Page 60 of Journey to the Forbidden Zone
One moment she was walking, the next she was airborne, slammed sideways by a force that felt like a god had kicked theAntillesin the ribs. Her shoulder connected hard with the bulkhead, a flare of white-hot pain shooting down her arm. She crashed to the deck, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. The lights died instantly, plunging the cabin into utter blackness punctuated only by the violent strobing of emergency beacons outside the small viewport. Their bloody glare painted jagged shadows that leaped and died with each pulse.
A sound unlike anything she’d ever heard tore through the ship – a metallic shriek so profound it vibrated in her bones, a death cry from theAntilles’s very core. It was followed by a deeper, shuddering groan, the sound of massive structural members straining beyond their limits.
Then came the alarms. Not the usual proximity alerts or system warnings, but the full-throated, mindless shriek of theship-wide catastrophe klaxon. It wasn’t a sound; it was a physical assault, drilling into her skull.
Carmen gasped, rolling onto her knees, ignoring the screaming pain in her shoulder. Adrenaline burned through the lingering fog of guilt and desire, sharpening everything to a razor’s edge.
The deck plates trembled violently under her palms. Conduits overhead spat furious showers of sparks, illuminating the cabin in brief, hellish flashes. The stench of burning insulation and something hotter, more elemental – scorched metal, vaporized coolant – flooded the air.
She scrambled towards the comm panel near the hatch and slapped her palm against the comm activation pad. It flickered weakly, the display cracked.
“Zed!” she roared, her voice raw, swallowed by the cacophony. “Zed, report! What the hell was that!”
Static hissed, then Zed’s voice cut through, unnervingly calm amidst the bedlam.
“Captain. Primary power fluctuations detected across all decks. Source: Engineering. Jump-drive core containment has been compromised.”
The blood in her veins turned to ice. Jump-drive containment. Failure wasn’t just breaking down. It was catastrophic energy release. Meltdown. Oh, shit
“Status! Containment field integrity?”
“Containment field integrity: 0%. Core breach confirmed. Hyperspace transition has been forcibly terminated. We are adrift in normal space.”
Adrift. The jump-drive wasn’t just damaged; it was gone. Ripped apart from the inside. TheAntilleswas dead in space. Or worse.
“Sark!” Carmen barked, switching channels, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. “Sark, respond! Where the hell are we?”
Silence stretched for agonizing seconds, filled only by the ship’s death throes and the relentless wail of the klaxon. Then Sark’s voice crackled over the comm, thin, reedy, and drowning in undiluted terror.
“Captain, I’m getting nothing on short-range sensors.Nothing. No stars. No nebulae. No energy signatures.” His voice hitched, a sob barely contained. “We’re … we’re in the void, Captain. Deep void.”
Oh, no. Oh, God, no.
“Captain,” Sark continued. “Captain, we’re a thousand lightyears from the nearest charted system. There’s … there’s nothing. We’re in the middle ofnothing.”
CHAPTER 23
Carmen rubbed her shoulder,trying to assuage the dull, insistent throb, despite the pain providing a grounding counterpoint to the numb horror spreading through her chest. The emergency lights in the mess hall cast long, skeletal shadows across the faces of the crew, painting them in stark relief: Sark, hunched over, his orange skin ashen, webbed fingers twisting together; Norvik, unnervingly still, his blue face impassive but his black eyes fixed on a point beyond the table, calculating odds only he could see; Letitia, leaning against the bulkhead near the hatch, arms crossed, her dark eyes burning with a fury that seemed directed inward as much as outward. Zed’s boxy chassis stood nearby, one of his telescopic arms hanging loose, sparking intermittently from a damaged joint. On the comm screen mounted on the bulkhead, Mila’s image was a study in calm focus, her green eyes watchful, her furred ears pricked forward.
The silence wasn’t quiet. Outside, the void roared, swallowing the groans of the woundedAntilles. A thousand light-years. Nowhere. Nothing. The words echoed in the hollow space between her ears, a death sentence whispered with lips of guilt.
Sark broke first. A choked sound escaped him, halfway between a gasp and a sob. He buried his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking. The raw, unvarnished terror of it set fire to Carmen’s nerves. She understood it. Felt it clawing at the edges of her own control. But she couldn’t afford it. Not now. Not ever.
“Enough, Sark,” Carmen said, her voice slicing through the heavy quiet. She forced her tone to stay low, flat. “Panic gets us spaced faster. Save it.”
He lifted his head, tears glistening on his orange cheeks.
“Save it for what, Captain?” His voice trembled. “The drive’s scrap. We’ve got, what? Weeks of air? Months? Just floating here until we …” He trailed off, unable to voice the slow, suffocating end.
“Until we starve. Or freeze. Or the microfractures finally give way and we get to experience vacuum up close and personal,” Letitia finished for him, her voice tight with a brittle anger. She pushed off the bulkhead, pacing a tight circle. “Great options. Real inspiring pep talk, Captain.”
“Pep talks are for winners, Letitia,” Carmen replied, leaning forward, resting her forearms on the cold metal table. The throb in her shoulder intensified. “We’re not winning. We’re surviving. So, let’s figure out how the hell we dothatfor longer than next week.”
She turned her focus to the impassive blue face across the table.
“Norvik, options. Real ones. What have we got?”
“Survival probability under current conditions is negligible, Captain,” he stated, his voice devoid of inflection. “Without propulsion, we cannot seek resources. Life support is stable, but finite. Food and water reserves: approximately sixty-three standard days at rationed levels. Air recycling: optimal for now, but contingent on power stability, which is currently fluctuating at dangerous levels due to the drive-core breach.”