Rakion Galaxy

"Try to stay awake then MacCreedy, until told otherwise you and me are still on-duty. If you fall asleep on patrol, you'll have a court-martial on your hands.", Messer said to Charles, who replied with a quick "Yes sir" under his breath. He was still shaken from whatever the heck happened in the lift and almost being shot by his fellow Officer, and steadied his breath as the grav lift loaded its passengers for the ride up. He looked over the group again and let out another self-calming sigh. Aside from the smoker in the group, everyone seemed friendly enough, at least with Messer taking charge. Looking up through the glass roof of the lift, he saw the curved ramp along the roof of the shaft signifying the topmost floor of the ship: the Bridge. Looking back down through the thicker glass floor below, he saw a very, very long drop into darkness. The idea of falling through the floor hadn't exactly frightened him until now, and he was even more frightened on the fact of how old the ship was. Circuits all around have probably been frayed and destroyed by time as the hull of the ship has, and at this point, shit could hit the fan anytime. As the lift approached the Bridge, he readied his Tycho rifle for whatever was ahead, and aimed around Messer as not to hit him should some kind of terrorist start shooting back. Terrorist, he thought to himself, what am I thinking? He shook his head a bit to wake up, and took aim at the lift doors.

"No one is to fire unless I give the order, or if you feel yourself to be personally threatened.", Messer ordered, and Charles remembered to take his finger off the trigger. Pointing his finger forward and pressed against the trigger guard, he nodded in conformation as the lift suddenly halted. Glancing to Messer, who had glanced back to make sure he was ready, they got ready to fire at the unknown within. The doors slid open, and Charles thought he saw Messer in his peripheral vision take a step forward to either assume point or just to keep the lift doors from closing. Focusing back to what was in front of him, Charles almost immediately tilted his gun lower at what he saw was in the room. All that stood in the middle of the room was a teenage girl with hair dyed pink, holding some sort of Japanese sword. He noticed that the girl was slowly looking them over as they entered, standing her ground and unmoving as if she were a statue. She then focused her gaze directly on Charles, and he felt a tingling in his head. It felt very familiar for some reason, the almost unnoticeable feeling of having his mind probed for information. He realized that it must've been his chip being Breached, but it hadn't set off any alarms to him on what was happening. Gazing into the Datascape in front of him and looking at his chip's overall status, his chip firewall showed no signs of being Breached... At least, not by unknown sources.

The girl spoke, locking her eyes with Messer's, tilting her blade a bit to the side. "Do I really look like I could nab you from all the way over here, Officer? Lower your gun, please..." Charles lowered his gun a few seconds after, and looked the girl over again. Pink hair and matching pink eyes wasn't a very common occurrence, and Charles couldn't see any signs of her hair being dyed recently. In fact, hair dye was tested in cryofreeze and was said to turn deadly during the defrosting process, so it was obvious that her natural hair color was in fact pink. As he searched his memories, he remembered someone very close who had pink hair like her's. "My name's Ellis Allven, one of the... Survivors... Of this voyage.", she said, and Charles nearly dropped his gun at the name. It couldn't have been her, the same person who he had spent countless days with in the hospital? Charles now lowered his gun completely, slinging it to his side, and used his chip to help him search his memories. The name Ellis Allven appeared across many pages of his memory dating back to when he was just six years old. Is this really how long I've known this girl for?, he thought to himself as he looked through his past. As he read page after page at speeds far impossible from someone without a chip, he found out that his father and her father knew each other since college, and have worked together ever since. His chip compiled a summary of all that he remembered.

When Ellis was born six months after Charles was born, it was found that she had some sort of rare disease and was to be killed immediately to prevent its spread. Both fathers were able to prevent her from being slaughtered at birth, but they couldn't stop the testing they did on her. As far as his memory knew, all but one of the tests they did on her wouldn't have undesirable long-term effects. The one that did affect her was a test of her mental capacity with and without a chip, and as it turned out, Ellis's father had to spend millions finding a chip that would work fast enough for Ellis to use. Normally, chips were factory built to fit the general IQ and mental processing speeds for most people around the world. Ellis was different, which was easily proven by the many chips she went through and blew out throughout the first two years of her life. It was a miracle that the blow outs didn't kill her, even more so that she didn't suffer mental scarring as a result. When her father finally found a chip that would work for her, scientists were highly skeptical of the choice he made, which was never made public. The disease left Ellis with a nearly collapsed rib cage and a shredded pair of lungs to breathe with, and lived in the ER for over five years until they healed with the help of expert medical workers and students from the nearby Mountainview College. Charles was first introduced to Ellis when he was six, however he'd never seen her awake until half a year later. She was constantly breathing through a respirator, so it was hard for her to talk when he was able to get out of school to spend time with her. At 10, Ellis took her first breath of fresh air while sitting in a wheelchair outside the hospital, and a year later, was able to go to school. Through the will of both fathers, they went to the same school from the sixth grade onward, but Ellis and Charles only ever had PE together for some reason. It was probably because Ellis was so knowledgeable already with the chip she had that she didn't need another five or six classes, but Charles never really found out for sure. All Ellis could do until she was a sophomore was sit in the bleachers or do stretches while the other students either ran circles or played soccer or something. Some students would make fun of her, others would stand by her side no matter what happened. As she reached 11th grade at age 16, she was finally cleared for physical activities, and she went right to work at getting her strength up. Despite the worries and warnings from her doctors, Ellis was able to turn into the athlete her mother always dreamed of her being within the coarse of her 11th grade year.

He realized that he had his Datascape feed set to public, and he quickly pulled himself out of his memories and set his feed back to private. By now, the entire group knew that Charles knew Ellis, but at this distance, Ellis wouldn't have known about the flashback he had. At least, I hope not., he thought to himself. As he looked up from his downward gaze, he saw that Ellis was finishing up some sort of explanation of going on, and had thankfully not been blasted to bits by Messer or Laiden. Everyone had already exited the lift, and with a sigh, Charles followed. Looking up at the main screen to see what was outside, he saw Eopi on the starboard side of the ship. Ellis spoke again, and Charles looked to her as she spoke. "We need to find a way off the Arlington as soon as possible. The ship is falling apart around us with every passing minute, and I'm afraid for the well being of the Arlington's oxygen supply.", she said before pulling a compact respirator over her mouth. Charles looked her over, seeing how much she's aged in the past few years, then looked to a blank computer screen to look himself over in the reflection. "Man, the changes we go through...", Charles said to himself as he saw the mask of the Engineering suit gaze back at him, it's expression unreadable to Charles or anyone else.

Giving that speech felt awkward, Ellis had to admit, and at first there was only silence. Silence, save for one of the ESF officers who had murmured to himself. The other officer looked back to the one who muttered, then back to Ellis before speaking again. "I see. It would be in our best interest to get off the Arlington as soon as possible", he said and lowered flak gun, leading the group into the Bridge with an air of leadership. Messer and the two sisters began to look around, however before anyone knew it, Laiden had managed to disappear through one of the staircases leading back down to where they had come from. As Ellis went to check another computer, Messer spoke up again. "So you mean to tell us that the Arlington is some sort of doomsday bomb carrier?", he said. Ellis brought up a schematic of the ship on the computer she had gone to and displayed photos of the opened bomb doors on the underside of the ship, directing Messer to see. She removed her respirator so she could speak. "That is what I just said, is it not?", she replied, backing up so Messer could scroll through information on the screen. One of the two sisters spoke up as Ellis sat in the Captain's chair, pulling up information on the hangar bay. They DID need to get off the Arlington, after all, and they'd need a landing craft to do just that. The Captain's Datascape would supply her with every last detail of each and every ship in the bay.

As status logs came and went, the results began to look dimmer and dimmer. She found out at first that the fuel for the landing crafts was taken directly from the Arlington's fuel supply, and over time, the fuel had been burned away by both idling engines and damaged reserves leaking fuel. There were only a few emergency ships that were currently loaded with fuel, however those ships had also been damaged by time and age to a point where they wouldn't make it to the surface. Collapsed hangar bays and launch tubes were also a problem, leaving only three available escape craft. Ellis brought up the ship's automated repair crew and ordered them to prepare one of the escape craft for takeoff, using parts from other damaged ships to fortify the craft for landfall. After doing this, she downloaded an emergency flight manual to her EVA-X which would run her through takeoff and flight procedures if and when she would fly the landing craft to Eopi with the others.

Speaking of the others, Ellis got up from the chair she sat in and looked around. Messer was talking to the sisters, and the other Officer was watching the main view screen displaying Eopi. She looked over a few other screens, and with another hunger warning from her EVA-X pestering her, she decided that getting something to eat before landfall would be a good idea. "I'm going to get something to eat. A ship's being prepped in Hangar F-4 to get off the ship and will be ready in an hour. I'll see you all there." she said, displaying a map on the Datascape using her chip, then went to the grav lift and made her way to the mess hall. A few minutes later, she was eating a slice of heated french bread she had found frozen in the ship's food banks, enjoying her first meal in five hundred years. And it was delicious. Who knew bread could taste so good? Letting the butter melt in her mouth, she swallowed the rest of her food and took a few more heated slices with her to the grav lift. The grav lift began descending toward the hangar bay as she finished her bread, but halfway down it suddenly stopped, causing Ellis to fall forward a bit as it stopped. Muttering a curse, she looked up to the lift's ceiling and told the EVA-X to breach the lift's gravity stabilizer to fix the problem. "The ship's in even worse state than I thought...", she said to herself before a sharp budge from the lift startled her and forced her forward again. The doors openned to the hangar bay, and Ellis sighed with relief as she exited. "Whew... Thought I'd drop all the way down for a sec-", she said, turning around to see the lift had disappeared after the doors closed, a loud crash moments later forcing her to grip her hands out of fear of what could have happened to her.

Ellis turned from the lift after a minute of standing and walked her way to the ship which was being prepped for liftoff. It was an 8-person Swan class carrier craft normally used for transport of space miner personal, but was augmented for usage in planetary landfall. Opening the back door and climbing in, she saw that the interior was similar to that of a VIP jet back on Teresa. She walked down the middle isle, past the inwardly faced chairs and information screens, and sat in the pilots seat in the cockpit. There was fifteen minutes until liftoff, but she wanted to make sure that everything was alright with the ship before takeoff. The Swan was equipped with a Datascape-only piloting system for the main pilot and a manual system for the co-pilot to be enabled if the Datascape should fail out. The EVA-X began to sort through screens and run engine tests for propulsion and rotation while Ellis ordered the repair drones to fuel and power her ship. As they did this, her chip reported back positive results from the engines, and began to pressurize the fuel for takeoff. The drones connected refueling tubes to the Swan, and she noticed the fuel gauge only go up to 55% before stopping. Irritated with the lack of fuel available, she ordered the drones to put the refueling equipment away and to finalize repair operations. Looking in front of her, she saw the ship HUD begin to format itself and plot the path she would drive the Swan to in order to line up with the launch tube. The shield indicator appeared on the side of the HUD, notifying her that the drones have installed a Targe anti-atmosphere shield which the ship would activate upon landfall operations. The drones put themselves away after another minute, and the launch door blinked red in front of her.

Everything was ready for liftoff. She would only need to wait for the others. Little did she know that Charles would be the only one to make it to the Swan in time.