Yuzuki woke with the feeling of a boot pressed against her side. She growled at the offending appendage and slapped it away, rolling over.
That had not been a good idea. She tumbled off of the chair she had been propped up on, and sprawled, briefly, on the floor. The misplaced Yuzuki braced herself upright, blinking herself awake. When she got her bearings straight again, she looked up to the owner of the offending boot. Immediately, a datapad was thrust into her hands. She stood up to accept it.
“Here,” the helmeted Cho stated, “We’re no longer in fold. Everything is operating in parameters except for a slight variation in the coolant temperature around the distortion drive. It’s been logged, we think it’s just because of the damage.”
Yuzuki examined the datapad, looking over the temperatures. As she did so, more bits of her mind started waking up and she realized there was music being played in the room. Her duty section, most of them sprawled out and napping on the floor – those who weren’t monitoring the equipment at least – was gradually stirring as well. They had been on watch for what seemed like forever. After looking over the temperature logs and giving a brief glance to the pressure, discharge, and load entries, Yuzuki checked the time of the latest entry.
“It’s not time for turnover yet,” she said, suspiciously. “We’ve still got two more hours before we switch the sentries.”
“I know,” replied Cho, removing her helmet now that her hands were free. Her light blue hair, previously confined, now spilled free, cascading like a smooth waterfall around her shoulders. She smiled genuinely. Yuzuki wasn’t sure why.
Nowhere near as cheery a morning person – and especially not after having fallen asleep half-upright in a chair that wobbled on two of its four legs – Yuzuki ineffectually attempted to brush her own hair back. Regrettably, this didn’t help much. Her hair would never be that perfect. Lowering her gaze back down at the datapad, Yuzuki creased her eyebrows together and gave the readout a rather hopeless frown.
“Ok,” she said simply, lacking anything better.
Cho politely leaned over and tapped one of the icons on the screen. The display changed.
“Oh.”
Yuzuki looked up and around at the groggy duty section. She counted heads. Quite a few of them were missing – probably out doing some sort of corrective maintenance, or just trying to get away from the confines of the cramped monitoring room. Ozuno was missing. Kichi was missing. Leiko and Junko were sitting and talking quietly – Leiko smiling. Briefly, Yuzuki wondered what about, but thought better of asking.
“I figure,” Yuzuki reasoned out loud, “We could get them to send down something from breakfast.”
“You should go.”
Very briefly, Yuzuki had a flashback of the last time she had been bold enough to go into the wardroom looking like she had just crawled through an exaust pipe manifold. She had been inexperienced and naïve enough to bring the reports directly to the Captain, and even though at the time she had not known better, looking back it made her shrink a little on the inside. The Captain wasn’t someone she really wanted to confront. There was the matter of the engines to attend to. Junko had come back. She had forwarded a message to the bridge, but would anyone have read it? Did she really want to have to tell the Captain, directly, that the ship was going to have to be cut apart?
No. No, she didn’t.
Yuzuki groaned.
