Edax sapiens

Dvospolan

Captain Alexis Kratzer stood on the bridge of her beloved Seawolf, The USS Connecticut. Starboard, she watched her men below in magboots as they sealed the outer hull of her ship. The damage was luckily minor–caused by a fragment of metal too small to detect and too quick to avoid once seen.

No casualties today, she thought.

Then she looked up and gazed at the less fortunate tattered mess of shrapnel suspended in space in front of her–the objective of her mission. Although obscured, Alexis could still make out the letters of the once-best ship in the entire US fleet: The USS Dvospolan. A gift from Croatia after the events of WWIII, it was a ship unique and beautiful as its country of manufacture, but now it looked as if Saturn had swallowed it, spat it back out, and sawed it in half with its rings.

"If only she stayed alive for five more years," her second-in-command, Jerry, muttered beside her. "She was due for the museum in 2106."

Alexis didn't acknowledge his remark, because it was just as much about her as it was about the mangled Dvospolan.

Jerry sighed and faced his captain properly.

"Much like you, Captain," he said, and then after a break of silence, asked, "Why the hell did you volunteer an attack vessel for a rescue mission?"

Kratzer swallowed disdainfully before responding, "Because we were close and no one else would, Lieutenant."

Dissatisfied, he pointed outside and challenged her.

"Captain, it is a minefield out there. We have over half our staff dedicated to repairs. And even more unlike you, you want to personally board that shipwreck? We don't even know what happened–"

"Lieutenant," she interrupted him sternly, "you are dismissed. Ready my suit and prepare my men. We will board within the hour."

"Aye, Captain," Jerry saluted her.

Her trusty lieutenant, although headstrong at times, followed her orders and swiftly left her presence.

Once she was sure he was gone, she pressed a button on the comms table to replay the distress signal that started all this.

He sounded just as she remembered him on the battlefield all those years ago...

Brothers-in-arms back then, she joked with herself.

"This is head-engineer Carlile Smith of The USS Dvospolan," said Carl's lively face, "and I... I have sealed myself in the containment chamber on Deck Three."

He put the camera in the air and steadied it before letting it float. In his hands was a control board he ripped from the wall and somehow manipulated to send out his distress signal.

Alexis always liked that about him. Carl was the kind of guy who was genuinely dangerous with nothing but a paperclip. A goofy grin spread across her face as she remembered all the times he sent her to fetch him scrap metal so he could repair or sabotage waterships (always under the threat of imminent death) and how miraculous it was when it all actually worked. She missed those days. Sometimes when looking out to the stars, she'd catch herself daydreaming about how space would smell like the ocean if she let some of it in.

But she knew Earth was a long way away now, both in distance and time.

Carl ran diagnostics on his makeshift panel and explained how an unidentified power surge overloaded the spacecraft's reactor, killing many, and oscillated the grav-generator between neg-five and pos-five, killing the rest. After realizing he was truly alone, Carl put his head in his hands and wept.