Prophets

calling up details on the drives, the maneuvering jets, life support, and structural integrity. She couldn’t get anything except the internal diagnostics of the bridge itself. “I can’t communicate with the ship’s systems. Everything in the pilot’s station is cut off . . .”

“Wahid?” Mosasa snapped.

“I can’t raise the bridge’s nav console.”

“Tsoravitch?”

“It’s dead. Everything’s dead!” She slammed her fists against the console in front of her. “Nothing.”

Parvi stared at Tsoravitch and felt the same edge of panic herself.

“Snap out of it,” Mosasa said. Parvi heard desperation in his voice that went deeper than Tsoravitch’s panic. His voice grew brittle as he yelled at her. “We need the external sensors on-line, and that’s not going to happen with you breaking down!”

Before Parvi could intervene, Wahid said, “Listen.”

The bridge fell silent. After a few seconds, a sound resonated through the skin of the Eclipse, a distant hammer blow echoing though the whole vessel. Another few seconds and the sound repeated.

It took a moment for Parvi to realize what was happening.

“The lifeboats,” Parvi said to Wahid.

“What?”

“The drive failure caused enough damage to trigger the emergency systems to abandon ship.” Another distant hammer blow. “The Eclipse is launching the lifeboats. Everyone locked in the cabins is being evacuated.”

That meant everyone except Bill and the people on the bridge.

Tsoravitch sucked in a ragged breath and asked. “What could make that happen?”

“A catastrophic failure,” Mosasa said quietly. “Complete loss of shipwide life support, imminent structural failure, fire, explosion—”

Another hammer blow, and a slight lurch felt through the floor.

Mosasa pushed away from the bridge console and pulled himself toward the wall. Once there, he began pulling open access panels.

“What are you doing?” Tsoravitch asked.

“A failure in the data lines to the main console,” Mosasa said, “We shouldn’t have lost the feed from the rest of the Eclipse.”

He’s assuming there’s still something out there to get a feed from.

“Tsoravitch,” he shouted, “get over here. I’m going to need your help.”

Another hammer blow, and another lurch.

Parvi could picture the lifeboats bursting from the skin of the Eclipse, like parasitic larvae burrowing out of the flesh of their host.

Tsoravitch pulled herself over to Mosasa, and the two of them began digging into the guts of the bridge’s data network.

Wahid turned to look at Parvi. “Think our boss saw this one coming in his AI crystal ball?”

Parvi shook her head as another hammer blow echoed through the bridge. This one seemed farther away, and the lurch that followed weaker. “No,” she told him. “I don’t think he had any idea.”

Parvi saw strands of optical cable and electronic components floating between Mosasa and Tsoravitch. She wondered if they did get the bridge reconnected to any external sensors whether she would want to know what it