Drifting Dark

Chapter 10: The Graveyard

"That one almost hit the engines!" Brendan's shouting managed to pierce through the screeching alarms. Shrey's response was lost as a set of heavy metallic thuds were added to the cacophony.

Helen didn't need any extra incentive to hurry. She stumbled as the extra acceleration pushed her downwards, taking a few sluggish steps before her weight returned to normal. The artificial gravity had automatically adjusted itself to compensate. It took her a moment to register what that meant.

All of the bottom thrusters must have just turned on. Not the engines. They were still in dark mode.

She caught the edge of the door and swung herself into the flight deck to see Brendan and Shrey in the two front seats. Both of them were working frantically at the controls, caught up in a heated conversation.

"We're taking too much damage," Brendan argued at Shrey from the copilot seat. "We can't maneuver properly with just thrusters, we need the engines."

"If we leave dark mode then we're fucked!" Shrey snapped back, not quite shouting, evidently trying to focus on flying the ship.

"If we stay on this course, then we're all dead anyways," Brendan replied. "There's no one else out there. We need to take the risk."

"Thrusters is all we have." Shrey paused for a moment to glare at their first officer. "And I can make it work."

"What's going on?" Helen asked loudly as she gripped the back of Shrey's chair. She watched the large viewscreen, a map of the local area. The dotted line that represented their predicted course flashed once, before disappearing. It was impossible to miss that their little ship's icon was surrounded by a huge number of objects, indistinct blobs picked up by their proximity scans.

Slow-moving objects. Fast-moving ship.

A dangerous combination.

"Are they mines?" Helen asked, even louder than before.

"No," Brendan answered, suddenly noticing her arrival. "It's a graveyard."

"Oh, shit," Helen said under her breath. She pointed at the viewscreen. "So those blobs on the scans..."

"Ships, or chunks of them at least," Brendan answered, barely looking up from his console.

"Who's ships?" Helen asked urgently. "What's actually out there?"

Brendan's eyes widened. "We don't know."

Helen gestured to the viewscreen. "Switch it to the camera."

They were just dots until Brendan zoomed in. There were big ships, there were small ships. Brendan was focusing in on one section, where the debris appeared to be most dense. Then the wreckage came into focus.

Hulls burned black by laser fire, dotted with craters the size of cars. Shuttles, nothing more than frames, burst apart by missiles. Tiny fighters, drifting dead, despite no visible exterior damage.

Logos popped out at her: Earth, Mars, and...

The Horizon Alliance.

Not pre-war. But the ships were old styles. This wasn't just an old battlefield, it must have happened near the start of the war. Meaning, those ships had been out here more than a decade.

Helen stared at it, eyes darting across the screen as the camera began to pan. "What's our heading look like?"

"The computer is recalculating," Brendan answered. "It needs a few more seconds." It beeped and he swore under his breath. "And how do you plan to get through that without the engines?"