"Fusion Four's shutting down!"<br/><br/>"We're losing containment in the secondary plasma tanks!"<br/><br/>"There goes another capacitor ring!"<br/><br/>"It's too much damage, we can't-"<br/><br/><strong>"Hold fast, you limp-livered sissies! Are you engineers or Girl Scouts?"</strong>The Chief Engineer came tearing down through Main Engineering like a profanity-belching ballistic missile in overalls. He held a spot-welder in one hand and an old-fashioned wrench in the other, for attacking the sparking and overheated machinery and insufficiently agile crewmen respectively. "This old bitch is wounded, but she'll be carrying through, and I'll lick the big black balls of Titan myself before I let you slackers let her down! Hamford, Put Fusion Four in standby and route its power draw split between Fusion Two and Five. Manfred, vent the tanks spinward so we don't run into the vapor cloud! And for you-"<br/><br/>A line of circuit breakers exploded down one side of the compartment, filling the air with sparks and sending everyone ducking for cover, but Harold didn't so much as slow his advance on the unfortunate rating, wrench in hand. "When we've taken too much damage, you'll know because we're all sucking vacuum, you hear me! Now go find me twenty meters of insulated cable before I stop being nice and use your testicles as an emergency fuse joint. And let me at that capacitor!"<br/><br/>The captain's call for emergency warp jump came as he was finishing the welding job on the cracked capacitor, restoring temporary power to a cluster of the ship's aft maneuvering thrusters, though their reaction mass was low all the same. "Oh, frozen hell, a jump under this condition? We'll be lucky if the ship holds together. Alright, what the captain says goes - power relays closed! Capacitors charged! Main engines offline, rerouting their feed to the mythril feeder cores. Stand by for warp jump!"<br/><br/>Then the world went mad. Harold hadn't been able to find time to poke and prod enough at the 'new, improved' jump drive they'd installed into the Liege, but for the first few seconds it seemed to be functioning fine. A little high on the power draws, though - then low? High again? The entire ship went dark for a split second as the drive soaked up every drop of energy available, then dozens of lighting panels all over the vessel exploded as that power was surged back into them. And the drive core itself - this was new, but he was almost certain that mythril wasn't supposed to glow like that, or to glow at all. It was too bright to look at, and he could barely hear the frantic cries from around him. "Fusion One's running loose!" "I'm loosing the mag field on Fusion Three and Five!" "Fusion Two can't handle this, she's overloading!" A few seconds more, and the entire ship would be blown to incandescent splinters by overloading fusion reactors. He had no idea what happened if you aborted a warp jump midtransit, but it couldn't be worse than atomization.<br/><br/>"Scram the warp drive!" The engineering compartment echoed with the howling of all the demons of Hell as the abused, malfunctioning jump drive was abruptly starved of its power supply mid-transit. A warp jump couldn't simply be stopped, though, and it needed power to bring the ship out of warp again, so the mindless circuitry started melting down instead, cannibalizing itself for that last little erg of juice to finish the abort sequence. Finally, it stopped, the smoke-filled room quiet but for the faint cracks and creaks of bulkheads flexing and popping. Even Harold had been knocked off his feet, though that didn't calm his temper any. "Get your pathetic arses up and get me a damage report! The captain, assuming she's alive, is going to want to know what happened, and I'm bloody well going to tell her!"<br/>