"That one almost hit the engines!" Brendan's shouting managed to pierce through the screeching alarms. Shrey's response was lost as a set of heavy metallic thuds were added to the cacophony.

Helen didn't need any extra incentive to hurry. She stumbled as the extra acceleration pushed her downwards, taking a few sluggish steps before her weight returned to normal. The artificial gravity had automatically adjusted itself to compensate. It took her a moment to register what that meant.

All of the bottom thrusters must have just turned on. Not the engines. They were still in dark mode.

She caught the edge of the door and swung herself into the flight deck to see Brendan and Shrey in the two front seats. Both of them were working frantically at the controls, caught up in a heated conversation.

"We're taking too much damage," Brendan argued at Shrey from the copilot seat. "We can't maneuver properly with just thrusters, we need the engines."

"If we leave dark mode then we're fucked!" Shrey snapped back, not quite shouting, evidently trying to focus on flying the ship.

"If we stay on this course, then we're all dead anyways," Brendan replied. "There's no one else out there. We need to take the risk."

"Thrusters is all we have." Shrey paused for a moment to glare at their first officer. "And I can make it work."

"What's going on?" Helen asked loudly as she gripped the back of Shrey's chair. She watched the large viewscreen, a map of the local area. The dotted line that represented their predicted course flashed once, before disappearing. It was impossible to miss that their little ship's icon was surrounded by a huge number of objects, indistinct blobs picked up by their proximity scans.

Slow-moving objects. Fast-moving ship.

A dangerous combination.

"Are they mines?" Helen asked, even louder than before.

"No," Brendan answered, suddenly noticing her arrival. "It's a graveyard."

"Oh, shit," Helen said under her breath. She pointed at the viewscreen. "So those blobs on the scans..."

"Ships, or chunks of them at least," Brendan answered, barely looking up from his console.

"Who's ships?" Helen asked urgently. "What's actually out there?"

Brendan's eyes widened. "We don't know."

Helen gestured to the viewscreen. "Switch it to the camera."

They were just dots until Brendan zoomed in. There were big ships, there were small ships. Brendan was focusing in on one section, where the debris appeared to be most dense. Then the wreckage came into focus.

Hulls burned black by laser fire, dotted with craters the size of cars. Shuttles, nothing more than frames, burst apart by missiles. Tiny fighters, drifting dead, despite no visible exterior damage.

Logos popped out at her: Earth, Mars, and...

The Horizon Alliance.

Not pre-war. But the ships were old styles. This wasn't just an old battlefield, it must have happened near the start of the war. Meaning, those ships had been out here more than a decade.

Helen stared at it, eyes darting across the screen as the camera began to pan. "What's our heading look like?"

"The computer is recalculating," Brendan answered. "It needs a few more seconds." It beeped and he swore under his breath. "And how do you plan to get through that without the engines?"

The viewscreen centered on what Brendan had seen. A huge ship, it must have been a cruiser, was directly in their path. It had been cut by laser fire right down the middle, so that they now had two giant hunks of metal to dodge. Except it was too close for them to go around it now.

"We can do it," Shrey stated calmly, with zero pause in between keystrokes. "Because we're going to pass right in between."

Brendan stared at him with confusion, until it dawned on him that their pilot was serious. "That's crazy."

"It'll work," Shrey stated confidently, without looking at either one of them. "We're long, but we're thin. We can make the squeeze."

Brendan went back to staring at the approaching shipwreck on the big screen, noticing how they were maneuvering to be closer to the center of the ship. "I really hope you're right."

Helen nodded subtly. "Brendan, close all the emergency airlocks," she ordered calmly. "Let's try to minimize any atmosphere loss."

"On it." Brendan sent the commands that began slamming the bulkhead doors throughout the ship.

Helen gripped onto the metal bars behind the chairs, bracing as they began to pass between the two halves of the derelict cruiser.

New alarms went off as the edges of the wreck scrapped their hull, causing metallic groaning and screeching to resonant though the air. Smaller, broken off sections of the main wreck caused uneven bangs as the ship collided with them.

It was over before they knew it.

"We've got damage on our starboard and top sides," Brendan reported. "Some areas lost pressure. Not a lot, so far."

Helen leaned over his shoulder. "Turn that blasted noise off."

Shrey silenced the alarm with a complicated series of keystrokes. "I'm going to have to make a shortcut for that," he muttered.

"Much better." Helen took a deep breath and stood up straighter. "Now, what do we know so far?"

Brendan switched the viewscreen from the camera to the map. It seemed like even more objects had appeared since the last time it had been up. "We're in a debris field. A big one. Maybe twenty or thirty ships, it's hard to get an accurate count."

Helen studied the map closely, her brow creased more the longer she looked. "But how?"

"We didn't see it," Shrey said plainly.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Why not?" Helen responded. "How could we miss something like this?"

"Because we're in fucking dark mode," Shrey answered, somewhat annoyed. "Our sensors are limited."

"But this isn't just a few little ships," Helen said, looking puzzled. "There are chunks of cruisers out there."

"And they're hunks of dead metal, not glowing ships." Shrey huffed. He brought up the map on the view screen again. As they watched, pieces of the debris field behind them were vanishing from the display one by one. "We didn't see them until we were right on top of them."

"I was here when it started," Brendan added. "The scans picked them up when we were less than a minute out. The alerts didn't start until we took damage."

"We were taken completely off guard," Helen breathed. She scowled as she watched the debris surrounding them. "What are our options now?"

"Not much," Shrey responded with a sigh, watching as their predicted course began to update itself. "I'm trying to keep us away from the shitting big pieces. But in dark mode, I've only got the maneuvering thrusters. And this is a big, heavy ship." He tapped the side of the console impatiently. "Give me a few damn minutes."

"Every second we're in here, we're taking more damage." Brendan pointed at the big red flashing section on the ship map. "That's another hit. Right in the middle of the cargo section." He looked over the list of ongoing high priority alerts. "We've lost a quarter of the thrusters so far."

The lines on Helen's brow deepened. "But they're spaced all over the hull, all down the outside of the cargo hold. That whole system is decentralized."

"And they stick out like magnets for this fucking space litter," Shrey added. "We've still got enough."

Another muted alert popped up on Brendan's screen. "And that's another one gone." He scowled at the display. "We're losing more every minute."

"It's not just the thrusters being taken out," Helen added, zooming in on the ship map. "We're moving fast enough that even the smaller pieces are ripping our hull to shreds." She pointed to the red flashing areas in the ship's interior. "Good thing we closed the airlocks. We've already lost pressure in lots of sections along the cargo hold."

"I know that!" Shrey snapped. "But I can't go any faster in dark mode."

"But you can get us out of here?" Helen asked seriously.

"Yes," Shrey replied confidently, just as another thud echoed through the cockpit.

Brendan gave him a skeptical look. "With the ship in one piece?"

"Probably," Shrey amended quietly.

"What's that?" Helen pointed at the screen, at the one big blob on their newly predicted trajectory.

"Oh no," Brendan uttered as he looked up. "That's bad."

"I see it," Shrey hissed irritably as he worked.

"We're going to hit it," Brendan announced airily.

"Who's pessimistic now?" Shrey grumbled back.

"There's no way to avoid it!" Brendan retorted. "And it's big enough to sink us."

Shrey didn't answer, keeping at the controls.

"Brendan, what do you mean?" Helen asked calmly.

Brendan drew Helen's attention to one of the screens on his station. He rotated the three dimensional map to show how their predicted course would cause them to hit a quarter of a blackened warship. "We can't go starboard, we don't have enough thrust to make it. Not without the engines."

"Then go port," Helen concluded.

"We can't." Brendan leaned back in his chair. "We've lost all the starboard thrusters," he reported grimly. "We don't have any way to avoid it."

"Sure we do." Shrey didn't look up from his main screen, his hands racing definitely over the entire keyboard. "Prepare to fire the starboard thrusters."

"But that'll send us straight towards the center!" Brendan protested, jerking forwards in his seat.

"Just do it," Helen told him firmly, sounding calm even as her fist clenched up.

Brendan frowned as he hit a few buttons across his console, then leaned back and crossed his arms.

With a few button presses, Shrey changed the angle of the thrusters along the side of the ship. They all felt a jerk as the ship began to rotate. Helen smoothly recovered from a near stumble due to the abrupt motion.

Brendan raised an eyebrow at Shrey. "How is a barrel roll going to help us?"

"No, that's not it," Helen spoke first, watching the three dimensional display on Brendan's station. "You're turning us upside down?"

"That's the plan," Shrey confirmed, smoothly slowing their rotation so they stopped at the optimal angle. "Now, full on the starboard side thrusters."

Helen held on tight to the backs of the two chairs as the ship began moving to the side. Helen and Brendan watched the camera view on his console. The destroyed warship was coming up. Fast. Their trajectory was changing, albeit painfully slowly.

They could make out the individual pieces of floating debris around the ship now. A chair. A door. A blanket. They passed out of view just as quickly.

The nose of the ship had just made it past the wreck, so it was now out of the camera's angle. There was a thunderous crash as the two vessels made contact. The now-familiar sound of metal on metal returned, the old vessel clawing into the side of their hull. They began to turn, shuddering vibrations running through their vessel, as the exterior layers of the hull were torn away.

Brendan's screen showed the rising damage count, the increasing number of hull breaches. They watched as section after section lost pressurization, the expelled gas altering their course even further. One piece hit the last cargo section, one section away from the shuttle bay that housed the dark generator.

Brendan inhaled sharply.

"We're going to make it." Shrey watched his station screens, set to only show the controls system, intensely. "We are going to make it."

No one contradicted him. No one said a word.

No one breathed until the sound stopped.

"We're past it," Shrey announced in the silence, audible relief in his voice. "Still in one piece, as promised."

Brendan exhaled loudly. "That was too close."

"We've been through worse." An alert blinked on Shrey's console.

Helen eyed it worriedly. "What's that?"

"We've lost the remaining thrusters," Shrey reported. "We're drifting."

Helen glanced over the screens, with all their alerts and warnings flashing in their faces. "Anything else in our way?"

"Little stuff," Brendan answered. "That was the worst of it."

"Just a few more seconds... we're out now." Shrey leaned back in his chair, grinning triumphantly. "How's that for fancy flying?"

The edge of Helen's mouth curled into a hint of a smile. "Your talents never cease to amaze."

Brendan didn't smile. "I'm unsealing the airlocks between the still pressurized sections." He whistled lowly as he looked over the damage map. "Wow, we're lucky that we can still walk to the back of the ship without ship suits. The cargo section is a complete maze now."

"The bulkheads will hold, we can worry about that later," Helen said confidently, without looking at his screen, as she was still staring at the map of the graveyard. The icon of the ship was slowly inching away from all the debris. "Right now, I want to know what's going on with our ship. And what our new course is, considering we've just lost all maneuverability."

Shrey sat back up and began working again. "It'll take some time for the computer to run the numbers."

"Let me know when it's done." Helen reached behind her ear, turning on her personal radio. "Engineering, I need a damage report, ASAP."

"I'm working on it," Aqeel replied quickly. "Get back to you later."

"I need to know what our options are."

Alarms came through over speaker along with a series of creative swearing from Aqeel and urgent, indistinct shouting from Cassie. "Stuff is broken. Call back later." The connection cut.

Helen sighed and turned off her microphone. She let out a long, heavy breath as she stared at the damage map of the ship. "How could this happen?"

Shrey's quick hands halted for a moment. "That's a damn good point." His motions resumed, as his fingers danced across the keys with haste. "According to the map, we shouldn't be anywhere close to any of the battle sites."

Brendan evaluated the map critically for the first time. "So did we drift?"

Shrey frowned as he eyed his screen, almost suspiciously. "Not this far. There weren't any graves anywhere near our route."

"There isn't supposed to be," Helen responded, growing anger hiding behind her sharp eyes. "How the hell did intel manage to screw this up?"

Brendan looked at Shrey, who shrugged as he kept working. "Ask Mike, not my department."

"Where is he then?" Helen glanced at Brendan. "Wait, shouldn't he be up here?"

"He just got off shift," Brendan explained.

"I don't know and..." Shrey frowned. "He's not answering his comm."

Helen held in another sigh. "If he muted his radio for nap again, I'm going to kill him."

"I think he said he was going to the gym?" Brendan suggested uncertainly.

"I hope not." Shrey switched the view screen back to the ship map. Huge sections were flashing red. He pointed at a red section near the front of the ship. "That whole area was bombarded to shit. It's completely depressurized."

Helen's expression shifted, suddenly concerned again. "I need eyes on that section." She reached over to Brendan's console to turn on the microphone. "Who's closest to the gym right now?"

"I'm on the observation deck." Danny's voice came through the channel to the entire cockpit. "I can be there in a few minutes."

"There's damage to that section. Go check it out," Helen ordered, then paused. "Mike may have been in there and he's not answering his radio."

"On my way."