Jaya found herself slipping in and out of consciousness.

She could see a steady pulsing alarm light. It was a radiation warning alarm, telling all crew to evacuate this section of the ship.

These are working offices, she thought. There would be thousands of people here.

She had acute radiation syndrome, she knew that. She felt nauseated, confused. Her vision faded out at the edges, and what she could see was dim.

She could not hear the alarms in the room beyond, but there should be a sound. Her uniform had popped its hood over her head. Between the two, she knew that must mean that the hull had also been breached. She was in a vacuum.

Her back touched something, and it hurt. Her reaction was to spin to face it, but her body moved slowly, barely listening to her.

It was the ceiling; she had drifted into it.

So the gravity was out as well . . . or . . . something like that. Her mind was not working right, and it made it hard to think. Another symptom of the radiation.

She didn't know how much; but it must have been a massive dose.

Something else drifted into her field of vision.

It was Alexander.

Her memory of where this was and why she'd been down here came flooding back.

Alexander was unconscious, looking in even worse shape than she was.

His uniform had also sealed over his head, though she thought she could see damage to it in places. It was hard to tell.

Straining herself, she reached for him, taking his arm. It hurt her skin to even touch him, even with gloves on her hands.

Ah, right - she was probably burned over her entire body. Even inside.

The pain made her cry out, but she grit her teeth together, turning it to a sound of anger. She tightened her grip on Alexander's arm.

Every room had fortified areas for an emergency. Beds could be space capsules, but the security closets provided more protection against radiation.

Flailing her foot until she found a surface, she kicked off, dragging Alexander with her. Somewhere . . . somewhere was the closet.

There it was. She saw the door, trimmed in yellow for emergency. It was flashing in the darkness to draw attention to it.

Whoever had thought of that detail should get an award. She would have had a much harder time finding it with her dying vision otherwise.

The door opened, and she saw that some boxes had been stored in here. Bad form, Alexander. She'd write him up later over that. These were supposed to stay empty.

But there was still space. She went in, dragging Alexander in after.

The door closed.

"Medical assistance has been summoned," a computer voice said in her ear.

"Tell them . . ." she croaked. "Tell them to save Shaw first." Her voice was a rasp. But it was Alexander who had all of this knowledge that was vital right now.

Radiation exposure like this. This was how her brother had died. Walking into it like it was nothing, to save his ship.

She could not even say she had done that. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The radiation alert flashes suddenly changed; they were flashing out a new pattern, one that sounded even more urgent.

She knew what it meant, but her hazy mind had trouble thinking of what.

Oh, she realized. It meant a fusion reactor breach.

The reality of that sunk into her slowly.

----------------------------------------

The wailing alarms panicked Tred more than the blow that had shivered the entire ship.

A lot of big things could have caused that blow that were bad, but not catastrophically bad. A missile impact that burst outside the armor, a slow-moving asteroid or something. Not good, but the Craton would survive those.

But a fusion reactor breach was something that could rip apart even the Craton.

He had read hundreds of reports on such occurrences. Fusion reactors were a well-understood technology, rendered as safe as was possible. But when you harnessed that much power, there was always danger.

His system had incomplete information on what was even happening, even on the emergency channels. He saw the information growing, getting more thorough, as reports came in from the automatic systems.

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He paused as the original source of the problem was reported; a burst of gamma rays that had come out of the temple megastructure. The estimates on the power of the burst varied by orders of magnitude; which meant they knew nothing.

But any gamma ray burst on any of these levels of power was an astronomical-scale event. A star or something like that, dying!

There was no star nearby. He scanned over the data a couple times before he could accept it.

Well, it had been a gamma ray burst, he could only think. He moved on.

The burst hadn't hit them; at those energy levels they'd just all be dead instantly if it had. No warning or even a moment of pain. But it had been near enough that it had played absolute havoc with the ship's systems - and its magnetosphere. That had weakened, and charged particles from the Van Allen belt around them had seeped in.

The magnetosphere was back up, but thousands of people in the ship would have gotten radiation exposure far above safe levels.

The next part was what caused him to rise in his seat. The stream of particles had hit Reactor Three. The magnetic fields within the reactor itself, that held in check the fusion reaction there, was destabilized.

People in the restaurant around him were screaming, the staff trying to move them to one of the safety bunkers.

He got up and ran for the elevators. He had to get down there.

Some elevators were shut down, others packed with people. But Tred knew every route to engineering, for every reactor. He took ramps, running until he was out of breath, and then walking until he could run again.

He came to an area where the gravity was off, and he turned on his magnetic boots and tromped on. Security airlocks accepted his credentials and let him through, and past one of them was vacuum.

He did not have a space suit, but he had his uniform on, and it was an ersatz spacesuit. He triggered that mode, and his suit hood popped out and over his face, sealing itself at the neck.

Taking an air tank from a panel, he connected it to his suit and went on.

The lights were out here, and further down the hall he found Response Team One, evacuating civilians and fighting to contain two leaking cooling conduits.

This was physical damage, he saw. Something, some piece of junk, had hit the ship. Or something on the ship had exploded.

He had to get to Reactor Three before it blew.

Pirra was not here, she was the Response Officer he knew the best. He only saw Kiseleva, her second in command.

When the woman saw him, she waved furiously for him to go back. He shook his head.

"I have to get to the reactor!" he yelled.

He didn't really need to yell over the radio, but his words had the effect. Kiseleva made a chopping motion toward one hall. That way, it seemed, was clear enough.

He ran down there.

His suit screamed out radiation warnings; he could see nothing, but he found cold routes past those hotspots, going deeper. Yes, something had definitely hit the ship, and as he opened one door, he stumbled back.

It was a piece of another ship, embedded into the Craton. It had penetrated hundreds of meters to be this far in, and that meant that dozens of decks had been vented to vacuum.

It was a piece of hull. He could see on it part of a logo, too scorched to be made out. But there were a couple of letters; EN'S GH.

The Raven's Ghost had been destroyed, he realized.

Probably, he thought, her own reactor had breached and ripped her apart. Then her remains had crashed into the Craton.

There were still flames from oxygen leaks, and a gap that vented down into space. Thousands of cables and pieces of deck jutted out in the gap, any one of which could rip his suit - or him.

But he had to get across here. The reactor room was on the other side.

Someone slammed into the wall behind him, shaking it. He turned and saw another engineer. He did not know the man, but he looked just as terrified.

"We gotta get across!" the man called over radio.

Tred nodded. "We can run and jump it."

The man hesitated, then nodded. Tred knew it wasn't hard, not in microgravity. But it was terrifying.

He jumped, thinking about how frightening and dangerous and stupid this was after he pushed off.

His radio did not broadcast his scream.

But he made it, and moments later the other engineer did the same.

The door to the reactor room had sealed; radiation warnings were going off, but Tred's personal detector showed nothing.

"I think it's safe inside now," he said. "Relatively, at least."

They forced the door open, and went in.

Everyone in here was dead or dying already.

The amount of rads that flooded through here would have knocked them out instantly, Tred told himself. It was better that way.

The Reactor was in a bad way, though. The first layer of magnetic buffer fields had already failed, and had been incinerated. The second was about to fail and the third was already flickering.

"We have to get the core plasma out of the ship!" he yelled. The other engineer nodded.

"Through that door!" he yelled, pointing. The door was shut.

They pushed off, going over, when the second field failed. There was a flash of light, and something exploded as the second field generators were incinerated; backup equipment breaking down, already damaged and unable to shunt off the heat properly.

Red-hot pieces of metal flew over, and Tred saw a turbine rip free, spinning itself apart. A shower of pieces was being thrown off, shifting as the piece tumbled, and in moments it would riddle them-

They hit the door, and in a moment of miracle, it opened automatically.

The other engineer gave him a shove in, and then hit the emergency door shut button.

Tred realized too late what he was doing, but he barely even got it in time; the heavy door shielded Tred, but already the debris was flying their way.

A few pieces flew in before the door was fully closed. The rest hit the door, the outer wall, and the other engineer.

Tred screamed again as he saw red coat the window on the door.

That man had just died, he realized, frozen in place.

It couldn't be in vain.

He turned, looking for the emergency shunt controls. It was a large lever on the wall, and he put in his security code. The computer did not even respond, it was not working here. Nothing was working.

Except, hopefully, the manual lever. It was normally kept under heavy cover, locked and even disconnected from the system. But those precautions were connected mechanically to the rest of the systems in a way that meant, when things got damaged, it automatically came out and was ready to use.

It was not easy to turn. Normally two were supposed to do it. He would just have to do his best.

Grabbing the lever, he wrestled with it, turning it slowly.

He heard a loud metal thunk. Then the warning klaxons changed again, and something huge rumbled.

The reactor core was venting, he realized.

He had just saved the ship.