Chapter 16 - Gravity

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

—Stephen Hawking

The hangar was brand spanking new, a large space where the metal walls and deck plating gleamed under the bright overhead lights. The air was almost too clean, the kind that made him want to breathe shallowly, with a faintly citrusy tang from the final system flushes.

But here was Captain Luca, on his hands and knees, in a dimly lit corner, waging war against a stubborn, greasy stain that had the audacity to mar his damn floor. It was a dark, ugly blotch, mocking the otherwise flawless surface.

He attacked the stain with a scrub brush, sweat dripping into his eyes, the tight fabric of his bodysuit clamped against his skin. The bristles scraped against the metal, a harsh sound that blended with the steady hum of the ship’s machinery. Did being captain come with a clause about floor scrubbing?

He knew enough to recognize engine grease when he saw it. He’d never thought to check if the System store had anything for stain removal. It seemed like an oversight, in retrospect.

“Fucking grease monkey,” he muttered, picturing Ryan’s smug face and his usual trail of questionable substances. “You’d think one of us idiots would have the decency to clean up our own damn messes.”

He paused, leaning back on his heels, to examine his handiwork. The stain had faded, but it was still there, a faint shadow against the gleaming metal. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered, grabbing a fresh rag. This stain was a personal affront, a violation of the sanctity of his ship.

The bristles of the brush caught on a rough edge, jerking his hand. He swore under his breath, rubbing his knuckles before diving back in. His head was starting to hurt, the cleaning fluid working its way in behind his eyes.

Above him, the alarm blared to life.

The alarm was fucking loud, a shrill, piercing shriek that sliced through the hum of the hangar, overriding everything. He dropped the scrub brush and was moving before conscious thought caught up, sprinting towards the hangar exit as red emergency lights pulsed over the silent Percival.

“Bridge, report! What’s our status?” he called into his comm unit. Europa had taught him to stay level when the alarms started. Portal overflows had doomed multiple outposts, and he’d seen people die because they froze instead of moving. Panic got people killed.

Emily’s voice crackled back instantly. “Luca, we have multiple system alerts! And we’re getting cascade warnings from the FTL drive calibration sequence!”

The FTL drive was the problem. They were almost at the Oort Cloud passage, and nobody got a second chance at the preliminary calibrations.

“Ryan, Danny! What the hell is going on?” he barked into the comms, his boots pounding on the metal deck plating as he raced towards the nearest lift.

Ryan’s voice shot back, breathless, “Luca! We’re running the final power conduit stress tests for the Reality Anchor Field! There was a surge. Danny’s trying to isolate it, but the whole damn board lit up like a Christmas tree!”

“Is the FTL drive active?” he snapped, skidding to a halt as the lift doors hissed open.

“Not yet! But something’s drawing power erratically!” Danny yelled, his voice higher-pitched than usual.

As Luca stepped into the lift, the deck beneath his feet seemed to vanish. One second he was upright, the next he was weightless and stumbling upward, his stomach lurching violently. The gravity had just cut out.

“Fuck!” he yelped, flailing for a handhold, his limbs uncoordinated. Gravity slammed back on with a bone-jarring thud, sending him crashing to the lift floor. His teeth rattled, and a sharp pain shot through his knee. He’d have to yell at Chris for not making a gym down here.

“Bridge! Report!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet.

“Intermittent gravity failure, ship-wide!” Zoe’s voice came through, strained. “It’s cycling! Hold on to something!”

The lift began its ascent, a jerky, unsettling ride. He braced himself, his mind racing. A power surge during FTL calibration, gravity failing. Nothing about this was good.

Sprinting down the corridor towards the bridge felt like running on a ship made of jelly. The deck plates seemed to shift beneath his feet with each gravity fluctuation.

He burst onto the bridge. Red lights still pulsed. Emily was a rock at her XO station, her harness tight around her chest. She was rerouting power while Zoe had both hands on the navigation console, trying to compensate for the gravitational distortions. Danny was hunched over his science station and working frantically at his console, sweat beading on his forehead as he coordinated with Engineering below.

“Report!” he demanded, striding towards the command chair.

Emily didn’t look up. “Massive power surge originated from the FTL drive calibration sequence in Engineering, Luca. It cascaded, causing intermittent failures in the gravity emitter’s network and threatening to overload the FTL capacitors. Ryan and Chris are attempting to manually discharge the capacitors and isolate the surge at its source.”

“How bad is the capacitor overload?” he asked, his eyes darting to the FTL system status display. The bars were deep in the red, pulsing ominously.

“Critical,” Danny called out from his science station, his voice tight with strain. “If Chris and Ryan can’t get that discharge sequence initiated in the next two minutes, we’re looking at a containment breach. At best, it fries the FTL drive. At worst...” He didn’t need to finish.

“Engineering, options! Now!” Luca yelled into the comms, his voice hoarse.

Danny came back first, slower than the others. “Luca, I can initiate a full system shutdown and a slow, controlled bleed of the capacitors. It’s the safest option. As long as the bleed stays controlled, the capacitors never get near failure threshold. But the process will cause significant thermal stress on the secondary conduits. We’d need at least three to four days of diagnostics and repairs before we could even think about attempting another FTL calibration, let alone the jump itself.”

It meant a four-day delay, minimum. Luca’s gut clenched.

Before he could respond, Ryan’s voice cut in. “No time for that! The primary relays are fused. I can bypass them, go straight to the manual discharge valve, and force it. It’ll be instant. But if I miscalculate the energy feedback loop...” Ryan hesitated for a fraction of a second. “It could flash-fry the entire capacitor bank. The drive would be a useless hunk of metal. Permanently.”

The choice slammed into Luca. It was a guaranteed, lengthy delay versus a high-stakes gamble that could either save them in seconds or doom their entire mission. Emily looked at him, waiting for his call. They weren’t jumping today, but they were almost at the right place to ignite the FTL drive. A delay would cost them the alignment window and give whoever was trailing them four more days to close the gap.

He could make the call blind and pray. Or he could burn [Damage Control] and know.

The thought alone made his skull tighten.

The ability sat there like a sealed emergency kit in the back of his head. Twenty-seven seconds of brutal clarity. Twelve-minute cooldown. The cost was lighter than [Systems Analysis Burst], but it was still a cost. If he burned it now and the crisis cascaded again before Engineering got the drive stable, he’d be making the second call without it.

Another violent gravity hiccup rattled the bridge. Danny’s capacitor graph climbed another notch toward catastrophe.

Yeah. Fine. Better blind later than dead now.

He let the ability go.

[Damage Control]

The System imparts emergency-triage knowledge: what to vent, what to isolate, what to reroute, what to sacrifice, and what must remain protected to preserve ship survival.

For 27 seconds, the most effective crisis-response chain resolves into a single actionable sequence.

Base Duration: 20s

Adjusted Duration: 27s

Base Cooldown: 12m

Adjusted Cooldown: 9m 55s

Pressure slammed in behind his eyes as the bridge display reorganized into a violent triage tree. Vent. Isolate. Reroute. Protect. Danny’s shutdown path lit clean blue, safe and controllable but too slow. Ryan’s bypass flashed in hard red-white through the fused relays, ugly as sin but viable if Chris got the manual discharge valve open before the feedback rebounded into the anchor field. Three seconds late, and the capacitor bank died. Done on time, the surge bled out and the drive lived.

“We don’t have four days.” The words came out clipped as he rode the spike of pain. “Ryan, you’re up. Do the bypass. Chris, get on that valve and stay ahead of the feedback loop. Do it now.”

“Got it, Captain!”

Behind Ryan, Chris was panting. “He’s on it, Captain. The margin’s thin, but he’ll make it.”

The FTL capacitor readings on Danny’s science station were pulsing a deeper, angrier red, almost at the absolute overload threshold. He gripped the command chair hard enough to feel the seams. Come on, come on…

A series of sharp, percussive thunks echoed from the engineering deck through the ship’s frame, followed by a high-pitched whine that rapidly diminished. The angry red on the FTL display flickered, then began to recede, slowly at first, then faster, dropping back into the amber warning zone, then finally, into the green.

Everyone on the bridge let go at the same time. The violent vibrations ceased, and the emergency lights stopped their maddening pulse, replaced by the steady, if still somewhat dim, operational lighting.

“Capacitors discharging,” Ryan came over the comms, barely holding it together. “Field surge contained. We… we got it, Captain. FTL system is stabilizing.”

He let out a breath as his whole body slumped slightly. “Good work. Stand by for full diagnostic reports.”

The bridge doors hissed open and Joey stumbled in, hair wild, eyes wide and darting around. He was clutching a datapad in one hand and a half-eaten protein bar in the other.

“What in the hell was that?” he demanded, looking utterly befuddled and slightly green from the gravity fluctuations. “I was trying to organize the medical supplies! Did someone break something again?”

Before Luca could answer, Ryan and Chris stormed onto the bridge from the lift, faces flushed, bodysuits stained with sweat and probably some kind of coolant. Ryan was practically vibrating with residual adrenaline and fury.

“What the fuck, Danny?” Ryan exploded, stalking towards the science console where Danny was still hunched over his readings, looking utterly drained and pale. “You said that diagnostic sequence was isolated! You said it wouldn’t feed back into the primary capacitor array!”

Chris stepped forward, jaw tight. “The isolation protocols existed for exactly this test, Danny. I want to understand why they weren’t there when we needed them.”

Ryan threw up his hands, pacing. “We’ve been pulling eighteen-hour shifts trying to prep this damn drive! You ran a live maximum-load test without a second set of eyes?” He pointed a shaking hand at Danny. “This wasn’t some harmless glitch. People could’ve died.”

Danny flinched, curling in on himself. “I… I thought I had,” he stammered, his voice barely audible. “The schematics showed a fail-safe… I ran the simulation…”

“Simulations don’t mean squat when you’re manually overriding safety interlocks to stress-test a system that can tear reality a new one!” Ryan roared, getting right in Danny’s face. “This isn’t some college lab experiment!”

“Hey! Back off, Ryan!” Luca snapped, stepping between him and Danny. The relief from averting disaster was rapidly being replaced by a surge of anger. This wasn’t helping. “Screaming isn’t going to fix anything right now.”

“Luca, I want to know how a live-path test ran with the interlocks off,” Chris said, quieter but no softer.

“Enough.” Luca looked between them, his best friend and Chris, both fraying at the edges. “Both of you.”

Danny’s jaw tightened, his face pale but controlled. He met Ryan’s eyes directly. “I know.”

Zoe moved. She was off her console in a flash and stepped smoothly between Ryan and Danny, her smaller frame surprisingly formidable as she faced down the furious engineer.

“He made a mistake. A big one, yeah,” Zoe said. She didn’t raise her voice. Her dark eyes were fixed on Ryan. “But he’s not deaf, and he’s sure as hell not going to learn anything from you two screaming in his face.”

Ryan opened his mouth to protest, but Zoe didn’t give him the chance.

“He knows he fucked up, Ryan,” she continued, her gaze unwavering. “Look at him. You think he’s not already tearing himself apart over this?”

She then turned slightly, her shoulder brushing Danny’s arm. “Danny.” She kept her voice even. “What exactly happened with those interlocks? And the feedback loop calculation?”

The shift in tone seemed to break through Danny’s paralysis. He swallowed hard, his gaze flickering from Zoe back to the floor, then hesitantly up to meet her eyes.

“I… I thought the simulation accounted for the cascading effect from the secondary conduit when I stressed it to theoretical maximums,” he managed, voice hoarse. “The interlocks… I had to manually disengage them for that specific test parameter. I was trying to find the absolute breaking point of the pre-charge cycle, to give us a better margin for error. The model showed the secondary conduit isolated from the primary array. I trusted it. I didn’t have Ryan verify the live path.” He looked utterly wretched. “That was the failure. I trusted the model instead of a second set of eyes.”

Ryan still looked like he wanted to explode, but Zoe’s intervention had taken the wind out of his sails. Chris, too, seemed to deflate slightly, though his expression remained grim.

“That’s an explanation, not an excuse,” Zoe said, turning back to Ryan and Chris. “The logs will show where the model went wrong.”

“And nobody bypasses a live safety interlock alone again,” Luca said. “Danny, you and Ryan pull the logs. Chris, check every relay the surge touched. Em, build the new procedure and put it in writing. Nothing like today happens twice.”

Ryan ran a hand through his already messy hair, but he backed off a step. Chris looked away first. Some of the tension went out of him.

Joey, who had been watching with wide eyes, finally found his voice. “Uh, anyone want more meatloaf? Or maybe a sedative?”

As the tension began to dissipate, Zoe moved closer to Danny. “Get some water before Luca starts hyperventilating again. Then pull the logs with Ryan.” She had a way of diffusing things. And right now, all of it was pointed at Danny.

Danny managed a weak, grateful smile, the color slowly returning to his freckled cheeks. Zoe gave his arm a squeeze and let go.

“Yeah,” Luca said, letting out a long breath. “But let’s try to keep the near-death experiences to a minimum, okay? My heart can’t take this shit.”

He stood there for a moment, not sure his legs were going to hold.

“I need a drink,” he muttered.

Where the hell was the alcohol? He turned and headed for the door, leaving them behind in the dim, silent bridge, the scent of ozone still hanging in the air.