go and try and find someone who is willing to buy the ship. I want you to try and find where the hospital is. I want us to meet up here in two hours, do you think that you can do that?”

Silvia nodded, “Yeah, I can do that dad.” Jeran nodded and let her go off by herself. He then headed off to find somebody to but they ship. It took him a while to find someone who was willing to buy, however the price was only half bad. However he needed a new bank account to take them money and by the time he gotten that opened it had been about two hours.

He was beginning to remove Null from the ship when Silvia came back. They didn’t have anything else left in the ship because it had all been in their old ship. Now they had enough money to pay for the hospital and maybe get another smaller ship, they hired a transport car to carry Null to the hospital.

Apophenia Tue, 10/28/2014 - 11:27