by Chaoseternus Six
Power failed as soon as we left jump, the ship rolling uncontrolled through space as radiation alarms, powered by their own back-up batteries, suddenly wailed throughout the ship.
The sound powered phones squawked with messages of damage, leaks and high radiation levels, with several compartments failing to respond at all to calls. It didn't take a genius to figure out that we had been hit just as we jumped, and that we had still somehow managed to jump successfully.
Unfortunately, it was a cert that we weren't where we wanted to be, and that our jump engines had been damaged in the process.
Apart from ensuring everyone had shots the medics assured us would temporarily increase our radiation tolerance, we ignored the radiation alarms, we had no choice. We had to get to home, to warn of the Cylon build-up as soon as possible and we knew that if that meant our lives to warn the Colonial Government, that it was a worthwhile exchange. We couldn't risk leaving the ship to wait for the radiation to die down as would be normal procedure too, the Cylons were coming and all they needed to do was stumble across us unpowered and vulnerable like this and it would be game over for us and very likely for the Colonies as well.
So, pushing all thoughts of future children from our minds we worked.
First, DC teams were suited up and sent into the non-responsive compartments where they quickly found a massive rent in the hull, its edges melted and slumped under the extreme heat of the nuclear detonation. They didn't need to say that they found no survivors; we knew that as soon as they reported the compartments breeched.
It also made the situation very bad for us, a major rent like that would have to be repaired before we could jump and every circuit, every pipeline in those compartments would have to be completely replaced, as the radiation would effect their function badly, hell most likely we would have to tear out the entire compartments, throw everything out into space.
We couldn't use compartments which now had been exposed to a nuclear detonation; they were compromised and would most likely be radioactive for years. Radiation in the rest of the ship would fade, in those breeched compartments it wouldn't, not in any reasonable length of time.
It also explained the power outage, several major powerlines were routed through those compartments and the lose of those line sin such an abrupt fashion would easily have triggered a reactor shut down, at the very least it would have tripped breakers through out the ship.
The situation looked bad.
Our first task was to rig bypasses for all the essential powerlines and fuel lines that passed through those compartments, which included the backup Command Centre, the enlisted living quarters, a spares store and an empty storage bay, one which had been loaded with foodstuffs. Lucky for us, we had already eaten that room bare.
That took us five hours to complete, five hours in which we were extremely vulnerable and knew it. Then, using manoeuvring thrusters only, we had to find a place to hide, the main drive still being offline and in need of repairs.
We had only one choice, and that was moving close to a nearby ring system around a massive gas giant and hoping if anyone came, we were close enough to be masked whilst being far enough away the crews sent to work on the hull were not at risk from being hit by debris from the belt.
It was a tricky balance, one which we hoped we did not have to test; after all we could easily trigger a radiological alarm at the moment.
Then came the big job, repairs. The worst job was stripping the breeched compartments; the crews were limited to a mere twenty minutes in those compartments due to the high radiation levels, and they had to strip the entire room, shove the hot debris into nets positioned outside the hull and do it all without compromising safety in twenty minute stretches, and in zero gravity.
It was a task that proceeded slowly, very very slowly, eroding our hopes to report to Colonial space before the Cylons got there. But we refused to give up; we had to try, to do everything in our power to get warning out. After all, every one of us had family or friends of some sort still in Colonial Space.
And there were still the rest of the repairs to consider.
There was one bright spark to brighten up our day however; a crew inspecting the outside of the hull came across a shattered, torn Scimitar wedged into the forward hull, obviously totally dead. It appeared we had found the cause of the big shudder we had felt just before the Dradis went offline.
We removed it, but after a quick check to make absolutely sure it was dead, netted it to a protected, out of the way section of the hull.
We rather suspected Intel would go bananas when we dropped that in their laps.
The repairs took five days and by the end we were downhearted, fearful. We knew in our hearts that it was to late, even if we refused to acknowledge it out loud.
But we had our duty, and we would not fail. We might just get lucky after all.