Stargate Unification

Damage to Destiny

Eli spent his first day trying to find every ounce of power he could from the systems, and found that some of the systems in the forward section were powered up. He knew they had not been that far forward, as there were multiple hull breaches between the sections they were in. He was reviewing the details, and began shutting down the power that was being used as it was sizable.

The computer raised several alarms, as he tried to shut it down remotely. No matter what he did, it would not allow him to shut that section of the ship down, and it was shielded so he could not tell if it was pressurized or not. The piece of good news was that the sections directly around the sealed section were pressurized, and the space suit would likely be an overabundance of caution. He however knew he would have to do it, as it could save him several more weeks of power. The first thing he did however was shut down life support, as he knew he could wait days between running it for a few hours. The computer was running a complicated diagnostic program on the stasis pod to determine what was wrong with it. It would be 3 days before it finished, and he went to work on reading the manual.

He spent hours pouring over it while he sat in the observation room. He finally found a reference to another section of pods, in the forward section of the ship. It was inside of a sealed area of the ship that the sensors couldn’t scan through. It also appeared it was in the section of the ship that was using an extensive amount of power that could be utilized elsewhere. He looked at his watch, and realized he had been working for 22 hours, and decided to sleep before he ventured to the forward section of the ship.

He set up in the hydroponics bay, as the plants here would extend the time he had between needing to use the life support on the ship. He knew that 2 weeks for this repair would be an absolute miracle for time, and had to extend it as much as possible.

6 hours later he finally gave up on actually sleeping, and walked to the compartment they were storing the space suits. It did not take him long to get into it, his only regret he had to do this alone. He always felt better if there was someone to go over the final checks, in case he missed something. He double checked everything, and walked to the elevator before he pulled up the code he needed to get to the forward compartment where the power was being used.

As soon as the doors opened he put the Keno into search mode, hoping to find other interesting things while he was here. He knew he was not likely to get another chance at coming this far forward for some time, as it would be a long time before he could justify it when all he needed to do was shut down the power drains in this section.

He slowly walked through the corridor, the second Keno he still had telling him that the atmosphere here was nominal. He however knew he still had to open the door to the sealed compartment, and there was no way to determine it’s status. He walked to the door, and realized this compartment wasn’t sealed for no reason. He looked at the door system, and saw that it was locked by a code that had been put in place.

He typed in the code they had used for the bridge, and smiled when it actually worked on this door as well. He had learned you could essentially set any code you wanted, if it wasn’t locked before you did so. He pushed the button to equalize the pressure between the compartments, making the door indicator go from a steady yellow, to flashing green for a few moments, before it turned a solid green. He pushed the door to be opened, and was shocked when the lights came on.

He had found the proper Stasis Pods for the entire crew, as well as storage bays with more parts and other supplies than he could count right now. He also found dozens of the repair robots, and hoped he would be able to get even a fraction of them online in the next few days. He searched the compartment slowly, making sure he knew what was what before he moved on.

After nearly an hour he finally found a control console, and walked over to it. He noticed it was frozen in the middle of a countdown, and that because of the failure the station had to be reset. He had seen it a few times when they first came aboard, and suspected it was the result of a much wider system glitch from when the ship was launched. He watched the screen reset, and the timer quickly moved to 0 before it began flashing quickly and initiated whatever it had been programmed to control.

His first clue something was weird was his tablet alerting him to the fact that whatever was happening, a huge power drain from the system had s**t off, and he had more power as a result. The second was when the stasis pod across from him suddenly opened, and a woman with dark red hair stepped out of it. She pointed something at him, and he was wise enough to raise his hands as she looked around.

“How long have you been aboard?” Eli asked as she looked at him and c****d her head.

“Who are you?” she demanded in a language he had no hope of deciphering just by hearing it spoke. He however did happen to catch that it closely resembled Latin, and Lantean, and may be yet another progenitor language.

Eli moved slowly as he grabbed the tablet, and hoped that he was formatting the sentence properly. “My name is Eli, I am from Terranus. How long have you been aboard?” he asked in English while he typed in the Ancient he had learned aboard Destiny.

The woman looked at the screen, and lowered her weapon as she took the tablet from him. She had detected the same thing about his English, and knew if he had not heard the actual language spoken, he may not be able to relate the sounds with the text. “Since the Destiny launched, how many years has it been?” she asked showing him the text while she spoke the words slowly.

Eli's eyes went wide when he read that as he took the tablet from her and read it again. “Since Destiny launched?” he asked as he typed his message into Ancient. “We are not sure how many years it has been.” He said as he handed her the tablet and his statement surprised her.

She walked over to the command console, and she began looking through the logs. She began cursing more and more as she chewed out the situation. A glitch had indeed froze the system, and it had happened one year into the journey they should have been on. Because of it their wake-up call had glitched, and they had never woke up. She looked through the logs of the dozens of galaxies the ship had traveled through.

Eli watched her reaction, as he had switched the tablet to listen to what she was saying and dictated it onto the tablet so he could read it.

“60 million years, what the hell is going on?” she demanded as Jota and Irnas walked to the commotion she was making. She switched over to the ship diagnostics, and her eyes went wider as she saw the condition the ship was in. “How is this thing still flying?” she asked him.

“With a lot of work, and a lot of luck considering we still do not fully understand the systems.” Eli said as the tablet listened and translated what he spoke into Ancient so she could read it.

“My name is Vasi, Commander of the Alterran Exploratory Forces. This is Jota and Irnas, we were all aboard when Destiny launched. How long have you been aboard?” she demanded after introducing herself and her two companions who had just woken and walked over to where they were. He watched as she activated the repair drones, and he counted 25 of them that made their way from the now unsealed compartment.

“2 years, and there are a lot of things that need repairs. We however do not have the time or power to do anything. We need to be back in stasis in short order. Especially with as many of you as there are.” He tried to explain before she shook her head.

“We will not go back into stasis, especially after the glitch we experienced. I am sure with the robots and the knowledge we have, we can get the power we need.” Vasi said as she looked deeper into the diagnostic program of the ship as a critical alert sounded. She input a complicated series of commands that he barely caught before the ship dropped from FTL.

“What are you doing?” he asked as he stepped next to her and ran the location scan of the command ships. He sighed in relief when he saw the nearest one was 95 light years away, as they had dropped out in the middle of a dead zone.

Just as he was about to confront her about it, he saw the power levels drop dramatically as multiple alarms went off.

“Irnas, we have a breach in Plasma Storage. Get on the controls and isolate the problem, we do not have a lot of time.” Vasi ordered as he stepped up to another of the control consoles.

Eli helped him, and was impressed at how quickly he flew through the systems, isolating the damaged sections and routing them into a cohesive strong of storage modules. The diagnostics were not optimistic, and Eli quickly realized it would not matter how many repairs they managed. By the time they had isolated the leak, they had lost 20 percent of the plasma storage they had.

“Why is the recharge star calculated so far out?” Vasi demanded allowing the tablet to translate for her.

“It is a long complicated story, short version, we do not have the owner to battle our way through an automated weapons system intent on destroying us.” He said before she looked at the tablet and she looked at it a little confused. Eli opened up the sensors, and found the nearest star they could recharge from. He zoomed in on it, and showed her the Command ship that was in the perfect position to intercept them. She hit the button, and it highlighted the hundreds of drones aboard it.

“Can we jam them?” Jota asked her as she accessed the information that Eli and Rush had downloaded from them.

She sighed as she looked at it, and transferred it to the station he was working at. “You look, you have more robotics experience than I do. Irnas, how long until you can get into Plasma Storage and begin a full assessment?” she asked him as she pulled up the engine modules diagnostics. She sighed as she saw that all but one of them was operating at critical levels.

“6 hours before the room is fully vented. It will take the drones another day before they reach the area and seal the breach. The diagnostics are not promising, it could take weeks before I can rebuild the primary modules. Some months before all of the modules can be repaired.”

Eli was beginning to understand a few of the words, and smiled as he learned what the actual vowels were. He was glad he had studied Latin, and was learning Lantean from the stuff the Dr. Jackson had recorded. It also helped he could read it to see what the actual word structure was.

“It is going to take several weeks to get the engines back online as well. Nearly all of the remaining modules need rebuilt, and it seems we will have to move one from storage and install it. Jota, how are the shields working? The drone programming can wait.” Vasi told them.

Eli read it, and looked up to see a fourth of them walk down the corridor. He tapped Vasi on the shoulder and pointed at her.

“Morna, what is wrong?” Vasi asked quickly.

“Horgath did not make it. His pod broke while we slept, and it killed him. Something is desperately wrong, because he is a skeleton, and the scans say he has been that way for 45 million years.” Morna said as she looked at Eli curiously. As the others had not stunned him she decided to wait for an explanation.

“We slept far longer than we were ever meant too. It’s a miracle any of us woke after the length of time. The ship is in critical condition however, and as much as we will mourn, we need to focus. We need a diagnostic and analysis of the power generation and distribution systems.” Vasi said quickly as he realized they were all wearing uniforms.

They worked for several hours, Eli and Vasi talking with the assistance of the tablet, and eventually Eli had picked up enough of what they had been saying he had a basic understanding when they spoke. There were only a few words that he Ididn’t recognize at all, and he realized it was profanity that the translator hadn’t been programmed with.

Eli looked at them, and decided to surprise Vasi. “So do you have supplies, or should we go to hydroponics and see what we still have available?” he asked in Alterran.

All 4 of them looked at him surprised, because he hadn’t shown he was picking it up for 4 hours.

“That was the reason we had to go into stasis, we had little supplies for food or water.” Vasi said surprising him by speaking English. “Do you not have a supply line via the Stargate?”

Eli laughed as he thought about that. “No, the distance is so great we do not currently have a supply line. However we can communicate with Earth and hopefully they will be able to solve it for the amount of supplies we do have. Maybe in a few weeks we can grow more of it, but it will be surviving that long that is the tricky part.” Eli said in English.

“Whatever it takes, we will need several weeks just to repair the ship to survive an FTL jump. That will give us plenty of time to see what we can do to help along a supply line.” Vasi told him.

“Follow me.” Eli said with a smile as he grabbed the space suit and walked to the elevator to where hydroponics was.