Chapter 14: Chapter 9: Damage Control Drill

--1 Week later–

 

“Commander, we are ready for the FTL jump.” Lieutenant Zu saluted me. 

“Alright, Ellie, start the FTL countdown if you would.” The week had passed by relatively smoothly. I still had a couple of nightmares, but Eva helped me through those by keeping me some company. Now we were ready to depart from Felix Invenire. Since our next jump would take a couple of hours, we had decided to do a damage control exercise in the meantime. As things could go wrong at any time, it was also important to train during jumps.

“Is everyone in position?” I asked my lovely XO. She’d been very helpful to lessen the load on my shoulders this week, and I was very grateful for that. 

“Yes, all practice dummies are in place and waiting to be rescued. The fire simulators have been placed and activated as well.” 

“Good.” I nodded and looked forward towards the bridge. Steadying myself against the railing. Ellie’s countdown reached zero and the ship zoomed into FTL. “Let’s begin in seven minutes.” 

Luna nodded and stared at her tablet. 

Those seven minutes passed swiftly as I opened the intercom. “Attention, attention! A fire has been reported in hallway 9F. Damage control, to your stations!” I then sounded the ship’s damage control alarm and then turned myself to the different camera feeds Ellie had set up for me. 

The damage control crew quickly came into action and arrived at the scene shortly after. Following what they had learned during training and previous drills, everything was going very smoothly. 

I nodded contently. “Looks fine and dandy to me.” 

 

At least, it was fine and dandy, until something shook the ship again. Almost throwing me out of balance. 

“Uh. What was that?” I looked around the bridge. But just as I did, all the lights went out.

Ellie quickly restored the ship's lighting. “Commander, we have been hit by a sudden surge of energy.” Ellie explained. 

“Commander! My systems are down. I can’t see anything on the sensors.” Lieutenant Zu called out. 

At the same time, a voice yelled over the intercoms. “Fire in the engineering bay! Help!” 

I didn’t waste a single second to open up a shipwide channel of my own. “Attention. We have a fire in Engineering. This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill!” I closed the channel again and yelled to the rest of the bridge. “Get us out of FTL before we crash into a star.” 

“Yes ma’am.” The bridge personnel responded in unison. 

Luna was frantically swiping on her holo tablet. 

“Can you see anything?” 

“Nothing. All cameras are out as well.” 

“Fuck. Something must’ve destroyed the sensory circuits. This is bad.” I looked around and opened a channel to Gunny, who was part of the damage control group. “Gunny, did you get the alert?” 

“Yes we did. Intercoms are working fine.” 

“I’ll need you to be our eyes. We are completely blind here.” 

“Aye aye. We are almost there.”  

 

The entire bridge held their breath as we waited for more information from Gunny. The intercom stays quiet for a minute before it roars to life again. 

“One of the oxygen tanks has exploded. Several people are injured. Noone appears to be dead. We are trying to contain the fire, but we’ll definitely need to repair that tank.” 

“We have spare parts. Shouldn’t be an issue.” I looked at the ship's layout on my holostick. “No… that won’t work.” I shook my head. 

“Commander?” Luna asked. 

“Ah, was just thinking of venting the air to immediately get rid of the fire. But without sensors, it’s just too risky. We wouldn’t know which airlocks are closed and which ones aren’t. Talking about sensors…” I looked up at the rest of the bridge. “Any ETA on when we get them back?” 

“No clue Commander. We’ll need to manually reroute the circuits if we want to temporarily have them back. But we won’t have a clue what’s happening in the back of the ship.” Zu answered. 

“Any info is better than no info.” I nodded. “Can you go and reroute them now?” 

“Yes ma’am.” She saluted and ran off the bridge.

 

A tense quarter of an hour later, Gunny reported back. “Fire is mostly under control now. We are pushing forward now to squeeze out the last bit.” 

“Any word on the injured?” 

“They’ve been sent to the infirmary already. Most had slight burns.” 

“Alright.” I closed the intercom. “I’m going to check on the infirmary.” 

“Commander, shouldn’t I do this? I think you’d be more valuable here.” Luna stopped me by stepping in front of me. 

“Right… Yeah. I guess that’d be best.” 

“I’ll let you know more the second I get there.” She smiled and turned around to head to the infirmary.

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At almost the same time, Lieutenant Zu came back on the bridge. “Circuits should have been rerouted, Commander. We just need to do a reboot of the system now.” 

“Ellie?” I waited for my robotic assistant to reboot the system. 

“System rebooted, Commander.” 

“Status?” 

Zu got to her station again. “Looks like it’s working, Commander. We have vision of 80% of the ship. And apart from the big dead zone behind us, our exterior sensors have been restored as well.”  

“Alright, now we can go and try to figure out what the actual fuck hit us.” 

“I might have a theory about that, ma’am.” Lieutenant Bailey raised his hand. “Me and Lieutenant McAllister have come up with a theory.” 

Lieutenant McAllister continued. “We had a brief period of data from our sensors coming in after we got hit. And we believe we might have been hit by a pulse of a pulsar.” 

“A pulsar, really?” 

“The energy signature matches it, Ma’am.” Bailey said. 

“What’s the chance of that happening?” 

“Incredibly small.” Bailey shook his head at the screen in front of it. “But it’s still there.” 

“So, you are telling me we got hit by a Pulsar and survived?” 

“We only travelled through it for a fraction of a second, and our shield caught most of it. But again. It’s just a theory, could have been anything, but that’s the most plausible.” McAllister finished. 

“Hmmm. Ellie?” 

“Yes, Commander?” 

“Is there any way we can prevent getting hit by a pulsar. Build in some kind of detection system or something like that?” 

“Not really, Commander. Not until we’ve charted the entirety of the galaxy.” 

“But, like I said, Commander.” Lieutenant Bailey talked to me. “The chances of that happening are incredibly small. We’d need to have supernatural bad luck for this to happen to us again.” 

“But it happened to us once, didn’t it? It’s always good to be prepared.” 

“Commander.” Ellie spoke to me again. “Prevention might not be possible, but there might be a possibility to negate the effects of getting hit drastically so this situation will not occur again. If Lieutenant Bailey can give me access to the data, I might be able to devise something to help the ship survive better in the future.” 

“Bailey, can you give her access?” 

The Lieutenant saluted. “Yes ma’am.”

 

I worked on some other minor issues caused by the energy surge until my holostick notified me of an incoming call. It was my XO. 

“Yes, LC? Any news from the infirmary.” 

“Most people are fine.” Luna replied. “We got a couple of serious injuries, but Doctor Winter says they’ll be fine with some recovery. How are the sensors?” 

“Our rear sensors are fucked, but we can do a couple of Crazy Ivan’s to see if anyone is sneaking up on us.” 

“I am not familiar with that term.” 

“It’s old submarine language.” I explained. “It means that you perform a sudden hard turn to look at your blind spot. Submarines had a sonar blind spot behind them because of turbulence created by their propellers. Luckily, I followed a course on pre-spaceflight naval tactics.”

“Ah…” Luna didn’t really sound terribly interested, but I couldn’t blame her. Most of these tactics were not popular in officer training either. But they could definitely be useful, as was the case now. “Would you still like to visit the infirmary, Commander? I can come back and take over the bridge now, assuming things have calmed down.” 

“Yes, I’d like to visit the injured myself if that’s possible. I also want to inspect the damage in Engineering.” 

“I’ll be returning to the bridge shortly.” Luna reported and hung up. 

 

Fifteen minutes later, Luna had changed posts with me, leaving me free to go and see the crew. 

“Commander!” One of the more injured crewmen called out to me once they saw me enter the infirmary. The left half of their body was covered in bandages. 

“How are you doing, sailor?” I walked closer to their bed. “Hope you are not in too much pain.” 

“It definitely hurts, but these painkillers are working wonders.” They smiled. “I was standing right next to the oxygen tank when it went up. Luckily, everyone was wearing their protective gear.” 

“Well, I hope you get better soon.” I then raised my voice. “And that counts for the rest of you as well. We can’t run this ship without our engineering experts, now, can we!?” 

“Hell yes, Commander!” A female engineer yelled from the other side of the room. Others quickly joined in the cheering. 

I smiled. -Morale successfully restored.- 

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