There's Ursa Minor—find the handle, travel up… there, Alpha Ursae Minoris—Polaris. The north star, shining bright in the sky, was the first thing I always looked for to orient myself when I looked up into the night. Traveling south from Polaris, my dreary eyes spotted more stars—wait, no, scratch that… sparks? Aspen, why are there sparks—

Sensation flooded through my body like lightning, and with it came pain. Suddenly, I was aware of where my right arm was supposed to be, a lump of mangled, half-pulverized flesh sitting in my shoulder socket instead.

The cloth on my deep blue naval service dress uniform had been torn off, and the thin exoskeleton that formerly ran down the upper arm had likewise been destroyed, with tiny sparks still flying from the frayed wire ends. I needed that!

It took another half-second for my struggling brain to register that I was floating, my long black hair splayed outwards, having come undone, and another half-second on top of that to recognize that that meant I was either in the ring's central docking bay, an unlikely possibility given my employment role, or that the ring had ceased to rotate, which was a terrifying thought. 

4-kilometer-wide Banks-class orbital habitats did not simply cease to rotate- once they were spun up, it required a prohibitively enormous amount of time and energy to return them to their stable deployment state, an amount of time and energy that only the largest habitat operators and navies could afford to spend in any circumstance besides critical, life-saving repairs and station deorbiting. Nansen Ring did not belong to any such megacorp or superpower.

A horrible, groaning shudder echoed through whatever room I was in, and it was at that point that I finally tried to get my bearings. With a practiced motion as effortless as moving a limb, the microthrusters on my exoskeleton's torso fired out a tiny burst of monopropellant, just enough for my magnetic boots to deliver a much-needed satisfying click as they attached to the floor… or ceiling, or walls- look, a hard surface was good enough for now.

A groan escaped my lips as my body and exoskeleton adjusted to our newfound non-floating status, having evidently been there for quite a while, while the stump that was once my right arm performed an almost mocking twitch, causing another wave of pain to travel through the body that I suspect was only being kept together by adrenaline and emergency stimulants.

In front of me sat a large transparent observation window, which offered an excellent view of Ursa Minor, and not much else—space tended to be empty like that. My fuzzy, dim peripheral vision offered similarly sparse information- an array of powered-down workstations, a few cabinets that had spilled open, a desk, and scattered floating items- a few phones, watches, and drops of blood—drops of blood?

I spun around as fast as I could in my magnetic boots, my body groaning with exertion, hoping beyond hope that it was my blood, and no-one else's. I was immediately proven wrong by a floating body—blood pooled in a bubble of microgravity liquid around her torso, her sandy-blonde hair floating outwards, the sparkle I had known in her eyes gone. Lieutenant Kinn—Amanda, my senior chief engineer, friend, and my sister-in-arms in the monstrous task of maintaining Nansen Ring at its full functionality, spun in a gentle tumble, drops of blood spinning out to splatter on the dimly lit room's crash padding. A large metallic tube, clearly a piece of electrical housing, sat impaled in where I knew her heart used to be. Her own exoskeleton's control unit had been taken out by the impaling housing, and its matte black frame sat as limp as she was.

I spent a second or two dimly observing her tumbling body before I registered that she wasn't breathing, and near-immediately vomited on what I could now tell was the ceiling—I barely noticed as the control unit on my back torso pumped me with another dose of emergency boosters in a near-futile effort to keep me operational. Not even a full-scale medical regeneration could fix that—even as my mind feverishly protested, a part of it knew with certainty that she was gone.

By the time I had managed to bring my eyes up once again, I could tell Ki—Amanda wasn't the only one. Behind her, across the vastness of one of Nansen Ring's four ringside engineering control rooms, more bodies floated lifelessly, animated only by their preserved momentum, darkened blood splattering the crash padding and workstations scattered across the room.

My exoskeleton's connection to the station network or to the wider internet was completely busted, and the life monitors on the rest of my team listed on my exoskeleton's left forearm panel all read UNKNOWN. An alarm on the far side of the room weakly stuttered out some sort of alert or warning, but I wasn't able to make it out, my ears seemingly numb from whatever had happened here. 

It was then that I looked out the far side observation window, and finally remembered what had happened as I gazed upon a million silvery flecks of dust and debris scattered out into the space surrounding the ring. Memories came crashing onto my consciousness like a wave, and my legs gave out as I remembered each and every one of them.

Lunch with Amanda and the other engineering officers at a nondescript Chinese restaurant, nonchalantly discussing a thruster burnout on ring section 8. Her smile, vigor and undeniable passion as she discussed the best way forward for the team in handling the newly ordered docking bay retrofit. Ensign Stewart nodding like an overexcited teenager trying out a VRMMO for the first time at her every word. Shamelessly staring at—what the fuck, Aspen, wrong memory! Rewind!

Lunch with Amanda and the other engineering officers at a nondescript Chinese restaurant, nonchalantly discussing a thruster burnout in ring section 8.

The news report on the television across from us reporting that fast-moving extrasolar objects having been detected early this morning by the watchtower telescopes on the far side of Luna, and that an emergency meeting of SCA—the Space Coordination Association—had been called for 3pm UTC on Lincoln Orbital.

Sub-Lieutenant Osen mocking Lincoln Orbital for its frankly gaudy interior design choices, and for unappealingly serving as the chief gladiatorial arena for stuffy SCA and UN bureaucrats after they moved out of New York City.

Amanda tearing SLT Osen a new one for disrespecting the SCA, while quietly agreeing that both organizations were much more dysfunctional than they were 30 years ago.

Taking the blissfully short rapid transit ride back to engineering control after paying our lunch bill, and idly browsing the internet for new sapphic literature I could voraciously consume in my off-time.

Ensign Stewart—Ophelia—adorably hitting her bunny-like augmented ears on the rapid transit doors as we arrived at our station, and needing to take a detour to the nearby repair bay to get them checked out for recalibration. Reassuring the girl that I would cover for her.

The news report on the television across in the control room reporting that the group of fast-moving extrasolar objects had been observed ejecting—

Watching in the viewport as distant explosions lit up the black void beyond the ring.

Frantically configuring and jury-rigging defensive weapons systems that hadn't been activated since Nansen Ring's initial deployment testing, eight years ago.

Hearing our communications links with fellow orbitals and ships die, one by one, and losing our landline to station control in the central docking bay. 

Scrambling damage control teams and whatever engineers we could scrounge up to feverishly contain fires and catastrophic loss of atmosphere on every ring segment, as shrapnel and hypervelocity impactors from a battle seemingly raging across every part of near-Earth space punched holes in the station's thin skin.

Standing uselessly in shock and awe and horror as bolts of what seemed like contained plasma lanced through debris-filled towards us, and bracing against the engineering room shock padding as weapons fire tore through our minimal armor and impact webbing, rending aluminum and steel and nanofiber and flesh—

And for far too many wasted minutes, I could do little but stare into the sea of stars beyond, blanketed with the dead, my world changed forever and everything I knew ripped away.

No. No, fuck this. My story is not going to end here. Humanity's story is not going to end with a couple of aliens blowing up all our shit out of nowhere, glassing the planet and fucking off to who knows where. Get your shit together, Aspen. As of this moment, your title is Chief Engineer Lyndal, and it is your responsibility to restore Nansen Ring to full functionality, as per your sworn duty to the New Zealand Republican Navy. You have a problem, Aspen. Solve it. Do your job.

Shaking myself out of my stupor with help from another dose of exoskeleton stimulants, I rose from my collapsed position on the ceiling and planted my magnetic boots firmly on solid ground with a click, scanning the room for the nearest emergency cabinet, always painted in bright, reflective safety orange—there, near the central display screen.

I clicked off my boots, weightless once again, and fired my exoskeleton's microthrusters to push me forward. I gently slammed into the thankfully undamaged cabinet a few moments later, my boots automatically reattaching to the wall and my exoskeleton correcting my posture to avoid any stumbling. 

My left arm complained bitterly in pain as it was forced to wrench open the cabinet doors on its own, once again reminding me that I wasn't in any condition to be performing the hard manual labor that engineering work often entailed. I didn't pay much attention to that as I quickly donned one of the cabinet's stored emergency environmental suits, the socket connection on the torso interfacing with my exoskeleton and disabling its microthrusters to avoid any accidental reflexive suit puncture. The suit's right arm hung limply at my side, but it hopefully wouldn't be a problem.

Nansen Ring was likely one of the luckier orbitals in the frankly absurd situation I found myself in—it had been recently retrofitted with a nanorobotic self-sealing and self-repair system, which could distribute nanites form storage stations on the ring and in the central docking bay to quickly seal minor hull breaches, preventing major loss of atmosphere.

As evident by the state of the station outside the viewports, that self-repair system had either been disabled or destroyed in the attack, and it would make whatever remained of engineering's job roughly 1000% easier if it could be reactivated—thankfully, for ease of access, the nanite storage stations were placed very close to each engineering control center on the ring, and I'd need to traverse just about a hundred meters to assess the state of the nearest station. 

Grasping at a seemingly somewhat functional control panel near the suit cabinet, I brought up the atmospheric controls for the engineering room, and inputted my officer credentials. After taking a cursory survey of all the bodies in the room—even someone of my limited medical training could tell they were all deceased—I flipped a switch, and the engineering room slowly vented atmosphere, which was a much more desirable outcome than if I opened the air lock to the ring landscape and was summarily ejected into space by the sudden pressure differential. 

Now without the use of my exoskeleton thrusters, I trudged over to the engineering air lock at the fastest speed my magnetic boots could manage in a horribly clunky emergency suit, and looked back at the still slowly tumbling bodies of my colleagues and friends, struggling to push the sheer despair out of my still barely functional mind.

Softly, I whispered, more to myself than to them, "I'll come back for you. All of you."

For the briefest moment, I could've sworn I saw Amanda whisper, "stay alive."

I punched the door panel with my suit's glove, opening the inner air lock door with a gentle whirr of the inbuilt motors. As I feared, the outer air lock door had been punctured by debris, with both panels bent inward at unnatural angles. Beyond the damaged outer door, I could see in all her faded glory the artificial landscape of Nansen Ring—the intricately designed artificial landscape, dotted with small lakes, islands, rivers and forests, rapidly curved away from the horizon until it looped back over itself, high in the star-studded sky.

The simulated blue sky normally provided by projectors attached to the ring's vast inside-facing windows was long gone, and in its place was an incalculably large field of debris against the black background of space, each with their own sunlit glint that made it appear as if medium Earth orbit had suddenly gained a million new stars.

Sputtering emergency lights and alarms provided the only sign that the ring still had any semblance of available power, and I could see to my left that a not insignificant chunk of ring—I vaguely remembered the inner surface layer had once been a large arboretum Ophelia had frequented—had been simply ripped away, replaced with an open view into the void and the frayed innards of the ring's outer levels. Chunks of metal, vehicles, and even lifeless bodies littered the landscape, helplessly floating and tumbling in microgravity.

I didn't have the time to spend contemplating the almost beautiful destruction inflicted upon my home by the events of the last… I didn't know how long it had been. It didn't particularly matter, now. I found the nanite storage building in my still-fuzzy peripheral vision—a squat white modernist building with little ornament other than the release ports for said nanites—and set off on the cracked pathway that snaked through the now-lifeless forest towards the building, limited by the agonizingly slow speed at which I could walk with an emergency suit and magnetic boots.

A corner of my mind still dedicated to analyzing what had just happened to me dimly registered that, visible through the cracked windows, the ring was orbiting above Europe—and no lights could be found on the entirety of the continent.

My short, stiff walk to the nanite storage building was blissfully uneventful, even if that meant I could do nothing but walk and contemplate for far too long than was optimal for my mental health… which would go down the drain anyway after my adrenaline and boosters wore off, so I didn't particularly care.

According to my limited information and sensory inputs, the entirety of interplanetary civilization had just been utterly curbstomped by some malevolent extrasolar entity, and Nansen Ring was very lucky to still be in… mostly one piece. Hell, I was lucky to still be mostly in one piece. Why the loom of fickle fate decided I wouldn't die instantly with the rest of my team, I couldn't possibly tell—I certainly wasn't the smartest cookie on the ring, nor was I particularly suited to restart human civilization, given my engineering-focused skillset and a sexual/romantic orientation that was… mostly incompatible with childbirth. Besides, the full body reconstruction I went through a few years ago made me entirely sterile, which I much preferred over having to deal with unending gender dysphoria for the rest of my life.

That train of thought was thankfully interrupted when I absentmindedly slammed into the entry door for the nanite storage building, nearly cracking my emergency suit visor, soliciting a mighty groan and a few moments of forehead rubbing. Aspen, you utter idiot, look where you're fucking going, it's not like you may or may not have the fate of the entire ring in your hands.

Recovering from my momentary dizziness, I punched my access code and ID into the sputtering door panel, praying to the hundred deities I didn't worship whatsoever that it still worked—and, luckily, it did, letting out a happy beep and glowing green as the outer air lock door opened to let me inside. 

Quickly transiting the air lock, I surveyed the small control room—floating objects were scattered every which way, tumbling and crashing into each other, while all but one workstation sparked uselessly.

My eyes naturally landed on the functional workstation, then on the figure standing there in a full combat suit, who was aiming a standard low-velocity pistol squarely between my eyes. My brain went into overdrive for a moment, before my gaze traveled to the peculiar purple-black augmented ears I'd recognize anywhere, slightly dented and mangled but still clearly alive.

"Ophelia?" I barely managed to choke out in a raspy voice, my brain quickly kicking itself for assuming everyone everywhere was gone.

A light, airy voice tainted by clear exhaustion responded from the suited figure, who quickly raised her visor, revealing a short girl in a blackened NZRN uniform, her speckled brown hair lightly dusted with soot, and her hazel eyes near tears. "Aspen?"