Situation Normal All F***ed Up. (A Battletech SI)

[MarkWarrior]

Situation Normal, All F***ed Up. (A BT Si)

Introduction

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was that it was cold. The second thing I noticed was that I was stuck. As in, instead of the nice, warm bed I usually slept in, with the blanket and my wife next to me, I was trapped in some sort of box that had iced-over glass for the door. The third thing I noticed. I was naked as the day I was born. Which explained part of why I was so cold.

Had someone tried to kill me? I tried to scream for help, but instead, what felt like mucus began to crawl up my throat, forcing me to cough viciously and hard, spitting out a sickly yellow-green substance that tasted acidic on the way up.

Leaning forward and resting my head against the cool, comforting glass as I coughed up what must have been half of my stomach and lung capacity in this gross and awful-tasting crud, I noticed that the 'door' or whatever the glass was, had begun to slide open.

What started as a slow creak open pushed all the way up as whatever leftover battery or hydraulics kicked in and spilled me out onto the floor.

"Ow," I groaned into the hard concrete. I had tried to catch myself, but my arms didn't seem to be working; everything felt weak. Like I'd spent a few weeks in bed being sick. My bones ached, and my throat was scratched and raw from the vomit.

"Can anyone help?" I rasped, my voice sounding like I'd chain-smoked a carton of cigarettes. But no one responded. The only sounds I could hear were what I thought was the wind beating on the outside of whatever building I was in.

I lay there trying to force my muscles into obedience for what felt like an eternity. The time crawled by while the wind continued its song. My only measure of time was the sound of my heartbeat.

Finally, though, my arms began to respond. Pushing them underneath me, I tried to do a push-up and get back onto my feet the same way I'd been doing since high school, only for the now weak and noodly arms to fail me. Muscles that had atrophied collapsed and left me on my knees.

But I could finally see, and craning my head around, I observed my surroundings.

Behind me, where I'd first fallen, was what looked like a bunch of knock-off cryo tubes from Halo, only square. All of them, except for the one I'd just fallen out of, were cracked, opened, or damaged in some way.

The concrete room around me was covered in debris, skeletons, and destruction. There were scorch marks on the walls, old, spent shell casings on the floor, and burnt-out equipment everywhere.

I had no idea how I'd even gotten here. The last thing I remembered was working on a chapter for one of my Battletech fics while my wife and I watched a show in the background. Eventually, she'd rolled over and gone to sleep while I'd stayed up another few minutes to work on something. Then I'd set my head on the pillow and been out like a light.

Shaking my head slowly, I ripped myself out of what had happened yesterday. Looking down, I noticed that my hands and arms looked small and frail compared to what they'd been the night before. Not as if I'd gotten older or younger, but as if I'd been a coma patient for a long time.

Still, even if my muscles were weak, I couldn't just sit around here on my knees. I needed to do something. First, I needed to be able to move, to take stock, and see what I was missing because of the rubble I couldn't see over.

Spotting the leg of a metal table nearby, I slowly crawled on my hands and knees over to it. One edge was jagged and rough, but the other was perfectly fine. So, I put the jagged end against the floor and tried to push up.

"MMM, fuck," I grunted as a jolt of pain from little-used muscles shot through my arms and legs. But I was standing, and even if it hurt, being able to stand was movement in the right direction.

Now leaning on my makeshift cane, I carefully moved through debris on the floor. Now that I was standing, I remembered I wasn't wearing any clothes, and that included shoes. Maybe there were some clothes next to the icebox. Now that I was paying attention, it did look like there were some shelves or lockers beside the rows of the dead and damned.

Hobbling to the locker, I looked at the one beside the box I'd crawled out of and noted that it did indeed have my name on it. "H. Mark A." Was set into a nameplate, and it looked like there weren't any locks on it. So, I grabbed the handle and twisted, smiling as it began to open. Then the red emergency lights turned off, leaving me in the dark.

My heart jumped; a part of me wanted to hide because of whatever might be coming after me in the darkness. The other part of me was telling me that I was still naked, and that If I was going to die, I might as well do it warm and without being shriveled up.

So, I reached into the now-open locker and felt a burst of happiness and satisfaction at what felt like clothes.

Pulling each item out, I began to slowly identify what they were in the pitch-black. That was a shirt; this one was a pair of shorts. Finally, I found what felt like a pair of boxers, and leaning against the still-cold icebox, I began to pull them on.

Backwards, I put them on backwards. That was uncomfortable, so I quickly stripped them back off before pulling them on the right way. Certain important parts of me at least somewhat protected, I gradually found items and got myself dressed. Pants, shirt, a pair of shorts, and what felt like slippers.

The clothes were all baggy on my now-frail and skinny frame barring the elastic of the underwear. But they were still clothes. Still, there might be other things in the locker, so I began combing through it in the dark. There were a few items that I couldn't identify, but there was one that felt intimately familiar.

Grabbing onto the pistol, I slowly pulled it out and began running my fingers over it. It didn't feel like any of the models I was familiar with. The grip was textured in an odd way, but it was comfortable in the hands, and it was something.

Hopefully, whoever had used this locker set up their handgun the same way I liked to. Pushing the lever on the device under the barrel of the sidearm, I blinked and covered my eyes as a flashlight burned my retinas even though it was facing away from me.

Leaving it on and blinking spots away out of my eyes, I waited until my vision wasn't impaired to begin inspecting the rest of the locker bearing my name. There was a carbine of some description sitting beside a pair of socks and boots. I wasn't going to be able to hold the other weapon with the state I was in. So, I set the handgun and flashlight combo down in a place where it illuminated around me, pulled the socks and loose boots onto my feet, and used my table leg to stand up.

"Three minutes without oxygen, three days without water, three weeks without food," I reminded myself. I had air, I had shelter. What I needed was water and food…

---

The room I'd woken up in was the deepest part of wherever this was, and however damaged the room I'd started out in, the rest of the facility was worse.

Exiting out of the crumpled metal door, I noted that the rooms were marked above the doorways. The room I'd just left had a bright yellow "Cryo" painted above it.

In the hallway, illuminated by the light on the end of my pistol, were two rooms. Each of them had the room name written out above them. One read Storage, the other Generator.

Thankfully, the doors seemed to be able to be manually turned and opened with the same sort of seals you'd normally see on a Navy ship. Even if I was a bit concerned with my ability to open those kinds of doors at the moment, I needed to get inside the generator room to see if I could get the lights back on. Then I could check storage for water and food.

But first, I needed to catch my breath. Maybe I'd been in that icebox for so long that I'd gotten weak, but I didn't know why my heart and lungs were causing so many issues.

I collapsed against the wall next to the generator room and just breathed for a moment. Why had I ended up here? How had I ended up here? What was the reason for all of this?

They were questions that needed answers. Answers that would have to wait until I'd gotten the survival priorities fixed.

"Maybe I was living in the Matrix," I muttered, standing up and leaning against the door before grabbing the wheel and putting all my weight into spinning it open.

To my surprise, it spun easily, or easily compared to what I'd expected and after a few seconds, I had access to the generator room.

The generator room had lights. Or at least some form of them. They were red, and they didn't glow like the ones that had been in the cryo room. No, they kinda looked like glow sticks at a second glance.

"We're not here to marvel at glow sticks, Mark," I said out loud, taking control of my scattered brain and looking around the room.

It was in better shape than the cryo room. No rubble or anything, just dust and lack of maintenance, and the generator wasn't anything I was familiar with.

Still, I needed to try something, and there was a small panel on the generator with an analog dial on it. Moving closer, I could make out that whatever this thing used for fuel, it'd finally run out of whatever was in the tank.

The problem was that I didn't see anything that would be used to power a generator. All of the shelves around me were filled with full water jugs. There were no fuel cans, no propane tanks, nothing that made sense.

"Maybe there's something in the storage room," I sighed, resting my head against the dusty generator for a second before groaning and easing myself off of the machinery.

Wait, I closed my eyes and opened them again, now realizing that there were some labeling instructions on the screwcap for the generator's fuel tank.

It was in small font, but with the help of my pistol light, I made out some instructions.

"Primary source, distilled water. Use other sources only in the event of an emergency."

"Huh," I guess someone had found a way to get the water engine working, after all. And, I was surrounded by water jugs.

Resting on my cane, I flowy made my way over to one of the jugs that was only partially filled and tried to lift it, only for me to drop it onto the floor where it then rolled back towards the generator.

"Well, that worked," I laughed, turning around and heading back over. It took a bunch of breaks and tries, but I eventually managed to empty it out into the fuel tank. It didn't move the needle a lot, if at all. But it did do it a small bit, and the instructions on reactivating the generator were spelled out and idiot proof. I guessed I'd ended up in a military installation of some kind.

Grabbing onto the handle of something that looked like it'd come out of the Metro series, I turned it and flipped a switch. One second, passed, then a second as I counted to ten before releasing both and smiling.

There was a gentle whirring sound that filled the air as the generator started back up. The red lights remained, but now clear white ones began to come on where they weren't broken or dead.

"Well shit," I swore and sat down as I looked at something I recognized was painted on the wall. A blue shark on a red rectangle… I just hoped I wasn't on Von Strang's world…

 

[MarkWarrior]

Chapter 1

Date: Unknown
Location: Unknown

I didn't know how long I sat there, staring at the mural, insignia, claim? Hell, I didn't know what to call it! But eventually, my hunger and exhaustion got the better of me. I had been asleep in that pod for what was probably a long time, and now I wanted to eat a meal and go back to sleep.

I wouldn't be going to sleep. Not when I didn't know anything about my surroundings. I didn't even know how or why the generator had started back up without needing some sort of battery or external power source to kickstart the fusion process. I certainly wasn't going to ask those sorts of questions when it had worked, and I hadn't died in the process.

That said, I did think there was probably food in the storage closets. Even decades or centuries-old MREs would be better than starving to death. Who knows, maybe they even managed to fix the constipation problem over the last few centuries?

Groaning, I stood back up and turned my back on the generator and the Rim Worlds Republic sigil. Then I slowly limped back through the corridors and stopped in front of the first of two storage rooms.

Now that the lights were on, I could see that it wasn't the dull gray concrete that I'd thought it was. For all that the Rim Worlds Republican Army and Amaris had been monsters, they clearly had a sense of style. Roman Arches and painted walls made the place feel less dead, even though it was made from some sort of extremely durable concrete, and the lights were a comforting yellow instead of the harsh, white that was usually used in facilities.

Finally, reaching it, I leaned against the wall to the storage room. It had the same sort of door that the generator room had, and with a heavy grunt and a twist, I unsealed it and pushed the door open. The interior of this storage room had fared infinitely better than that of the cryo bay. Maybe it was because there wasn't a firefight in here, or maybe it'd just missed the bombardment, but the room went back for what felt like four or five hundred feet. It could have been less than that, might have been more. But it was hard to tell when I was distracted by the massive shelves that went from the floor to the ceiling of the room.

It wasn't a short room, either. It must have been at least fifty feet tall, and supported by pillars of what was probably a high-strength alloy and reinforced Star League era Concrete. They were decorated similarly to the hallway, with vague Roman Republic markings.

Unfortunately, for all that, it was really cool to see all of this. This was most certainly not the room that held the food. Or at least didn't have the food within easy reach. Yes, I was forklift certified, but I didn't even know where to start in this room. So, I turned around and limped across the hallway to an identical door. This time it was on the same side of the corridor as the generator room. So, I was hoping they'd have kept things a bit more normal-sized.

Pausing to catch my breath. Man, I was really out of shape after having been on ice for so long. I just looked around me for a minute or two. Really taking in the atmosphere. I didn't know what had possessed the Amaris family to do it this way, but it really was a nice facility. Better than most of the office jobs I'd had.

Still, I was hungry, and regaining muscle mass and filling my stomach were both a part of the same goal right now. I wouldn't be able to get more energy without it. So, I spun the wheel on this door and pushed it open, too.

"Thank God," I exhaled as I saw what looked like a normal-sized storage room, filled with pallets of MREs, small arms, and other assorted items that you might find in a military bunker that was intended to remain hidden for a long time.

Staggering over to the closest pallet of said MREs, I was glad to see the flavors and the names were written on the side of the boxes. I didn't know how many each box held, but given the amount of pallets, I was probably going to be fine on food for a while. I was just hoping they actually provided the laxative gum so that things didn't get too clogged up.

I knew that I'd probably regret it later, but I went for the one that I saw and recognized first. The Jalepeno Pepper Jack Beef Patty. Sure, it'd always been one of the most hated MREs back home. That didn't mean that I wouldn't enjoy eating anything right about now.

Grabbing one of the boxes off the pallet, I ripped it open and pulled out two of the packages. Opening them, I pulled the contents out and sorted them together before starting the heating process. I could probably eat them cold, but that was the last thing I wanted to do after having been frozen for so long.

While the MREs were heating, I hobbled over to another pallet and removed a water bottle from one package that contained hundreds of thousands of them, then I mixed in the little powdered juice mix from the MRE and sucked it down. I hadn't realized just how thirsty I was until liquid finally touched my tongue.

Now it was time to eat. After that, I could figure everything else out.

–
–

Blinking, I woke up with a short gasp for air, jolting upright and reaching for the handgun I'd put back into the holster at my thigh. It drew smoothly, and I held it in shaking hands as I scanned the room.

I hadn't tried to fall asleep. I'd just finished eating and then woken up. The remnants of the two MREs were still where I'd left them, the two chocolate chip cookies waiting for later along with the second packet of juice mix.

It took a few seconds for me to calm my racing heart and to allow myself to slide the sidearm back into the holster. Once I had, I took one last deep breath and used my makeshift cane to stand up.

Hobbling over to the pallet of waters, I poured the powdered electrolyte 'juice' mix in, shook it, and took a sip. Then I tucked the bottle and the cookies into one of my pockets, along with the two packets of instant coffee.

I might need those to stay awake later if I were so weak that I fell asleep right after eating. Now, I had food, I had water, and I could inventory both storage rooms later. Right now, I needed to figure out where I was, how deep underground I might be, etc.

The corridor with the generator and both storage rooms was a dead end, there wasn't an exit that way. Which meant I was going to have to go through the cryo-storage room. I swallowed, hesitating for a second. There was something eerie about the cryo-room.

Maybe it was the amount of people that had never woken up in there, maybe it was the lingering souls of those who had been trapped here and unable to escape whatever firefight happened. Whatever it was, I didn't like it.

But it was my only way out, so I steeled my will and stepped out into the brightly lit corridor. Slowly meandering over to and through the door that led to the room in which I'd awoken.

Now that the room had more than emergency lights, I could see that almost all of the other cryotubes were empty. The few that were still closed had red indicator lights that indicated they were dead.

It was probably sheer chance that had led to my cryo tube opening when it had. After all, if I had lost this much muscle mass, I was probably close to dying in one of those tubes myself. Admittedly, it was a peaceful way to go. Never waking up from an icy slumber. But that wasn't how I wanted to go out. Shaking my head, I turned away from the cryotubes and looked around the rest of the room.

The exit across from me was covered in rubble, and I wasn't sure if I was strong enough right now to shift any of it. Then I saw the intact computer consoles and shrugged to myself. There might be plans for the facility in the databanks.

Limping over, I found a lone intact chair and barely managed to shift it upright. The wheels on it were noisy and nearly seized from a long time of sitting idle with no maintenance, but it did work. Sliding over and wincing at the sound of the wheels squealing in protest, I looked at the keyboard in front of me.

Leaning forward, I blew the dust off the machinery and hit the enter key, hoping that it would do something; and do something it did. A lone screen with a crack across it lit up, prompting me to provide authentication to access the computer systems.

I sighed, I didn't have anything to authenticate, and knowing Battletech, especially the tech from the Rim Worlds Republic and Terran Hegemony, it'd have some sort of biometric scanner that ID'd me from DNA or something similar.

Then I remembered the locker having had my name on it and I frowned. There might be a solution there, but it only raised more questiosn.

Why was my name on a locker next to the cryo-tube? How did I get there? And more importantly. Why and when did I start working for the Rim Worlds Republic. Why couldn't I remember anything if I did?

Taking a moment to appreciate the old chair, I closed my eyes for a second before groaning and rising to my feet once again. I knew I'd left the rifle in the locker. Was there something else i had missed?

I made my way over and paused at the sight of the now defrosted Cryotube. I could see my reflection in the glass. I looked gaunt. As if everything that wasn't skin and bone had melted off of me while I was out. It was a miracle I could move at all. Much less that I was able to function.

My hair was long and was now curling down around my shoulders, and my beard was down to my mid chest. I looked like an old British sailor who had been marooned on an island for many years.

Shaking my head at the stranger, I looked away towards the still-open locker. My name still on the front of it. "H, Mark A." There were spare magazines for the rifle in the locker and the handgun at my side. There was also a strange-looking set of dog tags. It kinda reminded me of a USB thumb drive, only it had an odd crystalline structure to it. My name was also printed on said dog tags. With an ID number that said IDN: MAJ 0607-2740-98586

I had no clue what the letters and numbers meant, but I assumed IDN stood for Identification Number, and with the dogtag chit in hand, I headed back to the console.

Looking around, I finally found the place to insert the chit, and when I did, a small panel slid out of the console. A tiny needle embedded for me to prick my thumb with was waiting for me.

"I hate these," I grunted, and placed my thumb down for a brief second of pain before the panel withdrew.

"Welcome, Major Hull," the screen lit up with what was definitely my face. "Time since last login, two hundred and seventy-seven years, four months, and three days…"

"What did I do?"

The question rang in the empty facility, echoing back to me even as I stared at my own face in a Rim Worlds Republic uniform…