A hiss of air pressure and a blast of recycled air woke James from his artificial slumber. He felt the crust of his eyes crack as he started to open them, and felt the sting of how dry they were as the canned air brushed across the sensitive orbs. He instinctively tried to lift an arm and wipe at them, but the cryo cuff held it in place along with multiple intravenous lines that had sustained him during his hibernation. There was a hum as they started feeding him a cocktail of electrolytes and stimulants to get his internal system going again.The red flashing emergency light, meant to be gentler on long unused eyes, was blinding as it flashed its alert at him.
“Captain Riley, 59265,” He slurred his I.D. out through a sandpaper dry throat. His tongue felt swollen as he rattled off the numbers. The flash of his neural link projected in his vision as it made connection to the shipboard system. His private hud started to come online “System, report.”
“Unknown energy spike detected, Captain.” The robotic female voice replied. It was projected directly into his mind through the link, hitting all of the same receptors it would have if the noise were audible. “Navigation offline. Unknown radiation detected. Long range communications offline. Life support operational. No imminent threats detected to colonist lives. Unable to restart navigation systems. Maintenance drones report the primary communications antenna has been damaged.”
“Disengage I.V. and open pod.” He ordered.
“It is advised that you allow the pod to complete its cycle, Cap-”
“Override. Let me out.” James growled, and the pod hissed again as the lid lifted away on hydraulic arms. The needles sliding from his arm left an uncomfortable feeling, but the pod hit it with a puff of coagulant and the holes sealed quickly as if there hadn’t been half a dozen hoses running into it. The pod sat at an incline, and with the door open James was able to stumble out of it. He gripped the side, immediately regretting not letting it run the wake up cycle, but he caught himself on its edge as he got his feet. He would rather deal with cryo hangover than sit in the stifling confines of the pod.
“Is the commander coming online?” James asked.
“Commander Perkins is undergoing the wake up cycle now." The system responded.
"I know that isn't sass I'm detecting." James said. He felt there was a hint of judgment in the system's response.
"Negative, Captain." The robotic voice replied. James just grunted as he paused to throw on some ship fatigues. The clothes stuck to his damp, clammy skin. Still cold from the cryo sleep, the shirt was awkward as he pulled it into place. The entire time, he gritted his teeth against the worst hangover headache of his life. Having antifreeze in your veins for who knew how long turned out to be an unpleasant experience, and he reminded hismelf to just let the damn thing give him the damn wakeup cycle next time. With the clothes on, he straightened his back and took on a confident stride as he headed for the bridge.
Half the monitors were dimmed or out when he arrived, and warning signals flashed across the control panel of his station. He sat in the captain's chair, taking a moment to run a thumb over the hand carved bear he kept at his station. A small trinket he had worked hard on, the hunk of now extinct walnut wood it was made from had cost him over a month’s salary, but he was proud of his little totem. His small ritual done, he immediately began flicking through the notifications. Most of them read exactly like the system had warned. Unknown energy spikes, radiation the instruments could not get a proper read on. Their navigation systems appeared to be fried. Anything with an external sensor was zapped. The life support was a completely inboard system and had all of the shielding necessary for travel through the great black abyss, but anything else that they needed to stay the course or call for help was completely fried.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
As he was reading through reports, Commander Samantha Perkins entered the ship's bridge, she appeared noticeably healthier and more alert. Her complexion glowed with newfound vitality, her cheeks tinged with color. Her eyes sparkled with renewed brightness, the exhaustion of cryo sleep that had dulled them now replaced by a sense of energy and determination. Her movements were confident and assured, a testament to the restorative effects of the nutrient cycle.
"What are we looking at?" James asked after she had some time to read.
"No damn clue." She said curtly. "I'm digging into star charts while the system gives us a visual of the external. With how fast we are going it's going to take some time to render. We are about a decade from our next jump point though.”
James ran through the status of the colonists. So far, the system had only woken the both of them up. He initiated the wake up protocols of the ship's personnel. The hundred and fifty-three crew members, including himself and Sam, were the people who kept the lights on and the drones running, as well as a fully functional hospital staff. He needed them all to start going through systems and checking on their ten thousand passengers. The colonists, bright eyed hopefuls longing for a new beginning, were stacked like cordwood in their cryogenic hibernation pods. The massive bays of the ship were filled to the brim with everything they needed to get a colony up and running. From food stuffs to terraforming equipment, It all needed to be checked for damage or contamination from the unknown forces that the ship had run into.
“James?” Sam said. There was a tenor of fear in her voice that snapped him out of his thoughts. She gestured, and the ship’s AI shared the image to his optical display.
A series of images that the system had salvaged from the moments of the incident up to the present. It was all from external cameras of the ship. They were traveling so fast that it took the system time to interpret the delay from the light. The relativity meant that it took time for the computer to compile it all as it backtracked what was captured in their passage as they traveled faster than the light itself.
The external view was the usual star filled void. They were relatively close to a solar system, close enough for long range cameras to be aware that there were bodies circling the red sun at its center, as they were using the solar mass to slingshot into their next jump point. But as the images progressed, it looked as if the sun had sent a flare in every direction, but the readings did not align with the solar radiation. It flared, and as the wall of light closed in, the last images before the cameras were fried was the red energy wall coming at them transitioning to blue.
“That last part had to be equipment malfunction, right?” James said to himself.
“The blue?” Sam asked. “Yeah, that's what I thought. But none of it is behaving as it should according to all of our known observations of solar flares or anything of the like. I can’t even tell you what hit us, but it wasn't solar radiation.” As she spoke, another alarm on their consoles started to activate.
“Uh, Sam? Did you trigger a jump attempt?” James asked. He couldn’t quite keep the fear out of his voice. The stoic and composed captain, that was him. Samantha on the other hand started to scramble as she tapped at controls. She started swearing under her breath. “Sam?” He asked again as he tried to take control of the attempted jump sequence.
“It’s doing it on its own.” She said. “The core is activating on its own. There aren’t even coordinates entered.”
“So, to clarify, the physics bending engine that lets us go between two points of space is attempting to, what, shove us through one point of space into…?”
“I have no damn idea, Jim.” She said, defeated. “Everything I'm seeing throws theoretical physics out the window.”
The silence was deafening as they stared at one another, both processing and hoping the other would speak first. James swallowed audibly. Sam’s hands hovered in front of her, her fingers twitching over the controls wanting to work but unsure what to do. Then her hands balled into fists, and she set them down on the console in front of her.
“Whatever is about to happen,” James said, “know that it’s been and hon-”
…initializing scan…