Puck glanced over as she approached. “Find anything useful?”
“You could say that,” she sighed. “What’s going on with the Typhos?”
Puck brought up a recording on the terminal and pressed play. The brassy audio came with a great deal of crackling, cursing, and a few back-and-forth grumbles. Puck gave her a nervous grin, then fast-forwarded and pressed play again.
Puck’s voice played first. “Typhos, this is Kharon, we read you.”
“Oh, fucking finally,” the gruff voice on the other end crackled through. “Kharon this is Optio Beckar—SCS Typhos, we—mayday—”
“Optio?” Puck said. There were a few seconds of hissing static.
“—hear us?”
“Yes, hearing you again, sir.”
“We need to abandon ship immediately—send vessels—”
“Sir, be advised, we cannot relay to you. Both Zelus Gate and Kharon have been turned off and abandoned.”
“Kharon’s been abandoned too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then who the fuck are you?”
“We’re, uh … we’re what remains of the crew of the Argus, sir. The same thing happened to us, we retreated to here.”
“We—” The man’s voice cut away, and Adequin grimaced as a loud squeal rang out, drowning the rest of his sentence in static. “—Divide is contracting toward us.”
“It is, sir.”
“Fuck.”
“Do you have any warp cores?”
“Void. No.”
“You need to get as many of your people as you can aboard your away vessels and start flying inward.”
“Away vessels? We have a thousand fucking people. We could only fit … maybe thirty…”
Puck stayed silent for a few long seconds, then his voice came back low and apologetic. “You’ll just have to do the best you can, sir. Fly straight inward. Try to make it here—or Zelus Gate.”
“How can we—” Another peal of static overtook the recording, and Puck slid his finger across the screen to close the playback menu.
“That’s when we lost them,” he said quietly.
Adequin rubbed the back of her neck. Puck looked down, and she gripped his shoulder. “You did good, Circitor. It’d take us weeks to warp to them, and by that time the Divide would be so far in, we’d all be done for. It’s all you could do.”
He let out a soft sigh, then gave a furtive glance at Griffith and Jackin standing behind her, speaking quietly. “Sir,” Puck said, “can I talk with you in private for a moment?”
She nodded, and he followed as she crossed to an empty corner of the room. “What is it?”
Puck lowered his voice. “I didn’t want to announce it in front of everyone because I wasn’t sure what you’d want to do. But I dug deep into the code, and I found a restart fail-safe. It’s what’s been keeping us from getting the gate turned back on.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “You can turn it on?”
He nodded.
“Rake!” Jackin called suddenly. She looked back over to find Jackin hovered over the main terminal. “It’s … Lugen.”
Adequin’s breath stalled in her throat, and she hesitated only a second before jogging across the room and sliding into the seat. It’d taken fucking long enough. He’d probably been sunning himself on some Outer Core tropical beach. But she was relieved. If anyone could do something to help them, it was Lugen.