Redux - chapter 1

Summary: The crew of Redux had one day left of duty before they went on a three month leave. But when Command calls them up, telling them to take part in a new training exercise in exchange for two extra weeks of leave, the crew are hesitant to take up the offer.

But orders are orders.

And Captain Charlotte "Charlie" O'Donnell has a bad feeling about this training exercise.
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Chapter 1

Charlie shuffled in her seat. Her new position lasted six seconds before she slouched further into the chair, one hand pressed between her legs. She pulled the still warm cup of coffee closer to her chest and wriggled once more in her seat. Blue eyes dropped from the scene of nothing but an inky darkness to her booted feet, crossed at the ankles and lazily slung on top of the control panel. It was a bad habit she’d picked up from Zach, her pilot, but she could understand why he’d do it.
         She took a shaky, cold breath in and listened. Nothing but silence greeted her and she furrowed her brows. She expected jokes, cheering, laughter, even insults, but not the silence. Either the crew had listened to her for once or something was wrong. She sighed, drank the last dregs of her coffee and dropped her feet to the metal floor.
         With a yawn she grabbed the railing that accompanied the three rungs up the next tier of the bridge. She’d managed to place her foot on the second rung before a beep from the main controls pulled her gaze over her shoulder.
         A blue light flashed in urgency and she jumped down onto the lower deck with another sigh. Underneath the blue light was a button and she pressed it, listening to the speakers on the bridge channel nothing but static for several seconds. She sighed and dropped her eyes to the floor. That made it the seventh glitch in three days.
         Then there was another sound. Her head snapped up and she listened closely, “…ch…el… z…as” More static filled the small space of the bridge.
         “Eerie.”
         She snapped her head up to see Warrant Officer Class 1 Zachary Chamberlin, his blonde hair mused more than usual. Tired green eyes stared down at her and she caught the dredged look in his appearance. She shook her head. Some days she wondered how he’d managed to get this far into the military with his lack of care for his appearance. “I thought I ordered you to bed.”
         Zach pressed himself against the railing that ran the length of the room, overlooking the lower level. One of his boots was settled against one of the lower rails whilst one of his arms propped him up. His other hand held firmly only to the cup of steaming coffee in his hand. “No offense Captain but I’d feel better if it were me on the bridge.” He shrugged one lazy shoulder and straightened himself up with a hand over his face, “Besides, I convinced Soko to stay in bed.”
         “What a gentleman,” another voice interrupted. A taller and dark skinned man entered the room, making the already cramped space even smaller. Charlie lifted one brow at the plastic glass in his hands. Sergeant Wes Eliot let out a chuckle and tilted the glass in her direction with a grin, “In celebration.”
         Zach snorted. Charlie watched Zach climb down one handed to her level without spilling a drop of coffee. “It’s about time we were going home.”
         “Ain’t that the truth,” Eliot said.
         “You know,” Charlie said, the corner of her mouth caught in the start of a smile, “one of these days you guys’ll listen to my orders and actually follow them.”
         Zach dropped himself into the pilots seat, his cup propped dangerously close to a few live circuits and open wires, his hands darting across the controls with expert ease. “Yeah, and on that day we’ll be dying with pigs flying telling us that they told us so.”
         Eliot snorted above her and Charlie shook her head. She folded her arms and pressed them against the head of the co-pilot’s seat. “Do I need to call Torres?”
         "Is it not just another glitch?”
         She looked up at the Kenyan man and shrugged her shoulders, “And that’s exactly why I’m wondering whether or not to let the man sleep. Which is something both of you should be doing.”
         “Yeah, yeah,” Zach said before he grabbed his cup and kicked his feet up and onto the control panel. “My opinion, get him out of bed. If I’m up he can be up.”
         Charlie arched a brow at that. “What’d he do?”
         Zach gave her a sidelong look before he shook his head. “He changed the temperature controls in the shower. Instead of hot, I got cold. Freezing cold.”
         “And you did what exactly?”
         “Nothing.”
         “Zach,” she said, her voice tired. She wondered sometimes how any of her crew managed to stay within the military so long.
         Zach gave her another look before he grumbled something. When she asked him to repeat himself he said, “I may or may not have covered his pants in itching powder.”
         Charlie closed her eyes and ignored the laughter bubbling up one level above her. She opened her mouth, ready to say something, but decided against it and shook her head instead. The glitch did worry her. Torres had said he’d fixed it that morning and with leave just around the corner, she didn’t want any problems when they all left. She turned away from Zach and started up the small ladder. “Get to bed Eliot,” she said.
         “After this drink,” he said.
         She shook her head and left him on the bridge with Zach. Her feet touched the tiny corridor between bridge and mess when there was another beep from the control panel. She turned, made her way back into the small room and waited. Zach threw a glance up at her before he pressed a button.
         Once more static filled the room then there was another shift in tone. “Air… on… d… eat… not… ard…” The transmission disappeared into nothing but noise before Zach turned it off. Something nagged at her stomach, and it wasn’t the coffee she’d been drinking before. It was something else, something off about the glitch. Her ship had had glitches before, enough to fill a book, but there was something different about this one. There was no indication it was different, just her gut telling her it was.
         “I’ll get Torres,” she said and her smile from before was gone. There were a few words from Zach and Eliot as she left, but they were ignored in favour of her thoughts. Tomorrow they supposed to head home, ready to enjoy three long months of much deserved vacation time. And yet, she could feel something brewing. Something bad.
         In the mess hall she dropped her cup into the sink and carried on towards the crew quarters through the other door in the room. A wall of doors stood resolutely whilst three green and seven red lights stared up at her. Signs of who was and who wasn’t in bed. She stopped at the nearest door and rapped her knuckles against it. She waited, listened, and knocked again. There was the faintest sound of movement and she decided to use the call button.
         The single word, “Shit!” sounded and she let the corners of her mouth begin to take the shape of a smile. It was a manner of seconds before the door opened inwards to reveal a short man. He threaded his hands through short tufts of black hair, giving his hair impossible angles, as he looked up at her, “Yeah?”
         “Glitches.”
         “Come on,” he muttered, his voice still catching up to his awake body, “I fixed it this morning.”
         “Torres, go make sure it is glitches and nothing more. We had two within two minutes.”
         That widened his eyes and he managed to raise his brows with a question, “Something else then?”
         “That’s what I want you to find out.”
         He gave a tired sigh and closed his eyes. “Alright, gimme a few.” He disappeared back into his room, the door closing in her face and she turned to carry on walking. The sound of a door opening didn’t attract her attention, Torres’ voice did. “You know, we could solve a lot of problems if Command gave us an up to date ship.”
         She let the smile linger on her face as she carried on walking, her back still to the engineer. “And you know that that is not happening for a long time.”
         “Can I break the system?” She laughed and he carried on, “They’d have no choice but to replace it.”
         “Fix it. That’s an order.”
         She stopped at the fourth door and eyed the two red dots that stared up at her. McCallister and Nelson were in bed. She checked her watch: one zero two, and a quiet sigh escaped her. On the command console outside of their door, she typed out a few orders for McCallister. Once satisfied she started towards her room again.
         The sound of a door being jerked open grabbed her attention and she glanced over her shoulder. Eliot stopped in his progress into his room to offer her a quick nod and smile before he disappeared. The door was closed and a green light flicked to red moments later.
         When she reached her own quarters she moved straight for the standard, metal cabinet that served as a wardrobe. Her mind did anything but rest and her muscles were too worked up to consider sleep. She pulled out a black vest, shed her jacket and shirt, pulled the vest over her head and recaptured the blonde strands of her hair that had escaped throughout the day. As she passed by her door she raised a hand and touched the picture of Arreton Lake she kept nestled close. It was a small habit that she’d adopted over the years and one that became second nature to her.
         Back in the hall she listened to the whispers of Torres’ and Zach’s squabbling that carried itself through the empty ship. She gave the pair of them another shake of her head before she moved towards the end of the corridor. There was a ladder that led down into the belly of the ship and stopped a few feet away from the door that led to the large on ship gym. Blue eyes scanned the room and after a moment she settled no running a few laps around the room.

Four laps in and Zach’s voice over the internal systems slowed her feet to a stop. “Hey Cap, I know you’re in the gym but err, I think you should come listen to what Torres has to say.”
         Charlie frowned and turned her direction towards the panel that would allow her to answer back. She pressed an arm against the cool metal of the wall, pushed a button with the other and said, “Go on.”
         “Okay, firstly, the glitch? Isn’t a glitch. The others were but not this one.”
         She rolled her eyes, “Get on with it.”
         “It took a while and I had to scrub the entire systems, double checking that I was right.”
         Zach’s voice interrupted him and she could hear the irritation in his voice, Torres had a bad habit of rambling. “What he’s trying to say is that it’s a distress call.”
         “What?”
         “Yeah,” Torres said, “but the thing is that I can’t get a location on the source. As I said, I’ve been scrubbing and testing our systems, but the message isn’t coming from anywhere.”
         “It has to come from somewhere.”
         “That’s what I said,” Zach interrupted.
         Torres started again, “I know so I looked and I looked but the only way that a signal’s source could be masked is if somebody’s jamming it. If whoever this is has perfectly functioning equipment, let’s not all hold our breath though, then we should get a point on their location. Otherwise, they’re being jammed or are masking their signal themselves.”
         Charlie ran a hand over her face and kept the little ‘I told you so’ voice out of her mind. They only needed one more night. “Torres can you clean the signal up.”
         “I can try running it through a scrubbing program, see what happens, but I wouldn’t count on it.”
         She nodded to herself, her mind working over possibilities and ideas. There was a crease to her brows and she felt something nagging at her. “Is there any chance you can pull up the other glitches we’ve been having and scrubbing them?”
         There was some hesitation before Torres answered her back, “I guess. You think this isn’t the first?”
         “We’ve had seven in three days. You tell me.”
         A pause before Torres said, “Working on it.”
         “And send what you get to my quarters.”
         “Working,” he said by way of response.
         Zach’s voice came back, “Should I dial up Command?”
         She eyes the clock on the console: one five three. Nobody would be happy with that time of call and she shook her head, “No I’ll do it tomorrow. Let me know if you find anything immediately.”
         “Gotcha.”
         The transmission cut out and she rubbed at her face with her hands. One night. They had one more night to survive. A groan of frustration escaped her and her mind wandered back to Torres’ words. It was somebody trying to get some help. Or a trick. Pirates had used the same trick to lure Command ships into tight situations and she would rather die than jump into anything that would put her crew at risk.
         She lifted her hands away from her face and settled her mind on running a few more laps before she even thought of sleep.