Work Text:
Sojourn Six
Chapter One:
Growing up, Rhee never would have thought she’d find herself here, standing on the bridge of a space exploration ship streaking through the cosmos. Oh, how she’d dreamed and dreamed of it, but those were never believed to ever come true. Yet here she stood firmly planted dead center in the middle of the small space.
She never thought she would – or any of them could, really – have the chance to grow up, the world being what it was when they were kids.
As desperate humanity was today, it had been worse, so, so much worse, back then. It had been hard being a child wont to experience life as a child, not clawing and fighting her way through miserable squalor. Young as she was, they all were, she’d known the Redhats were pure evil; the worst of the worst that society had borne, and they were bent upon destruction of anything that didn’t mould to their warped views on perfection. The adolescent Rhee had been cheered alongside the remaining members of the Resistance as the last of the deplorables had been locked away.
It was then that she’d dared to dream that maybe, just maybe, one of her fantasies would have the possibility of coming true.
Society had been righting itself – the technological advancements, investments in the sciences and arts and everything that enriched the world in wonderous ways – when it had all gone to shit again overnight.
Never had Rhee believed any of the old stories told of how her homeland had once been the ecological farce of what had once been called the Rust Belt; of the russet-colored sludge-water of the river and the stench of decaying fish carcasses, of the fires upon the water itself. Her fondest memories were that of running through the lush, verdant nature reserves weaving in and about the otherwise sprawling metropolis. That was, until the cataclysmic explosion of the super-volcano in Yellow Stone. Those that had been scoffing and mocking the city of her birth then fled to the coasts of Northeastern Ohio, the uplands there having been just out of reach of the resultant earthquakes. Those parklands she’d explored as alien worlds of her own imagination’s creations transformed into cramped tent cities, with crushed grasses and mud-slicked trails between the rows of flapping mylar and wind-fluttered lacey thongs. The annual deer culling had, at least, served a purpose then. The grocers had only been able to keep fresh meat on the shelves for so long.
Rhee had been one of the fortunate ones, at least at first, she’d had a solid roof over her head, a routine of educational pursuits, a fairly privileged existence by comparison. That was until the riots had started.
Over a simple thing, really.
An empty roll of toilet paper and a refusal to share a square from the next stall had literally started the second Civil War. The Resistance had been fighting with the Redhats for decades to prevent bloodshed; they’d been thorough in their destruction of the basic public necessities, all to prevent those except for the most alabaster pasty-white melinated from benefitting from modern-day conveniences and ultimately failed. Never had it occurred to anyone that the ill-timed consummation of a Nachos BellGrande would have been the spark to light the conflict’s fire.
She’d always wondered, thereafter, just how historians would recount those six embarrassing years. Lump them in with the previous decades under the Redhats, she’d supposed. They had discouraged critical thinking.
Rhee’s comfortable, cushy adolescence crumbled away into scrapping with her once-friends – she’d never once considered herself a fighter, but her self-described East German shot putter build had served her well in the scrabbles – for food and other resources. She’d stubbornly stayed behind when her family had fled with the rest of the Redhat sympathizers, she’d been relieved that those battles were at least no longer fought. For a time, she’d lived alone in the sprawling mansion on the lake side of the pocked-up road, but there’d been so many more of the others in much greater need and she’d surrendered the property over to the relief efforts.
She’d fought with her father viciously over the family’s tendency to hoard the essentials, she hardly wanted to come across as a hypocrite.
That had been over thirty years ago now. Rhee no longer struggled with her survival. The Resistance had taken root, rebuilt society again after the ash and dust finally cleared from the skies enough for agriculture to sustain the population. Progress had advanced far more rapidly than anyone had anticipated.
And with that, came a whole new set of problems.
Too many survivors. Not enough yielded resources.
Though she’d daydreamed and pretended to be an intergalactic explorer in her youth, Rhee’s equilibrium revolted at the ideas whenever she’d ever set foot on anything other than solid ground, those aspirations had quickly vanished to the bottom of Lake Erie with her internal organs after ferrying even from one side of the harbor to the other. Nevermore had she wished for the ability to squeeze a neck pinch like the one she’d seen performed countless times on the web-tube to the fuckers clutching their bellies in laughter. Even more so had she desired for the play-acted death grip also been a real technique when the holo-pics of her hurling over the side of said ferry had surfaced across the interfaces.
Rhee twitched the corner of her mouth into the ghost of a grin. Thirty-odd years was a long time ago now, and those morons were still mesmerized by the jumping fountains on the downtown square. Okay, those are pretty cool, she did think to herself – she would never let her scoffing betray her own fascination with the soothing rhythmic dancing of the water jets, however.
The access to education was not a factor of her resilience against melting away into the dregs of so many others, not one she took for granted, at any rate. She thought she’d used the knowledge she’d learned quite well.
Rhee was standing here on the bridge of her very own space vessel, after all, the envy of the greased-up, cranked-out tweakers bitching about the days of before, but not doing a damn thing about moving into the stable housing of the old, converted skyscrapers. The Resistance had raised enough funding for the projects to be free for use to anyone in need, and for the ever-loving life of her, Rhee could not understand how anyone hadn’t utilized the opportunity.
She sometimes pictured her Redhat father and brother sitting in front of the web-tube in one of the units, her mother clacking away with beaded-chained crucifix for her daughter to come back to the family, all completely oblivious that they slept in dry beds because of the progress they’d tried to prevent. Even more, she thought about the looks on their faces when, in four years, her face would be shown across every web-tube channel when she’d returned in her spaceship from its inaugural voyage.
The crawl at the bottom of the screen would read:
Capt Rhee Levis, commander of first successful exploratory mission for Earth alternative.
Rhee had never cared for public speaking, however. Always in the back of her mind for the next four years would be the creeping dread that she was going to make a complete tongue-tied ass of herself on global broadcast. She gave a preemptive thanks to whatever deity she didn’t believe in that the walls of the cabins were soundproofed, and her crew wouldn’t hear the stammering mess of bumbled words being recited over and over and over.
Poor Rigel wouldn’t be so lucky.
As with everything that had come in her life since childhood, she’d had to fight to get him clearance to come aboard. Rhee wasn’t above dropping the name of a powerful contact and ally to her superiors, nor was she too proud that she’d resorted to the tactic during a mission briefing. Wherever Rhee went, Rigel went.
A dog was a girl’s best friend, after all.
The dopey thing had captured her heart when he’d tumbled out of a transport five years ago, all ears, knobby knees and cankles. Knowing in four years her first command would be sailing the stars on its maiden voyage, Rhee wasn’t exactly sure taking the beast home was the wisest venture, but the little shit had figured out within five minutes how to bore his ice-blue eyes into the soul she swore she didn’t have. Days after officially adopting the young, juvenile dog, she was convinced that Darwin had skipped over this particular specimen. Albino Dobermans were equally as intelligent as the other color varieties.
Rigel – Rhee had named him after one of the brightest stars in the once-again-clear-night skies – was the dimmest damn dog she’d ever had in her life.
He’d taken to his conditioning well though. And the ship was spacious enough for him to exercise his long, spindly legs. The crew’s insistence that the beast accompany them on their journey had helped secure him a berth as well. Not only was Rhee thankful that her moody sense of balance was finally cooperating, but also that the ship’s gyroscopic stabilizers would always keep the vessel level during hyper-light jumps; she sometimes wondered if the single ganglia in Rigel’s possession had sufficient juice to power his autonomic nervous system.
Rhee reached down to rest her hand on top of her best companion’s smooth-furred white head. “Tican,” she commanded with more certainty than she felt. “Take us out.”
Chapter Two:
Tican McCreary met Rhee waiting in line at one of the recreation centers that was reopened for after school activities in the city. Too many troubled and at-risk kids like him had been creating too much havoc with the little to no supervision they were getting from whatever parents they had at home.
In his case, he was the parent. His younger siblings, Sh’Nay and Neville, counted on him to provide for their continued survival.
Like Rhee, Tican had been forced to grow up too fast; his stepmother and father having both been arrested by the Redhats’ gestapo goon squad for daring to possess the legal limit of the medicinal marijuana Neville needed for his adolescent-onset of MS. They’d just picked the prescription up from the dispensary on their way home from work that evening, a burnt-out headlight had sent the McCreary heads-of-household to prison under some bullshit sentencing for a law that was made up in the courtroom.
Tican was too young at the time to even consider fighting back. He’d been old enough, however, to take on the responsibilities of caring for his younger sister and brother.
He’d managed enough school credits to be able to finish out his education in a work-study program, learning electrical engineering and aeronautical mechanics. The space program had been restarted – the real space program, not the vigilante space-commandos fleet the Redhat’s demagogue had started – and Tican had always dreamed of flying through the cosmos since he’d been little.
Tican could never have been accused of being an introvert, he’d inherited his biological mother’s bubbly, boisterous personality. Or so he’d been told, she’d passed shortly before his fifth birthday, his memories of her were scattered and incomplete. He was known around his ‘hood for being friendly and helpful to anyone that needed assistance, so it came as no surprise to him that he’d been able to make a crack in the RBF of the intense-looking white girl in front of him in line.
Rhee, as it turned out her name to be, was visiting the rec center for somewhat the same reason as he, the weekly free spaghetti dinner. She lived in a studio around the corner and took advantage of the program to stretch her wages to their maximum limit. The rec center wasn’t near Tican and his sibling’s neighborhood but was close to Sh’Nay and Neville’s school. Sh’Nay took art classes and Neville aquatic physical therapy, the pasta and meatballs were the one dinner a week that the trio knew for certain they could count on. Rhee’d helped him carry the trays of food back to his family’s table, graciously accepted their offer to join them for the meal.
From that day forward, Tican and Rhee had been inseparable whenever circumstances allowed for it.
More than once, they’d been mistaken as a romantic couple, even by Sh’Nay; Neville was still on the too young side to understand the societal expectations that girls and boys weren’t supposed to be just friends, he accepted their friendship for the platonic relationship that it was. Entertaining it had been at first, annoying after a while, then downright infuriating when the same people kept insisting that they were too close to be only best friends.
So what if Tican knew Rhee preferred her gatchees to be the black boy-shorts cut from the Alejandro Cevilla collection – the cotton blend, the silk was too chafing? She’d introduced him to the wonders of the collection’s Pretti Boi line of boxer-briefs. The way his junk looked in the skivvies would have eased his father’s worry that Tican was “underdeveloped” for a man in the McCreary lineage.
As metro as his father had been, with his mani/pedi-ed nails and perfect cuticles, he’d still been rather obsessed with his sons looking masculine.
So what if, after Sh’Nay graduated, got her own apartment and took Neville with her, that Tican and Rhee had stayed up late every weekend? Lounging around in nothing but those undergarments, gorging on too much booze and ice cream, and binging any sci-fi media they could find in the web-tubes archives?
So what that if they vehemently denied any physicality to their friendship to the administrators that believed they’d been cheating during the fleet academy’s curriculum? Fucking each other didn’t cause them to finish first and second in their class, he first due to his overwhelming prowess in the mathematics, Rhee kicked his ass in the physical sciences; they’d achieved that due to the presence of more than a couple brain cells rubbing together.
Finally, the rumors were dispelled when Rhee’s quick wit helped her rise in the ranks of the fleet quicker than anyone in the previous four classes and she’d been promoted to Captain. Her snark and sarcasm led many to shirk away from prying much into her private affairs and she’d stated in no uncertain terms that Tican McCreary was a childhood friend whose relationship with her went beyond the bond of friendship or family.
Anyone that knew Rhee well enough knew that the only man in her life was that Dober-dipshit, Rigel.
Tican would be remiss if he denied an appreciation for the big, dumb dog. He’d never seen Rhee as content as the day he’d let himself into her post housing and found the snoozing duo spooning on the couch.
Captain Rhee Levis, the no-nonsense hardass of the One Earth Space Exploration Agency, reduced to smiling goo in the presence of a puppy.
The only other time in recent memory that Tican could recall Rhee looking so happy was the day she’d relayed to him that she’d pulled rank and got him assigned as her XO/lead helmsman on the expeditionary vessel she would be commanding.
Sure, he’d been ordered to report to another with the singular role of Executive Officer, but that captain was a twat-waffle-cunt-cake as Rhee had so eloquently put it, and he was more than elated to take on the additional duties if it meant serving with his best friend. Tican was the final member of the Sojourn’s six-man crew to be secured in place.
Girlfren’ saved the best for last, he told himself.
There was no doubt in Tican’s mind that they’d be successful in their mission; if not Rhee’s crew, someone’s crew. The fleet had no choice other than to find a suitable alternative planet, the resources on Earth Prime, as it was coming to be called by the Agency’s brass, were trending downward toward scarcity. They weren’t quite there – yet – but if an analogous celestial body couldn’t be located within the next twenty years, the old world-style wars over commodities and famines would ensue.
Mars and the moon had been ruled out as colonizable early on due to their lack of appropriate atmospheres. Technology had progressed at such a rapid rate under the leadership of the holistically minded Resistance, but the means to manufacture such large artificial environments hadn’t moved much beyond the theoretical stage.
Humans were already adept at exploiting biomes for fit of their needs, why spend excess thought into converting the wide-open expanses of the barely habitable into the cozy livable when probes had already remotely discovered similar potential candidates decades ago?
But that was one of those debates Tican and Rhee had had those nights they’d been sitting around in their underwear drunk and sugar-rushed on ice cream.
Humanity as a whole had proven itself to be irresponsible, parasitic almost in the way it treated the world around it. And it had only gotten worse under the rule of the Redhats. As much as it had tried correcting the problems, the Resistance had realized it had inherited a broken planet. Plans for reestablishing space programs sought out those individuals like he and Rhee to lead the survey missions.
So, when Rhee – Captain Levis he would now have to start calling her, Capn L would be an acceptable less formal honorific – gave him the order to pilot the ship away from its orbital moorings, it took every ounce of Commander Tican McCreary’s reserve not to punch every button like they often would in the animatronic toys section of the retail shops.
Chapter Three:
It was beautiful, more beautiful than she ever imagined.
And Rhee Levis imagined a lot.
Most of the time she hadn’t been busy surviving, she’d spent it with her head lost in the way up beyond the clouds. Racing away in star-bound craft whatever design her overactive imagination could design.
She’d never been one of those that believed in the exclusivity of existence of Homo sapiens in the all of the universe. It was too vast, too unknown to harbor sentient life on only one measly planet on a far-flung arm on the outskirts of the Milky Way.
She and Tican – and occasionally Sh’Nay and Nevi – would lay on piles of blankets during the summer months in the Dark Sky park an hour outside the city. Once open for public use whenever the skies cooperated in cloudlessness, the park had suffered under the cuts to scientific funding under the rule of the Redhats and had fallen into some state of neglect. The observatory was still functional and accessible to all, but the trails and outdoor viewing areas had succumbed to overgrowth and disrepair. Cadets, such as Rhee and Tican, in the newly formed One Earth Space Exploration Agency’s academy program, were granted unfettered access to anywhere in the park they could navigate as an adjunct to their studies.
The stories they’d tell each other were limited only by the tree line cutting into their field of view.
Once of age, Sh’Nay would follow in her newly acquired beater of a Corolla and she and Neville would drive back home whence they grew bored of staring up in the heavens. Rhee and Tican would still be splayed out on the dewy quilts in the morning.
Rhee never believed she would actually see one of her childhood fantasies be so close to coming true.
Whooshing through the cosmos, exploring the frontier furthest from anything anyone had ever been known before, being the first to step foot on alien worlds.
‘Twas bittersweet for her that her dream had necessity for fruition rather than for expansion of thought and knowledge. It saddened her that the habits of humans weren’t so far removed in their evolution as to not fall into the tradition of exploitation of whatever resources she and her crew would discover.
Rhee had very little doubt that it would be her and her crew to be the ones to make first contact on a new planet. If nothing else, Rhee considered herself to be of the stubborn fucker variety, and she was hellbent on making good on the promise she’d yelled at her family during one of their innumerable arguments. Scientific endeavors would be the path to her success in life, not the acquiescence into the archaic, dogmatic, Atwood-ian roles society had adopted under that heinous regime.
She stopped in her pacing of the bridge to turn her attention to the large viewscreen at the bow end of her vessel’s angular design. It wasn’t until the academy that she’d discovered a natural talent for architecture, she’d always had an artistic eye, but drafting blueprints for space-bound aircraft had never been a consideration in her head. She’d taken inspiration from all those old sci-fi movies she’d watched with Tican; her dream of commanding a vessel that looked like that of the one on her most beloved web-tube reruns was too far-fetched for current technology.
Hyper-light distorted the starfield too much, they were little more than luminated streaks slicing past the viewer. The folding of the physical space happened too far forward to be visible to human eyes but was the basic component for the theory behind the faster-than-light travel. It still would take over a week to traverse the vast distance to the sector of their destination, and it was conjectured that possibly as long as another to find a suitable planet for exploration.
Each of the six starships had set out in a different direction, Rhee and her crew dispatched to the furthest of them – it was a joke amongst them that it was meant to keep the entirety of the smart-assy crew out of the brass’ brainwaves for the next coming years – and they welcomed the challenge of trekking out beyond where most terrestrial-bound minds could conceptualize.
That was why, Rhee had explained, that she’d named the vessel Sojourn. Tradition was never a thing that Rhee held steadfast to – lest the craft would have been named after some previous explorer; not that she minded that, it just wasn’t her style – otherwise she’d still be some poor sap thinking their ship would come in through hard work and devotion to some made-up sky daddy. She, as they all did, all six of them, took immense humor in the reality that their ship had, indeed, come in, and they were chasing after their wildest dreams.
Rhee stopped her pacing in front of her chair, she doubted she’d ever actually sit in the thing; Rigel was currently curled up into the tightest of white Dober-balls on the uncomfortable-looking cushion. If he wanted to commandeer it for himself, he was free to do so, Rhee was more at ease stalking her way around the compartment.
It was her command style.
It’d proven disconcerting for most other cadets she’d been in the simulators with, the instructors had even discouraged the behavior. But, as with every aspect of her life, Rhee did things her way and reveled in her efficacy at excelling over the critics.
Never one to be still for long, movement helped her think, kept her body at-pace with the constant thoughts and ideas swirling in her brain.
“Q,” she asked of the black-haired woman seated at the console next to Tican. “ETA for the Alpha Erimani system?”
Q, no one – not even she – knew her name to be anything other than that singular letter. Q had been abandoned outside a hospital during the war. She was of the same age group as Rhee and Tican, but she’d been found to have a traumatic brain injury caused by what was presumably a concussive explosion and she had no memory of who she was or where she’d come from. She’d had all the male – and a fair number of the female and alternative-gendered – cadets fawning over her on campus.
Rhee had no interest in the carnality of need of the human body, but even she had to admit that the woman was gorgeous.
Q lived in the room two doors down from Rhee in the dorms, had a similar schedule and an affinity for the weight room. She’d become fast friends with Tican too, Rhee never denied the observation that there probably wasn’t a human alive that wouldn’t get along with her best friend.
Q was obviously of Asian descent but spoke with a thick Minnesotan accent that Rhee couldn’t help jovially teasing her about.
Not that Rhee’s Ohio one was any better, she knew she let the dreaded ‘ope’ slip out with embarrassing frequency. And the nasally ‘aa’s and slightly elongated ‘oh’s were something even she could hear herself saying. The obnoxious ‘ope’, thankfully, was something that had disappeared from her and Tican’s vocabularies the longer they were removed from their hometown. Q, as well; she’d grown up with the nonsensical exclamation for everything as regular vernacular.
The woman’s aptitude for navigation and eidetic memory for star charts had made her the most sought-after copilots upon graduation. Rhee could still feel the daggers being plunged into her back when Q’d been assigned to her command.
Rank had its privileges, and Rhee was not above utilizing them to her every advantage.
Long, delicate fingers that belied a swift sureness across anything electrical danced across the control panel. “Eight days, twelve hours and fifty-two minutes, Captain Levis,” Q replied.
“Nuh-uh. None of that. Rhee gon’ be jus’ fine.”
Rank had its privileges.
Chapter Four:
It was expected for a crew of six, and one dog, to grow bored enroute during the week and a day long duration it took to hyper-light through the cosmos to a far-flung, remote sector of the galaxy. The crew of the Sojourn, however, had lived up to the reputations for being obnoxious shits too smart for their own good by getting creative in their recreations.
Rhee was lax in her adherence to rules and regulations. She allowed for the boarding and use of illicit substances only when a crewman had time enough to recover from the effects before reporting back to duty. By necessity, they ran twelves as shifts, which proved to be of sufficient detox time for the consumption of gummies and shrooms. Rhee didn’t partake – she never had had an interest – she wasn’t opposed to the practice, if it allowed her crew to relax without getting in the way of their duties, then she wouldn’t be a prude.
She enjoyed the giggles that she heard coming from the open rec room door too much, although she’d never admit that.
She, herself, would play tag with Rigel throughout the craft’s corridors. It was an unspoken rule that nothing would be said about the footage recorded by the internal sensor lenses in affixed in the ceiling plates. She had an image to uphold to the admiralty and finding her tearing through the ship to smack her dog on his skinny butt and he goose her in the ass with his pink, porcine-looking nose per the rules of their game was hardly the methodology by which to do so.
One evening Tican and Q had gotten so fooschnoockered that they’d thought it fun to join in. Rhee couldn’t remember the next morning who’d she’d cackled at harder, her officers as they’d wobbled down the hall, or her dog as he’d attempted to divide himself thrice in order to chase after each simultaneously.
If nothing else, Rhee desired to be the type of commander that her fellow explorers wanted to serve with. A captaincy wasn’t anything she’d ever thought she’d achieve, so she promised herself to let loose from the intensity she often held unto herself and have fun with the position.
She had little doubt that once the Sojourn’s external sensors detected the star alignments of Alpha Emirani that they’d all snap back into the professionalism that had made them all amongst the tops in their class.
Maintaining on-course with the autopilot engaged and no one on the bridge wasn’t against regulations, per se, but it was, however, rather frowned upon by the agency. The crew of the Sojourn swore that their little secret would never get revealed.
As the gravimetric forces shifted to those signaling the approaching of planetary bodies, Rhee and her friends gathered in the mess for a celebratory toast. She didn’t know how Kryo had managed to smuggle sixteen cases of champagne aboard, or when, the ship had been under heavy guard until liftoff.
Given Kryo’s childhood growing up on the streets of Mexico City, she doubted she really wanted to know just how much of an expert in illegal activities her science specialist was. She had damn good suspicion by which means he’d become an expert in chemistry.
Not that it mattered to her one ounce.
They had all signed up to enroll in the academy for a new start, the promise of new worlds to be the first to walk upon, the first to enable the rebuilding of their crumbling society by the bittersweet ways and means of the inherent destruction of that other world.
Tican had mentioned one night in her cabin as they’d finished watching another of their crappy old sci-fi flicks on the web-tube archive that he hoped humanity would have its shit together by the time they got back to Earth.
Rhee’d simply replied with the quirk upward of an eyebrow that was quite possibly her signature non-verbal gesture of sass.
Never was that shared thought mentioned in their toast in the mess, they knew what the inevitable outcome would be. The Resistance was doing all it could to reeducate, reprioritize the civilized masses. Chaos and selfishness had run too pervasive for too long and it was taking more time than their planet had left to rejuvenate.
“To Captain Rhee Levis!” Dee cheered. The ship’s medic raised her champagne flute high in the air, away from Rigel’s roaming snout. The amazon of a woman grinned as she tweaked that fuzzy, white proboscis between her fingers.
“To Cap-hicc-n Rhee!” Cort slurred in agreement.
Dee and Cort had been on Rhee’s short list of crewmen requests after Q. She’d known Tican was slated for assignment on another vessel, initially she hadn’t even thought about poaching him.
For a total of zero-point-two-six seconds.
She’d argued that very few other available pilots would be able to handle her unorthodox commanding style.
Despite their rowdy tendencies – and the fact that they were a hot-n-heavy couple – Dee and Cort scored in the upper one percent of their class alongside Rhee, Tican and Q. They partied hard, worked hard, and thought even harder.
Kryo was no slouch either, Rhee knew. He’d simply been enrolled in the science track and could probably out-math even Tican.
“Guys…Ri-Ri, get over here, you don’t drink booze, you dummy,” Rhee called her attention-seeking pest of a dog away from worming his head under Dee’s armpit. “I ain’t nuthin’ special. I’m on this bucket jus’ like you are.” She downed the substantial remainder of her champagne in one gulp. “I jus’ gots more responsibility if shit goes wiggy than y’all do.”
“Nah, mah girl gots game. S’why we here,” Tican slid over to wrap his arm around Rhee’s shoulders. His free hand flew through the air as he whistled, emulating the flight of the ship. “Sailin’ the stars. A bunch-a nobodies. We worked our asses off to get here. Ain’t nobody doubt that you’d get this ship, girl. And we gon’ be by your side when we get back to Earth to tell them assholes that we found our new home.”
Before Rhee could blush anymore, the shrill of the proximity sensors shrieked from the navigation consoles on the bridge.
Q was the first to reach the screaming displays. “Shit. SHIT. SHIT!” She was unsure of what her fellow crewmates heard of her yell as the vessel yawed uncontrollably.
“Ion storm! Hold on!”