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