Dr. Ishpetyr stared in open-mouthed shock as a chunk of metal - some alien ship's wing, sleek, curved, sharp, and positively venomous-looking - sliced open the hull straight through his lab. Papers vaulted off tables and into the nothingness of space. Extremely delicate, expensive equipment was indelicately smashed against the alien wing. Sensitive equipment was ripped out of calibration, ruining hours of careful work. A fire boiled beautifully into vacuum. Damnit!

He snapped out of it. If his lab was hit by the wing, then there was a good chance that other debris could get through the sheilds. The sheer incompetence of Captain West was making itself known right here and now. And that's when a horrible realization hit home. If debris could strike the hull at its own whim, decks could be sliced open. Power conduits would snap like gossamery elastic. Overloads could short out vital systems, including-!

Abel raced to his office bulkhead door. The metal was bent, and it only opened halfway. Good enough. He raced down the corridor, pushing people out of the way, vaulting clumsily over an injured sailor. He might have accidentally kicked the sailor on his way down. Not important. If the Asgard core went down, then an injured sailor would be the least of their worries. He swung himself into an access ladder and climbed frantically. He shoved his pass in front of the guard, and clawed open the door. When Abel finally managed to get to the core, he was relieved to see it intact. Not that that mattered much, of course - an intact computer is not equivalent to a working computer. Abel moved a featureless stone to a particular featureless circle - what an exceedingly clumsy interface - and waited. The core activated successfully. The capcitors and surge protectors were all reading functional, although one particularly nasty surge had hit, overloading an auxilliary panel in an obscure corridor. Thanking God, he shut down the core, and collapsed, exhausted from his run, against a console.

~o~0~o~

"You heard the Captain! Evac to auxilliary control room. Let's move! Now, now, now!" Lt. Commander Thomas shouted. He rallied the crew toward engineering. With practicied speed, he typed his passcode into the computer, authorizing a control switch. He hit the comm before he left the bridge. "This is Lt. Commander Thomas to Engineering. You better have that auxilliary control room up and running in two minutes, or there will be hell to pay." They'd practiced a bridge failure scenario several times. In the heat of battle, should the bridge fall, they'd likely have far less than two minutes. But there was no physical way to move faster, other than asgard transport beams, and Creon didn't think this scenario warranted the possibility of scattering his atoms across half the ship.

As he ran behind what was left of the bridge crew, Creon thumbed his radio. "Lt. Commander Thomas to damage control. We're running to the goddamn auxiliary control room on our maiden voyage. I am not a happy man. Fix the bridge, and do it yesterday." When they finally burst into the auxilliary control room door, Creon fixed his attention upon the navigation officer. "If we aren't into a stable and clean orbit by the time the Captain gets back, this is the last bridge shift you'll pull for a long time." Turning to the rest of the crew, he said, "Now let's make this ship easy for Captain West to fly, shall we? I want a preliminary map of surrounding debris ASAP. If we can helpt it, let's try not to make this mission into a total failure." 

The crew was flying now. Things would be alright. Or else.