The past two weeks were fairly uneventful besides flying backward through time. The small ship consisted of the main room which held four beds and four chairs and a small table There was a small lavatory with no shower. There was no proper galley and they ate bland cubes that contained all the nutritional value they needed that had to be heated up in the small microwave built into the side of the table. Straight off the main cabin was the small cockpit. It had two seats, one for the pilot and one for the navigator. They took shifts keeping an eye out, Zayd as the head pilot and captain took a 12-hour shift with 8 hours piloting and 4 hours being on call if Sturletto needed him, Keisha would be then pilot for 8 and then be on call for the remaining 4 if Mirlaj needed any help.

Sturletto and Mirlaj were both brilliant in their own rights and were capable of minor course corrections but for anything big, they needed an experienced hand. When not keeping an eye in the cockpit Sturletto and Mirlaj were supposed to spend their time researching the fragments of information they had about the old time-shield on the Icarus, but usually just spent it arguing with one another about everything. Being within arms reach of another person the entire trip was beginning to wear on everyone's nerves except Zayd who seemed to flourish with the close quarters.

As they approached the vectors where the Icarus was believed to be Keisha was five hours into her piloting shift. Zayd knocked on the door slightly and slipped into the navigator seat. "Aren't you supposed to be getting some R&R?" Keisha asked.

"I'm supposed to be, but I can hear Mina and Sturletto going at it again even with my earplugs in." Zayd laughed and put his feet up on the console, careful not to hit any buttons. "The two of them just argue all day and night. I'd tell 'em to separate, but to where?"

"Yeah," Keisha said. "The other day I heard them arguing about how long to nuke a dinner cube for. 'It's two minutes and thirty seconds or it goes soggy!'" Keisha gave her best Mina impression.

"'No, it's a full three minutes or the cube doesn't heat up enough!'" Zayd imitated Sturletto perfectly and the two of them started laughing.

"How did you get so good at impersonations?" Keisha asked.

"Practice makes perfect." He said. a comfortable silence filled the space between them. Keisha made a few course corrections.

"What do you think we'll find when we get to the Icarus?" He asked.

"Hopefully some answers. I'm not sure. Fiolas had a couple of theories." She said.

"Yeah, I read the same report. Possible time freezes, small time loops, a time loop inside of a time loop." He looked over at her, "What do you think we'll find?"

"I hope we find people we can save. If the closer we get to Rigel, the further back in time we are, then maybe we'll get to see the original Icarus crew. Have access to their raw data." Keisha sighed a bit and checked their flight path again, "I hope we find something to save. I don't want to destroy the Icarus, not if we can help them instead." She caught Zayd staring at her. This time he didn't look away.

"That's one thing I love about you Brakas. Everyone else is looking for a way to blow the problem up and you're looking for a way to save it." Keisha blushed and went back to her controls. "Hell, even your boyfriend proposed taking some intense explosives with us, so we could try bombing it to death if we can't find another way to turn it off."

"He's not my boyfriend." Keisha said, "Besides, it's a good idea. If we can't turn it off, we have to try something. I just think it needs to be a last resort."

Zayd watched her and nodded. "OK then. We'll make it a last resort." They went back to watching the debris field around Rigel's Collapse in silence. The muffled argument between Mina and Sturletto seemed to be cooling off and for just a moment everything seemed peaceful.

A light started to blink on Keisha's control panel, "Huh, that's weird." She checked a few other systems. Zayd sat up in the seat next to her. "It says we're receiving a message, but I can't find it on any of the regular channels."

Zayd sat up in the chair and started flipping through the channels as well to check her work. "I don't see it either. I'm opening up the communications array to search for non-binary messages." He clicked a few switches and a strange sound came over the speakers. It sounded eery but beautiful.

Mina opened the door to the cockpit, "Hey, turn that up." Keisha did as she was told and put the message through to the whole ship. It sounded like it was on a loop.

"PLEH DNEZ ZEELP DZIMORPMUK ZE NUSHATS RAU DNA DSAPALOK SAH LEJIR NUSHATS SUHRUHKI ZE SITH"

Both Mina and Sturletto started typing the sounds they heard onto their holo pads. Keisha recorded the message and sliced it so they had one complete cycle. By the third time, the two doctors were already arguing about the best way to decipher the message and who could have sent it. Zayd was trying to be the peacekeeper and working on convincing them to calm down.

Keisha turned the message off the speakers to the cockpit and then played the spliced recording backward, "THIS IS ICARUS STATION, RIGEL HAS COLLAPSED AND OUR STATION IS COMPROMISED. PLEASE SEND HELP."

All three of them were yelling now when Keisha stopped the incoming transmission and played the recording she had. They all stopped immediately and listened to the message. Mina was the first to break the silence. "Good work Brakas! How did you decipher that so quickly?" She stuck her head through the door and had a huge grin on her face.

"I didn't," She replied. "I just thought if everything but us is moving backward through time then this message probably is too."

Mina laughed and kissed her on the cheek then returned fully to the cabin. "You see Sturletto, you are not the only brilliant mind on this ship!"

"We would have gotten there if you just listened to my method." he retorted.

"Your method would have had us listening to this garbled message for hours." She yelled back.

"Everybody quiet!" Zayd shouted. For the first time in a week, everyone did. "Does anyone know who could have sent that message?"

"Well, I think it's obvious it's from the Icarus." Sturletto pointed out.

"Helpful," Mina replied and rolled her eyes.

"What I meant was, who from the Icarus mission could have sent that?" Zayd clarified before they could start fighting again.

"We have an original manifest of who was there when the collapse happened," Sturletto took control of the main computer in the small cabin and there were 12 people on board.

"Keisha, can you play that through again for us?" Zayd called out. Keisha replayed the message over the comms and they all listened intently. "Sounds like a woman, Sturletto can you whittle down our list to only women on the ship?"

Sturletto started taking names off the manifest. "Down to four."

"Play it again please?" He asked. They listened to it again. "It sounds like she has an accent. The Icarus left right after they mandated the common language directive so the colonies would be able to communicate. I have no idea what the accent could be though."

"There it's that one" Mina pointed to a Charlotte Rose, the Chief Financial Officer.

"How do you know?" Sturletto asked.

"That accent is Spanish. I was very close with a Spaniard back on Chronos, and he pronounced his R's the same way. He was very proud of his heritage, he spoke a lot about different cultures. Two of the names on there are most likely Asian, and the other looks like they were from Africa. Charlotte is the only name that looks as though it could go with a Spanish accent." Mina smiled.

"Oh come on. You know a guy and he knows all about old Earth culture." Sturletto was starting to get huffy. "Well, as long as you know a guy. We'll all just risk our life because you know a guy."

"At least I know something! I didn't get onto the Pytheas for cheating my way to the top of the class like some other people aboard this ship!" She yelled back. Things were getting out of hand and looked like it would turn into more than just yelling this time.

Zayd stepped in between them and picked up Mina and sat her down in a chair, then used his height and massive shoulders to intimidate Sturletto into a seat on the other side. When they were seated and quiet he said, "That is quite enough. There is enough stress and drama riding on this mission without the two of you at each other's throats." He looked both of them in the eye, "There will be no more yelling. There will be no more arguments. There will be discussions and disagreements but no name-calling, no interruptions. You both will behave like professional adults. Is that understood?" He stared down Sturletto until he mumbled something akin to a 'yes sir' then did the same to Mina who glared right back. She finally nodded assent and Zayd decided not to push his luck. "Good.

"OK, I think this Charlotte Rose is as good a choice as any and if Dr. Mirlaj feels strongly about it I'm going to choose to go with her gut feeling until we know for certain." He paced the few steps they had available to them and started talking out the problem. "What do we know about this Charlotte Rose?"

"The manifest only tells us the basics. She was the Financial Officer aboard the ship, so most likely there to make sure the money was being spent where it was supposed to. It was a massive undertaking at the time so she would have been highly qualified for Earth standards and everyone, captain included, would have needed to make sure she was happy because she could pull the funding and stop the program anytime she wanted to." Sturletto said.

"Why was the Financial Officer calling for help. Where was everyone else?" Mina asked.

"We knew there was crew onboard, but we weren't sure if they would still be there when we got there. We don't know if they're still going forward in time, or if they're also moving backward. I think it's a fairly safe assumption that if this message is going out backward the crew is too. If they are there and it appears we can save them, we will. If we can only save a few of them, let's make the one sending this message one of them." Zayd said.

"I do have something for that sir." Mina sat up in her seat. "If we discover they are going backward through time I brought two suits that will theoretically let me shift them back into normal space-time slowly enough to save them and bring them on board."

Zayd nodded. "Why only two? If you knew there were 12 people?"

"I brought six, but the four of us will need to wear them to keep ourselves from joining them on their trip back." She replied and then looked up at Zayd, "I could also ask if we knew there were 12, why did we bring the smallest ship? Where would they all go? Do we even have enough oxygen to get all of us back?" Now everyone focused on Zayd.

"We're going to do our best to save as many as we can, but I've been given orders to do whatever is necessary to end this. There might not be a return trip to worry about and the Pytheas can't afford to lose one of their larger ships if we have to be here when it gets destroyed."

"We may not have to wait any longer to find out," Keisha called from the cockpit. Zayd came back to the cockpit and sat in the navigator's seat and Mina and Sturletto poked their head in through the doorway. Right out the front window was the Icarus. It was a small station surrounded by a red shield that made the exact shape hard to make out. They could tell it was a tall ship with a command deck on top.

"First problem," Keisha said, "How do we get past the shield?" Everyone turned to her for the answer. "Right. One problem at a time," she said mostly to herself.