“It’s not uncommon for someone in your position to feel an impending sense of dread. Perhaps that you fear that your whole understanding of how the world works could come undone and radically shift. Does this sound right to you?” The young Drake spoke, stroking his lower jaw with a clawed digit. It looked ridiculous; Alex was certain if the dragon had facial hair, then he would be gently stroking it as though it made him look more in thought than he currently did.

“I suppose so,” Alex replied. “Honestly I don’t know how to process this. If they exist then what else does?”

Grayich let out a gentle hmph of thoughtfulness. Not once did he look away from Alex with those slitted eyes. After a moment of brief silence he began to speak again.

“How do you view the state of the Alliance. More specifically; how do you see humans interacting with other cryptid species?”

“What do you mean, doc?” Alex said.

“How do you think humans these days respond to members of species not their own?” Grayich elaborated.

“I guess, normal? Humans treat Lykans, Dragons, Garudas and everyone else like normal. They are like us and we are like them.”

“And what if I told you it wasn’t always like that? What if I told you that there was a massive increase in suicide rates among humans back in the days that followed shortly after revelation day?”

Alex took a deep breath when he thought about it. He was feeling quite peculiar as to where the young dragon was going with this. He thought back to those days in history class and learning about the changes to human society that followed shortly after a Dragon revealed himself.

Then, to break the silence that filled the room, Alex spoke once more. “I would say I have no idea what you are talking about, doc.”

“Back in two thousand forty-seven when we stepped out of the shadows and showed ourselves to humans, for many, even my own existence was too much for humans to comprehend, they ignored Cryptids, didn’t notice them or pretended not to. It's a self defence mechanism humans have when confronted with the unknowable. Some are able to face it head on with a clarity that borders on normalcy and many others are unable to process that it exists so their own minds make it invisible. What you are experiencing is nothing that hasn’t been seen, Captain. You are experiencing anxiety and panic because you are unable to process the concept that these creatures exist in our galaxy.”

“I guess-… I suppose as a captain, I am used to having a sense of authority. Understanding the chain of command and the way things are. Knowing that out there is another species who may be more advanced than us disturbs me. Makes me wonder where our place is in the galaxy.” Alex said solemnly.

The young drake broke eye contact first with his gaze slowly drifting to the floor for a moment before he picked them back up and looked at Alex. Even he looked as though he was worrying about those same thoughts Alex had, instead, chose to bury them deep down.

“Sir, I think this is perfectly normal for you to be experiencing these feelings of inferiority. To question our place in the universe. Believe it or not, part of counselling on space ships is to prepare for the inevitable first contact and how confronting it can be for crew mentality and especially those with faith and religion.”

Alex looked around the room uncomfortably, speechless. Words couldn’t form themselves in his mind while he processed what the good dragon doctor just said to him. In a way, the thought of not being the only one on board with these thoughts seemed to be comforting. Another thought was how this was going to affect the crew, would this affect how they were going to perform their duties? Was Alex going to have to put dozens of men and women off duty to deal with this?

“Doc, I cannot make you betray your confidentiality with my crew but I need you to tell me if they are worsening, alright?” Alex said sternly.

The Dragon nodded with eyes closed, “I understand, I will let you know of any new developments within the confines of Doctor/Patient confidentiality” he said. “Was there anything else you would like to talk about?”

Alex shook his head. “No, Grayich. I think I will be fine; will you?”

“Will I what?” Grayich cocked his head on angle in confusion.

“Are you going to be alright? You are quite young so I imagine this might be shocking to you.”

Liyurch chuckled, his wings bouncing as he did so. “You really don’t know much about us Dragons, do you? Knowing that thing exists doesn’t change my faith in the Cycle. No matter what new entity enters the equation, that is always a constant.”

“The Cycle?” it was Alex’s turn to cock an eyebrow in confusion.

“Part of Draconic philosophy is belief in a concept called: The Cycle. We learn to be closer to the natural world around us. It's why our ships have oxygen factories resembling parks and forests, it's why we do not accessorise our meals with things such as seasonings and delicate cuts and it is what helps dictate our breeding behaviours. In it we learn to be more in tune with the natural balance of things. If that thing exists then it is merely another component we did not realise to our own beliefs. I hold no illusions that its presence intimidated me but I must learn to accept that it was part of the galactic ecosystem whether I agree with it or not.” Liyurch said with a wry smile.

“It is a surprise you are able to comprehend this much trauma, sir. The incident when you and Commander Hammer were ten must have been so much to process.” He continued to speak.

Alex’s face tightened up, his gaze turning steely and his manner stoic when he heard Liyurch speak. The young drake seemed so innocent with that gentle smile, knowingly digging into past traumas Alex kept buried deep with the hopes of never seeing the light of day ever again. Usually he admired Liyurch for going above and beyond with his research and learning, No. This was a line he crossed, a sense of privacy Alex wanted unbroken no matter the cost. So he stood up and looked down on the dragon he sat contently at his desk, unaware of the nerves he was pulling on.

“We are done here, doctor.”

Grayich twisted in his chair to watch Alex stand up and prepare to leave the office. His muscles above his eye ridges cocked up sharply to give him an expression of confusion. Alex, on the other hand, had reached for the door handle as he pondered over the words Liyurch spoke to him. The young dragon called out to him as he left his office. Clearly wanting to know why Alex felt this way. And yet he found himself face to face talking with an issue he deemed long dead and buried, as he left the office he hadn’t taken notice of his grip on the handle was crushing the metal rod that acted as the handle. His fist tightened into a fleshy vice subconsciously as he felt anger. He was only three steps away from the office when a tremor suddenly gripped the ship, jerking everything in the infirmary loose as tools clattered to the floor, the tremor’s intensity increased steadily and then a sudden sharp jolt to one side had thrown everyone and everything around the sickbay.

Alex struggled to keep his balance steady and the sudden jerking and the nervous groans of nurses who hadn’t expected it, even with his arms outstretched to stabilise himself, would prove to be a futile effort against the warped forces outside the ship enforcing their will on the Phoenix. Then the shaking started to drop in intensity and violence was on the verge of dying down. Little did Alex realise he was holding on to his breath before releasing it and lowering his hands. Another tremor, stronger than the one before, had struck. The tremor gripped the Phoenix with enough force that it threw Alex hard to the floor; When he collided with the metal flooring he felt pain shot up through his neck and let loose a yelp in pain as something inside him came undone. The ship then settled quickly as it had started violently throwing its occupants around. Alex tried getting up off the floor when a sudden spike in pain shot up through his neck and into his head, the pain burned with a ferocity he hadn’t felt in a long time as he gently rotated his head to look where the pain came from. Bringing his other hand over to nurse his wounds did Alex see his shoulder jutting outward at an awkward angle and when his hand lightly touched the protrusion it sent a sharp electrical pain as he hissed through it.

A Minotaur, one of the male nurses, rushed over to Alex to help by placing his large beefy hands underneath the fragile human and set Alex, who groaned and hissed with each touch on his injury, on a nearby surgery table. The minotaur looked around, his large eyes scanned the room before leaving Alex with his dislocated shoulder to go help another nurse who had a cut along their face.

Alex’s face clenched in pain.

The nurse walked over helping his fellow medical staff along the way before he tended to Alex. He used one of his large beefy fingers to press Alex’s head down against the cold surface and felt a forceful grip grab his wrist and feel it pulling down to the floor which had sent a sharp jolt of pain to spike, letting the human captain scream in agony before the pain died down to nonexistence, briefly before ending as quickly as it began. Alex turned to see his shoulder resting normally where it should have been and no longer visible through his space suit. He gave his newly realigned shoulder a few rotations to test it and after feeling no pain wherever he began to swing his arm.

Meanwhile on the Bridge, Alex stormed over to Clemens whose grip on the controls seemed fierce by his white knuckles and veins bulging through his fists. His head was level while he shifted his gaze between the main screen and the computer monitor in front of him.

“Anybody mind telling me what the fuck happened five minutes ago, did we hit something!?” He shouted.

“Negative sir, the ship keeps adjusting our heading, I’m fighting her to stay on course.” Clemens grunted.

“For some reason the navigation computer keeps adjusting our heading, saying something about an ‘environmental hazard’ being present at our exit coordinates.” Collins replied. “I don’t understand this, auto-nav doesn’t adjust headings for radiation hazards.”

Alex walked up to the Navigation console, temporarily pushing Collins aside to look at the monitor and to his credit, he was right. The monitor displayed bright letters stating a hazard was directly in front of the jump coordinates. Alex inputted his authorisation codes once more to override the warnings. Strange it was, Alex thought back on his training as to what could possibly be the cause. He knew it couldn’t have been asteroids, not that close to a nebula and certainly it would not have stayed around their exit vector for five minutes. Perhaps it could have been a slow-moving rogue planet that had drifted into their vector? Alex sighed, then sat in his chair. It was regrettable that for as advanced as their Navigational computers had gotten, they could only indicate something was present at their exit location but not identify what it was. Collins consulted with his most recently updated star charts then took into account how much time has elapsed since they were last updated due to the Phoenix not being able to gain constant updates during Jumps.

But after ten minutes of carefully calculating known comets, asteroids and stellar phenomena, Collins declared there was nothing near the coordinates that could cause them to alter course. The Junior Lieutenant then said that the Nav computer was still displaying an error despite Alex being certain he override them.

Ugghh… Just another faulty thing that needs to be fixed on the damned ship!

The rest of his shift went without any further incidents, that night when he went to lay down on his bed Alex’s previously injured shoulder flared up in pain and he learnt to sleep on his back. The next day had also been without incident, Alex checked the old digital clock above his chair, counting down the minutes until they were about to exit their Jump. Shortly he called out to the ship and prepared them, still, something about the alarm bugged him. While he slept, Engineers visited the bridge and restarted the computer and searched the logs with their scanner tools and found no bugs or fault codes. And yet, it continued to display a hazard warning. It must have been a hardware issue from the scanning equipment outside the ship; it was not uncommon for Jumps to damage components that were not internalised. However, Alex needed to put up with it until they reached Sagittarius and then he could send a team to fix it.

Two more minutes until Threshold Crossing. The lights dimmed themselves and a muffled alarm buzzed its warning. The prow, open with its antennae equipment pulsating an eerie blue that glowed off the dull grey panels of the prow while also breaking up the black centre of the kaleidoscopic tunnel.

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Five…

Alex braced himself, he took a deep breath in.

Four…

Which he then followed by clenching his buttocks.

Three…

He closed his eyes to prepare himself, the last few transitions to and from Jumps had gotten more intense with each use. After the last one he had to brace himself for the inertia.

Two…

While his eyes remained closed he heard the bridge crew follow his lead as they took deep breaths of their own.

One…

He pursed his lips and let out his breath as he opened his eyes just in time for the ethereal glow of the Jump apparatus to disappear and the whining down of energy echoed through the bulkheads.

Zero…

The black epicentre of the tunnel reached out with its dark tendrils desperately trying to pull the colour off the Phoenix and back into the void of Real-space. New colours emerged from the dark and stretched themselves into shapes. In a single microsecond as they bled slowly into reality something about those shapes started taking on familiar designs and…

Oh shit!

“Helmsman; evade-“ His warning however, came too late.

The fuselage shattered into pieces upon contact with the Phoenix’s prow. Alex was violently thrusted forward from the impact but the seatbelt he wore pressed firmly into his belly, groin and shoulders which would have sent him careening towards the back of Ensign Clemens’ seat. The debris which obstructed their view had drifted away clearing the way for them to see more wreckages approaching. The sudden unexpected impact had Alex indecisive about clutching his chest or groin to nurse the pain but outside, the Phoenix had distracted him momentarily. The Forward Jump sensors were caved in and cleanly snapped off to drift with its fellow metal waste. It still retained an ethereal glow which quickly dimmed when it drifted off with the rest of the ship. The bridge crew continued to stare at the pieces as it drifted past them however their attention was quickly brought back to the present as an alarm sounded off to warn them of another collision obstacle rapidly closing in on them, Alex looked ahead and saw the Alliance cruiser freely spinning on her side like an excited puppy rolling around in snow for the first time. The lettering of its registration glowed as it spun itself to reflect light from off the pockets of luminescent nebula gas.

U.T.S.S Acheron. HVC-134

Clear as the luminescent red batch of gas would allow it to be. The Acheron drifted on its side just as the Phoenix rapidly closed the distance between the two ships. Alex called out to Ensign Clemens. His arm flew up as he pointed to the obvious approaching hull. “Clemens, hard to port, increase power to yaw!” He shouted.

The Phoenix suddenly rolled to its left and started to duck underneath the spinning remains of the Acheron but as the two ships grew closer, the Acheron’s tower rolled into view prompting Clemens to jerk his controls more to Port just to avoid crashing through it. Even with his natural skills, his timing proved to be too slow as the tower sent sparks flying off into the cosmos from it scraping against the Phoenix’s hull which had shaved the tower an entire deck off amidst the ear-splitting shriek of metal grinding against itself against the Phoenix’s hull. Alex quickly reached for the microphone above him while being held down by his seatbelt.

“All hands, all hands report to action stations, this is not a drill. Set ship to Red Alert!”

The hazard lighting from the jump swiftly shifted to red and the alarm was replaced with one of a different pitch and tone. Outside of the Phoenix, the prow closed in as the Jump antennae, what was left of it, was pulled back into the main body of the ship. The dented panels closed in to seal the damaged Jump spear underneath its protective sheath as Clemens narrowly avoided one of the Acheron’s engines rolling into view. He thrusted the ship upwards and towards a dense pocket of blue clouds that looked so smooth in its contours while patches of red gas contrasted against the strong vibrant colours. Close to them Alex saw an entire graveyard of ships. Each one was dead and left adrift with varying degrees of destruction. The closest ship to them, an Apollo class Hospital ship had its fore section blasted off while the rest of its slim body was covered in scorch marks and chunks of its upper body exposing the spindly rebar of its chassis. Alliance ships weren’t the only casualties to be found in the nebula. As Clemens ducked and weaved through massive sections of the starship hull that was drifting idly through the void. Clemens mumbled something that resembled “You got this, you can do this'' to himself as he pulled the ship in a sharp upwards turn, barely managing to avoid colliding with an entire cylindrical engine but not so much the smaller looser debris that clanged against the hull before drifting off the Phoenix.

The remains of another ship forced Clemens hard to port and into a dense pocket of bright red gas.

“Ensign, find us a clearing and prepare for full stop!” Alex ordered.

“Aye, sir.”

While skimming the azure cloud, Clemens then engaged the manoeuvring thrusters to avoid a massive cloud of small debris from an unidentified ship when suddenly a massive flash of light filled the bridge, the crew tried to shield themselves before feeling the ship rock from a massive forceful explosion seemingly from the dense cloud. It pushed them off course and left them helpless to react to the explosion that thrusted the Phoenix. When his eyesight returned to him, Alex unclipped the belt buckle and looked out to see the ship on another collision course with a Lykan frigate. Its long body with a spherical structure in the centre had multiple impacts from some kind of railgun that had punched holes clean through the ships body, its sister ships suffered similar fates with only the fore compartment intact while the rest of the body dissolved into shrapnel. Alarms wailed and the infrastructure croaked. Men and women yelped in shock as they were rocked about by the Phoenix

“Lieutenant, report! Who fired on us!?” Alex shouted.

“I can’t see shit out there!” Clemens shouted.

“There’s too much junk out there, sir. Sonar isn’t detecting active signals.” Collins added.

“Then check the external cameras” Alex growled. “That explosion didn’t come from nowhere!”

Collins rapidly tapped away on his console; he made a few noises resembling frustration but didn’t seem to have come across as though he couldn’t perform his duty. “Actually, sir,” Collins said. “I think it did. That dense cloud we passed must have had combustible elements in it. It detonated instantly as soon as Port thruster three’s plume touched it. Sir I recommend we avoid dense cloud pockets in the future.”

Alex agreed and then told Clemens’ to find a clearing without using the rockets. The manoeuvring chemical rockets were slow, Alex heard the whoosh of air leaving the network of pipes that ran along the length of the ship to deliver minute bursts of momentum in tight situations. But never did they encounter a situation like this that would require this much fuel. The Lykan frigate lay dead ahead of the Phoenix resting among its sisters in the nebula. Even Clemens’ struggled to keep his hands steady to avoid the frigate before he saw another obstacle.

It was too late for Clemens’ surgical touch as the Phoenix ploughed through the cloud of debris with dull thuds and clunks orchestrating their assault on the hull. A flat piece of metal collided with the portside window with a loud crack spreading a web of white cracks along the pane; seeing the cracks had quickly grabbed everyone’s attention while Alex felt his heart spike in pace more than it had before with the possibility of a breach. Everything around him slowed to a crawl as he focused on whether or not the cracks would grow. Then his attention was broken by something from the debris cloud banging off the prow in front of the bridge. Only for a brief moment did Alex see the body bouncing off the prow when he turned to face forward, the body of what appeared to be a human briefly before it smacked against the glass, covering it in a spatter of blood that covered the entire window panel in gore with a wet sounding thud. Instantly, everyone on the bridge crew, including Alex groaned and winced at the sight of the red puddle that amassed itself and slowly spread itself to the edges of the window. Clemens’ clenched his entire body as he tried to face away from the mess. Somebody on the bridge made heaving sounds, though Alex suspected it might have been Gabby; Garuda’s were predominantly herbivorous with a small percentage of meat in their diet, but the sight of seeing the body be reduced to a pulp from sheer force and then spread out on the glass like paint to a canvas would have been too much for her system to handle. Tentatively, Alex tried to return his gaze forward; his view was obstructed from the blood thinning itself with occasional dark red spots slowly drifting outward on the remaining inertia it carried.

Oh fuck, think I’m gonna hurl! Alex thought to himself.

He tapped on the control panel on his armrest to engage the shutters for the bridge windows, hoping they would be able to get that image out of their mind and focus up. First thing he needed to do was get the Phoenix out of harm’s way, so he ordered Clemens to find a clearing for him to park the Phoenix; Alex felt the ship turn hard to port before feeling the inertia pull on him indicative of the ship stopping.

Clemens turned around in his chair with his skin covered in beads of sweat and his hands shook fierce “We are dead in the water, sir.” Was all he said.

Alex threw his head to Hazaari, the plumage on her neck stood on end from everything that had happened. “Lieutenant, open up radio frequencies on all channels, find out if anyone out there is alive and if they are then confirming this was the fleet we were meant to meet with. Collins, order Damage Control teams to respond to any hull breaches and seal them up and get me damage reports!”

Hazaari nodded in acknowledgement then turned to face her console; her golden talons pressed against the side of her head before her beak went slack. Collins saluted briefly before running out of the bridge and into the CIC behind them.

“This is U.T.S.S Phoenix; registration one-eight one-four two-two-seven-four six-four eight. Hailing any survivors in the Nebula, please respond to this frequency.” Hazaari said into the microphone.

Alex pinched the bridge of his nose as he stood up, around him nothing but carnage. He looked out the window to see drifting bits of metal and ships that have been cleaved cleanly in half or worse, been destroyed and turned into fields of razor-sharp shrapnel ready to shred anything that dared to go through them. He turned his gaze to the closed blast shields, thoughts turned sour when he thought about the poor crewmen they ran over. How many out there in the nebula were thrusted by vacuum into the cold expanse? How many were right next to the explosions when the cores went critical or when the magazines were hit? It was not until Collins had burst into the room with a tablet in his hands and begun to speak that Alex snapped out of his morbid thoughts.

“Reports are coming in now, sir; several Jump chairs were shaken loose from initial impact and sent their occupants to the infirmary with broken bones. Internal sensors show the port side corridor on deck four had been breached and is sealed tight. Zero fatalities as of yet but twelve are in critical condition. One of the torpedo tube hatches took some shrapnel and now it's stuck closed.”

Mindlessly and without meaning to, Alex took the tablet out of Collins’ hands but his attention was drawn to the only unobscured window on the bridge and the massive wrecks to dozens of ships all of different designs and from different nations off their starboard side. The bridge crew gawked at the ghoulish sight of the graveyard being lit by such pretty colours of the nebula. Hazaari’s plumage stood on end when she saw the Alliance ships broken in pieces which proved shocking enough for her to stop her message out into the cosmos. To the left, a Lykan battlegroup was shattered as the main fuselage was shattered into a cloud of shredded metal. Some of the larger wrecks that drifted close to the Phoenix looked as though they had an inkling of power left as sparks flew from frayed wires or broken appliances, red emergency lighting dimly flickered. Alex felt a nudge from behind and his senses started returning to him; the bridge flashed with red lighting and the alarms buzzed loudly in pace with the flash of the emergency light. Collins stood behind Alex with a worried look on his face as he called out to him.

Alex turned on his heels and bolted straight for the CIC, once inside the circular room it was not as calm and quiet as it was before. crew members ran frantically from one console to another, conversations overlapping each other and blending itself to become a chorus of panic. Once inside the central table of the CIC, Alex summoned a holographic model of the Phoenix, then he brought his hands closer to shrink the model which then included as much of the debris around the Phoenix as it could process until the Phoenix was only a foot in length and the debris surrounding was numerous. He increased the model’s size once again and spun it around it to assess the damage before turning around to face the chaos.

“Alright everyone, stop what you are doing and listen up!” He shouted, which soon stopped the crew in their tracks. “The way I see it we have two emergencies to take care of; First I want you to coordinate the damage control teams. We need to triage, get them to seal any breaches first and worry about the cosmetic damage later. Secondly, we have at least a dozen ships on the float out there and so far, no culprit or anything to indicate who’s responsible, so we are going to deploy recon probes and search parties in shuttles to locate survivors and lifeboats and if we can, we will locate the flight recorders. Now, let’s move people!” He concluded by clapping his hands.

Shortly after his orders, reports from all over the ship started pouring into his tablet, the notification sound continued to sound off repeatedly to the point it almost rang like a school bell. The first things he read through were the injury reports from the infirmary followed by the reports from Damage control teams and engineers. The damage, while extensive, was not as major as he had feared. The reports had shown camera footage of one such DC team fully suited up in the decompressed corridor removing a large piece of shrapnel that had been flung in through the window and embedded in the opposite wall. The repair team sealed the breached window with a light grey metal panel and welded it to the frame before manually engaging the environmental controls to restore atmospheric pressure. The team leader then took out a can from the tool box that had been brought with them and began spraying the area with a thick white smoke to test if it was welded properly; shortly after concluding that it was done properly the camera then cut to black. Alex also watched over the shoulder of a Naga who operated a small drone that was deployed to inspect the outer hull damage and was shocked to see the many new scars the Phoenix possessed along her fore and mid compartments. Jagged metal stuck out from the hull like serrated teeth while at the end of some of the tears the piece of metal responsible was wedged in tight and sticking out. While he examined the sight of the damage Alex felt relieved none of the damage had entered through the inner hull, with a few exceptions that couldn’t be fixed.

One of the reports that was addressed to him was from Dr. Vawilk from the Astronomics lab; Alex almost dismissed it before remembering he asked the scientists to use their equipment to scan the local area. With all the debris and the explosion from the dense pocket of gas he didn’t want any surprises waiting for him out there in the nebula, when he opened it, he was greeted with a mix of feelings that conflicted with each other in equal parts good and bad. According to them the nebula contained highly flammable methyl alcohol which combusts quite easily in high concentrations. They Vawilk stated his advice on avoiding any denser pockets of the gas in the future to avoid another explosion equivocal to on old earth naval mine, before he then went on to explain that any significant explosions from nuclear weapons or even a detonated Jump drive could erupt the entire region regardless of particle density. The report then went on to explain that Vawilk and his team were able to identify nearly thirteen separate vessels… All laid to waste. Suddenly, the tone of the report shifted when Dr. Vawilk advised that due to the nature of some ships and the high number of debris cluttered in the immediate vicinity made it more challenging to pick where it came from which then went on to explain that they were running simulations to ‘piece’ them back together to provide a more accurate summary.

In the background, radio chatter picked up the airboss’s communication with the pilots in both Port and Starboard hanger decks.

“Angel One, disengage fuel clamps. Seal your tanks and pressurise your cabin.”

“Copy that, El Tee. Fuel tank is at one hundred percent.” The pilot responded with a small click at the end of their speech.

“Begin pre-flight engine diagnostics, call out fuel pressure and thrust EPR.”

“Standby, Airboss… Pressure is reading at five bars and maintaining four thousand five hundred kilogram of thrust.”

“Your readings are green, Angel One. Eject diagnostic jack and prepare for vacuum.”

“Copy that, Airboss.”

On the wall of camera monitors, Alex selected the camera inside the hangar bay just in time to see the hangar decompress swiftly before the doors opened up allowing the blue and red light to flood the depressingly dull hangar with colour. The clamps were released and Angel One slowly drifted out into the void which then spun around to fire up its engines which let out a transparent orange plume a few metres away from the craft. It didn’t accelerate fast, in fact, Alex stopped watching its nose mounted camera because he felt sick from how often it swerved from side to side avoiding debris.

Looking down back at his tablet, scrolling past through the vast messages on the intra-ship network did Alex see the work orders that asked for his authorisation to enact upon. Everything from fabricating and installing new glass in the one breached section to removing the panels that were damaged by the explosion. Alex stopped reading them after the seventh or eighth request to engage in repairs and started authorising each and everyone until his tablet’s inbox was empty. He heard something from one of the pilots that was sent outside to search for survivors but didn’t quite understand what they were saying until he selected the camera monitor of one of the other shuttles sent out.

“I say again, Phoenix. I have located a lifeboat adrift fifteen kilometres off your starboard bow; permission to inspect for survivors?”

Alex reached out for the microphone and pressed on it to speak. “This is Captain Rowan; you are cleared to search for survivors. Establish radio contact first then check for any traps. Phoenix out.” He took his finger off the button.