Malan heard the sounds of raised voices above his and Talia’s own heavy breathing and pounding footsteps well before they turned towards the Miotov’s humble docking bay. The station actually had two, one on either side of it’s main body, but they’d not used the other since their arrival at the station two years prior.

Their own transport, a lightweight cruiser designed for shuttling small crew between systems in comfort and little else, was mag-locked to the Miotov’s docking arm and accessible via a small airlock and decontamination chamber on the side of the bay. He and Talia entered the bay at a jog. It was a simple room, with several lockers and a few monitoring stations next to the airlock.

It was directly before one of these monitor’s flickering screens that Thaddeus and Beric stood, faces flush from both the run, and flourishing anger.

“It was your job, Beric—you are our Maintenance Officer!” Thaddeus ground out, jabbing a pointed finger into Beric’s chest, which Beric slapped away with the back of his hand, nostrils flaring.

“Don’t touch me. I don’t even know what’s wrong yet, give me a chance to have a look at the diagnostics before—”

“Have a look?” Thaddeus roared, throwing his hands up in mock despair. “Have a look? Beric, keeping the Sparrow operational in case of emergencies is one of your main responsibilities. You should already bloody well know.”

“Christ, Thad, there’s only so many hours in a day and there’s only one me to keep everything up to scratch. Besides, you know how run down I’ve been—”

“Oh, well that will certainly make me feel better when I’m being torn apart by cosmic abominations. ‘Could have seen my grandchildren again, but poor Beric was run down. Oh well, he did his best!’”

Beric opened his mouth to retort, but he finally spotted them out of the corner of his eye, and the edges of his mouth previously twisted into a furious snarl twitched. Malan could almost see the plan fall into place by the relaxation of the muscles in his face. He needed a scapegoat, and Malan fit the bill perfectly.

“I get you're frustrated, Thad, but it’s not like I didn’t arrange cover. I assigned Malan to watch over it whilst I caught up—I just didn’t expect him to not ever bother.”

Malan narrowed his eyes, but Beric’s steady gaze kept his mouth closed. This wasn’t the first time Beric had thrown Malan under the bus, and it likely wouldn’t be the last if Malan wanted to keep the older man’s mouth shut. Of course, Beric had asked him to do no such thing, but that hardly mattered at this point. If nothing else, the bickering needed to stop long enough to get the Sparrow operational again.

“Sorry,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “This round of sensor cleaning took longer than—”

“Sorry for what?”

The sharp, clipped tone of Elena Vasquez stopped each of them in their tracks and they snapped towards their captain as she entered the docking bay. Her crisply pressed captain’s uniform had been hastily replaced, or rather, obscured by steel grey battle-plate. It was, much like everything she owned, meticulously maintained, yet bore the pocks and scars of years in combat. In her right hand, she held a metallic case by its black leather handle.

He had known, of course, Elena had begun adult life in the UGC military wing, and had spent years operating in fringe space. They all had. He had not ever really considered what that had meant. Now it was impossible to ignore. Their captain kept all her usual brusque sharpness in her expression, but now here eyes were cold and hard. There was an odd stillness to her—not calm, but instead, taut. A viper coiled and ready to strike at any moment.

“Well?” She repeated, and Malan shook his head free of his momentary surprise.

“I ran behind on my tasks. Didn’t get to diagnostics on the Sparrow and now it’s not functional.”

To his surprise, Elena’s piercing gaze cut not to him, but to Beric. “You passed off your responsibilities to our scrubber.”

Beric blinked owlishly for a moment, slight smirk falling away. “Malan is hardly a normal—”

“Irrelevant,” Elena hissed. “The responsibility is yours. Malan isn’t qualified, or paid to do your job for you, Beric, regardless of whatever ability he may or may not have. Now, what is the status of our bird?”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I—I’m not sure yet. I haven’t started the diagnostics yet.”

Elena’s nostrils flared, and Malan thought he could see her literally swallow a barrage of furious expletives before letting out a long, unsteady breath. “Get to it, Beric. Talia, you support him with going through the ship’s main systems. Thaddeus, assume the ship will be flight ready and perform all the other standard checks. The rift is widening still, but our sensors are yet to pick up any movement. We have time but not much. Malan,” she said, turning to him with an unreadable expression as the others scrambled to obey.

“I know you requested to be kept away from engineering and tech, but I need someone with the know-how to check the non-critical systems. There’s probably nothing there, but we can’t afford to get through all the critical diagnostics finding nothing and not even having started anything else.”

“Of course, I—”

“Sorry, Malan. But that’s not all. Here,” she said, holding out a small tablet about the size of a book for him. He took it, and peered down at the display with its litany of fluctuating readings, and his stomach lurched as he realised what it was.

“Are you sure? Surely one of the others…?”

“Of all of us, you’re the only one with any first-hand experience with the Abyss. Tell me truly, how many times have you gone back over the readings the Jauda took the day of the attack? Tell me you haven’t memorised each and every second from the moment the rift formed to when the first abominations clawed free from its depths?”

Malan said nothing, and Elena nodded in satisfaction. “Just keep an eye while you work. Keep me up to date with your best time estimate.”

“There’s no way I can do that accurately with only one example to go on.”

Elena placed a hand on his shoulder. “I know, Malan. But its better than having nothing to go on at all. Every slight advantage we can get, we take. We need to be away before they start getting through,” she said, hand tightening around the leather handle of her case. “There won’t be a fight if we don’t. Now move.”

Malan swallowed thickly, but nodded and followed the others through the momentarily acrid spray of the decontamination chamber and into the Sparrow proper. He clambered through the docking port only slightly awkwardly and forced himself to maintain a swift stride through the central mess and rec room that made up the bulk of the centre of the small cruiser.

The Sparrow was a modular craft, rather than built to specifications. It was a popular way of building ships, enabling captains to swap out modules and repurpose ships to specific tasks depending on what was required. If they were being honest, the Sparrow hadn’t been required to do much. It’s only job was to ferry them between jobs and systems at a reasonable speed, and jump fast enough to flee the scant threats that might pop up in the relatively secure systems at the heart of the UGC.

It’s main strengths were its reliability and the lack of upkeep it required, which made it all the stranger it was non-functional now of all times.

The portside corridor led him around the bulk of the rec room and captain’s quarters on his right, and directly onto the bridge. The Sparrow’s bridge was a compact affair. A pilot’s seat sat dead centre, protruding from the front of the ship with a panel of monitors and controls in front of it. Talia, Beric and Elena could pilot the ship, but the seat was usually occupied by Elena.

Flanking the pilot’s station but a few feet behind, were two more crew positions, each with their own series of flat-panel monitors suspended from the ceiling and reclined, black leather seats. Talia and Beric held these positions in flight most often, and they sat there now, fingers frantically moving across keys as they ran diagnostic after diagnostic.

It was a sign of how serious things were that Beric didn’t bother to register his arrival on the bridge, and Talia only paused enough to shoot him a strained half-smile before her eyes returned their full attention to the monitor’s above.

Malan wasted no time. At the rear of the bridge was a seldom used panel built into the back wall. It was rarely used—most of the important functions could be completed at the other stations—so there was no chair. He moistened his lips and took a sharp breath. It had been some time since he’d last had this kind of work to do. It reminded him too much of his old life, and the path that had led him here in the first place.

Unfortunately, there was no time for being caught up in his issues. Malan flicked the power switch, and his own fingers began to move—a little uncertainly at first, but in moments muscle memory and bloody-minded expertise took over. He found an old rhythm he’d not fallen into in years and he began to run diagnostics and interpret the data it fired back at him at a pace that surprised even him.

He’d expected to be rusty, to need time they didn’t have, but it was like slipping into well-worn boots. Malan knew this work, better than he ever could any of the things he’d done since the Jauda. He did not have an intimate knowledge of the Sparrow specifically—though he knew many of its modular components well—but his understanding of the science and technology that lay at the foundation was such that he didn’t need to.

Malan had once described it to his father as feeling the craft. He saw subtle shifts in the data readouts and heard the ship breathe, felt the thrumming heartbeat of it’s engines. Even delving through the Sparrow’s non-critical subsystems told him things about the more important parts of its function.

A shift in the pressure powering the ship’s hydraulic doors. Fluctuations in the cooling system’s efficiency. There was nothing that would show up on the ship’s diagnostics, but there was no doubting his instincts, nor the bigger picture what he was seeing was building up towards. This was not some small malfunction because of a corroded or degraded part, or even some glitch in the operating software. The subtle changes were in too many places, and across too many different systems for that.

The Sparrow was sick, and they had almost run out of time to find out why.