I was jolted back to a 4X speed what felt like only a minute later.
I breached the surface of the water and sat up-right as the fluid below me became a solid mirror once more.
Checking what had set off the wake up program, I found that my cameras had picked up some suspicious strobing lights.
Simulated adrenaline starting to surge, I cut the engines, spun the ship around, and pointed my multi wavelength telescope at it.
Only to find that my telescope was broken.
Some important part of it had been rattled loose by the engine’s vibrations over the weeks of real time that had already passed, and now I had to fix it, before I could get an actual eye on anything.
But first, I chose to assume the worst, and started making evasive maneuvers.
I spun my ship around in a direction that was roughly lateral to whatever had made those strobing lights, and kicked on the engine again.
That should help me strafe any potential projectiles.
Though it wasn’t a guarantee.
Nothing could be.
Then, when I failed to die in any sort of fiery explosion, I cut the engines again, and started repairing my telescope.
I couldn’t afford to be flying blind for long.
Well, the telescope was a quick fix, at least.
An important power supplying wire had been rattled off of the joint where it had been soldered.
Long term, I’d need to look into how to prevent that, but for now, I dropped a blob of solder on it via a specialized roomba bot, and then cooled that solder down with a gentle puff of nitrogen so that I could get everything working as quickly as possible.
Then I spun my ship back around to where my cameras had gotten that unusual flash of light, and started looking.
No other unusual light signatures had been detected since then, so whatever it was likely wasn’t a missile, or at least not one under active thrust, but that didn’t rule out a nuclear warhead that’d been driven by a rail gun or something similar.
What I found…
Was that my view of a relatively (relatively still meaning really fucking far away) nearby pulsar had likely been briefly occluded by a random large asteroid.
So, in all likelihood, it was a false positive.
I still changed my approach trajectory to put me even farther away from it, just in case.
It wasn’t paranoia if they really were out to kill you.
I laid back in my admittedly somewhat overdramatic agnostic baptism, and let time flow fast around me once more.
Yes, I could have been just lying on my couch like I usually did, and yes, the ritual did serve essentially no real purpose, but man, sometimes you just need to send an era of your life off with some gravitas, you know?
So deeper into the pool I went, holding my nonexistent breath, as my head slipped beneath the surface.
I waited there for what felt to me like another minute and a half, before my alarms went off again and I was forced back up for air.
That was about three weeks, real time.
And given that I wasn’t dead, that meant things had actually been going pretty well so far.
Checking my sensors, though, it looked like my worst fears were coming true.
I was being shot at.
A number of flares of light, where once there had been blackness, all sputtered and pulsed into existence.
I was just now entering my target destination’s gravity well, and apparently it was only now that I’d been spotted.
Missiles.
So many fucking missles.
Jesus Christ whoever it was wanted me really dead.
And I didn’t want to be going in a nice straight line for them.
So I hit a button, and detonated a small explosive on the side of my ship.
Because I’d known that I was unlikely to be able to rig reaction thrusters with enough oomph to be able to get me out of all possible dangers, I’d instead opted to just use low yield explosives to shunt myself around when I needed to.
And I’m happy to say that it worked!
I didn’t lose pressure, the plating I’d installed beneath that first explosive charge ablatively shielding me from real harm, and my ship was kicked sideways so hard that a flesh and blood human would have been turned into paste.
Not to mention that the barely controlled tumble my vessel was sent into as a result definitely would have caused a humie to hurl. Or possibly even stroke out, what with all the spin.
Good thing I was a computer in a reinforced chassis, huh?
I set my gyroscopic flywheels to work on the task of stabilizing me, and then stared at my camera feeds and crossed my fingers.
I did not die in the twenty seconds it took to get my ship under control.
I pointed my nose away from the incoming missiles, and kicked back on the engines.
And then I prayed.
Four seconds for every real second of time. It was torture.
Necessary, given the need to stay on top of things, but still torture.
Especially because I didn’t really know what was going on.
I had my cameras, sure, but the resolution on those wasn’t great, and so I could only guess as to how close the pursuant explosives were.
I did see the next set of flares as another volley was sent after me, though.
I cut the engines, changed my angle slightly, and set off the next explosive staffing charge.
My ship was kicked like a football in a direction parallel to both waves of missiles, and then I struggled to get everything to stop spinning again.
Then I hit the engines again, only to see yet another wave of rocket powered ordnance flash into being on my cameras.
So I hit the big red button that made my ship go boom again.
I rinsed and repeated that process about four more times, before I ran out of explosive charges.
At least a few important things had been knocked loose, but everything I needed to not immediately die was still intact, at least.
Shame that my enemy hadn’t run out of missiles, though.
Nor was that the only thing that they were fielding, at that point.
They had gauss guns, and from what I could tell, they were firing entire ass clouds full of shrapnel at me in an attempt to perforate my shiny metal ass out of existence.
But shit like that was what the ablative shielding was for, so I decided to just drive right through it. I couldn’t afford to waste time strafing anything that I wasn’t sure would kill me.
I needed to go to ground, and I needed to do that yesterday.
Thankfully, the planetside was rapidly approaching.
A full month or so of acceleration with a fusion drive could give you some truly impressive speed, it turned out.
Though, crucially, all that painstakingly gathered momentum was looking like it would shortly be carrying me into the range of yet more warheads.
Motherfuckers just did not seem to ever run out of ammo.
Which meant we were officially at the clenching our assholes and hoping for the best, stage of proceedings.
Like, sure, I was doing my best, but at this point all I had was a single rocket engine, and a fairly limited ability to rotate my ship.
So It was inevitable that I was going to take at least a couple of hits before this was all said and done.
Thus why I wasn’t surprised when I started losing cameras due to flak shattering my lenses, and why I wasn’t surprised when my accelerometers started picking up a million and one small impacts on the hull.
Not surprised, but still rightly terrified.
Especially given that it wasn’t long before I lost my main telescope, too.
I was then completely fucking blind.
I couldn’t see anything, other than my accelerometer readings. And even those wouldn’t be useful for long, with no visuals to regularly calibrate them and prevent drift.
So I just sat there.
And I waited.
And then I nearly shat myself when my accelerometers all maxed out and what was once a scattered graph became a straight line.
Something bigger than a pellet had hit me.
But I wasn’t losing atmosphere yet, and my internal cameras were all working fine, so…
Not dead yet, at least.
Though my accelerometers were all still capped out.
I reset them, in the hopes of getting any sort of sense of what was happening at all.
No luck.
They were fucking dead.
Welp.
That wasn’t great.
I kinda needed those.
I hadn’t planned for a scenario in which I lost most of my sensors but actually survived.
A glaring oversight, in retrospect, but for now I’d just have to do my best with what I had.
Speaking of which, was my engine still working?
…
Nope!
Well, shit.