“Come on, you bloody piece of sh–”

Andrews reached out to whack the side of the console in his quarters as if that would help the damn thing connect. He’d been trying to reach the Canterbury for weeks, ever since the blackout started and hadn’t managed it yet. But Riggs said that the ships from the company his sister ran had managed it using some form of local network they’d set up with ships in each system, so he was trying to piggyback off that to get through. 

Although truth be told, he wasn’t really interested in the Canterbury. That was Mason’s job. He was way more interested in the Canterbury’s XO. He growled at the screen again, giving it another whack. What if the same enemy had dropped out of underspace and attacked the Canterbury? She could be floating somewhere, half destroyed, and he wouldn’t know. 

No. He cut that thought off. The Canterbury was a tough ship, well armed, with an experienced captain. They would be okay, surely…

The logo on the screen disappeared and he blinked. “Hello?”

Catriona had spoken to the comms experts in Ops and Engineering and they both said the same thing. Whatever was causing the communications blackout wasn’t on their end. All their equipment was fine so it was likely that some kind of spatial anomaly or a subspace disturbance was blocking their signals from getting through.

Just to be on the safe side, she forwarded a recommendation to the Captain to launch some probes and see if their transmissions to those were also being affected. If direct line worked but subspace didn’t then they had their answers for sure, and figuring out how bad the interruption was also important since for all they knew they were unknowingly located within a subspace void.

The fact that their propulsion was having trouble too wasn’t just coincidence, was it?

Then there was the fact that they still couldn’t reach the Resolute. Despite having split off in this sector, they wouldn’t have gone very far, relatively speaking. At this range they still should be reachable even if it was some kind of spatial anomaly. Were they okay?

Was he okay?

She was in her office, busy reading over the reports from engineering regarding that issue, when all of a the unmistakable alert of an incoming communication chirped from her desktop console. Excited to finally have comms back, she quickly accepted the transmission…

And was greeted by a familiar face.

“Hello!” She beamed with glee as she saw Jayce’s face, genuinely happy to see him as she dropped everything she was doing and focused on him. “Wow, it’s great to see you. How are you managing this? We haven’t been able to reach you for a while now. Are you alright?”

He grinned broadly, relief running through him that she was okay. “Yeah, we’re all good,” he said, his voice gruffer than he’d intended. “Some sciency-comms shit with a couple of civvie ships. From what I can tell, we’re leapfrogging the signal to a ship somewhere near you.”

As he spoke, he looked at her directly, checking for any signs of injury. “You guys okay? Have you…” Dammit, there was so much he needed to tell her. “Listen, if Mason doesn’t get through to your boss, you need to watch for underspace apertures. We had a run in with a bunch of ships that dropped out of it and every system we’ve been through is utterly totalled.”

Hearing him say that immediately switched her to work mode. Every system totaled? Cat didn’t think about asking him if he was sure. He wouldn’t have said it otherwise. If that was the case then this was definitely a lot worse than they thought.

“Then this is definitely not a natural phenomenon,” she declared. “Part of me was still hopeful that this was one of those subspace voids or spatial anomalies from remnant black holes which have been known to cause similar incidents. But knowing this now, we may have to assume that this isn’t limited to just us. For all we know, this is far more reaching.”

If that were the case, and the enemy was capable of cutting off comms, they were in serious trouble.

“Can you send me any data you have?” She asked. “I’ll relay it immediately to the Captain as soon as I can. By the way, are you experiencing problems with your warp drive too?”

He nodded, already collating an encrypted datapackage to send over to her. Mason would be doing the same for Thorne, but better the Canterbury had the info twice than not at all. “We’ve been skittering along with it working in fits and starts. We’ve managed to jump a few systems that way. I’m sending what we have on the assholes who tried to jump us as well. Our science guy says they’d already taken a right battering from someone. So we think we have a friendly already in the underspace passages.”

She smiled at his description of the event. “If that’s the case, we can definitely use all the help we can get.” Then her smile faded as she continued. “I’m glad to hear your warp engines are still working well. For our part, we’re stuck in this system for a while now. We’ve been trying to reach anyone since then and your call was the first we’ve received from anyone outside the area, at least from what I can tell. Are you able to reach anyone from command? Task group? Task force? If we’re under threat of imminent attack, we’re going to need reinforcements. We’re in a system with pre-warp civilizations. They can’t help us help them.”

“Nope, nothing,” he said. “The first comms contact we’ve had is with the civvie ships, and now you. Nothing from anyone else yet.”

The news was disappointing but expected. If they were under massive attack, it made sense to cripple them and render them mute so they could do anything to interfere. But on top of such a serious issue, they still had to find Captain Murphy. And if he was out there while everyone was getting attacked by unknown enemies, his likelihood of survival was going to go down the longer it took them to find and recover him.

But as she thought of the missing man, Catriona suddenly thought of the information she gave their helmsman and figured two heads were better than one. “Hey I’m going to send you something. It’s some intel and navigational data I got from a source, before all this happened. Right now I already have our CFO looking it over but maybe your nav officer might be able to make sense of it as well. It’s not confirmed and for all I know it’s just bad intel, but it’s the only lead I have right now involving Captain Mur–”

The screen went black again.
“What? No!” Andrews growled and whacked it again, but it remained stubbornly blank. “Piece of–”

He sighed and unfolded himself from his chair, heading up to the captain’s ready room to see if Mason had managed to get through as well.