(This was Prompted by one of my amazing patrons, and it made me cry. Here you go, @leximpwrites this is on you!)
“The core is overloaded!”
“We can’t! The first blast, it destroyed the escape pods!”
It was a chain of accidents. Stupid accidents that could have been prevented if everyone on the ship knew what tot do. But they didn’t. Secret-keeping was still a problem, even in the Alliance. Too many races feared sharing the little details of their ships for fear of someone else taking advantage later. It wasn’t unreasonable. The Alliance had its fair share of ancient enemies, now forced to work together for the greater good.
But the habit, to keep developments to themselves unless they absolutely had to, continued.
The accidents started small. A short in part of the ship that made the power grid in the living quarters go unstable. It was mostly just annoying; the lights flickering on and off. Some of the atmo controls, heating mostly, to turn on and off unreliably. Easily managed. Those with comfortable quarters opened them to those without, and the ship moved on with the mission with only a little grumbling.
But that little fault, a few hours of instability, left a deeper mark than anyone could have guessed.
Because the core containment was on the same circuit as the life support, protected and hidden, a few cables woven in with the rest.
Cables that were never made to accommodate even the smallest power surge.
Minute by minute, hour by hour, the power flickered, and the core containment threatened to fall, eaten away as the delicate connectors, designed for absolute stability, burned out, one by one.
The explosion took the ship by surprise. At first, they thought they were being attacked. Why wouldn’t they? The fault in the circuits had been fixed. Power was stable again. Everyone who had switched rooms was already back in their own quarters.
It wasn’t until the internal alarms began to scream that the crew realized that the explosion came from within, and the cause was worse than any of them could possibly have guessed.
“What’s going on?” Valery, the only human on the crew, demanded as he stumbled into the room. The artificial gravity wasn’t gone, but the stabilizers were, and the ship was listing hard to one side. “Gaz, talk to me!”
“It’s the core,” Gaz said, and caught the human when he stumbled again and got within arm’s reach. Gaz, being nearly twice his size and possessing four arms, was perfectly able to catch the falling human. “The shielding is gone. It’s shedding radiation. I think… I think the coolant vaporized.”
“It can’t have!” Farro insisted. Like Gaz, he was Ravsi, two meters of muscle, scales, and six limbs. His round face was twisted with fear, and small wonder. An unshielded core… many races still used radioactive cores for energy. It was efficient, after all, and safe.
“Cores don’t just explode!” Gaz snarled back, defense-spines rising around his shoulders and back with his temper. “It had to have been the coolant!”
“It doesn’t matter why it exploded,” Valery cut them both off shortly. He was notoriously cool-headed, and so the anger from him was startling enough to take both Ravsi by surprise. “We can argue about it later. What do we do?”
“The core has to be manually shielded,” Gav said reluctantly. It was a death sentence for any Ravsi. They were notoriously vulnerable to radiation. There was thick shielding between them and the core, but it wouldn’t be long before that started to fail. He could already hear the shielding going down as ore and more of the power drained away, automated to protect the central mass of the ship. They were already far too close to the core. In another minute, the whole ship would be flooded with the full blast of the core’s radiation and everyone aboard would die. “There’s a failsafe, it’s a crank about twelve meters from this door. If we can get to it, we can save the ship.”
“The last of the radiation shielding beyond this door is gone. Going in there… we don’t have anything that can take the radiation long enough to make it to the crank.”
“How much radiation is actually coming off that thing?”
“By a human count around eight thousand roentgen an hour.”
“More, closer to the core, but the core is farther down the hall, and there’s some shielding between it and the crank”
“Tell me about the crank.”
“It’s… it’s supposed to be operated by a single crew member, but I saw it through one of the cameras right after the explosion, before the cameras died. There’s most of a metal door on top of it. It has to be moved before the crank could be operated.”
Valery looked between them, and at the door, and nodded once.
“We’re going in,” he decided resolutely. When they stared at him, he steadied himself on the tilting floor. “I can shield you long enough to get there and back.”
“I’m going to shield you,” he repeated in a voice that allowed no argument. “We’re going in. You two are going to move the door and pull the crank. I’m going to keep you alive. Clear?”
“I asked you if you understand me, Gaz.”
There was a look in his eyes, wild and fierce. Gaz had never seen a human like this before, let alone their quiet scientist friend. It was frightening, and when he traded nervous glances with Farro, it was clear he felt the same. “Clear.”
“Good. Get ready to open the door and get ready to hustle. I can’t hold a shield like this for very long.”
Without a word, Gaz reached for the door controls. Like all the doors close to the core, it was a manual door, and he took a long, steadying breath. Beside him, Farro got ready to move.
Valery closed his eyes and concentrated hard. Glowing gold-green shields spilled out of his hands and wrapped around Farro and Gaz, warm and soothing, deeply scented of a forest in the first minutes of sunrise.
“What about you?” Farro asked, almost at the same time that Gaz realized Valery didn’t have a shield of his own.
There was no time to argue. Gaz yanked the door open, and they ran, barely able to keep their feet amid the rubble. Chunks of matte black stone shielding littered the floor. Valery only looked at the stone and focused harder, the shields around Farro and Gaz turning to green crystal that flowed with them as they ran.
The crank came into sight. As Gaz thought, there was a great metal door blocking it. He and Farro wasted no time applying all their muscle to it, adrenaline and desperation lending them the strength they needed to shove it aside.
When Gaz pulled the crank, it felt like victory, but there was no time for celebration. The core was shielded, but there was more than enough radioactive rubble in the hallway to kill them all if Valery’s shield failed.
“Done?” Valery asked, hands shaking with effort, but with determination blazing around him. Gaz nodded. “Good. Time to go.”
They ran, tripping over rubble and crashing into the walls as the ship tried to stabilize over and over, and failed. Finally they made the door and dove through. Gaz slammed the emergency closure, and the door trembled as thick shielding closed over it, cutting off the escape of any more radiation.
With a pained gasp, Valery let his shields fall, and collapsed to the floor, skin red and burned-looking.
“Did we do it?” he asked as Gaz reached for him, and held up a hand. “Give me a minute. I’m not feeling great. Is the core shielded?”
“It is,” Farro said, and knelt beside Valery. As Gaz reported in to the captain, assuring her that the core was contained. Now, at least, they had a chance to call for help. “How did you do that?”
“My grandfather is a Lesnik,” Valery smiled without humor, and let Farro help him up slowly. “I have a little magic in my veins.”
“Is that why… why you could take the radiation?” Gaz asked, supporting him from the other side even as Valery toed off his shoes and left them behind. “Your human magic?”
“No,” Valery said, and glanced towards the medical bay when they passed it, before he kept walking. Later, Gaz would remember that glance, and curse himself ten times a fool. But for now, he let Valery lead them to the crew quarters. “I’m human. We don’t die easy. There’s an incinerator onboard, right? With containment?”
“Yes,” Farro said when they reached Valery’s room, and the human stripped to his skin. It was odd. Usually humans were skittish about nudity, but Valery didn’t hesitate to dump all of his clothing into the metal waste-bin by his desk. “Why?”
“Burn all of this,” Valery said, and passed to over. A wave of his palm encased the bin in more of his green magic. “It’s all covered in radioactive dust. Better do it fast. I’m too tired to hold a shield.”
With that, he waved them out and stumbled for the small shower attached to his rooms, and left Gaz and Farro holding the green-glowing waste-bin.
“Better do as he says,” Farro said at last, and they let the door close behind them. Shouts were echoing through the ship and Gaz wanted to go to them, wanted to reassure them, but Valery told them to burn his clothing, and the green shield around the bin was already flickering weakly. “Where…?”
“Here,” Gaz said when they came to the chute, and held it open for Farro to dump the whole thing down into the well-contained incinerator below. With the threat disposed of, he hesitated. “He’s not… human’s can’t take that sort of radiation, can they?”
“I don’t know,” Farro whispered, the adrenaline wearing off all at once. He sagged against the wall, eyes dark and worried. “No one knows what humans can do. Not really.”
With fear crackling between them, they looked back at the closed door to their human’s room, a clear message that Valery did not want company. “What do we do?”
“What can we do? The ship is dead in the water. We can’t go anywhere until a rescue comes.”
“Medical is full of people who were hurt in the blast. He doesn’t… seem hurt. Just tired. I read that paper from the Ha’reeti xenobiologist. Magic wears humans out, and Valery said he’s not very good at it…”
“Maybe,” Gaz said reluctantly. Valery’s door remained firmly closed. “We need to report, and maybe we can tell the Captain that we need a Human ship to meet us. Someone who can… who can make sure he’s alright.”
“Carrier Arctic, please come in!”
“He’s crashing. What happened?”
“He… he protected us. He shielded us from- he said he could take the radiation. He said-“
“Humans don’t- they don’t just die. Everyone knows how hard it is to- we have to save him!”
“Carrier Arctic, come in!”
“His body is shutting down. I don’t know how to treat a human! No Ravsi could- how long was he exposed?”
“I don’t know. Not more than a few minutes. He said- he said we had to be fast.”
“Arctic, we have a dying human onboard, please send help!”
Gaz sat on the floor Valery’s empty room, a bottle in his hand. Ravsi didn’t weep like most races, but his throat was raw from screaming helplessly into the silent room. The room that had been carefully stripped of everything their human owned, all of it given to the incinerator to protect the crew from any lingering contamination. The room itself was cleaned, decontaminated, and cleaned again, until there wasn’t so much as a hint of the human who used to live there.
Of the human who chose to protect a crew of people who weren’t even his own species rather than save his own life.
Of the human who died in the hospital of Carrier Arctic, too far gone for even the greatest of their healers to save.
The door slid open soundlessly, and Gaz might have flow to his feet, mad with grief, if it hadn’t been Farro, four more bottles in his hands.
“I asked how humans mourn,” he said as he slid down the wall to sit beside Gaz, and offered one of his full bottles to replace Gaz’s empty one. “They… they told me to raise a glass. They did it… they did it to show me how.”
“What do they say?” Gaz asked, and stared down at the bottle in his hands. “When they do that?”
“They said,” Farro said, and raised the bottle to their friend, to the human who saved them all. “To the glorious dead.”
dededos
prguitarman
2087
vaporwave
titsay
