Summary:

After a starship captain and her ensign stay behind to keep the wormhole open for the crew to return to Earth, the captain orders the ensign to escape on a shuttle. As he leaves, she has very little hope of surviving, let alone seeing home again. But the multiverse has a way of surprising people.

I’m going to have to put that ensign on formal report one of these days. He maybe didn’t disobey a direct order, but he knew what I wanted him to do when I issued the order.

It was just some random asteroid that hit our ship in the middle of a deep space patrol. We tried to open a wormhole to get the ship back to Earth so we could then have everyone get to the escape pods where there’d be plenty of ships around to scoop them up. Out here there was little chance of another ship finding them. Most ships didn’t have our wormhole generation range. Plus, spacetime was pretty well mapped out there. Jumping to it from the middle of nowhere was no big deal. Them getting to us? Not as likely.

Except we couldn’t get full power to the wormhole generator. We got a wormhole, but not one nearly big enough for our ship to go through. But escape pods or a shuttle? That would work.

It took two of us to keep things going on the bridge. I was fighting to keep the wormhole open as more and more escape pods slipped through to safety. He was fighting a losing battle to keep the engines from overloading from the collision damage and keeping the wormhole open so long. He’d already kept the ship from blowing up far longer than I expected. I would have recorded a commendation for him, but I knew no one would ever receive it.

As the last of the escape pods were entering the wormhole, I told him to get to the shuttle. There was one not too far away from the bridge.

He tried to argue with me, despite his low rank. He said the ship would blow without him. I told him that was going to happen no matter what. It was just a matter of time.

He told me to come with, but I told him there wasn’t enough time for that. The wormhole generator needed active tweaking of its output levels or it would collapse. It might last a minute or two, but not enough time for me to follow him to the shuttle.

He tried to say he should stay behind then, but his thing was engineering. And piloting. He was one hell of a pilot. Mine was wormhole physics. If I hadn’t taken the command route, I’d probably have been an engineer myself, or finding ways to improve the technology back on Earth.

I ordered him to go then, and pointed out that we were both dead if he stayed. The captain goes down with her ship. He needed to get in that shuttle now, or I would spend the last minute or two of my life throwing him into the brig.

Full Script Here

This is a pretty SFW script, although there's at least references to sex in it. It's more just a story about a captain recounting her story and the aftermath of a disaster affecting her ship.

If anyone wants to change anything, including the title, tags, or whatever, please feel free to do so.

Please feel free to comment as well, although please don't tag others.

Thanks for reading this, and hopefully even though it's not a terribly sexy story, it might still be an interesting one for some people.