//------------------------------//
// 1 - Crash 
// Story: Justice 
// by TwoTailedFox 
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Solitude. That’s what he enjoyed most about this. Sitting in the Captain’s Quarters, Alex looked over and over again at the mission objectives, quietly swishing his tail behind him, with the only sound to share his consciousness being the soft hum of the ship’s drive system, one of the most comforting sounds known to any spacefarer.

With the tap of a clawed digit on the console, he brought up a 3D representation of the course the ship was traveling. In the after aftermath of the annexation of Earth, he’d been ordered to investigate an area of space showing signs of instability to the sensor stations erected in the area. Rather than risk his command ship, he instead was flying the Aurora, his personal ship. What he didn’t tell the Admiral, was that he was intimately familiar with this part of space. Nobody knew that. Well, except for the voice that decided to join him.

“From what you told me, Alex, there isn’t much waiting for you if what we think happened, has happened.” That was the voice of Lucy, the Artificial Intelligence that Alex had programmed as a kit, her voice as crisp and refreshing as the day he programmed it. Lucy had been a constant fixture in his life, and was as much a friend to him, as she was an archive of everything Alex had ever known, both from his old life, and his new life. He regaled her with tales of striking achievements that Humanity had accomplished, and chilled her with tales of soul-crushing sadism and depravity that very same species was capable of. He had taught her where he came from; Earth, a planet full of squabbling nations and mistrustful leaders, and how he came to where he was now, even if it did mean a new body along the way, a story that many would never believe, and he suspected, many would never.

“Hmm. I can imagine how that will go down. Soldier caught not disclosing the answer to one of the biggest secrets his people ever stumbled upon. That’s grounds for a court-martial.” Almost to punctuate the point, the fur on his stood up on end at the thought.

“I remember the video footage you showed me of the burial site. That must have been… quite morbid to watch that.” She wasn’t untruthful, but Alex found it more weird than morbid. He’d flown a ship back from his version of Earth, through an artificially-created space-time fissure, and emerged into the universe he was in now.

The ship itself was fine, but he remembered that the engines had taken a hit. By the time he had reached Vulperia, the main engine was in bad shape. He had forced the remaining crew to use the escape pods, and attempted to pilot the ship down to the planet surface. As soon as the ship landed, Alex hot-footed it away from the landing point while the engine went critical. The ship inevitably exploded, but while he was at a sufficient distance away not to be incinerated by the heat blast, he was hit with a radiation dose that would eventually prove to be lethal to his then-human body. The explosion clearly triggered a planetary emergency, and his life-signs were picked up by medical personnel within a half hour after the explosion.

While the doctors at the hospital they transferred him to treated him with a mixture of suspicion and fascination in equal measure, there was one particular doctor who understood the gravity of the situation that he’d been deposited in. He would be dead within a week or two, and there was nothing medical science could do. His DNA had been physically destroyed at the chromosomal level, and it would be only a matter of time before his body began to suffer the ill-effects of his body being unable to cope with the extreme damage.
His name was Doctor Phal, a light-blue fox with more ‘mystical’ connections that he was prepared to admit to his colleagues. Through subsequent conversations with him, Alex had learned two things; a young kit had been brought in with severe injuries due to an accident, and that ‘magic’, or rather, the manipulation of arcane energies was a thing in this universe, albeit one not entirely trusted.

Thinking like a Doctor, he saw two doomed patients, but with his help, he offered to mitigate those numbers. The next day, he had brought two assistants, and they secretly wheeled the young kit to Alex’s room, while security were distracted by a few choice “false alarms” across the compound. Before the procedure, he was asked for two things; to make this effort worthwhile, and to never tell a soul, to maintain a false form of amnesia when he would later awake. After he weakly nodded his head in agreement, the two assistants nodded theirs; Alex’s consciousness was forcibly extracted from his failing human body, and ‘grafted’ into the brain of the young kit.

A loud alarm woke Alex up from his quiet musings, and he hot-footed it up to the ship’s multi-purpose Command Centre. “Activate the viewscreen; what did we stumble on?” The command came naturally, as he made his way to the Captain’s chair. A glowing fissue was dead-centre of the screen... a large, almost star-like shape at it’s centre, and five smaller ones around it. As he contemplated its meaning, the ship began to vibrate. “Lucy... what’s causing that?”

“It’s some sort of force being applied to the hull… we’re being pulled into the fissure!”

“Full scan, I want to know everything we can about that thing!”

Several seconds ticked by, feeling like an eternity to Alex as they passed, “It appears to be a localised distortion of the space-time continuum. The ship’s sensors are also reading Arcane energy, and it’s causing a disruption to the ship’s drive system. We can’t fight this.”

“Is there anything we can do to stop it?”

“Not on board. We don’t have any magic-countermeasure systems, and I don’t want to risk making that fissure bigger... or it could become a threat to neighbouring worlds.”

“Then let’s make every second count. Secure all systems, and secure your quantum bluebox; the last thing I need is for you to be damaged. I’ll handle navigation as wel go in.”

“See you on the flip side. Lucy out.” The lights in the cockpit dimmed, and most of the monitors went dead; Lucy had indeed gone into what was the cyber equivalent of hibernation.

“Good job, Lucy. See you on the other side.” Alex’s training kicked into action, switching the helm’s controls to manual, and making sure that his mechsuit was ready and configured for long-term wear. He secured the ship’s Quantum Capacitor, and switched the ship’s systems to battery power, powering down the fusion reactor; he didn’t want to risk an adverse reaction.

As the ship was pulled into the fissure, it felt like a gradual, but fast acceleration, pinning Alex to his seat as the inertial dampening system struggled to compensate, as the interference from the conduit wreaked havoc with that, and other ship systems.

Without warning, the ship suddenly found itself in normal space, the jolt being more violent than Alex remembered it the first time around, as his face became reacquainted with the floor. He staggered back to his feet, and was about to stabilise the inertial dampening field, when he looked at the viewscreen, and saw that a planet was looming large in front of the ship.

Alex staggered out of his seat, and made his way to one of the the forward consoles. Smashing a small glass box, he pressed a button within it. I’m going to need that if I’m going to survive down there.

Alex then activated the protected data lines from the console on the other side, connected to Lucy’s blue box; her virtual consciousness once again joined him, “Lucy, I’ve got navigation to handle. I need you to train every sensor we have on that planet. Every populated area, every landmark, every landmass, even as this ship goes down. Download all that data to my Holotool so we’ll have some way of navigating later. If we survive this, that is...”

The flight into the atmosphere was turbulent, but Lucy was already collecting data on what locations were populated, and Alex used that data to full effect to plot a crash point, away from anywhere important. The ship itself was designed to survive a planetary crash mostly intact, aside from alloy damage to the ventral side of the vessel. “I’m going to try and smooth out this landing with the ventral thrusters. Lucy, brace for impact!”

Alex engaged the seatbelt he purposely fitted to the Captain’s Chair, just in time for the rear of the ship to make contact with the canopy of a large wooded area on it’s way to making contact with the ground. The impact with the soil was harsh, causing the vessel to momentarily launch itself into the air again, before coming back down even harder, an impact that caused Alex’s seatbelt to unbuckle, and his head to make contact with the console at the front of the ship, knocking him unconscious.

Lucy may have been an AI, but to her, it felt like an eternity before the ship came to a stop. There wasn’t much she could do for Alex, but she carried out the major operations required after a crash of this magnitude, like shutting down the engines, re-engaging the fusion reactor after an inspection scan, and sending a Med Bot to the bridge for the incapacitated captain.

Controlling the bot was second nature to the AI, although her multi-tasking capacity was diminished after the crash. Alex might be seriously injured, but she needed him, regardless of his state of mind. She commanded the bot to give him a shot of intravenous stimulant, to force his consciousness to the surface.

For Alex, it felt like he was swimming back up to the surface of an ocean; when he finally came to, it felt like he had the mother of all headaches. “Lucy…. the ship… I assume we made it?” The words struggled to come out for him “Yes, Alex, we made it, but you look like you’re in bad shape. Get up, and make your way to the Med Bay, I’ll provide navigation lights for you down the corridors.” With a paw applied to his face, Alex stumbled out the door, and made his way to the back of the ship; the Med Bay was dimly lit, and all but two of the eight beds were damaged. He propped himself against one of the working ones, and hauled himself onto the smooth surface. His eyes ached at a sudden light coming from the ceiling, “Steady, Alex, I’m just running a bioscan…. you have a concussion, blunt-force trauma to the head, and whiplash. Just lie back and relax, I’ll have you up and ready in no time.”

“While you’re patching me up…. can you give me the run-down of what…. you found on this planet?” Alex strained.

“It’s a curious planet, to say the least. I was only able to scan this side of it, but I found a large supercontinent, with scattered concentrations of life-signs, undoubtedly a civilization of some description. We landed near the center of this continent; there is a small hamlet, and a large city almost bordering it to the north-west of our position. The planet itself is strange, and I don’t use that term lightly. It’s got suitable mass for a stable rotation on its axis, as it orbits its star, but it’s tidally locked; one side permanently bathed in sunlight, the other in complete darkness save for starlight. It has a single satellite, and that, too, is tidally-locked, and in one location has caused a permanent solar eclipse.” Alex was only half-concentrating, as the intense pain in his temple gradually lifted, and his eyes adjusted to the light, “We’re not seeing the whole issue here, Alex. Arcane energy… targeted arcane energy, pulled us into a space-time anomaly, and we just happened to crash land on a planet with intense residual magic traces. I don’t think this is a co-incidence.”

The medical equipment retracted, and Alex swung his legs over the side of the bed. “What are you trying to say, Lucy?”

“That someone wanted us here.”