CANAISIS ∞ Chronicle Two: A Captain's Journey

52 ∞ Double Reboot

Long Ago

He was unaware of anything. All thought had fled his mind. Even the awareness of the passing of time had gone.

How long he sat there, he did not know. Occasionally, Canaisis' voice pressed against the void that had become his mind, but it did not penetrate. The absence of thought offered a seductive absence of the pain in his soul.

Canaisis' intrusions threatened to break that mental void, but he resisted without thought. Everything had become too much for him... his efforts futile, the results ending up the same: extinction.

<EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN PROTOCOLS INITIATED... >

<END OF FILE>

The abrupt interruption startled Ayla with a painful stab of lightning through her consciousness. She was within the darkness again, her thoughts slowing to a stop, but she knew there was more. Gathering her strength, her Gift sought the Captain—it flowed toward him, and she became him.

∞

Mental conditioning from years of training snapped across his mind like a whip. His heart skipped a beat, then raced to a pounding pace as the adrenaline hit.

Zero-G!

He was floating in the dark with emergency sirens blasting his ears. As the emergency lights kicked in, he oriented himself within his cabin.

Extending his leg, he caught the edge of the bed, pulled himself to it, then kicked for the door. One hand grabbed the doorjamb, the other hand found the slide button mounted at the center of the door. Sliding the button aside exposed a small hole designed to emit a whistle if air flowed too quickly through it, an indicator of whether there was low pressure on the other side. He heard no whistle, but his heartbeat pounding in his ears sounded like a drum.

Bracing himself, he yanked the door open and launched himself from the jamb straight at the Bridge door. His hand locked onto the handhold beside the door as he slapped the manual override panel. The door opened, and he flung himself through the air at the command chair.

"Canaisis! Report!"

No answer. Gareth's sense of alarm jumped another notch. Something was terribly wrong. His lungs sucked in heaving gulps of air as he fought his panic. Training squelched his emotions as he pulled himself into the chair and strapped in to stop his body from floating up and away.

His fingers automatically keyed the controls in the arm of his chair. First came the Bridge protocols and then the control systems. The blast door to the Bridge closed with a thud as he watched for the indicator lights to tell him the Bridge's independent environmental systems and power had come online. The alarms on the Bridge were not as loud as in the hallway, but he ignored them. He was now self-contained, and that was a necessity since he hadn't taken time to don a pressure suit.

His mind became crystal clear, prioritizing as the Bridge monitors gave him information, his hands flying over the keyboards of his chair.

Systems were not responding. He needed to assess what he did have. Canaisis was priority, but she was shut down!

How's that possible? There was no time to wonder how. He needed to know why?

Lists of alternative courses of action scrolled through his mind. Keying subsystems to run diagnostics, he found no damage to the ship seemed to have occurred. Air pressure was constant across the board. But he had power failures across multiple levels.

Next, he keyed navigation to see where he was. He should have never allowed his ship to break orbit without knowing his course. He chastised himself. He'd been lax in his duty as Captain.