It took Seabourne a minute to realize he'd never actually told his partner in crime the plan. They never established what to do if separated. Seabourne hadn't even given him a communicator. This last point was moot as the communicator Seabourne was yelling into had no battery in it anyway, but all in all things were going quite pear shaped, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing as the plan had been rubbish to being with.
"Guess I'll have to go on without him, hope the alarms don't spook him too much."
Seabourne continued to confidently make his way down the corridors to the bridge. He knew the route well, Orlando was a sister ship to his last command, Breezewood. While the Enterprise class liners all had their peculiar charms, their amenities were modular in nature. His own ship had kept a cabaret where most put a forward resturant, for example, but the hallways deflected around whatever what in that location all the same. Of course, normally Seabourne would have made use of the crew passages behind the scenes that allowed Orbital personel to seemlessly transfer from deck to deck without disturbing the guests. Given the current status of his Orbital credentials, Seabourne stuck to the public areas that were less likely to dead end in a locked door.
He checked a clock: 8 minutes since the goose was loosed. Not long, now.
The door to the bridge was open, a good stroke of luck, but there were two crewman inside. They looked up when he entered.
"Who the hell are you?"said the crewman closest to the door. Her companion continued to rewire the cove lighting around the edge of the bridge."I really don't have time for an inspection, right now, we're behind as is."
"Ah, inspection, right, can see you're terribly busy. I suppose I'll just have to come back in, say, 30 seconds."
"What happens in 30 seconds?"
"That's when the biological hazard alarms go off."
The other technician stopped his work and looked to his supervisor. She raised a concerned eyebrow back at him before klaxons started wailing.
"I'd be evacuating this bird if I were you, which is ironically how we got into this mess to begin with."
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship, the digestive track of the goose had stopped its somersaults and decided to stick its fiery finale. Seabourne knew from past experiences that the resulting explosion of fluids, for lack of a better term, would necessitate replacing the entire bulkhead, but it wasn't his ship this time so he wasn't really concerned by it. That first cruise on the Breezewood with Gaian wildlife aboard had taught the xenobiological world all sorts of new things about the creatures, including that their digestive tracks do NOT handle eggs well.
The technicians, well trained to never ignore an alarm and jaded with indifference to the corporation's property in any case, decided to make for evac. If this was a trick, they weren't being paid to stop it, and if there really was a contaminant aboard, they certainly weren't being paid enough to risk their lives over it."Hit the lights when you leave, would you?" said the electrician as he made for the door.
Seabourne sat down in the chair and had a moment of nostalgia for his old ship. The captain's console was much more limited than the full desk he had installed on his own ship, but then again Orlando's captain had worn significantly fewer hats than the former chairman of the board and editor of wanderlust. Still, the interface was the same, it just displayed fewer things at once. It had been kept open to facilitate running diagnostic tests, which was a good thing as Seabourne had no idea what his old passwords were or if they were still valid. A few swipes and the doors to the bridge were closed and sealed. Another few and Seabourne could see the dots of the tracked crew making for the starboard Runabout to evacuate, all of them accounted for. The ship was initiating an emergency departure and didn't need permission from the bridge to disembark. There was one unidentified lifeform lethargically pacing near the source of the alarm and a significantly more active one in the power core. He opened the intercomm to the room with the ship's reactors.
