UNSF: A Space Story
The Void Without Definition
The year was 2553. The starship Infinity of the United Nations Space Fleet was cruising along at a steady speed of 3 parsecs per hour along the outskirts of the Andromeda Galaxy.
It was a quiet Monday morning. Captain Rajben Pors Rusutt stretched his arms as he saw the stars shoot across his large, panoramic windows. He watched as his wrinkled face yawned in his reflection in the glass pane, stretching the skin around his dry, parched lips.
“Xinul,” he called out.
“Good morning Captain, how may I assist you today,” came a voice that seemed to originate from everywhere at once.
“A glass of water, please.”
As the Captain held out his hand, the particles between his fingers started shimmering as if they were glistening in bright light. The shimmering particles collated into a swirling whirlwind of energy. Before long, they started slowing down, transitioning into calmer vibrations as they started forming bonds; complex molecular structures were being put together atom by atom in the palm of his hand.
The Captain raised the fully formed glass to his mouth. As the first few drops of moisture greeted his expectant tongue, the ship suddenly started slowing down. In fact, the change in velocity was so fast that even the inertial dampeners couldn’t dream of keeping up. The Captain was flung across the room and onto the wall at the opposite end. His back made a painful cracking noise as it made contact with the hard carbon fiber wall that had been adorned with pictures of all his fondest memories.
The lights in his room went red as sirens blared across the ship.
“RED ALERT! ALL OFFICERS TO THE BRIDGE,” called out Xinul as the Captain tried to pull himself back to his feet.
He realized that he had definitely gained weight and wasn’t nearly as agile as he once thought himself to be.
“To infinity and beyond, they said,” mumbled the Captain as he put on his uniform and limped his way over to the main elevator.
The usually calm and sterile corridor was now a buzz of activity. Medical staff rushed the injured to the sick bay. Engineering personnel were running around trying to fix what the Captain was sure was a multi-level catastrophic system failure.
He finally managed to push himself through the waves of people and squeeze into the overcrowded elevator.
“Everyone else, OUT. Captain’s orders. Xinul, take me directly to the bridge.”
The crew of Infinity had thankfully been trained to handle such situations and moved aside for him.
“Xinul, locate Dr. Linges Amgosj,” the Captain demanded.
“Chief Engineer Dr. Amgosj is in Engineering, Level — 3”
“Good, at least one of us has started working on this”, he thought to himself as he finally arrived at the bridge.
If the corridor had been busy, the bridge was a frenzied, manic mess of panic stricken crew, hundreds of beeping computers complaining of multiple failures and what appeared to be a crying baby left alone in the Captain’s own, precious seat.
“CAPTAIN ON DECK!” called out first officer Dovangu Mussori.
At once, the crew stopped what they were doing and looked to the Captain for their orders. Even the baby seemed to have quietened down.
“All right, Commander Mussori, status report.”
“The ship seems to have come in contact with an unidentified physical phenomenon as we travelled past the M33 Nebula. This phenomenon has effectively crippled our ship. We’ve lost all ultra-lightspeed travel functionality and barely have enough power to keep our thrusters on. The system has essentially been locked out of several of its important segments and cannot access them. We are yet to determine whether this phenomenon was caused by some sentient, and potentially hostile entity or if it has natural origins. The main power core has reached temperatures of 6000 Kelvin and is still rising. Dr. Amgosj is currently working to combat this issue. We have 3 casualties and 78 injuries, all being treated in sick bay. All personnel are accounted for and life-support systems are still holding.”
“So it’s worse than I had been expecting. Xinul, open a channel between Dr. Amgosj and the bridge.”
Immediately, the face of a man in his late thirties appeared on the bridge’s main holographic viewing panel. He had a worried expression on his face as he moved between terminals frantically.
“Doctor, what are we looking at?” asked the Captain.
“I honestly don’t have any idea. I’ve been trying to shut down the power core for the last 10 minutes but the system simply refuses to respond. I’m running a complete system diagnostic which should give me an error report once it is done.”
“Keep working on it Linges, we’re counting on you,” said the Captain with a reassuring smile.
He took a deep breath and tried to calm his mind. However, his legs felt heavy and the throbbing pain from his back was starting to become more than just an annoyance now.
“Will someone please get that baby out of my chair?” he asked sternly, looking around at all the crew members.
One of the new cadets quickly scooped the child up, apologized, and rushed to his quarters. Seated comfortably, he finally put his brain to work, thinking about what the most important things were for him to consider at that moment in time. He asked everyone to be quiet so that he could think in peace. After much thought, the answer finally came to him.
“Xinul, from the current rate of increase of the power core temperature, how much longer do we have before it goes critical and explodes?” he asked inquisitively.
“At the current rate of increase, you have approximately 57 seconds before the ship explodes,” declared Xinul calmly.
“Alright, so we have just over a minute to live. Xinul could you show our impending doom clock as a countdown on the main viewer next to Dr. Amgosj’s face?”
“Of course,” chirped Xinul as the viewer went into split-screen mode, with the countdown numbers showing in large bold text on the left side.
The mortified faces of the bridge crew stared at it in disbelief.
“Dr. Amgosj, not to rush you in any way, but it seems that we have about… 45 seconds to live,” called out the Captain.
“Oh, that’s perfect, my diagnostic program will be done in just under 30.”
“Don’t you think we need to consider alternative options at this point?” asked the Captain as calmly as he could.
“Oh, no I’m confident that once my error analysis is done, I should be able to shut the core down immediately.”
“Yes, but aren’t you cutting it a little close?” asked the Captain with increasing urgency.
“20, 19…” Xinul kept counting counted.
“Dr. Amgosj!” the Captain screamed.
“Ah it looks like my program has gotten stuck somewhere, I think it could take another minute to wrap everything up, perhaps we should consider other options now…”
“Dump the Core, now!” the Captain yelled.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit too extreme Captain, I mean…” he started.
“6, 5, 4…” reminded Xinul cheerily.
“LINGES, I ORDER YOU TO DUMP THE CORE!!”
Dr. Amogsj opened the emergency engineering chute, propelling the power core out into the blackness of space. The white-hot material barely made it a 100 kilometers away before it collapsed onto itself. A fraction of a second later, it violently exploded outwards, sending enough energy to power a planet for a decade in all directions.
The shockwaves and debris sped across towards the ship at an alarming speed.
“Divert all remaining power to aft deflectors and shields. All personnel, brace for immediate impact!” urged the Captain.
The knock was just as bone-shattering as the previous one, flinging both man and machine across the lengths of whatever rooms they occupied in the starship. Sparks flew everywhere and many fell on flammable substances, lighting up several sections of the ship.
The Captain couldn’t tell apart the beeps and sirens from the ringing in his own head when he opened his eyes next. He saw several bodies strewn across the floor, bent and broken in abnormal ways. Some of the lucky ones were getting back to their posts to assess the damage and get an account of the extent of carnage.
He somehow crawled on all fours to his precious chair and hauled himself back onto it. His vision was blurry and he realized he was coughing blood.
“Is this the end?” he thought to himself wistfully.
On the main viewer, Dr. Amgosj was not in the frame anymore. Instead, there was now a black screen which displayed some kind of text.
The Captain shook his head and squinted his eyes, and was just about able to make out what was written:
Error Analysis Complete:
Issue(s) found & resolved. Resolution presented in parenthesis.
Segmentation Fault (Core Dumped)
