Ilo wakes up to the annoying beeping of the alarm. De could change the tune, but prefers it to be annoying to clearly communicate its intent. Besides, any tune becomes annoying when playing at such moments.
Ilo stares with unfocused, dehydrated eyes at a piece of paper taped at the ceiling above the bunk that says "THE VOID HATES YOU CAVE DWELLER". The day promises nothing nice, but staying in bed promises a world of pain after the initial relief. Ilo reaches for the stow and grabs a bottle with recycled water, then drinks it, trying not to let any touch der tongue. Ilo reaches for the pack of Icepick1 and takes the four-hourly dose, the main reason for waking up. The chills and the pain are not quite there but delaying would only knock Ilo out from being useful for several more hours.
Ilo slowly gets up the bunk. The air is stale and has multiple funky smells: the filter needs changing and the recirculator needs a repair. The air quality indicator on the wall is red. Ilo adds a couple of degrees to the manual offset to at least keep the light informative for a while.
After several chores, while Ilo is sitting on a crate resting from exertion, the next alarm beeps. Ilo turns it off, gets up and quickly shambles to the communicator. De checks own image in the preview and ruffles the hair a bit trying to look a bit less desperate, then calls the contact.
- Hello, Ilo. - the hooded Void Church rep responds. - How are you doing?
- Quite fine, Deiv, but will be much better once I am out of here. Have you looked up what I asked you too?
- Uh, yeah, about that. - Daiv flips a couple pages on der tablet. -- The run is cancelled. Sorry, you'll have to wait a week in that system.
Fear grips Ilo. This is not possible.
- What the hell, Daiv? I can pay, I have a good load. Just get me on the way or we both will be much poorer. I'm not paying you this amount for such a delay. Surely you understand every day I spend in this shithole incurs expenses.
- Sure, Ilo, but there is just no way I pay off enough workers to open a breach just for your ship. Nothing can be done.
- Listen, Daiv. - Ilo slumped and abandoned any attempt to look presentable. - I am fucking dying here. I will be bankrupt in a week and even if I put up a distress signal my life is as good as lost. If you don't find me a way, I will crash my ship into one of your expensive, just installed, breach gates and my dead man's hand has all your info. Find me a fucking route.
- Oh hell. - Daiv sighs and digs into the tablet. - There is one other way but you'll have to be at another gate in an hour. I can piggyback you behind a hauler. Can you do it? Pay's the same.
- Sure. - Ilo is reinvigorated. - I'm sure the old dump can do it.
After finishing the call and setting the course, Ilo runs around tying down and stowing everything possible. The gemstones had to be shoveled into a crate and hastily covered with a taped tarp.
Ilo turns off any optional systems: gravitation, air filtering, extra lights and puts all power into the engine. The ship starts to shake a bit from the power propelling it and dodging the debris as Ilo floats through the room to the navigation screen. The time to arrival is 30 minutes, should be plenty.
Suddenly, the ship violently changes the direction several times, which throws Ilo around, then the shaking stops. Ilo spits out the blood, which floats in red bubbles, and jumps back to the navigation.
- Engine error during navigation: ERR_UNDEFINED. - the screen says.
Ilo doubles over in a coughing fit, while grabbing a handlebar, spreading even more blood mixed with mucus over the room. That makes dem nauseous and de throws up in a random stow box, trying to keep it contained with the last sparks of consciousness.
When the fit is over, Ilo pulls the navigation script to figure out what the error means. The error turns out to be a cryptic feedback code from the engine firmware, meaning apparently nothing critical or common enough to interpret. Ilo stubs the script to ignore the error and restarts the navigation.
The ship starts, but soon the glitch happens again. After Ilo is shaken around, this time less damaged due to grabbing the handlebar ahead of time, ship continues but shaking intensifies and keeps jerking a bit. Ilo checks the scanner logs and peers out of a window, but does not see any reason to maneuver in either.
Ilo digs deeper into the navigation logs and finds that obstacle avoidance appears to be malfunctioning and destabilizes even more with every false positive. Ilo disables the avoidance after running a forward scan.
Ilo puts on an EVA suit and crawls out of the airlock. Fighting the sickness bouts, de climbs around the hull while keeping an eye on the debris scanner, and checks the maneuver engines. They seem to be fine. Ilo comes back in.
Just as Ilo takes off the suit, the debris sensor lights up. Ilo checks the reading and sees the debris field coming up. The field is not possible to survive at normal speed with malfunctioning debris avoidance. Ilo puts in a speed limit and starts the navigation again. The estimation tells dem the ship will be 20 minutes late.
As the ship enters the debris field and impacts start hitting the hull, Ilo floats around the room in desperation. Either the ship is likely to be torn to pieces or the window of opportunity is missed. De starts hastily unscrewing the panels from the walls, checking the connections of maneuver engines. They all seem fine.
In desperation, Ilo jumps to the navigation screen and stares at the ETA, listening to increasing debris impacts and trying to figure out a way out of this mess. And that's when de notices the small red dot in the navigation interface which has been there for a while but never attracted Ilo's attention. Ilo pushes it and an update notification jumps out to dem:
Patch Notes, version 2.23.91
* Fixed avoidance in some rare edge cases, known to manifest in poorly mapped systems
Ilo immediately presses the "UPDATE" button and floats back as update is downloaded and installed. Afterwards, de restarts the navigation and, amazed, watches how the ship accelerates to full speed while gracefully avoiding the debris. The estimate tells dem that the gate will be reached 5 minutes ahead of the breach. Ilo curses the homebrew package management, relaxes and floats back into the mess of bodily fluids, wall panels, and gemstones flying around the room.
1 ↑ Icepick, from ISPK -- Industrial Strength PainKillers. Slang term for a strong painkiller brand, often used by voidcraft crew affected by cancer or other painful void-related diseases.