Untitled Story part 4

Lydia was about to issue her customary reprimand about the pressure-seal to the bridge having been left open when she remembered that she had been the last one through. Lukazj was floating along the shaft behind her, with Marta emerging through the aft hatch.

Most of the debris in the mid-ship shaft had settled, only the few larger chunks retaining any kinetic energy in the face of the air-resistance, so as the crew sailed through, they were uncaringly pinging little flecks of spaceship out of their path.

Marta had avoided looking at the red-smeared lab door as she passed it. She awkwardly pawed the wall for stability as she pulled on a distressed grey and blue NASA t-shirt and tied the drawstrings on her hastily-donned blue sweatpants. She looked like a college student taking a lazy day - her hair an unkempt afro, her low-effort attire already-worn, stained, and poked by the absence of her usual sports bra. Bracken wasn't a stickler for professionalism at all times - you couldn't be, on a voyage like this, but Marta was perhaps the most fastidious crewmember when it came to her appearance... I guess these are unprofessional times. Lukazj was the best-presented of them. He looks like his official portrait Lydia thought, considering her own disshevelled, bloodied, and patched appearance as they took their stations and strapped into the g-seats.

"Marta, I want you to run over the system logs for the Q-ring and fusion reactor 1." Marta, in the port-facing crew seat, started rattling away on the keyboard by way of acknowledgement.
"Lukazj, see if you can get navigation to make sense, and bring the cold-gas thrusters online, just in case this has something to do with the EM-RCS." as she spoke, she kept her focus on her controls, running her fingers over the panel in front of her, everything much more familiar now.

"I'll open the blue-shade."
The sequence was already in motion, and with that statement, she hit return.

There was a clank, a judder, and an electronic squawk as a red-rimmed error message flashed up on her screen. The motors had all drawn too much voltage.

The Blue-shade petals were designed to protect the cabin occupants from the intense broad-spectrum radiation that the forward lobe of the warp bubble blue-shifted up from the cosmic microwave background radiation. All forward-facing surfaces of the ship were armored against it, and the blue-shade was a series of hinged flaps of composite materials that closed over the windows.

The others looked up expectantly at the noise.

Lydia glanced at the friction-welded Earth-Elapsed Time rollers - still not ready to work that into her thinking... except...
"Lukazj, what do the radiation-shield temperature sensors say?"

He tapped his touch panel a few times.
"Huh! We've been out of warp for over an hour, but it's still hot enough to sear a steak on! This should have dissipated ages ago!"

"Check the log." she continued steadily.

He was already bringing it up. He sagged.
"...Of course - I should really have expected this. The temperatures are off the scale until about 40 minutes ago. The motors are either over-resistant, or the petals are physically welded shut."

Lydia unbuckled and floated over starboard to the Abbal's un-occupied station. She reached up above the console, pulled a panel cover off and cranked the handle inside until the petal outside creaked and shucked unsteadily open.

The others stopped what they were doing, unbuckled, and floated over to peer out.

A haze of tumbling, ashy grit was clearing, reflecting the cabin lights pouring out through the window. It was hard to see beyond it.

"Marta, kill the lights, please." asked Lydia, seeing that Marta was closest to that side of Malik's panel.

The cabin went dark, lit only by the red glow on Bracken's console, and the dull grey of the endless computer logs sprawled out on the others. Outside, the particles of grit lost their definition, and the crew waited for their eyes to adjust and see the stars...

...and they waited.

"We're not in intergalactic space, are we?!" Marta finally asked, incredulously.
Lukazj cleared his throat "No. What little sense I can make of the graviscan indicates that there are gravity-wells in the vicinity. We're in cluster of low-mass stars, I'd say - but the output is totally unreliable."

"What the fuck? ...You two, get back on the logs. I'll open the rest of these petals." Lydia commanded after another interminable silence.

Untitled Story part 3

The hum of the shower unit filled the living quarters. It's not like they were bothered by drinking one another's recycled, distilled bodily fluids anymore - they were all astronauts, it came with the territory... but something about Marta being in there, water spewing over her and powerful vaccuums sucking it out again, filling the distillation tanks with Malik's viscera, exceeded that tolerance.

The silence needed to be filled - and besides that, there were more pressing matters, cold as it was to think it, than the gruesome death of their Science lead. Their friend.

"Sitrep." She said steadily.

Lukazj pulled a tablet with a depth display off a velcro strip beside his cubby, and started tapping away.

"Well", he started, arching his eyebrows, "like you said, Navigation doesn't know where we are, there was a power surge from Fusion Reactor 1 - that's what blew that capacitor in the hallway, and the gravity lock went completely screwy when we had that acceleration anomaly."

She furrowed her brow. "The acceleration anomaly - what the hell happened there!? The Alcubierre drive shouldn't incur acceleration - we're supposed to be in our own little bubble of flat space-time - the G-Seats were a formality!"

"Well, Marta would be better able to speculate on this - she's the Warp theorist - I just point the ship where we want to go..." He was venturing something upbeat, some false modesty, but even before he'd finished, he had sagged under the non-literal gravity of the situation. The hum from the shower ceased, and the hiss of the fans took over. He continued.
"I figure the power surge from the reactor caused an uncontrolled assymetrical increase in warp field strength, which - sort of - tilted-" he inclined his tablet to illustrate "- the spacetime we occupy when the ship is in transit."

The fans shut off, and the shower door opened. Marta floated out of the cubicle mindlessly, completely nude.

Some part of Lydia felt a swell of pride that not a single lecherous thought had yet crossed her mind, because she does have *incredible - NO, dammit. NOT THE TIME. ^{I mean shiiit, that wax-work skin - NO! You're a fucking professional, and a married fucking woman!} while she mentally stamped on that thought, she caught a split second look on Lukazj's face that hinted at a similar process occuring in his own mind.

Seeing such wildly innapropriate thoughts mirrored in her second-in-command reassured her that it was just a stress reaction... Anything to not have to deal with the here and now, I guess...

Lukazj resumed - "That manifested as a g-force in the cabin of upwards of 15 or 16 G's. It's a miracle that any of us survived... halleluja G-seats, eh?"

Lydia looked to Marta, now gently rotating in a feotal position in the middle of the room, her head submerged in an undulating blossom of frizzy black hair. "Salinas, you agree with that assessment?"

The reply was slow to come - her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, not locking to the surroundings as she rolled. Bracken was about to ask again when she said simply said "Basically."

Lukazj reached into Marta's cubby and pulled out a blanket, floating over and wrapping her loosely in it.
"So then the capacitor blew... then what happened?"

Another pause, but she blinked and made eye contact with him.
"The surge accelerated us, and then the field went asymmetric - the computer would try to initiate a field collapse and drop us out of warp, but with the generator still surging, it couldn't do that - it dumped as much of the extra power as it could into the the capacitor and the batteries - but the batteries can't accept that much energy that quickly, so the charging relays are probably burned out, too."

"Fucking hell." Lydia cursed.

Marta was coming out of her shock to some extent - or at least, switching gears into shop-talk. Now she was looking at Lydia.
"Don't curse the damage - if the computer hadn't distributed the power away from that segment of the Q-ring, the spacetime torsion would have spaghettified us."

Lydia blanched at that. "So, if I'm reading you right - we must have jumped to a much higher warp factor than we wanted to be at? So we've probably over-shot our destination?"

"The surge must have subsided, and the computer was able to shut down NFR-1, and collapse the field, I guess. We could be somewhere between Earth and 438, or somewhere way beyond... if Navigation can't get a fix, then..." Marta looked down at her knees, suffused in the blanket.

Lukazj's brow had been crumpling gradually as the explanation went on. "I wonder why the reactor surged? None of the test ships - none of our supply drop ships, nothing powered by one of these units has ever had that occur..."

Marta's face became distant... "Not my field. They're Abbal's babies..." she doubled over again.

Lydia straightened "We need to find out where we are. Let's go open the blue-shade."

Part IV