Orbital Breakdown

It's quite a dramatic thought, imagining 1.2 million tons of plas-steel, drive packs, and anti-grav systems falling from the sky. Even more so watching the backup circuits kick in, and the behemoth come to a grinding halt. But let me tell you, it's even worse to be on that hunk of metal as it does. Damn good thing I was locked up, I suppose. I guess containment has its perks. Gyrometic implant reported going from an 88.7 m/s freefall to a dead stop. That was much less pleasant. 36.1G of deceleration, said the readout. I've been in enough crashes to handle that sort of bodily trauma, but not using these piece of shit convict augs.

Inconveniently, the hab-plate coming to a stop unfortunately put the plate lighting system onto backup power. Red emergency strips illuminated the rigi-plex box I'd forced to call home for the last 4 years. It had the barest furnishings legally required for petty criminals who had the 'privilege' of single quartering. One table, one chair (conveniently pulling double duty as a combi-lav), and a wall rack that ostensibly counted as a bed. No outside windows, not that there would be a view to look at anyways. All the contact with outside comes through a vid-feed in the bulkhead door, along with the piped in nutri-paste for meals. Good behaviour earns you the reward of flavour for your next meal. It's certainly a flavour, but I'd never been able to figure out what exactly that flavour is.

I was busy playing Auto-Chec against the 'issued' neural implant at the time the drives failed. Thanks to some legally dubious assistance I offered one of the guards, I broke the crypto on it some time ago. All I had to do was clear a transaction for some brothel on another plate. Apparently he didn't want his wife hearing about his after-work escapades. As far as she should be concerned, her husband's infidelity never happened. He was at work, according to the transaction records, bought syn-caf and donuts for the rest of the guards. Easy business, and kept me sane. Breaking the prison NeurOS is child's play with the right tools.

As for why I was stuck with prison-augs, glad you asked. The Unified Council prison system replaces any augmetics that may help you break out when they book you. That's because once you aug up, you're locked into the mech life. You can swap around, mix and match, pick and choose as much as your neural plasticity can manage. But once you've crossed the Rubicon into the augmetic side of life, you can't de-aug. Brain doesn't quite like it. I did some research about it, mostly out of curiosity. Turns out the grey thinking meat doesn't cope too well with losing the silicon crutch once its grown attached. Symptoms range from loss of senses and limb control to total irreversible coma. Some UC agreement decided that bricking aug-heads wasn't a good look for the prison system, and they mandated that the most the cops could do was downgrade your gear. As long as you behave behind bars, you'll get your stuff back on release, within reason. Apparently invasive neural surgery is still on the table, but comas are not.

To be perfectly clear, the penal-grade stuff is only good for slag. Like everything else government, it's lowest-bidder trash, and routinely breaks down. It's also all locked down to hell, and you're gonna have a damn hard time unlocking it. It's not like they leave any ports open for jacking. All that is done remote, through the penal management system. You're gonna need a hook-up if you want to mess with it. My hook-up was not exactly inclined to let me slip my chains and run, but hey, any entertainment is better than gray walls.

That being said, given the opportunity, I didn't plan on sticking around in my shoebox if I found an opening. Didn't expect the sky to fall though. Definitely changed the dynamic.

It's not common for drive-packs to fail, especially on Ergastula I. Ironic, given the hab-plate was also built with government funding. Guess they didn't want their prisoners to get the easy way out. The Gast is also not the easiest place to get to. The star in the Ergastula system isn't scoopable for ship fuel, so you need enough gas to get in and out. The system also contains only Ergastula I and its shattered ice moon, Volusii, so there's not jack and shit out here in terms of industry. The Unified Council actively states these things in their pub-casts about the corrections system, trying to discourage ne'er-do-wells from taking tourism visits to their prisons. Said tourists would probably still get ventilated if they tried, I'm certain there's guns hiding in Volusii's rubble.

So what caused the drive-pack failure? I fell for approximately ten seconds, so the backup packs kicked in as expected, but backups usually only have the juice to maintain altitude. So while we weren't going to fall to the surface immediately, we weren't going back up until the mains kicked back in.

Unless the main generators got destroyed by something.

But who would slug out a prison hab-plate? Word in the facility between the other prisoners says we're just reprocessing ice, likely for usage in other systems. There's some fab-facilities, but they're just for manufacturing replacement parts to keep the machines running. Could it be a prison break? How the hell would anybody manage that? You'd have to get enough of society's dregs to agree to work together to not only;

Break out of their cells,

Overcome the guards,

Make it to the sub-orbital docks, through more security,

Hijack a UC skiff, manage to override the control protocols,

Make it to orbit,

Hijack another UC ship, with a fold drive,

and, somehow do all this without getting ventilated.

Simple, right? This entire thing could go off without a hitch, if it was anyone else besides the worst of the worst. Most of the inmates on Ergastula I, at least the hab-plate I was on, were smugglers, thieves, biojackers, the petty criminal type. A little cunning, relatively clever, but the kind to cut and run if slugs start flying. My kind of people. So I kept playing Auto-Chec. At least once the main power came back on, the stupid emergency lighting would turn back off.

32 minutes later, the crash alarm sounded.