Adrift in the dark

[Widow's Veil]

//From the bases being gone, repeat of opening post in base thread. Figured it would best go here instead of in the POB forum


Day 1

Fred is staring out the main window of the station. Only faint red lights are behind him, the station is on emergency lighting and heating only to place minimal load on the station reactor for conservation. Outside, the once tranquil backdrop of nebulae and asteroids is gone. It is impossibly dark outside the windows, almost as if it was sucking the light out from within the station. He turns and looks grim.

I don't even know if this message will reach anyone, so I might as well monologue. Some sort of spatial anomaly displaced us. Nothing is outside but the darkness. I don't understand how but there aren't even any stars. We've switched to emergency protocols. All power is off in bays other than A and we are rationing our stores accordingly, but who knows how long until we somehow identify our position or even more importantly, find a way home. Construction has halted. What few engineers we have are attempting to adapt a jump drive to the stations power core to see if we can move the whole thing. My hopes are not high. I may not be a scientist, but that device was made to move a battleship, not a space station. And I highly doubt increasing the reactor throughput will allow us to move this station without either catastrophic damage or failure... Still though, it's better than sitting around defeated and waiting for stores to run out.

I promised my crew prosperity and safety. He looks outside again. I'm not sure they've ever thought me a bigger fool.

[Widow's Veil]

Day 5

Footsteps echo down the main corridor of the Veil. Fred was walking the truss down from sector A towards the sealed B blast door, into the powered down sections of the station.

He was doing busy work. Double checking the seals on bulkheads, making sure the outer hull was still maintaining its integrity, running diagnostics on life support. Anything to get his mind off the current situation. The sensors couldn't even detect any traces of radiation in this space. He did not even know if he was IN space.

"Bulkhead seal test complete. Seal reads optimal. Replacement unnecessary." scrolled across the screen on the access panel. Fred turned to return to main engineering to see what the others were up to. Somehow the corridor seemed even more looming walking towards the pulsing emergency lights than it did walking into the darkness.

Keying in the access code, the door slid open in front of him revealing the second deck of main engineering. Most of the crew was either here or in the commons. At least in engineering, the core provided more light than just the emergency lights. He looked down. Below, the crew worked away tediously, likely trying to lose themselves in their work as much as Fred was. Above, many of the non-engineering crew had been tasked with cannabalizing the hyperspace scanner production line. "We need as many salvagable optronics as possible," the last memo read.

In any other situation, he would be furious with the state of the reactor room. Coil after coil of superconductors lay on the ground, waiting to be put into what looked like some kind of cage apparatus. At the center of it, a mark 4 unit of a prototype jump device. The mark 4 was being used because of its significantly higher yield, even at the expense of increase strain on the reactor and fuel consumption. It guaranteed atleast the A sector going...somewhere. Chances dropped significantly for sectors B and C, but not outside the realm of possibility. "Still though, might as well play it safe and confine ourselves to A," he thought.

The familiar clang of boots on metal stairs snapped Fred out of his thought process. Chief Engineer Roberts was coming up and making a bee line for Fred.