“Captain, they’ve still not responded”. That statement echoed off the patchwork chrome and dull metal which encased the command room’s vital electronics, though the uniform quiet glow of blue of screens mixed with the faint yellow shining through the barely used overheads and off the ears of every officer even after the sonic vibrations had factually gone still. They’ve still not responded.
It had been three days since their last radio transmission. The command team had spent most of that time glued to their various stations and though the Captain had insisted that everyone cycle out to get some rest Jason hadn’t gotten much sleep. Judging by the yawns and red eyes of the rest of the command team, Jason imagined he wasn’t the only one. The air seemed poisoned with a moderate dose of anxiety and it permeated the command room. The crew didn’t seem to be breathing the same air – in fact, they were more or less thrilled to get a few days light duty. “Cleaning floors beats running cable” his deep voiced, dreadlocked friend Chewba had said. True enough, Jason had though. He found that couldn’t share his anxiety with his friend – officer responsibilities and all that – and moreover he couldn’t put words to it. Just…something wasn’t right.
Scanning the command center Jason could see that he wasn’t the only one on edge. Gather’s knuckles were white on the ship’s manual throttle sticks, even though the maneuvering engines were at a dead stop. Carinza’s understudy, a well-gifted-but-not-in-smarts-if-you-know-what-I-mean midshipman by the name Stacey Echeveria, was peering over her sonar display. Though it was backlit with the same dull blue as the rest of the equipment, it was not reading anything due to the Captain’s insistance. Jason seriously wondered if Ms. Echeveria knew as much. Or what she would do if something actually did blip-in.
—
“Captain,” a sweet songbird tweeted, a welcome distraction from his distraction. Kat lightly walked past him, her railrod skinny form passing by the impossibly narrow hallway, of which Jason was taking up a considerable portion, without so much as brushing him. She had a habit of that – being able to weasel in and out of tight spaces that no one had any business of being able to, and to do so without it looking difficult in the slightest. It made her incredibly useful for accessing areas made hard to reach by the destructive kinetic force which ripped the T-Bird apart. And altogether really distracting.
She walked past Jason without giving him another look, assuming of course she needed to look at him to squeeze past and didn’t simply phase through the space. That would be useful if that were the case, Jason thought absently. She walked to the sonar display, which was a separate round console near the communications command center and faced straight up, forcing the user to crouch over view the display. Out of habit, Kat settled her left arm on then rim of the console and tapped the viewscreen, which was recessesed by a few inches. “Sonar and Radar is running again. I can’t locate the short in the radio transmitter though I’ve spent half the day trying, ” she made a slight pout with her lips, “I will need to rewire that system if we don’t find it soon.”
No big deal, just rewire, program a calibrate the radio communications array from scratch. With pretty much nothing. Jason knew that she was more than aware of their lack of inventory of…well…pretty much everything. Jason wasn’t sure if it was her brilliance, confidence, or slender form (or his own lack of sleep) but she was powerfully alluring at this moment. The brand new mark under her chin indicated that he probably wasn’t the only one who thought so.