I jolted awake, a sharp, insistent sound piercing my dreamless rest. Apparently, I had fallen asleep at the controls waiting for the reboot to finish up. I peered through bleary eyes at what was making an infernal racket.

BEEP BEEP BEEP

"Turn it off," I muttered, my voice gravelly from sleep. My hands groped blindly across the console, searching for the source of the noise.

The alarm stopped

Blinking away the grogginess, I focused on the diagnostic screen in front of me. The reboot was complete, its final report blinking patiently on the display. The Mammut's systems were active again—barely.

“Computer, status report,” I commanded to the air.

“Not authorized,” came the automated reply.

“Ah, forgot about that,”I sighed, cursing under my breath. Of course, I’d forgotten to restore my stolen command codes. With a few keystrokes, I reinstated them, bypassing the outdated security protocol to give me access.

“Computer, status report,” parroting my earlier statement.

The synthetic voice droned out a list of the ship’s battered systems:

Life Support 87%

Gravity Generator 76%

Warp Reactor-2 65%

Warp Core 63%

Warp Reactor-1 61%

Shields 48%

Engines 22%

Navigation 19%

Integrity Fields 7%

Communications offline

Sensors offline

“At least we have life support, small blessings. Still going to wear the suit though,” The real issue, however, was the black alloy along the Mammut’s hull. The sensors were covered by it from the forward section all the way back to a little past three quarters of the hull, rendering them useless, and the rest were damaged. Worse, it seemed to be growing in some way. Have to keep an eye on it.

““Guess I’ll have to launch a probe for external data,” I said aloud, planning my next steps. “Reactors first, integrity fields second, shields third, and life support fourth. Everything else can wait.”

Squeezing back into my EV suit, I secured the helmet and stepped into the dim corridor outside the control room. I started walking towards the aft section while remembering the full layout of the ship.

There were two places a probe would be stored. The storage room on deck 2 and the shuttle Bay that was currently open to the void. Not wanting to take a spacewalk I briefly decided to climb up to the deck above as the elevator was currently broken.

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The Mammut had five decks in all, a vertical slice of survival buried deep in the void. The control room, nestled on the third deck, was supposed to be the safest part of the ship. I climbed the maintenance ladder to deck 2, the EV suit’s servos humming softly with every movement.

Deck 2 was eerily quiet. The storage room was ahead, down a corridor where emergency lighting cast unsettling shadows. My boots echoed against the floor, the sound amplified in the silence. I reached the storage room and hesitated for a moment before prying open the door. The heavy door resisted before finally creaking open, revealing a cluttered interior.

Inside, the air felt heavier though I knew it was just my imagination. The room was crammed with all the odds and ends the Mammut had accumulated during its years of service. Crates were stacked haphazardly, their labels faded, some in languages I didn’t recognize. I scanned the room, looking for the cylindrical housing of a standard issue probe.

“Come on, where are you?” I muttered, shoving aside smaller containers.

Finally, tucked behind a stack of spare coolant tanks, I spotted it: a sleek, dust-covered probe launcher. I heaved it onto a nearby workbench and began the process of activation. Its onboard diagnostics flickered to life, the interface clunky but functional. The probe was intact, its systems self-contained.

“Alright, old friend. Let’s see what’s out there,” I said, carrying the launcher toward the aft airlock.

The Mammut’s aft section was an even greater mess than I remembered. Damage from the warp jump was evident here more than anywhere else, the walls warped and scarred, black alloy creeping along the seams. The airlock door, however, was miraculously functional. I cycled it manually, stepping into the chamber and securing the probe launcher to the exterior hatch.

“Launching probe,” I said, almost ceremoniously, as I pulled the release lever.

The probe shot out into the void with a soft hiss, its thrusters firing briefly before it drifted into the blackness. I watched its telemetry feed light up on my helmet display. The probe’s sensors began to scan, piecing together a picture of the surrounding space.

The results came back almost immediately—and they weren’t comforting.

The warp jump hadn’t just displaced the Mammut in space; it had thrown it into a region utterly devoid of known star charts. The probe detected faint stellar bodies and debris fields, but the spatial coordinates didn’t match anything in the ship’s database. Worse, the strange alloy coating the hull seemed to emit a faint energy signature—a beacon in the dark.

“Great. Just great,” I muttered, cycling the airlock and retreating into the ship. “I’m lost, the ship’s half dead, and I might as well be waving a neon sign that says ‘come and get me.’”

Back on Deck 3, I started prioritizing repairs. The reactor came first. Without stable power, nothing else would hold. I climbed down to Deck 4, where the reactors housings loomed like a sleeping beast. Its hum was erratic, the pulse uneven. Panels flickered, spilling light onto the black alloy creeping up its sides.

“Let’s see why your energy readings make you seem like you've had 16 cups of pure espresso in the last hour,” I said, accessing the maintenance terminal.

A warp reactor is a device that uses pulsed power modules to drive a Warp Core, which consists of two ion ring Marx generators and two dense plasma focuses. The dense plasma focuses fire at each other, injecting two ion and plasma beams from opposite ends of a double-barreled head. The beams merge near the device's mid-plane, and are then radially compressed and accelerated.

Both reactors output was unstable, fluctuating between safe and critical levels. I spent what felt like hours stabilizing the power core, rerouting damaged circuits and replacing fried relays with spares scavenged from auxiliary systems.The computer AI regulated the energy flow into the warp core the entire time to prevent it from melting down. My fingers trembled inside the EV suit gloves, the strain of precision work amplified by the stakes.

Finally, both reactors hum evened out, a steady rhythm like a heartbeat.

“One thing to check off the list,” I whispered, stepping back while wishing I could wipe the sweat from my brow through the helmet. Even though the suit’s environmental controls kept my temperature regulated, I was still sweating due to the strain.

Next came the integrity fields. They were at a dismal 7%, barely holding the ship together. I climbed back up to Deck 3, where the field emitters were housed. The black alloy had taken root here as well, its tendrils growing across the emitter nodes. I pried them free and replaced the worst of the damaged components, watching as the field strength inched upward. The alloy seemed to resist my efforts, as though it was alive and unwilling to cede control.

After what felt like an eternity, the emitters stabilized at 40% capacity. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to buy some time.

The shields and life support came next. Both systems were heavily compromised, but functional enough to limp along with minor repairs.

Making one more trip, I head up to deck one where the crew quarters would be and grab a cot and blanket.

By the time I returned to the control room, exhaustion had taken hold. My body felt like lead, my thoughts sluggish. I collapsed into the chair again, staring at the ship’s diagnostic display of all I did.

Working up the courage to move again I slowly crawl out of my EV suit. Set up the cot and disappeared into Dreamland.