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Frustrated, Key slams his hand on the console. He's managed to restore this room's seal, so there's air. Unfortunately, while he was crossing the breach, main power went out.

He's tried everything he knows, he just cannot direct main power back to engineering. Apparently there's too many physical breaches in the power lines, he's going to have to do this the old fashion way.

"Drudge, pull ships schematics. I'll need to know where we can put a jumper." He opens a nearby storage locker and pulls out a pair of bottle sized cylinders wrapped with cord.

"The nearest repairable conduit is in the ceiling of hall to the auxiliary bridge."

"The one I came in?"

"Correct."

He closes his helmet and releases the lock to the hall door. After the air clears, he steps out and starts looking for the power conduit markings. When he finds them, he sees the problem. The ceiling's cracked, right down the middle of the hall.

He sticks one of the cylinders to the right side, where the power should be coming from. Getting a green light from it, he presses the activator. There's a quiet hum as the device drills through the wall, then the light changes to blue, indicating that it's connected.

He then starts sliding the other cylinder around the opposite side of the ceiling. Not getting any reaction form the device, he mutters, "Where is it?"

He switches to the upper part of the wall, and starts sliding the cylinder nearly a meter to the left and right of where the conduit should be.

"Start at the floor and work your way up," Drudge suggests.

With a shrug, Key lets the coiled wire fall loose and drops to his knees. As he puts it to the wall, it's red light comes on, there's conduit behind the panel. As soon as he slides it upwards, the light goes off.

With a heavy sigh, he moves it back, and when the light comes back on, he presses it's activator. It starts to hum, and Key puts a few pieces of debris over the loose wire to hold it to the wall and floor.

When the light turns blue, the lights in the hall come on.

He smiles. "There we go."

When he gets engineering repressurized, he raises his visor. "Have there been any replies to the distress beacon?"

"Unknown," the ships computer answers.

"It's been broadcasting long enough, we should've heard something back from somewhere by now. What's the status of the beacon?"

"Transmission has been active for 23 hours, 4 minutes."

"Where are the towers?"

"Aft of the bridge."

"Probably damaged. Run a diagnostic, then run a structural integrity simulation to see if we can safely perform a course correction."

"Acknowledged. Estimating 4 hours to complete simulations." There's a few minutes of silence, then the computer states, "The tower array is misaligned. Our transmissions are being scattered off the hull."

Key sits heavily in a nearby chair, already knowing the implications of that statement.

No one can hear their cries for help.

* * *

Alice flops into the right seat of the pod. She's exhausted, until now, she's been feeding off of Keylan's strength and experience. If it wasn't for Key, they'd be in much worse shape. Among the survivors, she's the only lieutenant left among the crew, and all her experience is medical. She never wanted anything to do with command.

Now, she's alone and she's beginning to realize just how bad their situation is. In her thirty years of fleet service, she's never been in a crisis situation. Her crisis training was triage, not starship ops.

Not knowing what else to do, she cries. Hard.

The last time she cried this hard was when she came out of cryo and found out her husband had passed away. That was years ago.

Her AI, Pond, does his best to help relieve her physical pain, but there's little that can be done for the amount of emotional pain she feels. That's something she'll have to deal with on her own.

"Alice."

She snaps awake.

"Alice. Are you okay?"

She rubs her face and sits up. "Yeah, fine."

"The communication's tower is damaged. Our mayday can't be heard."

"What?" She's awake now.

"I'm heading to the equipment bay, see if I can get a distress call out using the mobile unit."

"You be careful."

"It still has air." The ship shutters, and an eerie groan echoes through the ship. "Uhm...can you make sure that we all have fully stocked pods? We may have to leave sooner than we want."

"I'll do what I can."

"Thanks."

Suddenly grateful for something to do, she heads to the back of the pod and starts opening the storage compartments. "Pond, we need a checklist, and contact the others."

* * *

Key stands at the consol for the mobile com array, quickly getting frustrated. These were designed to penetrate atmospheres, not ship hulls. Without the ships main array to relay through, it's almost useless.

"Okay, so we can't boost the power without risking damage to the emitter. Can we make an antenna?"

"It would be easier to repair the existing array."

"Yeah, but not at FTL speed." Key chews his lip in thought.

"We could increase the FTL envelope and drag it behind us."

Key turns to the doors to see a young man wearing an EV suit. "Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Gregory Marks. Alice said you may need some help."

"Lieutenant? I thought everyone left were ensigns."

"I was jogging the lower ring when it hit. Should've been in my quarters sleeping but I couldn't sleep."

Key nods. "Drag it."

"Yeah, rig it up, set it to transmit, and kick it out the back airlock."

"Through the aft ejection tunnel?" Key asks skeptically.

In the event of a abandon ship, the racks of cryo tubes can be ejected through an aft airlock. This act is usually done explosively, permanently, and shuts down the engines in the process.

"You do realize that once we do that, we won't be able to fire the engines," Key states.

Greg sighs. "I was thinking, more like after we do the course correction, if we can."

"We have to do stop our pitchpole first."

"How fast is it?"

"Pretty slow. We have a couple days before we hit 15 degrees."

"Simulations complete," the computer announces.

Key sighs, "Well, time to find out what we can and can't do."