A needle in space

"OK, I can handle this," she thinks as she takes some readings with her armor and forces herself to take slow, deep breaths from her nose through the adapter to the oxygen filters in her armor. "Enough air for three days. Nutritional supplements to last two weeks as much as eating nothing but paste isn't appealing. Liquids might be tricky but I can filter enough for two days past dehydration. So what to do?"

Space is big and there's a lot of emptiness, finding a habitual planet is going to be tricky at best. She could Dance but to where? Any direction is as good as the other right?

"Let's save the random jumping for later."

Her armor's sensors could help but there is no way they'd have the range unless there was a ship right on top of her and she'd see it in that case. "Tachyon pulse?" she muses, catching sight of her dimensional viewer. "It could work like radar. But the signal wouldn't reach far enough, the array isn't large enough. Wait, the pulse had to have resonated with my force field! Otherwise I wouldn't have felt any feedback before."

She sets to work and within three hours she's modified the viewer to send out a tachyon pulse and to receive any signal that returns. She turns her focus to the force field she has active and alters its shape to function as a better antenna. "Here goes nothing," she thinks as she fires the first pulses and nearly giggles at the mental tickle it creates as it travels through the force field. "Now to wait."

Five minutes later she's twitching in boredom and decides to see if she can assemble a mini gravity engine with what parts she can spare from her armor and the dimensional viewer. After all she may need to maneuver around whatever the tachyon pulse finds.

It ends up taking twelve hours for the first pulse to return to her but the signal is hopeful, it bounced off of something. She reshapes the force field to create a more concentrated beam toward the direction the pulse came from and fires again. Time for some more paste.

Ten hours later and the signal returns and there is definitely something there. It is small, maybe a kilometer in length but not much else can be deduced. She sets her armor's computer to calculating the distance of the object and puts the finishing touches on the gravity engine. Then she Dances.

It's a ship of some kind. Something about it seem familiar but she can't place it. The ship's systems seem to be down and she's adrift. There are some minor power fluctuations but it's hard to pinpoint what from outside the hull. Val engages the gravity engine and does a flyby looking and hoping she'll recognize an access hatch. It's not until her third pass that she spots one and moves in. She hooks herself to the handrails with force fields to leave her hands free as she studies the door. There's some sort of writing that almost looks..."Kree? No, not quite but it's close. If that's the case this should be the manual access panel..." She tries to engage the panel but there doesn't seem to be enough power to open it. "That or I'm not reading this right."

She shakes her head slightly but not too much as she is in a zero gravity environment. "Now is not the time to start second guessing." She Checks her anchor points and then forms another field, a short spike over the knuckles of her right hand, and punches the panel. The panel cracks to reveal the mechanism to open the hatch and soon enough Val's inside the airlock and is closing the outer door. She leaves up her force field with her supply of oxygen just in case; after all who knows if the life support is active or if the people who own the ship even breath the same air as her.

"Hi honey, I'm home," she thinks as the inner airlock door opens to the gloomy interior of the ship. "I've really got to make a space suit when I get a chance."