Chapter Text
Gate travel is instantaneous. Adam told himself this every single time he had passed through a Drift Gate; a repetitive drone that kept him calm, kept him sane. In truth, despite being no astrophysicist, he had overseen Gate construction and repair enough times to know his little mantra was false. It was virtually instantaneous - so fast your brain can't transport signals quickly enough to recognise it - but virtually and literally were two different words.
The point being, you should never be able to tell you’ve made a gate transit, except for the suddenly different star and sunscape, and the polite beep of your console telling you that, yes, you’ve once again made it through intact. Adam had spent enough time marooned around Keeper’s Dance whilst building their return gate to know that a short, sharp beep was the kindest sound you could ever hear. “You’ve made it back, sailor,” it said.
His bridge was on fire, both virtually and literally. His console was ablaze with panicked messages, from the ship itself to others alongside her. A growl thundered throughout the hull like lightning, or the shearing tear of metal. His crew were in an equally charged state, ready to blow.
“Captain! We’ve suffered breaches along the mizzenhull!”
“What did we even hit?” Adam groaned, only with movement realising how much his neck hurt. He unbuckled his flight couch and floated over to his second officer, a well-dressed woman named Jaz. He peered over her screaming displays to no avail.
“If we hit something within the superluminal pocket we should be dead, boss!” Another voice, Levee, told him what he already knew. It was just natural to think that the current state of his bridge and his vessel was caused by a collision - anything else boded worse, in his head. “Ack, the radiators are overwhelmed! Reactor’s having a tizzy too, it's trying to scram.”
“We need to organise DC teams immediately,” he floated back to his seat, standing on its leather like a pirate pointing to the horizon in old sailing manuals. “Jaz, contact the other ships that transited before us, check if this problem is flotilla-wide.”
“Yessir!” Jaz said with her typical precision supplemented by the swiftness of terror.
“What about the scram, boss? The reactor is ignoring all my commands, it might be heading towards a blow out.”
“God above.” Meric pushed through the air to see Levee’s console directly. The heat coming out of the reactor was supposed to be massive, but without the careful dance of the radiators to balance it out, the temperature gage was climbing higher and higher with every second wasted.
“What’s overloading the reactors?”
“I- I don't know man, we might’ve dropped in too close to the host star?”
“Argh, they should've figured that out before we transited here.” Adam swatted the growing sweat beads on his forehead away. “We need to lose heat or we’ll die of heat stroke before the reactor blows. Can we eject the heatsinks?”
“Yes boss, but it’d be a temporary solution-”
“A temporary one is better than none at all. Eject the heatsinks, see if the reactor stabilises.”
“And if it doesn't, boss?”
“Are the lifeboats still intact?”
“I could reroute power to them…”
“Do it, get them spooling. Jaz?”
“I’m reaching out for signals, Captain, but it's all garbled- I think the antenna might’ve taken a hit?” She tapped away at her console, the screen turning to static at the corners. “LIDAR isn't giving me much either, it's like we’re encased in the middle of a firework.”
Adam kicked off and floated back over, doubtful they’d be going anywhere by their drives any time soon. “Do we have any external cameras still working?”
“Ahh, the ones on the mizzenhull aren't responding, sir. The entire dorsal hull, even…”
“What about the ventral ones?”
“Erm… yes, captain, I’ve found a couple.”
“Bring us about with the RCS, 180 degrees roll.”
“Yessir!” Jaz tapped in a few commands and the ship obliged, some distant gas spewing outwards as she rotated along her longest axis. The screen of the cameras was dark, then less dark, then suddenly overwhelmed with light. The feed adjusted as best as it could, filter on filter trying their best to darken the star by several magnitudes. However, as they turned, the screen became covered in dead particles, white marks across the entire lens.
The screen’s light engulfed them both as the bridge switched to emergency power. Adam had a sudden recollection all the way back from his engineering school days on nascent Axius; they talked about the first stellar exploration of a solar flare, captured opportunely by a passing merchant vessel. The captain had ordered his ship turn about and collect as much data as they could from Solaris, absorbing solar radiation like a broad, power-hungry leaf. The dead pixels, the camera struggling to adjust, the star opening up with strands like a bizarre, eldritch god, all reminded him of those forty-year old photos.
“Oh, God.”
Jaz had started gripping her seat rests, tightly and with knuckles white. “I don't think we can escape this, captain. Not without a significant orbital change.”
“Then we need to weather the storm.” He nodded. “Levee, I need you to dump the reactor’s active components.”
“A- all of it, sir?”
“Yes. We turn to emergency power on my order. Keep life support and the escape pods primed, otherwise I want all power drains switched off.”
“Even the antenna?” Jaz asked, eyes still locked on the camera screen as more and more particles died.
“Even the antenna. If any other ship is still alive out there, they’ll have half a mind to do the same. We’ll reassess our situation in…” he punched a timer into his watch. “Twenty four bells. I want all usable air cycled out of compartments we won't be using, including the engineering bays.”
“Yes, boss…” Levee began tapping away at his keyboard. “What about after-”
“We’ll hear nothing of it, Levee. We survive this, then we think of what comes next.” Adam’s lungs felt like steel. “Jaz, open the pipe?”
“Pipe is open, captain.”
Adam floated back towards his seat, reaching up for the small radio wire stowed up there, and speaking into the receiver. “All hands, this is Captain Adam Meric. The Crusoe , and quite likely the rest of the fleet, have been hit by some kind of…” he gripped the small black circle, unsure if anyone was listening, “solar phenomena. Quite possibly a high class solar flare. I need all crew and passengers to move to their quarters and bunker down as we move to emergency power; life support is being prioritised over everything else. We’ll…” he could see the glaring light, still flowing out from Jaz’s console. “Once conditions have improved we’ll think about reaching the other ships in the fleet. Until that hour, stay put, stay calm, and stay together. We will weather this storm. Meric out.”
Forty people on the Crusoe . The Gatehaulers had a population in the hundreds. The executive boats, the construction craft, the station builders, the colonisation craft… Adam hadn’t been made privy to the exact numbers, but he had to guess at least a couple thousand souls were now floating, adrift, half dead, around a star that hated them and a void that lay in wait for their passings
It’d been three days since the transit, and Adam was sick and tired of his flight seat. It beat sleeping on the floor like much of the rest of his crew around him, but there was a limit to the comfort of leather. He loved the little ship he’d been given charge of - though, little was relative, as it was one of the largest by volume in the fleet. He thought he’d never get sick of her, but the air was stale and slow moving, and the warble of the crew and the ship’s metal skin left him in pieces. He had long grown used to the faked day-night cycles of a starship, or so he had thought. That nonchalance, the participation in a performance just to keep his vitamin D up and his mind intact, was starting to take its toll. He hadn’t shaved in days.
“Ey, capitaine .” A voice came floating over, waking him up from his stupor.
“What’ve you got, Marcelo?” The swivel of his chair was almost automatic.
“Reactor’s in très bon condition, all things considered.” He smirked. How could he pull something like that off in their situation, Meric would never understand. “Levee is tightening the lugs back up as we speak. Though, we did detect more radiation than is, uh… particularly healthy while we were down there.”
Adam leant on his arm, and imagined how deep his eyes had sunken. “Just in the engine room?”
“Ah, if only it were so simple… we’re receiving a higher dosage than Centrum background average.”
“Enough to be a problem?”
“Enough to someday be a problem. At least if we all catch cancer, we might just win a huge payout from the company.”
“You’re relying a lot on that ‘if’, there.”
Marcelo kept his smirk. “Far be it from me to be the only one in the room thinking about payments, no?”
Adam sighed into his hand. “One step at a time. What’s the food situation looking like?” He asked to the room, filled with soft murmurs. “Jaz?”
His second looked up from the screen, a paper notepad floating like a cloud above her keyboard. “S-sorry captain, what did you say?”
“Food. How’re we doing?”
“Uhm…” She pushed the notepad, and several balled up discards, out of her space, and tapped away on the terminal. “We should have a couple more days worth. It was smart of you to have installed those water cyclers before we left, Captain.”
“Smart of the Keeper’s Dance Fleet Yard corporation. I don’t make those decisions.”
“Well, then,” Jaz turned back to the screen. “Water’s not gonna be an issue either way. For now. Under this current load.”
“How’d you mean, Anika?” Marcelo got to the question before Adam could.
“Well, the next step’ll be to assess our options, right? I’ve only counted what might be… five other ships through the cameras alone-”
“I told you to turn those off, Jaz. Life support only.”
She let out an eep, tapping twice and the screen turning off, as if no one had been drawn to it in the otherwise dim room. “Sorry, captain.”
“It’s fine, just… save that power. What were you saying?”
“Right, yes.” She clicked her pen in and out, before writing as she spoke. “I count five ships. There might be others that made it and are still intact - hard to say until the storm dies down. But we were one of the few ships equipped with longer term life support anyways . And nothing as complicated as the Venturer and her retinue”
Adam leant back into his seat, hand to his scratchy chin. He itched it to little satisfaction, the breath-filled humid air keeping his pores wide and sore. “And the wonders of the hub and spoke philosophy strikes again…”
“You could reasonably jury-rig a bigger filtration system like that if you had some sort of flux or substrate.” Hanging from the railings that surrounded his captain’s seat, Marcelo was already tapping away at his portable terminal.
“And where would we get that?”
“Rocks.”
“Rocks?”
“Rocks.” He smirked. “We might be able to get better data from the long range probes sent ahead of us. If… they weren’t also fried by the same solar flare that we hit.”
Adam waved him down, locked in thought. “We can’t think about prospecting right now.”
“Why not?” Marcelo fed the terminal under his arm. “Making plans, it sure beats staring at the walls all day.”
“We need to focus on immediate survival. Whether there are rocks out there that are full of ice, or Drift, or- hell, gold, I don’t particularly care. Whilst that solar storm rages, we are bunkering down.”
His two staffers glanced between each other.
"What will we do in two... three days, when the food starts running dry?"
“And, what if we run into an unpredictable problem between then and now, captain?” Jaz asked after a moment, clinging to her seat.
“Unpredictable....” Adam sighed, loudly. “This entire situation was unpredictable. By its very nature we- waltzed into this valley of death without a single idea of what awaited us. The cards we’ve been dealt by lady luck itself have brought us to the shitter, and in the shitter we will remain until we can be sure that the natural nuclear reactor in this sky isn’t trying to tear us to shreds.” He pushed himself up from his chair, speaking now to the entire rank of engineers and mechanics laying in cots or gently floating around him. “I will not risk the lives of this crew worrying about next week, next month, or next year , until we solve the problem of tomorrow first.”
“Captain…” Jaz spoke to the air slowly, still gripped onto her seat. “Are your orders just to wait and see?”
Hands wound around his head rest, Adam locked eyes with his second officer. She was an upstart, failed out of the navy, but an otherwise bright spark. Her words weren’t an act of mutiny, he could tell, but a genuine question. She didn’t trust that course, but she would stick to it for as long as it was ordered. Adam suspected most of his crew would do the same.
“No, Jaz. We’re going to make a plan of action, not towards some unknown future date. Our direction blossoms from here. What will we do first? Recontact the fleet. Then, we regroup with everyone who’s left. We count manpower, we count resources, we decide whether we are going home or staying here. but first, we need to turn our antenna back on and see if the outside is still screaming at us, hm?”
An ever so small smile broached Jaz’s face, to match with Marcelo’s ever present, ever chipper smirk. “Yes, captain!” with gusto she spun back around, tapping away at the console. A clunk and a whir, as the antenna came back to life on the limited power they were affording themself. “And… the datastream is still overwhelmed, sir. God damnit…”
Adam managed a small smile, pulling himself back into his seat. “Well. It was worth a shot. Would’ve looked cool if it’d worked” He glanced down to his own chief engineer, who simply maintained his smile. “We’ll check again tomorrow.”
“ C'est la vie .” Marcelo pushed back down to the floor, the locks on his magnetic boots re-engaging.
However, with a headphone to her ear, Jaz waved Marcelo down. “Uh, captain, belay my last.”
Adam sat up. “Go on?”
“There’s… eugh, it’s weak, but this isn’t just random noise anymore. I think it sounds like someone’s voice? It’s got that- dudun, dudun rhythm to it. Do you know what I mean?”
“Surely the comm array has a noise filter…”
“May I see, Anika?” Marcelo stepped forwards, leaning over the console like he was going to look either way. He blinked a couple of times, opened his terminal once again, and began looking at the signals there, too.
“It seems something on an ultra-high frequency channel. If I just…” He tapped a few times, and with an almost magician’s touch, the lower frequency bands were thrown away, leaving them a message that he wound down and down until it was at readable levels. “Ah, whichever clever
fou
is sending this sped the message up. It’s all here on the higher frequency bands.”
Jaz sighed. "He's right, it's as clear as day. I can't believe I missed it, honestly..."
“No point in dilly-dallying. Play it.” Adam commanded, leaning back in his seat. This was the start of the bloom. He hadn’t said it, of course, but he was in the midst of preparations. His mental checklist for survival in a hostile environment was long, but he reckoned he could cut it down to three things; food, water, air. Food, water, air. They had all three for now; surviving long term would be about finding those things. But before any of that, they had to find the others. There would be no food, no water, and no air without the community below it as foundation. Adam had learnt such a spirit from his father, a former union miner on Arasin Maxima; there was nothing without his fellows, but with them? That’s civilisation, baby.
The message began as suddenly as the silence stopped. “... the Adeline , we need urgent support from any surviving members of the fleet. Our damage control systems are floundering, we are ablaze! We might have to abandon ship. Please, if anyone can hear us! This is the Adeline …”