Day 2: 5049 Nano total: 116,173

Two days of headaches have slowed me up a bit, and I have some other work that must be handled tonight. But I think I have my story moving along the right path.

Here's a short snippet for today:

The door started to open, stuck. Annoyed, De caught the edge and shoved it farther. The work set him perspiring like he'd run a marathon, and he stumbled into the room.

The lights came up. The last time he had been here, he had delivered a report to Admiral Ward, who had smiled and thanked him.

Sitting in that chair.

The room looked remarkably intact. There had never been much here by way of personal mementoes. He wondered if Admiral Ward had relatives.

And it hit him again, that feeling of utter desolation at knowing none of them had family back home. None of them had a home. Just the hundred or so of them, out here in this fragile shell, lost and powerless. The last of the humans.

He sat down in the chair, mostly out of need to get off his feet. The computer clicked on, the screen flashing for the key. He leaned forward and laid the key against the screen, watching it scan in. And then ask for the code.

He did not, of course, have the Admiral's code. He entered his own. Then hit the affirmative when the computer asked if he had assumed command.

The computer would begin now to try and reach the previous commander. Failing that in thirty minutes, the command computer would switch to his control. They liked to try and keep mutiny and espionage from happening, but the people back at HQ new that things happened, that sometimes a catastrophe could take out --

All dead. Even there.

He had kept busy until now, forcing other work in to fill the moments when his mind wanted to wander to faces lost --

His young wife, waiting for him to come home. Seeing her wave him away at the docks by the shuttle, dressed like a little China Doll, drawing looks of surprise from all the tip dressed women in their plastic clothes --

Oh God, Oh God. He needed something to do. He couldn't stop and think about her, about his family, about friends. He needed to work, he needed something --

But he had to wait for the computer to confirm he had command, for whatever damned good that did any of them. Command of a death ship, lost forever here on the edge of a system he couldn't even name and with no where to go.

Rule the world by letting it take its course

Do not interfere

He laid his head back on the chair, taking deeper breathes. It was not the lack air in the room or the corridor that made him breathless. He had lived on the edge of disaster too long, and now found it impossible to step back from the abyss. It surrounded them, more certain than the walls of this room.