20:14:36

Beverly Price rounds a corner swiftly while removing her aerowrench from its designated pocket in her pants. She had promised herself after the last top secret meeting that she would fix that damned flashing door light before the next meeting and well, there were about 17 minutes before she was due to be present in the cockpit. No big deal though, she could fix the light in just under 45 seconds if it was the general issue she thought it was, and she was rarely ever wrong in her guesses. Stepping around the last bend she pauses next to a door and places her finger on the bare metal of the wall. A popping sound reaches her ears as she grips the newly revealed pad and pulls it outwards. She flips her multi-tool to the setting she wants and carefully places it inside the panel and begins her work, finishing just 46 seconds later. The light stops flickering almost instantly and she closes the pad, nodding to herself with the edge of her lips ticked upward ever so slightly. Just another normal day on the TSS Geisel, thank god it's not one of the abnormal ones, but she would speak of those soon enough.

Beverly makes her way through more corridors of the ship and arrives in the cockpit exactly 15 minutes before the set start of the transmission. She makes her way over to where she should be when it begins and pulls a notepad out of her pocket. She reads it over quickly, making sure she did not miss anything for their weekly maintenance report. Farm irrigation unit 4 - broken pump - complete, engine coil 7 - complete, showers units 17, 298, 245, 138, 97, 40, 674 - complete, sinks units 34, 68, 156, 452, 246, 601, 123, 234 - complete … She stops reading before the item at the bottom, the most important one, the reason for the meeting today. She quickly pencils in the door light she just fixed between lines mentioning various broken lights and the list of microwaves and turns her head toward the screen, waiting for the countdown to finish.

The screen picture changes and a voice fills the room. “Good morning everyone. Let’s hope this can be quick and painless, eh?” Beverly nods carefully toward the screen containing Walt Whitaker but thinks if only quietly to herself. First, the captain makes his remarks about their new charted course, explaining in mathematical terms exactly where the ship is set to go. Then the pilot commander explains the steps they will take to do so. The navigation commander fills Walt in on what they have learned in the past week about the ship they are moving towards, how they do not yet know its name or origin but its size seems large enough to possibly contain supplies to help avoid their impending crisis. Walt gives them the go ahead to move the ship into position after he speaks with the rest of the commanders and other guests. About 30 minutes pass before Beverly hears her name spoken. She looks up and speaks. “I have the weekly report on mechanical errors and fixes. Normally this would be something you would need to hear about over transmission but there was an occurrence we thought you should know about. Most errors this week are general maintenance, we did have one engine blow but managed to get it back under control and functioning at around 62% capacity once again, which goes along with the reason for this part of the call. Earlier this week on E23/4/2248 at approximately 20:14:36UTC the TSS Giesel experienced a ship wide power surge. As far as we have been able to tell, every part of the ship running with any link to electronic power was briefly out of commission, some parts of the ship were without power for up to 45 minutes, though most were back on within seconds. We have sent mechanical teams all over the ship and worked carefully with different commanders and sectors and have not been able to find any trace of this surge or what may have caused it, other than engine number 7 which was already showing issues beforehand.”

“I see,” Walt said, his brow furrowing slightly as he looked down. “I will check on our side of things later today and get back to you on if we saw anything here. I do not think an alert was sent to anyone on the team about any critical failure but I will make sure we double check. In the meantime, have you set up any extra tracing programs?”

“We have sir, we set them up almost immediately to insure we saw anything that may have happened again. Nothing has shown up on them yet. I expect we may see change as soon as we change course for the newly found ship, however, since some systems will need to switch modes.”

“That would make some sense. That being said I think that was just about all for today. You should be all set to do so. I want to stay online and see if I see anything change here as well.”

The captain now stepped forward and gave his signal to the team of pilots to begin the change in course. Beverly watched as they furiously began pushing keys and buttons and she watched out the window as the view the ship had slowly moved to the right. She didn’t even notice when the screen went blank. “Walt? Hello? Get him back online! We need to know what his logs say as well.” the captain stated. “On it sir”, Beverly heard someone say, though she didn't know which. She moved over to one of the communication stations to check and see if she could do anything to help if the issue was on their end.

“Sir. The network on the ship is still up but it isn’t showing anyone who we could connect to.”

“Odd, continue trying, maybe we have moved into a dead zone. Beverly, begin another ship sweep and see if someone has accidentally messed something up elsewhere.”

“Will do sir,” she replied. Beverly didn’t even think to look back as she moved to the nearest com and began typing codes to reach other workers on the ship.

***

Walt Whitaker stared at the blue screen in front of him. Anyone on his team could tell that his anxiety had spiked. “What happened?” he said, his voice much louder than it was when he normally spoke, “Get them back online, I lost the log.”

“Sir”

“WHAT” he boomed.

“There is no TSS Geisel to get back online.” the intern paused, “They’re gone.”