Her commands set off a flurry of activity below decks, and no insignificant amount of grumbling and complaining about “busy work.” She wasn’t just trying to keep her crew distracted, however, as the ship had taken a direct hit by a very powerful weapon. While the damage appeared to be contained to the aft sections, it was simply prudence to make sure there were no surprises waiting for her when the time came for the Icarus to fight.

As it turned out, problems began cropping up much sooner than she’d expected. Not even two hours into the ordered systems check it was discovered that the power system had been compromised and that had they tried to fire the auto-mag or the forward laser batteries it would have likely blown out several junctions on the primary power bus, and the secondary bus wasn’t capable of allowing both weapons to be fired simultaneously. Apparently when the RDS pod was hit, and subsequently jettisoned, there was damage to junctions where the powerplant fed into the MUX. Commander Graham gave her a running estimate on repairs and it looked like everything would be buttoned up and tested well before she assumed they’d need them. There was considerably less complaining about the workload below decks as the rest of the checkouts were performed.

“All departments have checked in,” Barrett said from the OPS station where he was conferring with Ensign Accari. “Power MUX is back to one hundred percent and no other problems were detected during the system tests. Armament has signed off on the forward weapons systems after doing an internal operational checkout, but the chief down there wants permission to do a live fire test.”

“Denied.” Celesta shook her head. “While we’re closing head-to-head with the enemy, firing the forward laser batteries would be giving a bit too much information about our power and frequency output.”

“I’ll tell him, ma’am,” Barrett said. “Loop-back dummy-load tests all checked good, so we know the MUX can handle the current to the projectors. I’ll have them button it all back up and get their people out of the forward compartments.”

Like all Terran starships, the forward third of the ship was sparsely populated since there were all kinds of nasty sources of radiation and other dangers. All the high-power transmission equipment for the radars and high-power com systems were up there and the RF leakage from the waveguides and transmission lines was a definite health hazard. The munitions magazines were also forward of the centerline, but even the big nukes like the Shrikes were so well-shielded there was little danger from exposure from those.