In a mere moment, Retvik’s situation had gone from perfectly fine to utterly catastrophic.
The satellite has been knocked from orbit, the ship had been disconnected from the satellite, everything was shaking violently and there was no power what so ever. Breathable air levels were dropping, the space shuttle was spinning wildly as it was pulled back towards the planet’s surface and there was no way to contact the station below to try and get help.
Really, Retvik should have been panicking. He was, he was panicking a lot. There was something weird though. Maybe it was how it was so dark inside the ship that had made Retvik feel somewhat calm. Or maybe it was because he’d smashed the side of his head against something pretty hard and sharp. He could feel blood dripping down his face and Retvik was certain he had some sort of major head injury, most likely a concussion, but there was a weird underlying sensation of calm in the gradually fading air.
He wasn’t even sure what had started it. The power had gone off first. That, Retvik was certain of. An EMP or something maybe? The power went off, THEN something separated the satellite from the ship that was connected to it. Retvik was very, very thankful that he had been in the ship because he had seen what had happened to the satellite and he really didn’t want to think about that any more.
With no power though, that meant no computers to recalculate a course to safety, no life support systems, nothing. Retvik had just managed to get his space suit on, which contained a backup non-electrical system that allowed him to continue breathing, but apart from that, nothing else was working.
Desperation taking over, Retvik grabbed on to the walls of the falling ship, trying to reach the nearby manual reset. If he could just… pull that one lever and press that one button, maybe there was a chance that the power could come back on. And if the power came back, the ship might be able to change course and not… well, crash. To Retvik’s dismay though, as he repeatedly flipped the lever and pressed the life out of that button, nothing happened. The circuitry was completely fried.
And the ship was speeding up.
The G-forces were starting to get to Retvik now. He was getting nauseous and dizzy. He didn’t know what specific amount of force he was experiencing, but Retvik could vaguely recall that the dizziness and nausea would happen at about 15G, with unconscious looming at 20G. With no rockets to help slow him down, it was possible that Retvik might experience up to 40G, which would most likely kill him. At least it would kill him before the impact with the ground would.
Retvik started weighing out his options, as he slowly made his way towards a tiny little chamber in the centre of the ship. The chamber was a ‘catastrophe box’, essentially a safe for Retvik to lock himself inside, made of solid steal with a passed interior. The box was not designed to save Retvik, but to preserve his body for identification and burial. But the box was really meant for being trapped in space, not burning up in the atmosphere or collisiding with a planet’s surface.
No matter how Retvik looked at it, he was going to die. Rather than feel scared though, Retvik felt grief and regret. One last little trip, he had promised to Gath. One last business trip and then they could retire and settle down together, for real. One final job for an… an asshole who had helped them out once in the past. And now Retvik was never going to go home.
There probably wouldn’t even be enough of him to find, let alone bury. If he was lucky, the ship would crash into the ocean rather than the ground. The impact would destroy everything and still kill Retvik, but at least they’d be able to find his corpse with most of his features intact. Maybe the parachutes would deploy, slowing the ship’s descent enough so that Retvik wouldn’t burn up in the lower atmosphere. If he was miraculously lucky, the backup systems might restart before the ship fell too far, allowing it to glide down and crash in a slightly less spectacular explosion, and the catastrophe box might protect Retvik’s broken body enough for him to be resuscitated. Or at the very least he’d be able to have an open casket funeral.
Those thoughts bothered Retvik. So he tried to think of something optimistic. He’d had a good life, mostly. There’d been a handful of massive catastrophes. He’d survived most of them. He’d just experienced one too many. But he would be leaving his friends and family, his dearly beloved Gath behind.
As darkness and unconsciousness loomed over Retvik’s mind, forcing him to close his eyes, one final thought repeated through his mind.
“I should have listened…”