)
April 8, 2514; approximately 9 hours outbound from Persephone, White Sun Cluster
0315 hours
The captain woke with the sound of the end of the world still echoing in her ears. Cooper sat up in the tangled sheets of her rack, one hand gripping compulsively after the old wound, the other clenched over her heart in the fabric of the tank top she slept in. She straightened those fingers and smoothed out the cotton, then felt after her jugular pulse. Her heart rate was soaring in the nightmare’s wake. Cooper micro-focused her attention on her pulse as though it were a meditative mantra, shutting out every other chaotic memory and thought until nothing else existed and that wild horse gallop had eased to a steady, normal pace.
For a long time, Cooper listened to the near-silence, hearing only her own ragged breath and the whisper of fans through the ventilation ducts, and under that, the faint thrum of the ship’s engines. Her cabin's main light was out, but the two blue emergency lights -- one beside the door to the crew quarters corridor, the other at the top of ladder to the bridge hall -- provided their dim glow. When her heart-rate had calmed to her satisfaction, Cooper groped after the PDA unit Chang had cobbled together for her, which lay on the edge of the let-down writing desk just beyond her rack. The hand-held’s display was filled with a broken spiderweb of cracks, but the screen still activated at her touch. It was 0327 Sihnon standard time. Zero-dark-thirty indeed.
There was no red flashing priority notification in the d
