---[ POV: Flynn ]---

Flynn was stunned for quite some time and could do nothing else than look at the emergency message displayed on his HUD with a stupid face.

Am I dreaming?

The young man played the recording back, but sure enough, it was not a hallucination or a fantasy. There was someone, a girl, asking for help.

But how come?

It was clear by now that this planet was not one under the mantle of the Empire and Flynn was definitively the sole survivor of the crash.

Did someone also got lost in these parts of space before me?

No! though Flynn. That is virtually impossible. Me ending up here is already quite the stretch on its own, there is no way this happened twice in a row. Just no way! Although, given all the 'impossible' or 'improbable' things that have happened recently, I am not so sure anymore...

The young man was completely puzzled. At the same time as me, then? Maybe there was another ISF ship synchronized on my jump coordinates when I left the theater of the Starfall space battle and it tried to follow me in hyperspace when I jumped?

Flynn could not remember any such ship, however, and Commander Regus had been clear that the young pilot's mission was to flee alone and stealthily in the hope of avoiding the Mind Eaters' attention.

Flynn was mulling over those reflections while looping through the audio recording, trying to clean it as much as possible with JAX, when he picked up on a new audible cue in the message.

A low and continuous growl that he had first thought to be some generic background noises. It was sometimes modulated by short, angry, and plaintive shrieks.

"You son of a bitch!" cursed Flynn while slamming his fist on the surface of the nearby engineering bay work surface.

He was about to elaborate on his invective but many thoughts and ideas suddenly clicked into places and he had a reminiscence of the moment the shrieker had gulped down the crate and his transceiver.

The crate... could it be? Nooo... surely not? Reallyyyyy?!

Now that he thought about it, the box was just the right shape, with proportions similar to a coffin or a stasis pod. Someone could certainly fit inside.

Have I been clandestinely transporting someone all along? pondered the young man incredulously. That would make more sense than the Starfall high command dispatching a corvette to Earth just to relay information.

But who? And why?

If it really was a disguised stasis or transport pod, it had to be for someone extremely important to justify such secrecy and out-of-norm procedures. Just who was VIP enough to warrant an ISF battlecruiser sacrificing itself and its entire crew to the Mind Eaters just to create her an escape window?

That interrogation and its implication made Flynn shudder. The only thing that came to mind on the spot was either a higher-up of Central, the government responsible for overlooking and ruling the entirety of the Empire, or even worst, someone closely related to the Emperor himself.

A cold sweat ran down the young man’s spine and he gulped.

In either case, he would probably get executed on the spot if someone from the Empire discovered he had let such a VIP get eaten by a giant alien lizard as soon as she was released into his care.

Flynn remembered about the four dead Regulators he had immolated yesterday and cringed at the thought that he had not a particularly good track record regarding the wellbeing of people he was in charge of. This was even worse if he assumed that his fighter squadron back on the ISF Starfall had probably been wiped out by the Mind Eaters fleet by now.

Flynn chased those unnecessary thoughts away as there was nothing that could be done about it and tried to focus on what had to be done now that he knew there was another survivor.

That poor girl had sounded quite confused and he could understand her if she had awoken from stasis with her pod located in the belly of an alien monster. His only wish was that the pod would resist long enough for her to get out of there alive.

The crate had seemed heavily armored and protected, taking no real damage from the crash or the monster chewing on it, so Flynn was not too worried on that front but, at the same time, he had absolutely no idea of what the biological life forms that had evolved on that planet were capable of. For all he knew, the shrieker was able to eat and digest metals and minerals, and its gastric acids could maybe burn through the composite material of the crate. If it was the case, Flynn had no doubt the pod was also probably protected by a potent shield but, once again, the shrieker biology, or even environmental factor, could disrupt the shield. There were records of imagination-defying creatures or natural anomalies cataloged in the archives of the Empire; creatures and anomalies that could interact with energy fields in strange and unexpected manners were not the most unusual, by far.

There was no room for indecision. More than letting an Empire VIP die, Flynn was more afraid of losing what seemed to be the only other person on this planet apart from him.

He looked at the darkness outside. Time was of the essence so he would have no choice but to spend the night in the wilderness.

You have to do what you have to do.

Without losing one more second, Flynn gathered all the equipment he thought would be needed for a rescue mission in an unknown environment and deposited it on the workbench near the fabricator. Most of it was already strapped to his armor, to begin with, since he had prepared it before leaving for his exploration earlier in the day.

The lieutenant was now planning a journey that could last for days, however, and expected to fight a giant alien creature, so the load had to be slightly modified. He thus gathered additional rations, medical supplies, and exploration tools.

He also went ahead and grabbed a searing-blade knife that had belonged to one of the Regulators. Flynn had carried his laser cutter tool with him during the day but since he was planning a confrontation with the shrieker, a real weapon seemed more appropriate.

The young man also searched the corvette for an adequate long-range weapon but found none so he had to settle for the sidearm of the dead Regulators; small laser pistols.

Flynn had not considered them when he fought the shrieker since those pistols were considered one the weakest weapon in the ISF arsenal and he knew they did not have the firepower to bring the beast down. Not only that, but the laser projectiles of the weapon, while usually working perfectly in a space battle environment, was highly unreliable planetside because there were a lot of things that could interfere with it. Nonetheless, they would still prove an incredible asset to fend off against anything less imposing than the colossal reptile, which he had no doubt was the apex predator in this mountain range. Or at least, he strongly wished so...

Laser pistols had self-recharging power cores that could last for years on end. If one was cautious not to shoot repetitively enough to get the core overheating, the pistol boasted virtually infinite ammunitions. Because of this design decision, however, they had sub-par firepower when compared to the other ISF handheld weapons with standard magazines.

Since Flynn’s only range option was the mere laser pistol, he decided to also take some time to craft primitive pipe bombs. With his knowledge and the fabricator, he would probably be able to craft some plasma or waves grenades but that would take time and he was in a hurry. Resources and materials for advanced equipment were also limited so he had to be cautious.

Pipe bombs, the simplest trick in the book, took less than 3 minutes a unit to produce. he made 10 before running out of easily available reagents. He had to be cautious with what he used since he did not have infinite raw materials.

Once Flynn was satisfied with his haul, he waved his hand above it, activating the storage function of the armor which he had just recently gained access to.

Such storage technology was based on dimensional science, the most esoteric and complicated field of science exploited by the Empire, which FTL technologies were built upon. From the little Flynn could understand about it, dimensional storage relied on the existence of subspaces planes layered between - or was it beneath? - the space-time continuum. He had no idea if the subspace already existed or was outright generated by human technology. Such an advanced subject was beyond him. Flynn was geared for basic spaceship engineering because of his chips and neural stack programs but was far from a scientist. Advanced dimensional sciences were not something a regular soldier could hope to grasp just with the help of a regular neural stack and its basic AI. His practical sense was simply happy that the feature existed and was easy to use.

Easy to use, indeed; the items scattered on the surface were scanned and then disappeared to be stored in the subspace generated - or accessed - by the armor.

Creating and maintaining such a subspace was taxing on the energy core of a simple armor so the space available was generally restricted and optimized for what was considered to be regular combat or tactical loads.

With the items he had just stored, his HUD displayed that he was already using 32% of his storage. Well, considering it contained an imposing power-hammer, a couple of kilos of explosives, and more than enough survival material for two people to last a month, that was not bad at all.

Flynn got out of the corvette and had the scanning system of the armor try to pinpoint the distress beacon. Since he had no map of his surrounding, a simple compass indicating the cardinal directions appeared as a bar at the top of his HUD with an indicator pointing in the general direction of the signal.

There was not much more information displayed but it was quite normal since Flynn was relying only on his armor capacity without the proper support infrastructure to complement it.

The young lieutenant made a mental note that he would have to salvage the reconnaissance drones of the corvette to help him map out this place. The good news was that a scouting corvette had a lot of them so even if some were busted, he had more than enough spare parts to patch up at least two or three.

For the moment, however, he could only use the limited radar functionality of the armor to monitor his immediate surrounding. Depending on the environment, obstructions, and interference, this functionality had an approximate range of 200 meters but it could stretch out a lot farther than that given the perfect conditions.

This was yet another functionality he had no access to this morning and was now very grateful to be able to use. With its continuous monitoring of his environment, it was almost impossible to sneak up on him without the help of advanced stealth technology. Flynn felt somewhat less vulnerable.

The compass indicated that his quarry was somewhere to the southwest.

Flynn started to walk toward the ravine wall as he had no choice but to climb out if he wanted to head south since the gorge was only running from west to east.

The young man looked up the sheer cliff.

"Get in the ISF, they said! Good pay and citizenship guaranteed, they said! They never talk about chasing big-ass lizards on alien worlds to rescue some girl born with a golden spoon up her ass and whose underwears are probably worth more than your life, however. Noooo! They prefer to skip that part."

The young man let out a dry chuckle. If I continue like that, I’ll become as grouchy as old man Regus. Now that I think about it, the men were sometimes calling me ‘Captain Grump’. Flynn frowned. I am too young to become a discontent grumbler! Nonetheless, this little rant had helped him refocus and calm down.

"Well, that's the soldier life, alright."

He started to climb.

"Here I go again."