Journey of Disaster

A David Sands Competition story by GB Williams

Sep 20, 2025

An entry in The Sands of Time Writing Competition

Journey of Disaster by GB Williams

Captain Arnold stood in his ready room, stomach churning as stars floated by. The universe was wrong. There should be rainbow streaks, not distant spots. Their faster than light engines had stopped ten minutes ago. He had received no reports from Chief Engineer Skinner nor Lieutenant-Commander Winton, who currently had command.

Arnold returned to his desk and activated internal communications.

“Chief Skinner?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“We seem to be travelling under inertia.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Care to explain why?”

“Because—” Electrical crackles and explosions came clearly across the comms. “Sorry, Sir, busy,” the usually unflappable Skinner snapped.

The distant hiss of an extinguisher and a few choice swear words followed before the channel closed.

Two months. Arnold’s last assignment. Possibly ever. Get this crew working or they were all out on their ears, including him. If they couldn’t manage a simple supply run of medical aid to a plague-ridden colony, the colony would die, and they’d be unemployed. And unemployable. Arnold hadn’t envisioned his career ending this way. As unpalatable as that was, it was not as indigestible as the prospect of letting two million people on Derayus Prime die and taking thirty years to get home without FTL drive.

Taking a steadying breath he headed to the bridge.

The bridge had the standard 5X sloped floor configuration: science and communications stations at the top, captain’s chair in the centre with tactical and piloting stations at the front. Secondary stations were positioned around the edges of the rooms but rarely needed manning.

God, they look so young.

They were young. Most only out of training a year, they had been pushed out of other assignments. Being part of this crew was considered a punishment. Arnold had tried not to believe their reputation. Then he’d met them. Six more weeks to make them cohesive or they would be thrown out of the fleet. Challenge accepted.

The captain’s chair sat empty.

The door swish should have alerted the bridge crew to his presence. Their failure to notice was concerning.

“Lieutenant-Commander Winton,” said Arnold.

Winton jumped and turned from her position beside Parker at the science station. She was nearly thirty, and if the momentary panic and disarrayed hairdo were any indication, promoted beyond her ability.

“Why wasn’t I notified our engines had stopped?”

“A momentary blip, Sir. I didn’t want to disturb you over a minor incident.”

“Minor incident?” The forced calm of his tone contrasted to the fists hidden behind his back. “Losing propulsion in space is never a minor incident. And having the conn infers a duty to keep your captain informed.”

“I wanted to bring you a solution, not just the problem, Sir.”

Arnold clenched his teeth. “Admirable but foolish and against regulations. Full sitrep, please.”

Winton swallowed. “The fission generator containment field failed, we’ve lost the FTL drive and all other propulsion systems. Failures are confined to propulsion. No injuries reported. We are drifting, but in an uninhabited system with little traffic, so should be fine.”

Arnold clamped his lips then crossed his arms. “Lieutenant-Commander, do you not comprehend our situation? An ‘uninhabited system with little traffic’ means no help nearby. Drifting from FTL is still incredibly fast, worryingly so when there is a planetary system to crash into.”

Tension in the room ramped up.

“Navigation, what is our course?”

The young man at the piloting station sat straighter and turned to face the captain. “Er, not sure, Sir.”

Captain Arnold glowered at him. Is he even old enough to have completed training? “And what is the first responsibility of navigation?”

“I’m a pilot, Sir.”

“On this ship, you’re both. First responsibility of navigation?”

“To always know the ship’s location and heading … Sir.”

“Correct. And?”

The pilot refocused on his console, fingers flying over the touch screen controls. “Ah.”

“Pilot Mukherjee?” Arnold asked, his voice stretched thin.

“Double checking, Sir.” His fingers flew over the controls again, and unless he had done something extremely stupid—always an option—he had now calculated what Arnold had suspected. “Well, Mr Mukherjee?”

The boy gave the loudest swallow ever. “Erm, Sir, on our current trajectory, we are going to collide with the largest moon of the second planet of this system in two hours twenty-nine minutes. And if by some miracle we miss that, we will dive into the sun in four hours and thirty-three minutes, Sir.”

“Comms. Channel to engineering. Main viewer.”

The smoky engine room filled the viewscreen. A worn face appeared. The once chiselled jawline sagged with age, the strong brow was lined with furrows, but the blue eyes remained keenly intelligent.

“Chief Skinner,” Captain Arnold said in a neutral tone, “how long until we have FTL?”

“Minimum five hours, Sir.”

“How long before the solid fuel drive could be operational?”

The chief frowned. Using the solid fuel drive was always the last desperate option. “Probably three and a half, four hours. It would require bypassing the fission drive, meaning getting FTL back would take even longer.”

“Understood. I need some form of propulsion within the next two and a quarter hours or we crash into a moon, killing not only this crew, but two million colonists who won’t get their medical supplies.”

The chief froze. The blanched face of Crewman Hamm popped up in the background. Arnold suspected that that walking disaster was the root cause of their current predicament.

Skinner’s eyes narrowed. “Atmospheric displacement.”

Arnold frowned. “What are you suggesting, Chief?”

“I can’t currently access navigation, but our cargo bays line the hull. Open a bay door, take down the air shield, and the resulting air expulsion will change our trajectory.” Another electrical explosion made Skinner wince. “Gotta go.”

The viewscreen blinked off.

“Put forward vision on screen,” Captain Arnold told Garland at the communication station. Cresting behind the nearest plant was the moon in their flightpath.

The only sounds were fingers frantically tapping screens.

“Sir?” Lieutenant Parker called. “I think, if we eject bays A and J simultaneously, that should give us enough of a push to take us out of the range of the moon.”

Mukherjee’s fingers danced over the touch screen. “There’s a problem, Sir.”

“Losing cargo is less problematic than losing lives.” Those words of wisdom came from Lieutenant Prost at Tactical.

“Not with this cargo,” Arnold grated.

“The push from A and J wouldn’t be enough,” Mukherjee said. “We’d still skim the moon’s atmosphere.”

“Not if we blow it up first,” Prost said.

Arnold frowned. “Lieutenant Prost, I appreciate your enthusiasm for a good explosion, but what do you expect to achieve?”

“One less large object in our way, Sir.”

“Replacing it with many smaller objects. Any of which could permanently disable the ship.” Arnold shook his head. “Besides, we don’t carry planet destroyers.” Arnold ran a hand over his mouth.

“Sir?” Winton was unusually hesitant. “What if we blew the cargo bays, not concurrently, but in sequence?”

An interesting thought. Arnold turned to her. “Explain.”

“The atmospheric expulsion Chief Skinner suggested used in sequence should change our trajectory and put the ship into a spin, which in turn means we should skim off the moon’s atmosphere.”

Captain Arnold regarded her without blinking. “Have you run calculations?”

“Not yet, Sir.”

Arnold nodded. “Advise me when you have.”

Arnold left via the main door. Once the door swished closed he moved to the edge of the corridor and rested his forehead on the cool metal bulkhead. He banged his skull twice. Once for each million people they were letting down. How had he ended up on a medical supply run at the edge of the known universe with a crew who could barely tell an exhaust port from an expansion joint?

Because he called the Admiral an idiot. He shouldn’t have, however true. But a good captain never gives up on a crew. That was his only hope. Teach this crew to work well together, and they wouldn’t be forced out. Nor would he, despite the Admiral.

Pulling himself together, he moved to the door separating the bridge from the ships working guts. Here he saw the cargo bays, each reached via an open staircase. The engine room was across the central gantry over the wide inflight storage area. Because this was a relatively short flight the area was virtually empty.

Across the gantry, Arnold entered engineering. Despite the engines taking up the entire rear quarter of the ship, this room was the same size as the bridge, but with fewer workstations and an incredible view of the FTL fission chamber.

The room felt wrong without the white-blue shimmer from a working containment field. All fission material had been evacuated to stasis chambers where the reaction was suspended, leaving the drive an empty bottle in a ship.

Vents had cleared the smoke. Opposite the door, a knot of four people crowded the open wall and floor panels of the containment field generator. Crewman Hamm stood close by. As always, the man’s uniform looked slept in, rumpled and stained, with a rip by the ankle. Whether his hair had ever seen a comb was debatable. There was something so innately unkempt about Crewman Hamm that neat and tidy could not exist in his proximity.

“I want to help,” Hamm said.

“You’ve done enough,” Skinner growled, turned to glare, then spotted the captain. Skinner issued instructions before he stood, wiped his hands on his uniform, and strode across to the captain.

“How bad?” Arnold kept his voice down.

“Bad,” Skinner whispered. “Unbelievable.” He shook his head in despair.

“What happened?”

“Crewman Hamm.”

No surprise. “What did he do?”

“I asked him to check the running stats of the containment field generator.”

Arnold noted Skinner’s fist clenched at his side.

“Something easily done at a monitoring station.” All telemetry was fed to those stations. “Only station three has been on the fritz for the last four days.”

“How long has Crewman Hamm been on multi-skilling rotation here?”

“Four days, Sir.”

Of course. The problem with multi-skilling was the assumption that a crewman had skills to start with.

Oddly, Crewman Hamm’s speciality was security. Arnold and Skinner agreed that Hamm was undoubtedly the best sharpshooter either of them had known in careers spanning three decades. A depressing reminder that he and Skinner had served for longer than most of this crew had been alive.

“He moved to station five.”

“Let me guess, that also went on the fritz?”

“Yeah, but not necessarily Hamm’s fault. So I told him to eyeball the stats.”

Arnold nodded. That meant opening the wall panel and reading directly from the instrumentation.

“Why is the floor panel open?”

Skinner rolled his eyes. “When removing the wall panel, Crewman Hamm bent the lower corner. So after taking the readings he couldn’t replace the panel. Meaning he had to open the adjacent floor panel. That’s when things went wrong.”

“How?”

“Crewman Hamm arrived late, bearing breakfast.”

Arnold’s stomach sank. “Breakfast?”

“A runny egg sandwich with saturnyne sauce,” Skinner said through clenched teeth. “The egg dripped into the containment field generator while the panel was open.”

“I see.” A vice tightened around Arnold’s skull. “So what took out the remaining propulsion systems?”

“The sauce,” Skinner said.

Arnold blinked.

Skinner led his captain to the nearest engineering station and called up a schematic of the ship, focused on the containment drive. “Command connections to all drives run through this conduit, right next to the containment field generator. That’s no problem because the generator never heats up. However, when Hamm pulled up the floor panel, he also pulled up the generator shielding. Meaning his drippy egg fell directly into the reverse polarity ionisers and cooked, blocking the ionisers.”

“That caused an explosion?”

Skinner nodded. “And broke into the command connection conduit.”

“But each cable in that conduit is heat shielded. It should take more than that to burn through them.”

“That’s where the saturnyne sauce comes in. When the explosion happened, that lighter density sauce was propelled into the conduit were it mixed with the carrier fluid, which reacted with the vinegar in saturnyne sauce amplifying its acidity levels and eating through every cable within the conduit, including key nodes in the redundancy network.”

“So to get any propulsion at all, what do we have to do?”

“Completely reroute all control cables, bypassing the field generator conduit, which I can do, but after that, rebuilding the containment field generator will be a ten-hour job.”

“Bridge to Captain Arnold.”

Lieutenant-Commander Winton’s tentative voice came through. Skinner pressed pads on the closest screen to draw the feed to their position.

“Go ahead, Winton,” Arnold said into the viewer.

“We’ve worked it out.” Winton appeared pleased. “We can run a series of atmospheric expulsions from the cargo bays. It will ensure we miss the moon.”

“I want to see those calculations before you act,” Skinner demanded.

Winton swallowed, nodded, and tapped her console. “Data transferred to you, Sir.”

“Winton,” Arnold said, “organise the entire crew to relocate the medical supplies into the central holding area. We can’t save everything, but let’s reduce our losses to bandages and tape, Derayus needs the medications more.”

“Already on it, Sir.”

With that relief, the screen went blank, and Arnold watched Skinner check the computations. “Your thoughts?”

“There’s a certain insanity to it that just might work.” Skinner stood straight and turned around. “Crewmen Hamm and Johannes, get to the storage area, help move the cargo.”

Both men offered salutes. Arnold tried not to notice how much Hamm needed to improve his.

“It’ll work?” Arnold asked, seeing Skinner frown over the calculations again.

“It’ll work, but the timing has to be perfect.” Skinner looked up. “You want solid fuel or FTL back first?”

“FTL.” If the expulsion idea worked, they’d need that most. If it didn’t work, they’d be dead. “Keep me informed.”

Arnold worried as he walked back to the bridge. Below the gantry, everybody not on duty was scrambling to unload the cargo bays. Some still in sleep suits.

Quiet calm descended over the bridge as Captain Arnold retook his chair.

When the door swished open and Crewman Hamm stepped in, Arnold braced.

“The bays are as empty as possible, Captain.”

Even Arnold relaxed as Hamm took position at the security workstation. The viewscreen showed the moon they were approaching.

“Physical cargo bay doors are open. Air shields holding,” Winton advised from the secondary science station on the edge of the bridge. There she would use the mathematical model to mark the moment for each opening. Prost would control the air shields. Parker would monitor reality against the model to confirm progress or alert of deviations.

“This is your show, Lieutenant-Commander Winton,” Arnold said. “On your mark.”

“Yes, Sir.” Timing was critical. Too late and they’d hit the moon, too soon and they’d hit the planet. Just right, they’d twist away from the collision. Arnold’s impulse to grip the armrests was repressed to demonstrate faith in his crew.

“Lieutenant Prost,” Winton said, “on my mark, blow seals on cargo bay C.”

“Yes, Sir.”

One heartbeat.

“Mark.”

One press and the air seal over cargo bay C blinked out. On the screen, the image shifted.

“Cargo bay B on my mark. Mark.”

One more press, and the image reorientated, distance made pallets of bandages from bay C seem tiny as they drifted away.

Winton and Prost moved through the sequence from C to A, then J back to D. Each air seal fell precisely to Winton’s mark. As they moved through the sequence, the spinning of the ship showed as the moon started to whirl around the viewscreen’s edges. The manoeuvre was working. No moon crash today. Arnold felt his heart calm as the moon made another circuit. Any moment now the screen would show the moon only on the left-hand side. Any moment now.

The moon got closer. Any moment now. The moon got far too close.

“Projected trajectory not achieved. Atmospheric graze in ten seconds,” Parker announced.

“Prost,” Arnold commanded. “Raise shields. Hamm, close all bay doors. Garland, red alert.”

The triple ‘Yes, Sir’ was heartening as the lights changed colour and sirens clamoured.

“Shields are up,” Prost announced.

“All bay doors secured,” Hamm confirmed a second later.

Arnold called for shipwide comms. “All hands brace for impact.”

His own safety belt clicked into place. The edge of the moon filled the left-hand side of the screen, and the inertial dampeners could not eradicate the impact of atmospheric drag.

“Shields are holding,” Prost reported.

“Getting heat warnings in cargo bays F and G,” Hamm added.

“Two more seconds and we’ll be free,” Parker announced.

Arnold’s heart thumped painfully, then the moon and its planet disappeared, along with the drag factor. They were flying free, still under inertia but safe from crashing.

“We did it!”

Winton’s triumphant cry initiated cheers on the bridge.

Arnold allowed himself one moment of closed-eyed appreciation. “Mr Mukherjee, confirm changes in trajectory.”

Breaking off his own celebration, Mukherjee did. Arnold waited.

“They’ll call it the Winton Wheel,” Hamm declared.

As Mukherjee turned in his seat, lacking a smile, Arnold doubted anybody would ever hear about the manoeuvre, let alone name it. Winton was quickest to pick up on the silence from the captain’s chair. She called for quiet.

“Sir?”

Arnold could not fault the tentative tone. He requested Mukherjee’s report.

“We won’t hit the sun. We’ll hit the first planet.”

Incredible. They had made things worse.

The central viewscreen changed to show an unhappy Chief Skinner. “Captain.”

Arnold knew that look. Skinner’s report that they couldn’t get any engines running in time helped no one. No. There had to be a way to make this right. He had never lost a crew and wouldn’t start now. Two million colonists were depending on them.

“Okay,” Arnold said. “This crew is without a doubt the most disaster-prone the fleet has ever had the misfortune to have. But we are a crew. And unless we do something effective, we will be a dead crew. Suggestions anyone?”

“Abandoned ship?” Crewman Hamm said.

“No point,” Winton said. “The escape pods only support life for fourteen Earth standard days. The nearest M-class planet would take an escape pod sixteen days to reach.”

“So the choice is die quick or die slow?” Prost demanded.

“No,” Arnold said. “Two million lives, people. We will find a way.”

“We’ve survived worse,” Hamm tried.

Arnold glared at him. “Only after getting yourselves into worse.” He sighed. “We’ve avoided one collision, we’ll avoid the next. Prost, you know weapons. If we fire on the planet with inertial dampeners off, will that push us away from the plant?”

Prost ran the calculations. “Yes Sir, but not far enough.”

“Sir,” Parker said tentatively. All eyes turned to him. “According to my readings, the first planet has no atmosphere. It’s basically a floating rock. If we reconfigure the deflector array above cargo bays E and F, then redirect the bay loading beams through the deflector, we can basically turn those shields into a tractor beam.”

“You want us to tractor beam ourselves towards a planet?” Prost asked.

“No, no. Yes!” Mukherjee said fingers dancing over his console. “Parker’s got it. Time it right and we can use that makeshift tractor beam to slingshot us around the planet and put us at a tangent to the sun. We’ll go past, but we won’t go in.”

“Without shields, we’ll burn to a crisp,” Garland pointed out.

“Not necessarily,” Skinner said, surprising Arnold. “Parker’s suggestion leaves the remainder of the shield emitters functional. If we only use the deflectors over E and F for the tractor beam, then as long as we’re not trying to use that and shields simultaneously, we can reconfigure the remaining shields to cover the entire ship, though they’ll be closer to the actual hull than usual.”

“If they fail,” Garland worried, “we burn instantly.”

“If we don’t try we burn anyway,” Arnold said.

“We should reduce power draw too,” Skinner said. “Move everybody to either the bridge or engineering to reduce life support requirements. We can do this.”

“Chief Skinner?” Parker put in. “With the shields in that configuration, would they have the power to survive a coronal mass ejection?”

Arnold wanted to scream. “Are we expecting a CME?”

“Yes Sir, and we want it too. If it hits us side on it will throw us beyond the terminal heat perimeter of the sun.”

“You want to play pinball with my ship, in hope that the hottest air blower in the galaxy can save us from solar incineration?”

Parker’s expression of uncertainty increased. “Er, yes, Sir.”

Arnold nodded. “Okay, crew we have a plan, Lieutenant Parker assist Chief Skinner to get those arrays working.” He looked at Mukherjee. “How long do they have?”

“Fifty-eight minutes.”

The viewscreen returned to the star, a massive ball of swirling, burning gas and potential death.

“Crewman Hamm, lock all physical shields in place. Lieutenant-Commander Winton, get every crewmember to the bridge or engineering. Everyone, this is going to be a rough ride, you will project confidence and capability to the rest of this crew even if you don’t feel it. There will be no mistakes. Do it.”

There was no frantic activity. Emergencies weren’t the same when it was all pressing touch screens. Still, Arnold knew the crew was doing everything possible. He turned to the comms desk. “Garland, mute the alert, that siren doesn’t help.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The crew started to filter in. There were twenty-four and the captain. Eight for each working shift. Though it was a skeleton crew, Arnold felt his responsibility to every member. He was glad that of the sixteen off duty, twelve were here, leaving Skinner more room to work. Even those rudely awoken from rest periods had never looked more alert. Except Baldwin, who curled up in a corner and instantly fell asleep.

“Captain?” Prost called. “Would you mind reviewing something with me?”

Needing a diversion, Arnold moved to the tactical station. “Yes, Prost?”

He appreciated the man’s discretion as Prost kept his voice low. “The CME, it’s going to be a big one.”

“We need it to be, to move us far enough out. But with shields up we should be protected.”

“Yes, sir. But look where that takes us.” Prost pointed to his workstation. “We’re already on the outer rim. Once that CME hits, we’ll be flung aside, still travelling under inertia. We’ll drift to the edge, right into that.”

Prost’s screen clearly denoted The Scatter Field.

Arnold swallowed.

The Scatter Field, the last remnant of an unknown war. It was a system of self-replicating mines, technology so advanced no one knew who had built it or how it remained working at least four thousand years after installation. Entering that field was a death sentence.

“How long till we reach the activation point?”

“Five hours.”

“Then let’s celebrate the fact that Skinner said it would only take him four and a half to fix the FTL. Well spotted, but keep it to yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Arnold returned to his chair to see a secure message on personal comms. From Skinner. He opened it eyes only, so the message was projected directly into his eyes, unseeable by others. This tractor beam idea, genius, but kill or cure. Fifty-fifty survival probability.

At that point, fifty-fifty was good.

An eternity passed far too quickly before Skinner announced the array was reconfigured. Parker confirmed rerouting the loading beams through the dish between the deflectors over bays E and F. He was flushed when he looked up at Arnold.

“We’re good to go, Sir.”

Arnold nodded. “Mukherjee, are you ready?”

“We’ll be in range in six.”

“Prost, on Mukherjee’s mark, activate that tractor beam.”

“Five.”

“Target is locked.”

“Four.”

The countdown stretched everyone’s nerves. Mukherjee looked up as he said “One” and locked eyes with Prost. Hearts thumped.

“Mark.”

Prost pressed his screen. Nothing happened.

The ship juddered. Arnold looked down at his readouts. Everything confirmed that they were now being pulled towards the planet. The tractor beam had pulled them out of their spin and into a stable trajectory.

“Release,” Mukherjee called.

“Released,” Prost confirmed.

Another jolt as the connection severed. “Confirm course.”

“Course confirmed,” Mukherjee said.

“CME has commenced,” Parker reported. “We’ll hit the concussion wave in … five…”

“Sheilds are up,” Prost said.

“All hands brace for impact,” said Garland, a ship-wide announcement. All seated personnel had belt restraints, but most would have to cling on.

“Four…”

Arnold filtered out the countdown. They would not die today. He sent a private message to Skinner.

The ship shuddered and rocked. The CME hit like a demolition charge. The room jumped sideways. The security straps across Arnold’s chest tightened painfully. People were forced off their feet, two screams announced injuries, Baldwin slid from his chosen front corner to the opposite corner. He sat up, shook his head, took one glance around the bridge, curled up again, and fell back to sleep.

“How does he do that?” Winton demanded.

Telemetry confirmed they were moving away from the sun. The increasing temperature told Arnold he still had two reasons to sweat.

“And we’re clear!” Mukherjee announced.

The cheers were euphoric, and Arnold wouldn’t stop them, didn’t want to, however premature they were. Skinner reported life support returned to the whole ship.

Crewman Hamm sat straighter. “I’ll raise the shutters.”

“Belay that,” Arnold told him. “Let them cool in position. Dr McGuire—” Their only medically trained officer was here. “—we have injured. Triage here, treat any serious wounds in the med bay.” The med bay had only one bed. “Make a ship-wide announcement when you’re ready for the minor injuries to line up at your door. Lieutenant-Commander Winton, you have the conn.” He stood and headed out. “I’ll be in engineering. And for pity’s sake, someone wake up Baldwin.”

The crew cleared the way as the captain rushed towards engineering. Inside, Skinner and team continued working on the containment field.

“Anything I can do to assist?” Arnold asked.

“Nope.” Skinner was on his knees.

A punk-haired scrap of a girl moved towards Skinner wearing a sleep suit and carrying a bundle of cables and spares. “I’ll fix this, you reassure the captain.”

Skinner made way for the girl, then approached Arnold, moving him to the far side of the room.

“You’re trusting a trainee with this repair?” Arnold asked.

“No, I’m trusting Myka.”

“She’s wearing a non-regulation cat sleepsuit and bunny slippers.”

“And knows more about engines now than I ever have or will. You want this done in three hours, she’s our only hope. What’s with the three hours, anyway? We’ve ridden the CME out of danger, haven’t we?”

“Out of one danger. Now we’re heading towards death by self-replicating mine.”

Skinner swore. “Does God hate us?”

“We’re alive, so no. But three hours, yeah?”

Skinner rolled his eyes. “Three hours.”

This crew had been pushed and still would be. Surviving would be good, surviving with good morale would be better. Arnold stopped at medical and general quarters, checking on the crew, bolstering spirits. For a few minutes he joined those replacing cargo in the bays. But he was sweating without the exertion. The urge to check time elapse was too great. The Scatter Field was coming, like or know it or not. Not wanting to infect others with his tension, he returned to the bridge. In a ship-wide announcement he thanked the crew, as one and individually, stating that they had given an exemplary performance.

“What was Baldwin’s performance exemplary of?” Prost asked under his breath.

“Remaining calm under pressure,” Arnold stated as he checked his watch again and headed to his ready room. Under an hour to go. It might be the last thing he ever did, but he had to complete his log and dictate letters of commendation for his bridge and engineering crew.

He was about to transmit them when the artificial gravity failed.

Dragging himself back to the desk, he hit the comms. “Chief Skinner?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“I’ve lost gravity in my ready room.”

“Oops, sorry!”

Arnold assumed that high-pitched response was Myka’s. He landed with a bump. After scrambling into his chair, he opened a viewscreen to Skinner. “What happened?”

Myka’s spiky hair appeared. “Sorry Sir, my fault. I wanted to stop our drift into the Scatter Field. So I reversed the tractor beam and sent out a repulsion wave of equal and opposite magnitude to our drift. Didn’t expect it to knock out sections of artificial gravity.” She drifted away, muttering to herself.

“Sir.” Winton appeared at the door. “We are at a complete halt. No more drifting. Except geospatially, of course.”

The whole universe was in constant movement, so nothing was ever truly stationary. “Thank you, Winton. Prost!” he shouted through. “Who did you tell about the Scatter Field?”

“The Scatter Field?” Winton’s tone hit the appropriate squeak of fear.

“No one, Sir.”

“Then how did Crewman Myka know?”

“She’s weird, knows everything. Current drift ETA puts us fifty-seven hours and forty-two minutes until entry to the Scatter Field. Do you think we’ll have propulsion by then?”

Sarcasm, just want he needed. “No doubt, Lieutenant.”

“It’s fixed,” Mukherjee proclaimed in surprise.

“What?” Winton asked.

“FTL is back online.”

Arnold didn’t know what Myka had done, but he was damned glad she’d done it. “Mukherjee, plot a course for Derayus Prime. We have two million people to save.” Arnold looked back to Winton. “You have the conn, Lieutenant-Commander. Just meet the schedule.”

Her grin a mile wide, Winton turned and gained the captain’s chair. As the door closed, Arnold turned to face the stars.

Would losing some cargo count against them? Knowing the Admiralty, yes. But he wouldn’t let them denigrate this crew. They were children who’d been berated for imperfection too many times. He could build the confidence they needed. If he held on to them and the captain’s chair.

He smiled as the faster than light drive kicked in, and stars rainbow streaked across the void.

Journey of Disaster

A David Sands Competition story by GB Williams

Journey of Disaster by GB Williams

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