in an unusual alliance of gunners and mechanics that left the doc promising to always maintain full stocks and to keep his maintenance perfectly on track.
Claire watched them with a suppressed smile. Her roommate was going to be fine after all; she was tougher than she looked. Claire marveled at how easily the Manasseh's spacers adapted. If only Noah were as easy to teach as the medic. The demands of shipboard life quickly distracted her from that wistful thought.
Lieutenant Loyd started teaming Claire with other officers in the sims. She by far preferred fighting from the damage control console rather than taking the hot seat on tactical control. At that engineering watch station, she filled her screens with detailed system schematics and huddled with her division, plotting out ways to keep the ship fighting. Someone else in those team drills would make the attack and defense decisions, and when their mock ship took hits, Claire would take power, air, or whatever else was needed and reroute it to keep the ship able to fight and to escape to fight again.
Her department head still insisted she study fighting the ship from tactical control, but the XO's roster gave her the damage control central slot for the next fleet exercise when they got back to Yeltsin's Star.
In the fleet reports, Ephraim was having maintenance issues again and had returned to Blackbird. Manasseh would run the war exercise with their sister ships in Blackbird simulators instead of live action, so the Ephraim could take part.
* * *
The deafening clangor of General Quarters yanked Claire up out of a deep sleep. The throbbing alarm beat on as she rolled out of her bunk and grabbed for her skinsuit. She threw herself into it, her waking brain waiting for the final notes, which would inform the crew that this was only a drill.
They didn't come.
She closed the last seal, opened the stateroom door, and ran for Engineering. Spacers crowded the passageways as everyone else who'd been off watch charged towards their duty stations in an ordered rush. She slid through the Engineer hatch, noting every face was as tense as her own, yet there was no confusion, and everyone arrived within moments. She saw a lot of concern in their eyes, but no fear—yet, at least—as she took her own station and plugged in her earbud.
“All Hands, this is the Captain.”
The voice came up quickly on all channels, and Claire felt a quick surge of relief at how normal he sounded. That relief didn't last long.
“We've just translated back into normal-space for our precision navigation drill,” Commander Greentree went on. “We're just over thirty light-minutes from Uriel, and we haven't picked up the Blackbird nav beacons. We haven't gotten any response to our FTL transmissions, either. Now, I'm probably overreacting here.” He chuckled easily. “But, the Protector would like us to take care of his ship, so we're staying at General Quarters until I know for certain what's going on. And when we find out it's all the fault of those idle layabouts at Blackbird, the first drink on-station will be on me! Carry on.”
On the command channel, Claire heard Lieutenant Loyd report the Manasseh's course set for an approach to Blackbird Alpha at full acceleration. Moments later, he announced drone launches, and her stomach clenched. Those birds were expensive; the CO would only authorize two if he wanted a look at Blackbird badly. Claire switched her display to mirror tactical control and saw her department head had countdowns for when each drone would begin reporting on Blackbird. The first sensor was set to skim past at max acceleration and even at closest approach it would stay well clear the yard complex, moons, and Uriel itself. The second would decelerate to provide detailed information but arrive nearly an hour after the first. Two of her techs switched their consoles to mirror the drone sensor operators' screens in CIC just as they had done before in drills to get early hints of where their tiger teams would be needed. Claire found and added the voice channel the two operators were using.
For just over two hours, they waited.
The operator for drone one yelped a startled curse over the com when that sensor's screen flashed red—Failure to lock onto navigational beacon: “Blackbird Alpha, Blackbird Bravo, Node 2A, Blackbird Charlie, Node 3A . . .” The screen text scrolled quickly as more beacons should have been in range, and weren't. Then that warning shifted to just the bottom quarter