Castaways part 1
Posted By: jameson9101322<jameson9101322@gmail.com>
Date: 21 July 2009, 5:12 am
Read/Post Comments
|
Initiating Standard Thaw Cycle
Thaw Cycle commencing in T-300
Vital Signs real all-normal.
Blood pressure 90/70 and rising
Heart Rate holding steady at 45bpm
The pins popped out of a standard UNSC cryo-containment pod in the jagged shadow of a mutilated drop ship fuselage. Within the coffin was the slumbering shape of the universe's greatest super soldier. Seven feet tall, a pillar of nerve and wire completely contained in a ton of green MJOLNIR armor. The last SPARTAN. John-117. The Master Chief.
Cortana watched the sub-freezing vapor rise from the vents in the pod. It was the only thing, beside herself, that was still intact in their ruined joke of a spaceship. She monitored the rise in his body temperature. She paid close attention to his respiration and heart rate. She noted every integer of his rising blood pressure as if they were the most precious numbers in the world. He was the only friend she had left. Maybe the only one she'd ever really had to start with. Her specs read all normal, but she'd learned long ago that when it came to humanity figures could be misleading. It wasn't until his brain-scans began looking normal that she let herself relax.
The Chief pried himself slowly out of the pod, every inch of skin burning from the sudden change in temperature. He was on the ground. Or at least there was gravity. He was still a little without his bearings. He immediately spotted Cortana's familiar purple light, even if he couldn't quite get her in focus. "Where are we?"
"I'm glad to see that you're okay." Cortana said, a little snidely. "Our inertia carried us into the gravity of a planet the UNSC has charted as HK-154. Not that that means much to us. We're light-years away from them now."
The Chief stepped down onto the metal floor, his knees and ankles uncomfortably weak. He didn't like coming out of stasis, it made him feel vulnerable. "How long was I out?"
"18 months." Cortana answered.
The Chief snapped his head to her. "Only 18 months!? I said wake me up when you needed me not wake me up when you're bored."
"I woke you up when we survived a fiery landing onto this planet." She replied. "And I was bored."
"I'm glad to see you haven't thought yourself to death." He said. The ground was feeling more solid now, he straightened himself up to full height. Everything was sore, but at least all his wounds and such had healed while in stasis.
"I took measures to prevent that." She answered matter of factly. "I spent most the time rereading logs from the Halo missions and watching archived videos."
"So you couch-potatoed your way through a year and a half." He observed.
She cocked her head to one side and fixed him with a soft smile. "I missed you."
The Chief paused to look at her, the faintest bit of a smile hiding unseen behind his face place. "So. Why did you wake me, really?"
"Our electrical reserves were nearly obliterated in the crash." Cortana explained. "I am currently running solely on battery power. I didn't want to die out while you slept, and I didn't want to leave you sleeping until there wasn't enough power left to wake you."
"This is a problem." The Chief agreed. He walked over to her pedestal. "How about our beacon?"
"I'm rerouting whole power to it now." She said. "Give me five seconds after I close down to set the subroutines then yank me."
"Right."
He did as he was told, watched the seconds on his HUD, then pulled Cortana's chip from the pedestal and inserted into a slot at the back of his head. Her voice filled his mind like a second awareness. "That'll take care of that for a little while at least."
"What do we do now?"
"We need to find an alternate power source." Cortana said. "We've got a lot of useless parts in the walls of this ship. We can construct some kind of transducer even if all we have is solar power."
The Chief took this moment to look up at the blue sky and bright white sun. HK-154 seemed very much like Earth, even the trees looked the same. "We may find something more than just that."
"I can pull up topographical scans from the UNSC research library. It won't be exact. Humankind has yet to make it out this far."
"Noted." The Chief said. He dislodged his Assault Rifle from the mangled wall mounting and checked the clip. Near empty. It still had some of the orange sticky from Installation 04 ground into the handle. "At least we know what we won't find."
"What's that?"
"Sentient life."
|
