“What the hell was that?”
Before Faith could react, Captain Lazar was on his feet and halfway across Operations, throwing orders with an assurance and ease that was unusual for him, almost second nature– like he’d been born into his rank. Ten paces away, the Admiral stood slowly, eyes studying the dead screens in the half darkness, quietly trying to assess the situation, pin down problems, formulate immediate solutions. Near the dead grey panel of the viewer, Harrison slammed a fist against the polyquid emitter surface of his dark and unresponsive console, breathed a quiet curse.
“Where are our backup systems?” Faith asked reflexively, and an instant later, as if by divine response, the overhead lights flared to blinding life, replacing the soft glow of bioluminescent strips with a painful brightness that lingered for a fraction of a second before inner limiters kicked in and dropped the lighting down to a softer level. Holographic consoles flickered to life, flashed warning signs, cautionary measures that had already been taken to preserve critical systems and ephemeral data.
Faith took a step toward her Lieutenants, eyes straying to fingers as they tried to pull explanations, reports, anything useful they could get out of the panicked banks of suddenly sluggish consoles. In the flurry, she blinked, stopped. “What’s going on? Get the viewer online.”
“Ma’am!” Someone shouted. Dead grey paneling crackled, glowed, then filled suddenly with an image of stars and cosmic dust. For a moment, Faith stared into the depthless sea of space that stretched on outside the ship, blind and uncomprehending. There was no movement, no reassuring pass of endless stars into electronic oblivion. In a way it was surreal, impossible. Just a moment before they’d been bending space at close to 400x the speed of light, but now...
Anderton threw up his hands in frustration. Lazar closed the distance between them, leaned in over the Lieutenant’s shoulder.
“We’re dead in the water.” Anderton shook his head. “Doesn’t make any sense. Engines are at nothing. Zero percent.”
“How is that possible?” Faith crossed the deck between her and Anderton, slowed as Lazar looked up and flashed her the hasty edge of a warning look that said watch it clearer than any words could have. Anderton shook his head again, threaded his fingers back into the holographic console, forehead creasing.
“No idea.” Anderton managed, distracted by his frantic search through a database of light and fact that refused to cooperate with his commands. “I can’t even access half the systems that would tell me what went wrong.” He looked up at the viewer, eyes wandering for a moment through the stars beyond. “The only thing I can say with any real certainty is that whatever happened, it knocked us back into normal space and totally killed any momentum we had in the bend.”
“Where are we?” Lazar asked suddenly.
Anderton held up his hands in resignation. “Well, if we had access to navigation and skin sensors, I’d be able to tell you, but right now I’m not getting anything from anywhere.”
“Ships like this weren’t designed for such a sudden deceleration back into flat space.” Faith put in. “There was probably a shipwide compression of matter and energy in the hull that pushed everything out of tolerances...”
“It’s more than that.” Harrison turned to face the Admiral and the Captain. “I’m getting scattered AI reports of overload-based outages all over the ship, and a total lack of data from practically everywhere else onboard.”
Faith’s eyes flicked to the communications officer. “Baker?”
“I’m not getting anything up here either, ma’am.” Her eyes retreated back to the console. “It’s... it’s like the whole ship is just... dead.” She swallowed, fingers threading through one another like nervous fish. “The whole intership network must be down.”
“What could do that kind of damage?” Faith turned back to Lazar, locked eyes with him in the pause. His response came quick, sure, free of the kind of hesitation and fear he’d shown when they’d had front row seats to the destruction of Tarsis, to the end of someone else’s world.
“It must be something we haven’t seen yet.” He turned back to Anderton’s console, eyes wandering through streams of holographically represented data and red-blinking errors. “Some new anomaly in the way the fabric of space bends through here, or...”
“Or it’s a new weapon the Coralate is fielding, and we just happened to be the guinea pigs picked for its first test run.” Faith let her eyes wander back to the viewer, to the stars, and in the silence, she breathed her own curse.
“I want those sensors online as soon as possible.” Lazar stated, touching Anderton’s shoulder with a reassuring hand. “We won’t stand a chance if the Blueskins catch us like this.”
“Sir.” Was Anderton’s only response, quiet and uncertain. Lazar looked up in the silence, his own eyes lost in the stars as he pulled in a deep breath. Faith glanced back at him, and for a moment, they locked eyes again. In the pause, Lazar spoke, and his voice was quiet, tired.
“Well Admiral, what do we do next?”
“The only thing we can do.” She reached into a panel, tossed him a sack of emergency gear and a flashlight. “Damage control. The repair crews are going to have their hands full, and we’re the only ones up here who don’t have anything better to do.”
“Right.” Came Lazar’s uneasy response. He looked across the deck at his comm officer, at Baker, and gave her a loose gesture as Faith passed off an emergency radio unit to her. “Anything happens, let us know.”
“Roger.” She nodded, tried a smile, then looked away as it faltered. “Sir.”
“Keep the ship together until we get back.” Faith shouldered a pack emblazoned with a stylized wrench on one side and a red cross on the other, then crossed the deck to Lazar. “Ready?”
“Lets get to work.” He nodded.
