Season 1 Episode 03: The Captain

Captain Trunketh and Chief Engineer Holbrook fight to give the passengers and crew a chance to get away from the ship before the anomaly eats it.

The ship suddenly lurched, like running over a pothole on the freeway. Captain Elizabeth Trunketh lost her balance for a moment, and the knife she held, along with the hand holding it, lanced straight through the side of the bowl she was sculpting, turning the whole thing into a spinning pile of entropy. She said a few words that her father taught her and glanced out the viewport of her quarters just in time to see the kaleidoscope of hyperspace transform into a rolling starfield.

Her clay-covered finger activated the command console in her room, and she cursed again as she began prioritizing the many blinking red indicators.

“Navigation, report!” She barked as she grabbed a rag to clean her hands.

Her communications screen erupted with the music of a hundred different alarms, and the face of Harald Smith, the ship's navigation officer, appeared.

“The drive kicked us out of hyperspace.”

One of the red lights on her console informed her that the artificial gravity had failed across most of the ship, meaning that most of the passengers and crew were adrift, and the ship was tumbling!

“Why didn't emergency gravity automatically engage?"

"Unknown power status."

"Well, we're not in hyperspace anymore, so use power from the drive and get gravity back up.”

“Captain, part of hyperdrive power is locked out.”

"Take whatever power you can and get gravity back up now! Ease into it, though; we need folks to float gently back to the floor. I'll call Engineering about the hyperdrive."

"Yes, Captain."

Her earpiece beeped.

“Captain,” she heard the ship's Engineer, Steven Holbrook, say. “This is The Hole. I need your help down here.”

"Are you sure?" She untied her apron and let it fall to the floor. "I was about to head to the Bridge. Also, why is some of the hyperdrive power locked out?"

“Sir,” Steve’s tone was a little shrill. “It's complicated to explain, but I'll summarize. We are about to lose the ship, and your expertise and command authority are needed here in The Hole now, or the survival of the passengers and crew won’t be possible. No time to explain in detail, but you really need to get moving. I’ll fill you in while you run.”

“All right," she said, entering commands on her console to dump all telemetry data to the escape pods. She then activated the ship’s Mayday beacon and rerouted the console to her tablet.

"Captain," the Navigation officer spoke on her screen, "Gravity is back up, but I'm not sure how long we can maintain it. There's something weird going on with the hyperdrive that keeps draining power. We should evacuate the passengers to escape pods for their safety."

She pushed the button on the wall for the ship-wide intercom.

“Proceed to escape pods,” she said, but she could only barely hear her announcement echo back to her from her communications screen over the many blaring alarms.

She pushed her face closer to the intercom mic.

“Please proceed to an escape pod assigned to your deck," she said louder.

"That goes for you folks on the bridge, too," she said to her comm screen. "All of you, reroute your consoles to your tablets and get to your assigned escape pods.”

She grabbed her tablet off the bed and stuffed it under her arm as she headed for Engineering, still wiping clay off her hands.

“Ok, Holbrook,” she said when she reached the corridor. “Please explain why you’ve insisted that the Captain not run to her Bridge in the middle of a ship-wide emergency.”

“We hit some new kind of spatial anomaly that loused up hyperspace navigation. If the engines hadn’t detected it and exited hyperspace when they did, we would have been ripped to pieces.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, at least.”

“Almost; it didn’t actually save us, though; it just delayed things a bit. It looks like a tiny area within the hyperdrive generator stayed in hyperspace.”

"Whoa, what?" She absorbed what he'd just said for a moment. "The hyperdrive is still running? Shut it down!"

“Sir, I can’t shut it off,” continued Steve. “This hyperspace bubble, or whatever it is, isn’t coming from the engines. It’s self-sustaining and wants to grow and wander about the ship. Keeping the drive powered up is the only way I'm keeping it contained...and even then, it's a bit tricky.”

As far as she knew, and she'd had Holbrook's job for many years before they'd made her a ship's Captain, nothing remotely like a self-sustaining hyperspace bubble had ever been witnessed before.

“All right, can you gather all the data you have about the anomaly and your hyperspace...bubble...thing and put it in the core?" Her mind raced as she ran. This new discovery needed to get backed up to the escape pods for posterity to keep someone else from learning about it this way.

“Can’t, sir,” he replied. “Keeping the bubble under control is delicate work. It’s all I can do to stay ahead of it.”

She switched her earpiece to the Navigation officer.

“Yes, sir?”

“Harald, Steve says that we hit a spatial anomaly of some kind that kicked us out of hyperspace. Gather all you can about it from the nav data, add it to the distress beacon signal, and make sure it gets copied to the escape pod memory banks as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

She switched back to engineering.

“I know there’s more...tell me what it is.”

“Ok, sir. The bubble is only a meter or so wide right now, but it offsets hyperspace navigation as it moves or changes size. That interference zone radiates outward a considerable distance from the ship. It'll add random uncertainty to any hyperspace jump. The escape pods...”

“...if we abandon ship, the escape pods will need to get outside that range before jumping," the Captain continued for him. "How far out?"

“Too far for their thruster fuel," said Steve. "But there's more to it than that. This thing refuses to sit still, and when it moves or changes shape or size, its interference zone changes with it."

"I think I already know the answer to this," she said. "But since you're using our hyperdrive to contain the bubble, what will happen to it when an escape pod engages its hyperdrive?"

"Each pod that powers up its drive will drag the bubble and interference zone towards it. As for the size..."

"I get it, Holbrook."

She stopped running and quickly used her tablet to issue general orders to abandon ship...which would, in turn, instruct the escape pod commanders to jettison their pods as soon as they were full and ready to depart and to get as far away from the ship as possible. She added a verbal addendum to remind them not to power up their hyperdrives until commanded to do so.

"So, let me make sure I understand all of this," she looked around the corridors to make sure that no one was within earshot and lowered her voice. "If the pods need to use their hyperdrives, they'll have to do so as far away from the ship as possible, and all at once, and at the right moment, or else some of them will miss the target planet and their passengers will die in deep space...if they’re not rescued within a few weeks."

“Captain, getting them to hit the jump button all in the same nanosecond will be impossible, so they'll end up all over the place no matter what we do.”

“You and I can’t pull this off from our tablets either.”

“No," said Steve. “It’ll be hard enough as it is, and this bubble wants to grow much bigger."

"How much bigger?"

"I don't know, just...bigger."

When the Captain arrived at Engineering, she found Steve standing at the hyperdrive controls, his fingers moving over the console. She looked over his shoulder for a moment.

“Holbrook, I need you in one of the escape pods."

“Sir...”

“No, I've thought about this,” she said. “I'm going to order the pods to jump to the nearest habitable planet on the map, which means I have to remain here while you coordinate the jump from the nav console on an escape pod to navigate for all the pods simultaneously."

"I see what you mean...slave them together. Also, if Harald works with me from a different pod, we can triangulate and make it even more accurate. They still all have to hit their own jump buttons, but one pod targeting for all of them slays a ton of variables."

“Yep,” she said.

"I could do my part of it from the four-person escape pod here in The Hole."

She thought about that while watching him struggle to hold the hyperspace bubble in place.

"Nope, we're still in the weeds when it comes to understanding this thing, and the pod running the show will also have the best chance of hitting the target if anything else goes wrong. I need you in one of the larger pods with lots of people on board just in case yours is the only pod that makes it."

"I get it."

"Good," she said, struggling to calm her voice. “Now, show me what I need to do to hold down the fort, and then show me how fast you can run.”