Why my ship explodes when I run out of oxygen...
02 Jun 2016Latium Greenvine
The CMDR settled comfortably into his seat. It was going to be a long supercruise to the remote outpost. This was just another boring delivery to pay the bills. He’d done this same run seven times in the last month. Some time later, as his mind was beginning to drift off to other matters, new information popped up on his HUD. “Salvageable Wreckage” appeared close to the path his ship was now on. The CMDR studied the message for a moment. He’d fallen into a pirate trap once before, while answering a distress call. That incident only helped to make the CMDR more cautious and suspicious. Space is dangerous place after all.Just before the wreckage signal slipped by, the CMDR pulled back on the throttle and locked onto the faint signal. This was a pretty remote area of space. Curiosity had overruled his sense of cautiousness. What would he find way out here? Something profitable perhaps?
Seconds later the CMDR’s Adder slammed out of supercruise into local space. The CMDR checked his radar but saw nothing. Throttling up into the blue, the CMDR began looping around the area looking for a radar signature. After a few moments something popped up. It was a faint signature, something small. The CMDR boosted in the direction of the signal scanning the starfield ahead for the outline of a ship.
Suddenly, there it was, nearly indistinguishable against the endless black of the cosmos, the small outline of a Sidewinder.
The CMDR pulled his ship in close and activated the ship’s lights. He slowly maneuvered his Adder around the hull inspecting the damage. The Sidewinder was riddled with holes and had deep cuts from beam lasers carved into the armor plating. As he came around the bow he felt a lump in his throat. There before him was a shattered canopy and the lifeless body of another CMDR hanging halfway out of the cockpit.
The CMDR breathed a deep sigh then loosened his safety harness. He made his way to the back of his ship. There he put on his EVA suit and exited his craft from the rear.
A few moments later, the CMDR was approaching the derelict Sidewinder. The cargo hatch, he saw, was open. A magnetic limpet was still attached to the outside. Pirates. Just as he’d suspected when he first saw the weapon damage.
Knowing that most everything of value had already been removed from the craft the CMDR made his way to the bow. There he came face to face with the deceased CMDR. What he saw haunted him for many years afterwards. The dead CMDR was frozen solid. There was no obvious damage to his body. Yet, his face was bloated and twisted up in agony, blank eyes staring back into the face of the CMDR through the glare of their respective flight helmets. This man, it so obviously appeared, did not die quickly. He suffered terribly, gasping for breath as his own blood began to boil his body.
Gently, the CMDR pushed the frozen corpse back into the cockpit and looped the seat’s safety harness around one of the dead man’s shoulders to hold him in place and keep him from drifting out into the black forever.
Ten minutes later the CMDR was back in his seat gazing blankly out his own canopy at the wreckage. He gave a salute, then, looking over at his navigation panel, targeted the Sidewinder and sub-targeted the small ship’s power plant. Moments later, three gimballed multi-cannons emerged from the Adder. Flashes of fire erupted from the spinning barrels. After a few seconds the Sidewinder disappeared in a brilliant explosion. A gentle shock wave rocked the CMDR in his seat, and then it was all over. Only a few small bits of the ship’s hull remained scattering all directions in space.
The CMDR sat in silence for a while still gazing out at the stars where the unfortunate Sidewinder had been only moments before. Breathing another deep sigh the CMDR retargeted the outpost, realigned, and throttled up. His frame shift drive began to spin up. The Adder’s computer began the countdown to supercruise. Just before the ship could leap back into supercruise the CMDR cancelled the sequence and throttled down.
The young CMDR decided he would not take lightly the lesson that the look on the dead man’s face had just taught him. He saw his own face there. It wasn’t so long ago that he himself had started out in a similar Sidewinder.
The CMDR looked over his shoulder at the ship’s maintenance screen where the Zorgon Peterson logo shown brightly in the dim cabin. He unfastened his safety harness and made his way over to the small panel. As he drifted there weightlessly before the computer screen he began to access the ship’s protected settings.
“Manual security override is necessary to access this setting” the ship’s computer calmly protested.
“Alpha, zulu, centuari, wolf, piscium, niner, two.” the CMDR replied.
“Security override successful” replied the gentle, yet lifeless computer voice.
Once inside the protected settings, the CMDR wrote a short subroutine and attached it to the basic life support settings. The subroutine was a simple one. Once the life support ran out of oxygen, the ship would immediately self destruct.