I awoke to smoke. It was thick and dark, and I had to wait for my head to clear before I could make sense of my surroundings. I coughed out the smoke that filled my lungs and tried to think, a difficult task with all the alarms.
“Pilot,” rang out the automatic voice over the crackle of flames, “please activate manual override for fire alarm.”
I looked around, my vision beginning to come to. I tediously reached down and released the harness that held me to the chair. I fell to the ceiling with a thud. Great, the whole damn vehicle flipped. Then another thought occurred to me. Gravity was back, which meant I was on solid ground. “Pilot,” the recoding repeated “Plea-” With a zap and pop, the voice was interrupted. “Trent?” a new hurried voice called. I groaned and rolled off my back.
“Vitals are fine I assume then,” The female voice stated,
“Reactor 3 ejected successfully, but we short circuited after we switched all power to life support and thrust. Power is at 34%... I did some calculations, looks like we are stuck here for a while…”
I got up on my hands and knees and hacked out a lung, I looked up and began to drag myself towards the red light over the fire alarm. Lifting my arm to reach the switch was like lifting a sack of rocks, but I reached the alarm. With the push of a button, the emergency hose popped from what would be the ceiling if I weren’t crouched over on it, targeted the flame, and sprayed its fire retardant at the base of the flame. A few emergency lights came on and ventilation began to clear the smoke and dump reserve oxygen into the cockpit of my craft. I took a deep breath of the fresh air and immediately felt better. My head hurt less and my vision cleared, and I began to move toward the console next to me.
“Memory,” I wheezed, still tasting smoke on my tongue, “what the hell happened.”
An orange figure flickered to life on the console, upside down, at first, but it righted itself to my vision quickly,
“I’m currently trying to figure out those details chief, but we lost contact with the Pythagoras around the same time we ejected the used uranium core. We transferred power and… well I don’t know what exactly went wrong. We lost thrust to engine four, and the mag-pulsars on engine 1 and 2 stopped working after we hit the event horizon.”
We entered the black hole? That’s not possible. I shouldn’t be alive in that case. I went to the console and began checking the ships status. Energy levels – normal. Life support – working fine. Alternate power – Solar panel 2 is missing, wonderful. Last two nuclear reactors are fine, and magnetic pulsars on all engines looked fine now, with the exception of engine four, which appeared to be missing its aft thrust nozzle entirely. I checked the front camera. The upside down world outside came to view. I was on the dark side of whatever rock I landed on, a small moon lurked overhead, and I noticed some shadowy structures reaching toward the sky, but could not identify them as smoke passed the camera lens.
“What is the air situation looking like?” I inquired. “I wont be able to stay here forever.”
The ships AI responded with a calm tone,
“I have stored about a month’s worth of air on reserve, just in case something were to happen while mining in Zeus’s asteroid belt. Not like we could have predicted a star dying two weeks ahead of schedule, and the falling into the resulting black hole. We should be fine on Oxygen. Speaking of… Trenton… there is something you may want to see…”
I slowly approached the conduit over which Memory had pulled up a new screen revealing a standard atmospheric reading. Upon further inspection, the graph revealed something impossible.
“The readings are… normal. As a matter of fact-“
“They almost exactly match Earth’s atmosphere, and the artificial atmosphere of the new Martian colony,” Memory sounded as confused as I was as she pulled up the other two graphs, “That’s not the only strange thing... It appears to be precipitating only on our pod.”
I moved back to the video console, and attempted to rotate the camera. After the motor made a few cracking sounds, the camera gave way and the source of the precipitation came to life on screen. I sat back dumbstruck, Memory had to do the speaking for me.
“What IS that?”