Broken Pieces Shine || An Orville AU Story

Slingshot

It was a risky maneuver that didn't pay off. However the reality of the situation was that had she not tried to do it when she'd done it, they probably would have ended up in a million different pieces floating out in space for all eternity. She knew that Ed wasn't anywhere near happy with this but neither was she so they sat there in silence. It was like a very pathetic game of chicken to see who might yell at the other first. Ed was tapping his fingers on the console, periodically glancing in her direction before looking away just as she attempted to catch his eye.

"We're still alive." She was the first to break the silence between them, "And as long as we are alive there's hope."

"Hope for what? Let's be realistic here, you don't have to coddle me."

"I'm not trying to coddle anyone, Captain, but I think we'd have been far worse off actually being pulled through that black hole than-"

"Than what? Getting flung a billion lightyears across space after getting caught in its gravitational pull? Where did that thing come from anyway? Do we know that it was a blackhole because a lot of this doesn't make sense." He sighed loudly. She looked down at her console. The data was confusing, that was a light way of putting it at least. She also didn't have any way to answer his question. Not immediately.

"I don't know." She closed her eyes and rested back in her seat, taking in a deep breath in an attempt to calm herself.

"Do you even know where we are?"

"Do you?"

"Not the first clue. I don't even think our distress beacon is working." He frowned and leaned in to work on the console in front of him. Being slingshotted through space like that hadn't been good for the shuttle they were in. Perhaps it was one of the larger, nicer ones, meant for longer travel than just a light transport from ship to ship or landing on a planet but it was still very cramped compared to the size of The Orville. The ship they were both accustomed to being on. "Get some rest I'll keep running scans until I come across anything resembling signs of life."

"Captain-"

"That's an order, Lieutenant."

She didn't want to say anything that would upset him more than he already was, so she got up, moved to the back of the shuttle, and pulled down one of the beds from the wall. After locking it in place she laid down and curled up. Still watching him from behind as he worked tirelessly, trying to find anything familiar. A single speck of life in the vast emptiness they were thrown into. She was trying to tell her that there had to be some hope. That maybe the Orville would be able to pick up their signal even if they couldn't do the same. It wasn't as if they wouldn't have seen what had happened but how fast they could be caught up to was another question entirely.

She lay there, in silence, for a long time, wondering how she was ever going to sleep or even rest at a time like this. Unfortunately, there wasn't much else she could do and if he wanted to be left alone for the time being then her best bet would be to leave him alone. Ever so slowly her eyelids got heavier and her blinks turned into gentle dozes until finally, she'd fallen asleep. Her dreams were nowhere near peaceful, either.

******

"Alara!"

Her eyes opened up and she blinked a few times to clear her blurry vision. When she sat up she could see what Ed had woken her up for. In the distance, there was a very large space station. Though it wasn't Union, that was for sure. It looked like a place that had been cobbled together from space junk and debris of other broken-down ships.

"What is it?" She moved from the bed where she had been laying and back into the seat she had been sitting in before he'd told her to go get some rest. "I mean how...all the way out here? This is the middle of nowhere."