---[ POV: Flynn ]---

Lieutenant Flynn opened his eyes to the dimly lit interior of the corvette's cockpit.

The only illumination present was one of the red emergency lights that survived the impact.

He tried to sit down but got dizzy.

Given the quantity of coagulated blood on the ground beneath him, it was no wonder he was so lightheaded. The sight of the overturned first aid kit on the floor reminded him of the dire situation he was in.

A small wave of panic washed over the young man as he thought he might have been asleep long enough to burn through his few remaining hours of life support. However, when he had JAX display the time left on his HUD, he let a sigh of relief escape from his lips. He still had 4 hours remaining which meant that he was only unconscious for about 3 hours. It was enough time to figure something out, right?

Flynn looked down at his abdomen through his torn working jacket and was glad to see the freshly formed scar tissue where the pipe had previously pierced him.

The nanites coursing through his body had done wonders healing this wound but he knew his lost blood was probably not entirely replenished given how he felt. There were also probably some internal lesions remaining.

The biogel had helped tremendously, providing the lymphites with the raw components required to reconstruct his body, but there was only so much they could accomplish with first aid biogel. The corvette had a small med bay with better medical equipment but visiting it was hardly a choice when he had first woke up.

For the form, Flynn grabbed the injector and inoculated himself with the third biogel ampule he was suggested to use before he passed out. He then rummaged through the content of the first aid kit until he found the blood pellets.

Blood pellets were pills containing minerals and nutrients required to restore and manufacture new blood cells, just like biogel was used to restore flesh and tissues. He took 8 pellets immediately. It was way more than necessary, but he knew that his lymphites would use what they needed and store the rest in his biochemical storage vesicles for later use.

Those handy implants were part of the lymphites system and could store combat drugs, medicines or other compounds to be used, or released in the host's body later on.

Once appropriately treated, Flynn waited for a minute to gather his spirits before getting up and inspecting his surrounding. The cockpit seemed completely wrecked.

He waved toward the door, willing an open command through his neural stack that should have been connected to the ship AI but nothing happened. Most systems seemed broken. Even the ship AI was no longer operational.

The young man leaned against the door and disengaged the manual lock. The sound of compressed air being released and hydraulic elements losing pressure could be heard. He pulled to the side. With a metallic screech, the door slid in its tracks.

The sight that awaited him on the other side was beyond his worst expectations.

Internal wall panels had been ripped off left and right, exposing the inner systems, piping, and circuitry of the corvette. A part of the second deck catwalk had collapsed and the cargo hold beneath was a mess of scattered equipment, much of which seemed heavily damaged.

The four Regulators that had accompanied him were scattered all around the place, none of them in one piece. Flynn didn’t even bother to verify if there was a survivor; there were dried blood, black and pulsating symbiotic muscles goo, and shreds of armor everywhere.

Flynn had been a soldier since he was fourteen; he had seen the horrors of war before but the scene still upset him. He felt particularly bad as their pilot and officer in charge. Those men were probably dead because the kinetic dampener field of the cargo haul had been redirected to the flight deck to ensure the pilot would remain operational for as long as possible during the emergency landing.

The armors of those commandos were nothing to scoff at, able to withstand cannon shots and grenade blasts head-on, but in the end, there was nothing that could save someone from what had almost been a free fall from orbit.

The young man saluted the devotion of those soldiers as he saw that one of them had used his body to straddle the package they were charged to protect and tried to prevent it from getting hurled around by magnetically anchoring his feet and hands on both sides of the crate, essentially transforming his own body into a security harness. What an absolute lad.

His corpse was now mangled beyond recognition but the crate remained in place against all odds.

"What a crappy way to die. I'm sure you will find a place befitting your bravery somewhere amongst the infinite stars, warrior of the Empire."

Flynn took a small moment to pay respect but quickly resumed his examination of the cargo bay.

He had to assess his situation and get someone here to rescue him and recuperate the package as soon as possible.

If he wanted to accomplish that, however, he had to survive first, and his parched throat reminded him of just how much fluid he had recently lost.

He used his optical implant and the processing power of JAX to scan the wreckage and instantly locate the compartment where the survival rations should be stored. He didn’t bother with the galley as he was almost certain the food and water dispensers would be out of service. The insipid nutrient paste served in the galley was barely preferable to a survival ration anyway.

They were stored in a compartment with a banged-up hatch on the right side of the cargo bay.

Flynn got down and tried to open the compartment, but it was stuck. After trying again and again for another minute, he quickly lost patience and returned to the cockpit to grab his laser cutter where he had left it.

He promptly cut open the hinges mechanism of the hatch and got one of the ration boxes out.

‘Ration’ was a generous word as they were in fact simply pills containing the required nutrients to sustain a human. It was the most efficient way to store a large number of rations on smaller ships. Most of the place dedicated to storing rations was instead occupied by emergency water bottles.

Since he seemed to be the lone survivor, he would not have to worry about food or water for quite some time. Scout corvettes were outfitted to feed a crew of up to six men for more than two months so he was not worried at all on that front.

No, it was not hunger or dehydration that would kill him; he would probably die of asphyxiation before long.

Every exploration corvette of the ISF was outfitted with six basic spacesuits. If he was lucky, some of them should still have intact oxygen cells. Each spacesuit cell would probably only have enough oxygen in store to last him for a day but it was a long way from the meager 4 hours he had left on the ship life support.

If he estimated that half of the six suits were still in a usable state, he could probably expect about 72 hours of autonomy. The main flaw of those basic spacesuits was that their oxygen cell had to be replenished directly from a life support system, exchanging old air depleted of its oxygen for a respirable one. This meant that once he was done using their preloaded oxygen cells, that was it.

A somber but more practical thought crossed his mind. The advanced combat armors of the dead Regulators were designed for prolonged deployment in hostile environments. The Stygian Predator armors were equipped with their own life support system which could internally recycle a small amount of air for days on end. In addition, if there was even only traces of oxygen in their environment, they could extract and process it, basically making the suit self-sufficient.

If Flynn could salvage one, he would probably be safe for at least a week or two as the armor would slowly filter the remaining traces of oxygen in the corvette air until absolutely none was left.

In the long run, his best shot at not dying was to find a way to repair the oxygen recycling system of the corvette, but this was counting on the fact there was no leak in the air circulation system. If his precious oxygen had leaked outside somehow, there was not a lot a functioning life support system could do.

The young man brushed those dark thoughts aside for now, opened one of the water bottles, and downed it in a second. The lukewarm water still felt refreshing given his situation. He needed a lot of fluid to help replenish his lost blood and keep him fully operational so he opened a second bottle and drank a couple of sips before unbolting a bottle of food pill and throwing one in his mouth. One was enough to satiate a normal-sized man for 24 hours.

Flynn rolled the pill on his tongue for a second before swallowing it with another sip of water.

He remembered the last time he had to use emergency rations; it was during Basic Combat and Tactical Training.

BCTT was the compulsory two years instruction program any member of the ISF was forced to go through after enrolling. One could get in as soon as they reached 14 years old, as was his case. During BCTT, new recruits learned the basics of combat, military operations, and service on a spaceship. It was also during BCTT that most of the standard-issued implants and augmentations of the ISF were bestowed upon the recruits.

The young man smiled wryly as he reminisced the despair he felt during wilderness survival and exploration classes knowing he had to survive on bland ration pills for weeks on end. Now that he truly needed them, he was grateful for their existence and practicality.

Once he finished his meager meal, he got back up and scanned the bay again to locate the life support and communication systems, his two priorities.

Flynn used his stack AI to launch an initial diagnostic.

JAX compiled and synthesized all the information he could visually gather and extrapolated a lot of data from the time he had been connected with the ship AI but in the end, the report was less than satisfactory.

Flynn returned to the cockpit, sat in the co-pilot seat, and tried to access the main console to initiate a more detailed diagnostic but the system was no longer operational.

He crouched down and opened the maintenance panel beneath the console, exposing its guts.

The damages were worse than he expected. No wonder JAX was no longer able to interface with the ship AI. The processing cores had seen better days but the data nodes seemed somewhat fine.

Flynn knew he could probably try to link with the main node of the console to get a copy of the latest registered data but since he could not remotely interface his stack with the ship computers anymore, the second-best option was to directly connect to the main node using a physical connector; the link-chip.

The young man brought his right hand behind his neck, brushed aside the long red hairs in the way, and pressed against his link-chip slot.

The link-chip was a standard chip included in the chipset of any neural stack system and allowed an individual to directly link his stack with another system through hardware connection. The only thing required was a link-chip port on the targeted system.

Even though it was a lot less practical than letting your stack AI interface with a system remotely, it allowed establishing a link with systems whose interfacing programs were down or nonexistent.

The advanced security protocol on a link-chip also almost guaranteed that a neural stack establishing its connection through its intermediary would not get attacked or hacked.

With a small click, a silicon chip about the size of a fingernail slid outside its port at the base of Flynn’s skull. The young man grabbed it promptly. He then found the port for this model of chip on the console and inserted it.

A plethora of information started to appear on Flynn’s HUD as the connection between his neural stack and the console node was established.

Most of this data was corrupted but he used JAX to help him filter through the intact files and download them directly to his stack. Once everything needed was transferred, he closed the connection and recuperated his link-chip.

The lieutenant then had the different reports displayed by HUD and sifted through them.

He was quite shocked when he looked at the planetary scans gathered by the observation equipment before it got fried during atmospheric entry.

Could it be an error?

The conditions seemed strangely Earth-like. The air was breathable and contained no trace of dangerous pathogens. The gravity was just slightly lower than that of Earth at 9.247 m/s² and a geomagnetic field shielded the planet from harmful solar radiation. There was even a reading of liquid water on the surface.

This seemed almost too perfect to be true. Not that Earth-like exoplanets didn't exist, but they were rare enough for it to be suspicious he had landed on one with almost perfect condition to sustain human life by pure fortune. Nonetheless, Flynn was forced to admit that given the other reports regarding the deplorable state of the corvette and its life support system, he felt somewhat relieved that there was maybe an alternative to dying of asphyxiation.

He looked at the reports regarding the corvette infrastructure but almost all systems were out of service. The young man felt particularly dejected at the horrible state of the communication instruments as it was probably his only chance to get rescued.

Flynn rapidly inspected the communication panel accessible from the cockpit, but it seemed almost fine. The problem probably stemmed from the transmitter and receiver located in the hull.

Just getting to them for reparation would prove quite challenging but with his tools at the belt and the engineering bay of the corvette probably stashed with the relevant equipment and a fabricator, it would most likely be feasible.

The young man sat down for a moment and rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted because of the recent crash but he only had about 4 hours of life supports left.

With a lot of luck on his side, all of the corvette space suits would still have intact oxygen cells. If it was not the case, he would probably be able to salvage one of the dead Regulator’s armor.

Flynn judged that with his repairing and maintenance skills, restoring the communication system would be a matter of a day, give or take. This took precedence over everything else since getting someone here to get the package back was arguably more important than his own survival.

The lieutenant was aware that strategic information could potentially save thousands of lives down the line. It would be selfish to prioritize the repairs on the life support system before those of the communication system since he had no way to know how things would go. If he spent too much time working on the life support or if an accident happened while he did, he could end up unable to do anything about the transmitter to send a distress signal to the Empire. It was clear that he had to prioritize the reparation of the communication equipment. He could then worry about restoring the life support system of the ship while waiting for a rescue team.

The transceiver on a corvette was not designed for communication across the galaxy, only reaching out to the nearby cluster of stars at best, but if there was an Imperial world or outpost in the stellar neighborhood able to receive his distress signal and launch a rescue mission, help could be here in about a week.

Lieutenant Flynn knew that it was all wishful thinking but the atmospheric readings regarding the planet conditions still seemed a bit far-fetched and he did not want to risk discovering they were indeed erroneous once it was too late. He preferred to get help here before running out of life support and having to test for himself.

Flynn requested JAX to pull up all the data regarding the corvette communication hardware and had the AI help him devise some reparation plans.

Once it was done, he sighed one last time but got up, resolute. Something his dad had once told him and by which he had tried to live by came to his mind.

Flynn’s family originated from one of the multiple production worlds of the Empire. When he was a kid, he lived in a factory city with his father and three older brothers in almost inhuman conditions. Since they were not citizens of the Empire - citizenship must be earned -, they were treated little better than slaves. Despite it all, the young man had never heard his dad complain a single time in his entire life. When the times were tough or when Flynn or his brothers got depressed, their father often said "It's when it's getting rough that it's time to be a man. Make a plan and face it. Hold your head high and don't cry, boys, it'll all get better in time."

Flynn’s dad died overworked at the age of 43 but he had seen his four sons off to the officer training program of the ISF before he died, paying the entirety of the enlistment fees by himself. Although it was not the most glamorous career and contained its fair load of dangers and hardships, ten years of service as an ISF officer guaranteed citizenship. Flynn’s father had bought his sons a future and a life away from the slave work of the factory, and for that, the young man and his brothers would be eternally grateful.

"Make a plan and face it. Witness me, dad, I am not dying here."