You lean back as the Night Horse settles into it exit vector from the Azur system, bound for the Murnmore system. The Royal Marines are still occupied down on Azur 4 but the Night Horse's guns are not needed. The assault transports that the Royal Marines rode in on have plenty of orbit-to-surface firepower and the targeting system to use it effectively.

The warp jump to the Murnmore is supposed to last four days, you have a reasonable well-mapped warp jump route, and your crew is eager to see a new system. You can't exactly blame them after spending what feels like a month and a week doing nothing but stare at a star chart and watch light codes crawl about. Midshipman Huckle is down in the engineering spaces checking the Kleinova warp drive over again checking for any damage he may have missed for the eighth time that you know about. It's an overabundance of caution in your opinion. Then again you have just seen the results of a warp jump (of sorts) go horribly wrong.

Midshipman Engel is down in his quarters. Ostensibly he is there to catch up on paperwork but you know he queried the auto doc for something to help with warp jump sickness. You guess that he's either passed out or headed that way quickly. You remain on the bridge, watching the readouts and murmuring silent superstitious prayers to the Gods Below for safe passage.

Jump hour comes and the Night Horse translates with barely a shudder. You let out a barley audible sigh and stand down Midshipman Huckle to rest. This promises to be a smooth warp jump or so you think. You glance about for any piece of wood, even false wood, to knock on as soon as the though springs to mind. Finding none you thumb your palm and pray that you haven't brought forth bad luck onto the Night Horse.

Three hours later your fears are confirmed. An anomaly alarm screeches, yanking you from your stupor, followed instantly by the fire alarm. Glancing down at the status board you curse and slam a hand down on the ship wide broadcast button.

“Fire in the prow Thunder Strike batteries. Get the automatons moving, we need it put out now!”

“Aye Aye Sir!”

“Aff, moving now, aye aye sir!”

Your hands flash to the damage response commands for the automatons but your lack of familiarity with this particular subset of their systems leave you fumbling through menus and directories. Every automaton work group you select is already executing damage control commands so you leave them to run. Fifteen minutes into your scramble you hear Midshipman Engel come back up on the radio.

“I've got three work parties making good headway up the port access ways. Douglass! I need you to concentrate on the starboard ones.”

“Squashing a flare in the vent systems at the moment but I'm dispatching a spare team to start in on that. Two minutes out.”

You lean back and settle for watching the displays instead of getting under their metaphorical feet. Over the next fifteen minutes the fire is beaten back and extinguished. You let out a sigh of relief as cautious self-diagnostics run on the prow weapons mounts. There's some minor damage, cosmetic and otherwise, but backups ad backups-of-backups are coming online to take up the slack. A full work party of ten crew automatons and an egghead are down for the count but it could have been a lot worse. You shudder at the memory of seeing a fully charged capacitor bank let go all at once on a previous cruse. You breath out a sigh of relief.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Good work crew. Set automated cleanup protocols and take it easy for a bit. We're not to Murnmore just yet.”

February 4th, 8252

Two days have passed since the fire in the prow weapons mounts and it has been a smooth warp jump since then. You still have an itch that you can't quite place or scratch, a feeling that you haven't quite dodged the plasma blast, that something else is yet to come. Midshipman Huckle can be found intermittently cursing a blue streak as he works to fix up the prow weapons mounts, the egghead damaged in the fire, and struggles to sleep. Something is eating at him, some past terror brought back to mind by the fire, but the best you can do is gently prompt him to visit the auto doc as needed and to lay off the home brewed liquor.

Midshipman Engel is almost too perky to stand, having come thought the fire unscathed and cheerfully, almost willfully, ignorant of how close to disaster you all had come. A fire aboard is a special terror for ship crews, and a fire aboard while in warp transit doubly so. In a system, if a fire gets out of hand aboard ship, there's either help available or a handy gravitational body to park on or around. Life boats don't have warp drives of their own, there is just nowhere to squeeze them in, so you have to hope you can drop out of warp in a charted system and that FTL comm link summoned rescue can reach you before the food runs out.

That night your dreams are haunted by things that you can barely remember. Ghosts of shipmates past laugh at some grand joke that you missed. A coconut falls on a black sand beach. Old Tex crossing up the moonshine with the engine degreaser while making manhattans again. Lou 'Spaghetti' Spinnelli singing opera at full false-soprano volume while cleaning, earphones on and blaring, mopping right over the bosun's boots.

You wake ill-rested and mildly irritable. Your breakfast of synthesized eggs tasting faintly of cardboard, more so then usual anyways, is enough to get you to synth up an extra cup of coffee with salt and slug the whole thing back while it is scalding hot and black. You just about burn your throat and heave your breakfast back up but it sure as hell wakes you up to face your shift.

February 5th, 8252

You feel the deck plates buck under your feet not five seconds before the Night Horse translate back to normal space at the edge of the Murnmore system. You leave the translation to complete on automatic as you pull up the status board. The jolt of translation hits and then the Night Horse bucks and twists again. Your eyes dart across the display searching frantically for a cause. As the deck bucks for a third time you spot it. The maneuvering thrusters are firing erratically, overcompensating for something and being near-instantly shut down by the automatic overrides. You fight the urge to spit on the deck in frustration. You take a deep breath to steady your voice before thumbing the ship-wide broadcast button.

“Midshipman Engel to the bridge, man the sensors please, passives only. Midshipman Huckle, please find out what is tripping the thrusters and cut it off. As soon as you do we're going to silent running.”

A pair of 'aye aye Sir' responses come back over the comms but you have already put them out of mind and turned to the help. With the thrusters bucking erratically you have to shed velocity and soon. You chop the main thruster output down to half and drag the Night Horse into a series of curving turns to bleed off the extra speed.

“Engineering to Bridge, resetting the thrusters now. Reset time is five seconds. That will flush the error state out of the system. Thrusters coming back up... now.”

“Bridge here, can confirm thrusters are back to normal operational status. Going to silent running.” You flip the needed switched to set the Night Horse all but drifting along a ballistic trajectory in a bid to minimize external emissions.

“Sir? You need to see this.”

“Send it to my display Midshipman Engel, thank you... Shit.”

“Aff Sir.”

“Bridge to Engineering, how are things looking back there?”

“Still chasing out gremlins from the rapid reset sir, and silent running limits how fast I can go. Why?”

“We've got company in system. And it's not friendly.”