The Spread Part 1

Rose didn’t know how long she’d been in the crate. Her back ached; the cool metal of her container offering no comfort. Why should it? It’s not like it was made to ship people like this. The air was stuffy, and the air purification strips stuck to her neck were slightly whirring with the strain. It was all worth it though. Worth it to be off of that terrible rimworld. It was the kind of place you didn’t stay unless you couldn’t afford to leave. Rose had always dreamed of leaving. Of seeing the stars and discovering new things, and she couldn’t do any of that from that damned rock. That’s why she took the risk when a supply cruiser had landed in her town. Why she slipped in the crate when no one was looking, strapping the purification strips she had stolen to her neck and praying they worked.

Now all she had to do was wait. It was an uncomfortable wait. She had had to contort her lithe body to get in the crate, and there wasn’t much affordance to move, small as she was. She looked at the monitor attached to her wrist; the dim light illuminating her temporary prison. “Twenty-three percent air purity” was the readout from the strips. She still needed to wait. She needed to last as long as possible or there was a chance that the cruiser might deem it worth the cost to waste an escape pod jettisoning her back to her wasteland home. She had heard stories of others escaping rimworlds like this: by stowing away and waiting until it was no longer feasible to waste resources returning you. The cruiser would have to dump her on the next inhabitable planet, and she could figure things out from there. Even that was more of a shot at the life she wanted than anything she would find back home. So she waited in her box.

Her mind wandered to the thoughts of being the captain of a ship just like this. Of travelling the void and seeing what the galaxy had to offer. Foods and peoples and places of all varieties. All she had to do was wait a little longer. Her watch buzzed. “Fifteen percent air purity”, it warned. Should she raise the lid at ten? Five? How long could she wait before it got dangerous? The strips could malfunction working this hard. Her heartbeat starts to rise as her watch flickered over to fourteen percent. She considers raising the lid even now, and weighs it against the extra five minutes of distance warp drive would put between them and her homeworld.

Just as she raises her hand to push the lid from her container, there’s a loud crashing like steel scraping steel. She’s jostled hard against the walls of the crate as it feels like it’s thrown across the room. More crashing. Warning sirens now. Hissing. She reaches out, desperate to release herself, but she’s thrown again and her head connects with the lid. Hard. She hardly registers the words that play over the ship’s loudspeaker as her vision goes black. “Foreign object collision. Sealing sector for repair”.

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The frantic beeping of her watch rings through her sore head, crashing her back to consciousness. Her eyes take a second to refocus, though they shoot wide once they register the words in front of her. Despite the throbbing between her ears, she reaches out and gives a firm shove. The lid screeches open a crack: just the corner. All of the jostling must have bent it. Still, the rush of cool ship air gives her the energy to push again, and this time the lid creaks open. She half-unfurls half-collapses her way out of the box. The cool titanium floor of the ship is hard against her back, but still feels refreshing against her sore limbs. She feels the intense humming against her neck calm as the strips recalibrate to normal air. Checking her watch just to be sure, she finally lets herself breathe as it ticks up past the heartwrenching “two percent” readout. She rests her head against the floor and allows herself a precious moment to relax; the first she’s had since she left home that morning.

She doesn’t rest long. Rising to her still-asleep feet, she surveys her surroundings. Or tries to. The room around her is pitch black.