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Die Hoffnung - Vierlande Prison station.

It was an ossuary, here. Not that there were any bones aboard. Not that every unioner knew what the word was, but they understood, nonetheless. You are in the crypt, here. They had been flushed out of the airlocks in the adjoining days; wrapped in glistening anti-flash foil and committed to the dry freeze of open space. A penumbra of blue specks shimmering above the Hannover sunrise. It had moved from a funeral to a steady, non-committal industry – shuttling out the dead and picking them clean of everything from the small curios to pressure suits, battle rifles, down to the credit chips in the pockets and the implants in their flesh.

Unity, amongst the living, conspiring with the dead to ensure that some still lived.

It had been several weeks since the slow, stunned circulation of the lost, scattered survivors of the in-space Alster Union families found themselves dredged up against the prison that they had once feared. Many refused to land; refused to see the hulk as a refuge. But hunger and fuel shortages had sapped away at old fears, and old disgust. The stomach was pragmatic.

The docking bay, a functional, slab-walled, military cylinder, had been gutted apart. Without landing codes, dirigible airlocks had been strapped to the breaks and pits within the plates where antimatter had mined the bulkheads apart, turning solid neutronic steel to ordinance within the glimmer of a wavelength. Power had been restored through a brace of cables strewn throughout the long corridors, headed from heavy radionuclide batteries hacked together from reactor products and no small amount of improvisation. Transports, shuttles and fighters, offloading human waves of the shell-shocked and the confused huddled around portable heaters and flickering emergency lights. Without the internal shields that had shut sound from structure, the prison would shudder and moan as plasma beams sintered fresh alloy over the pitted hull, bolts clanged as damaged, unrecognisable, or unusable equipment was stripped, torn apart, and cannibalised. In the labyrinth of the dark prison, clusters of Unioners from cells that would have barely shared a wrench under conventional circumstances, huddled in annexes and old guard barracks quarters around the outer edges of the hull. The prison, once permanent home of near sixty thousand of Rheinland’s most desperate and their jailors, had turned into an enclave of improvisation.


The old prison was a monument, now. Not that there was any solemnity in the empty halls. No. Even the children had retreated into a workmanlike frenzy. It was a pack-mentality coping mechanism that had saved lives before and was now being tested to the limits of endurance and sanity; when all you have has been taken away from you, you work. You perform what you know. You create, to survive.

It was the old dictator's belief that death is purifying. Perhaps that was the point.

A plasma pack, from a coalition rifle, edged with the hard Vee of the Volvograd ordinance combine, had been sliced away from its weapon. It lived a new existence providing power to an oxygen bubbler, cracking out breathing gas under high temperatures in an improvised water splitter that subbed in for the station’s creaking life support.

“That which takes life now gives life to others. March 826 Never forget. We were here. We survived.” had been scrawled into the plasteel case, etched with the Hammer and Cog of the Alster Union, the V stretched out into a hard U. The air had a strange taste to it, that old, washed out bloodstains and the cleaning aklines hadn’t been able to mask with their chemicals. A mass to them. It weighed at the lungs.

Perhaps it was the desperation. But the sounds of hammers whispering through the steel sang a different chorus. Perhaps bitter, perhaps not without naiveite; but it was what it was. Hope. There would be a future.

But for now, there was only the hammers, working at the bones.

Deep within the floating metal husk of Vierlande, is Valentina in her work outfit. A strong-sealed helmet, magnetic boots and air-sealed suit. She works on the life support systems, occasionally looking around and feeling the bullet holes that rip all over the station. Valentina sighs to herself, speaking in her thick Hamburger accent "Egh, this will take forever to fix, always something going wrong on projects such as these" she says to herself. She inserts her maintenance pad looking over what systems are broken and what others can be repaired. She goes to rub her head but remembers she is wearing her helmet "Goddamit, okey so fix this-clogged filters, corroded or severed electronics, oh this'll be more fun then Oktoberfest." she mutters to herself frustratingly. Val takes out her toolbag, getting out a welder and getting to work. She currently works alone, occasionally humming a old tune to herself.

Bingo.


Gunda Riehl had few talents in her existence, but one she could pull from the crowd and claim is that she had an ability to be first. First to discover the hull breach by blundering into the wrong compartment. First to take a bullet, first to get stuck in a jump hole phase aligned to the ass-end of the multiverse. Most people believe they are unlucky - Gunda disagreed. Gunda believed that the human machine was optimised for luck - it must be. How else could anyone live to turn old - or, at least, thirty four - without having their particles jammed into starstuff?


This wasn't one of those firsts. One of the few certainties that had remained true after the Undine had shattered into a field of steel bolides and human soup was that luck was what you made of it.

When a ship blows, most of the systems go. You don't have to hear the screaming and the terror of the people trapped in pressure pockets where the structure doesn't give out. You don't need to hear them freeze, or roast to death, scrabbling around in the dark. You don't need to see people choking on nothing, see them silent-scream, bobbing in place, wondering for a miracle with the last trickle of their electrons. See, small, tidy little coffins like fighters and shuttles have all their volatiles packed together in a cramped space with nowhere to hide. You go out fast. Battleships? They're blocks of steel and stone and circuitry, at the end of it. They're bodies where you can cut the heart out but the muscle, oh, the muscle's going to take a long, long time to rot away. And if you're trapped in that dead body, you don't know that you're part of a dead man, a dead ship, dead fate. No. That's where the desperation sets in, the belief that someone, somewhere out there, is going to risk their lives to rescue you. So you dig in, as you're roasting alive, blown wires arcing around you, dead gravity sticking you in the space between the wall and the floor, waiting for contrition. Watching the balls of oxidising reactants and creep towards you, cooking you through your protectivewear. There's a wet crunch in your body, the strange, unfamiliar break of a system you've always assumed, known, to be under warranty, failing you. Blood in your eyes, copper in your mouth - teeth, where are your teeth, where am I...?

And then the second wave of torpedoes blew their proximity fuses and saturated antimatter into the remains....


She was hyperventilating, stretched across a scalding pipe covered in cracked in insulation, her arm twitching, her leg, bent off to the side, as if trying to prove the slide rule in a puddle of her own piss.

Balls.

The terminal that had been in her arms until the blackout lay at her side. It was made of tougher stuff than she was, and refocused. Stared at the black beyond.


The window. The one, unprecedented break in the continuity of Gunda Riehl that was keeping her stitched together. It was the planetside service window; a cramped, midget of a cupola that gave just enough space for one person to sit and watch the methane creep across the Hannover side. By some divine intervention the fusilade of war had barely scarred the glass, nor had the debris, spreading their way across Hannover high orbit in a kessler event that would take a millennia to flash into nothing within the blue, nitrogen rich skies. The station's bar had larger viewports, but once all the expected alcohol-looting had ended, was as empty as as the chancellor's head; pressure was steadily dropping in the compartment from where a Hessian torpedo had lodged itself into the deck below. This was all she had. And Gunda Riehl had got to it, first.



It had become her private freak-out zone. Her seance, private to all. You, me, and the anticyclonic Ice Giant below.

Riehl shivered. A clammy, wet cold. That probably meant the dehumidifiers were broken. She tapped into the terminal a standing request order to check the atmospheric sensor lines in the outer levels. Someone would get to it. Somewhere.

Right. Work. She fixed the dim screen in the dull planet-shine before the flicking emergency lights glared her out.


Cargo containers. Forty feet Bretonian models, unmarked and unsigned by the Junkers who delivered them. They were filling the common areas. It was almost a blessing that the Alster Union had been reticent to move their people wholesale to the leaking prison given the cluster of junker supplies being ferried in with each freshly arriving transport. Gunda saw the inventory and whistled. Near forty thousand tonnes. It would all need to be installed by hand.

Makarov's Arrival

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Valentina is repairing a loose conduit when the familiar voice of Gunda comes over the radio, a voice she knows well. She goes to answer before hearing the actual message sighing to herself. She deactivates the grav-boots and climbs around the struts and systems to grab another conduit. She brings it over to the broken one, thinking to herself of the schematics of Vierlande and speaking out loud. "Okay, this is the bypass conduit that when connected should give basic life support" she mutters, she presses her communicator speaking into it "Attention, I'm about to test basic life support, please don't take off your helmets until I say so" she nods to herself that should do it.

She connects the two wires together with a click, there is a brief spark and the Life Support hums online, air being pumped around the station. Valentina does a wide grin, pulling herself over to the main console her brief happiness is gone with the reality of the situation as the console reads "NOT ENOUGH POWER" and "MULTIPLE BREACHES DETECTED, VENTING OXYGEN". Valentina hits her helmet slightly "Right right, of course" she turns off the life support finding solace that at least her hasty fix has worked. She activities her communicator speaking station-wide"Dr Depperschmidt here, hasty fix on the life support is operational but we haven't got enough power to run it, plus the multiple large and small breaches around the station mean it won't do much good either. All teams keep an eye out for broken atmo scrubbers and large-scale breaches. Small scale ones? Bolt some metal over it and seal it tight, that'll do for now. Valentina out" she sighs rubbing her helmet muttering "My hair is going to be a mess now" she smiles to herself before activating her magboots, walking heavily over to the main power core.

Valentina walks through the corridors, occasional pausing to check an open manifold she shakes her head "Should keep these closed" she picks up and the door and locks it in place. Then hears the familiar voice of her recruiter. She talks whilst walking through the corridors occasionally spraying red cracks and other structural damage "Been here since yesterday, I'm near the power core, corridor 5-Echo-Foxtrot." she replies to Riehl. She smiles a bit at the hell joke, it does now seem to be that way.

Valentina opens up the processor image, looking over them with glee as her head thinks on all the possibilities. She activities her communicator once more "They've seen better days, but I can work with them and about the pants? Check laundry for that." she replies. Valentina briefly chuckles at the thought of a pants-less Gunda shaking her head muttering "work work" to herself. She finally reaches the Power Core, opening up the door and looking in at the Fusion generators, spanning a entire room with wide-eyed amazement. She activates her radiation sensor and enters. She activates her private comms to Riehl "Gunny, meet me in the power core if you want" she says. She cracks her knuckles and connects her datapad to the main console.

Power Core

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Valentina jumps at the sudden communication, looking around from her pad and eventually up towards Makarov waving at him "Hey, how did you-eh nevermind. You know you can just jump down right, there's little gravity now" she says. Valentina goes back to her pad, checking over the extensive damage to the power core. She mutters to herself as she thinks "Okey, so magnet system is still in place, check. Vacuum Vessel has not been breached, check. First wall plating undamaged, nope." Val looks at the schematics on her pad, parts of the outer plating of the Core have been ruptured or warped she curses to herself in German.


Valentina activates her communicator making another log "Valentina here, the first-wall plating of the Fusion Core has been ruptured or warped from the battle. Immediate replacement move to top of workload else at some point it might leak out radiation. Emergency power should still work but we're not going full power until I'm sure this'll work" she states over the communicator before switching it off. She checks over her oxygen levels, about two hours left and then looks back up to Makarov "Might need your help down here"