Markus and James slowly made their way up two sets of stairs, the sound of their feet on the metallic steps echoed all around the stairwell. Their flash lights creating shadows all around the walls. They emerged in a small room, across from them another set of stairs led up to the next deck, close to them was an elevator and a sign on wall. To their left a large double door was set into the wall, 'Engineering and Transmissions' was clearly written above it.
“Here we are then.” James remarked. “Lets go and see if we can do anything.”
“Let me just check out that sign a second, see what's on the next deck.” Markus said as he walked across the room.
The sign was a map of the deck. Through the door they would reach the main systems room, which included Life support, artificial gravity, and temperature among others. Further down the deck lay the emergency systems rooms, and beyond that was where the main reactor and Light Drive were located. The Light Drive was what gave mankind the ability to travel at almost the speed of light, by bending time and space around the ship; in effect moving space rather than the ship itself. It had been a staggering achievement in science and engineering and would allow access to far off places that could have only been dreamt about visiting in ages gone. The Transmissions room lay to the right of the main systems room. The deck above, according to the sign was the Bridge; this would also contain star and navigation maps as well as the master computer systems.
Both men stood at the door to Engineering, James pressed the button located on the right hand side and the doors slowly opened, a hissing sound accompanied the sliding mechanism. They were greeted by a dark room. Oddly enough, Engineering was the darkest deck they had seen so far. The emergency lighting was really struggling here, their flash lights found no sign of any other crew members; living or dead. James' heart sank, he had almost convinced himself they would find some of the crew up here. Surely someone would have been here trying to fix the power problems, but no, the deck seemed as deserted as everywhere else.
James made his way to a large screen on the nearest wall, it was on but static rained down the screen and it would intermittently switch itself off and on. It was the general power statistics, it displayed at a glance which systems are using the most power, which aren't using any and most importantly the status of the reactor.
“OK,” said James after spending a minute or two looking at the display. “I can't tell for sure yet until I investigate more, but it appears we may have a problem.”
“What’s wrong?” Markus asked, he sounded stressed.
“Well, according to this we are down to ten percent power. That means everything is running off the emergency power, which is fine for the immediate future but soon everything will start failing.”
“How soon is soon?” Replied Markus, now clearly stressed.
“Going by what’s here, maybe.....24 hours at the most.” James answered
“Shit, what the hell? Why were we woken just to die?”
“Look, it's not necessarily that bad. Like I said, I need to double check these figures. There maybe something we can do to increase what time we have.” James said, his tone suggesting he wasn't sure who he was trying to convince.
“What do you mean? How much time are we talking?” Markus asked.
“Don't know how long it will give us, but we can shut down all none essential systems, switch the Stasis chambers on all decks to manual – in effect switching them all off.” James said in reply.
“And then what? Just float around aimlessly in space?” Markus was getting clearly agitated.
James was beginning to get concerned with how Markus was dealing with things, clearly he wasn't coping all too well with the situation they found themselves in.
“No, hopefully not. With all systems we don't absolutely need shut down we can hopefully keep enough power in reserve to control the ship. We head up to the bridge, set a course back to Earth and then we both switch on a Stasis chamber and sleep until we get home. We just pray the ship can survive however long the trip lasts.”
“Will that really work?” Asked Markus.
“Yeah, well the first bit will. As to whether we'll get home? I honestly couldn't say, but I don't know what other options there are. To put it bluntly, we either suffocate on board this ship when life support goes offline or we try and make it home. At worse, we'll die in our sleep.”
“Oh.” Markus said under his breath.
“I know it isn't what we wanted to hear, but let me just check further, it may not be as bad as that yet. I'm going to head down to the reactor, while I’m gone why don't you try some of these terminals; see if you can find anything out.”
Markus felt alarmed, he didn't like the sound of being left on his own. It must of shown on his face.
“I wont be long Markus.” James said, “just relax OK? We'll get out of this.”
And with that he walked off down towards the other end of the deck, Markus watched as the light from James' flash light grew further and further away, before completely disappearing. He stood there in the dim light, flash light in hand looking around engineering. Various machines, large and small filled the room; most of which had a computer terminal built in. He assumed this would have been a busy place when things were normal, but now it was empty, deserted and too quiet.
He walked across the room to a small office, inside he found a desk with a terminal on top and a couple of filing cabinets. He sat himself down in a chair behind the desk, and switched on the screen. After a few seconds of loading a message appeared.
ENGINEERING SYSTEM.
PLEASE ENTER AUTHORISATION CODE.
Markus sighed, he didn't have a code. He stood up and walked across the office to one of the filing cabinets, a label on the front read 'Paper Archives'. He opened the top draw, revealing several dividers containing various bits of paper work, most of which made for tedious reading and dealt with system reports from before the ship left Earths orbit. The other drawers were the same, reports taken from different days and months but all from Earths atmosphere. He tried the next cabinet, the content here was like before, only during flight. Markus could see that reports were made of all the systems during flight, right up until the Light Drive was activated. After this there was nothing else, at least not on paper.
“The terminals would probably have more up to date stuff.” He muttered to himself.
All of a sudden James Hortons voice filled the air, the suddenness of which gave Marcus a nasty jolt.
“Erm........This is James Horton. I am currently in Engineering, if anyone can hear this then please make your way up to Engineering. Hopefully we can all help each other to work out this mess. Thank you.”
He's found a way to communicate, maybe there will be others around too.
He slumped back down on the chair, holding his head in his hands, sharp pains running through his brain. The headaches were definitely getting worse, what was causing them? How long had they been asleep?
The lights went out, only his flash light lit the room.
“What the fuck?!” He whispered to himself, “what now?”
A low 'Hum' came from the direction of the reactor, he stood up holding the flash light in front of him. His head felt like it was splitting open. He slowly walked out of the room, shining the flash light in the direction James' had gone, there was no sign of him; only an intense darkness.
A voice?
Markus spun around, he could hear someone, someone shouting. What was being said he couldn't tell but there was definitely a voice. Just then the lights came back up, they were still the same eerie red of the emergency lighting but now they seemed a lot brighter and stable. And there was the voice again. Markus began walking to the hallway outside of Engineering, that was where it seemed to be coming from. He stopped at the top of the stairwell and listened, all had gone quiet.
“Markus?” James said as he walked into the hallway.
The fright nearly scared Markus half to death, he let out a whimper; dropping the flash light down the stairs.
“Jesus fucking Christ James! Nearly gave me a damn heart attack!” Markus responded, clearly distressed from the sudden scare.
“Sorry.” James said. “What you doing out here anyway?”
“There was someone down there, I heard a voice” Markus replied.
“A voice? Are you sure? Maybe somebody heard my announcement! Could somebody be coming?Did you hear me over the ships tannoy?” James asked excitedly.
“Yes I did, that's when you scared the shit out of me the first time!” Markus remarked, “You could have warned me!”
“Sorry.” James replied, “ I had completely forgotten about the ships tannoy until I saw a ComSpeak on the wall back there! Hopefully if anyone else is here they'll have heard it too.”
“There is someone else here!” He said back to James, “I swear I've just heard someone! Anyway what was it you were doing back there? I noticed the light was improved, was that you that switched it off?”
“ Yes, I've shut off all none essential services. The figures checked out, there is no plan B; looks like we'll be sleeping on our way home soon. The lighting is running a bit more efficiently now though. I had to reset the reactor to try and get some more power. It wasn't just the lights that went off, everything did – including life support!”
James glanced down the stairs, if Markus had heard a voice then they had since moved on. He turned to Markus.
“Did you get anything from the terminals?” Asked James.
“No, I tried the one in that office but I don't have a code. Figured the rest would be the same. We should get down to the next deck, see where that voice came from.”
“No need,” said James. “Listen.”
James was right, there was no need. There were footsteps slowly walking up the stairs.