Drifting Dark

Chapter 1: Onboard

"Where the hell is everyone?" Cassie muttered to herself as she ducked through an open doorway. Her footsteps echoed through the long passage as she stepped onto the metal grating on the floor. This section of the ship looked exactly the same as the last. She wouldn't have even known the difference if not for the regularly spaced emergency doors.

Reading the schematic was one thing. Being inside the thing was completely different. She'd never felt the scale of a ship this large before. It was making it impossible to get her bearings. The lack of any kind of signage or markers wasn't helping either.

She'd been wandering around for half an hour and all she'd discovered so far was that the ship looked as ancient on the inside as it did on the outside. Which didn't mean that she hadn't seen a lot of it so far.

Lots of wires, some completely covered in electrical tape. Lots of pipes marked up with handwritten notes in illegible script. Lots of cables. Lots of rust. Lots of dust. An apparent endless collection of bare, grey-orange corridors that looked exactly the same.

But no people.

No one to ask for directions, and she was certain that she was completely, utterly lost. Her first day was not going well so far.

The grating creaked as she took another step. She glanced into an open doorway. Another empty room. Another room without anyone inside.

She tried to tell herself that the lack of people was the only reason why the whole place felt so empty.

It was goddamn spooky.

She made a right turn, to enter another almost identically looking corridor. Without any markers, or even sounds, she had no idea if she was going in circles. She could make out the faint humming of the artificial gravity generators, the high pitched fans in the ventilation shafts and even the soft hum from some of the old fashioned warm lights, but none of that was helpful. Her exasperated sigh was soon added to the audible mix.

And the loud hiss right above her.

"Ah!" Cassie nearly jumped out of her skin, her hands shooting up to protect herself, as the blast of air brushed by her hair. The air jet died down a second later, leaving her standing there frozen, her heart pounding a million miles a minute, and completely unharmed.

"Just air. Totally normal. Nothing to be afraid of. It's just the ship," Cassie muttered to herself nervously. She squinted upwards to look at the air pressure release valve. Manual setting. Not digital. Ancient.

"This thing should be in a museum," Cassie complained aloud as she started walking again. She figured that as long as she kept walking, she'd have to make it to the front eventually. This place couldn't go on forever.

It just felt like it did.

"Hey!"

The voice echoed through the hollow corridors. Cassie would have heard it easily even if he hadn't been shouting at the top of his lungs. She stopped and turned around to see a tall man jogging towards her, hopping over the airlock frames sticking out of the floor as if he'd memorized them.

The first thing she noticed was that he wasn't wearing a standard uniform like her, not with a red shirt like that. The only colours they came in were brown-green and teal-blue, even though the grease stains made Cassie's look a little browner than usual. Her pants were bordering on a dress code violation, but his grey ones were definitely out of bounds.

Grey and black were space born colors. Green and blue were planet born. Those were the only two sides that mattered.

Only civilians didn't have a dress code. She frowned, slightly confused. This was unexpected. She hadn't known they had passengers on board.