Prisoner Escape

[redletalis]

Sargeant Walters was the highest authority aboard the Chagrin, and Kim considered herself lucky that the gray-haired man wasn't as bad as the rumours said. It wasn't easy to be a woman in the army - old-fashioned stereotypical views ran rampant despite all the time that had passed - and it was even more difficult to be a woman in the army travelling through space on a mission. Kim had long since gotten used to some of the things - the lewd hollers and crude suggestions for one - but a lone woman out in the middle of space, miles away from help or friends and surrounded by men, well, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what might happen. It had happened before, women ending up pregnant or raped, so that was a reason why Kim was very grateful for Sargeant Walters. He was a tough old nut, and his discipline was hellish, but it at least kept her safe.


Not that she couldn't take care of herself, heavens no! But still, she was the only woman on board and there were many men and it took a lot of time to get to Prison Delta787 , and she preferred not to have to look over her shoulder all the time, wondering if she was going to be jumped or if they were spying at her in the shower or whatever. It was more for her own peace of mind rather than any embarrassment she might have felt by being ogled by men. There was little room in the army for shyness or embarrassment, and even less room for it in the middle of space, so she had quickly gotten past those inhibitions.


*Not that I am going to run down the corridors butt naked either,* Kim thought to herself as she walked towards the cockpit of the Chagrin. Her brown hair was cropped short - in space one had to be careful with one's resources, especially food and water, so short hair was a must. It also helped to keep lice and other such nasty little bugs away, and whenever it threatened to get too long it was straight off to someone who could cut it for you. The suit she was dressed in was padded and bulky and it kept her warm and snug and protected her, so Kim couldn't have cared less what it looked like. Besides, who was she to dress up for right in the middle of freaking space?


"Hey, Williams! Was wondering when you were going to show up and brighten my day!" Rodriguez called to her as she stepped into the cockpit. It was a surprisingly small space considering the enormous ship that was piloted and controlled from this little room. In return it was full of blinking buttons and screens full of information that Kim wasn't even going to try to understand. She was a mechanic with a love for things going kaboom, not a geek.


"The Seargent wants you to take a break and get some food into you," Kim replied, totally ignoring his flirting. At least Rodriguez kept it light and funny rather than being annoying. "I'll look after things here while you go down and get some grub."


"Alright, but if anything happens to my baby Chagrin then I'm holding you responsible!" Rodriguez declared as he jumped out of the chair and headed towards the door.


Kim snorted. "This isn't a 'baby', Angelo, it is a scrapheap just waiting to fall apart at the seams! You should see some of the repairs I've had to do to the engines. They suck. Prisoner transport ship or not, the army should look at upgrading it."


"Let's just hope that you didn't just jinx us, Williams." The Latino man said as he exited the cockpit.


Kim shook her head and grumbled about superstitious people as she plopped down in the pilot's chair. She may be a mechanic, but she had also learned to at least be able to keep the ship on course and also realize when the dashboard was telling her that something was wrong, so she could substitute like this for a short while. Besides, watching the blackness of space and the glowing stars outside the window was a break from glaring at broken machinery. Sighing in boredom the brunette woman briefly wished that she had brought along something to read.


Perhaps it was god or perhaps it was something else which had made her forget her book in her quarters, but that was the only thing that allowed her to spot the oncoming meteor that was hurtling towards the ship's path. In only a few seconds they would collide and the ship would be history. Kim did the only thing that she could do, she pulled the handle for the emergency breaks and hoped that the ship would stop in time. The large, scrapheap-like vessel shuddered, groaned but stopped and just in time too. The comet was this close to hitting the ship, and Kim actually swore that she could feel the heat of the celestial body as it flew past them.


"Holy shit." She muttered and ran her hand through her short hair, absentmindedly noting that it was almost time to cut it again. Taking a deep breath and reaching out for the control that would start the engines again, Kim blinked when the constant hum of the ship suddenly changed into a noise which she knew was not good. The sudden stop must have disrupted the repair jobs she had been doing on the engines and also destroyed things totally, for everywhere she looked in the cockpit the consoles were telling her that the ship was shutting down totally. The lights had turned into red, warning of danger, and the mechanical voice of the ship's computer rang through the entire ship warning for the crew to get to the escape pods. Kim cursed violently and ran to do the same, only to find that the doors which led from the cockpit corridor and into the rest of the ship wouldn't want to open for her no matter what she did. The entire ship had been totally fucked up, and Kim turned on her heel and ran back to the cockpit. The engines were still working a bit and she could only pray that they worked enough for her to steer the ship to some sort of safety. Or could send out a distress signal or something.


"Come on!" she practically shouted as she sat in the pilot's chair, grabbed the steering controlls and turned the ship in the direction of the closest planet she could see which could sustain human life. It was luckily not far away, and she put the pedal to the metal - as the saying went - pushing the ship to its limits as she steered it in that direction. The lights on the console blinked as the crew escaped in the pods, and she wanted to smash all those little lights, cursing them for not even having tried to come back to help her. Or the 900 plus prisoners that they were transporting.


Then suddenly the green planet's gravitational pull grabbed a hold of the ship and the vessel shuddered, metal screeched and the ship lurched a bit as the tail part of it - the cargo hold - was ripped off from the rest of the body, and Kim could only count herself lucky that the cells had been placed in the middle of the ship rather than at the back. She didn't want so many lives on her conscience. The green planet was getting closer and closer, the ship was going faster and faster as the pull became stronger, and Kim grabbed for the break again hoping to slow them down, but the second she pulled it the engines of the ship exploded and she lost complete control over it.


"Fuck!" the brunette woman cursed as she gave up trying to control or steer the ship, and instead scrambled out of her chair and stumbled like a drunk towards the doors out of the cockpit. The entire ship was heating up thanks to the atmosphere and the speed of the descent, the gravity was totally out of whack, and it was only luck that Kim managed to get out of the cockpit and was running down the corridor towards the doors that led into the ship proper when the Chagrin crashed. Kim couldn't stop the scream as she was thrown from one end of the corridor to the other, hitting her head on the doors that led into the cockpit and blacked out.

 

[Red Thunder]

The grinding noise of metal being torn split the air in his small room, and Sean Young finally open his eyes. Neither the vibration nor the chaos had interrupted the convict's slumber: the transparent aluminum walls of his cell were mostly soundproof in order to prevent prisoner communication, in addition to being ridiculously sturdy, and he was used to sleeping through violence. But the tail-end of the ship being torn off, well, that wasn't something one trained oneself to sleep through. Open as it was to first the harsh vacuum of space and then the alien atmosphere of some god forsaken planet, equipment and personnel flew past his cage.


The hell?





The shaking wouldn't stop, and an too familiar feeling gripped his body: where once his motion matched that of the prisoner transport, now the ship plummeted toward a planet's surface. And gravity, ever eager to do it's work, was pulling him about in odd ways. He thought that maybe the ship was spinning, but it was impossible to tell; Sean had been a part of the ground forces, not the space navy, and he'd only ever ridden in personnel transports. But twisting or not, it didn't matter. All that did was that he was rapidly approaching an unknown ground for unknown reasons, and he only knew that he didn't like it. Grimacing, the prisoner managed to grab ahold of his landing seat as he fell through the air and, pulling himself onto it, buckled himself in and braced for impact.


Impact was not too long in coming. Sean had been seated maybe twenty seconds before his downward momentum was sharply interrupted. The vessel still skidded across the ground (he prayed it was ground, and that the ship wasn't merely skipping across some ocean), and Sean bounced up and down, back and forth, as the transport collided with and deflected off various boulders, hills, and bluffs. But finally it came to a halt, albeit at a rather uncomfortable angle: it felt as if the nose had followed the incline of a cliff upwards, leaving the ship to sit at a 35 degree angle. Breathing a sigh, Sean smiled and reached for his small pack of smokes.

He very well might die soon, but whatever gods still lived seemed to have seen fit to keep him alive for now. And that suited him just fine. Better still, the emergency lighting was casting a weak illumination into his cell, and it looked like the skid had ripped a small but workable sized gash in the floor.


"About damn time something went right for me," the convict muttered with a grin. Shoving a cigarette in his mouth and the pack back into his pocket, Sean slid down to the opening and wiggled through to freedom.

 

[redletalis]

It was the heat that woke her. Kim came back to the world of the living slowly and in stages. The first thing that she noticed was the pounding headache which made her head feel like it had just been used for a drum during some sort of wild tribal dance. The second thing she noticed was that fresh air was running throughout the ship. They did their best, but during long journeys in space fresh air was a rare commodity and though they got the needed oxygen, the air never smelled so fresh or, well, sweet in a way. Nor was the space ship rigged to simulate a gentle breeze through the twisting corridors.


She groaned and slowly opened her eyes, only to hiss and close them quickly as they started stinging like hell. It took her about fifteen minutes of careful blinking and slow opening of the eyelids for her eyes to get used to the light again, and Kim could finally look around. The part of the ship's hull which had housed the corridor to and the cockpit had been torn off the rest of the hull in the crash, and now this frontal part was embedded in the ground at almost a vertical angle. Kim herself was lying on one of the safety doors that were placed at regular intervals along the corridor to the cockpit. The doors were half closed and probably the only reason that she was still alive and hadn't been speared on pipes sticking out of the walls, or sliced up or even thrown out and underneath the crashing ship. That would have been nasty as hell.


Up above her on an incredibly steep angle she could see the cockpit. The doors were riped open, a thick branch forcing its way through. Dark green leaves were falling down at her, landing on her face and making her sneeze only to groan as the aching in her head kicked up several notches. It was fascinating in a way to stare at that branch, and Kim simply lay there for a while, trying to comprehend that she had survived such a terrible crash.


"Okay, enough mushy stuff," she muttered to herself and groaned as she carefully turned around until she could get onto all fours. That was as far as her movements went before a dizzy spell came over her and nausea ran through her with a vengeance, and she found herself throwing up. It landed half on the doors supporting her and half down in the corridor beyond. It was gross and it told her in no uncertain terms that it was best that she didn't move for some time yet. Pulling off her gloves and running her hands through her short hair, Kim winced and groaned when she found the goose-egg sized lump. Luckily there seemed to be no blood and so far it didn't seem like she had broken any limbs, thank heavens, so she would be fine soon enough. As long as she did everything with the speed of a snail, then she would be fine.


She kept up this mantra as she slowly straightened into a seating position. She found it necessary to stay like that for a while before feeling confident enough to move into a standing position. Kim nearly lost her balance when she stood up, her knees were shaky and weak, but she refused to lay down again. Her mind cleared slowly and her bodily functions came back little by little, until she sighed in relief when she could function normally - as long as she didn't turn her head too fast.


*Now, what to do?* the brunette woman mused. It was obvious that the cockpit was a lost cause, the entire control panel was ripped to shreds by the branch and whatever else that had happened up there that she couldn't see quite yet. She had to think - not an easy thing when her head was still aching like hell. *Okay. Okay, let's see. The escape pods would have automatically sent out a distress call, but their range is limited and the crew inside might simply float around in space until they are dead from hunger and dehydration, so that's no help.* She didn't linger on that, there would be time later to think about the fate of the rest of the crew. *The spare radio! If it's still useable I can get it to high ground, boost it with some of the batteries and such from the ship and send an SOS as far as I need.*


It was a good plan. It was the only plan she had. On an unknown planet with a ship of ex-prisoners - if anyone had even survived.


Along with a concussion. And a climb up to the cockpit to get extra wires and whatever else she could salvage.


This was not going to be fun at all.

 

[Red Thunder]

Grass? That's...unexpected. But not unwelcome.





The drop from the ship hadn't been far, merely ten feet or so, and the prison shoes protected his feet from the hard ground beneath. Hard, save for the flora that spread across it. A gentle breeze ruffled the green blades back and forth, as it did the blonde mess of hair atop his head. But the wind did more than play with the vegetation; it brought with it the harsh scent of smoke and upturned earth. Inhaling deeply, Sean frowned. He thought he might have even smelled blood and viscera. Lovely. Telltale signs of injured and dead. The pertinent question, of course: to seek to aid or not? If it was fellow convict, the blonde might be able to convince them to aid him in whatever steps of survival might have to be taken. If it was a soldier, however, things might get scrappy. A bullet would end this unexpected sudden vacation rather sooner than he might like. The cigarette rolled about in his mouth, useless with no lighter. Of course, you could never tell with people: the hypothetical con could mean his death as easily as the hypothetical government dog could mean his salvation. Yet he almost certainly couldn't survive alone. So, back to square one: seek aid or not?


A voice echoed in his memory as if in answer. It was harsh and gruff as it ever was, but Sean held nothing but the highest respect for the man to whom it belonged. Leave a man behind? Are you shitting me? The young man smiled wryly at the thought of his months dead commanding officer. If I ever hear of you doing that, I'll rip your damn head off myself! You got that, Private!?


Yes, sir. His next step now decided upon, Sean set off through the alien grass.


His path bore him around the smoking wreckage to a decent point of entry. A short piece of shrapnel, salvaged from the destruction that littered the ground, sat snugly in one hand. His green eyes roved, always on the lookout for danger. And to carefully pick his step. The ship had carved a deep furrow into the dirt, mounding it up on either side, and crawling over the embankment to get to the gaping hole where the ship's tail had been proved harder than it looked. A little worse for the wear, Sean tried dusting his hands off on his gray prison pants, leaving small smears of blood on them from where he'd torn his hands on rough rocks and roots. He'd seen little in the way of survivors in his ten minute journey: a trail of blood here, a ripped open package of supplies there. Mostly he'd seen corpses, eight by his count. All but two were prisoners, and of those four seemed to have died from damage taken during the crash, as did the soldiers. Worryingly, the remaining two convicts had gunshot wounds, and the soldiers' sidearms were missing. But Sean had not been confronted so far. Setting his teeth, he crept past the smoking hull and into the corpse of the vessel.


Inside was more carnage: more corpses lay within their cells, having been tossed about in the reentry turbulence; a few more people in military garb lay about, stripped of their weapons. Even the guts of the ship itself hadn't avoided trauma; wires sparked and pipes dripped liquid or hissed gas. But nothing lived. So he continued on, seeking for a place that might have sheltered someone.


Eventually he could make out the door to the cockpit, its black double sliding doors hanging askew in their damaged state. His eyes narrowed as he peered through them from a distance. A humanoid shape, female by his best guess, seemed to be moving about, fiddling with or searching among the carnage inside. The pilot? Maybe. Taking a breath to steady himself for whatever happened next, Sean called out, his gravely tone cutting through the silence much like the grinding of a rock across stone.


"If this doesn't teach the military that letting women fly their spacecraft is a damned bad idea, I don't know what else will."


His voice was cautious and alert, but he tried to sound casual, as if bantering with an old friend. Hopefully it wouldn't get him shot.

 

[redletalis]

Her spacesuit would be too bulky to get through the doors and the branch and whatever else was up there int he cockpit, so Kim shimmied out of it and threw it to the side - it had been sweltering hot inside it anyway - and in her standard army-issued olive-green tank top and the mottled cargo pants. She was barefoot, but she would pick up some sturdy boots once she was done with the cockpit. The spacesuit was bundled up and tied off and used as a backpack when she finally started on the steep climb up. And it was a really difficult climb when one had a concussion and a headache the size of the planet itself.


The cockpit was full of dirt and leaves and branches and broken glass. Wires and buttons had been ripped out, panels were flung all over the place. One of the chairs was halfway out of a broken window, the other was bent and broken but still holding on. Kim reached out to one of the cabinets that had been nailed to the wall and carefully opened it, wary of anything that might come tumbling out. Luckily nothing did, and she breathed in relief when the spare radio transmitter seemed to not have suffered anything during the crash. She packed it at once into the spacesuit-turned-backpack.


*Now for the wires.* She sighed, waited for a dizzy spell to pass and then got to work. There were a lot of wires that she could simply pull free. The sheer amount of damage was beyond horrifying. The possibility of others having survived was less than promising, she might even be the only one!


Just when that thought truly registered a voice spoke up. It was enough to make her jerk and hit her head on the edge of the console under which she had been scrounging for wires, and the world started to spin again. Kim cursed up a storm, holding her head and turned around to look at... at another survivor. A survivor like her which was a true relief and blessing. But also not like her because she could see the body shape in the vague lights of the corridor and it wasn't a familiar shape. Nor was it a familiar voice. This was a convict.


What to do? Was he friendly? Was he a foe? Did she dare take the chance to team up? Did she dare not to take that chance?


"Say that again and I'll string you up with these wires and leave you for the locals."


She thought that was a good reply. Open for more friendly discussion but also a warning not to try anything.

 

[Red Thunder]

So she returns the banter, eh? That's a good sign. I hope.


He crouched down in the partial doorway. The odd triangular frame the tilted doors created was just large enough for him to shimmy through if he were to penguin waddle his way through it while crouching. His six and a half foot tall build was normally a boon, but not in this case. Who knew what she would do if he tried to come through? So he stayed put, arms braced on either door. His impromptu weapon he kept securely out of sight.


"Ah. Right. The locals. And those would be?" Shrugging, Sean rolled the paper tube around in his mouth, allowing his saliva to wash the taste of tobacco around his tongue. He might be out a light, but that didn't mean he wouldn't get some enjoyment out of them. "I mean, no offense, 'Ace', but it's pretty damned obvious you didn't land here on purpose. I'll bet you have as little idea as to what's indigenous as I do."


From his new position the state of the cockpit became more obvious to him. It looked as though a tornado had torn through it for all the indiscriminate destruction. But more importantly, he could finally make out the chick. He'd been thinking she would be pretty standard military cannon fodder. Between the cropped hair, the cargo pants, and the way he held herself...yeah, she was definitely military. She struck a very different presence than his gray prison clothing, unkempt facial hair, and relaxed demeanor. Inside him, his heart grew hot with anger as he visually confirmed his previous suspicion: enough military dogs had died to his explosives, and too many of his friends had been mercilessly struck down by soldier fire.


A loud pop ripped him out of his contemplation. She looked like she'd just yanked another handful of wire out of the shattered console. Sean's brow knitted in curiosity despite himself.


"The hell are you doing?"

 

[redletalis]

"All I know is that we're currently on one of the less explored planets in this system." Kim grunted. Despite having accumulated a lot of wires there was little she could actually do with them alone. She would need other things in order to go through with her plan and even more wires would just take up space. So she called it quits for now - she could always come back here and get more if she needed it - and turned her full attention on the other survivor now that he was closer and more fully in the light.


Blond hair, illegal cigarette and grey prison garbs. She could work with that. Could have been a while lot worse.


"We need some way of contacting people, so I am planning to rig up an SOS signal. These wires will help with that." She shrugged as she started stuffing them into her spacesuit. "If I'm lucky I might even be able to hack into the communication lines of the closest ship and even get to talk to people." Unless he was could jimmyrig a radio together out of spare parts then his best bet of survival was to make sure that Kim lived. At least she hoped it was. And she hoped that he got the hint, too, unsubtle as it was.


She picked up the suit with the wires and radio transmitter. Not too heavy. Would be better off when she could get her hands on a real backpack. Now to see if he was a friendly.


"Gonna crouch there in the doorway forever, ducky?" Kim looked at him.

 

[Red Thunder]

A snort escaped his nose. A radio transmitter and a mess of random wires? She was, what, an engineer then? Good. Basic training aside, that should mean he could overwhelm her if he had to. As long as she didn't have a firearm, anyway. Which, if she did, it was a little strange that she hadn't used it to threaten him.


Interesting. The bitch has barked but hasn't shown her bite yet.


She could merely be saving it for later, of course. Or maybe she didn't have one. But he had better play it safe. Sean shrugged casually at her question. The less threatening he appeared, the better it would be for him.


"I dunno. It's not a bad set up, this broken door frame. Nice breeze coming in from the decimated back end of the ship and a nice view ahead through the shattered remains of the cockpit window."


He chuckled but his eyes watched her warily. Heavy though her supplies looked, he wasn't about to aid a government soldier without at the least being asked to.


"What? Got issue with my chosen place of leisure? Shit, woman. I knew the military all had sticks shoved up their asses, but damn."

 

[redletalis]

Oh good lord, he was one of those. Kim told herself that it wouldn't really be worth it if she lobbed the nearest piece of debris at his family jewels so beautifully framed by the ruined door, and then finishing him off while he was out of it. It would be quite satisfactory though even if it would probably bring more trouble than it would be worth. Instead she came closer until she was just out of arm's reach and crouched down herself.


"Will you please move out of the fucking doorway so that I can get out? Or do you want me to bat my eyelashes at you as well?"


Who knew how long the day was on this planet? She had a whole lot of things that she wanted to do and pick up before night fell, and with the way the ship had ripped apart she needed all the light she could get in order to find the stuff she needed. She didn't have time to sit here and jabber with a stubborn prisoner- well, ex-prisoner. It wasn't like she was going to try to keep order all by her lonesome.


"The SOS signal isn't going to send itself." She added. She needed to be somewhere really high in order to send it, and no surrounded by decade old scraps of a ship that should have been decommisioned some two hundred years ago.

 

[Red Thunder]

"Wow. A 'please', and to a prisoner no less? Did that hurt?"


But despite his snark, Sean backed away. As he did he stuck the impromptu knife he held into the band of his pants. It wouldn't do for her to see it just yet. Standing up, he shook his head.


"An SOS? You really think anyone will be looking this piece of shit boat, or even if they do, you think you can rig a device powerful enough to send a signal out?"


He held a hand out expectantly as she came through, far enough away to be non-threatening but close enough to seem helpful.


"I guess you could bat your eyelashes at passing ships as well."

 

[redletalis]

She snorted but shimmied through carefully, bringing the improvised pack with her. Kim eyed the hand for a moment before accepting it. "I know I can make something strong enough to reach the closest shipping lane. I need more equipment and stuff, and I need to get somewhere very high in order to do it though. It's going to be a bitch finding such a site and transporting things there, but at least there's lots of usable metal around."


Besides, who knew what else she could find and scrunge up once she started going through the bowels of the ship? Weapons. Tools. Medical equipment. Food rations. Clothing. She would need it all.


"Don't know if people are looking quite yet, but even the army will take notice when we don't arrive on schedule." She said as she tied off the pack to her own back. "Got to try something. I'm not about to sit around like a sack of potatoes. What about you? Grand plans in escaping this place?"


Kim carefully stared making her way down the steep slope. First her quarters for boots if her quarters had survived, if not then straight on to storage and the medical bay to get what she needed.

 

[Red Thunder]

"I'm not sure yet that exile on some gods forsaken planet isn't better than a life imprisonment and perpetual labor in the sector's worst hell hole under a government that took everything from me." He looked askance at her as he followed, eyes shifting constantly. A cornered wildcat couldn't have been more cautious or distrusting of its situation. "I'll get back to you on that."


Where was she leading them? Supplies, maybe? He stopped suddenly, and a breeze caught him in the face, throwing his hair about annoyingly. Suspicion crept into his voice unintentionally.


"Hold on. Where are we headed? No offense, but I don't really trust a military broad like you, and I'd rather not follow you around a corner to just get a new hole in my chest."

 

[redletalis]

Kim stopped as well and turned to look at him. "Right now I'm going to see if I can find my cabin and my tools and a pair of boots." And weapons, but she didn't mention that. "Then I'm going to find the captain's cabin to check coordinates. The cockpit was totalled and the captain's cabin is the only other place that stores travel information automatically. After that I'm looking for supplies. And after that,well..."


She shrugged. She was going to see if she couldn't find the highest point around here, climb it, jimmyrig a transmitter, send out an SOS and hopefully stay alive long enough to actually enjoy the fruits of her labours. Once that was done then she would allow herself a mental breakdown and all that entailed.


"You come along if you want to, but I'm not going to force you." She started walking again, ducking under a bulkhead that had fallen in the middle of the corridor. Next door to the right should take her towards the crew's quarters and the captain's cabin.

 

[Red Thunder]

Sean clicked his tongue as she dodged under the fallen support. He may very well decide to stay behind later, but until it became clearer just what the hell this planet had to throw at him he'd stick with her. Sighing, he con followed her.


"Fine. Tell me what you need, and I'll see about finding it." A soft but protracted metallic groan echoed through the ruined ship, and even the emergency lights flickered. The man cast a worried look at the ceiling and tugged on his prison jacket. "And let's get your shit fast. This POS sounds about ready to give up its ghost, and I don't wanna be inside her when she does."


As her approached the woman's position, he spied a wayward lighter lying forgotten on the cold steel floor. Evidently not all the soldiers were upstanding members of society. Deftly he rescued it from isolation and gave it a home within a pants pocket.

 

[redletalis]

"I fucking told them to retire this thing and go with a better ship but noooooo, of course not. No one ever listens to the mechanic who has to constantly fix the shit and keep it running, of course not!" Kim grumbled. She walked quickly through the corridors, passing doors and debris and once squeezing through rubble that had almost fully blocked the corridor. She also very consciously ignored and refused to look closely at the lone body they passed. It was decapitated and familiar and she didn't really want to know who it was. Not right now. Other things had her focus, like survival. That came first.


Luckily the corridor with the crew's quarters wass one of the more intact ones, and Kim hurried over to her own room. The door was stuck but she managed to force it open far enough to slip inside. The first thing she grabbed were socks and boots and started putting them on. She didn't really want to see him, a prisoner, in the clothes of one of her team, but she would be worse off if he died on her because of something stupid like proper clothing, so she called out to him."You might want to change clothes as well, those garbs aren't exactly made for survival or rough handling. And grab a backpack if you find one!"


Stomping to make sure the boots were properly on, Kim found her army issue backpack and started stuffing it. First with the radio transmitter and wires, then with an extra set of clothing followed by whatever tools she found lying around. The rest of the space would go for other supplies. A quick drop by the captain's cabin found the captain - dead, speared clear through right there on his bunk, don't look too closely! - and the latest coordinates that had been stored in the computer. The computer sputtered and died right after but she had managed to write them down. Kim hesitated for a second before she left, staring at the captain's weapon belt. It had fallen from its customary space on the table, but the weapon was still there and undamaged. In the end she took it and even found the extra cartrige the captain had laying about, buckling it on. Her own weapon was probably lost somewhere around the engines where she had last seen it. Or, more likely, totally lost and gone.


"Ready to gather more essential supplies?" she asked as he exited the cabin. "We need medical supplies, food and water packs, and some more tools from the storage area. We should have enough wires for now and the metal plates we need we can get from the outside. And once we open up the ship we can get more wires that way too."

 

[Red Thunder]

He had his head down when she came back into the hall. Sean had stayed in the hallway when she'd entered the captain's quarters. He had evidently located a backpack since leaving her quarters; he'd probably yanked it off some corpse he'd spied in a side room. It lay beside him on the floor: worn, dull, and ragged with use. A fair example of the usual state of military equipment. But the uniform shirt she had indicated to him still sat clenched in his rough hand, though he'd donned the boots and the pants. At his feet lay the navy's patches, cut harshly and unceremoniously from the sleeves. His hand was behind him, being pulled back forward again, as if having just scratched an itch on his lower back. As she emerged and addressed him, the ex-con shrugged.


"Ready as I can be, being made to team up with your like. And being made to wear your damn uniform."


A small point of red light bounced in the general area of his mouth, and the plain smell of cigarette smoke wafted toward her, carried on the slight breeze. A look of disgust crossed Sean's face as he lifted the shirt, but finally he began putting it on. As his muscles moved in obedience, lines and dots of white began flashed into sight. They were scars, each the color of bleached bone: some were short and jagged, as if made by claws or shrapnel; some were thin and straight, as if made by knives; and some were mere circles, as if made from the impacts of bullets of various calibers. Shirt in place, Sean buttoned it up then looked at her expectantly.


"Well? You gonna lead us outta here?"

 

[redletalis]

Even int he weak light it was hard not to notice the scars, but Kimani didn't mention it. Nor did she mention the way the patches had been removed and suspicious lack of equipment to remove them with. Instead she set off down the corridor, back towards the blockage, her pace faster than before now that her feet were protected from shrapnel and things falling on them and who knew what kind of diseases were to be found on this planet? THe heat was usually a wonderful place to breed malaria and similar diseases, and that was something that had been found on every planet so far apart from the ones covered in ice.


"We need to go three levels down to get to the storage area. Let's just hope that the way is relatively clear." She said as she squeezed through the rubble. The ship groaned again as another part gave in, and she could smell smoke coming from somewhere in the walls. That was about as bad a sign as she could think of. When the fire was in the walls there was so much that could be blown up and you didn't know exactly where the fire was so it was damn difficult to put it out.


"We have to hurry. Left here! Three staircases leading straight down one right after the other should get us as close to the storage doors as we can get." She said as she ran down the corridor, jumping over debris. The smoke seemed to get thicker the further along they came. "By the way, my name's Kim. You got a name or should I continue calling you ducky?"

 

[Red Thunder]

As Kim vaulted over the fallen bits of ship, Sean paused to examine what remained of his nicotine stick and stared at the fading ember on the filter mournfully. It fizzled as it hit the deck, and Sean paid it no mind. Instead he glanced stared at his companion incredulously.


"Nah, I definitely prefer condescending nicknames from representatives of oppressive regimes."


Following her lead but certainly seeming life he was trying very hard not to, the ex-con cleared the debris field as well. As he did, he managed to inhale a good lung full of acrid smoke. Coughing as he came to a stop, the man looked at her through eyes tear-filled from breathing the bad air.


"I'm -cough- Sean." Fingers curled in a fist, he beat his sternum a few times, trying desperately to clear his throat. "That's 'Shawn', not 'Seen'. I swear -cough- to God, if I hear that damned pronunciation I'll -cough cough- I'll hand you your ass."

 

[redletalis]

Kim stopped, tried not to cough up a lung - damn smoke was getting worse by the second, something really serious must have caught fire - and glared at him. "Okay, Sean, you have some s-cough-serious issues with the military here, so lets -cough- do it like this: you stop it with the rem-cough-remarks until we're both safe and-cough- and alive and then I'll give a fuck, okay? Just wait until -cough- then?"


She didn't wait for a reply and instead headed further into the smoke, keeping a hand over her mouth and walking almost completely bent forwards in an attempt to get below the layer of smoke. It didn't really help much since she was going down, but a little bit was better than nothing. Two more staircases and she swung off into a corridor where the smoke wasn't as thick yet, and gasped desperately for the almost-clean air.


"Holy fucking -cough- shit." She muttered, coughing a few times more, and took a moment to make sure that Sean was still with her and they hadn't gotten parted in the smoke. "You alive?" she called back and coughed once again.

 

[Red Thunder]

There was a soft thud, as if something had hit a wall, and it was followed by a string of curses. Ten seconds and several heavy footfalls of the stairs later and the swearing was accompanied by the mouth that spoke it. Sean looked a bit worse for the wear: his eyes were red from the smoke, his knees and the undersides of his arms were covered in ash, and his voice had become even more gravelly if possible from the smoke inhalation. In his hand he held something wrapped in cloth; evidently it had been heated to some degree by the fire, as Sean dropped it unceremoniously onto the floor where it landed with a muffled clank. He pointed at it, his coughing fit having left him speechless for a moment. The palm of the hand, what little could be seen, was very red. But as the thing hit the ground, the cloth folded back a little to reveal a solar panel power unit, though perhaps a little too powerful for something as small as a radio.

 

[redletalis]

"Oi!" she pulled him further away from the smoke and if it hadn't been for the backpack then she would have given him several good whacks on the back to help clear his lungs. Once she was certain that he wasn't about to keel over, she went back to look at what he had carried with him, blinking when she saw what it was. She picked it up almost reverently, gaping at the solar panel power unit.


"Fucking hell! Where did you even find that?! This ship isn't solar powered and there was nothing like that on the cargo list!" Kim looked it over quickly. It was in good shape and it hadn't been hurt by the crash landing, but there were no serial numbers or anything else that could tell here where it came from and how the hell it had ended up on a prisoner transport ship.


It took another ominous rumble from the ship to get her moving again, and she hurriedly wrapped it up again as she walked past Sean. "A mystery for later on. But this is a great stroke of luck, our chance of contacting someone with this baby here just rose exponentially! In here." Pushing a few buttons on the panel next to it, Kim soon had the door to the storage area sliding open, and she thanked the gods that the doors hadn't been damaged. "Food and water packs on the left, medical on the right and tools should be somewhere at the bottom shelf in the middle. I'll get the tools, you start packing up whatever you can of the other stuff."


Kim crouched down in front of the shelf, put the solar panel power unit carefully to the side and started rooting through the boxes for whatever equipment that she could find.

 

[Red Thunder]

Beads of sweat were beginning to form on his brow. Between the running, the climbing, the tense situation, and the steadily rising temperature, Sean was evidently feeling a little warm. As Kim crouched down, he looked hard at the back of her head. The hand that had carried the solar panel unit had been cradled in his other arm, but now it reached behind him, grasping the impromptu grip of his impromptu knife. But a split second later he'd evidently changed his mind. Muttering "Would a 'please' kill you?" under his breath, the man ducked off to the right.


And whistled. He'd not seen medical supplies of this caliber since he'd joined the Underground. The rebellious force had always had to scrape and scrounge when injuries and wounds needed treating. If they had known the Military had access to this, they would have raided some army medical convoy a long time ago instead of lifting what it could find at the local hospital, entities who themselves were scrapped for good material.


Sean shook his head, clearing it. That was then; this was now. His hand hurt like hell, and there was no telling what other injuries either of them might sustain, or what kind of alien or terrestrial plagues they might encounter. He yanked off his pack, threw it open, and began tossing into it what he thought they might need: pills, including anesthesia, penicillin, sedatives, inflammation suppressants, artificial immune system boosters, and other medicines; gauze and other forms of bandage, including a still-packaged one use tissue regrowth kit; and lastly a small defibrillator. Satisfied, Sean grabbed a tube of burn gel and hoisted the significantly heavier pack onto his back. As he applied the greasy product to the palm of his hand he joined Kim.


"Short of a nuclear blast, I've got us everything a guy could need. Medically speaking." A loud protracted groan echoed through the hall, and Sean cast a concerned eye back the way they'd come. "You finished yet?"

 

[redletalis]

Since she couldn't carry several hundred pounds of equipment on her back Kim had to go really old-school. She had to choose only the truly essential equiment even if there was more specialized equiment that would make the same work go faster. Most of the specialized equiment demanded different sorts of power sources and that wasn't something that they would have available at all. Hammer, tongs, a box of nails, a screwdriver with interchangable heads, a good deal of rope and several rolls of duct tape along with other bits and bobs that she knew would be necessary in the endavour.


"Just about. I even found a small welding torch but we'll have to be really frugal with that." Kim got to her feet and turned around towards the food and water packs, only to spot the hurt hand when she passed Sean. She started picking out the vacuumed packs. The taste wasn't the best but it would last them for a week or maybe more if they were careful. Until then they might have even figured out what sort of animals were safe to eat, perhaps even managed to contact people.


"I'm sorry, I didn't notice your hand before. Will you be fine?" she asked as she dumped the load into her backpack, realised that there wasn't enough room for everything, and then scrounged up a small satchel which she stuffed with everything else. It would be cumbersome to carry around, but it would also be worth it. This wasn't a military exercise with the instructors looking on and making sure nothing went wrong, this was the real deal and one could never be too prepared. Not for this.

 

[Red Thunder]

"I'm-"


He turned from the hallway to glance down at her. A somewhat somewhat sour expression was on his face, and he looked like he was about to smart off again. But he held his tongue, instead reaching out to grasp at what few water bottles and food packs he could fit in his military cargo pants.


"I'm fine. Being a con doesn't mean-" Sean pursed his lips but stood back up from where he'd crouched in front of the food stuffs. "It got burned yanking that damned solar panel. I found some ointment; it'll heal."

 

[redletalis]

This was obviously going to take the both of them to work. Kim was used to working with soldiers who were trained to raport the second something happened that might hinder their work, and Sean obviously had some serious issues with the military. Add to that that they were, in essence, jailor and prisoner and their current situation, well, tempers were bound to fray.


"I've burned my hands during work a lot of times. I could take a look at yours once we get out. If you want." Not the best olive branch, but right now they didn't have time for proper heart-to-hearts. The ship had started shuddering, not enough to hinder movement but enough to be noticable to them. "Something's tearing, we better get out. There is a hidden doorway for mechanics not too far from here. It leads straight outside but it might be a long drop down depending on where and how we're positioned. Or we can go the other way and get out at the proper entrance or where the ship's been torn in half. Any preference?"


The black some that they had fought through before was slowly creeping towards them and filling the corridor, the emergency lights were starting to flicker and the shaking was getting worse. They had to make a decision really quickly or they might not even get out of the ship before it either collapsed or blew up. Ships of this ancient sort either did the one or the other, no third alternative.