NOVEL NEXT Chapter 2 - Fire Amidships
"Sometimes, reaching for the stars is a waste of gravity."
– Thomas Carlyle
Burning plastic and smoke. Shit. A fire had started somewhere below deck.
"Chris, Ryan, Danny, let's go!" Luca said, grabbing one of the hand-held radios. He led the way down the corridor and toward the stairs below the command bridge.
The door hissed as it slid open, and a wall of black smoke rolled into the command deck. The smell was worse down below, quickly making his eyes water.
"Holy shit," he muttered, pulling up his shirt to cover his nose. It didn't help, not at all. "Grab a flashlight." The smoke was thick as hell, and the fire was just getting started
Ryan was behind, coughing up a storm, his flashlight shining down the corridor where waves of smoke were coming from. They moved forward. Danny was muttering something like prayers, and who could blame him.
"There!" Chris pointed ahead. Through the smoke, Luca could see the sparks, live electric current buzzing blue and white. The wall was on fire! He wasn't sure what was actually on fire, as the acrid smell and smoke were overwhelming.
"That's our primary step-down transformer," Ryan wheezed, his engineering brain still working even while he was slowly suffocating. "It… sends power… to the main bus." Ah, shit. No pressure or anything.
Luca's eyes were watering, and he could feel sweat rolling down his back. The black smoke was covering them now, soot getting into their hair and clothes. His hands were shaking, but Luca told himself it was from the adrenaline, not fear. Captains don't get scared. They get focused.
"Fire extinguishers," He said, pointing to the emergency station mounted on the wall nearby. "Danny, Chris, grab them."
"Luca, here! Help me." Ryan called from down the corridor. He was struggling to open the heavy blast door with the sign that read 'Electrical Switchgear - High Voltage.' Shit.
"Hold on," Luca said, pulling up the radio. "Em! I need the override code for the switchgear room!"
"One sec, Luca, everything's a mess," she said. After a moment of silence, she added. "I think I found it, 4742-3031-2069."
Luca punched in the code, and the heavy door hissed, unlocking. Why didn't it move? They had to slide the fucking thing open. The electrical room was a dizzying array of panels with red, blue, and white buttons everywhere. Luca didn't even know where to start. Ryan, at least, had been part of the team that worked on the layout, and he ran over to the tall metal cabinet where the compact SF 6 breaker was located inside a gas chamber.
Ryan slammed his hand on the 'EMERGENCY TRIP' button, and gas started pumping into the breaker, the light turned from Green to Red.
Luca grabbed the manual handle to be sure and yanked the level to the off position. The hum of the high voltage died.
Portal delves were one thing, but this was different. This was their ship burning around them, and if they didn't get things under control, they'd all die floating in the vacuum of space.
Danny and Chris triggered the extinguishers at the same time, the jets CO2 gas hissed out. The cold blast created a fog that mixed with the black smoke and created a gray goup that made the visibility even worse.
"Keep it up!" Luca yelled. The chemical smell was getting worse, burning the inside of his nose and making his eyes sting.
The flames died back to glowing embers, crushed under the reletless attack of the extinguisers. The orange light faded, leaving them in the darkness with just the beams of our flashlights and the emergency light strips.
That's when Chris rounded on Ryan, his voice sharp and loud. "What the fuck were you thinking with that power surge?"
Ryan straightened up, his expression shifting from relief to anger in about half a second. "What are you talking about?"
"The reactor startup!" Chris snapped, waving his hand toward the smoking transformer. "You didn't allow time to warm the coils! No wonder the transformer blew!"
"Hey, asshole," Ryan smirked, shinning his flashlight on Chris' face. "We needed power right fucking now, or those UER troopers would've been crawling up our asses!"
"Perhaps," Danny offered, stepping in. "The surge happened because the power bus wasn't mapped. The main transformer took raw voltage straight from the generator with no regulation. It overloaded the first node in the chain and blew it like a fuse."
He looked at Chris, then at Ryan. "It wasn't the startup. It was the fact that the shipbuilders hadn't finished grid integration. Any of us would've done the same thing." Great, now it's Dad's fault.
Luca shoved in between them, raising his voice. "Enough." Gotta shut this down.
Chris froze mid-retort, and even Ryan straightened.
"This shouldn't have happened. The grid was mapped during the boot sequence. That's not on Ryan."
He looked around at the smoke, the scorched panel, the fried circuits.
"We've got a hundred more things like this waiting to bite us in the ass. So, unless anyone wants to fight every time something breaks, we focus, we fix it, and we move on."
After a moment of silence, Chris muttered. "Still burned like hell."
The radio crackled for a second, and then Zoe's voice broke through the static. "Luca, you copy?"
"Yeah, the fire's contained," He croaked. "Status?"
"We're drifting, but the real problem is the grid," Zoe reported. "Diagnostics are a nightmare. The entire power distribution system is unstable. The reactor's fine, but the power isn't getting where it needs to go."
On the main display, she threw up a schematic of the ship's power system. Red lines pulsed everywhere, showing cascading failures. The reactor, the ship's heart, was a steady green, but the arteries leading from it were blinking red.
"We're on emergency batteries," Zoe finished, "and they're draining fast."
"Joey's heading to the hangar for protective gear," Luca said into the radio, his mind already racing. "Zoe, I need you and Emily to find a way to isolate the damaged circuits from the bridge. Don't let the failure cascade."
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He turned to the soot-covered engineers. "The transformer is fried. Danny, you said there's a spare in Storage Bay Two?"
Danny nodded, his face gray. "Yeah. Crated. It's heavy."
"Let's get going," Luca said. "Ryan, Chris, you two are with me. We're swapping it out."
He could feel the argument between Ryan and Chris simmering below the surface, all tense and shit. Ryan had been their combat engineer forever and had earned his place. While Chris was the new guy and Luca could tell this wouldn't be the last time they'd be butting heads. He'd have to define roles for these guys, or they'd be killing each other before the Republic could do it for them.
Storage bay two was a cramped compartment filled floor to ceiling with sealed crates, most of them labeled with their research and survey equipment. The air was better here, anyway, away from the burned transformer, but it still tasted metallic and wrong. Emergency lighting cast weird shadows everywhere, making it hard to read the shipping labels.
"There." Chris pointed to a large crate marked with technical specifications. "Power transformer."
The thing was huge, easily six feet on each side and probably weighing as much as a car. The crate itself was reinforced metal, the kind they used for equipment that cost more than most people made in a year. Looking at it, Luca had serious doubts about their ability to move it without proper lifting equipment.
Ryan stared at the crate. "We're screwed." He was still breathing hard from the fire suppression, and Luca could see sweat stains spreading across his shirt despite the dropping temperature.
"Joey, how's that protective gear coming?" Luca called over the radio.
"Found the uniforms and the masks," Joey's voice came back, slightly distorted. "Oxygen's good for maybe an hour in each tank."
An hour of oxygen. That should be enough time, he thought… assuming they didn't run into any more disasters.
The latches gave way with metallic clicks, and they pried open the top of the crate. Inside, nestled in protective foam, was the transformer. It looked exactly like the one they'd just fried, all gray metal surfaces and bright yellow warning labels. This was their spare, they didn't have anymore.
"Fuck me, this thing's heavy," Ryan grunted as they started lifting it from the crate. He'd grabbed one corner, his arms shaking with the effort.
"Where's your power armor now, big guy?" Luca grunted as his fingers tried to grab hold.
"God knows," Danny replied, huffing and puffing. "It's back there somewhere."
They managed to get the transformer out of the crate and onto a dolly.
"Easy, now," Ryan muttered as they maneuvered around a corner. "Don't let it tip."
By the time they reached the burned-out transformer housing, Luca's lungs felt like they were on fire, and his vision was starting to blur. The smoke hadn't cleared, and the air recycling system was still struggling on auxiliary power.
Joey appeared through the haze like some kind of rescue angel, carrying a bag full of emergency gear. He tossed oxygen masks to each of them. Luca had never been so grateful to breathe through a mask on his face.
"Thank God," Ryan gasped, his voice muffled by the hiss as he turned on the oxygen.
With oxygen flowing and better lighting, the work went faster. Chris and Ryan seemed to have forgotten their argument completely, working together to disconnect the burned transformer and wire in the replacement.
"Still nothing from the Genesis Platform," Emily reported over the radio. "No response."
With oxygen flowing and better lighting, Ryan and Chris began disconnecting the slagged remains of the old transformer. But a new problem quickly became apparent.
Ryan's voice came over the comm, strained and sharp. "This is a nightmare, Captain. To get the new transformer in, we have to cut power to the main bus."
Luca felt his stomach clench. The main bus was the ship's spine.
"But the emergency batteries are wired into that same spine," Chris added, his voice grim. "If we shut it down to do the surgery, the whole ship goes dark. No lights. No comms. No air."
They were trapped in a classic engineering deadlock. A two-front crisis. They couldn't fix the power without shutting it off, and they couldn't shut it off without suffocating.
This was no longer a problem for engineers. This was a problem for a commander.
Luca keyed his radio. "Emily, you hearing this?"
"I am," her voice came back, tight with tension. "The batteries are at forty percent. We have about an hour before they're dry."
An hour. He looked at the massive transformer, the complex wiring, and the two engineers staring at an impossible problem.
"Okay," Luca said, a plan forming in his mind. "I have an idea. It's not a good one." He took a deep breath. "We're going to hot-swap it."
A stunned silence from the engineers. "Captain, that's insane," Chris finally said. "The feedback could fry the new transformer, the batteries, and us along with it."
"It's our only shot," Luca stated. "Emily, I need you to reroute all battery power, every last drop, and pump it directly into life support. You'll bypass the bus completely and create a new, temporary connection just to keep us breathing."
"I can isolate the grid," she replied, her voice tight but steady. "But that power flow won't be clean. It'll be a raw, unfiltered feed. I can't guarantee it will hold."
"It only has to hold for five minutes," Luca said. "Ryan, Chris, that's your window. The moment Emily makes the bypass, the main bus will be dead. You'll have exactly five minutes to transplant the new transformer before she has to restore the main grid. Zoe will be watching the reactor. If it spikes, she pulls the plug on everything. Understood?"
He was no engineer, but he was the only one who could make this call.
"On your mark, Captain," Ryan said, a new respect in his voice.
"Emily," Luca said into the radio. "Do it."
The emergency lights in the corridor flickered and died, plunging them into absolute darkness, broken only by their flashlights. A new, deeper silence fell over the ship as the hum of the main bus vanished. The only sound was the hiss of their own oxygen masks.
"The bus is cold!" Luca yelled. "Your five-minute window starts now!"
The trip back up through the ship felt like climbing out of a volcano. The smoke was finally starting to clear as the air recyclers struggled back to partial functionality. His legs felt like rubber from exhaustion and stress, and the oxygen mask was making his face sweat under the safety goggles.
Emily looked up when he entered, her mask secure. "Luca! How's the situation below?"
"The transformer's almost online," He said, pulling off his oxygen mask and immediately regretting it. The air up here was better, but it still tasted wrong. "Chris and Ryan are finishing the installation now."
"Thank God," Zoe muttered, not looking up from her navigation console.
"Any luck reaching Dad?" He asked.
She shook her head, frustration clear in her voice. "Nothing. Either they're not monitoring, or they can't risk responding. I've tried everything."
"He knows we're alive," Luca said, more to convince himself than her. "He's watching. He has to be."
The bridge comms crackled. "Five minutes are up, Captain," Ryan's voice said, strained. "How's it look from your end?"
Luca looked at Emily. She took a deep breath. "Bringing the main bus back online... now."
The emergency lights flickered back on. On the main display, the power grid schematic, once a mess of red warnings, now showed a clean, stable green line flowing from the reactor, through the new transformer, and out to the rest of the ship.
"Power's back online!" Ryan's voice crackled over the radio, triumphant and exhausted. "We've got full reactor output flowing through the new transformer."
The bridge lights flickered and then stabilized, shifting from the red emergency lighting to normal white illumination. Displays that had been dark suddenly sprang to life, showing cascades of data and system diagnostics.
"Holy shit," Zoe breathed. "I've got full telemetry, gravitational mapping, and collision avoidance."
The relief in the room was almost tangible. Emily was smiling for the first time since they'd launched, and damn if she didn't look good doing it. Even covered in soot and exhaustion, coordinating a ship's power grid like a boss.
"Alright, Zoe," Luca said, standing next to her. "Let's see if we can get some proper thrust and figure out where the hell we're going."
Zoe nodded. "Routing power to main engines now. We should have maneuvering capability in about thirty seconds."
The ship rumbled with new energy. Luca could feel the deck plates vibrating as the fusion reactor ramped up to meet the new demand. It was working. It was actually working.
"Main thrusters responding," Zoe announced. "I've got attitude control and... wait."
Something in her voice made Luca's stomach drop. The smile vanished from her face.
"What is it?" Emily asked, already moving to her diagnostic panels.
"Power surge in the life support grid," Zoe said, her voice tight with confusion. "The thruster activation is causing a feedback loop. That bypass Emily set up... it's not stable under this kind of load. The system's trying to compensate, but I can't..."
The warning klaxons started blaring before she could finish her sentence. Red lights flashed across every console on the bridge, and the ship's automated voice began announcing, its tone chillingly calm:
"Critical system failure. Life support systems are offline. Oxygen levels falling."