by M. D. Cooper
WHERE ARE WE?
STELLAR DATE: 10.03.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: ISS Lantzer
REGION: Unknown
Jessica lay prone on the deck for what felt like an eternity, trying to make sense of why everything hurt so much, while wondering why the emergency lighting hadn’t yet come on.
The she remembered that she didn’t need lighting, both because she had excellent night vision, and because her skin could glow.
Which it already was.
OK…brain seems to be finally working again, she thought with a rueful laugh as she examined the deck around her, noting that she was half-propped up against the bridge’s forward bulkhead.
“Trevor?” she asked, casting about for her husband while deploying a nanocloud to begin scouring the bridge.
“Here…”
The word was followed by a long groan to Jessica’s left, and she held up a hand, increasing the glow coming from her palm.
Trevor lay on his side, a tail of blood coming from his mouth as he worked his jaw slowly.
“Is it bad?” she asked.
“No, just bit my tongue. And I might have broken a finger…or two.”
“Karma? Lucida? Sound off,” Jessica called out as she rose on shaky legs and walked to Trevor’s side. “So you’re saying you’ll live?” she asked him.
He grunted and pushed himself upright as Lucida spoke up.
“I think I will too…though I feel like I could also be dead.”
“Here too. Though I smashed my console,” Karma added.
“Gil?”
Jessica didn’t expect the AI to respond. If the bridge systems were completely offline, the AI wouldn’t have any way to hear or respond to them, which seemed to be the case.
“What happened?” Karma asked, the sound of a harness unbuckling coming from his direction.
Lucida coughed out a rueful laugh. “Aren’t you supposed to know? You’re on Scan.”
“No scan on a jump,” he retorted. “Though I did catch sight of weird colors on the forward display. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Me either,” Jessica replied. “Stars…there’s no active EM anywhere, other than the a-grav decking and, my skin. Why aren’t emergency systems coming back online?”
“Probably the same reason half my mods aren’t responding,” Trevor said. “That was one hell of an EM spike that hit us when we…stopped? Is that what we did?”
Jessica checked her internal logs and saw that her mods had registered an EM spike, but the energy surge hadn’t done any significant damage to her. “OK, that was a big burst. I seem to be alright, though. Benefit of being…well…me, I guess.”
“You just love energy,” Trevor said as he carefully straightened a finger. “Uh…I was going to follow that with something clever, but I’ve got nothing.”
“Shit—uh, sir,” Karma said as he watched Trevor move onto his second broken finger. “That’s just nasty.”
“Then don’t look.”
“OK,” Jessica turned to look over the two ensigns, who were both in better shape, thanks to having been strapped in. “We need to get core systems back online, which means accessing the hardened node two decks down and running a re-init. We also need to check on Gil and the rest of the crew.”
“I’ve got the core,” Trevor said. “Sabrina had a scaled-down version of this backup model.”
“I’ll get to Gil,” Karma said. “He and I go way back.”
“Should I search out everyone else?” Lucida asked, looking worried and a little scared. “What do you think did this, anyway?”
“ ‘This’ as in knocked us out of the jump, or fried the ship?” Trevor asked with a guttural laugh. “Sorry…nervous energy.”
“Well, both, I guess,” Lucida replied, her own warbling laugh following her words.
“There’s a lot of power involved in a jump,” Jessica said. “Gates aren’t powered by piddly stuff like fusion generators. Could be that we had a mirror failure, and some of that energy passed directly into the ship—or it could have been something else entirely.”
Karma pressed a hand to his temple and groaned. “Whatever it was, I’m starting to feel like it all grounded out in my head.”
“You’ll survive,” Trevor grunted.
Jessica chuckled softly while walking across the bridge to the emergency locker. She opened it to reveal a dozen EV suits and pulse pistols.
“Suit up, kids, we could have breaches,” she instructed while pulling out a suit for herself. Her skin made it so that vacuum wasn’t a concern, and she could rebreathe the same air for several minutes, but she wasn’t going to risk her life unnecessarily.
Trevor and the ensigns grabbed suits, and as they geared up, Jessica passed out additional directives.
“Lucida, you head down the starboard concourse. That’ll get you to engineering faster. I’ll take the port side. Drop comm buoys and stay in touch. Anyone gets a chance to look out an inspection port, do it. I want to know if anything is out there…and where we are.”
The ensigns gave affirmative responses and left the bridge ahead of Trevor, who stopped to give Jessica a quick embrace.
“You be careful, glow girl.”
“I will, you just get that hardened node online and initialize repair systems.”
“Easy,” Trevor replied, his tone calm and soothing. “We’ll have the ship rolling…well…soonish.”
Jessica realized that she must have been speaking with more intensity than she meant to and ducked her head in a quick nod. “Of course we will. Then we’ll figure out where the heck we are.”
“Maybe we’ll look outside and see Star City looming nearby,” he replied.
“Core, that would be fantastic.”
They walked together down the passageway that led from the bridge, Jessica’s lavender glow lighting the way, until they came to a ladder shaft, where they were to go their separate ways. Trevor gave her a brief embrace before stepping into the shaft and dropping down to his destination deck.
Well…after I go look outside. I’m starting to feel like that’s a priority.
Following her gut, Jessica worked her way up the tech decks to the ship’s dorsal arch. The a-grav decking was offline closer to the hull, and she was able to pick up speed, pulling herself along handholds until she finally reached the airlock that led to the observation dome.
Though she’d passed through a few sections of the ship where emergency power was active—which had been a relief—such was not the case with the airlock. She debated using the manual system or attempting to power it herself.
No…you might need your juice later, she decided.
Instead, she pulled open the panel and attached the door-jack’s handle, pumping it several times to pressurize the emergency hydraulics. The interior of the airlock still registered as containing atmosphere, so once the system was primed, she pulled open the door and stepped inside. Readings showed that the observation dome on the far side was also pressurized, so she quickly repeated the process on the exterior door.
When she pushed the outer door open, she was met by the brilliant glow of space. After moving through the inky black ship, the light of the cosmos was a welcome sight. She pushed herself up to the top of the observation dome and grabbed a handhold. Muting her glow as much as possible, she peered out and tried to get her bearings.
“OK…” she murmured while slowly spinning around. “There’s the galactic disk…and that’s the core and the Aquilla Rift. There’s the Orion Nebula…”
Jessica continued to turn until she saw another nebula, a wall of dust and gas that stretched on for hundreds of light years in either direction. She knew it by sight, having had it dominate her travels for many years.
“And there’s Stillwater. Fan-fucki
ng-tastic.” She took a breath and then tapped into one of the comm buoys.
Trevor was silent for a moment, and then said,
The implications of his statement were not lost on Jessica, but even so, she doubted that was the case. Space was just too big to effectively block jump gate travel on a multitude of vectors. She only knew of three systems that had interdictors blocking such travel, and they all did it right at the heliopause.
As Jessica spoke, a glimmer of light caught her attention, and she turned. She peered at the twinkling light for a moment before it flared into star-like brilliance.
Shit…not a star. That’s a ship, decelerating on approach.
Karma spoke up a second later.
The AI sent a feeling laden with disbelief.
She gave the approaching ship a final look, gauging its rate of deceleration. A quick estimate put its time of arrival to be a little less than three hours.
We came out practically on top of it. No way that’s coincidence.
Jessica sent an affirmative response, and tuned out the conversation that Trevor, Gil, and Karma began to have regarding reinitializing the reactor. She closed the outer airlock door behind herself, then, despite a temptation to hurry, followed suit with the inner door.
No point in rushing, and killing us later from decompression.
Five minutes after exiting the observation dome, she reached Bay 2-19A and was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was a-grav working, but the bay’s door was powered up. However, when it opened, smoke poured out into the passageway, and she saw heat signatures on the IR band.
Jessica sent a quick thanks and dashed down the hall to the closet, where she found a pair of foam guns and a pulse suppressor. She grabbed all three and ran back to the bay’s door, cursing herself for not having closed it and inadvertently feeding the fire fresh oxygen.
Stepping inside, Jessica closed the door behind herself and looked over the shapes of the SC batts, looking for the largest blaze. A second later, she spotted flames dancing through the acrid smoke, and moved forward, firing the suppressor’s pulses to clear the smoke.
Jessica didn’t reply, instead spraying foam over the power junction, dousing the fire before looking around for any smaller blazes.
Jessica angled to her right, weaving amongst the waist-high cylinders until she spotted two larger shapes through the haze.
Jessica fired the suppressor’s pulses to clear more of the smoke away as she searched for the cabinet. When she found it, the doors were twisted from the heat. A few tugs and they came open to reveal two empty hooks.
Jessica knew of a few places where there should be more cabling, but none were close, and there were no guarantees that they’d be properly stocked, either.
Moving to the left-most SC batt, Jessica crouched next to it and found the release tool slotted into the base of the battery’s case.
At least you’re where you’re supposed to be.
A minute later, she had the battery’s mounts free. She turned to give the room another review, now that the smoke had cleared. Two of the other SC batteries were still online, their ‘active’ lights glowing green, holodisplays showing a trickle of discharge, which meant they were still connected to something. She moved closer and saw that they were both connected to a separate junction than the one that had been on fire.
<
No? Damn. Must have blown another junction toward the bow as well. If that’s the case, you’re going to have to take that batt right up to the scan node and power the sensor array from there.>
A few seconds later, Jessica felt the pull of gravity fade away and bring about a natural inclination to hunker down and stay near the deck. Of course it always had the opposite reaction, and she lifted off a few centimeters.
Pay attention to what you’re doing, woman.
Quickly reorienting her senses to a world of unimpeded reaction, Jessica grabbed the battery case’s handles and pulled. Her feet hit the deck again, and the battery slowly lifted into the air. Once it had risen a meter, she got behind it and pushed.
Getting the battery into the passageway took a few seconds, and then the following ten minutes were spent maneuvering it down corridors and up a maintenance tube to the first deck.
The literal ton of superconductor battery was cumbersome and unwieldy, and Jessica hated every minute spent getting it to the sensor node, worrying about the approaching ship and how they knew nothing about it. She opened the door, fearing smoke and fire once more, but found the chamber dark, and the air clear.
Thank stars.
She muscled the battery inside and then quickly latched it to the deck next to the room’s primary power interchange. Luck was finally on her side, and she found an auxiliary power cable where it was supposed to be, and quickly connected the battery to it.
The batt’s activity light came on, casting a green hue around the room.
Gil said.
