Commander Mark Jrichtson awoke to the dim red glow of emergency lighting in near-total silence.

Picking himself up off his prone position on the reinforced decking, he came face-to-face with a small pile of ceramic shards resting before him, the closest of which read "ade it to Hutton Or" and "22 L". His body felt strangely heavy- a sensation which somehow seemed familiar, although in his freshly-conscious state he could not remember exactly why. Taking one of the shards in a gloved hand, he was surprised to find that it clattered back to the deck after being released, rather than remaining suspended in place. He repeated the process several times before the realization finally hit him.

"Gravity...planet...I'm on a planet! Or a moon. No one remembers the moons."

He glanced back at the vacant helmsman's position, noting with chagrin that the seat restraints had been and still remained retracted. "Fancy new inertial vectoring chair's made me soft," he groused silently. The flight-screens along with every last display located on the Vanguard's spacious command deck were dark, the sole source of illumination provided by the crimson glow of emergency lights. A quick once-over revealed that he seemed to have been spared any severe injuries, and anything more thorough would have to wait.

"Fuck. Well, figuring out exactly where the hell I am won't be a bad start."

Mark returned to the helm position and initiated a manual reboot. The effort was met with silence, dark displays, and a distinct lack of the familiar DeLacy OS chime.

"That's just bloody brilliant. Off to try something different, then."

The Reorte-based engineers had done their jobs well. In the event of power failure, the nav subsystem(s) was self contained and fed by a reserve battery...with a little luck, it might just start. Several seconds passed before the holographic Navigation and Contacts panel finally flickered to life. Mark wasted no time in quickly selecting a tab labeled "Galaxy Map", eagerly awaiting some form of progress.

"NO CONNECTION AVAILABLE . REVERTING TO LOCAL BACKUP OF UNIVERSAL CARTOGRAPHICS(R) GALAXY MAP. STAND BY…"

"ERROR CODE:1d29482cef ERROR: NO REFERENCE TO CURRENT POSITION FOUND. IF THIS ISSUE PERSISTS PLEASE CONTACT YOUR LOCAL UNIVERSAL CARTOGRAPHICS FIELD OFFICE OR OUR GALNET SITE."

Mark blinked incredulously at the glowing orange text plastered across the holographic panel for several seconds in disbelief. "The hell…okay, no sense in wasting more time here. Bridge's dead and the one thing still online isn't exactly of much help." As he turned to stand from his seat, he reached beneath the console before him, gloved fingers quickly finding the edge of a panel recessed flush with the console housing. After a moment, he succeeded in prying open the small compartment and retrieved the Hassoni-Krueger Model 83 light coilgun along with the five combination power cell/magazines stowed within...one of which he snapped into the unloaded handgun's mag well, although he left the safety on as he turned to leave.

"Finally, a solid line of defense against hard vacuum, lethal levels of radiation, and whatever waiting behind this bulkhead that's escaped mention. Real indispensable, Mark."

—

The damage was about as bad as he'd expected. Probably worse, actually. Sure, auxiliary power was up and running, but even with every last heat sink in the tubes automatically popped on realspace entry the badly overtaxed FSD had overheated spectacularly, fusing nearby power transfer cables into a charred, molten mass and kicking off a fire that had necessitated the full depressurization of two internal compartments to extinguish. His ship's other core modules hadn't gotten off easily either; magnetic containment and vectoring in the aft fusion thrusters was shot and the Vanguard's Class 8 powerplant had been killed in the crash as a safety measure. The lone spot of hope was Deck 3 - housing the dorsal launch and retrieval bay and the machine shop fabricators, it was furthest from the damage and had survived the crash mostly unscathed.

"LOCALIZED CABIN PRESSURE ALERT. DEPRESSURIZED AREA HAS BEEN AUTOMATICALLY CORDONED. PULL DOWN AND HOLD TO INITIATE MANUAL OVERRIDE."

Mark dismissed the automated alert before checking the CMM fibre tether securely attached to his suit and a bulkhead shackle, bracing for the impending rush of air. Even crouched low to the deck, it slammed into him like a Lavian beast of burden, only subsiding several seconds later. Stepping into the ruined compartment, the blackened frameshift drive housing and decking slick with the remnants of fire-suppression foam only confirmed the damage report retrieved from one of the few operable terminals in Primary Engineering.

"Shit. I'm not leaving this rock anytime soon. Not like there's anywhere to leave for without a functioning Galmap." He turned to exit the compartment and began heading topside. With just a little more luck, the backup Auto-Field Maintenance Unit had been transferred to the machine shop during a hasty repair job at Suffolk Hub...right before it was ripped apart by the bugs. Hazy memories of his involvement in the desperate Battle of Jataya surfaced to mind, memories that he just as quickly forced back out. He really didn't need the distraction right about now.

—

The total darkness of the passageway ahead was only illuminated by his helmet-mounted floodlamps. Although power to much of the deck was cut, the bulkheads running along either side seemed free of any visible damage. Rounding a corner, he soon arrived at his destination: the internal hangar access airlock. Out of curiosity, he tried the console...as expected, nothing. Sighing, he unslung the small portable power cell pack and prybar he'd snagged from the machine shop on his way there, placing both on the deck before crouching near an access panel and taking the latter implement to peel away the metal plate and expose the wiring beneath. After a few minutes, the lock was once again operable and he cycled it open before stepping inside.

As he entered the hangar bay, Commander Mark Jrichtson witnessed the first bit of good news he'd had in over several hours. The sleek, gloriously intact hull of his heavily modified Gutamaya GU350i Courier-class light multirole gleamed dully under his helmet lights, it's smooth, contoured lines a stark contrast to the Vanguard's boxy, utilitarian design. Even after he'd hit the surface, the undercarriage locks had held. Keying in a command on his wristcomp, he climbed onto the craft's lowered access ramp and made his way into the cockpit, quickly booting up the main interface under reserve power -"no sense in spooling up the reactor now", he thought- before scrolling through the subsystem readings panel. Satisfied that his craft was in operating condition, he returned through the access hatch into the darkened hangar bay, now in greatly higher spirits than he had been just a few minutes ago. Destruction of his former home and marooning on a desolate airless rock be damned, he had a ship once again, and a bloody fast one at that! Of course, with auxiliary power to the bay still offline, the Courier wasn't flying anywhere...no way in hell was his tiny power pack going to open the massive thirty-eight meter long armored bay doors even a fraction of a centimeter. Still, there would be time to sort that out later - right now he had a planet to visit.

—

Within the Vanguard's medbay, a small refrigeration unit sat behind a row of padded cots, the retracted bin inside extending with a pressurized hiss. Inside rested several rows of miniature vials, one of which Mark gently removed with a pair of gloved fingers.

It was never the things you could see that would end up killing you, oh no. That would be too easy. A slow, painful death to alien pathogens was not a pretty way to go out, and the disastrous Lycaon and Odysseus expeditions were more than enough proof of that. Prometheus Medical, a megacorporate giant already renowned for their Stimtek line of performance enhancers ordered in bulk by factional and private militaries across the human bubble and the ubiquitous, intravenously delivered "juice" that allowed spacecraft crews to survive high-g acceleration conscious and uninjured was one of the first corporations that had rushed in to fill the gap. The first production runs of ImmunAug nanites had hit the open market only a few months later, and were heavily marketed towards long-range explorers who often spent months in uncharted space at a time and occasionally conducted planetside surveys of newly-discovered worlds. Mark snapped one of the small canisters into a receptacle on his suit, feeling the pinprick of a needle in his left shoulder a few seconds later.

—

Mark checked his equipment one last time as he headed for the shattered viewport of the forward observation deck in lieu of the ventral boarding ramp, currently crushed beneath the light frigate's nine-hundred-and-fifty ton bulk. The handheld atmospheric data collection unit joined his coilgun sidearm resting in a holster on his suit's hip, along with the four magazines of ammunition as he once again secured his suit tether to a nearby bulkhead-mounted loop. As the doors to the observation deck ground open…

...nothing could have prepared him for what awaited outside.