Untitled Story part 1

WHEEP WHEEP WHEEP
What the hell is that?, Bracken wondered as she blinked to clear her vision. The mess of coloured lights were a watery blur. As she tried to get her bearings, she realised her left temple ached, and she was not entirely sure where she was or what was going on - just the sense that she did know, and that that was important, but no specifics were forthcoming.

She pawed at her face, noticing when her hand was close enough to her face to focus on with some reliance despite the incessant wheeling of her surroundings, that it was gloved.

Gloves.

She registered the pressure across her torso.

Harness.

Her gloved hand came away from her face dappled with dark spots where the fabric had absorbed beads of perspiration - and one larger red wine blotch... her temple.

Gloves., she thought again, Harness.

Flightsuit!

The logical dominoes fell, and bolstered up the disarrayed structure of her memory.

Cabin!

The WHEEP WHEEP WHEEP continued.

Master Alarm!

With enough of her wherewithal restored, she blinked again to crush out the blurriness in her vision. The control console was wheeling around her and bobbing back up repeatedly, but she could make out the flashing red text in the centre screen.
She realised that it wasn't the cabin that was spinning, but her eyes - fighting some illusory spin that was not actually ocurring... this must have been a hard knock on the head... as she concentrated to overcome it, the throbbing pain in her temple flared in objection, and she spotted globules of undulating blood floating between her and the next seat.

The figure in the next seat was not moving...

Lukazj. Flight specialist Lukazj.
She assured herself he was just unconscious, and, shaken into some state of autonomic alertness, she robotically tapped the panel in front of her to mute the Master Alarm, and call up the sitrep.

MET17d6h11m23s : MASTER ALARM triggered.  
                 CONDITION(S) VIOLATED:  
MET17d6h11m23s : 'voltage limit - NFR1 Output #3'
MET17d6h11m24s : 'cabin g-limit'  
MET17d6h11m26s : 'graviscan fix invalid'  
MET17d6h11m32s : 'EET calculation mismatch'

Eyes wide, she glanced at the Mission-Elapsed Time clock.
For reliablility, it was mechanical, setting it apart from the myriad smooth touchscreen and depth displays that surrounded the forward viewports.

MET|17d|7h|2m|15s

Below it was the Earth-Elapsed Time clock, also mechanical - but the numbers printed on its rollers were nonsensical, scuffed and smeared, as if from being scrubbed too hard or rubbed against something - and the right-most roller appeared to have been friction-welded to its faceplate, the perspex fronting showing signs of heat-degradation. There were thin wisps of smoke inside the unit, floating disorganised in the microgravity.
Bracken unbuckled her harness with only slight difficulty, confusion and alarm overcoming the pain and disorientation as her primary concerns.
Grateful for the lack of gravity - in her condition, she would surely have crumpled to the ground under any significant g-load - she gently floated over to Lukazj, and gripped his shoulders to steady herself. With relief, she noticed his eyelids undulating in REM sleep.

"Lukazj." she croaked. Her throat was bruised... when she thought about it, her everything felt bruised. Lukazj had blotches across his face, minor sub-dermal haemorrhaging.
She cleared her throat uncomfortably.
"Specialist Woiczek." she mumbled, wobbling his slack shoulders. "Wake up."
His face furrowed, and he started to groan.

She looked past him, surveying the cabin. There was a vivid, energetic spew of red painted in an arc across the rear bulkhead, and a ceiling-mounted touch panel appeared to have been shorn in two by an object embedded in one of the rear status panels - bent and fritzing from the impact.
The pain in her head and the blood on her glove accounted for the red, and the object in the rear and the sitrep's "g-limit" warning accounted for the pain in her head (and everywhere else).

She squinted to focus her still-bleary vision on the object embedded in the rear wall. She could make out the blood adorning one corner, and the text on the cover - "flight manual". What kind of g-force could plunge a navigation textbook through an inconel alloy console mount?!

The two other crew seats were empty - Salinas and Abbal would have been in the lab. Strange, how easily some thoughts came.

The blood stain put her priorities in order, and she clamped a hand against her head, looking around for the first-aid box.

Floating over to it, she caught her reflection in its cover, and lifted her soaked glove - there it was, a small, deep, triangular gouge in her left temple, visible in a collapsed shell of a bubble cragged with semi-coagulated blood, held to the wound by surface tension until her glove had crushed it, now refilling in its absence - a glowing globe of crimson, undulating with movement and her pulse. It tickled.
The hard cover of the manual must have caught her with a corner while the g's were still building. Her hair behind the wound was streaked with an arrow-straight course of browning dried blood.

Everywhere there was such evidence of absurd acceleration.

As she removed the necessary items from the box, she struggled past the fog in her mind and the ache in her skull to recall what had happened.

It was like recovering lost data from a corrupted drive - unrelated, disordered images - Alice kissing her on their fourth anniversary; tumbling out of control during basic; Garibaldi, their retreiver; The Tomatina with Marta; A dark circle rimmed by piercing blue light; Lukazj giggling like a schoolgirl at the Paris taxi-driver story during the Neptune-assist;

And there it was. She had just applied the coagulant spray to the wound when something about the pressure and the spume of misty particles through the light tripped some vaguely related strand of memory.

Kepler 438.

Not the star system, nor the mental image, nor the tantalizing spectral analysis, nor even the words - but just the concept, the goal, the crushing but exultant purpose that had hung over everything for the last 12 years of her life.

She was momentarily stunned by the vagaries of human consciousness. Its unbounding complexity, but also its comical capacity for derailment. How the hell could she lose track of 438?!

"Lydia."

Her name in Lukazj's groggy Baltic voice shook her to an embarrassing degree.

"What happened?" He was unbuckling his harness.

"I, um..." she struggled to word some response, spinning awkwardly with the inertia imparted by her involuntary jerk at hearing the voice.
Hands full, she couldn't steady herself. Head full, she didn't think to try. You're the Captain, Lydia, say something.

"Fuck, are you alright?!" he piqued, spotting the partially-patched gore as the left side of her head spun into view.

"I'm, eh..." The captain, dammit! "We need to check on the others." she stated, mustering as much dignity as she could, and every ounce of situational awareness she had, to make that command.

"First thing's first- let's get you patched up, let me help." Lukazj placed a hand on her to halt her pathetic pirrouetting, and smiled that half-smile of his.

Part II