As the last fiery bits of ship and hope fall from the sky, the surviving crew make their first fortifications against the elements. So far, everyone who was alive, is still alive...
Groups(See Characters and Locations in the List Post for details.
Faris immediately goes for the radio. Naturally for a lifeboat, the system is idiotproof and automatically looks for other distress signals and broadcasts from ARES III craft. After a bit of frantic button mashing, it picks up a few radio contacts. No actual data is being transmitted except automated system alerts, but the multi-antennae is able to triangulate where some of the signals are coming from. (See map.)
Squeegy starts tearing the cabin apart looking for anything that might be useful for making a shelter with. When he starts disassembling the seats for bedding, it's enough to pull Faris away from the radio and comment Isn't this lifeboat supposed to be a good shelter?
At any rate, you've got a complete stock of everything in the craft. Six flight seats, some wiring, the piloting terminal, a first aid kit, and essentially nothing but the lifeboat's walls. And the space suit in the airlock of course.
Even idling, the terminal would drain the section emergency battery quickly. You power down the computer, and take stock of the rest of your makeshift lifeboat. The fridge is still attached to parts of the habitation section, but it's leaking air like a sieve. You wisely retreat back to the icebox.
All the movement blurs your vision and sets the room spinning. Disoriented and aimless, you try entertaining yourself with some colorful food packaging. The throbbing outer regions of your head protest loudly at your attempted origami, and the room starts spinning faster.
Your options are few and clear you've got a band of robotic minions, and you're going to put them to use. It takes a bit of effort and manhandling to get them out of their orbital launch bays and into roving posture. But it all goes just as designed, and you send out a pair to look at the land, with the rest lined up behind.
These robots were really meant to operate with satellite navigation, and don't have the stature to explore on their own, but they try their best for you. The module has landed in a gully or crater with scattered junk it might take a while to find a route for the bots to climb out of. At least your hull looks intact.
Packed up for landing, the Hydroponic Lab doesn't have a lot of walking space, and everyone links up quickly. Vlad is stiff and bruised, but some tenuous flexing proves he can move well enough, if painfully. Rosie anxiously tries to placate him, but Vlad calmly wards her away.
Personal priority one out of the way, Rosie then flies off to dig out her research blackboxes. Serg and Vlad immediately set to finding air leaks. Luckily, most of the experimental greenhouse material was stored right at hand. They set to patching the broken corners around the module locks with powerful adhesives. Meanwhile, the bottom of the Lab is slowly filling with water hopefully, there aren't any hull leaks below the floodline.
Rosie retrieves her cases from the muck and clutches them a moment. Priority two resolved, she rushes about trying in vain to find a radio in a module that was never meant to be by itself. In the dash, she trips over a soggy pressure suit.
Okay, you're on Mars, in a closet, with a space suit. As stark as the situation is, you manage to steady your breathing with your impromptu mantra.
All you have in your escape pod is a first-aid kit you managed to swipe and the removable light. There's the built-in radio, but the one in your suit is just as good. You had already started squeezing into your space suit when the pod fired off, and now steadied, you finish putting it on. After several minutes of psyching yourself up, mission mode takes effect.
Nothing left to do now but open the door.
This couldn't get much worse. You run back to the EVA chamber to grab the space suits, and yell to Tetsuo and Augusta to try anything to reseal the bridge. Tetsuo rapidly inspects what seams he can get to aside from any number of new holes in the structure, the obligatory (and you bitterly note, completely superfluous) windows are threatening to pop out any minute. Tetsuo tries some random adhesive on the frames, but it's a fool's errand.
He's a bit more concerned with Augusta, who's having trouble just staying on her feet. In her moments of full clarity, she makes it clear she injured.
You get the suits back onto the bridge and prep them for use. The survival instinct insists that one of the suits goes to you, being in the best shape to escape the bridge. But Tetsuo knows it too, and starts boiling at the realization that there's only one other suit...
You start slapping makeshift plaster onto the whistling holes in the modular wall as fast as your space-suited hands allow. It's not working very well, and takes a lot of caking. Enough is piled on that the whistling stops, but you can see the suction won't let it hold.
You take a panicked review of the Bio Lab itself. Aside from the modular connection points, everything else seems intact. The water tanks fractured in the crash and are leaking out all over the floor. There's nowhere near enough for it to be dangerous, but it's getting everywhere.
It crosses your mind that the polycarbonate terrariums could be sealed air-tight if need be. You briefly consider climbing in with your little friends, but no one terrarium is big enough for a person anyway.
Everyone is dazed and confused after the tumble. Louise snaps to first, and shouts to patch up the hull immediately. Pitor can't take his eyes off the bodies on the floor. Despite his brief inspection, there's no confusion here. It's obvious from the abundance of broken bones that the Crew Foreman and the two rocketry technicians are dead, or will be momentarily.
The new ranking tech Pitor starts moving the corpses aside and setting heat blankets over them. Geoffrey flatly quips that they're not going to get more or less dead. Vernon just sets to work on the hull mumbling the only discernible words are ...than me...
The Engineering Section is large and full of odd niches, but with three, later four, crewmen searching, it's clear the hull is effectively intact. The most immediate problem is the water pouring out some fluid lines, and air rushing into others. All are capped off easily enough, but few of the tanks themselves are cracked open.
As if the slight bulge wasn't enough, a timid poke and some searing pain confirm your fears. The arm is broken. Cursing, you search the even more unlucky man who made it in with you. The tag on his uniform reads Aurifaber - Edmund, the meticulous geoscientist, charged with environmental testing on crystal growth. You whisper a half-remembered sailor's prayer for the poor guy, and start rifling through his pockets. Finding nothing, you then pry the medical bag out of his rigid hand.
The contents are thoroughly scrambled from it's flight around the room, though you do find a few syringes of morphine. Pain is pain, but you decide you'll need all your wits about you.
Donning the pressure suit you dragged in is no easy feat. Stuffing your legs in is troublesome, and trying to get into the sleeves instantly turns torturous. Pain is pain all right.
The view would be breathtaking if it weren't so hostile. You're surrounded by broken, hilly Martian landscape, by the looks of it a crater field, highlighted by flaming bits of the Ares III still plummeting from space.
There's no way of judging orientation, but from your vantage point you can see a lot of crash site. The direction is easy enough to reckon from the smear of wreckage across the landscape. Farther along the crash line are some smooth lumps you guess to be the prepared science modules, with more bits coming down over a mile or two. In the other direction are some big metal cubes and assorted trash. Among them is the unmistakable prow of the Ares' bridge, a couple hundred yards away.
The chunk you're standing on is probably another module, because there's nothing up here but heat-shielding. You don't know how, but you wound up on a different block of the ship than what you were working on. While you ponder this, your suit computer chirps that your airtank is down to quarter full. Maybe an hour of air if you pace yourself.
You let out some wholly appropriate whoops in celebration. Your leg puts a quick end to any dancing though. At least the revelry proves it's still in one piece, even if it hurts like a bitch. Years of roughhousing let you take it in stride.
Looking around, you can't see any structural damage, but you hear quiet whistling from somewhere. Your leg certainly isn't up to sort of climbing you'd need to get anywhere up the walls in here. Reasoning that the bay is big enough and sturdy enough for the moment, you assess your transportation options.
The Auger is in quite a pickle. It saved your life on the ride down by wedging into the side of the Vehicle Bay, but the Bay is now laying on it's side, so the Auger forms a good portion of the floor. With enough leverage and some disassembly, you should be able to get it out, but not with everything laying about like this.
Thinking of leverage, you turn to the remaining backhoe, now teetering on it's dorsal. Some finagling and dodging gets it to do a one-armed Macarena with the digger until it rolls back onto it's wheels. The digging arm is a little bent, but functional. The bigger problem is after it's ride around the bay, the suspension is shot.
The computer reads everything as completely intact. The small radial reactor is operating well, and the energy banks are charged. The air tanks are even full, so at least you're in no danger of suffocating. You've got no better option than trying to escape, so you gun it.
You make it a few inches, if that. The terrain monitor says only 5 of 8 wheels are touching, and the collision monitor is going crazy. Reverse doesn't do any better. The rover is completely surrounded by rocks and jammed beams from what's left of the Vehicle Bay.
Dragging yourself across the room to your friend's corpse is a double exercise in willpower. You make it though, and start looking for something to tie your leg to. You manage to rip an armrest off a chair it's bulky, but it might work.
You have less luck actually getting some cloth without any tools handy to cut up a jumpsuit with. Taking stock as best you can from the floor, you find some pens and electrical cord. The tarantula draws your attention back, and you notice it's cage is a collapsible job of plastic panels and stiff wire.
Fortunately, nothing actually pierced your jumpsuit. Unfortunately, that means all your wounds are on your head and hands, including a couple bad lacerations on your scalp. Dr. Saberi insists you'll need stitches, but you manage to convince her that now is not the time. For the moment, it's bandages and gel all around.
Shideh escaped to much damage herself, except for a long slice down her face. That is, until she finally relents to the obvious and says her right arm is in pain. She hisses, and guides you through a prodding examination. Nothing broken, but she diagnoses her shoulder is probably sprained.
As no one is yet in immediate danger (for certain values of immediate), this turn will be 15 minutes again. For a few of you, that's a critical bit of air. Do read the spoilers for important details. Those of you who posted a bunch of successive actions, take note of what was and wasn't accomplished for some idea of what can be readily done in a timeframe.
Some of you didn't complete your actions this turn. Basically, I checked to see if you were successful, failed, or just delayed. I'm running into a slight problem of not presenting you guys with enough information for you to really judge what you can and can't do in your location.
My advice is to just take the initiative and describe what you'd like to do with whatever you can think of as being in a place, then I'll determine whether it's possible rather than me trying to comprehensively tell you everything you could ever need to know. That said, there will be delays where your attempt to something stalls or fails, without being disastrous or unrepeatable. But I'm not going to put actions in anyone's mouth.
In the List Post, you'll notice that expect for water, air food and power are described in general terms. Air tanks have a definite amount in them (roughly 4 hours), but other than that, it's hard to gage things like how much air there is in a room. Food is always a pretty relative term. And power right now is a little up in the air. Every module and vehicle has it's own battery supply, and the power ratings say how long the batteries in each location will power the active equipment there. I'll make a more solid, empirical power rating system by the time people start bunging machinery together.
I've also included some specific information on the different suit types. The differences aren't too critical now (for most of you anyway), but are worth knowing.
By the way, you guys do know I'm keeping all this in the third post right? There were a few redundant responses that I kind of covered up there. It's not comprehensive by any means, but it's got everything that you've definitively covered. Including interpersonal relations yes, I have a system.
Other corrections will go here as they inevitably arrive.
I should explain my system for air use. I heard somewhere (probably MythBusters) that a standard sized SCUBA tank holds enough oxygen-normal air for a person to operate under normal swimming conditions for about two hours; and that the volume of air in such a tank at normal pressure was about the same as a phone booth. This may not be perfectly accurate, but it's plausible enough for my purposes.
In other words, my ruling is that every cubic meter of space in a structure is worth about 1 man/hour of air without proper CO2 circulation. I'm also ruling based on usual space travel operation procedures that the air is slightly denser and more oxygenated than Earth-normal, to give me some wiggle room. This does have implications for things like cognizance and plant growth. And fire. At some point, when you've got a more secure system together, you'll be able to manually control the air mix, with it's own possibilities.
I'm sure people will want to know exactly how big each structure is, and I do have some rough ideas, but they're open to change at the moment. I'll decide that as it becomes more important over the next several turns, or when people ask. Suffice to say, only Strife, Squeegy, Faris, Dietrich, and Kallev are in much danger of structural suffocation. Qwerty is low on air in the normal way.
Author
Topic: Angry Red Planet - Totally And Completely Dead (Read 48138 times)