Heat crept up Adequin’s neck. She turned her face to Puck, though her eyes stayed on the screen. “Lock down the bridge, please.”
Puck clamped his gaping mouth shut and began furiously swiping through menus.
“Sir…？” Kamara turned stunned green eyes onto Adequin. Eyes that were terrified, eyes that begged for an explanation. Adequin could only shake her head once.
She turned back to the viewscreen, catching another glint as it danced across the abyss. “Puck, let’s go full dark.”
“Uh…” Puck’s voice wavered, then he cleared the hesitation from his throat. “Copy, sir.” He raised his voice to address the rest of the crew. “Time to batten down the hatches, ladies and gentlemen. Get to your posts.”
The crew snapped from their reveries, almost crashing into one another as they hastened to their consoles.
“Flynn, let’s get those shields raised,” Puck said.
Flynn, a stout man with a ruddy complexion, gaped at Puck for a few long moments. He let out a sharp breath, then sat at his terminal, and with trembling fingers began to type in commands. Commands he’d never had to type before, and that no defense engineer aboard the Argus had ever typed.
“Vega,” Puck continued, “we need all hatches shut—the outward facing observation windows and hangar bay doors first, please.”
“Yes, sir,” Vega called out, already sitting at her console, navigating through menus.
“It’s Roth, right?” Puck asked a gruff, older man.
Roth gave a curt nod. “Yessir.”
“How’s that cloaking system looking these days?”
The older man gave a relenting shrug. “Functional, s’far as I know.”
“Check it out, let’s see if we can get it online.”
Roth nodded and leaned over his screen.
Puck raised his voice to speak to the whole crew again. “We’ve got power diverted away from Duo, Octo, and Novem Sectors, so do not draw from those systems—that’s two, eight, nine. If you need additional resources, ask me first. The rest of you, start taking all nonessential systems off-line. Start outward-facing and work inward. Low-light mode, reduced O2 and grav in uninhabited sectors, the whole works.”
Adequin watched Puck work in reverent silence. In the quiet, the tiny voice in the back of her head grew louder, judging her, calling her out on the futility of it all. She’d put the crew to work simply to keep them busy. Distract them to give herself time to process what this meant.
That wasn’t an enemy rolling up to shoot them out of the sky. It wasn’t a complement of Viator forces crossing over to wipe them out. She couldn’t arm her soldiers and create a battle plan and give a fervent, rousing speech to inspire them to greatness. They could shut the blinds and lock the doors and pretend they weren’t home, but it would achieve nothing.
But what else could she do? She’d already sent for help. They’d pushed the thrusters beyond their limits, and they had no engines. They were dead in the water. Thirty-five thousand kilometers from the Divide and counting.
Her brain did the math without her consent, estimating how much time had passed between Kamara’s updates on the distance of the visual anomaly. Something in the realm of fifty thousand kilometers per hour.
“Forty minutes,” she said, not realizing she’d spoken aloud until Puck turned a confused look onto her. Realization flickered across his eyes.
Before he could respond, Flynn interrupted, “Sir, the shield’s sensors are going haywire. We’re getting hit with…” He trailed off, his pink cheeks blanching.
“With what?” Puck asked.