Destiny Among the Stars - Scifi - LitRPG - Adventure

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change."

– Stephen Hawking

The hangar was brand spanking new, a large space where the metal walls and deck plating gleamed under the bright overhead lights. The air still carried that faint, fresh-off-the-lot smell, scrubbed air, and something vaguely citrusy from the final system flushes.

But here was Captain Luca, on his hands and knees, in a dimly lit corner, waging war against a stubborn, greasy stain that had the audacity to mar his damn floor. It was a dark, ugly blotch, mocking the otherwise flawless surface. The indignity of it all.

He attacked the stain with a scrub brush, his biceps burning, sweat beading on his forehead and dripping into his eyes, and the tight fabric of his bodysuit sticking to his skin. The bristles scraped against the metal, a harsh sound that blended with the rhythmic hum of the ship's machinery. Did being captain come with a clause about floor scrubbing?

'Starship Maintenance Familiarity' hadn't exactly covered stain removal, but he knew enough to recognize engine grease when he saw it. The level 10 ability may allow him to remove this stain once and for all. But fuck him, right? Fear of the migraine kept him from forcing it.

"Fucking grease monkey," he muttered, picturing Ryan's smug face and his usual trail of questionable substances. "You'd think one of these idiots would have the decency to clean up their own damn messes."

He paused, leaning back on his heels, to examine his handiwork. The stain had faded, but it was still there, a faint shadow against the gleaming metal. "Son of a bitch," he hissed, grabbing a fresh rag. This stain was a personal affront, a violation of the sanctity of his ship..

The bristles of the brush caught on a rough edge, jerking his hand. He swore under his breath, rubbing his knuckles before diving back in. The smell of cleaning fluid was starting to get to him, it was acrid and sharp. His head was starting to hurt.

Then the alarm blared.

The alarm was fucking loud, a shrill, piercing shriek that sliced through the hum of the hangar, overriding everything. He froze, the scrub brush clattering to the floor, his heart hammering against his ribs as if trying to escape. Red emergency lights pulsed, bathing the hangar and the silent Percival in a sickening, rhythmic crimson. Not again, he thought.

"What the fuck now?" he snarled, scrambling for his comm unit, already sprinting towards the hangar exit. "Bridge, report! What's our status?" His voice sounded thin, strained even to his own ears. Each pulse of the red light felt like a hammer blow against his chest.

He was still technically new at this. Being in charge of everything. He was pretty good, though, if he said so himself.

Emily's voice, crackled back instantly. "Captain, we have multiple system alerts! And we're getting cascade warnings from the FTL drive calibration sequence!"

FTL drive. His blood ran cold. They were almost at the Oort Cloud passage, but the preliminary calibrations were critical.

"Ryan, Danny! What the hell is going on?" he barked into the comms, his boots pounding on the metal deck plating as he raced towards the nearest lift.

Ryan's voice, breathless and laced with panic, shot back, "Luca! We're running the final power conduit stress tests for the Reality Anchor Field! There was a surge. Danny's trying to isolate it, but the whole damn board lit up like a Christmas tree!"

"Is the FTL drive active?" he snapped, skidding to a halt as the lift doors hissed open.

"Negative! But something's drawing power erratically!" Danny yelled, his voice higher-pitched than usual. The kid was smart, but he cracked under pressure.

Just as Luca stepped into the lift, the deck beneath his feet seemed to vanish. One second he was upright, the next he was weightless, stumbling upwards, his stomach lurching violently. Gravity failure!

"Fuck!" he yelped, flailing for a handhold, his limbs uncoordinated. Then, just as suddenly, gravity slammed back on with a bone-jarring thud, sending him crashing to the lift floor. His teeth rattled, and a sharp pain shot through his knee. He'd have to yell at Chris for not making a gym down here.

"Bridge! Report!" he yelled, scrambling to his feet, adrenaline a bitter taste in his mouth.

"Intermittent gravity failure, ship-wide!" Zoe's voice came through, strained. "It's cycling! Hold on to something!"

The lift began its ascent, a jerky, unsettling ride. He braced himself, his mind racing. A power surge during FTL calibration, gravity failing… not good.

Sprinting down the corridor towards the bridge felt like running on a ship made of jelly. The deck plates seemed to shift beneath his feet with each gravity fluctuation.

He burst onto the bridge. The scene was chaotic.

Red lights still pulsed, but Emily was a rock at her XO station, her harness tight around her chest. She was rerouting power while Zoe was wrestling with the navigation console, her face tight with concentration, trying to compensate for the gravitational distortions. Danny was hunched over his science station, frantically working at his console, sweat beading on his forehead as he coordinated with Engineering below.

"Report!" he demanded, striding towards the command chair.

Emily didn't look up. "Massive power surge originated from the FTL drive calibration sequence in Engineering, Luca. It cascaded, causing intermittent failures in the gravity emitter's network and threatening to overload the FTL capacitors. Ryan and Chris are attempting to manually discharge the capacitors and isolate the surge at its source." She was a machine, spitting out information like that.

"How bad is the capacitor overload?" he asked, his eyes darting to the FTL system status display. The bars were deep in the red, pulsing ominously. The trip was over if the ship blew up.

"Critical," Danny called out from his science station, his voice tight with strain. "If Chris and Ryan can't get that discharge sequence initiated in the next two minutes, we're looking at a containment breach. At best, it fries the FTL drive. At worst..." He didn't need to finish.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Engineering, options! Now!" Luca yelled into the ship-wide comm, his voice hoarse.

Danny's voice came back first, laced with scientific caution. "Luca, I can initiate a full system shutdown and a slow, controlled bleed of the capacitors. It's the safest option. It guarantees we don't blow up. But the process will cause significant thermal stress on the secondary conduits. We'd need at least three to four days of diagnostics and repairs before we could even think about attempting another FTL calibration, let alone the jump itself."

A four-day delay. Minimum. Luca's gut clenched.

Before he could respond, Ryan's voice cut in. "No time for that! The primary relays are fused. I can bypass them, go straight to the manual discharge valve and force it. It'll be instant. But if I miscalculate the energy feedback loop..." Ryan hesitated for a fraction of a second. "It could flash-fry the entire capacitor bank. The drive would be a useless hunk of metal. Permanently."

The choice slammed into Luca. A guaranteed, lengthy delay versus a high-stakes gamble that could either save them in seconds or doom their entire mission. He saw Emily look at him, waiting for his call. They were almost at the right place to ignite the FTL drive, one of the proposed entry points. A delay here might mean an opportunity for whoever was trailing them to catch up.

"We don't have four days," Luca said, his voice suddenly clear and cold. The decision was made. "Ryan, you're up. Do the bypass. Get it done. Now."

"Copy that, Captain!"

Chris's voice, strained and panting, crackled in the background. "He's on it, Captain! It's… it's gonna be close!"

The FTL capacitor readings on Danny's science station were pulsing a deeper, angrier red, almost at the absolute overload threshold. His knuckles were white where he gripped the command chair. Come on, come on…

Suddenly, a series of sharp, percussive thunks echoed from the engineering deck through the ship's frame, followed by a high-pitched whine that rapidly diminished. The angry red on the FTL display flickered, then began to recede, slowly at first, then faster, dropping back into the amber warning zone, then finally, into the green.

A collective sigh of relief swept the bridge, so profound it was almost a physical wave. The violent vibrations ceased. The emergency lights stopped their maddening pulse, replaced by the steady, if still somewhat dim, operational lighting.

"Capacitors discharging," Ryan's voice, rough with exhaustion but triumphant, came over the comms. "Field surge contained. We… we got it, Captain. FTL system is stabilizing."

He let out a breath as his whole body slumped slightly. "Good work. Stand by for full diagnostic reports." He needed a drink.

Just then, the bridge doors hissed open and Joey stumbled in, hair wild, eyes wide and darting around. He was clutching a datapad in one hand and a half-eaten protein bar in the other.

"What in the hell was that?" he demanded, looking utterly befuddled and slightly green from the gravity fluctuations. "I was trying to catalogue the medical supplies! Did we hit something again?"

Before Luca could answer, Ryan and Chris stormed onto the bridge from the lift, faces flushed, bodysuits stained with sweat and probably some kind of coolant. Ryan was practically vibrating with residual adrenaline and fury.

"What the fuck, Danny?" Ryan exploded, stalking towards the science console where Danny was still hunched over his readings, looking utterly drained and pale. "You said that diagnostic sequence was isolated! You said it wouldn't feed back into the primary capacitor array!"

Chris, his jaw clenched and looking grimmer than usual, stepped forward. "We nearly blew the damn drive, Danny! The entire ship! Because you skipped the isolation protocols!"

Ryan threw up his hands, pacing. "We've been pulling eighteen-hour shifts trying to prep this damn drive! You think we've got time to babysit every single stress-test you run?" He pointed a shaking hand at Danny. "This wasn't some harmless glitch. People could've died."

Danny flinched, curling in on himself. "I… I thought I had," he stammered, his voice barely audible. "The schematics showed a fail-safe… I ran the simulation…"

"Simulations don't mean squat when you're manually overriding safety interlocks to stress-test a system that can tear reality a new one!" Ryan roared, getting right in Danny's face. "This isn't some college lab experiment! People could have died!"

"Hey! Back off, Ryan!" Luca snapped, stepping between him and Danny. The relief from averting disaster was rapidly being replaced by a surge of anger. This wasn't helping. "Screaming isn't going to fix anything right now."

"He nearly got us all killed, Luca!" Chris shot back, his voice tight with controlled anger. "That wasn't a minor error. That was negligence!" He let out a slow breath, his shoulders losing some of their rigidity.

Luca looked between them, his best friend and Chris, both fraying at the edges. Terrified. They'd nearly lost everything, and Danny had just happened to be the weak link that day.

Danny looked like he was about to shatter, his freckled face pale, eyes wide with a mixture of fear and shame. He opened his mouth to speak, but only a choked sound came out.

Before Luca could retort to Chris, Zoe moved. She was off her console in a flash, stepping smoothly between Ryan and Danny, her smaller frame surprisingly formidable as she faced down the furious engineer.

"Alright, that's enough, both of you," Zoe said, her voice dangerously quiet. Her dark eyes were fixed on Ryan. "He made a mistake. A big one, yeah. But he's not deaf, and he's sure as hell not going to learn anything from you two screaming in his face."

Ryan opened his mouth to protest, but Zoe didn't give him the chance.

"He knows he fucked up, Ryan," she continued, her gaze unwavering. "Look at him. You think he's not already tearing himself apart over this? What he needs right now isn't a public flogging; it's to understand how the fail-safes were bypassed and why his simulations didn't predict the surge."

She then turned slightly, her shoulder brushing Danny's arm. "Danny," her voice softened, though still firm, "what exactly happened with those interlocks? And the feedback loop calculation?"

The shift in tone seemed to break through Danny's paralysis. He swallowed hard, his gaze flickering from Zoe back to the floor, then hesitantly up to meet her eyes.

"I… I thought the simulation accounted for the cascading effect from the secondary conduit when I stressed it to theoretical maximums," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "The interlocks… I had to manually disengage them for that specific test parameter. I was trying to find the absolute breaking point of the pre-charge cycle, to give us a better margin for error. I just… I didn't think the feedback would jump the primary relays that fast. It was… instantaneous." He looked utterly wretched. "It was my fault. I miscalculated. I take full responsibility."

Ryan still looked like he wanted to explode, but Zoe's intervention had taken the wind out of his sails. Chris, too, seemed to deflate slightly, though his expression remained grim.

"See?" Zoe said, turning back to Ryan and Chris, her voice losing some of its edge but none of its authority. "An explanation. Not an excuse, but a starting point. Now we can analyze the logs, figure out where the simulation parameters were flawed, and build in better redundancies."

She held Ryan's eyes for another moment, then Chris's. "We all make mistakes. Some are just bigger and louder than others. Let's focus on fixing the system, not just blaming the operator, unless you want to be the one calculating FTL jump vectors next time, Ryan."

Ryan grunted, running a hand through his already messy hair, but he backed off a step. Chris let out a slow breath, his shoulders losing some of their rigidity.

Joey, who had been watching with wide eyes, finally found his voice. "Uh, anyone want more meatloaf? Or maybe a sedative?"

As the tension began to dissipate, Zoe moved closer to Danny, her voice low and calm. "Seriously, you're good. You fixed it. Now, go grab a drink or something before Luca starts hyperventilating again." She had this way of… diffusing things, but also, Luca noticed, a particular way of focusing all her energy on Danny when he was vulnerable. She had a soft spot for Danny.

Danny managed a weak, grateful smile, the color slowly returning to his freckled cheeks. Zoe gave his arm another gentle squeeze, her hand on his arm, before she let go and turned to him. "See? Crisis averted."

"Yeah," Luca said, letting out a long breath. "But let's try to keep the near-death experiences to a minimum, okay? My heart can't take this shit."

He was suddenly exhausted, dead tired.

"I need a drink," he muttered.

Where the hell was the alcohol? He turned and headed for the door, leaving them behind in the dim, silent bridge, the scent of ozone still hanging in the air.

They didn't need saboteurs or shadowy conspiracies to tear this mission apart.

Nope.

They could kill themselves just fine, thank you very much.