“What do you mean we’re missing half the ship?” Justine asked.

  “It means half the ship is missing.” I said, trying to copy the makeshift map to my link to no avail. “At the very least it means there are major issues between here and there. At the worst, it means the ship is holding together by a thread, or something we don’t remember yet.”

  “I…couldn’t tell you what sort of technology we might have that could do such a thing,” Justine said. “Hold a ship together, I mean. One that’s been ripped apart.”

  “All we have to go on is that we’re alive,” Garrison said, stepping up to look at the map. “Let’s be grateful for that much at least. Sure it means things might be more difficult, but they already were to begin with.”

  “Right,” I said, now running through the alerts once again. “We have six people, and…seventy eight alerts. We might have to split up, that’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “Why don’t we wake up more people?” Pat asked.

  I was surprised I hadn’t thought of that myself. “Great question…how do we do that?”

  Once again, everyone shuffled their feet, waiting for anyone else to answer.

  “Right,” I said. “Anyone need this or the computer for a few minutes?” They all shook their heads. “Computer…” I paused, and took a different approach. “Actually, let’s see what we can do from the console, I have a theory. Much like the script I had written, I attempted to view the cryosleep functions and monitoring. I was able to view the subsystem and its status. As soon as I attempted to open its specific controls, the computer went black, rebooting once again. “Well, that answers that. Unless we want to risk waking up people manually, we might have to see if anyone else shows up.”

  As the amber glow from all the displays dimmed and grew, I saw the look of somberness across the crew. They all looked at me currently. They all still thought I was there captain. At this point I felt internally conflicted. I still didn’t feel like the captain, but that was just a weird gut feeling. Meanwhile the rest of the crew, my crew, looked at me for direction. I had been all too eager to step up and help so far, I wouldn’t stop now.

  “Looks like it’s just us for now, unfortunately,” I said, putting on my best ‘captaining’ voice. “Let’s work out what happens next.” My stomach gurgled rather loudly and suddenly.

  “Let’s make sure we have the fuel to get them done too,” Freight said, completely serious. As if sharing the same thought, we all turned to Celia.

  She shrugged, “Only a little bit has come back, sorry. I don’t know how much my specialization was strictly for food resources or something else.”

  “Makes sense,” Justine said, shouldering a bag. “I think we’re all just hoping someone makes it out of the fog. Let’s move, that map at least gives us something to work with. We’ll figure out where food is on the way.”

  I gave one glance around the bridge before turning to leave myself. “Let’s roll.”

  Walking back out through the ship made me realize just how off things actually were. The lights were on, yes, but they were obviously dimmer than they were supposed to be. Not every door or panel glowed, as if the room was closed for business. There was almost a slight haze throughout the corridors, if I didn’t know any better I would have said it was dusty, but no layers of grime showed on any surface. It was like the ship had only recently been woken up, and the very small disturbances were displaying just how long they had been untouched.

  “Does anyone know how long we’d been in cryo?” I asked, as we made our way to the mess hall.

  “Nope,” Justine said. “First thing I asked too, the computer couldn’t handle it. I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said. “Nothing can be easy.”

  The mess was more central to the ship, sitting between the upper and lower decks. Taking the lift down from the bridge put them close enough that it wasn’t terribly hard to find. As we navigated throughout the ship, the lights proceeded them, turning on before they entered corridors or rooms. The mess didn’t have any doors separating it from the rest of the deck, so as we approached the open room, a bright smattering of light cascaded all around us. The lights dimmed sharply, before returning to a brightness that was serviceable, but still a touch soft.

  “Power seems flakey,” Freight said, staring at the lights.

  “Everything seems flakey,” Justine added, moving forward. “Let’s get some food before it goes bad, if it hasn’t already.”

  We all followed after her, navigating around the vast amounts of tables towards the serving platforms.

  “It’s weird seeing all this infrastructure in place, and nobody but ourselves to use it,” Pat said, marveling at the scale of the room they were in. “Does the ship really have this many people?”

  “Well, you saw the other cryo chambers when you woke up right?” I said. “There were a lot near me as well, and it looked like they were several layers deep as well. The fact that everyone’s asleep, I’d be more worried if we did find someone else.”

  Justine approached one of the dispensary consoles, but gave it a questioning glance. She shrugged and pressed the small console anyway. The power shut off, we all held our breath the few seconds it took before the computer rebooted.

  “Who designed this piece of junk?” She asked no one in particular. She slammed her fist in the nearby wall. “One computer failure and the ship becomes practically inoperable? That seems like a massive oversight.”

  “There was redundancy implemented, you’ve seen the same readouts I have,” I said.

  “Had redundancy,” She bit the words out. “Not very redundant if everything goes down.”

  I just shrugged, trying not to let her get to me. “Guess we’ll figure out why it happened. See that it never happens again.”

  “Only if we can get there in the first place, we’re liable to starve to death.”

  As if to emphasize the point, there was a low grumble behind me. I looked over to where the rest of the crew now stood. That hadn’t been a stomach gurgle, they were all much too far away.

  “What?” Justine asked, my face giving away my confusion.

  “I’m not sure, I thought I heard something, but it’s not important. We need to find ourselves some supplies and get to—”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  A chirp sounded from each of our arms at once. I looked down at my own link and saw the very confusing sentence staring back at me.

  Connection established - loading…

  The loading had an indicator showing that it was currently doing something.

  “What?” I asked blankly.

  The dispenser beeped, and prepackaged meals began to stream out onto the loading tray.

  “What the hell?” Justine said, staring at her link and her food at the same time. “My order went through? It rebooted though.”

  “Everything is going through!” I shouted excitedly. “The computer’s back! Now we can figure out what’s going on with us.”

  Around us all, the large room began to vibrate with a new found energy. Consoles, computers, and links finally getting contact with the ship and doing what they were supposed to do. It seemed like the lights themselves glowed a bit more stable.

  There was an excited chorus as we began to try to login to our links and piece some of our lives back together. Unfortunately, the computer had only just rebooted and seemed to be taking its time getting back to normal processing levels. Food and life support were the priorities apparently, but that just made sense.

  There was another chirp. “I’m in!” Justine said. She was the first to do so. “Now I can…I can…do nothing apparently. Now it just says ‘Updating’.”

  “Oh,” Pat said, not taking her eyes of her own link. “What would it need to update now?”

  “Well, who knows how long we’ve been out,” Garrison said, peering over her shoulder. “There could have been a period where others were up and about, and we weren’t.”

  “Kind of like different shifts,” Pat said. “Still, it seems interesting. Oh! I’m logged in too!” She twisted her arm at a weird angle just to show us the same ‘Updating’ message.

  One by one, all of our links got past the login screen. Everyone except Freight. I looked at him as the rest of the crew tried to determine which link would update first. Freight just shrugged as if to say, ‘Not my thing’. He was an interesting character compared to the rest, I wondered if I had worked with him in the past. I felt like it made it easier to work with someone who didn’t talk much. Especially when he did, it was something he found important. And apparently what was important to him, was one of the packaged meals.

  In the advent of the computer coming back to life, the prospect of a meal had quickly been forgotten. I knew that if times were a bit more tough, that wouldn’t have been the case. But at the moment we were all just hungry, but starved for information.

  After what seemed like forever, someone’s link finally updated. Interestingly, it was Celia’s. Everyone, except Freight who was now enjoying his meal, crowded nearby Celia’s wrist. Her link was past the update screen, now connected to the ship’s computer, but Celia didn’t move.

  “Does, um, anyone remember how to use this thing?” Celia asked, holding out her wrist.

  “Let me take a look. May I?” I asked. Celia nodded. I looked at the small screen, and my mind blanked. In the bridge, the displays were all in some sort of text only fallback mode. Yet even on this small screen, there was a UI that my brain struggled to parse.

  “Uh, oh. I see what you mean.” I said. “Well, nothing like on the job training.” I began to play with the touch screen, and tried spinning the crown like a control. Anything that would show me some sort of submenu or application that made sense. But in the quick attempt I gave, I found myself defeated by the little device. Something about it made me feel disturbed. Like, I should have been able to navigate a link as if it was second nature. Failing had my brain feeling like it had failed in some spectacular fashion. “Okay, I guess this fog is a bit more convoluted than we thought.” I said, giving Celia back her wrist. “Once more people login, let’s try to figure it out together. Surely that will help us freshen up our minds.”

  There was another small chime.

  “I’m in,” Justine said. “I’ll see what I can figure—”

  She was interrupted as her own link began chiming continuously. She almost started shaking it.

  “What? Oh, I think I’m specifically getting some sort of alert.” She started messing with the controls.

  Watching Justine, I was hoping she would figure of the link. After struggling myself, I didn’t know what sort of task it would be for anyone else. When she froze, I just assumed that she had run into a similar mind freeze like I had. Instead, I saw her do a double take. When she looked up, I saw a deep fear in her eyes. As if it happened it slow motion, she started to say something. Just as the room flipped sideways.

  It didn’t feel like getting shoved, it was more like having the floor yanked out from beneath you. Only for it to be replaced by the wall. I barely had a second of recognition before I smashed into the edge of the mess hall. I heard the distant thuds as the rest of the crew followed suit. There was now a constant roar, what I assumed to be my own adrenaline fueled heart, except it was much deeper than that, and more than that, clearly audible. I was trying to catch my breath after having it knocked out of me, but it was much harder than I expected. It was like I was slowly being crushed by an invisible force. I tried to force myself to cough, gasp, anything to put air in to my lungs. By sheer force or adrenaline, I sipped air back into me.

  “What’s…happening,” I croaked, hoping I was loud enough to be heard over the deep rumble. A few precious seconds passed, I sincerely hoped I hadn’t just witnessed all of our deaths.

  “Engine…burn,” Justine said, surprisingly closer than I realized. “Moving.”

  My brain snapped into focus, adrenaline pushing whatever oxygen I had to my processing of the situation. The ship was moving, the engines were firing, and we were being crushed by much more G forces than we had been before.

  “Can…stop?” I shouted back, but it came out more like a gargle. There was no response, either Justine was trying, or there wasn’t anything she could do. I felt blackness began to encroach around my vision. I was struggling to breathe, I wouldn’t be conscious for much longer.

  There was wild crack, like the sound of thunder ripping through the ship. The room dimmed, lights flickered and shut off, I and everyone else fell back to the floor. As quickly as we had been thrown to the wall, it stopped.

  I somehow managed to remain conscious, but felt like utter crap because of it. My stomach was roiling from the sudden changes, I dared not move from my lying position. When I came down, I didn’t land on anything thankfully. The same couldn’t be said for a few others, Freight and Celia were struggling off of a table and dispenser. The furniture and permanent emplacements held where they were, this wasn’t abnormal for the room during a burn. The most unusual thing to happen was being here during the engines running in the first place.

  Garrison somehow had gotten to his feet and was helping everyone into recovery positions, it looked like a few people had gone unconscious. He seemed surprised by the fact that I was awake, but took it in stride.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to out in the open when that happens,” Garrison said. He looked over my arms and legs, making sure I didn’t break or sprain anything.

  “You think?” I said, finally mustering the courage to sit up. “If that was planned to happen every time, there wouldn’t be anybody left to run it. That was what, twenty seconds total? If that?”

  “Couldn’t tell you sir,” He said. “It seems all the ship’s computer is down again.” He showed me his link. The screen once again showed the ‘No Connection’ error that they’d all had before. “And I wasn’t paying the greatest attention when down decided to be sideways.” Garrison stepped away to his next patient.

  “Twenty seconds sounds about right,” Justine said, peering around one of the tables. Neither I nor her had ventured standing up just quite yet. “We should be thankful that was all it was. If that was the maneuver that was three days late, it would have a been a quite long one to make up for the time we lost.”

  “Do we know why it happened?” I said, trying to test my legs. “It seems weird that everything would just start working once again.”

  “No idea, sir,” She said, looking at her disabled link, as if wishing for it to tell her more. “An intermittent fault is the worst kind, especially in a scenario like this. If the computer miraculously comes back, the backlog of processes all try to finish their tasks. And if the scenarios are misbehaving too, then things turn off or on without any proper procedure checking. On top of that, if the computer shuts off, then you’ve cut everything short once again. We have no idea how long this has been happening, or what sort of damage it’s caused.”

  “If the core memory connects, then disconnects during any sort of procedure, I don’t want even want to think about what broken mess will need to be cleaned up.” I said. I looked around the at the crew, everyone was coming around. Judging by Garrison’s demeanor, it didn’t look like anyone got majorly injured. I stood up, my legs were a bit weak, but I was coming around. “Looks like things might be a bit worse than we planned.” I said, addressing everyone now. “But that means our job is more important than ever. We’ll want to figure out the best way to protect ourselves from…whatever that was in the future. This ship needs us, and I’ll be damned if I die before remembering who I am.”

  There were a few chuckles from that, it didn’t appear that I’d lost any of them from the cause.

  “The Bastion needs us,” Celia said, also now sitting up.

  “Pardon?” I asked.

  “The ship, Bastion. It needs us,” She said. “When I hit my head, I found myself drifting through what I can only assume were my own memories. The ship’s name is bastion.”

  “Bastion, huh,” I said. “Then let’s try to keep it that way.”