Marooned

Closed: EesomeBeastie and Prettypinklace

Background: it is the 25th century. Mankind has colonised a large region of space, too large to police effectively. The navy of the Human Commonwealth is constantly fighting against pirates, insurgents and smugglers. The Commonwealth navy carrier Indomitable is currently patrolling a lawless border region, sending out patrols of fighters to deter pirate attacks on civil shipping. One such patrol is that led by Lieutenant Alex Gregg and his Flight Sergeant, Natalie Vann.

Character
Name: Lieutenant Alex Gregg
Age: 25
Description: light build, thick dark hair (which he denies is receding), brown eyes and a ready smile
Bio: a career pilot and son of a career pilot, Gregg is a year into his first tour as a flight commander. At home behind the controls of his fighter, he finds managing others more difficult, in particular the cocky Sergeant Vann, who he also resents because she was transferred in to replace Sergeant Smith, who was killed in action four months ago and was a good friend to Gregg.
Picture:
http://www.firsttvdrama.com/central/dead/keffer1.jpg

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The ambush had been well planned, Lieutenant Gregg admitted reluctantly. The pirates had lured his patrol of four fighters in with a seemingly-disabled ship, then hit them from behind a moon. The fight had been short but bloody and he’d lost McCloud and Evans, but they’d prevailed. Only after he’d seen the last pirate break apart in his gunsights, under his hail of plasma bolts, did he look round for his wingman, Sergeant Vann. Scanning the space round his Hurricane-class fighter, he’d spotted her battered vessel being dragged down into the gravity well of the planet.

He’d fired his thrusters and followed her, trying to catch her with grappling lines and pull her away, but the stress of hitting the atmosphere had proved the last straw for his own wounded craft and he’d had a catastrophic system failure.

He remembered trying to bring his fighter down in a controlled glide, engines dead, then an almighty crash as he hit the snow-covered plain of the planet... then... nothing.

He shook his head to clear it and think straight. Suddenly he smelled the stench of burning insulation. Shit, he was on fire! He stabbed the fire extinguisher button. Nothing happened. He punched the canopy release. Again, nothing. And now he felt a numbness in his leg. He looked down and saw the nav control panel had been crushed in against his right thigh, trapping him.

The panic was beginning to rise within him, thoughts of being roasted alive threatening to drive away rational thought, when his canopy flew off, the emergency explosive bolts having been fired by someone outside. He looked up and saw the helmet of Sergeant Vann. He’d never been so glad to see her – cocksure, arrogant and insubordinate, she now appeared as his rescuing angel.

“Quick! Get something to lever the nav panel off my leg then help me out!” he ordered her. “She’s going to blow any minute!”

Natalie Vann

http://i674.photobucket.com/albums/vv110/jelly_beanjlw/Natalie-1.jpg

She’d spent her entire life trying to make something of herself. Growing up in a small town where her only hope of being anything was military service, Natalie Vann hopped the first vehicle out of town as soon as she was of age. For the past six years she’s moved up the ranks of the Commonwealth Navy. Currently she was stationed on the Carrier Indomitable.

Her Lieutenant hated her. Not that it mattered to her, she found it more amusing than anything. She never stayed in one assignment longer than six months or so anyhow. Most men still didn’t like being shown up by a woman. One would think nearly 5000 years after the American women’s lib movement things would have changed. She wasn’t sure what Gregg’s issue was with her and she never bothered to ask. She would have, did he treat her disrespectfully. But he didn’t, not even when she copped an attitude with her fellow pilots. The truth was, she may have a bit of an attitude but she wasn’t stupid and she didn’t make stupid mistakes. Her life depended on not making stupid mistakes and she was quite fond of her life.

She was pretty to boot. That made things difficult for her as well, pretty women weren’t generally thought of as smart women. She was both though, in her own right. She dealt with it, all of it, as it came. The rumors about sexual assaults and situations of that nature hadn’t rang true for Natalie. Thankfully, her attitude was backed up by a really harsh right hook. She could defend herself, on multiple levels. She was, at the core of it, a good pilot and a great soldier. If her lieutenant didn’t find that suitable, she’d be gone again. Either way, didn’t much matter to her. She was out of her small town hell hole and leading a very interesting.

Before going on patrol, she stopped and regarded herself in the mirror. She was a bit on the tall side and a bit thin. In the twentieth century she would have been the perfect size for a fighter pilot. Her lush, brown hair was speckled with streaks of blond. The pieces of blond made the hair lighter and gave it shine. It was an attribute gained from her mother. Her brown eyes were large and she’d been told, seductive. She was pretty enough that were she back home, she’d probably be married by now. Truth was, she was a bit lonely. But had she been back home and married she would have been bored out of her mind. She’d rather be lonely at times, then bored all of the time.

She’d went out on patrol that day, just like any other. Perhaps it was woman's intuition or her training, she wasn’t sure. But as soon as she laid eyes upon the apparently disabled ship, a feeling in her guy told her something wasn’t right. It was that feeling and the split second of awareness it brought that saved Natalie Vann’s life. She was certain of that.

The attack came from behind and very well thought out. She veered, hard left and performed a rather standard evasive maneuver. Nothing flashy, nothing fancy. Flashy and fancy got you killed very quickly. She took out two immediate threats sustaining only minor damage to her vessel. She also watched as Evans was blown apart. She said a silent prayer for him, he’d been decent to her. She took another hit, not as bad as Evans, but bad enough to send her navigational systems haywire. Which meant, she was left floating toward a planet. She watched, as Lt. Gregg took out the last of the enemy, though she didn’t see McCloud anywhere. Again, she said another prayer.

She wasn’t prepared to die, nor was she going to die. Not today, anyway. Though she couldn’t control her ship, she could keep track on the systems that were working as she was pulled toward the surface of the planet. Gravity could be a bitch, but the pull on this planet wasn’t quite as strong as that of Earth. That was her saving grace. Several thousand feet above the surface, she ejected. Her helmet on and her oxygen filtration system working, she had hope. Nanites released from the back of her suit and formed a make shift parachute, which guided her to the surface of the planet, relatively safely and only a few hundred feet from her crashed vessel, which to her surprise was still mostly in tact.

She heard Lt. Gregg’s ship crash, before she saw it. Without thinking, she ran directly toward it. She might be his favorite person, but at this moment he was all she had left. She’d already lost two of her comrades, another wasn’t acceptable. She fired the emergency bolts on his hatch, realizing almost instantly he was pinned.

“Quick! Get something to lever the nav panel off my leg then help me out! ... She’s going to blow any minute!”

Natalie was already one step ahead of him, a large piece of metal in her hand. It had come off his wing, and was warm to the touch even through her suit. She wedged it under his nav panel, avoiding his leg and levered it up which pried the nav panel back. She helped him away from the ship and watched as it erupted into blue flame that raced up into the sky. It had been close, but they’d made it. Making sure he could either sit or stand on his own, Natalie took a few steps back and looked at him.

“How badly are you hurt?”

She turned and scanned the horizon searching for the snow whitened landmarks she’d seen as she dropped in to the surface. There was a small craggy system of caves about 500 meters to her left. She hoped it was deep enough for shelter, until they could pick up rescue. So far, she’d picked up no signs of life, but her systems could be going cagey.

“My ship is still in tact, I’m going to grab the emergency supplies. There are caves about 500 meters that way ...”

She pointed toward the slight bump in the snow covered plain. She wasn’t, at that moment, one of his soldiers anymore. This was about survival and lost on a foreign planet, the only orders Natalie Vann was taking were her own. And for the first time, though it didn’t show, she was getting scared.

“We can make shelter there.”

Gregg staggered away from the wreck of his ship, his arm over Sergeant Vann’s shoulder to steady him. They had got far enough away for safety when she blew, but he still felt the shock wave slap against his back. Finding a rock poking through the snow to sit down on, he examined himself. The only damage seemed to be a rip in the right thigh of his suit, where the bent nav panel had torn it, and the self sealing system had kicked in, covering the tear with an airtight and antiseptic beige foam.

“Not bad at all, Sergeant,” he answered in response to her query about whether he was injured. “The suit’s ripped but the cut doesn’t seem to have gone deep.” Certainly the suit’s med system hadn’t considered it bad enough to inject drugs as he didn’t feel woozy nor were any of the relevant tell-tale lights lit on the status panel on his lower arm.

“I think I can stand and walk,” he continued, trying it out and finding that yes, he could stand without dizziness and walk with only the slightest limp.

His mind was shifting to thinking about shelter when Vann mentioned having spotted the caves. “That’s a good suggestion, Sergeant,” he replied, with only a slight emphasis on the ‘Sergeant’ to make it clear that he’d noticed her lack of acknowledgement of his rank and was rebuking her for it as well as thanking her for the suggestion. “We should fetch what we can from your fighter then check out the caves. We shouldn’t split up until we know more about this place. There could be predators in those caves or your ship could have attracted scavengers.”

He tried to remember the details of the planet from the mission briefing, but since they’d not expected to land it had been background material he’d skimmed and anyway he was still feeling shaken from his crash. He did recall that it had breathable atmosphere, with oxygen levels only slightly below Earth normal.

“In the mean time we should take off our helmets to conserve our suit oxygen. The lower oxygen levels here might make us feel woozy if we exert ourselves too much, but we can always slap the emergency masks on if we need a boost, if we have to run from a predator or something like that. Best to save the suit reserves for that.”

He unclipped his helmet and let it hang down behind him from the hinge at the back of his neck, taking a deep breath of the cold but refreshing air. It had been months since he’d breathed air that hadn’t been scrubbed and recycled a hundred times over and it tasted so very good!

Natalie

http://i674.photobucket.com/albums/vv110/jelly_beanjlw/Natalie-1.jpg

“Not bad at all, Sergeant ... The suit’s ripped but the cut doesn’t seem to have gone deep.”

She spared a glance at his injury and counted her blessings. Granted, she’d have rather been marooned here with either McCloud or Evans. Neither had seemed to have the animosity towards her that the Lieutenant did on day one. But she’d deal, as she always had. At least she wasn’t alone, which would have really blown. Kinda like his ship that tiny pieces of rained down and melted small pockets in the snow.

“I think I can stand and walk,”

As soon as he stood and she was certain he could support himself, Natalie started feeling even better. She was strong, indeed, but she didn’t want to have to haul him all the way to the caves. She wasn’t certain what their stay on the planet would call for and she wanted to conserve all the energy she could.

“That’s a good suggestion, Sergeant,”

She rolled her eyes. The likely hood that they’d survive here, was slim. They’d both already beaten the odds by surviving the assault, any more would be icing on the cake. The military called for a certain amount of respect and decorum. Which, she carried on with. But she wasn’t going to leave her survival in his hands, she didn’t trust him enough for that. He’d yet to give her anything to trust. In her mind, he was only a bump in the road of the rest of her career. She’d ignore his attitude, he couldn’t write her up if they were dead, anyway.

“We should fetch what we can from your fighter then check out the caves. We shouldn’t split up until we know more about this place. There could be predators in those caves or your ship could have attracted scavengers.”

Redundancy is superior officers had always amused her. She’d mentioned the supplies, he’d re-mentioned it so that it sounded like it was his idea. She wondered, briefly, if he even realized his own arrogance. She knew hers well, and embraced it. She liked herself better that way, after all she’d worked her ass off to get where she was. She’d earned it, in her opinion. She spoke as she began pulling the packs from the compartment on the underside of her ship. She also moved to remove the damaged systems control panels. She could fix them, hopefully, and get them both off this planet.

“Why separate at all? Unless you just like to talk to yourself.”

“In the mean time we should take off our helmets to conserve our suit oxygen. The lower oxygen levels here might make us feel woozy if we exert ourselves too much, but we can always slap the emergency masks on if we need a boost, if we have to run from a predator or something like that. Best to save the suit reserves for that.”


“You know, Lieutenant, I attended the same academy as you and learned all the nifty things you learned. You don’t have to repeat it all to me again.”

She removed her helmet and began strapping their supplies to herself, in the easiest manner to carry. His injuries may not be severe, but he didn’t need to push it. If they had a hope of surviving, they both needed to be healthy. If she could repair the panel, she could send out a distress signal for rescue. Even with the panel restored, it could take days. She’d suffer through it, she had to. She took several slow breaths, feeling fresh air fill her lungs. She eased her tone from cold to friendly and even skipped mentioning that he’d not even acknowledged that she saved his ass.

“I can manage at this oxygen level for awhile, even running. I grew up in a higher altitude and I was a cross country skier. I just fucking hated snow, it’s why space was appealing to me. And then, I end up possibly dying on a planet covered in this shit.”

OK, maybe he’d not needed to explain why they should take their helmets off, he thought, but had it really been necessary for her to be quite so sarcastic in pointing out they were both equally trained in survival techniques? How long was he going to be stuck here with this abrasive bitch? What did she think she had to prove?

But then he’d not been very gracious either, he realised. Maybe it was just because they were both under a lot of stress. He’d try to remedy that, then.

“Thanks for saving me, Sergeant,” he told her. “I’d have gone up with my ship if you hadn’t pulled me out.”

He saw that she was removing a comms panel and realised she was hoping it could be used to transmit a distress signal. But a radio was no good without power or an antenna. Although she was well up on survival techniques it seemed that her ship engineering classes had slipped her mind. But rather than point it out and risk rubbing her up the wrong way again, he simply went round to the side of her fighter and started removing a couple of the sealed micro-fusion generators. They might come in handy for recharging their sidearms as well as powering the transmitter, and maybe even rigging a heater if they couldn’t find dry wood to burn. Next, an antenna. The angle her ship had landed at allowed him to step up onto the wing without stretching his injured thigh too much and he managed to reach the blade-shaped comms antenna with only a slight twinge of pain. He had to take off his gloves to undo the catches, though, and by the time he’d removed the antenna and put his gloves back on his fingers were starting to grow numb. Keeping warm here was going to be difficult, he realised, especially when it came time to sleep.

He clambered back down onto the ground with his haul. “I can manage a couple of ration packs too,” he told her. “Or maybe a first aid box. I’m not a cripple!” He said that last with a smile, trying to break the tense mood.