Microfiction: Remembrance
Datestamp: 3090911
It's been 8 years since the coordinated terror rammings out in the Eastern Sector, and I still remember the day like it was yesterday.
When the first hyperwave audio messages started to trickle in, I was still on the shuttle up to Cirda station over Boulder in the Colora system where I was working at the time.
At first everyone thought it was just some sort of accident, news of a major collision between a passenger liner and a large commercial station, something that hadn't happened in a very long time. It was supposed to be nearly impossible, given current safety systems and it had everyone living in little tin cans in orbit a bit edgy.
Clearing the docks as fast as I could, I rushed for the command center to see if they had any more information on what had happened. Live video was starting to come in of Tower station and everyone was glued to the holos. All work had stopped as everyone watched the rescue efforts. It didn't matter that the crisis was hundreds of jumps away, the video brought us right into the scene.
I had never seen pictures of a major station disaster before. Smoke, atmosphere and volatiles boiled out of a hundred rents and holes in the station and you could see glimples of 4 and 5 decks in through the primary impact point whenever it rotated into view. I could only imagine the chaos on the station, the wailing of breach claxons slowly going tinny and weak in the dropping pressure, the sudden dark as the main power goes out and emergency lights flicker on, the sudden claustraphobia as all the pressure doors drop closed.
When a station gets past a certain size, people start thinking of it just like a ground city and not like the fragile peice of engineering that they really are. Emergency drills get ignored or skipped or forgotten, and then something happens and a lot of people die who might have lived. I just read today about a man who was hated by his cohorts for his insistance on keeping up the emergency drill schedule even after the station management stopped. He saved 2700 people when Tower was hit by the simple fact that they knew exactly how to evacuate their sections and did in an organized and sane manner. He was last seen going back into the chaos to try and get more people out...
The rescue workers were starting to get organized and efforts were underway to try and control the damage when it suddenly got much much worse. On live holo, we saw the second starliner strike arm B of the station and suddenly we realized that what was though to be a chance acccident was a purposeful attack. I remember seeing peices of the liner exiting out the far side of the arm, where they had been driven all the way through from one side to the other.
The rescue efforts got more and more frantic as the sheer volume of the disaster overwhelmed the emergency crews. I couldn't look away, watching with horror as the fires spread. Normal methods for dealing with a fire weren't working, there were too many volatiles leaking into the area, mixing and reacting from the station and from the liner's engine cores.
Then the unthinkable happened, arm B lost structural integrity entirely. Maybe the liner's engine core went critical or maybe it was just the heat and chemical damage to the backbone, but it seemed to go all at once. One moment a few million tons of spinning tin can, and in just a couple seconds it all came apart at once as centrifical force threw the debris in all directions. Before the debris blocked the view entirely, I saw some of the rescure ships twisting apart and flashing as they too were crushed by peices of the station. The unthinkable had happened, and all our eyes turned to arm A.
It held a lot longer, but I maybe it was just a given that it was going to go too.
I must have been in shock, I think I was sitting in central control for half a day, watching the holos repeat the dissolution of the arms again and again, trying to make sense of what happened. I only caught breif bits on the news about the other attack on Pentos military station and the pyrric retaking of starliner 77 later on.
I remember the events of that day, though I try and forget the wars that started then and all the chaos after that is even now still effecting us. We as an empire had been asleep for a long while, and these attacks woke something terrible in us, in the fear that this could happen anywhere, to any of us.
My heart goes out to the rescue crews who were in arms A and B when they let go. They rushed into danger so that others could live, and they did their job well. The toll could have been so much worse.
This I remember, and will likely carry with me until I pass. It joins my childhood memory of the loss of the Chenger, something I was watching on live holo as it came apart, taking scattering away our hopes of transwarp flight within our generation.
I just hope that the fall of Tower station is something that we can learn from, so we don't repeat it again in the future.
It's been 8 years since the coordinated terror rammings out in the Eastern Sector, and I still remember the day like it was yesterday.
When the first hyperwave audio messages started to trickle in, I was still on the shuttle up to Cirda station over Boulder in the Colora system where I was working at the time.
At first everyone thought it was just some sort of accident, news of a major collision between a passenger liner and a large commercial station, something that hadn't happened in a very long time. It was supposed to be nearly impossible, given current safety systems and it had everyone living in little tin cans in orbit a bit edgy.
Clearing the docks as fast as I could, I rushed for the command center to see if they had any more information on what had happened. Live video was starting to come in of Tower station and everyone was glued to the holos. All work had stopped as everyone watched the rescue efforts. It didn't matter that the crisis was hundreds of jumps away, the video brought us right into the scene.
I had never seen pictures of a major station disaster before. Smoke, atmosphere and volatiles boiled out of a hundred rents and holes in the station and you could see glimples of 4 and 5 decks in through the primary impact point whenever it rotated into view. I could only imagine the chaos on the station, the wailing of breach claxons slowly going tinny and weak in the dropping pressure, the sudden dark as the main power goes out and emergency lights flicker on, the sudden claustraphobia as all the pressure doors drop closed.
When a station gets past a certain size, people start thinking of it just like a ground city and not like the fragile peice of engineering that they really are. Emergency drills get ignored or skipped or forgotten, and then something happens and a lot of people die who might have lived. I just read today about a man who was hated by his cohorts for his insistance on keeping up the emergency drill schedule even after the station management stopped. He saved 2700 people when Tower was hit by the simple fact that they knew exactly how to evacuate their sections and did in an organized and sane manner. He was last seen going back into the chaos to try and get more people out...
The rescue workers were starting to get organized and efforts were underway to try and control the damage when it suddenly got much much worse. On live holo, we saw the second starliner strike arm B of the station and suddenly we realized that what was though to be a chance acccident was a purposeful attack. I remember seeing peices of the liner exiting out the far side of the arm, where they had been driven all the way through from one side to the other.
The rescue efforts got more and more frantic as the sheer volume of the disaster overwhelmed the emergency crews. I couldn't look away, watching with horror as the fires spread. Normal methods for dealing with a fire weren't working, there were too many volatiles leaking into the area, mixing and reacting from the station and from the liner's engine cores.
Then the unthinkable happened, arm B lost structural integrity entirely. Maybe the liner's engine core went critical or maybe it was just the heat and chemical damage to the backbone, but it seemed to go all at once. One moment a few million tons of spinning tin can, and in just a couple seconds it all came apart at once as centrifical force threw the debris in all directions. Before the debris blocked the view entirely, I saw some of the rescure ships twisting apart and flashing as they too were crushed by peices of the station. The unthinkable had happened, and all our eyes turned to arm A.
It held a lot longer, but I maybe it was just a given that it was going to go too.
I must have been in shock, I think I was sitting in central control for half a day, watching the holos repeat the dissolution of the arms again and again, trying to make sense of what happened. I only caught breif bits on the news about the other attack on Pentos military station and the pyrric retaking of starliner 77 later on.
I remember the events of that day, though I try and forget the wars that started then and all the chaos after that is even now still effecting us. We as an empire had been asleep for a long while, and these attacks woke something terrible in us, in the fear that this could happen anywhere, to any of us.
My heart goes out to the rescue crews who were in arms A and B when they let go. They rushed into danger so that others could live, and they did their job well. The toll could have been so much worse.
This I remember, and will likely carry with me until I pass. It joins my childhood memory of the loss of the Chenger, something I was watching on live holo as it came apart, taking scattering away our hopes of transwarp flight within our generation.
I just hope that the fall of Tower station is something that we can learn from, so we don't repeat it again in the future.