He stood slightly apart from the others as he spoke to them, and he held a glow-wand just like Festina’s. At the moment I opened the hatch, he was gesturing with the wand, pointing in our direction. The waving light made shadows leap along the corridor walls in a manner delightfully creepy. However, the man stopped waving as soon as he saw our party.

"Admiral!" he said — in a voice not loud but fervent. "I don’t suppose you know what happened?"

"A saboteur," Festina told him. "Hacked the ship-soul into committing Captain’s Last Act. I’m afraid the ship is…"

"EMP’d to rat-shit from bow to stern," the blue-suited man finished her sentence. "That’s what Captain’s Last Act means." He gave Festina a rueful smile. "At my court-martial, you’ll testify I didn’t do it, right, Admiral?"

"Of course, Captain… if any of us lives that long."

I looked at the man again. This must be Captain Kapoor, who spoke to us earlier on the intercom. He did not impress me much as a Figure Of Authority: he was shorter than I, with thinning black hair and a poorly shaped mustache. I am not well-informed on the subject of mustaches — my own people do not grow true hair, we merely have the suggestion of hair as part of our solid glass skulls — but if I were to possess a mustache, I would endeavor to carve it with bilateral symmetry instead of letting it become an unkempt blob of fur that appears to be sliding off the left edge of one’s lips.

Still, this Kapoor man did not seem totally foolish. He had happy crinkles around the edges of his eyes as if he must laugh a lot… and for all the tension that filled the air, he did not seem snappish or stressed. Indeed, one could argue he was altogether too blase about the situation, considering that his ship had been disastrously incapacitated in the depths of Unforgiving Space.

"I suppose you’ll be wanting a status report," he said to Festina. "Well, Admiral… the status is that everything’s Gone Oh Shit."

Many of the crew members looked confused at his words. I, however, knew that "Going Oh Shit" was an Explorer expression meaning dead, dead, dead. It derived from the fact that many Explorers blurt out, "Oh shit," just before some terrible calamity befalls them. I suppose Kapoor used the phrase to show Festina he was familiar with Explorer vernacular… which means the captain was sucking up to the admiral, but I thought he did it most charmingly.

"Everything’s gone?" Festina asked. "What about communications?"

"Especially communications," Kapoor answered. "Those systems have all kinds of top-secret crypto built into them: not just for encoding transmissions, but for switching bands a few hundred times a second, so we’re never broadcasting in one place very long. And then there’s the—" He stopped and threw a reproachful look at those of us who were not navy persons. "Ahem. I’m sure you know, Admiral, Hemlock has all kinds of gadgetry for keeping our messages secure, and one hundred percent of it is classified. Captain’s Last Act makes certain no such equipment can be salvaged. Nothing but melted plastic and defunct biomass."

"But that can’t be your only broadcasting stuff," Uclod said. "At the very least, you must have a Mayday signal, right? Something that runs off batteries and doesn’t get vaporized when everything else goes pfft. Civilian vessels have to carry at least three Mayday boxes in case of emergency. So a navy ship must surely…" He stopped; his eyes narrowed, glaring at Kapoor. "You don’t have a working Mayday?"

"Of course we do," the captain replied defensively. "Just not a good one. The Outward Fleet doesn’t likedistress calls that can be heard by absolutely anybody — it’s bad publicity to advertise how often navy ships break down. Even worse, the laws of salvage say the first person to find us gets to claim the whole cruiser. The Admiralty doesn’t want a civilian vessel, or even worse an alien, tracking us by our distress signal, taking our ship in tow, and dragging Royal Hemlock home to use as a lawn ornament. So… our Mayday only broadcasts to other navy ships."

"Ouch," Uclod said.

"Very ouch," Festina agreed. "The last thing we want is to tell the Admiralty we’re stuck adrift. They’ll send one of their dirty-trick ships to pick us up, and that’s the last anyone will see of us."

Uclod made a disgusted sound. "So you don’t have a single useful signaling device?"

Kapoor shrugged. "The ship’s escape modules are perfectly fine. They all have homing beacons… but they’re old-fashioned radio. From here, it would take five years for transmissions to reach the closest inhabited planet. As for using the escape modules for travel — they don’t have FTL capability. They can put you into stasis so you won’t feel time passing, but it’ll be almost a century before you get back to civilization."

"Fat chance of that," Uclod said. "With the Shaddill still in the neighborhood, we won’t get back to civilization at all… especially not in rinky-dink emergency capsules with their beacons blaring, Here I am!" He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. "We are right royally fucked."

Festina stared at him a moment, then turned her gaze to the captain. Kapoor only shrugged. "We can check all the systems to see if anything survived, but Captain’s Last Act is intended to be one hundred percent thorough. It even hits the storerooms that contain our spare parts. We can’t repair a thing."

"So," Festina said, "how long can we last without life support?"

"I don’t know," the captain said. He turned to the crew members around him. "Anyone here ever calculated how long the oxygen in a heavy cruiser lasts with a half-crew breathing it?"

Nobody answered.

"Well, Admiral," Kapoor turned back to Festina, "if this were a VR adventure, the captain would put on a somber face and say we’ve got twenty-four hours before the oxygen runs out. Damned if I know if that’s anywhere close — could be two hours, could be two hundred — but let’s go with dramatic tradition till our lungs tell us otherwise."

"Just bloody wonderful," Uclod said. "If twenty-four hours is anywhere close to correct, we’d better whip off a Mayday now. Even at that, we’ll be lucky to find a navy vessel close enough to reach us in time."

"But," I said, "there are many navy ships back at Melaquin, and that is not so far away."

"Missy," Uclod told me, "that is a whole heap too far away. When my dear baby Starbiter left Melaquin, she was traveling ten times faster than anything the human navy can do… and she held that speed for something like six hours, not to mention however far Hemlock has gone since picking us up. Those ships back at Melaquin can’t get to us in less than two and a half days; and I doubt if the Outward Fleet has any ships nearer. We’re a long way past the Technocracy’s usual stomping grounds — it’ll be a pure fluke if anyone gets to us in time." "It’s not quite that bad," Festina said. "The escape pods can put us into stasis and keep us alive indefinitely. When we run out of air here in the main ship, we’ll turn on our Mayday, ditch into the evac modules, and wait for someone to pick us up. But once we’re in stasis, we’re really sitting ducks… so let’s hold off on that while we try to solve our problem."

"Festina," I said as softly as I could, "what is our problem exactly? What is our Goal?"

She gazed at me a moment… and I wondered if she was mentally phrasing her answer in comprehensible words, or if she was debating why she should bother explaining the situation to such a grossly ignorant person. In many cases, Science-Oriented People respond dismissively toward those not of the Science faith — especially when the Science-Oriented People have decided that only extra special Science can save them.

But Festina was not cruel. After a few seconds, she answered, "We need a way to call for help. But all our equipment is either broken or it calls the wrong people." She smiled. "I don’t suppose you have a trans-light communicator in your back pocket, do you?"